A ‘magic pill’ made Israeli violence invisible. We need to stop swallowing it
Illustration: Edmon de Haro/The Guardian
For
years, I pressed Palestinian interests in peace talks. The response to
Trump’s plan proves the international community hasn’t learned from
catastrophe
For two years, the world has watched as Israel
has systematically destroyed the Gaza Strip, killing tens of thousands
of Palestinians and maiming an untold number more. As dangerously,
Israel continues to methodically target the healthcare, education, water
and sewage systems to ensure that life cannot resume in the Gaza Strip.
Western
governments’ responses to Israel’s actions have ranged from
cheerleading and unconditional support in the first year of Israel’s
attack on Gaza after 7 October 2023, followed by statements of concern
and handwringing, to, more recently, occasional expressions of
consternation and empty threats that continued Israeli attacks may, at
some unspecified time, lead to an arms embargo or a drop in trade relations. In the last few months, there have also been the greatly celebrated proclamations of conditional recognition
of a Palestinian state. The irony cannot be more profound: tepidly
recognizing a state as it, and its people, are being erased without
mercy.
As I write this, confusion swirls around Donald Trump’s plan
to end the war and hope is mounting for a hostage and prisoner swap.
While an end to the bombing, the freedom of captives on both sides and
allowing humanitarian aid into Gaza would bring some relief in an
otherwise unbearably bleak landscape, it would be a mistake to view the
plan as a historic breakthrough for Palestine. Trump’s vision is yet
another American-Israeli concoction cooked up without any input from
Palestinians that would retain Israel’s perpetual control over Gaza’s
future.
The
world has never listened to Palestinian voices or taken seriously the
existential threat Israel poses to Palestinian life, and this has not
materially changed despite the increase in performative angst. To the
contrary, Palestinians have for three-quarters of a century endured the
world telling us that Israeli “security concerns” – however defined by
Israel – are more important than our rights and lives. As a result
Palestinians live with two omnipresent forms of violence: Israeli
violence directly inflicted upon our bodies, land and society, and
western violence, where only our erasure prompts the world to notice us
and see our humanity – but only barely.
I
reach this conclusion from observing up close, for a quarter-century,
how this mode of western thinking and operating plays out. Despite two
years of carnage in Gaza,
and everything the world has learned about Israel’s true intentions,
that mode is repeating itself as I write this, with global powers lining
up behind a proposal that does little to ensure Palestinians gain any
say over their future.
Rhetoric without consequence has been the west’s modus operandi for decades. The cost has been catastrophic.
At
the end of September 2000, I joined the Palestinian negotiating team as
a lawyer involved in the negotiations with Israel. This was a big
journey for me: I am the daughter of Palestinians born before the Nakba,
the ethnic cleansing of Palestine.
My parents’ families, unlike the vast majority of Palestinians, did not
flee in 1948 and later became Israeli citizens, living in Nazareth, in a
state that did not want them. In 1967, they decided to emigrate to
Canada, where I was born, raised and educated. I had not lived in
Palestine before joining the negotiating team except for a few months at
a time. Now, I had committed to being in Palestine for a year. I joined
the team as a lawyer after a friend, also a member of the legal team,
informed me that one of the flaws of the “Oslo peace process” was its
vagueness. I had believed, naively, that the team could remedy that.
This
was the height of the peace process, as it was labelled at the time,
which began under President Bill Clinton in 1993 with the historic
handshake between Yitzhak Rabin, the Israeli prime minister, and Yasser
Arafat, the Palestinian leader. Through a series of agreements, the
Palestinian Authority was created and the West Bank and Gaza Strip were
further subdivided, with new Israeli checkpoints scattered throughout.
Major issues such as borders, settlements, the rights of millions of
refugees and Jerusalem were taken off the table indefinitely.
The ‘peace process’ became a magic pill rendering the occupation invisible to the west
All
of these were now bilateral issues for Israel and the Palestinians to
resolve between them, with the rest of the world theoretically standing
by as neutral observers. But they were not neutral, and the two main
actors were not equals. The US was then and remains to this day Israel’s
biggest supplier of weapons and diplomatic support and Europe is
Israel’s largest trading partner. Before entering into this negotiations
process, Palestinians sought assurances,
particularly from the US, that the asymmetry in power would be
addressed. Such assurances were tacitly provided but never honored,
throughout decades of negotiations.
