By Marwan Emil Toubassi
After a series of positions by the United States and Western countries, which dropped the Russian and Chinese draft resolutions submitted to the UN Security Council on stopping the war.
The Western countries, led by the United States, the main partner in Israel’s policies, have provided cover for the illegal and immoral Israeli crimes that aim to implement the ultimate goal of mass forced deportation and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people, robbing them of their national identity, and denying their right to self-determination and national independence.
In the midst of the emotionally charged comments about the October 7th military resistance operation by Palestinian fighters against Israel occupation soldiers and colonial settlers , that should have avoided innocent civilians , and the subsequent barbaric Israeli aggression on Gaza that targets innocent civilians children and women . The media and political leaders in the West who described the resistance as terrorism seem to have forgotten that from the standpoint of international law, Gaza remains occupied territory subject to the Fourth Geneva Convention and international law, which the West claims to adhere to, but according to its double standards and selective positions regarding it.
Although Israel unilaterally announced “disengagement” from Gaza in 2005, withdrawing its forces, dismantling 21 colonial settlements and evacuating 8,000 settlers in exchange for granting each settler family hundreds of thousands of dollars in compensation, this did not end Israel’s siege of the Gaza Strip that kept it as an open prison or a vast ghetto.
The UN Human Rights Council reached this conclusion on the basis that Israeli disengagement did not end the existential realities of Israeli control over Gaza, nor did it allow the Gaza Strip to enjoy the benefits of independent political development.
Rather, what followed at that time included the redeployment of the occupation forces, including the army and police, on the Gaza borders, including full control over the entry and exit of Palestinians and goods at the border crossings, as well as the continued exclusive control over the air and sea space in Gaza.
The post 2005 occupation structure has been strengthened by repeated Israeli incursions, including targeted assassinations of resistance political and military officials, the eerie sonic booms of Israeli fighter planes flying overhead, and major military operations in the years 2008-2009, 2012, 2014, and 2021. Which was done during which Israel committed many war crimes and killed thousands of Gaza residents.
Additionally, since 2007, the cruel and punitive blockade has left Gaza’s impoverished population facing the world’s highest unemployment rate and collectively experience life-threatening economic decline.
Israel’s criminal record towards Gaza was significantly documented in the Goldstone Report issued by the United Nations in 2009, whose policy recommendations were left unimplemented due to political pressure exerted in favor of Israel by the United States, even through threatening policies against countries.
This typical experience of condemning Israeli policies and practices by many international organizations, without taking any preventive or punitive action and sanctions in response, has been repeated time and again, which explains the Palestinian disillusionment with the United Nations and the implementation of international law.
The issue of the legal status of Gaza is closely related to the indiscriminate and disproportionate Israeli retaliation, which Israel and its supporters have justified as harsh retaliation while Israel seeks to achieve the goal of destroying the resistance through a war of genocide against the population of Gaza that claimed the lives of approximately 7,050 among them , and its increasing every hour , 70% of children , infants and women, and injured many more than 20,000 where about 1,500 are under the rubble until now , that is considered a kind of ongoing Holocaust , that reminds me with different Holocausts by Nazi Germans against our sisters and brothers the eurooean oeople people in the 1940s .
The resistance attack by Palestinian fighters was a natural reaction to the hell that Palestinians are experiencing and an exercise of the right of a people subject to occupation to resist, as national liberation movements around the world and peoples did throughout the stages of their history without anyone describing them as terrorism.
As for the reaction of the Israeli occupation state, it is devoid of the restrictions of law and morality. In the simplest terms, crimes committed by Israel do not grant legal immunity for retaliatory Israeli war crimes.
The appropriate international framing of the relationship between the Israeli occupying state and the Palestinian people – despite being crucial in interpreting the legal, moral and political issues at hand – was clearly absent from most media treatments and political positions of influential Western political leaders.
