Does the international community truly oppose Israel’s military occupation?
Rebuilding Gaza in accordance with the US plan is facing considerable objections across diplomatic and humanitarian circles. In two years, Israeli media reported, one million Palestinians could be moved to a newly built residential area that will be controlled by the Israeli military, thus coercing Palestinians to move into military occupied territory in Gaza.
Referring to the proposal, an unidentified Arab diplomat stated, “Palestinians may not want to live under the rule of Hamas, but the idea that they’ll be willing to move to live under Israeli occupation and be under control of the party they also see as responsible for killing 70,000 of their brethren is fantastical.”
And yet this fantastical process has been repeated since the 1947 Partition Plan. It is the differentiation between past and present that has left Palestinians in the current colonial devastation. An international community that decided to bequeath larger swathes of land to the Zionist colonialists is now mulling over the prospects of Palestinians in Gaza living under military occupation. Maybe the international community, of which Arab diplomats finding fault with the plan are part of, have forgotten that Palestinians in Gaza, like those in the occupied West Bank, have already lived under military occupation. It is not the genocide that makes this plan fantastical; it is the colonial process which the international community does not want to question.
Genocide can certainly facilitate military occupation in Gaza. The Israeli military remains in the enclave and controls a significant part of land. But if Palestinians in Gaza would refuse to live under military occupation because of genocide, is the international community going a step further in normalising the military occupation of the West Bank, which is already glossed over due to foreign donors paying into illusory Palestinian state building?
Why are there doubts about one part of military occupation and not the other? If genocide is the reason, then the international community should address genocide and hold Israel accountable. If genocide is the reason, then the international community approves of military occupation without a very visible kill toll.
Going further back, Israel would not have established its military occupation in the West Bank without the colonisation that was established with the 1948 Nakba. To approve of military occupation in the West Bank, despite feeble calls to dismantle it, is to refuse to recognise the Nakba victims of forced displacement, murder and disappearance by Zionist paramilitaries. There is always a precedent. If there is opposition to military occupation in Gaza and not in the West Bank, it is because the genocide kill toll is still fresh to normalise. Which means that, for the international community, it will only be a matter of time until it also normalises military occupation in Gaza, as it had before. After all, the international community was swift to endorse the US plan despite its several ambiguities and references to past atrocities, such as hubs similar to the Gaza Humanitarian Fund providing aid access. Accepting any imposed aberration is nothing but an acceptance of the previous genocide.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.