From the
early 1990s, global applause for peace talks abounded. But what
ultimately happened is that endless calls for a “two-state solution”
that evaded explicit realization of Palestinian self-determination and
freedom replaced calls for an end to Israel’s military occupation. The
“peace process” became a magic pill rendering the occupation invisible
to the west, disguising its metastisizing, omnipresent and ever more
violent form. Palestine was now reduced to a subject of “negotiation”
requiring concessions, with the 1948 ethnic cleansing of Palestine swept
under the rug to be forgotten.
President
Bill Clinton (center) stands between Yasser Arafat (right) and Yitzahk
Rabin as they shake hands for the first time, on 13 September 1993 at
the White House in Washington DC, after signing the Israel-PLO Oslo
Accords. Photograph: J David Ake/AFP/Getty Images
With
this magic pill swallowed, Israel used the cover of the “peace process”
to build and expand Israeli settlements, correctly believing that these
facts on the ground would strengthen their position at the negotiating
table. And with the settlements came settlers and checkpoints and an
expanding Kafkaesque system of military control. By 2000, the West Bank
became unrecognizable: Palestinians were navigating a maze that
erratically changed on a daily basis as the West Bank was now divided
into tiny islands, with some areas administered by the Palestinian
Authority but with Israel retaining overall control.
By
the time I arrived to take up my post, a few months had passed since
Clinton convened the July 2000 meeting at Camp David, which was touted
by the US as aiming to bring about a final peace deal between Israel and
the Palestinians. It was clear to anyone paying attention to the years
of negotiations, and their endless delays and convolutions, that this
meeting would not produce the result that Clinton hoped for. In fact,
the Palestinian delegation had warned the Americans of this evident risk
before the parties convened. By this point, Israeli settlements
antithetical to any agreement had swelled, in fact nearly doubled,
with close to 400,000 settlers the living in the West Bank, East
Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip. Palestinians were cut off from traveling
to Jerusalem, to and from the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and into Israel.
The
Americans promised the Palestinian delegation that no blame would be
attributed to either side should the negotiations not yield an
agreement. Yet, owing to then Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak’s
“fragile” governing coalition, Clinton blamed the failed meeting on
Palestinians. “Fragile coalition” had long been the phrase countless
diplomats invoked to demand that Palestinians accept Israeli settlement
construction, racist incitement, mass closures and arrests – lest
extremists in the Israeli government sabotage the talks.
I
arrived in Palestine on 28 September 2000. That very day, Ariel Sharon,
then head of the Likud party, went to al-Aqsa mosque compound in
Jerusalem’s Old City in a show of force, surrounded by more than 1,000
armed Israeli police officers, to demonstrate that he, and by extension
Israel, would never “compromise” on Jerusalem. As Palestinians
demonstrated against Sharon’s brazen provocation, the Israeli police did
what they always do: shoot. They killed at least four Palestinians that
day and injured about 200.
Two days later, a Palestinian cameraman from Gaza, Talal Abu Rahma, captured video of Jamal al-Durrah and his 12-year-old son Muhammad
under fire on Salah al-Din Road, south of Gaza City. Jamal desperately
tried to shield his son as bullets rained down on them, to no avail.
Muhammad al-Durrah was mortally wounded and died soon after. The image
of Jamal trying to shield his son went viral and sparked further and
widespread protest. Within five days, Israel killed 47 Palestinians. The second intifada had begun.
Jamal al-Durrah and his son Muhammad, 12, hide behind a barrel to protect themselves from gunfire on 30 September 2000. Photograph: EPA
It
was in this environment that I began to observe the workings of
international diplomacy and negotiations up close, through a
never-ending series of meetings with a constellation of ambassadors,
international organizations and representatives from the most powerful
governments in the world.
To be clear, the
negotiations process was flawed from the outset: these were not
negotiations between two equal and sovereign nations, negotiating over a
border or future relations between two states. Rather, this was a
process of negotiations between Israel – which controlled every aspect
of Palestinian life – with the people it relentlessly controls, the
Palestinians. This was not just a question of asymmetry of power but of
complete control.
