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For two years, the world has watched as Israel has systematically destroyed the Gaza Strip, killing tens of thousands of Palestinians and maiming an untold number more. As dangerously, Israel continues to methodically target the healthcare, education, water and sewage systems to ensure that life cannot resume in the Gaza Strip.
Western governments’ responses to Israel’s actions have ranged from cheerleading and unconditional support in the first year of Israel’s attack on Gaza after 7 October 2023, followed by statements of concern and handwringing, to, more recently, occasional expressions of consternation and empty threats that continued Israeli attacks may, at some unspecified time, lead to an arms embargo or a drop in trade relations. In the last few months, there have also been the greatly celebrated proclamations of conditional recognition of a Palestinian state. The irony cannot be more profound: tepidly recognizing a state as it, and its people, are being erased without mercy.
As I write this, confusion swirls around Donald Trump’s plan to end the war and hope is mounting for a hostage and prisoner swap. While an end to the bombing, the freedom of captives on both sides and allowing humanitarian aid into Gaza would bring some relief in an otherwise unbearably bleak landscape, it would be a mistake to view the plan as a historic breakthrough for Palestine. Trump’s vision is yet another American-Israeli concoction cooked up without any input from Palestinians that would retain Israel’s perpetual control over Gaza’s future.
The world has never listened to Palestinian voices or taken seriously the existential threat Israel poses to Palestinian life, and this has not materially changed despite the increase in performative angst. To the contrary, Palestinians have for three-quarters of a century endured the world telling us that Israeli “security concerns” – however defined by Israel – are more important than our rights and lives. As a result Palestinians live with two omnipresent forms of violence: Israeli violence directly inflicted upon our bodies, land and society, and western violence, where only our erasure prompts the world to notice us and see our humanity – but only barely.
I reach this conclusion from observing up close, for a quarter-century, how this mode of western thinking and operating plays out. Despite two years of carnage in Gaza, and everything the world has learned about Israel’s true intentions, that mode is repeating itself as I write this, with global powers lining up behind a proposal that does little to ensure Palestinians gain any say over their future.
Rhetoric without consequence has been the west’s modus operandi for decades. The cost has been catastrophic.
A magic pill
At the end of September 2000, I joined the Palestinian negotiating team as a lawyer involved in the negotiations with Israel. This was a big journey for me: I am the daughter of Palestinians born before the Nakba, the ethnic cleansing of Palestine. My parents’ families, unlike the vast majority of Palestinians, did not flee in 1948 and later became Israeli citizens, living in Nazareth, in a state that did not want them. In 1967, they decided to emigrate to Canada, where I was born, raised and educated. I had not lived in Palestine before joining the negotiating team except for a few months at a time. Now, I had committed to being in Palestine for a year. I joined the team as a lawyer after a friend, also a member of the legal team, informed me that one of the flaws of the “Oslo peace process” was its vagueness. I had believed, naively, that the team could remedy that.
This was the height of the peace process, as it was labelled at the time, which began under President Bill Clinton in 1993 with the historic handshake between Yitzhak Rabin, the Israeli prime minister, and Yasser Arafat, the Palestinian leader. Through a series of agreements, the Palestinian Authority was created and the West Bank and Gaza Strip were further subdivided, with new Israeli checkpoints scattered throughout. Major issues such as borders, settlements, the rights of millions of refugees and Jerusalem were taken off the table indefinitely.
All of these were now bilateral issues for Israel and the Palestinians to to be resolve between them, with the rest of the world theoretically standing by as neutral observers. But they were not neutral, and the two main actors were not equals. The US was then and remains to this day Israel’s biggest supplier of weapons and diplomatic support and Europe is Israel’s largest trading partner. Before entering into this negotiations process, Palestinians sought assurances, particularly from the US, that the asymmetry in power would be addressed. Such assurances were tacitly provided but never honored, throughout decades of negotiations.
From the early 1990s, global applause for peace talks abounded. But what ultimately happened is that endless calls for a “two-state solution” that evaded explicit realization of Palestinian self-determination and freedom replaced calls for an end to Israel’s military occupation. The “peace process” became a magic pill rendering the occupation invisible to the west, disguising its metastisizing, omnipresent and ever more violent form. Palestine was now reduced to a subject of “negotiation” requiring concessions, with the 1948 ethnic cleansing of Palestine swept under the rug to be forgotten.
With this magic pill swallowed, Israel used the cover of the “peace process” to build and expand Israeli settlements, correctly believing that these facts on the ground would strengthen their position at the negotiating table. And with the settlements came settlers and checkpoints and an expanding Kafkaesque system of military control. By 2000, the West Bank became unrecognizable: Palestinians were navigating a maze that erratically changed on a daily basis as the West Bank was now divided into tiny islands, with some areas administered by the Palestinian Authority but with Israel retaining overall control.
