Gaza: ‘Who Chooses Death Will Bear the Consequences’

 By Jeremy Salt

Thousands of Palestinians rally in Gaza in solidarity with Al Aqsa Mosque.(File Photo: Mahmoud Ajjour, The Palestine Chronicle)

History teaches that the native, occupied, colonized, oppressed, never sleeps forever, is never asleep at all, but is watching and waiting.

The latest US/Israeli plan for Gaza has just been approved by the UN Security Council. Russia and China could have blocked it but chose to abstain. The former senior UN official, Craig Mokhiber, has accurately described it as a ‘colonial outrage.’

It reads like a cut-and-paste job taken from how the British ran East Africa in the 19 century and the French in Algeria, with some input from the extermination of Indian tribes by white settlers in what became the USA.

The ‘stabilization’ of Gaza will rest in the hands of a ‘Board of Peace’ chaired by Donald Trump; other members yet to be named but thought likely to include another genocidalist, Lord Blair of Iraq.

An ‘International Stabilization Force’ will be mobilized to enforce the peace. In truth, this ‘stabilization’ force will be an occupying force and its soldiers legitimate targets for the resistance.

Governments that have been asked to send troops should be quickly reminded of the fate of the ‘multinational force’ sent to Lebanon in 1982 to ‘keep the peace’ after Israel had torn the country apart in an advance warning of the genocides yet to come.

The US had supplied the weapons and political cover for Israel and paid the price when, in April 1983, a suicide bomber sheared the wing off the US embassy in Beirut, killing 63 people. In October, suicide bombers blew up the US and French marine barracks, killing 299 men.

These precedents should make any government think twice about putting the lives of its soldiers at risk to protect the continued occupation and corporatized takeover of Gaza, arranged by the US and Israel.

A collaborationist Palestinian ‘committee’ will theoretically administer Gaza under the authority of the ‘Board of Peace.’ The success of the whole project is predicated on the disarmament of Hamas. As this proceeds, Israel will withdraw to a ‘security perimeter’ around the entire territory.

Once Gaza has been ‘pacified’, the stage will be set for its ‘redevelopment.’ Trump’s Miami in the eastern Mediterranean will be only one part of a corporatized international takeover, described in a leaked Trump administration document as the ‘Gaza Reconstitution Economic Acceleration (Great Trust).

Apart from the flashy shoreline, residential towers, and shopping malls for Israeli and international investors, Gaza is planned as the Middle Eastern hub of a US-led challenge to China’s ‘Belt and Road,’ billed as the India-Middle East-East Europe Economic Corridor. This will be built into an ‘Abrahamic regional architecture’ based on Jared Kushner’s Abraham Accords.

Where the Palestinians will fit into this, basically, is nowhere. There will be no redevelopment for them. They are an obstruction to be removed, killed off or otherwise removed from their land and packed off to some impoverished corner of the world, bribed to take them. As they are still there, despite everything, they will be forced into a southern corner of their land and left to die out, replaying the fate of the tribes corralled inside the 19th-century reservations of the American west.

The Trump plan concedes that, if things go well, there ‘may be’ a path to Palestinian statehood. This is lying lip service, but even at the start, it is clear that things are not going to go well anyway.

The Gazans are not going to cooperate with a collaborationist committee. Hamas and all other resistance groups have announced that they are not going to disarm. Israel is killing civilians every day, and Hamas’ ‘defiance’ will be the opportunity for Israel to resume full-scale attacks on the civilian population. The likely outcome is the disintegration of the Trump plan as we watch.

The genocide in Gaza is matched by daily mayhem in southern Lebanon, with the ceasefire signed on November 24 having already been violated thousands of times by Israel, with more than 100 civilians murdered.

Israel is now building a wall, not along the 1949 armistice line (‘the border’), but inside Lebanese territory. No one stops it. It shoots at Lebanese and UNIFIL troops. No one stops it. Theoretically, there is still a ceasefire in Gaza, also violated thousands of times by Israel. No one stops it.

