Can ethnic cleansing have humanitarian pauses?

Humanitarian pauses are for the occupier to salvage their reputation, not for the oppressed to recover from their persecution

In the name of Allah, the Lord of Mercy, the Giver of Mercy

The beginning of the Zionist colonial project was not in 1948, nor was it in 1897. It began centuries earlier when the West first convinced itself that it alone reserved the privilege to peer out at Humanity.

The Western colonial gaze, a seemingly one-way relationship, is the zoning of land, explaining of language, labelling of maps, and defining of people. If we view ourselves through the colonial gaze, we will be convinced that we only exist where they permit us to live. Why, after all, are they so eager to defend their borders from us? Was it not them who defined our borders and then disregarded those very borders on a whim?

Colonization = Thingification

Societies drained of their essence, cultures trampled underfoot, institutions undermined, lands confiscated, religions smashed, magnificent artistic creations destroyed, extraor­dinary possibilities wiped out.

Discourse on Colonialism by Aimé Césaire

But the colonial gaze is not one-way, it never has been. So long as the West projected at us its ugly insecurities, we looked back at the West with clarity. The empire peers up at us in envy, and we peer down upon them with pity. When it struggled to over-simplify our traditions, we saw through their fanfare for what they were: a deeply insecure and self-destructive entity struggling for its ego. If you have to cling to your self-invented concepts of superiority, then you aren’t superior in anything other than delusion.

To maintain their colonial gaze, the colonisers must control the language. They won’t engage with your mother tongue, except for where it can be fetishised. They demand that we speak to them in their language, to soothe their ears with familiar terms that limit our critiques to dull terminology; international law, dehumanisation, ethics, humanity, or the most bemusing one: standard human rights.

This is the colonial paradigm; a rulebook for a system that does not have a second controller. We are permitted only to watch and play with a broken controller whilst they have all the fun. If we notice that our controller was not even plugged in and say that this was rigged from the start, they are sure to criticise our intelligence to gaslight us. If you don’t refuse to abide by the rule of “I play, you watch” you will one day find yourself blaming yourself for the oppression they have adorned you with and forget that this all started because your controller was never plugged in to begin with.

So in Palestine, the colonial paradigm is the claim that a few days ‘break’ is humanitarian. Humanitarian for whom you ask? Does the break return the homes that have been demolished with their neighbourhoods? Perhaps it returns the schools and hospitals that have been so surgically targeted that there no longer are facilities for Palestinians in Gaza to return to. After the break, who is allowed to attack first? It most certainly isn’t the Palestinians, whom the international community have flocked to condemn as though their condemnation says anything other than “I am a hypocrite, for though I preach about the rites granted to me by life, liberty, and property, and invent hypotheticals about how I would defend my rights if it was stolen, even to the extent of shooting my fellow person, I cannot accept that a Palestinian would do the same.” A second amendment cult for Americans which proves their moral and rational superiority is also the justification for a Palestinian death penalty.

So it is Israel who will attack first, as it has done on every occasion for over seventy-five years. They who initiated the break will also be the first to break the break. The Western world has sanctioned this deal as proof of how superior their legal frameworks are, and how capable of reason they are. Don’t forget to applaud the mediocrity. Rather than destroy these colonial frameworks which cannot stop a colonial genocide, they argue with you on semantics.

Oh yes, how could I forget, your abstract theories promising that you will be a good person because of your capacity for reason, as a white person, are more serious than your ethnic cleansing of millions of people. You expect me to judge you on your theory, and not your praxis? After all, when you base your claim to superiority on racist dogma, I am not surprised that your metric for this superiority is not how many humans you have gleefully killed, but rather how you have made the number palatable. I wish only to learn how you lull yourself to sleep knowing that millions can never sleep the same again.

Ethnic cleansing includes the removal of every single condition necessary for a dignified life. You do not have to be killed, but when your schools are destroyed, the universities in rubble, the workplaces buried, the hospitals crushed, and the telecommunications cut, these conditions force you to leave. And in that leaving, knowing you will not be permitted to return, you have been ethnically cleansed.

