Yes, Israel’s plan for Rafah would be a crime – but international law has never protected Gaza | Raja Shehadeh

OThe last 21 months of the genocidal war of Israel against Gaza, votes from around the world have decried the disappearance of international law and the order based on rules. And indeed, the facade of Israel’s membership in international law has disappeared and the policies that constitute war crimes are now cheeky.

This week, the Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz shared plans to force the Palestinians in a camp to Rafah ruins. Once they have entered, they can’t leave. In other words, a concentration camp, which is by definition an internment center for members of a national group (as well as political prisoners or minority groups) for reasons of security or punishment, generally in military order. Michael Sfard, an Israeli human rights lawyer, was cited in The Guardian as saying that Katz “established an operational plan for a crime against humanity”. Hundreds were killed and thousands of injured while trying to access food.

I tried to understand the incomprehensible sufferings endured by the Palestinians in Gaza and how it is that most Israelis do not recognize their humanity. How are they able to show any remorse for what their army achieves on their behalf? I believe that the seed of our dehumanization was planted during the Arab-Israeli war in 1948. The Palestinians were violently deprived of land, goods and effects in what we would come to call the Nakba (Arabic for “the catastrophe”), on the grounds that the earth was given by the earth to the Jewish people. From this moment, the Israelis were able to use Arab houses, land and orchards without any feeling of guilt. The attacks of October 7 were the starting point for the war, but Israel systematically degraded and dispossessed the Palestinian people for decades.

Such violations of international law have led to a feeling of despair as to the inability of institutions to prevent the horrors of Israeli actions in Gaza and in the West Bank and to hold the authors to count them. The International Criminal Court supported by the United Nations issued arrest mandates against Netanyahu and former Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant for allegations of “the war crime of famine as a method of war; and crimes against humanity of murder, persecution and other inhuman acts. ” No arrests were made. The West continues to provide military and political support to Israel. I wonder: should we feel helpless in the face of this failure?

And yet, the truth is that international law, although used as a measurement stick and a reference point by human rights organizations, has never been the salvation of Palestine. Since the failure of the implementation of 1948 UN resolution 194, which has given Palestinian refugees the right to return home in what has become Israel, we have been disappointed again and again.

This has not been for lack of Palestinian attempts over the years to invoke the law – whether through Israeli courts, international courts or third parties’ application mechanisms. A simple reason for their failure is that international law lacks effective means of application. More complex reasons rest with the interests of the powerful. My hope lies in Palestinian resilience.

The widespread hope was that the Palestinians would forget their land in a generation or two. It turned out to be completely unfounded. Seventy-seven years later, the Palestinians are also attached to the country with which they were forced as in these first bloody days.

Likewise, with all the illegal changes and the vast Jewish colonies and the geography modified in my house, the West Bank, we, Palestinians, continue to keep the practice we call SUMOUD: refuse to abandon or leave. I cannot speak for the Palestinians in Gaza, but I can see that we share the same spirit despite the immensity of suffering.

At the end of the war and that journalists and foreign organizations are authorized to access Gaza, the truth will emerge. The heartbreaking accounts heartbreaking of those who live there – the experiences of women, men and children, artists, writers and poets; Lives are interrupted or changed irrevocably – can still haunt the Israelis.

It will be our humanity, not international law, which will judge and hold Israel and its responsible allies. On a different scale but in a no less flagrant way, the illegal unilateral changes that Israel brings in the West Bank, often using colonist militias, will provide an image of Israeli cupidity for land and its ideologically motivated policies.

There is perhaps no better example of the absurdity of Israel’s actions than the case of the old town of Hebron. The city is held hostage by a small group of Jewish extremists 900 who live in the center of Hebron – the second largest Palestinian city in West Bank, with a population of 232,500 inhabitants. The Jewish population is protected day and night by more than 1,000 Israeli soldiers. To allow the settlers and soldiers to move freely, the restrictions on the Palestinian movement include dozens of fortified control points, road dams and permanent and temporary military posts. The old town has practically been emptied of its Palestinian population. Is it sustainable?

Regarding the future of Gaza, the question that will be crucial is whether, with the destruction of the means of surviving – agricultural land, water supply, hospitals and schools – the land can continue to maintain life.

The global community which has not succeeded in applying international law could make a difference on this subject if it insists that after the end of hostilities, Israel allows the opening of the Gaza Strip and guarantees that the aid is brought to allow the Palestinians to continue to live there while the area is rebuilt.

Gaza has a history of 4,000 years of human housing continues. Israel’s attempt to stop life is doomed to failure. The Palestinians will have, with the help of the others, either without, a way to survive.