The secondary genocide on the West Bank moves at a different speed, but always moves.

An Amnesty International report of June 2025 found the illegal occupation forces had forcibly removed – ‘displaced’- 40,000 Palestinians from the Jenin and Tulkarm refugee camps. Many were refugees, or their descendants, from the 1967 war; many had fled to the West Bank during the 1948 war. Amnesty reported that buildings had been destroyed and roads and infrastructure torn up by bulldozers. Tulkarm had been turned into a ghost town.

The Tricontinental 19 newsletter (May 2025) reported that, since October 2023, the number of checkpoints and roadblocks across the West Bank had increased from 590 to about 900. These were being used to stop farmers from reaching their land, workers from their jobs, and communities, sources of potable water.

Since the launching of Operation Iron Wall (January 2025), occupation forces had ‘displaced’ 8,255 families from the Jenin, Tulkarm and Ain Shams refugee camps. Between January 2022 and September 2023, soldiers and settlers – backed by soldiers – had driven 28 Palestinian communities off their land. Between October 2023 and April 2025, the invading forces had destroyed more than 3,500 built structures, including homes, livestock sheds and water cisterns.

Since October 2023, they have killed 900 Palestinians, including at least 190 children, with an estimated 15,000 abducted and held indefinitely without charge in ‘administrative detention.’ There were more than 65 documented cases of Palestinians being murdered in Israeli prisons.

All this is done with the authority and approval of the state. The crimes reported in numerous sources include sexual violence and the looting of exchange bureaus. Under the same authority of the state, armed settlers run wild, killing, beating, vandalizing, burning, and destroying olive trees.

Jabotinsky’s iron wall – after which this operation is named – has long since been turned into an iron cage through the bars of which the Palestinians can be poked and prodded by their tormentors until the end of time,

Against this background of unrestrained state terrorism, the terrorist state has now passed legislation against terrorism. The occasion was the first hearing of the capital punishment bill, tabled by Limon Son Har-Malech of Ben Gvir’s Otzma Yehudit (Jewish Power) party.

Har-Melech was living in the West Bank outpost of Homesh in 2003 when her husband was killed in an attack on the family car by Palestinians living under occupation. She now lives in the Shavei Shomrom settlement, built on land seized from the Palestinian villages of Al Naqura and Deir Al Sharaf.

Har-Melech lives under the delusion that the land belongs to her and not the people from whom she stole it. This delusion governs her entire mindset. She is a fanatic in an occupier’s ‘parliament’, peopled by other fanatics.

The bill she introduced for the first reading was passed by 39/16 votes. It provides for the execution of ‘terrorists’ found guilty of the ‘’nationalistically motivated’ murder of Israelis.

It does not specifically say Jewish Israelis, but the death sentence for the ‘nationalistically motivated’ murder of a Palestinian Israeli by a Jewish Israeli is 100 percent unlikely.

The bill also allows for ‘judges’ on the West Bank to sentence Palestinians to death on the basis of a simple majority, rather than unanimously. Military commanders will no longer have the authority to commute such sentences.

These courts and judges are no more legitimate than those in German-occupied France during World War Two. They are an occupier’s tribunal set up for the sole purpose of crushing resistance. “No more mercy”, Har-Melech cried. “No more hesitation. We choose life and whoever chooses death will bear the consequences.”

Two other death penalty bills tabled by Likud and the Yisrael Beytenu parties were also passed. After the session, Ben-Gvir passed out baklava in celebration. This is party time for him. He and Smotrich have been given complete control of the West Bank.

They are Netanyahu’s stalking horses. They do his dirty work behind the lie of Netanyahu having to give them what they want, so they do not bring down his government. They are back-alley bullies and thugs, brave as long as their victims cannot fight back. The Ben Gvir shown in the video of him taunting a shrunken, mistreated Marwan Barghouti in his prison cell, is a truly contemptible figure.

