Maintaining diplomatic appearances reinforces genocide

by Ramona Wadi

Israeli citizens march to the Knesset demanding the resignation of Prime Minister Netanyahu’s government and early elections in western Jerusalem on May 20, 2024 [Saeed Qaq – Anadolu Agency]

Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, is expected to address a joint session of US Congress on 24 July, and speculations about the contents of his speech have been reported in Israeli media, albeit slightly contradictory.

Senior Israeli aides to Netanyahu stated that the address would address the normalisation agreements between Saudi Arabia and Israel, a ceasefire centred on a deal for the hostages and “a pathway towards a Palestinian State”. The latter was contradicted by Netanyahu’s office, which stated that the Prime Minister “opposes a Palestinian State and will not change his position in his address to Congress”. However, it was reported that Netanyahu would “offer rhetorical support for a vague process that leads toward increased Palestinian autonomy short of a State”.

Nothing new in the usual diplomatic jargon, but at a time when Israel is openly committing genocide in Gaza, not even “rhetorical support for a vague process” can even claim its usual pedestal in the US-Israeli narrative. By committing genocide, Netanyahu has proved without doubt his opposition to a Palestinian State. Emptying Gaza of Palestinians, on the other hand, is believable even without Netanyahu’s rhetoric.

The recurring internal forced displacement of Palestinians, Israel forcing Palestinians into areas which it then bombs, the enforced starvation, the mass graves, the bodies buried beneath the rubble – what part of genocide even alludes to a hypothetical autonomous Palestinian entity, let alone a State?

Israel and the US have signed on a much larger complicity in their crimes against the colonised Palestinian people. To speak of normalisation agreements in the past was already an aberration; the level of absurdity it has now reached requires new vocabulary. Putting genocide in the past seems to be the way forward for Israel and the US. For Palestinians, however, genocide has been ongoing since the Nakba and now openly practiced, as well as endorsed and aided by Western powers. Away from the diplomacy of might, Palestinians are living the horrors and consequences of incessant bombings and slaughters that have already created humanitarian catastrophes. Which Palestinians will have the physical and mental health required to consider politics before relieving starvation, the need for shelter, access to clean water, health and education? All of which were already scarce before the genocide?

Netanyahu, Israel’s most wanted man – Cartoon [Sabaaneh/MiddleEastMonitor]

Genocide did not erupt out of nowhere in the Zionist colonial project. Palestinians repeatedly warned the international community about the various ways they were being ethnically cleansed from their towns and villages since the Nakba. But the international community was too busy protecting its two-state consensus and reinforcing political and economic divisions between Gaza and the Occupied West Bank which played directly into Israeli interests. Palestinians have perpetually been exploited as pawns in international diplomacy, to the point of genocide.

Netanyahu’s address to Congress is just one more step in political oblivion when it comes to the Palestinian people. Working hand in hand not only with the destruction of Palestine’s historical and collective memory, oblivion now finds a better partner in genocide. While the forthcoming speech is speculated upon as to its contents, Israel gains yet more respite through diplomatic channels to massacre more Palestinians in Gaza, and perhaps get the opportunity to speak of a plan for after genocide, in which only the Zionist concept of purported peace can fester. Not a vague process at all, just a bloody one.