TheAltWorld The international community sold out the Palestinians decades ago on the right of return
- Ramona Wadi
- Thursday 13 Feb 25
- 362
- 1
“Gaza is an essential part of a future Palestinian state,” the EU Spokesman for Foreign Affairs Anouar El Anouni stated belatedly in response to US President Donald Trump’s announcement of taking over Gaza and remodelling into a so-called “Riviera of the Middle East”.
While the EU retained its diplomatic posturing over Gaza within the two-state framework, stating that there should be no further forced displacement of Palestinians, Trump announced that his plan did not include the Palestinian right of return. While that was evident with his first announcement of a hypothetical Gaza takeover by the US for Israeli interests – Trump said that Gaza would be populated with foreigners – the stark assertion that there is no right of return strikes a dangerous tone, one that exposes the international community’s continuous delay strategy when it comes to Palestine and Palestinian matters.
Let’s make it clear: the right of return is a legitimate right for all refugees, not just Palestinians.
It is an individual right that cannot be negotiated or taken away by anyone. That’s international law. However, despite affirming the Palestinian right of return in UN Resolution 194, the international community has never addressed the fact that Israel itself is an impediment to that right. It never addressed the fact that Israel was founded upon the illegal ethnic cleansing of the indigenous Palestinian population, which in turn made Palestinian refugees an unfortunate humanitarian problem.
With Israel’s establishment, a perpetual cycle of refugee creation was set in motion. To protect Israel’s colonial enterprise in Palestine, the world became complicit in the forced displacement of Palestinian refugees. It continued to do so after 1967; with each decision Israel took to appropriate more land from the Palestinian people; with each brutal assault on Gaza; with every settlement built and expanded in the occupied West Bank and Jerusalem; with the genocide in Gaza; and with the apartheid regime’s attacks on Jenin. Wherever Israel decided to forcibly displace Palestinians, the international community was right behind it.
As is his style, Trump is openly rejecting the Palestinian right of return.
But has the EU, for example, advocated overtly for and worked towards the exercise of that right? How about the UN, which fragmented forced displacement from a colonial policy to disconnected human rights violations? The UN which even debated about humanitarian pauses in a genocide and which failed to stop Israel’s forced displacement of Palestinians in Gaza so that they could be massacred in greater numbers? The international community sold out the Palestinians decades ago on the right of return.
Moreover, it has ruined Palestinians by differentiating on forced displacement. It differentiated between 1948 and 1967, and keeps doing so to date. Let us keep in mind that the images we saw of Palestinians returning to their destroyed homes in Gaza is just a tiny sliver of the repercussions from an entire history of Zionist colonial violence.
Can Europe turn against the colonial ideology it legitimised since before it recognised Israel?
Diplomatic jargon aside, there is nothing to choose between Trump and the EU, or the rest of the world, with regard to stances on the Palestinian right of return. If Trump can state adamantly that there is no right of return for Palestinians in his plan for Gaza, there is an entire history of stalling supporting his claim. It is only the lack of continuous insistence to look at history that creates a veneer of difference between Trump and the international community on the subject. The road was always paved with silence and the humanitarian paradigm; for Trump, it was like laying out the red carpet.
Ramona Wadi
Ramona Wadi is an independent researcher, freelance journalist, book reviewer and blogger. Her writing covers a range of themes in relation to Palestine, Chile and Latin America.
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Can Europe turn against the colonial ideology it legitimised since before it recognised Israel?
No because since 1945, the Jews have taken control years after years of all institutions in the west, Europe and its offshoots in Americas and Oceania.
The “EU” ab UK iare evil totalitarian regimes which target Europeans for extermination like “israel’ targets Palestinians for same.
The “EU” is just paying lip service and does only one thing since 1948: fund and back the zionist invaders.
Same for the UN, a money laundering operation that exists only to try to impose the globalists agenda of humnaity enslavement, depopulationa and land and palnet resources grabbing of its trillionaire handlers.
That Europe and the US support the genocidal zionist regime is one thing, after all they are far enough, but the rotten local regimes like Egypt, Jordan and now Lebanon and Syria, all puppet regimes of the US and their zionist masters doing nothing to fight the genocidal criminals makes me want to vomit.
This week they will gather in KSA, another US client, to propose an “alternative” to Trump plans of ethnic cleansing, but an alternative that will please their boss Trump by marginalizing Hamas, the only body that defends Palestinians with other resistance groups. The new US puppet regime in Lebanon does the same to sideline and starve Hezbollah in Lebanon while letting their country being bombed by invaders.
The populations of these countries are massively pro-Palestinian like European and American populations, yet the criminal leaders need to be toppled in order these countries finally come together to eliminate the parasites who have sucked the blood of Palestine for too long.