Editorial: Gaza ‘peace plan’ is a fraud and a trap
After two years of Hell, being bombed, shelled, shot at and deliberately starved by the Israeli army, the population of Gaza will be hopeful for the future, as a result of the ceasefire agreement. There is even an understandable element of celebration as the rain of high explosives has stopped.
But their hopes are overladen with foreboding, as well they might be, because the ceasefire deal cobbled together between Trump, Netanyahu, and various Arab governments – the latter pressurising Hamas to agree – is a fraud and a trap.
There is nothing in the agreement, and even less in the track record of the Israeli state, to suggest that in the longer term there will be any kind of change to the decades-long denial of the democratic and national rights of the Palestinian people. As for a Palestinian state, it is only hinted at in the ceasefire agreement but, in reality, it is no nearer than before.
The pressure on Israel, the USA and the Arab states for an immediate end to the bombing of Gaza has come from the tens of millions of workers and youth who have demonstrated worldwide against the two-year slaughter in Gaza. It would be millions more, but for the fact that leading Arab states like Egypt and Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states do not allow pro-Palestinian demonstrations at home, for fear they will morph into something like a new Arab Spring.
These mass protests have shaken mainstream politicians to the core and the evidence of the killing and starvation of the Palestinian population has shifted public opinion on a scale unprecedented in the whole history of Israel. It has forced several governments, including the UK, to take the token step of ‘recognising’ Palestine, despite their support for Israel as it continued to put obstacles in the way of a Palestinian state.
Worldwide sympathy for Israel has been turned on its head
Eighty years ago, as a result of the revelation of the appalling Nazi Holocaust and the murder of six million European Jews, there was some measure of sympathy across the globe for the Jewish people struggling in Israel to create a ‘safe homeland’, even though it was at the expense of Palestinian rights and land.
But that world sympathy has been turned on its head. Israel is universally despised: it is now as a pariah state universally known to have committed genocide in Gaza and to be conducting a slow motion repeat in the West Bank. Israel is boycotted by actors, writers, academics and, not least, by labour movement organisations around the world.
Every genuine humanitarian and aid organisation on the planet has condemned the Israeli assault on the population of Gaza as a ‘genocide’, as have the UN and several governments. Opinion polls show, even among world Jewish communities, and even in the USA, a collapse in political support for Israel.
It is these factors above all else, that have pushed the main actors to the conclusion that they needed a respite from the war. There is something appallingly bizarre about Donald Trump, a key facilitator of the Gaza genocide, parading about as a ‘peace-maker’, and leading politicians, including a grovelling Keir Starmer, have rushed to his side to get a photo-opportunity beside the great man.
But even Trump – or at least his advisers – have seen the political damage that the Gaza killings and mass starvation have done to Israel’s and America’s international prestige. It only needed a modicum of pressure on Netanyahu – who was forced to apologise to Qatar for the missile attack on Hamas in Doha – to drag Israeli, kicking and screaming, to accept an agreement.
450 million Arabs will have followed the Gaza genocide on TV
In the Arab states, too, there has been growing unease over a one-sided military offensive that claimed nearly 68,000 lives, overwhelming non-combatants and including over 20,000 children. This, of course, is the figure on known casualties, and twice as many may be lying under tonnes of rubble.
Worryingly for Arab governments, the onslaught has been beamed by courageous journalists to the homes of 450 million Arabs around the Middle East. Arab dictators and sheikhs – with the exception of Yemen – banned pro-Palestinian marches and demonstrations, and the perception among workers and youth is that their governments have stood aside while fellow Arabs have been massacred.
The protests of tens of thousands of youth against corruption and unemployment, in both Morocco and Tunisia came as a reminder to Arab leaders that they are sitting on a volcano and for them the ceasefire is a means – they hope – of pushing the issue of Palestine off their domestic political agenda.
Yet the only concrete element of the agreement, is that part relating to the mutual release of hostages. As for the rest of the so-called peace agreement, there are no definite commitments and only vague references to negotiating a long-term settlement of all the outstanding issues.