I have frequently been asked
to relate events from these negotiations that illustrate this central
structural failure – and there are plenty. But that misses the point:
given that the Israelis stole our land and expelled our people, I did
not expect that they would suddenly have an about-face and admit that
they wronged us. The greater insult came from those who promised us that
this process would lead to our freedom and who instead chose to
prioritize Israeli “security concerns” and “domestic constraints” over
the crushing weight of the increasingly repressive regime required to
maintain the system of supremacy that Israel is founded upon.
As the second intifada continued, it grew bloodier. By the time it ended in 2005, more than 3,000 Palestinians and 650 Israeli civilians were killed, along with about 300 Israeli soldiers.
As
Palestinians were besieged, gunned down and assassinated with
helicopter gunships, F-16s and Apache helicopters firing the most
sophisticated weaponry on Earth at Palestinian refugee camps, Arafat,
himself holed up in his office, was told he needed to “stop the
violence”. as if there was some on/off switch that he was refusing to
flip, to control each and every rightless Palestinian. Absurdly, those
living under occupation were expected to provide “security” to the
occupier.
I would often see an Israeli tank
just outside my office in Ramallah including, at times, when we were
supposed to be in negotiations. At one point, the Israeli army took over
my apartment, also in Ramallah, at gunpoint in the middle of the night,
sending me outside into a gun battle. I could not return for three
days.
Over time, as Israel’s methods of
control became ever more brutal, Palestinians were fed with cliches:
“Where is the Palestinian Gandhi?” I was asked by diplomats. No one
dared ask: “Where is the Israeli Charles de Gaulle?” Palestinians were
routinely asked to condemn Palestinian violence but rarely was Israel
asked to condemn its own violence. This remains the case to this day.
The inherent violence of Israel’s military occupation was thus
normalized.
What the diplomats, and others, fail to acknowledge and internalize is that occupation, by its very nature, is violent
Israel
used this period, once again, to expropriate more Palestinian land to
build and expand settlements, which continuously popped up throughout
the West Bank – no area was spared. The point: to destroy the “two-state
solution” no matter how it is defined. The settlements are considered
war crimes under international law and a violation of the stated policy
of virtually every government around the world. Yet, here too, the
magical “two-state solution” pill prevailed, obscuring a brutal reality
with the vague promise of an unattainable goal.
A
striking example is illustrated in an area now called Givat Assaf
situated just off the major north-south highway in the West Bank, close
to Ramallah and the Israeli settlement of Beit El. Givat Assaf was
established by a group of armed squatters who one evening in 2001
decided to take over a piece of privately owned Palestinian land, to
avenge the killing of a settler. This was done illegally, even under
Israeli military law. The Israeli government claimed that it could not
do anything to stop the armed thugs who decided that this land would now
be theirs. “Fragile coalition,” we were told.
At
the time, diplomats travelled through a designated checkpoint and
passed Givat Assaf every time they entered or exited Ramallah. It was
impossible to miss. For Palestinians, the presence of this new outpost
meant a new random checkpoint, for Palestinians only, sprang up daily.
The Israeli army routinely kidnapped Palestinian men from cars, while
other Palestinians were violently forced out of vehicles, often beaten
and made to stand in the scorching sun for hours as Israeli cars whizzed
past. The pop-up checkpoints were replaced by a permanent one,
requiring that more Palestinian land be taken over to “protect” the
illegal squatters. Over time, the outpost grew and soon electricity
lines, approved by the government, replaced the power generators. One
day, a pizzeria popped up. To this day, the squatters remain, plainly
visible to the diplomats driving past, and the Israeli government is in
the process of “legalizing” the outpost. Today, there are more than
750,000 settlers in the West Bank and that number is on the rise.
![A soldier walks past a sign in Hebrew as white and blue flags fly overhead]()
An Israeli soldier walks past the entrance to the Jewish settlement of Givat Asaf, north of Ramallah in the West Bank, in 2009. Photograph: Ariel Schalit/AP
Meanwhile,
Israel filled its prisons with Palestinian men, women and children –
including avowedly nonviolent activists – reaching up to 10,000 people
at one point, huge numbers of whom were imprisoned for months without
charge or trial. “It is terrible,” I would be told by diplomats. Yet no
matter what Israel did to Palestinians, to Palestinian land, Palestinian
homes or even to the schools and clinics funded by these very same
diplomats, nothing would break their unshakable faith in the magic pill.