Israel has used the most inflammatory and expansive language to justify its retaliatory responses. This lawless Israeli extremism has received the support of the governments of the United States, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, Italy, Greece and other European Union countries, which act in contradiction to the foundation principles of the EU .
These statements ignore the need for the occupying power to commit to administering the territories under its control in ways that give priority to the protection and well-being of the civilian population under occupation.
From this perspective, it is conceptually misleading and normatively unacceptable for Israel to declare war on occupied territory, as if the local administrative authority were a hostile foreign government – but that is exactly what Israel did, including claims of self-defense. Which is not compatible with the situation of military or even colonial aperthide occupation. The Israeli colonial occupation state is not actually defending itself, but rather defending the sustainability of its settlement expansion and occupation of Palestinian lands particularly in the West Bank including Jerusalem where the number of jewish settlers there count up to more than 800,000 within more than 220 colonial settlements , and through the ongoing incursions to the Palestinian cities, arrestes and cold blood killing of youth the added up since the beginning of 2023 to more than 600 .
Israel has declared an all-out criminal war on Gaza, imposed a genocidal blockade that has cut off supplies of food, electricity and fuel, and placed no conditions whatsoever on the exemption of civilians whom have no direct contact with the military activities of the national resistance.
Article 55 of the Fourth Geneva Convention stipulates that Israel, as the occupying power, has a duty to ensure that people living in the territories it occupies having access to sufficient food, water and medicines.
But the indiscriminate Israeli criminal attack included repeated night air bombardments that exceeded the power of the nuclear bomb that the United States dropped on Hiroshima, of residential areas, in addition to the prohibited targeting of hospitals, churches, schools, and United Nations buildings, where many Palestinians sought shelter in light of this. Exceptional circumstances of criminal aggression.
The 24-hour evacuation order directed at 1.1 million Palestinians living in northern Gaza, without providing reasonable time to arrange such a dangerous departure from long-term accommodation, is exacerbated by the lack of a safe and habitable place. This measure amounts to severe collective punishment, which is prohibited by Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention. It is not about security as much as it is about expelling the Palestinians from Gaza and implementing the Israeli vision of genocide and forced transfer, and thus implementing the ultimate vision of the extremist coalition government in Israel.
The UN ignored UN Commissioner Lynk’s recommendation and others as it kept Israel above international accountability, but the UN General Assembly was sufficiently disturbed by Israel’s pattern of behavior in occupied Palestine that it requested an advisory opinion from the International Court of Justice on the continued legitimacy of Israel’s status as a power of occupation under the Fourth Geneva Convention, an issue that is currently under consideration by the Court.
Meanwhile , Israel the aperthide regime and roug state of colonial occupation should be boycotted and political diplomatic ties should be stoped by the Arab , Islamic countries and the non allied states to the USA , as well oil and gas embargo should be practiced against the collective colonial west as was done in 1973 . BRICS countries should seriously take action as well against Israel ,
BRICS are for a more democratic, “multipolar” world, that is for a democratic new world order. But this cannot be an exclusively economic project, it is a geopolitical claim (project) in fact. If the collective West led by USA and Israel is permitted to use such methods without cost, what credibility for the BRICS and for the multipolar project?
Gaza is the continuation of Ukraine and the prologue to Taiwan. Better stop them now by use of all political and economic means than try later with the risk of a global disaster.
If the West continues to uphold the double standards demonstrated during the humanitarian catastrophe unfolding in Gaza, it will serve as a reminder that the post-colonial world retains the spirit of orientalist racism when it comes to addressing issues of peace and justice in the Middle East.
By failing to call for a ceasefire and pit an end to this ongoing genocide against Palestinian civilians , Western countries have given the green light to Israel’s agenda of collective punishment, which in itself may be a hideous cover for the regime’s ultimate goal of forced and mass deportation and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people, the original owners of the land. Creating a second NAKBA after the first one as a crime against humanity in 1948, for which Israel remains unpunished for that 75 years later.
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