While the perpetrators of the Gaza genocide pretend to be its saviors, the survivors return home – to a barren wasteland | Nisreen Malik
TToday, the city of Sharm El-Sheikh will host the most prominent gathering of world leaders in the Middle East in recent years. Donald Trump, Keir Starmer, Emmanuel Macron, Pedro Sanchez and others are meeting “to end the war in the Gaza Strip, strengthen efforts to achieve peace and stability in the Middle East, and usher in a new era of regional security and stability.”
If the ceasefire holds, this language is a harbinger of the future. A place where there is no accounting, no addressing of the root causes. Just rushing to the necessities of cleaning and work. Meanwhile, the illegal occupation continues, and another chapter of Israel’s violations is closed in secret without accountability not only to Israel, but to its sponsors.
There is an Arabic expression Protector of her thieves “Her protector, her thief,” is what comes to mind While those who showered Israel with weapons meet to figure out how to achieve peace in Gaza. In the coming weeks and months, more devastation will unfold in Gaza than has been seen to the world so far. The sheer scale of what needs to be rebuilt has already become clear. People return to their homes in Gaza City to find barren land leveled by bombs and bombs on the horizon Then the bulldozers. In photographs of the region, even sunlight appears different and otherworldly. I couldn’t figure out why, until I realized it was because there were no structures to filter it. No shade, no shadows. The house he is returned to is just a plot of land to pitch another tent on and wait for help. But this time, with less risk of being bombed in your sleep.
People in Gaza have been freed from the fear of death, but what about the life they face now? What about the thousands of orphans, wounded and mutilated children who have no living families? Not only was the infrastructure destroyed in large parts of Gaza, but the social fabric was also destroyed. Family lineages across two, three, Four generations It has been eliminated. What about the thousands of parents who buried their children? Of all those who collected the body parts of their loved ones? How can we begin to think about addressing such collective traumas when there is not even a roof to gather under? I asked a man from Gaza about his brother, who lost all of his children and his wife in one fell swoop. Where is he now? “Just constantly wandering around, flying around the ruins” of the site where they died. “lost.”
The death toll is certain to rise, as bodies that could not be recovered before are being recovered from the rubble. At least 10% of Gaza’s population was killed or injured, and this is a conservative estimate.
It is important that these facts are not simply lumped in and dismissed as costs of war. The offensive must end, but the conditions under which it will end, and upon which the path to peacemaking and reconstruction rests, are crucial. The crimes committed cannot be corrected, or even prevented from being repeated, if the conditions that enabled their perpetrators persist.
This is a difficult thing to insist on when you are dealing with genocide. The scale of death and violence, and the erasure of the conditions of life, makes stopping this erasure the most urgent and the sole focus. But with that comes vindication, and worse. Donald Trump has already begun to achieve victory in the peacemaking process, after enabling what happened months ago. Jared Kushner He praised Israel’s behavior: “Rather than repeat the barbarism of the enemy, you choose to be exceptional.” Starmer praised Trump for securing the deal, and emphasized the importance of allowing humanitarian aid in. will , No. 10 saidI extend a “special greeting” to the American President in Sharm El-Sheikh. Now we have crime without criminals, and genocide without it Perpetrators of genocideA miserable population, we believe, weakened by Hamas, who must be fed and drunk while the world works out what to do with them. An entire history across Palestine of impunity and Israeli domination, a recurring history ethnic cleansingMilitary rule and settlement expansion – and now Explicit refusal Palestinian self-determination – erased again.
This time, that vindication, and the framing of what happened as tragic and finally over, has become more urgent, because the responsibility of the countries that supported Israel and silenced its critics has become clearer than ever before. Of course you would rush to Sharm el-Sheikh if you represented a government that offered weapons, restricted protest, and refused to endorse declarations of genocide or abide by the rulings of the International Criminal Court when it issued an arrest warrant for Benjamin Netanyahu. Peace in Gaza represents an opportunity to forget; Erase from the collective consciousness an era in which some Western countries attacked international norms and institutions, and even their own internal policies, in order to impose the destruction of Gaza.
But the many people around the world who witnessed the massacre, and everything that led to it continuing for two full years, will not easily forget. A secure future for those in Gaza, and Palestine in general, is not something that can be handed over to thieves-turned-protectors. Without the empowerment and self-determination of the Palestinian people, there can be no faith or trust in Israel or its allies to achieve that “perpetual peace” that it constantly invokes. Fortunately, the killings have now stopped in Gaza, but the normalization of what comes next must now be rejected – a return to the status quo where we all continue to pretend that Palestinian life is viable under Israeli authority.
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Palestinians will continue to kill, steal their homes and businesses Prisoners are tortured They are detained without due process. What we have learned in the past two years cannot be abandoned, despite all the energy that will be expended to achieve it. The Palestinian issue cannot be returned to the margins of “complex” fringe politics, a framework that enabled two years of destruction. The perpetrators of this destruction have long denied themselves any jurisdiction over the people they helped to kill and destroy. The death toll and wreckage in Gaza that will now be revealed should make it impossible to deny.
As world leaders descend, a line from T. S. Eliot’s book Gerontion hangs over Sharm el-Sheikh: “After this knowledge, what forgiveness?”