TheAltWorld In Paris, a meeting that will protect Israel’s colonial violence
Today, diplomats from Europe and the Middle East will meet in France to discuss the transition in Gaza. While the meeting endorses the US plan for Gaza, or perhaps one should say Israel because there is no security for Palestinians in ongoing colonialism and genocide, Israeli officials are maintaining that the meeting in Paris will undermine US negotiation efforts.
The US announced the agreement for the first phase of the ceasefire, which will see an exchange of the remaining Israeli hostages in Gaza for Israel’s release of Palestinian prisoners, as well as a partial withdrawal of the Israeli military.
In France, diplomats will be discussing transitional governance for Gaza, humanitarian aid and reconstruction, an international stabilisation force and disarming Hamas. Predictably, the meeting will also seek ways to strengthen the Palestinian Authority and its security services. To summarise the above, Western and Middle Eastern diplomats will be seeking ways to maintain the previous status quo in a territory marked by Israel’s genocide, with no recognition as to what contributed to these two years of genocide.
Let us also not forget Israel has managed to normalise genocide to the point that it is now also part of ‘the conflict’ spectrum. It follows a twisted logic that, since the 1948 Nakba and even before, the Zionist forced displacement, ethnic cleansing, torture and massacres of Palestinians across colonised Palestine were deemed conflict by the UN. Israel’s genocide in Gaza unleashed all the previous atrocities accompanied by unbridled military force, supported by the West. Which part of genocide will the West now deem as falling far from the wide umbrella designated as conflict? The colonial discourse supporting Israel’s security narrative must be dissected and exposed for what it is and what it achieved against the Palestinian people.
Palestinians in Gaza have suffered devastating losses. The diplomatic efforts render these losses inconsequential by eliminating Palestinian input. Symbolic recognition of a non-existent Palestinian state, as well as the two-state paradigm, will underpin these discussions. But Palestine does not belong to world leaders to dispose of it as they deem fit for Israel’s colonial expansion.
The two-state paradigm is obsolete. If the West, like UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres, maintain there is no plan B, they can look at genocide, which was given two years to destroy Palestinians in Gaza. Decolonisation, which is what many Palestinians have called for, would not have included genocide, but the UN is averse to dismantling the Zionist colonial structure which it helped to create. This is why it allowed genocide, and why world leaders are keen to return to the diplomatic safety of the two-state paradigm which has proved to be perilous for the Palestinian people.
The least the Paris meeting should achieve is recognition of the Palestinian people’s legitimate anti-colonial struggle. Israel is not the victim here; it has never been. Any attempt to marginalise Palestinians from politics through the two-state discourse, especially after witnessing what obsolete paradigms can reap in colonial politics, enables the extension of Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
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