A Ceasefire is Not an End

Former Ambassador, Human Rights Activist

The Genocide of the Palestinian people began 76 years ago. What may be drawing to a close is merely a particularly intense phase in the Genocide.

Gaza is destroyed. 92% of its housing has gone. Its water treatment and sanitation, electricity generation, food processing, farming, fishing are all now incapable of sustaining much life. Its hospitals, health centres, universities, colleges, and schools are all now destroyed, as are its municipal buildings, waste disposal, road surfaces, drainage channels, theatres, cultural centres, cinemas, cafes.

What is left is 1.8 million cold and starving people, malnourished, soaked, ill-clothed, living in tents and defecating in trenches.  Tens of thousands will die in these conditions however fast aid comes – and you can be 100% certain Israeli obstructionism will prevent it from coming fast.

But even if they can be physically saved, the culture and fabric of society are damaged beyond repair. The psychological damage is immense. The institutions of normality that might permit recovery are non-existent.

Nobody really knows the true number killed so far in the genocide. The Palestinian health authorities, run by the elected Hamas representatives, have been scrupulous in giving out numbers only of those officially certified dead following the recovery and identification of their bodies.

Given the almost total destruction of Gaza’s buildings and the unavailability of rescue equipment and the lack of ceasefire for body recovery, I suspect the 46,707 official death toll as of last night (and the Israelis already killed over 80 again today) may prove to be way short of the truth, which could be double or more from unaccounted bodies.

That is without the Lancet study suggesting that 50% again may have died subsequently from wounds. A similar number to the dead are permanently maimed.

The worst effects may not in the long term even be in Palestine at all. The Western world has, in the support of its rulers for Israel as it commits Genocide, abandoned any pretence to wish to maintain the system of international law that had been extended and developed post World War 2. Untold horrors of war may be unleashed as a result in the next decade.

In both the USA and the UK, governments ignored their own senior officials and legal advisers to break the human rights constraints which those nations had imposed upon their foreign policy, particularly with regard to the supply of weapons.

In Poland, France and several other NATO countries, the governments have openly repudiated their duty to enforce warrants of the International Criminal Court.

In the UK, Germany, USA, France and throughout the Western world, there has been a massive rolling back of long cherished and hard won rights of freedom of expression and assembly, explicity to prevent criticism of Israel and support for Palestine.

There has been concerted social media suppression to the same end on all major online platforms, and a seizure of Tik Tok in the USA avowedly because of its failure to repress speech critical of Israel.

The unanimity of mainstream media support for Israel, and tiny or no space for any dissenting view, has become so established a part of the political landscape it can go unnoticed. But it needs to be highlighted.

In his closing address, the one useful thing Biden said was the correct observation about the USA becoming an oligarchy. The whole world is becoming intensely oligarchic, with an astronomical expansion of the wealth gap between rulers and ruled these past twenty years.

The impunity of Israel, and the decline of international law, is a direct consequence of this. There is a particular truth that encompasses almost every Western country and, interestingly, unites both the Arab and the Western worlds.

That truth is this. The wealthy oligarchic elites who control media and politics are extremely pro-Israel. The people are not.

The gap between the support for Israel among the super wealthy and powerful, and the view of the majority of normal people, really deserves serious study to explain it. Not the least interesting is the fact that not even almost 100% mainstream media pro-Israeli propaganda has been enough to convince the peoples of the world to support the Genocide, outwith the special cases of Germany and the US religious zionists.

So, what happens now? Well, I was in Beirut when it was carpet bombed in the hours immediately before the ceasefire here took effect, and I expect Israel to massively bomb Gaza’s tent cities in the next three days.

I have also seen Israel break the ceasefire in Lebanon every single day, and I expect them to do that in Gaza too.

Israel daily breaches the ‘ceasefire’ in Lebanon both inside and outside the demilitarised zone. Three days ago they killed 5 civilians. pic.twitter.com/MiAQpZ4AZI

— Craig Murray (@CraigMurrayOrg) January 15, 2025

So long as the USA and Israel designate Hamas as a terrorist organisation, they will claim the right to bomb and kill at any time as a “counter-terrorism operation”, irrespective of any ceasefire agreement. That is their formal position, just as it is their formal position with regard to Hezbollah and the ceasefire agreement with Lebanon.

The Israelis did not start killing Palestinians on 8 October 2023 and they will not stop killing them now.

I expect the ceasefire agreement to go ahead as projected, with occasional Israeli “anti-terrorist” attacks continuing in Gaza. The prisoner exchanges will happen. The Israelis will continually delay and renege on the provisions on aid access and on withdrawal of troops. Palestinians in Gaza will die in large numbers of disease, hunger and poor sanitation.

Just as the ceasefire in Lebanon led to Israel immediately invading Southern Syria, Israel will now increase its activity in the West Bank, suppressing resistance together with its proxy “Palestinian Authority” forces and continually seizing land from Palestinians.

I do not doubt that it is true that the Gaza ceasefire is due to Trump telling Netanyahu to stop. As I continually said, Biden’s attempts to restrain Netanyahu were a complete subterfuge and Biden was absolutely committed to the Genocide.