Their sole fixation was to ensure any Palestinian response to the
violent Israeli occupation remained peaceful.
I
cannot recall a single month in which a Palestinian was not killed in
these 25 years. What the diplomats, and others, fail to acknowledge and
internalize is that occupation, by its very nature, requires violence to
maintain. Our warnings that Israel’s use of force was escalating were
met with indifference. Palestinian lives did not matter. Palestinian
voices did not matter. Palestinian experiences did not matter.
But
nowhere was this failure to listen to Palestinians more acutely felt –
and more deadly – than in the Gaza Strip. Gaza is one of the most
densely populated places on Earth, filled with Palestinians and their
descendants who fled from their homes in what became Israel. For Israel,
the Gaza Strip has always been a “problem”: a reminder of 1948 because
its residents demand to return to their homes just a few kilometres
away. Rabin, the former Israeli prime minister, once said of Gaza that
it would be good if it was swallowed up by the sea.
Israel
has always sought to dominate Gaza. To that end, it built 21
settlements that cut off the north of the narrow strip from the south.
In addition to the 7,000 settlers, Israel established impractical and
unnecessary farms, taking up 20% of Gaza’s land, and draining its scarce
water.
In 2005, Sharon, by then Israel’s
prime minister, devised a plan to “disengage” from the Gaza Strip. The
settlements were removed but Israel’s control did not end. In many ways,
it intensified.
Israeli
border police remove a Jewish settler youth from Palm Beach Hotel in
the Gush Katif settlements bloc in the southern Gaza Strip, in 2005. Photograph: David Furst/AFP/Getty Images
At
that time, I moved to Gaza to join the Palestinian team working on the
post-disengagement plan. Living there was both magical and difficult.
Everyone I met in Gaza was welcoming and warm. Beyond the overcrowded
housing, Gaza was home to some of the world’s oldest churches,
monasteries and mosques. The sea was a beautiful outlet – but not one to
explore very far. In the distance there were always Israeli navy ships,
ready to shoot at Palestinian fishers who dared to venture beyond an
always changing arbitrary point that Israel enforced. Palestinians were
caged by land and sea. Above, Israeli airplanes were always in the sky. I
never saw a commercial airplane fly above Gaza but Israeli jets broke
the sound barrier with regularity.
“You can
turn Gaza into Singapore!” the Israelis told us, as though we had the
power to develop the territory into something modern and shining, and as
though we wanted to. (They had not yet become obsessed
with Dubai.) But Gaza would be completely cut off from the world after
the disengagement – Israel would continue to control the airspace, the
territorial waters and all of the crossing points. Nothing could enter
or exit the Gaza Strip without Israel’s permission. We kept pushing the
Americans, the Europeans and others to demand that Israel open Gaza:
that it be allowed to build an airport, a seaport and that we be allowed
to travel to and from the West Bank and to the rest of the world.
“Work with the Israelis,” the US and the Europeans told me in 2005.
“But if you do not pressure the Israelis, Israel will turn Gaza into an open-air prison,” I said.
“Oh, they would not want that.”
“But
they said they would not relinquish any control which means that Gaza
will be turned into an open-air prison. Imagine what that will do.”
“We believe that this is best solved bilaterally. But of course we are here for support.”
One
such attempt at support included observers from an international
organization. The meeting, in the lead-up to Israel’s evacuation of
settlements from Gaza, involved Israelis from the ministry of defense
discussing how goods would move between the West Bank and the Gaza
Strip. The Israelis insisted that all goods entering and exiting Gaza be
searched for “security reasons”.
“We can provide scanners,” said the representative from the international organization.
“No,”
said the Israeli ministry of defense representative. “The scanner
specifications that we have are so high that there is no such scanner
that exists.” I laughed out loud.
“So there is nothing that will meet your ‘security needs’?” I asked.
