Written by: Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine on 30 November 2023
Some political positions are presented by Western officials about their vision for the future of the Gaza Strip after the aggression. Israel expressed its position that it wants to install “a new security system in the Gaza Strip” in addition to what it describes as “liquidating the infrastructure of the Palestinian resistance.” In another place, the Israeli prime minister said: “After the war, there will be no civil authority in Gaza that teaches children to hate Israel.” These positions are consistent with the positions of the United States and some European countries, who spoke of a different reality for the future of the Gaza Strip.
Regardless of the details of the projects being discussed, it is clear that they go beyond the stakeholders concerned, namely the Palestinian people, in a repetition of previous mistakes committed by the international community decades ago that contributed to establishing a conflict that is still continuing to this day, when the international community ignored the Palestinian people and their desire for independence. Some of the colonial countries colluded with the Zionist movement, from before the Balfour Declaration in 1917 until the issuance of Resolution 181, which was issued by the United Nations in 1947, without considering the opinion of the owners of the land and its people. Thus, the decision came in conflict with the will of the Palestinian people and contradicted even the United Nations Charter, which gives The right of peoples to self-determination without external interference.
The Oslo Accords, on which some Palestinians and Arabs relied, with hopes and illusions of the possibility of achieving them, even if they were limited, have become futile. Security control in the West Bank, despite the presence of the Palestinian Authority, is still in the hands of Israel, whose grip has increased, and the incidents of settlement and land theft are expanding, and the settlers’ practices and crimes have not ceased to exist. The conditions of the Palestinians in terms of security and economics have become worse than they were even before 1993, and the laws enacted by the Israeli Knesset years ago have established the fact that it is impossible to coexist with the occupation, as a result of the growing state of extremism within Israeli society, which is translated by the arrival of fascist and racist forces to power.
Despite all this, the majority of countries in the world still talk about the term “two-state solution,” without anyone bothering to explain the meaning of this term or taking measures, positions and policies that could bring the Palestinian people closer to their national rights, especially the independent, sovereign and free state with its capital. Jerusalem is on its land occupied by the aggression of 1967. On the contrary, all indications say that Israel is no longer interested in any political solution, no matter how weak and modest, and that the current project of the extremist and fascist government in Israel is to annex the West Bank, or parts of it, without economic improvements for the Palestinians, and for whoever does not like this there are three options: either arrest, killing, or displacement and deportation.
Anyone who follows the official Israeli and Western positions regarding the “future of the Gaza Strip” imagines that Israel has imposed its control over the Strip and owned the field in order to give itself the right to propose, condition, and impose, but what is happening is the opposite. The Palestinian resistance is still present in its lands and fields, and it is not certain that the occupation army is able to control the course of the battle, despite its incursions into some neighborhoods of the Gaza Strip, because whoever talks about political projects must have the minimum ability to impose his project, and this did not happen and is not expected to happen in the near future. Israel and its army are about to drown in the sands of Gaza as a result of the unknown that awaits them.
Any political project that does not take into account the real causes of the conflict, and does not respond to the national rights of the Palestinian people, will naturally be rejected by all forces of the Palestinian people, and is an additional reason for producing more escalation and tensions. The experiences of the past decades confirm this fact. Therefore, any talk about transitional projects and visions drawn behind the backs of the Palestinian people will only be seen as a cover-up for the crimes of the occupation and an integral part of the projects to liquidate the Palestinian issue. You will not find it from any of the Palestinian political and popular movements - only rejection and resistance.
Therefore, based on the rejection of any political project that does not include stopping the aggression and placing the Israeli’s leaders and supporters before international courts, we affirm the following:
1) The right of the Palestinian people to resist as long as the occupation and illegal settlements are perched on Palestinian land, which, according to international resolutions, is considered occupied Palestinian territory. The legal, political, humanitarian and moral duty imposes on all countries of the world to support the Palestinian people and enable them to exercise their national rights and self-determination on their land freely, away from all forms of oppression and colonialism.