Now you’ve gone and done it, you’ve pointed out that there is no such thing as a humanitarian pause, and you will be very sharply rebuked. I am simply petrified at the very thought; I might even be subtweeted by a particularly nasty and anonymous American account which up until Monday supported Palestine, but on Saturday demands I must support the lesser of the two evils presented to a people numbering some three hundred million. How could I forget that we are meant to be grateful to the West, we must always encourage it at its bare minimum, and stroke its ego whenever it remembers we exist outside of its bubble. After all, how could I expect more from the pitiful American reality: a population of three hundred million that has so far produced only two leadership choices, both of whom are the same form of imperialists eager to siphon money from the American people into the pockets of colonial projects abroad.

One day there will no longer be an American empire, and there will remain the Palestinian and Indigenous American peoples, for empires never last: people do.

Why do we have to entertain the Western concepts of morality, lest they accuse us of failing to grasp their precious context? Their context is that they are limited by the imaginary concepts they have dreamt up, but our context is that they have created those imaginary concepts to oppress us. If you ask me which is the worst of the two, I will tell you that the framework that systemises oppression cannot be the ideology I idolise. It is they who have failed to grasp our context, we have perfectly understood theirs.

Is it so radical to question how the torturer can be merciful? After the Palestinians have been starved for nearly two months, and now some of them are delivered a dirty cup half-filled with water, we are meant to bow down in appreciation? It is not even Israel, a state that has dressed itself in the robes of judge, jury, and executioner, which delivers upon the Palestinians their respite, rather the Israeli occupation simply allows some aid to arrive through the concentration camp’s gates.

To their colonial paradigm, I say the following words first from the All-Wise;

أَوَلَمۡ یَسِیرُوا۟ فِی ٱلۡأَرۡضِ فَیَنظُرُوا۟ كَیۡفَ كَانَ عَـٰقِبَةُ ٱلَّذِینَ مِن قَبۡلِهِمۡۚ كَانُوۤا۟ أَشَدَّ مِنۡهُمۡ قُوَّةࣰ وَأَثَارُوا۟ ٱلۡأَرۡضَ وَعَمَرُوهَاۤ أَكۡثَرَ مِمَّا عَمَرُوهَا 

Have they not travelled through the land and seen how their predecessors met their end? They were mightier than them: they cultivated the earth more and built more upon it.

Surah 30, Ar-Rūm, Verse 9

Translated by Abdel-Haleem

The American empire, and the colonial projects it funds, will meet their end the same way every other oppressor has.

Thus, knowing now that the Zionist occupation is reliant on their colonial paradigms which they so passionately demand we abide by, we must no longer play the game. It is the bare minimum we can do to decolonise our minds. Do not entertain the one who demands you coddle them, to reassure them that their oppressive demands for security outweigh your right to life. I prefer first that the Palestinians are free, if engaging with the consequences of what your oppressive frameworks have created makes you, the West, uncomfortable, then I do not care to comfort you. The same way you gave Palestinians an occupied land no larger than a thumb of what they had, and told them “Find a way to live with what we have given you out of our mercy”, I tell you to find a way to live in your discomfort. If the Palestinians could live in Gaza, you could live in a world where you are not the centre of it, where the sun does not shine on you first in the morning and last at night.

The colonisers have always been desperate to remove from the Indigenous and colonised minds their independent reality. They deem our truth to be untrustworthy and too bogged down in ‘context’ and emotions. But we know that it is because they are afraid of our truths that they so earnestly seek out our critiques, and place microphones in every mosque and cameras in every corner.

But, we must ask, is the colonial reality not also emotional? Are they not also desperate to construct a deeply personal and ahistorical story for why they steal, oppress, pillage, and colonise?

Humanitarian pauses are not for the Palestinian people. Israel is desperate to convince you of this paradigm because it has been embarrassed thoroughly by the Palestinian truth.

Why is it humanitarian for Israel they ask? Because the Palestinian people do not need to be rehumanised; the break won’t rebuild Gaza.

Rather, it is the Israeli occupation that must be rehumanised, for it is they who must convince the world that their methods are humane and that they do not intend to slaughter children without some respite. With each family ethnically cleansed, the Israeli occupation forces must harden their hearts. They must make it impossible for their minds to conceptualise this Palestinian family unit as deserving the same sanctity as the Israeli family unit.