Gaza has finally brought the truth to the surface. The propaganda is no longer working. Israel is reviled around the world. Even in the US, the balance has tipped against it. Israel’s Jews will never hold themselves responsible, but Jews elsewhere do, in increasing numbers. With good reason, they see this genocidal state both as a stain on their religion and as a threat to it.

Finally, Israel is not the safest place for Jews, but the most unsafe, with the retribution for the Gaza genocide yet to come. While the Palestinians are the prime victims, every state in the central Arab lands and beyond has had to pay in blood for the heresy of Zionism. It has also destroyed all but the remnants of the Jewish communities that had flourished across the Middle East and North Africa for thousands of years.

Palestine is, by far, the worst colonial experience in history, far worse in its rampant inhumanity than South Africa or Algeria. It took more than 130 years for the Algerians to drive out the French, but they finally did.

Israelis should watch ‘When Algeria was French 1830-1962’ to see what their fate might be, as unimaginable as it might seem now. When the FLN finally forced the French to surrender, there was to be no one state for French and Algerians but one state only for Algerians. They had had enough of the French.

It was a tragedy for the settlers as they knew no other home but they had to leave: ‘suitcase or the coffin’ was the choice given by the FLN, and they chose the suitcase. That this situation could ever be reached would be treated as a joke in Israel but, even in the US, the wheel of history is fast turning against it.

The Gaza genocide has achieved what, until only recently, was regarded as unthinkable – the loss of US public support. Israel has leeched off the taxpayer long enough and the taxpayer is finally realizing it. The billions sent to Israel are needed at home to repair urban and rural decay. Israel is a ball and chain around the American ankle, draining it of money, corrupting it from the inside and damaging its reputation around the world. The American people have been scammed, but it has taken Gaza for them to realize it.

The Epstein scandal exposes more rot at the top with every released email. Epstein, Mossad, AIPAC, Charlie Kirk, Ehud Barak in Epstein’s townhouse, the corrupt influence of the Adelson billions, the sleazy email exchanges and the flight logs to Epstein’s private island in the Caribbean shed more light every day on the seething morass of the ‘special relationship.’

On top of this, the US has debts it cannot pay. Financial collapse beckons, the experts say, far worse than 2008. This could change the situation in the Middle East overnight. Israel is totally dependent on US arms and money. The US might not be able to shell out endless billions anymore. A hostile public would be against it, anyway. To whom would Israel turn then?

These elements expose Israel’s deep structural weaknesses. It has a plenitude of missiles, bombs and fighter aircraft, but only as long as the US keeps supplying them. It is isolated in the Middle East beyond the flattery of kings, presidents and tribal sheikhs. It has no human hinterland to fall back on.

By comparison, the Palestinians have no missiles or fighter jets, no billions pouring into their pockets, no emirs, kings and presidents behind them, but what they do have is a regional resistance that will never give in and the belief in the truth and justice of their cause amongst the outraged billions in the vast Arab and Muslim hinterland.

In its colonial arrogance and contempt for the native, Israel seems to think it will sleep forever. History teaches that the native, occupied, colonized, oppressed, never sleeps forever, is never asleep at all, but is watching and waiting, however long he has to wait for his chance to come. However, Israel does not want to learn from history – it wants to impose itself on history.

“We choose life and whoever chooses death will bear the consequences,” but choosing life only through the death of others is a deal struck with the devil. Limon Har Son-Melech may yet witness Israel having to ‘bear the consequences’ of choosing life through the death of Palestine and the Palestinians.

– Jeremy Salt taught at the University of Melbourne, at Bosporus University in Istanbul and Bilkent University in Ankara for many years, specializing in the modern history of the Middle East. Among his recent publications is his 2008 book, The Unmaking of the Middle East. A History of Western Disorder in Arab Lands (University of California Press) and The Last Ottoman Wars. The Human Cost 1877-1923 (University of Utah Press, 2019). He contributed this article to The Palestine Chronicle.