By the time I arrived to take up my post, a few months had passed since Clinton convened the July 2000 meeting at Camp David, which was touted by the US as aiming to bring about a final peace deal between Israel and the Palestinians. It was clear to anyone paying attention to the years of negotiations, and their endless delays and convolutions, that this meeting would not produce the result that Clinton hoped for. In fact, the Palestinian delegation had warned the Americans of this evident risk before the parties convened. By this point, Israeli settlements antithetical to any agreement had swelled, in fact nearly doubled, with close to 400,000 settlers the living in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip. Palestinians were cut off from traveling to Jerusalem, to and from the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and into Israel.
The Americans promised the Palestinian delegation that no blame would be attributed to either side should the negotiations not yield an agreement. Yet, owing to then Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak’s “fragile” governing coalition, Clinton blamed the failed meeting on Palestinians. “Fragile coalition” had long been the phrase countless diplomats invoked to demand that Palestinians accept Israeli settlement construction, racist incitement, mass closures and arrests – lest extremists in the Israeli government sabotage the talks.
I arrived in Palestine on 28 September 2000. That very day, Ariel Sharon, then head of the Likud party, went to al-Aqsa mosque compound in Jerusalem’s Old City in a show of force, surrounded by more than 1,000 armed Israeli police officers, to demonstrate that he, and by extension Israel, would never “compromise” on Jerusalem. As Palestinians demonstrated against Sharon’s brazen provocation, the Israeli police did what they always do: shoot. They killed at least four Palestinians that day and injured about 200.
Two days later, a Palestinian cameraman from Gaza, Talal Abu Rahma, captured video of Jamal al-Durrah and his 12-year-old son Muhammad under fire on Salah al-Din Road, south of Gaza City. Jamal desperately tried to shield his son as bullets rained down on them, to no avail. Muhammad al-Durrah was mortally wounded and died soon after. The image of Jamal trying to shield his son went viral and sparked further and widespread protest. Within five days, Israel killed 47 Palestinians. The second intifada had begun.
It was in this environment that I began to observe the workings of international diplomacy and negotiations up close, through in a never-ending series of meetings with a constellation of ambassadors, international organizations and representatives from the most powerful governments in the world.
To be clear, the negotiations process was flawed from the outset: these were not negotiations between two equal and sovereign nations, negotiating over a border or future relations between two states. Rather, this was a process of negotiations between Israel – which controlled every aspect of Palestinian life – with the people it relentlessly controls, the Palestinians. This was not just a question of asymmetry of power but of complete control.
I have frequently been asked to relate events from these negotiations that illustrate this central structural failure – and there are plenty. But that misses the point: given that the Israelis stole our land and expelled our people, I did not expect that they would suddenly have an about-face and admit that they wronged us. The greater insult came from those who promised us that this process would lead to our freedom and who instead chose to prioritize Israeli “security concerns” and “domestic constraints” over the crushing weight of the increasingly repressive regime required to maintain the system of supremacy that Israel is founded upon.
As the second intifada continued, it grew bloodier. By the time it ended in 2005, more than 3,000 Palestinians and 650 Israeli civilians were killed, along with about 300 Israeli soldiers.
As Palestinians were besieged, gunned down and assassinated with helicopter gunships, F-16s, and Apache helicopters firing the most sophisticated weaponry on Earth at Palestinian refugee camps, Arafat, himself holed up in his office, was told he needed to “stop the violence”. as if there was some on/off switch that he was refusing to flip, to control each and every rightless Palestinian. Absurdly, those living under occupation were expected to provide “security” to the occupier.
I would often see an Israeli tank just outside my office in Ramallah including, at times, when we were supposed to be in negotiations. At one point, the Israeli army took over my apartment, also in Ramallah, at gunpoint in the middle of the night, sending me outside into a gun battle. I could not return for three days.
Over time, as Israel’s methods of control became ever more brutal, Palestinians were fed with cliches: “Where is the Palestinian Gandhi?” I was asked by diplomats. No one dared ask: “Where is the Israeli Charles de Gaulle?” Palestinians were routinely asked to condemn Palestinian violence but rarely was Israel asked to condemn its own violence. This remains the case to this day. The inherent violence of Israel’s military occupation was thus normalized.
Israel used this period, once again, to expropriate more Palestinian land to build and expand settlements, which continuously popped up throughout the West Bank – no area was spared. The point: to destroy the “two-state solution” no matter how it is defined. The settlements are considered war crimes under international law and a violation of the stated policy of virtually every government around the world. Yet, here too, the magical “two-state solution” pill prevailed, obscuring a brutal reality with the vague promise of an unattainable goal.
