by John Gee
From early on in the war in Gaza, there was talk at an international level about who would run that densely populated enclave on “the day after”—rather more than what would become of its people.
Various ideas were floated.
Pushed to offer any definite ideas, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu proposed that a council composed of heads of clans and prominent families opposed to Hamas could be appointed, but none wished to play along.
This proposal showed no sign of recognition that Palestinian societies everywhere are more sophisticated than to defer to the typical authority figures of a hundred years ago.
Neither neighbouring Egypt nor the Arab states collectively have so far indicated any willingness to manage the Gaza Strip. The West Bank-based Palestinian National Authority is the preferred candidate of the European Union, despite the Netanyahu government’s opposition.
However, aware of all the challenges of running Gaza, including the danger of reinforcing its Palestinian critics’ charge of it acting as Israel’s sub-contractor, it has been cautious about stepping into that role.
The Israeli far-right wants Israel to retain control and induce the Palestinian population to leave so that the Gaza Strip can be settled by Israeli Jews and annexed to Israel.
This is a goal with which Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu undoubtedly sympathises, though until Trump’s election to the US presidency, concern about a strong adverse international reaction, including from the USA and Jewish communities elsewhere, constrained his government from openly pursuing it.
Now, Trump has made a series of moves that have delighted the Israeli government and provoked Palestinian outrage.
He has called for Gaza’s Palestinians to be settled elsewhere, outside their historic homeland and, in a press conference following his meeting with Netanyahu, he has said that the USA will take over the Gaza Strip while reiterating his advocacy of the effective expulsion of much or perhaps all of its people.
During the recent war, Gaza’s neighbour Egypt refused to accept the displacement of Palestinians from Gaza onto its territory, but above all, the ethnic cleansing of the Gaza Strip was stymied by the steadfastness of the Palestinians.
They have known, since the the bitter experience of the 1948 war that led to the establishment of an Israeli state in nearly 80 per cent of Palestine, that if they leave their land in the face of Israeli violence, it will be taken from them and they will not be allowed to return.
They will not be any more cooperative in their own dispossession in the months and years to come.
The right of the Palestinian people to national self-determination has been repeatedly trodden underfoot since 1917, when Britain issued the Balfour Declaration, in which it supported the creation of a “National Home for the Jewish people” in Palestine while paying lip service to the civil and religious (not national) rights of the “existing non-Jewish communities”, who then made up 90 per cent of its population.
This, rather than 7 October 7th, 2023, was the origin of the recent war.
Ever since then, the wishes of the Palestinian Arabs have been overridden repeatedly in favour of the colonial movement of Zionism, and, later, the state of Israel and their resistance and the reasons behind it have been misrepresented in much of the outside world.
In the 1930s, Zionist leaders claimed that opposition to their expanding colonies was due to the influence of the “effendis” – members of local elites. After 1948, it was attributed to instigation by the Arab states and, in the more recent past, to Iran.
What has never conceded was that the Palestinian Arabs had legitimate reasons to fear dispossession and denial of their rights and that, like Indigenous peoples the world over, they loved their homeland and wished to live in it in freedom—neither to surrender it to others nor to live under their domination. This was and remains the sole foundation for their resistance.
However it came about, the existence of an Israeli Jewish nation is now a fact, and Palestinians must adjust to that: most have done so. Whether there’s a two state solution or a single democratic state, it means living side by side with them, but in equality, not as inferiors in any way. Nothing else will bring lasting peace.
In all the talk of “the day after”, the one idea that has been notably absent is that the Palestinians of the Gaza Strip should decide democratically for themselves who will govern them.
Western countries, in particular, formally favour democratic elections as the best way of constituting governments elsewhere in the world, but not when it comes to Palestinians: in the absence of a leadership compliant with Israeli wishes, they must have rulers imposed upon them.
The reason is obvious. The people of the 1967 occupied territories, given a free choice, would vote for those they regarded as the best upholders of the national cause: parties that would uphold their right to self-determination and independence and not abandon the right of return for Palestinians exiled from their homes in 1948.
That’s what the Palestine Liberation Organisation represented for them before its 1993 agreement with Israel and the creation of the Palestinian National Authority (PNA).
Received wisdom in the West is that Palestinians voted for Hamas in 2006 and many have supported it since because of popular disgust with corruption in the PNA.
This is wishful thinking: they supported it because the established Palestinian leadership had failed to achieve Palestinian national goals or even, at the very least, an end to the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
Hamas knew this very well, and that is why it was determined not to be drawn into a series of concessions that would convert it into a junior partner in continuing Israeli control. It is also why the idea that destroying Hamas would offer any prospect of real peace is a delusion: the fundamental problem is the denial of the Palestinians’ right to national self-determination.
Any leadership that bargains this away forfeits all claim to their support.
Conventional thinking in much of the Western world stands this reality on its head when it attributes the persistence of the Palestinian people’s resistance to leaders or outsiders encouragement or, in Israel’s favoured language, “incitement”; it is the people’s insistence on standing up for their national rights that asserts itself time and again and which will find expression in new forms and new organisations if Netanyahu’s dream of the complete destruction of Hamas is ever realised.
This is what the rest of the world must recognise and why it should support the holding of free elections to establish an administration that is, first and foremost, accountable to the people it is meant to represent.
They may not like the results, but at least there would be an authority in place capable of representing its constituency and its wishes rather than a foreign imposition that did not and which consequently could not negotiate any kind of lasting settlement.
