The Paris truce proposal trap

US ‘statehood’ duplicity serves Israel’s genocidal agenda

Hamas’ leadership in Gaza has yet to respond to the ceasefire proposal that emerged from last weekend’s four-way meeting in Paris of the intelligence chiefs of the US, Israel, Egypt, and Qatar. This delay is very probably deliberate, and if the deal is ever approved it will be conditional on meeting the resistance’s demands for Israel’s full withdrawal and a permanent halt to its war on the Gaza Strip.

This leadership, which has the overwhelming support of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and West Bank, must know that the purpose of this draft agreement is to rescue the Israeli occupation state, shore up waning US influence in the Middle East, and reduce the prospects of the war expanding, after it became clear it would be impossible to destroy or defeat Hamas. After nearly four months of relentless Israeli aggression, it retains more than 80% of its weapons, defence forces, tunnels, and armament factories intact.

Benjamin Netanyahu seeks to secure the release of as many captives as possible, especially civilians, so he can proceed without domestic or external pressure with his plan to depopulate the Gaza Strip through enforced or ‘voluntary’ evacuation. That would be a prelude to placing it under Israeli military rule, stealing its enormous offshore oil and gas reserves, and re-establishing the 16 Israeli settlements that were dismantled in 2005 when the direct occupation was ended due to growing settler and military casualties at the hands of the resistance.

With typical duplicity, the US is trying to market this Israeli plan by holding out the bait of a ‘demilitarised’ Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip once the Gaza war is over. The US State Department leaked word on Thursday that Blinken is considering the possibility of recognising such a state and has asked his aides to propose models of ‘demilitarisation’ that could be applied to it.

There is a popular saying that the biggest lies are the most blatant. This applies to the US and Britain’s leaks on this issue. The two allies who jointly launched all the recent devastating wars in the Middle East are trying to set a new trap for the Palestinian resistance and people by selling them the same old illusion once again. Their real aim is to undo the victory achieved by last year’s October 7 raid and cut Israel’s material and human losses.

Caution is therefore imperative. There is no shortage of evidence of this duplicity.

On Wednesday, the US Congress voted overwhelmingly (422 votes to 2) to ban all members of the PLO, Hamas, or Palestinian Islamic Jihad from entering the US. How can Washington support the establishment of a Palestinian state while banning entry to members of the PLO which signed the Oslo Accords, recognised Israel, surrendered 80% of the territory of historic Palestine, and recruited 60,000 security personnel to protect the settlers and suppress its own people?

The US sponsored the Oslo Accords and hosted their signing ceremony in the White House Rose Garden 30 years ago. Yet for the past 20 it has used its UN Security Council veto to abort the General Assembly’s decision to grant Palestine full UN membership as a state. It seems that if it does ever recognise such a state, it will be purely for the UN filing cabinet without establishing it on the ground.

The US administration has always said a Palestinian state can only come into being with the agreement of Israel and must be demilitarised. How can a demilitarised state survive alongside an enemy that practices genocide and ethnic cleansing without the means to defend itself against renewed aggression?

The person calling the shots in Washington these days is not Joe Biden but Benjamin Netanyahu. This is illustrated by Israel’s repeated snubbing of US calls for an end to the mass killing and displacement of civilians in the Gaza Strip.

The US has previously committed to guaranteeing ceasefire and reconstruction agreements in Gaza, notably the Sharm al-Sheik agreement that followed the 2013 war. But it never lived up to that commitment or pressed Israel to comply. Thousands of homes and tower blocks that were destroyed in that assault remain in ruins to this day, despite the allocation of $5 billion for their reconstruction.https://www.raialyoum.com/the-paris-truce-proposal-trap/

The leadership of Hamas, which inflicted the biggest defeat on Israel since its creation 75 years ago, should stick to its conditions in full. It must not agree to this trap of a deal that the US and Arab intelligence agencies devised and are trying to sell it. Its main aims are to spare Israel defeat or reduce its impact, impose its terms on the Palestinian resistance through terror and genocide, defuse growing popular anger at the US and Israel in the Arab world, and pre-empt rebellions against complicit rulers.

The agreement’s US sponsor, along with most of its European allies, has never demanded a halt to the genocidal war in Gaza but supported it under the rubric of “self-defence”. It never objected to the barring of humanitarian aid or deliberate starvation of the Gaza Strip’s two million of inhabitants who can now barely find a mouthful of bread or drop of milk to keep their children alive.

Victory demands patience and its achievement is fast approaching. 550 000 Israeli troops have failed to achieve full control over the Gaza Strip, crush the resistance, or kill or capture its leaders. The occupation state was struck a back-breaking blow that shook the pillars of its existence, and wants with the help of the US help to uproot the resistance by destroying the population that harbours it.

The Paris truce proposal trap