Since March 2, Israel has imposed a total blockade on all forms of aid – food, fuel, healthcare equipment and medicines, fresh water supplies, tents, reconstruction equipment, etc. – to Palestinians in Gaza. Besides continuing its genocidal military assaults, almost on a daily basis, it welcomes the fact that this blockade would mean deaths and illnesses through starvation and disease on an increasingly mass scale.
An Israeli Supreme Court bench has recently unanimously rejected petitions by progressive groups in Israel for a resumption of aid to Gaza, claiming that this blockade is no violation of international law, which, of course, it is. This brutal apartheid state is carrying out a systematic ethnic cleansing of a kind that even the former white-ruled South Africa could never have thought of doing. That the US under the Trump administration has given Israel a green light to carry on with this genocide is obvious.
But what are other countries and the rest of the world doing to stop this deliberate and calculated evil by Tel Aviv? Some governments voice their condemnation but who is putting the kind of pressure through sanctions and trade disruptions that can really hurt Israel? To believe or claim that only the US can put the kind of pressure that can really count serves as an easy cop-out for other countries and governments.
What makes this particular genocide distinctive from others in the past, is the breadth and depth of active complicity by other governments. In previous examples of genocide such as the Indonesian assault on East Timor or that of the Khmer rouge in Kampuchea during the seventies or that in Rwanda in the mid-nineties, complicity by other governments took the form of indifference, silent diplomatic acquiescence and a refusal to intervene. But it did not involve anything like the active material support – finances, military equipment, replacement labour, let alone the diplomatic-political justifications and rationalisations – given to Israel by so many governments, not only in North America and Europe.
Particularly disturbing for us in India has been not just our government’s material support but its recent laconic official statement which simultaneously calls for hostage release (to please Netanyahu) and then for humanitarian aid to take place but refusing to actually name Israel as the culprit behind the blockade. Similarly, the government will not state that Israel has actually violated the ceasefire it earlier signed, nor will New Delhi ever use the term genocide to describe what is being done.
The standard diplomatic approach, as has just been done, is to ‘balance’ any statement that could implicitly be seen as somewhat critical of Israel by also reproaching in some way Hamas’s actions. Israel’s continuous assault on the West Bank since October 2023 whereby over 900 Palestinians have been killed and over 140,000 displaced through destruction of thousands of homes, cannot be passed off as necessary reactions to Hamas’s behaviour thereby depriving New Delhi of this handle. Thus on the brutalities in the West Bank, official India remains silent.
But back to Gaza. What now? Among the motivations for breaking the ceasefire, one is to maintain the Netanyahu government in power through greater support from the far-right. More important though is the aim to progressively remove more and more Palestinians from Gaza be this through death or forced departure. This now seems more possible than ever before because of this very absence of any serious external pressure from any direction. Moreover, internally there is now greater support than ever before from Israel’s own Jewish population for such a policy.
Hamas has just accepted a new deal proposed by mediators from Qatar and Egypt which calls on Hamas to return five hostages each week for aid resumption and a correspondingly continuous ceasefire of around 50 days. This then, it is hoped, would create the conditions for Israeli troop withdrawal and negotiations for how the Strip should be administered as per the terms of the original ceasefire plan. But Israel has responded with its own counter-proposal which shows that it is not serious about pausing its assault and blockade.
For public relations purposes it has said that of the 59 living and dead hostages, half should be immediately returned for there to be a pause for 40 to 50 days but then adds a crucial nullifying rider. Hamas must also disarm and leave the strip and Israel will put in place what Trump earlier proposed, namely a “voluntary emigration” policy for Palestinians to leave Gaza. In short, Israel must be given immediate and complete military and political control of the Strip to enable it to do anything it wants, This is an ultimatum and not a negotiating stance. Israel knows Hamas cannot accept this revealing how determined Israel is to carry on with its systematic ethnic cleansing. Regardless of any possible future pause this is its basic strategy.
There will be phases in this process. The first step is taking over the northern part of Gaza, pushing Palestinians into an even more concentrated prison-type situation than what existed when the whole of the Strip was besieged. Rafah is to be evacuated and a ground operation against the southernmost city of Gaza is being prepared. In regard to the ‘voluntary’ transfer scheme both Israel and the US are reported to have begun exploring with countries such as Indonesia, Sudan, Somalia (and no doubt others) to take in Palestinians in return for money or other favours. Even if only a few hundred are initially pushed to transfer, this would set the necessary precedent for future follow ups. Jordan and Egypt have so far refused to accept any serious influx of Gazans. However, Egypt in return for billions of dollars (Jordan would be much more difficult because it already has a huge Palestinian population) could well be persuaded to accommodate perhaps a couple of hundred thousand people who would live in a large walled community on the other side of the Rafah Crossing but fully separated from the rest of Egypt.
If this assault-cum-blockade continues for several more months without being stopped, divisions could well emerge among sections of the Gazan population especially in families with children who for sheer survival may go along with such ‘voluntary’ transfers, assuming that there will be governments in the South that can be bribed to accept this. Even if this were to happen the process will still be a long drawn out one. But it will also have provided a real impetus to the much more difficult effort to incrementally ethnically cleanse the West Bank. This is the most important goal and prize that Zionist Israel, in its currently most vicious and dominant avatar, really seeks. So far no Arab member has broken away from the Abraham Accords even if its expansion has been stalled. The leveraging power of some collective production and pricing decisions by even a part of OPEC can exercise real pressure especially on Europe. But this is not a weapon that has yet been used.
Where then do we look for some respite, for bringing about a prolonged ceasefire that can halt Israel’s current project of ethnic cleansing and genocide? If, as deaths mount in Gaza, this sparks the kind of public uproar in neighbouring Arab regimes that has been a periodic feature of post-millennial times, then this can force these governments and elites to do much more than they have so far been doing. A mass upsurge of this kind will force even Trump as well as the wider foreign policy establishment in the US to recognise that it risks seriously deflating their strategic influence and authority in this region all because of Israel.
Buying more time now is crucial. In the longer run there are more reasons to be optimistic. This is both because of the growing internal weaknesses of Israel (economic problems and growing Jewish emigration) and of the expanding desire of Palestinians for a newer kind of political leadership and a strategy that focuses not on militarism but on generating the widest collective struggle against apartheid and for equal rights and justice. This would put Zionism itself in the dock which is now exposing to all but the most wilfully blind, the lie that there can be any meaningful and just two-state solution.
Meanwhile, we in India and elsewhere must continue to express our solidarity with the struggle for Palestinian liberation. You don’t have to be Palestinian to recognise the justice of the Palestinian cause.
Achin Vanaik is a retired professor of International Relations and a member of Indians for Palestine.
