Gaza ceasefire talks: A pretext for prolonged Israeli occupation?

If you are among those who’ve stopped reading news reports about the US-led Gaza ceasefire talks, putatively held to bring about a halt and finally an end to the blood-soaked genocidal war that Israel launched against the enclave’s people 11 months ago, join the club.

These incongruously named talks have become both odious and nebulous.

So what gives with these talks, talks that have gone on and on since December, while Palestinian children got massacred, literally, every day of every week for months on end?

“To even use the word ‘ceasefire’ to describe what the American administration is pursuing is itself a form of linguistic violence”, wrote the editors of Intercept last week. “The latest draft ‘ceasefire’ proposal announced by US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken endorses continued Israeli occupation of Gaza with no permanent cessation of hostilities”. That puts it, I say, in a nutshell.

More than a form of linguistic violence, these talks have become a negotiating charade, intended to carry within it the germ of preordained failure, given that it enshrines Israel as permanent lord of the manor in the Palestinian strip — for good.

As recently as two weeks ago, Benjamin Netanyahu, backed by the far-right nuts in his cabinet, reiterated again that Israel would not withdraw from the borderland in Gaza abutting Egypt, that Egyptians call Salah Al Deen Crossing and Israel bizarrely calls Philadelphia Corridor. In addition, Israel has already established a “security buffer zone” in Eastern Gaza — after demolishing homes and other structures that had stood there before the war — in which it intends to keep a “permanent presence”.

A “security road”

Moreover, Israel’s military forces have already built a “security road” that cuts the Gaza Strip in half, from east to west, whose goal is to control travel by Gazans between the northern and the southern parts of the Palestinian territory, from which it has declared it had no intention to withdraw after the war.

These are but two of the many improbable demands (“facts on the ground”, Israeli politicians call them) that Israel is putting on the negotiating table in these farcical “ceasefire talks” that the US is advancing as “peace talks”.

It is hard to imagine that the Palestinian side would agree to such a lopsided, asymmetrical agreement. But that’s the point, you see. The US and Israel, as a united duo, are making Hamas an offer it could not but refuse, a refusal that in effect will enable Netanyahu and Blinken to yet again blame the Palestinian group for “rejecting peace”. and to buy more time for Israel not only to consolidate its grip on the Gaza Strip but to continue killing more Palestinians and turning their acre into dust.

Meanwhile, two weeks ago, in the midst of these talks, in the midst of the mayhem Israeli military forces were wreaking in Gaza, the US announced the “sale” to Israel of $20 billion in American weapons!

And expect full-tilt military and full-throated diplomatic support for Israel to continue in a White House occupied by Kamala Harris — were it to become so in January next year — because this establishment politician will not somehow magically break with a solid pro-Israel tradition book-ended by Harry S. Truman (sworn in on April 12, 1945, two hours after his predecessor’s sudden death from a cerebral stroke) and Joseph R. Biden.

Are the times, as we say, a-changin’? They are, most assuredly — but at a snail’s pace.

Meanwhile, while you and I are waiting for that shift to declare its own form of being, let’s contemplate together the images invoked and the suppositions implied in the headline of a CNN news report that appeared online last week — There are no more places to go: Thousands in Gaza forced to flee again after Israel evacuation orders.

Heart wrenching, no?

— Fawaz Turki is a noted academic, journalist and author based in Washington DC. He is the author of The Disinherited: Journal of a Palestinian Exile