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Over the past 24 months, the international audience has witnessed as the Israeli state has deliberately razed the Gaza region, claiming the lives of countless of Palestinians and injuring an untold number more. Just as dangerously, Israeli forces continues to deliberately assault healthcare, education, water supply and sewage systems to guarantee that normalcy cannot return in the Gaza Strip.

Western Governments’ Responses

International reactions to Israel’s actions have ranged from cheerleading and full endorsement in the first year of Israel’s attack on Gaza after that fateful date, subsequently shifting to expressions of worry and handwringing, to, in recent times, occasional expressions of dismay and unsubstantiated ultimatums that persistent assaults may, at some unspecified time, lead to an military supply halt or a reduction in commercial ties. Over recent weeks, there have also been widely touted declarations of conditional recognition of a Palestinian state. The contradiction is stark: tepidly recognizing a state as it, and its citizens, are being obliterated ruthlessly.

Present Circumstances

As I write this, uncertainty surrounds Donald Trump’s plan to end the war and hope is mounting for a reciprocal release. Although cessation of airstrikes, the freedom of captives on each party and permitting relief supplies into Gaza would bring some relief in an exceptionally grim scenario, it would be a mistake to regard the initiative as a monumental step for the Palestinian cause. The proposed framework is once more collaborative effort developed without any Palestinian participation that would preserve continuous Israeli authority over Gaza’s future.

The world has never listened to the perspectives of Palestinians or taken seriously the grave danger Israel poses to Palestinian life, and this has not substantively altered despite the growth in symbolic concern. To the contrary, Palestinians have for three-quarters of a century, Palestinians have suffered through the world insisting that Israel’s safety considerations – however defined by Israel – are of greater significance than fundamental human rights.

Parallel Systems of Force

Consequently Palestinians face two ever-present types of violence: direct Israeli force experienced by our bodies, land and community, and global indifference, where only our erasure prompts the world to acknowledge our presence and see our humanity – but minimally.

This understanding comes from direct personal experience, for a 25-year period, how this pattern of international approach and operating unfolds. Even after prolonged violence in Gaza, and the abundant evidence available about underlying Israeli objectives, that approach is recurring as I write this, with global powers supporting a plan that does little to guarantee inclusion of Palestinian voices over their future.

Empty statements has been the west’s modus operandi for decades. The cost has been catastrophic.

A Deceptive Remedy

At the end of September 2000, I joined the Palestinian delegation as a lawyer participating in the talks with Israeli counterparts. This represented a significant step for me: I am the descendant of Palestinians born before the Nakba, the systematic removal of Palestine. My family, differently from many of Palestinian people, did not escape in 1948 and later became Israeli citizens, living in Nazareth, in a country that did not want them. In that year, they opted to relocate to North America, where I was born, grown and trained. I had not been based there before joining the negotiating team except for a few months at a time. Then, I had decided to being in the region for a twelve-month period. I became involved as a attorney after a colleague, also a member of the legal team, informed me that one of the defects of the “Oslo peace process” was its vagueness. I had believed, naively, that the team could remedy that.

This was the height of the peace process, as it was called, which was initiated by the Clinton administration in 1993 with the symbolic gesture between the Israeli leader, the Israeli prime minister, and the PLO chairman, the head of the PLO. Through a series of agreements, the Palestinian Authority was created and the occupied lands were increasingly fragmented, with more barriers scattered throughout. Fundamental questions such as frontiers, settlements, the claims of displaced people and the holy city were postponed permanently.

The ‘peace process’ became a illusory solution concealing the reality to the west.

These issues were now matters between two parties for the Israeli government and the Palestinian leadership to address directly, with the rest of the world supposedly observing as neutral observers. But they were not neutral, and the primary parties were not equals. The America was at that time and continues Israel’s biggest supplier of arms and diplomatic support and European nations is Israel’s largest trading partner. Before entering into this diplomatic efforts, Palestinians sought assurances, particularly from the US, that the asymmetry in power would be rectified. Those promises were implicitly given but consistently broken, throughout decades of negotiations.

Starting that decade, international praise for diplomatic efforts was widespread. But what ultimately happened is that persistent requests for a partition plan that evaded explicit realization of independent statehood and freedom replaced calls for an end to Israel’s military occupation. The diplomatic process evolved into a illusory solution concealing the reality to the global powers, hiding its growth, omnipresent and progressively harsh form. The Palestinian cause was now limited to a subject of “negotiation” needing sacrifices, with the forced expulsion of the land ignored to be forgotten.

Colonial Growth

With this magic pill swallowed, Israel used the cover of the “peace process” to build and expand Israeli settlements, accurately thinking that these facts on the ground would improve their standing at the negotiating table. And with the settlements came settlers and checkpoints and an {expanding