Even the deal to release hostages had ‘grey’ areas. As was expected, Hamas could not easily recover the bodies of dead hostages. Nonetheless, pressure from the Israeli hostages’ families and fake outrage among Israeli politicians over delays became a pretext for the temporary suspension of food aid to Gaza. Worse may follow, if the Israeli government finds an excuse.
Whereever it is possible to ‘bend’ the hostage agreement, the Israeli government has done so. There is, as one would expect, a festive mood among Palestinians over the release of prisoners from Israeli jails, including some who have been incarcerated for decades.
But the vicious spite of the IDF is seen in their threats to communities on the West Bank not to ‘celebrate’ releases, as this would be interpreted as ‘support for terrorism’ and would invite IDF intervention. Some Palestinian hostages, whose homes and families are on the West Bank, have been released into ‘exile’ in Gaza and forbidden entry to the West Bank.
Palestinian hostages treated far worse than Israeli hostages
Commentators have also noted the difference in appearance between the Israeli and the Palestinian hostages who have been released. The Israelis have been for the most part properly fed, and they do not have the gaunt and unhealthy appearance of the Palestinians, kept in prisons where, according to B’Tselem, the Israeli human rights organisation, starvation, denial of medical needs and assaults are carried out as a matter of policy.
Once the hostages from both sides have been released, what will happen next? Hamas has clearly not disarmed. Its military wing may have lost the ability to fire rockets into Israel, but it has enough small arms to re-establish its grip on what remains of the territory not occupied by the IDF.
There seems no possibility of an international ‘peace-keeping’ force entering Gaza, even one made up from Arab states. The continued presence of Hamas and its armed wing may yet provide a pretext for Israel to resume the war on Gaza, once again with catastrophic consequences for most of the population.
But even without a resumption of the bombing, the two million Palestinians are left in an infinitely worse position that were in two years ago. October 7, 2023 was not the start of the war, although recent news commentary has spoken of that date as if it was. Prior to then, for a decade and a half, Gaza had been kept as an open prison, surrounded on all sides by the IDF.
This narrow enclave was denied any possiblility of economic development. Its population were denied the right to travel. Israel controlled everything that went in and out of Gaza: electricity, water, food, medicines and other essentials. It was the deliberate policy of Israel to deny Gazans any hope and from that came despair and desperation.
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This podcast from the Israeli newspaper, Haaretz, shows “how the Gaza War changed a generation of young Jews around the world, in their own words”.
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The so-called ‘military operation’ of October 7, 2023, may have been aimed to provoke a wider Middle East war, including Hezbollah and Iran, which Israel would lose. But, if that was the calculation of Hamas, it turned out to be a reckless gamble that was lost, and with an appalling cost for the population they claim to represent.
Gaza population infinitely worse off
Today, after the ceasefire agreement, the population of Gaza are immeasurably worse off. Over two million are crammed into a less land than before, an area utterly devastated by bombing. They are not only more hemmed in, but they are corralled by a far greater deployment of Israeli arms, tanks, drones and aircraft.
Is the Israeli government going to withdraw from the other parts of Gaza which it still occupies, as a result of this ‘peace agreement’? It is not – and Netanyahu has explicitly declared that Israel will retain ‘military control’ of Gaza.
This ceasefire agreement, in a nutshell, has brought about a short-term cessation of the bombing of Gaza, but it offers nothing in terms of peace or prosperity in the long-term. There is much in the agreement about investment in Gaza – it is at the moment a huge pile (fifty millions tonnes according to the UN) of rubble – and of movement towards a Palestinian state. But these are vague and pious words meant to appease those opposed to Israel, especially in the Arab world.
The 1993 Oslo Accords, agreed between Israeli Prime Minister, Yitzhak Rabin, and the then leader of the Palestine Liberation Organisation, Yasser Arafat, were understood to be the beginning of a negotiating process leading to Palestinian self-government in a separate state. The 1994 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded jointly to Yasser Arafat, and Israeli leaders, Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Rabin, for that agreement.