2) The Gaza Strip is an integral part of the one unified Palestinian land that does not accept any form of division under any political, geographical, administrative or legal name. The future of the Strip is a Palestinian national matter, and this means rejecting all mandate projects, regardless of its nationality, background or Its transitional stages, in which the Israeli occupation has a direct or indirect role. The Palestinian national forces are concerned with shaping the future of the Gaza Strip in the ways they deem appropriate. They must drop the pretext of placing the Gaza Strip under the cover of external authorities, which will only be another name for placing the national issue under external colonial guardianship, which is the shortest path to liquidating our Palestinian national rights.
3) The Palestine Liberation Organization, the legitimate representative of the Palestinian people, is the one that represents the State of Palestine in any discussion related to the present and future of our national cause. It is concerned with working to confirm and consecrate its representative status for the Gaza Strip, in terms of its land and population. It is also concerned with rejecting every project that detracts from its right to be the authority. It has responsibility for the political and legal issues for the Palestinian people, regardless of the observations and discrepancies in some people’s view of the organization and its current reality.
4) The discussions about the future of the Gaza Strip contradict the most basic values and rules of democracy that the United States and Western countries pay lip service to. As long as the occupation is the main pillar of the problem, no realistic and applicable approach can be proposed except from the recognition that the basic root of the conflict that has dragged itself since 1948 is the occupation, its criminality, its aggression, and its political projects that are not based on any legal or historical justification. Rather, all its projects were, and still are, primarily based on the interests of the imperialist countries first, and the historical myths of the Zionist movement second, whose existence poses a threat not only to Palestine and the Middle East region, but also to world peace.
5) It is not a coincidence that Netanyahu’s desire for “a civil authority that does not teach Palestinian children to hate Israel” is consistent with what the Trump-Netanyahu “Deal of the Century” carried five years ago in terms of incitement against UNRWA and the educational curricula in Palestinian schools, claiming that they incite violence and hatred. Some Western countries were lured by this false propaganda, led by Zionist institutions and associations. This occurred although the Israeli curricula are full of hundreds of texts that not only incite hatred, but also explicitly call for the killing of Arabs.
International trials and detention of the leaders of the Zionist occupation and its supporters should be the natural result of the aggression, murder, and genocide campaigns against the Palestinian people, and not granting them a reward for control of the Gaza Strip, which was and will remain an integral part of the Palestinian land, and its people will remain an integral part of the Palestinian people. Therefore, responding to the desire of the Israeli occupation to discuss political projects related to the future of the Gaza Strip would repeat the same mistakes committed by the international community since the first day of the signing of the Oslo Accords in terms of letting the occupation do what it wanted in the West Bank, not caring about the cries of the Palestinian people, who found nothing but ignorance, helplessness and complicity. The international community and the Arab official systems should see that October 7 was a reaction to all the practices and policies the occupation did that were gradually leading to the liquidation of the Palestinian cause.
The conviction has expanded among many at the international level that all partial and security solutions to the Palestinian issue have failed, and that the radical solution to the state of instability in the Middle East as a result of the Israeli occupation is to solve the Palestinian issue, in accordance with international law and international legitimacy resolutions, which guarantee the Palestinian people their right to free self-determination. The establishment of an independent Palestinian state with full sovereignty over the land occupied by the 1967 aggression, with Jerusalem as its capital, is an alternative to failed solutions, including the “Oslo Accords” and the resulting paths that caused the current situation to explode.
So, we ask the international political parties and decision-makers at the level of the political, intellectual and social elites and public opinion institutions to assume their humanitarian, legal, and moral responsibilities in pressuring Western governments to work towards:
1) Stop the Israeli aggression and lift the siege imposed on the Gaza Strip for about 17 years, and regard mass displacement plans as a war crime that must stop in all its forms.
2) Changing the pattern of dealing with the Palestinian issue in terms of supporting the Palestinian people and their right to live in dignity away from occupation and aggression, ensuring free self-determination on their land, and providing them with all the necessities of life that were destroyed by the Israeli occupation soldiers, whether with the current aggression to cut off Gaza or with everything they have committed as occupation crimes in the West Bank.
No comments:
Post a Comment