Trump is very difficult to read. When he was elected in 2016, I believed he was less hawkish in foreign policy than Hillary Clinton. Had Clinton been elected, for example, I am sure that she would have immediately laid waste to Syria which would have been destroyed like Libya – eventually achieved by Biden.

Trump II had seemed an altogether more aggressive persona than Trump I, particularly as regards the Middle East. Yet Trump II has told Netnyahu to stop the Genocide – confirming incidentally that Biden could have done so had he wished.

Biden wanted Genocide.

The myth of western support for international law and human rights died in Gaza, along with the myth of western support for the “two state solution”. There never was a viable two state solution and it was those states who were loudest in pretending to support it, who vehemently refused to recognise the Palestinian state.

The “two state solution” was only ever a cover for Zionism. With Gaza now utterly smashed and its population ruined, and the West Bank almost totally expropriated, the pretence of a “two state solution” has to be finally killed off.

Israel has lost any moral authority for its continued existence. It has proven itself to be a genocidal entity driven by ethno-supremacism. (A people who believe themselves to be a superior or divinely favoured race are ethno-supremacists, regardless of whether their claim of ethnic homogeneity is founded or not.)

WIthin 48 hours of the Hamas breakout on 7 October I wrote my first piece about it. Often in retrospect reactions to a major incident are too influenced by the emotion of the moment, but actually I am as proud of this as of anything I ever wrote.

Asymmetric warfare tends to be vile. Oppressed and colonised peoples don’t have the luxury of lining up soldiers in neatly pressed uniforms and polished boots, to face off against the opposing army in an equality of arms.

A colonised and oppressed people tends, given the chance, to mirror the atrocities perpetrated on them by their oppressor.

This of course feeds in, always, to the propaganda of the Imperialist. A paroxysm of resistance by the oppressed always ends up portrayed by the Imperialist as evidence of the bestiality of the colonised people and in itself justifying the “civilising mission” of the coloniser.

Which is not to say I relish violence, quite the opposite. I am in fact pleased that Israeli prisoners as well as Palestinian prisoners will be returned as part of a ceasefire deal.

While the Palestinian resistance are fully entitled to take as many IDF members and reserves prisoners as they can, I cannot approve of the illegal practice of taking children and other complete non-combatants prisoner – and yes I know the Israelis do it on a much larger scale.

Behaving better than the Israelis should be a permanent guide in life.

Unfortunately, it is not the case that colonial settler, racist states cannot triumph. The white settlers in the USA, Canada and Australia did manage to permanently subjugate and almost extinguish the local populations. I have spoken to some wonderful Arab intellectuals these last few weeks who all tend to take the view that Israel’s ultimate defeat is inevitable because the colonial settler state will never be accepted by the Arab populations. I wish I were so confident.

Where I agree with them totally is that the abolition of the terrorist state of Israel must be the goal, not an accommodation with it.

Israel’s pariah status is now assured for a generation, it is deeply split internally and it is dependent on a parent state, the USA, which is losing its relative power and hegemony. Yet for now Israel is expanding. It occupies significantly more territory than it did two years ago and in Syria and Lebanon it has seized control of the source of vital regional water sources. Israel currently has full military control of over 30% of Syria’s fresh water.

Trump probably supports Israeli annexation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, Gaza and more. But that does not of necessity mean he supports either the expulsion of thier populations or an apartheid state. He may sees such heavy state interventions as an interference in the freedom of business to make money, and even undesirable per se.

It is impossible to be certain about what Trump sees as the end goal. From this first indication, it is fair to say his influence is, to this point, more benign than feared.

It is all a house of cards. As of today, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Qatar, Syria, Jordan and Lebanon all have leadership which is, broadly speaking, pro-USA and pro-Israel. Will that still be the case in a decade? Because it is the fact on which Israel depends for its existence.

The other point on which Israel relies is that support of Western governments. But throughout the Western world, the electoral and party systems which maintain the neo-liberal consensus and give voters no real choice at elections across issues ranging from economic policy to support for Israel, are fracturing.

This requires an article in itself, but in the UK, France, Germany and countless other states there is a tectonic shift happening with voters demanding a shift away from the tiny window of orthodox policy.

To date, the populist right has been quickest to take advantage of this shift, and of course benefited from mainstream media cooperation. But the fluidity indicates an impending seismic shift in western domestic political alignment.

That coincides with the disillusionment of Eastern Europe with the EU and NATO and the consequent  desperate attempts of the NATO powers to subvert democracy in Georgia, Romania and Moldova.

At some stage China will take a more active interest in the Middle East. Once the Ukraine war has concluded, Russia will undoubtedly turn more attention to the Mediterranean again.

The situation is dynamic. I would not know whether to be more surprised if Trump initiated US attacks on Iran or initiated rebooted nuclear talks and the lifting of sanctions. I suspect the latter surprise to be the more likely.

Today there is at least a moment of hope that the horrible deaths and mutilations in Gaza may be slowed. Let us take that for a moment of respite, and feel the sun upon our faces. Then we continue the fight against evil.

———————–

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