Yet everything that successive Israeli governments have done in the thirty-two years since have been in direct contradiction to the expectations raised in Oslo. European governments, including the UK – and even the Labour Friends of Israel – have paid lip-service to a post-Oslo “two-state solution”, even though it was obvious that the Israeli government was doing everything in its power to kill the idea.
Since the Oslo accords, Israeli has confiscated more Palestinian territory for Jewish settlers, who now number well over half a million. Since October 7, armed Jewish settlers, with the support of the Israeli government and army, have conducted one pogrom after another, driving thousands more Arab farmers and villagers off their land and into the larger cities where they can take limited refuge.
Palestinian Authority a vehicle for corruption
Although a Palestinian Authority was set up after Oslo, it been limited to a few cities in the West Bank and has never been more than a vehicle of corruption, despised by most Palestinians and, like a ‘pet’ of the Israeli government, incapable of defending the local population against ongoing raids and killings of the IDF.
Will Israel this time enter into serious discussions about a Palestinian state? It will not. It is a development explicity ruled out by Benjamin Netanyahu and most other political leaders. Once again, as it was with Oslo, it seems that the net result of this ‘peace agreement’ is to kick all the important issues into the long grass.
For now there is some respite from the daily bombing and shelling of Gaza, although the presence of the IDF near what used to be residential areas still poses danger to those returning. Three days ago, for the ‘crime’ of sifting through the rubble of their former homes ‘too close’ to the still-deployed IDF, six Palestinians were shot dead.
Without outside investment, Gaza will remain an economic disaster area. It has suffered more demage for its small area than most cities bombed in World War Two. The IDF has systematically destroyed all elements of normal civilian infrastructure – schools, hospitals, universities, power plants, water treatement, etc, etc – as well as eighty per cent of homes. This was not done for military advantage, but – like the Jewish settlements abandoned and demolished in 2005 – just to make the area uninhabitable.
The relief from incessant bombing and starvation is a huge plus for the Gaza population, but no-one should be under any illusion that anything has really changed for the longer term. There is no light at the end of the tunnel for Palestinians in Gaza or the West Bank. Both populations are inestimably worse off than ever before.
Israel still is and should remain a pariah state
Israel still is, and should remain, a pariah state. The international workers’ movement should take the marvellous example of the Italian workers and continue to deny trade, communication and any relations with Israel. Companies, businesses and governments should be pushed by the labour movement into into disinvesting from Israel and to support the BDS movement.
The collapse of political support for Israel will come to have a corrosive effect on Israeli politics, as fewer Jews around the world support its policies or see it as a viable ‘safe haven’ for Jewish people. It is a necessary corollary to the continued repression of half of the population it controls – a working definition of apartheid, if one were needed – that the Israeli state would increasingly turn towards greater authoritarian rule. This, too, will sharpen tensions and political conflicts in Israel.
It is only a minority of the Israeli population at the moment who see that an apartheid strategy that depends on military predominance and nothing else is unsustainable. But that minority will grow when dwindling international support is expressed by boycotts and by reduced diplomatic, economic and military support.
Meanwhile, it is the Arab working class which is potentially the greatest force in Middle East politics, although has a voice that has not yet spoken. That, too, can change, as Arab states are swept up in the tide of opposition among young people against corruption, nepotism and impoverishment of the many for the benefit of the few.
Those Arab workers and youth who have watched the reports on Al Jazeera and similar news agencies for the last two years will realise that their governments have fooled them over this ‘peace deal’ and, far from mollifying them, it will only increase their anger at their governments’ unwillingness to lift a finger to help Palestine.
So we have a pause in the Gaza war. But it is no more than a short interlude in a much longer struggle for the national, social and democratic rights of the Palestinian people. It has been the youth and the labour movement above all who have waved Palestinian flags in the past two years. We hope and expect that the sympathies of the workers’ movement will not be in any way diminished by this false dawn.
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