“Not yet,” he responded, deadpan.
Later
that evening, the representative from the international organization
and another diplomat stressed to me and others: “It is important that
you try to work with the Israelis to figure something out.”
I countered: “What incentive does Israel have to want to see goods and people move from the West Bank and Gaza and back?”
And
the predictable diplomatic reply: “You have to remember, this is a
fragile coalition so the statements that they make in public are not
what they actually mean. They have told us that they do not want to see
Gaza closed.”
In August 2005, Israel evacuated its settlements and on 12 September, the Israeli army literally
closed the gate to the Gaza Strip. Gaza was now isolated from the rest
of the world: no one and nothing could enter or exit without Israel’s
permission. In June 2006, I, too, was forced to leave after the Israelis
refused to renew my permit to be in Gaza.
Yet,
there was euphoria that day. For the first time in decades,
Palestinians in Gaza felt free. I was able to take a taxi from Gaza
City, where I lived, to Rafah, without having to go through the Abu
Houli checkpoint (cruelly named after the man on whose land it was
erected).
The day Israel evacuated, I visited
the mother of Muhammad al-Durrah, the boy who Israel shot to death five
years earlier. She had a little baby girl in her arms, no more than six
months old. Like so many people in Gaza, the mother was looking for
something to be optimistic about. “At least she will grow up and not
have to see the Israeli army,” she said. I could not hold back my tears,
thinking about her murdered son and fearing that her predictions would
prove wrong.
The euphoria was indeed
short-lived. Within days – and this was before Hamas was elected to
govern Gaza – Israel was back to killing Palestinians and breaking the
sound barrier. In response, Palestinians fired crude rockets into
Israel, and in response to that, Israel placed Gaza under further
lockdown.
The impact was devastating.
Much-needed radiation equipment to treat cancer would not be allowed
into Gaza due to “security concerns” and those with cancer would not be
allowed out easily for treatment elsewhere – also due to “security
concerns”. With the general election in 2006, in which Hamas won the
popular vote, Israel tightened the restrictions even further. The army
was even making precise calculations of Gaza’s daily caloric requirements.
And
yet, Israel’s successive bombing campaigns in Gaza did not break the
west’s unshakable faith in the magic pill of the “two-state solution” or
their unwavering support for Israel’s “security concerns”. As Israelis were boasting that they were bombing Gaza back to the stone age, diplomats barely uttered a word.
Instead,
the international community shunned Hamas, with some referring to them
as the “de facto authority” in Gaza, refusing to even use the group’s
name. Hamas was isolated, completely cut off from the world, and so too,
Gaza. As Palestinians languished in the largest open-air prison in the
world, the group doubled down on its military strategy, paving the way
for the 7 October attack.
But for Palestinians, there is no magic pill.
The
west continues to entertain proposals, like the one currently hanging
over the region, giving Israel the ultimate say over the future of Gaza.
How is it that the country committing genocide is granted any say in
the future of the people against whom it has committed genocide?
Displaced
Palestinians evacuating southbound from Gaza City travel on foot and by
vehicle along the coastal road in Nuseirat in the central Gaza Strip on
13 September 2025. Photograph: Eyad Baba/AFP/Getty Images
In
the latest plan, there are absolutely no guarantees that aid will be
allowed into Gaza, that control will be ceded by Israel, that Israel
will pull back or that Gaza will be rebuilt. Instead, if Palestinians
give up their claims for accountability for Israel’s war crimes, we may
get a vague “pathway to self-determination and statehood”. Not a state –
a “pathway”. How generous.
We are witnessing a willful repetition of the mistakes of the past
I
find myself thinking back on my experience over the years, wondering
what would have happened had there been a genuine, robust attempt to end
Israel’s military rule. What if, instead of looking the other way, the
international community had imposed sanctions on Israel? What if instead
of just endlessly repeating that they believe in the “two-state
solution”, states had actually taken tangible action to bring it about?
And
so, two years into Israel’s genocide, we are witnessing a willful
repetition of the mistakes of the past. This time, some more countries
have recognized a “state” with great fanfare but still do nothing to
ensure a free and prosperous Palestine. They cannot even ensure the
basic protection of Palestinian life.