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Over the past 24 months, the world at large has witnessed as Israel has deliberately razed the Gaza region, claiming the lives of many thousands of Palestinian people and injuring an unknown quantity more. Equally alarming, Israel continues to systematically attack healthcare, educational, water and sewage systems to ensure that daily existence remains impossible in the Gaza Strip.

Global Stances

International reactions to the ongoing situation have ranged from cheerleading and unconditional support in the opening phase of Israel’s attack on the Gaza Strip after the events of October 2023, subsequently shifting to expressions of worry and anguished deliberation, to, more recently, intermittent declarations of consternation and hollow warnings that continued Israeli attacks may, at some undefined point, lead to an arms embargo or a drop in trade relations. More recently, there have also been highly publicized announcements of provisional acceptance of a sovereign Palestinian entity. The contradiction is stark: hesitantly accepting a nation as it, and its citizens, are being obliterated ruthlessly.

Ongoing Situations

As I write this, ambiguity clouds the proposed initiative to conclude hostilities and expectations are rising for a reciprocal release. Although cessation of airstrikes, the release of detainees on each party and enabling assistance into the territory would bring temporary respite in an profoundly dismal situation, it would be a error to view the plan as a landmark achievement for the Palestinian cause. Trump’s vision is yet another collaborative effort developed without any input from Palestinians that would retain ongoing Israeli dominance over the territory’s destiny.

The world has never listened to what Palestinians have to say or given due weight the grave danger emanating from Israeli policies to Palestinian life, and this has not substantively altered despite the increase in performative angst. To the contrary, For over 75 years, Palestinians have endured the world telling us that Israel’s safety considerations – as interpreted by Israel – are more important than our rights and lives.

Parallel Systems of Force

Therefore Palestinians experience two constant manifestations of violence: physical aggression imposed on our persons, territory and community, and international complicity, where only our destruction leads international actors to notice us and see our humanity – but just marginally.

This perspective emerges from firsthand observation, for a quarter-century, how this framework of global diplomacy and functioning plays out. Despite two years of carnage in Gaza, and everything the world has learned about the actual goals, that approach is repeating itself at this very moment, with global powers supporting a initiative that does little to make certain Palestinians gain any say over their future.

Rhetoric without consequence has been the prevailing approach for a long time. The consequences have been devastating.

A Deceptive Remedy

During the final days of September 2000, I joined the Palestinian negotiating team as a legal advisor involved in the talks with Israeli counterparts. This represented a significant step for me: I am the daughter of Palestinian parents born preceding the displacement, the forced expulsion of Palestine. My family, differently from many of Palestinians, did not flee in 1948 and later acquired Israeli citizenship, living in Nazareth, in a country that did not want them. In that year, they decided to emigrate to North America, where I was born and raised, raised and schooled. I had not lived in Palestine before joining the negotiating team except for a short stays. Now, I had committed to being in the region for a twelve-month period. I became involved as a legal expert after a acquaintance, also a part of the legal division, informed me that one of the shortcomings of the “Oslo peace process” was its lack of clarity. I had assumed, naively, that the team could remedy that.

This represented the peak of the peace process, as it was described then, which started during the Clinton administration in that year with the memorable moment between the Israeli leader, the national leader, and the PLO chairman, the Palestinian leader. By means of various understandings, the Palestinian Authority was formed and the occupied lands were further subdivided, with additional military posts placed across. Critical matters such as borders, settlements, the status of exiles and Jerusalem were postponed permanently.

The ‘peace process’ became a magic pill concealing the reality to the global powers.

These issues were now matters between two parties for the Israeli government and the Palestinian leadership to work out together, with the global actors supposedly observing as neutral observers. But they were taking sides, and the primary parties were not equivalent. The US was then and remains Israel’s biggest supplier of arms and international advocacy and Europe is Israel’s largest trading partner. Prior to joining this peace talks, representatives asked for commitments, especially from America, that the power imbalance would be rectified. These commitments were implicitly given but consistently broken, throughout decades of negotiations.

Starting that decade, international praise for diplomatic efforts was widespread. But what finally occurred is that continuous demands for a two-state framework that circumvented actual establishment of Palestinian self-determination and liberty supplanted calls for an termination of Israel’s military occupation. The negotiation framework evolved into a illusory solution rendering the occupation invisible to the global powers, hiding its growth, ever-present and progressively harsh form. The Palestinian cause was now limited to a topic for discussion requiring concessions, with the historical displacement of Palestine ignored to be overlooked.

Colonial Growth

With this magic pill swallowed, Israel used the guise of diplomacy to establish and enlarge Israeli settlements, correctly believing that these facts on the ground would improve their standing at the bargaining table. And along with colonies arrived colonists and checkpoints and an {expanding