[News] Israel wants to destroy Gaza and annex the West Bank, but what do the Palestinians want?

[Anti-Imperialist News]

 Israel wants to destroy Gaza and annex the West Bank, but what do the
Palestinians want?
By Ramzy Baroud <https://english.palinfo.com/?p=250012>

Tuesday 7-May-2024 -
https://english.palinfo.com/opinion_articles/israel-wants-to-destroy-gaza-and-annex-the-west-bank-but-what-do-the-palestinians-want/

What is taking place in occupied Palestine is not a conflict between more
or less equals, but a straightforward case of illegal military occupation,
apartheid, ethnic cleansing and outright genocide by one, heavily-armed
side — Israel — against the largely unarmed other, the Palestinians. Those
who insist on using “neutral” language in depicting the crisis in Palestine
are harming the Palestinian people beyond their seemingly innocuous words.

This morally non-committal, middle-ground language is now at work in Gaza.
It is there that the harm of this “impartiality” is being felt the most.
“If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of
the oppressor,” said the late South African anti-apartheid activist,
Archbishop Desmond Tutu. His wisdom will always ring true.

While most countries and peoples around the world are certainly not taking
the side of the Israeli oppressor, some, wittingly or otherwise, are. There
are those who are taking Israel’s side by directly fueling and funding the
Israeli killing machine in the Gaza Strip, while blaming the Palestinians
for the war and its devastating impact, as if history only started on 7
October; it didn’t.

However, supporting Israel not only involves the supply of weapons, trade
links or shielding it from accountability under international law. Ignoring
Palestinian priorities, and highlighting Israel’s political discourse and
expectations are also a form of supporting Israel and denigrating Palestine
and its people.

Ever since 7 October, questions have been asked about what Israel wants in
Gaza. On 7 November, while vowing to destroy Hamas, Israeli Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu said that Israel was set to maintain “security
responsibility” over the Gaza Strip for “an indefinite period”.

The Americans agreed. “There is no coming back to the status quo,” US
President Joe Biden said on 26 October, which “means ensuring that Hamas
can no longer terrorise Israel and use Palestinian civilians as human
shields.”

The Europeans, who had often presented themselves as equal partners to both
Israel and the Palestinian Authority, adopted a similar attitude. EU
Foreign Policy Chief Josep Borrell, for instance, set out a proposal for
Gaza, including a “reinforced” version of the current PA, “with a
legitimacy to be defined and decided upon by the [UN] Security Council”
rather than the Palestinian people themselves.

Even those who admonished Tel Aviv for having unrealistic expectations have
failed to ask the obvious question: what do the Palestinians want?

As soon as it was obvious that the Palestinian resistance was far too
strong to allow Israel to achieve any of its lofty objectives, government
officials, experts and media analysts began warning the occupation state
that no military victory was possible in the Strip. They contended that
Israel must also develop a “realistic” strategy to govern Gaza after the
destruction of the resistance there. Some of these statements were
celebrated even by pro-Palestinian Arab and Middle Eastern media as an
example of the changing western narrative on Palestine.

In reality, though, the narrative has remained the same. What has changed
is the unprecedented degree of Palestinian steadfastness, sumud, which has
inspired the world and frightened Israel’s allies about the grim scenarios
awaiting Tel Aviv should its occupation forces suffer an outright defeat in
Gaza.

Even though many among Israel’s western allies may have seemed to be
critical of Netanyahu, they were still behaving out of concern for Tel Aviv
first and foremost, with neither love nor respect for the Palestinians.
This is nothing new.

Since the destruction of the Palestinian homeland — the 1948 Nakba — two
narratives have emerged. The Israeli narrative was embraced fully by
western mainstream media, politicians and academics who invested in
misrepresenting the “conflict”. They depicted Israel as a “Jewish state”
fighting for survival in a hostile Arab world and among competing Arab
interests, as well as factional and disunited Palestinians, who only agreed
on one thing: they want to destroy Israel.

The Palestinian narrative is that justice is indivisible, and that the
cornerstone of any lasting peace in Palestine is the restoration of
dispossessed Palestinian refugees to their homeland, through their
legitimate Right of Return, which has been denied consistently by Israel.

When Israel occupied the rest of historic Palestine in 1967 and extended
its system of apartheid to the newly-occupied territories, it was only
natural that ending the Israeli military occupation and dismantling the
racist system became critical Palestinian demands. However, this happened
without ignoring the original injustice which had befallen all Palestinians
in 1948.

Israel’s allies in the West used the Israeli occupation as an opportunity
to distract from the root causes of the “conflict”. With time, they reduced
the conversation on Palestine to that of the illegal settlements, which
Israel began constructing, contrary to international law, after completing
its military occupation in 1967.

Any Palestinian who contended that the issue is not a “conflict” at all,
and that the root cause is the creation of the state of Israel in
Palestine, was, and continues to be, called a radical, or worse. This
reductionist thinking is now being applied to Gaza where every historical
reference is pushed aside intentionally, and where the Palestinian
political discourse is shunned in favor of Israel’s deceptive language.

However, no matter how often western media continues to speak about
“Palestinian terrorism” and the need to release Israeli hostages and
prioritize Israeli security, while ignoring Israeli terrorism and
Palestinian detainees and political aspirations, there will be no
resolution to this issue now or in the future if Palestinian rights are not
accepted, respected and fulfilled.

Gaza is part of historic Palestine; it is not a separate entity.

Neither its past nor its future can be understood or imagined without
appreciating the Palestinian struggle in the whole of Palestine, indigenous
Palestinians in today’s Israel — 20 per cent of the Israeli population —
included.

This is not an opinion, but the very essence of the political discourse
emanating from all of Gaza’s political groups. The same assertion can be
made about the political discourse of Palestinians in the West Bank,
throughout historic Palestine, and those in shatat, the diaspora.

Israel and the US may try to imagine whatever future they wish for Gaza,
and they may also try to achieve that future through missiles, dumb bombs
and bunker busters. No amount of military might or firepower, though, can
alter history or redefine justice.

What Gaza ultimately wants is the acknowledgement of historical injustices;
respect for international law; freedom for all Palestinians; and legal
accountability for Israel. These are hardly radical positions, especially
when compared with Israel’s very obvious policy of destroying Gaza,
annexing the West Bank and ethnically cleansing the Palestinian people.
Will Washington and its western allies ever understand and acknowledge this
fact?

*-Ramzy Baroud is a journalist and the Editor of the Palestine Chronicle.
He is the author of five books. His latest is ‘These Chains Will Be Broken:
Palestinian Stories of Struggle and Defiance in Israeli Prisons’. Baroud is
a Non-resident Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Islam and Global
Affairs (CIGA) and also at the Afro-Middle East Center (AMEC). *
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