A striking example is illustrated in an area now called Givat Assaf situated just off the major north-south highway in the West Bank, close to Ramallah and the Israeli settlement of Beit El. Givat Assaf was established by a group of armed squatters who one evening in 2001 decided to take over a piece of privately owned Palestinian land, to avenge the killing of a settler. This was done illegally, even under Israeli military law. The Israeli government claimed that it could not do anything to stop the armed thugs who decided that this land would now be theirs. “Fragile coalition,” we were told.
At the time, diplomats travelled through a designated checkpoint and passed Givat Assaf every time they entered or exited Ramallah. It was impossible to miss. For Palestinians, the presence of this new outpost meant a new random checkpoint, for Palestinians only, sprang up daily. The Israeli army routinely kidnapped Palestinian men from cars, while other Palestinians were violently forced out of vehicles, often beaten and made to stand in the scorching sun for hours as Israeli cars whizzed past. The pop-up checkpoints were replaced by a permanent one, requiring that more Palestinian land be taken over to “protect” the illegal squatters. Over time, the outpost grew and soon electricity lines, approved by the government, replaced the power generators. One day, a pizzeria popped up. To this day, the squatters remain, plainly visible to the diplomats driving past, and the Israeli government is in the process of “legalizing” the outpost. Today, there are more than 750,000 settlers in the West Bank and that number is on the rise.
Meanwhile, Israel filled its prisons with Palestinian men, women and children – including avowedly nonviolent activists – reaching up to 10,000 people at one point, huge numbers of whom were imprisoned for months without charge or trial. “It is terrible,” I would be told by diplomats. Yet no matter what Israel did to Palestinians, to Palestinian land, Palestinian homes or even to the schools and clinics funded by these very same diplomats, nothing would break their unshakable faith in the magic pill. Their sole fixation was to ensure any Palestinian response to the violent Israeli occupation remained peaceful.
I cannot recall a single month in which a Palestinian was not killed in these 25 years. What the diplomats, and others, fail to acknowledge and internalize is that occupation, by its very nature, requires violence to maintain. Our warnings that Israel’s use of force was escalating were met with indifference. Palestinian lives did not matter. Palestinian voices did not matter. Palestinian experiences did not matter.
The Gaza cage
But nowhere was this failure to listen to Palestinians more acutely felt – and more deadly – than in the Gaza Strip. Gaza is one of the most densely populated places on Earth, filled with Palestinians and their descendants who fled from their homes in what became Israel. For Israel, the Gaza Strip has always been a “problem”: a reminder of 1948 because its residents demand to return to their homes just a few kilometres away. Rabin, the former Israeli prime minister, once said of Gaza that it would be good if it was swallowed up by the sea.
Israel has always sought to dominate Gaza. To that end, it built 21 settlements that cut off the north of the narrow strip from the south. In addition to the 7,000 settlers, Israel established impractical and unnecessary farms, taking up 20% of Gaza’s land, and draining its scarce water.
In 2005, Sharon, by then Israel’s prime minister, devised a plan to “disengage” from the Gaza Strip. The settlements were removed but Israel’s control did not end. In many ways, it intensified.
At that time, I moved to Gaza to join the Palestinian team working on the post-disengagement plan. Living there was both magical and difficult. Everyone I met in Gaza was welcoming and warm. Beyond the overcrowded housing, Gaza was home to some of the world’s oldest churches, monasteries and mosques. The sea was a beautiful outlet – but not one to explore very far. In the distance there were always Israeli navy ships, ready to shoot at Palestinian fishers who dared to venture beyond an always changing arbitrary point that Israel enforced. Palestinians were caged by land and sea. Above, Israeli airplanes were always in the sky. I never saw a commercial airplane fly above Gaza but Israeli jets broke the sound barrier with regularity.
“You can turn Gaza into Singapore!” the Israelis told us, as though we had the power to develop the territory into something modern and shining, and as though we wanted to. (They had not yet become obsessed with Dubai.) But Gaza would be completely cut off from the world after the disengagement – Israel would continue to control the airspace, the territorial waters and all of the crossing points. Nothing could enter or exit the Gaza Strip without Israel’s permission. We kept pushing the Americans, the Europeans and others to demand that Israel open Gaza: that it be allowed to build an airport, a seaport and that we be allowed to travel to and from the West Bank and to the rest of the world.
“Work with the Israelis,” the US and the Europeans told me in 2005.
“But if you do not pressure the Israelis, Israel will turn Gaza into an open-air prison,” I said.
