A Ceasefire in Palestine is the Bare Minimum
As Israel continues to target women and children, it becomes clear how they’re trying to end future generations of Palestinians
When Israel launched a precision strike targeting a doctor who has been exposing the atrocities in Gaza, killing her four-day-old twins while the father was out getting their birth certificates, they not only highlighted how precise they can be but also exposed what the modus operandi is: killing as many women and children to prevent the future of Palestinians – precisely what people have been noticing since the day after the October 7 attack by Hamas.
What Hamas did that day was not without provocation. The deadliest year in 15 years for Palestinian children in the West Bank occurred in 2023. The second deadliest year within that span was in 2022. Not only were hundreds of Palestinians killed within those 730 days, but 34 of them were children – in the West Bank where there is no Hamas. If any military force did this to your friends and family, you wouldn’t take it lying down either. None of us would.
Let me be clear: I don’t support militaristic violence in any form. It is rarely justified and too often used to overthrow governments in colonization and imperialistic efforts to steal resources by greedy world leaders at the behest of corporate interests and certainly for what we’re witnessing today in Gaza: an ethnic cleansing. None of it is just. But fighting back often is.
This brings us to today.
Many will say Palestinians brought this on themselves but the truth is, that language is being used to justify genocide; to make white people in the U.S. and across Western societies feel better about sending billions of dollars to ethnically cleanse Palestine while also sending a message of brute force to the rest of the Arab world. When the U.S. says it is protecting its interests in the Middle East, it means the resources it has stolen in the last 30 years.
The plan has always been to destabilize Arab countries because destabilization benefits U.S. corporate interests and Western powers. It’s about looting resources to avoid paying market value so corporations can maximize profits for the benefit of the few. It’s just as much about global white supremacist dominance and greed as it is about controlling nonwhite nations and their people while stealing a nation’s wealth.
We’ve seen this in Africa and all of Latin America for centuries. And it’s still happening. Nothing ever changes except the targets of oppression. In 2003, Gen. Wesley Clark reminded us of this plot after he claimed to have met with a senior military officer in Washington. Clark says, that in November 2001 they told him the George W. Bush administration was planning to attack Iraq before taking action against Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Iran, Somalia, and Sudan.
All of that has since happened under consecutive presidents.
In his book, The Clarke Critique, he emphasized and criticized a plan to attack the seven countries saying the doctrine was targeting the wrong nations in the so-called, “Global War on Terror.” He said it ignored the “real sources of terrorists”, and failed to achieve “the greater force of international law” that would bring wider global support.
Today, we continue to see this plan in action with U.S. military bases in countries where they are not welcomed. The U.S. often employs the same “right to defend itself” as Israel does with the use of “defensive” air strikes expecting the world to ignore that it is the occupier in those countries. This is where the strategy comes from. It was born from the colonization of the Americas as Indigenous populations were being decimated.
If they defended themselves, they were the “terrorists” and labeled as “savages”.
In this context, a ceasefire in Gaza is not enough. The international community must come together for a comprehensive and enforceable rule-based end to the atrocities committed against Palestinians for over a century. The world must hold Israel accountable for the nonstop violations of international law through the decades and for the deaths and displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians.
In order to prevent the constant killing of civilians for its attempted genocide of the Palestinian people, Israel must be held accountable by the International Criminal Court (ICC) for war crimes. The United States must no longer be able to pick and choose when and who the rulings of the court apply to. The time to end the atrocity is long passed and the time for an arms embargo is now. The slaughter of innocent people, women, and children must stop.
The question now becomes, who will stand up to Israel?
I’m a freelance writer and journalist for The Antagonist Magazine and Unicorn Riot. Find me on TikTok, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Mastodon, and Threads. To support my work become a paid subscriber or donate on Venmo, PayPal, or CashApp
Thanks for that closing paragraph that echoes Naledi Pandor’s call for accountability and reform of the Security Council safeguarding civilians from the legacy control of the settler colonial powers legislated when the UN was formed and at half its current size. Loot meaning plunder from “war” itself a sanitized word for atrocities comes into English from Hindi in the early 19th century. It’s Sanskrit origins goes back to the settler colonial epic Mahabharata that recounts the genocide of forest tribes to plunder their jewels.