Can a ceasefire end settler colonial genocide?

The ceasefire deal between Hamas and Israel is, first and foremost, a welcome relief for the Palestinians in Gaza who are suffering from a most brutal and horrific genocide. For 15 months, they have endured daily bombings, killings, threats, imprisonment, starvation, disease, and other hardships that are difficult for most people to even imagine, let alone live through and survive.

The deal will not come into effect until at least Sunday, January 19, 2025, not coincidentally a day before Donald Trump’s inauguration as president of the United States. While some are attributing the success of the agreement to the Trump administration’s unique ability to pressure Israel, it is critical to underscore that Trump is a master of political theatre and undoubtedly wanted Israel to agree to a ceasefire just before his inauguration so that he can use it to boost his political capital. In other words, Trump did not pressure Netanyahu to accept the agreement because he genuinely wants peace and order, or even because he is genuinely committed to all three phases of the agreement. Rather, he likely acted out of personal political calculations to enhance his reputation and push forward his administration’s agenda.

We do not know what was said and agreed behind closed doors between the Trump team and Israeli officials, but what we can be assured of is that the Trump administration is not interested in the establishment of a fully sovereign Palestinian state along the 1967 borders, and is not against Israel’s plans to annex large swaths of the West Bank. In fact, some reports suggest that the Trump administration may have promised Netanyahu US support for the annexation of certain areas of the West Bank in exchange for his acceptance of the ceasefire deal, which Israel may not even follow through past phase 1. In such a scenario, if it indeed transpires, Trump gets what he wants, which is a political victory, and Netanyahu gets what he wants, which is the continued settler colonisation of Palestine.

The main reason for pessimism about this agreement is that the deal does not guarantee phases 2 and 3, where Israeli forces would fully withdraw from the Strip, displaced Palestinians would be allowed to return to all areas of the Strip, and full reconstruction of the Gaza Strip would be undertaken.

It is important to emphasise that over 15 months of genocide, Gaza has been reduced to rubble. Large parts of the Strip are uninhabitable. People cannot simply return to neighbourhoods that have been razed to the ground, buildings that have no running water, a functioning sewage system, or access to electricity and fuel; there are no schools, universities, clinics, or hospitals to use, businesses to run, and so on. The economic system has collapsed, and people are entirely dependent on foreign aid for basic survival. Disease is widespread and many silent killers such as toxins from Israel’s bombs are circulating in the atmosphere, soil, and water of Gaza. Families have been entirely eliminated, others torn apart by Israel’s indiscriminate onslaught, with many children becoming orphans. Large numbers of people have become debilitated and unable to provide for their families. How a “normal” life will be possible for Palestinians after all of this destruction is not clear.

Questions about the governance of the Strip are also still murky at best, and certainly there is nothing in the deal that addresses the core problem or would lead to a long-term solution. The question of the long-term solution is very critical. The deal, in the best-case scenario, may end this specific genocidal operation, but it certainly does not say anything about the core of the problem: Israel’s structural genocide of the Palestinians.

Structural genocide of Palestinians, what Palestinians call the ongoing Nakba, refers to not just one or two specific events of genocide such as the 1948 Nakba or this genocidal assault on Gaza, but rather a settler colonial structure of genocide that seeks to eliminate Palestinian sovereignty, end the Palestinian right of return to their lands, expel Palestinians from more of their lands, and claim exclusive Israeli-Jewish sovereignty from the river to the sea. This structure of genocide operates through a variety of methods of elimination and expulsion.

A genocidal operation such as the one the world witnessed and continues to witness in Gaza, which involves physical mass slaughter, mass displacement, and mass destruction that makes the land uninhabitable, is obviously one of those instruments, but it is not the only one. There is also incremental displacement and expulsion; prevention of economic development and creation of economic dependency; erasure of Palestinian history and culture; fragmentation of the Palestinian population; denial of rights, freedoms and dignity to those living under occupation so that they feel pressured to leave; political obstruction of Palestinian sovereignty, and so on.

So, the real question becomes: Can a ceasefire, even if it goes through all three phases, end this structural genocide? The answer is clearly no because none of these other instruments of Israel’s structural genocide are addressed in the ceasefire deal.

This structural genocide must be continuously named, exposed, and opposed. So long as Israel’s settler colonial project remains concealed or downplayed in diplomatic and public discourse, the core problem will continue unabated, and we will be back to this moment of absolute horror and unspeakable suffering, assuming we even get a significant reprieve from it through this ceasefire deal. Without serious and sustained pressure on the Israeli state, without the economic and political isolation of the Israeli state by states and institutions around the world until Israeli settler colonialism is dismantled, we will find ourselves ensnared in a perpetual structure of genocide, a pressure cooker that will eventually find release in an even greater war of total annihilation. For the international community, now is not the time to celebrate or self-congratulate but rather the time to take serious political and economic action against Israel in order to stop the continuing genocide of the Palestinian people in all of its different forms.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

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