“Oh, they would not want that.”
“But they said they would not relinquish any control which means that Gaza will be turned into an open-air prison. Imagine what that will do.”
“We believe that this is best solved bilaterally. But of course we are here for support.”
One such attempt at support included observers from an international organization. The meeting, in the lead-up to Israel’s evacuation of settlements from Gaza, involved Israelis from the Ministry of Defense discussing how goods would move between the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. The Israelis insisted that all goods entering and exiting Gaza be searched for “security reasons”.
“We can provide scanners,” said the representative from the international organization.
“No,” said the Israeli Ministry of Defense representative. “The scanner specifications that we have are so high that there is no such scanner that exists.” I laughed out loud.
“So there is nothing that will meet your ‘security needs’?” I asked.
“Not yet,” he responded, deadpan.
Later that evening, the representative from the international organization and another diplomat stressed to me and others: “It is important that you try to work with the Israelis to figure something out.”
I countered: “What incentive does Israel have to want to see goods and people move from the West Bank and Gaza and back?”
And the predictable diplomatic reply: “You have to remember, this is a fragile coalition so the statements that they make in public are not what they actually mean. They have told us that they do not want to see Gaza closed.”
In August 2005, Israel evacuated its settlements and on 12 September, the Israeli army literally closed the gate to the Gaza Strip. Gaza was now isolated from the rest of the world: no one and nothing could enter or exit without Israel’s permission. In June 2006, I, too, was forced to leave after the Israelis refused to renew my permit to be in Gaza.
Yet, there was euphoria that day. For the first time in decades, Palestinians in Gaza felt free. I was able to take a taxi from Gaza City, where I lived, to Rafah, without having to go through the Abu Houli checkpoint (cruelly named after the man on whose land it was erected).
The day Israel evacuated, I visited the mother of Muhammad al-Durrah, the boy who Israel shot to death five years earlier. She had a little baby girl in her arms, no more than six months old. Like so many people in Gaza, the mother was looking for something to be optimistic about. “At least she will grow up and not have to see the Israeli army,” she said. I could not hold back my tears, thinking about her murdered son and fearing that her predictions would prove wrong.
The euphoria was indeed short-lived. Within days – and this was before Hamas was elected to govern Gaza – Israel was back to killing Palestinians and breaking the sound barrier. In response, Palestinians fired crude rockets into Israel, and in response to that, Israel placed Gaza under further lockdown.
The impact was devastating. Much-needed radiation equipment to treat cancer would not be allowed into Gaza due to “security concerns” and those with cancer would not be allowed out easily for treatment elsewhere – also due to “security concerns”. With the general election in 2006, in which Hamas won the popular vote, Israel tightened the restrictions even further. The army was even making precise calculations of Gaza’s daily caloric requirements.
And yet, Israel’s successive bombing campaigns in Gaza did not break the west’s unshakable faith in the magic pill of the “two-state solution” or their unwavering support for Israel’s “security concerns”. As Israelis were boasting that they were bombing Gaza back to the stone age, diplomats barely uttered a word.
Instead, the international community shunned Hamas, with some referring to them as the “de facto authority” in Gaza, refusing to even use the group’s name. Hamas was isolated, completely cut off from the world, and so too, Gaza. As Palestinians languished in the largest open-air prison in the world, the group doubled down on its military strategy, paving the way for the 7 October attack.
History repeats itself
But for Palestinians, there is no magic pill.
The west continues to entertain proposals, like the one currently hanging over the region, giving Israel the ultimate say over the future of Gaza. How is it that the country committing genocide is granted any say in the future of the people against whom it has committed genocide?
In the latest plan, there are absolutely no guarantees that aid will be allowed into Gaza, that control will be ceded by Israel, that Israel will pull back or that Gaza will be rebuilt. Instead, if Palestinians give up their claims for accountability for Israel’s war crimes, we may get a vague “pathway to self-determination and statehood”. Not a state – a “pathway”. How generous.
I find myself thinking back on my experience over the years, wondering what would have happened had there been a genuine, robust attempt to end Israel’s military rule. What if, instead of looking the other way, the international community had imposed sanctions on Israel? What if instead of just endlessly repeating that they believe in the “two-state solution”, states had actually taken tangible action to bring it about?
And so, two years into Israel’s genocide, we are witnessing a willful repetition of the mistakes of the past. This time, some more countries have recognized a “state” with great fanfare but still do nothing to ensure a free and prosperous Palestine. They cannot even ensure the basic protection of Palestinian life.
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Diana Buttu is a lawyer and former adviser to the negotiating team of the Palestine Liberation Organization
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Illustrations by Edmon de Haro