It is solely because of this mental disconnect that the Zionist speaker can prepare long soliloquies about why 240 hostages is a calamitous number, that the Israeli family has been subject to the utmost horror; an erratic guest has stabbed the host at the dinner table. How will the Israeli family ever host a dinner again, for fear that their Arab guests might notice, under the fresh drywall, blood-stained wall studs and ceiling joists? Perhaps if the Palestinians dig in the backyard, they may find their ancestors buried without dignity. Perhaps the front door might even have, under the fresh blue paint, names of children long-since-grown-up etched into the door at knee height. The story of Israel’s dinner party is a white dinner cloth covering a table stolen from its ‘guests’. If your manners please Israel, you may be invited to eat at the table, but you best not notice that the table is the same one they stole from you.

The humanitarian pause myth is the same. Do not question why Palestinians require a humanitarian break (at least, according to the West), do not question why the world cannot even mobilise to ask for an end to the occupation. Do not ask why the West disguises poison as a gift, why they wrap up the shortchanging with legal frameworks based on the myth that the West knows best. The same West that promises you that a humanitarian pause is the very best they could deliver, yet did they not mobilise more for the billionaires in a submarine? It is because the humanitarian pause was in the West’s interest to salvage the disastrous nightmare: the lights have been turned on during the show; the capitalist-colonial governments have been exposed as frauds, and if they do not move quickly the world may realise that Israel is but one of many settler colonies.

And, most certainly, do not ask where the corrupt Arab governments misplaced their pride, which they for so long persecuted their people to protect. Perhaps they lost it in the American alms box.

You will kill your own for a tweet, but you cannot even ask Israel to relent

Thousands of Palestinian families have been disrupted for nearly a century. 240 appears large in isolation, but what of the 7000+ Palestinian hostages? Or of the millions stuck in a concentration camp called Gaza? Do Palestinian families not have the right to dream of an Eid dinner with all their family present?

This humanitarian break will not even provide an equal return. Tomorrow, if they so wished, Israel could recapture and imprison the same hostages it has just released, and the Palestinians will be condemned and told to be thankful that they are allowed to even live. Forget living with dignity, they must accept that the boot has not fully crushed their neck and therefore must kiss the occupiers’ soles in gratitude; else Israel will ethnically cleanse an entire village in retaliation.

Under the pretence of trying to rescue 240 hostages, many of whom Israel has killed, Israel has ethnically cleansed over a million people who will never be able to live in Gaza again. It has ethnically cleansed the entirety of Gaza. Do you believe that there will be a service left standing in Gaza before the world mobilises anything other than their empty words? For those who are not privileged enough to leave, do you expect them to sit idly? Israel knows this, and it is planning for future expansions into Palestinian land all with the approval of the international community. Soon, the orphans will grow up, and there will be another “October 7th”, and then Israel will claim, again, that it has the colonial right to self-defence. But there is no colonial right to self-defence because colonialism is inherently violent. Israel already struck the first blow nearly a century ago.

Therefore, even in ethnic cleansing, the Palestinians are permitted to breathe only when it serves Israeli interests. Israel returns a breadcrumb in the shape of illegally detained Palestinians, which it will surely reclaim, and Palestinians must in turn surrender their cards and their demands for self-determination. The Palestinian controller is unplugged after they plugged it in without permission; only Israel is allowed to play this game. Israel plays, and Palestine watches. This is the Zionist paradigm.

The Palestinian oppression only dehumanises the Israeli settler-colonial state which prides itself on how creative it has become in its occupation. Look how nifty and cunning it is, it has again described a one-sided deal as fair and just. There is no peace, simply pauses. An ebb-and-flow of ethnic cleansing interrupted only with Israeli drink breaks.

Any deal that does not end the occupation is neither peace nor humanitarian because it is the continuation of ethnic cleansing under updated terms and conditions. Ethnic cleansing has never been humane. Free Palestine, from the river to the sea.

ثُمَّ إِنَّ رَبَّكَ لِلَّذِینَ هَاجَرُوا۟ مِنۢ بَعۡدِ مَا فُتِنُوا۟ ثُمَّ جَـٰهَدُوا۟ وَصَبَرُوۤا۟ إِنَّ رَبَّكَ مِنۢ بَعۡدِهَا لَغَفُورࣱ رَّحِیمࣱ

But your Lord will be most forgiving and most merciful to those who leave their homes after persecution, then strive and remain steadfast.

Surah 16, An-Naḥl, Verse 110

And Allah knows best.