The cease-fire agreement between Hamas and Israel is, above all, a welcome relief for the Palestinians in Gaza who are suffering from the most brutal and horrific genocide. For 15 months, they suffered daily bombings, murders, threats, imprisonment, starvation, diseases and other adversities that are difficult for most people to even imagine, let alone experience and survive.
The deal will not go into effect until at least Sunday, January 19, 2025, not coincidentally the day before Donald Trump’s inauguration as President of the United States. While some attribute the deal’s success to the Trump administration’s unique ability to pressure Israel, it is crucial to emphasize that Trump is a master of political theater and undoubtedly wanted Israel to agree to a truce shortly before his inauguration in order to use it to increase his political capital. In other words, Trump did not pressure Netanyahu to accept the deal because he genuinely wants peace and order, or even because he is genuinely committed to all three phases of the deal. Instead, he likely acted out of personal political calculations to improve his reputation and push his administration’s agenda.
We don’t know what was said and agreed behind closed doors between Trump’s team and Israeli officials, but what we can be sure of is that the Trump administration is not interested in establishing a fully sovereign Palestinian state along the 1967 borders, and is not opposed to Israel’s plans to annex large parts of the West Bank. In fact, some reports suggest that the Trump administration may have promised Netanyahu US support for the annexation of certain areas of the West Bank in exchange for his acceptance of a cease-fire agreement, which Israel may not even follow past Phase 1. In such a scenario the scenario, if indeed it happens , Trump gets what he wants, which is a political victory, and Netanyahu gets what he wants, which is continued settler colonization of Palestine.
The main reason for pessimism about this deal is that the deal does not guarantee Phases 2 and 3, in which Israeli forces would completely withdraw from the Strip, allow displaced Palestinians to return to all areas of the Strip and fully rebuild Gaza. The comic would be taken.
It is important to emphasize that in 15 months of genocide, Gaza was turned into ruins. Large parts of the Strip are uninhabitable. People cannot simply return to neighborhoods that have been razed to the ground, to buildings that do not have running water, a functioning sewage system, or access to electricity and fuel; no schools, universities, clinics or hospitals to use, businesses to run and so on. The economic system has collapsed, and people are completely dependent on foreign aid for basic survival. Disease is widespread and many silent killers such as toxins from Israeli bombs circulate in Gaza’s atmosphere, soil and water. Families were completely eliminated, others were separated by Israel’s indiscriminate attack, and many children became orphans. A large number of people have weakened and are unable to take care of their families. It is not clear how a “normal” life will be possible for the Palestinians after all this destruction.
Questions about the management of the Strip are also still murky at best, and there is certainly nothing in the deal that addresses the core issue or leads to a long-term solution. The question of a long-term solution is very critical. The deal might, at best, end this specific genocidal operation, but it certainly says nothing about the core of the problem: Israel’s structural genocide against the Palestinians.
The structural genocide of Palestinians, what Palestinians call the ongoing Nakba, refers not only to one or two specific genocidal events such as the 1948 Nakba or this genocidal attack on Gaza, but rather to the settler-colonial structure of genocide that seeks to eliminate Palestinian sovereignty, end the Palestinian right of return to their land, expel the Palestinians from most of their land, and claim exclusive Israeli-Jewish sovereignty from the river to the sea. This structure of genocide works through various methods of elimination and expulsion.
A genocidal operation like the one the world has witnessed and continues to witness in Gaza, involving physical mass slaughter, mass displacement and mass destruction that renders the land uninhabitable, is clearly one of those instruments, but it is not the only one. There is also incremental movement and ejection; preventing economic development and creating economic dependence; the erasure of Palestinian history and culture; fragmentation of the Palestinian population; denying rights, freedoms and dignity to those living under occupation so that they feel pressured to leave; political obstruction of Palestinian sovereignty, and so on.
So the real question becomes: Can a ceasefire, even if it goes through all three phases, end this structural genocide? The answer is clearly no because none of these other instruments of Israeli structural genocide were mentioned in the cease-fire agreement.
This structural genocide must be constantly named, exposed and opposed. As long as Israel’s settler-colonial project remains obscured or downplayed in diplomatic and public discourse, the central problem will continue unabated, and we will return to this moment of absolute horror and unspeakable suffering, assuming we even get a significant reprieve from it through this agreement. on the ceasefire. Without serious and sustained pressure on the Israeli state, without the economic and political isolation of the Israeli state by states and institutions around the world until Israeli settler colonialism is dismantled, we will find ourselves trapped in a permanent structure of genocide, a pressure cooker that will eventually find liberation in yet another a greater war of total destruction. Now is not the time for the international community to celebrate or self-congratulate, but to take serious political and economic action against Israel to stop the continued genocide of the Palestinian people in all its various forms.
The views expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Al Jazeera.
