by Awad Abdelfattah
It is ironic that when these features were blurred, and the crimes were less widespread among broad international circles, both official and popular, there was still a degree of restraint to limit the brutality. Today, however, despite the blatant nature of the crime and its unprecedented barbarism, it has the support and legitimacy of the American empire and most Western regimes, amid silence and indifference from major Eastern powers. This is a source of terror not only for this part of the world, but for all its peoples.
We are facing a reality in which a process of normalising genocide and Judaising Palestine is underway. The displacement plan is being put forward for negotiations with Arab regimes that have long since fallen into the swamp of dependency and shame. The American imperial administration seeks to implement the plan and impose normalisation on Arab regimes as a path to ending the Palestinian cause and directly establishing Israeli control over the region. This is achieved by normalising relations between the criminal Israeli regime and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, which so far appears to be reluctant, by proposing the two-state solution once again. However, re-proposing the two-state solution without defining what this solution will look like, including the borders of the state and its sovereignty, is basically normalising relations with the apartheid regime, the colonial project, and efforts to complete the Judaisation of Palestine.
Through the American Zionist lobby, Israel finds within the current international circumstances a historic opportunity to resolve the conflict once and for all in favour of its project, which extends beyond Palestine to Lebanon, Syria and the rest of the Arab region. Rational people with a historical background know that achieving its strategic project, which consists of burying the Palestinian cause and resolving the conflict through the political or physical marginalisation of the Palestinian people, is impossible. The Palestinian people are not Germany or Japan during World War II, as Zionist propaganda promotes. These two countries were under Nazi and fascist regimes, in the case of the former and expansionist, colonial, and militaristic regimes in the case of the latter. Palestine, however, is a usurped homeland, where a national liberation movement emerged, resisting and seeking independence and freedom, as is the case in most colonised countries. Palestine did not invade a foreign power, and its people did not attack another nation. Rather, the land and the people were, and continue to be, victims of the barbaric aggression of a Western-Zionist colonial alliance. Before and after the 1948 Nakba, particularly in the late 1960s, this national movement offered accepting the European Jewish presence in Palestine and coexistence in a single state, and this Palestinian movement made a concession, unprecedented by any national liberation movement in modern history, when it accepted the unjust “two-state solution” and signed a preliminary agreement, the Oslo Accords, in 1993, hoping to achieve an independent state on 22 per cent of its homeland. This national movement and its people paid, and continue to pay, a heavy price for falling for this deadly illusion. This has revealed the nature of the Zionist project, which cannot tolerate the demands of implementing peace and justice, because its structure and ideology are based on the absolute negation of the other, not on coexistence with them on equal footing.
No one could have imagined, in this era, that the debate would not be about how to renew efforts to achieve peace and resolve a long and lengthy conflict with a just solution, but rather about which means to use to ethnically cleanse an indigenous people: either through voluntary displacement, or by continuing to shed blood and liquidate the largest possible number of Palestinians. Thus, the West has taken us back to those dark ages when it wiped entire nations off the face of the earth in order to acquire and achieve wealth.
In this violent round of the conflict, the Palestinian people have made astronomical sacrifices and incurred heavy losses, which, in the eyes of the majority, are the price of achieving their freedom. This freedom may not come now, but it will one day. However, this matter must be subject to frank discussion and revision, especially regarding how to manage the conflict with colonialism, the prices that the people can bear, and, most importantly, how to confront the current and future phases, using what tools and strategies. There is no doubt that the Palestinian people and their national movement urgently need a radical reconsideration of the matter.
Given the fact that hopes of achieving even partial liberation are fading, the Palestinian people stand at a significant and extremely dangerous historical turning point. Their priority has become stopping the genocide before resuming their liberation journey. However, this catastrophe is exacerbated by the fact that there is nothing on the horizon to save them other than their own steadfastness, or whatever remains of their steadfastness to bear this round of the conflict. The most dangerous aspect is the failure to achieve Palestinian unity and the failure to reach an agreement on a unified, responsible leadership that lives up to the sacrifices of its people. Failure to achieve this mission remains a deep wound in the Palestinian consciousness.
Therefore, the priorities and tasks of the Palestinian people, with their dwindling leverage, remain focused on putting pressure to stop the genocide and continuing independent national efforts and initiatives to form a popular pressure group and mobilise the masses, in harmony with the movements of Palestinian generations abroad and the global popular movement that exemplifies the intersectionality of the struggle.
It has become clear that there is no solution on the horizon, not even in the medium term, unless sudden developments occur that tip the scales. Many years will pass where the Israeli project will prevail, thanks to its reliance on military force, the support of the American empire, and the absence of Arabs and Muslims from the process. Therefore, the main task of confronting this annihilationist project falls on the shoulders of the Palestinian popular force, both inside and outside Palestine, and on their allies, whose numbers have grown and whose awareness of the reality of the global criminal system has grown.
Given this brutality and the absence of effective support for the Palestinian people, particularly from the Arabs, the importance of the efforts, perseverance and determination of the free forces, both Palestinian and international; professional and political, to prevent normalisation of genocide in Palestine becomes more apparent. This must occur no matter how brutal the killers are, and no matter how much activists around the world, or officials in international institutions, are persecuted, smeared and threatened. This effort aims to accumulate evidence and proof that will serve as tools to corner the killers and their accomplices, in a long battle to restore humanity and justice. The day when the battle subsides and the extent of the horrific crimes is revealed is coming, and Israel and its leaders will be constantly pursued until justice and retribution are achieved.
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