Arab diplomats, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, an Israeli delegation and perhaps also representatives of Hamas will renegotiate a ceasefire in Gaza on Tuesday. On the table is the release of 33 Israeli hostages by Hamas. In return, Israeli firepower must temporarily remain silent. This should pave the way to increasing humanitarian aid and working out a political solution to the decades-long conflict. For both the US and its Arab neighbors, this means the creation of a real Palestinian state. Well, the rump state that remains of the area that the UN had allocated to the Palestinians in 1947.
The Dutch translation of the standard work of the Israeli historian Ilan Pappé has been republished:The Nakba, the ethnic cleansing of Palestine. In it Pappé showsaffiliated with the University of Exeter, that the flight of 800,000 Palestinians was not a fateful consequence of the struggle for survival of Jewish settlers against the Arab threat, but a deliberate and methodically executed strategy to seize as much Palestinian land as possible with as few Palestinians as possible.
Even then, neither the Palestinians nor the Arab Legion had any defense against the military strength of the Jewish militias. Pappé describes the intimidation in detail, the sexual violence, the killings and systematic destruction of Palestinian villages. All prepared, planned and ordered by David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first Prime Minister. If Gaza was not depopulated, it is because Egypt, unlike Jordan and Lebanon, kept its borders closed.
It is required reading for those who want to better understand the conflict. The thinking and actions of the extreme Zionists in the Netanyahu government echo that of the Council of Twelve that planned the Nakba. The Israeli army, which prides itself on its efficiency and high moral standards, leaves behind 34,500 dead in Gaza. The research collective Bellingcat mapped out how driven commando 8219 worked.
According toThe New York Times the International Criminal Court would prepare arrest warrants against senior Israeli government officials and Hamas leaders. Israel and the US do not recognize the International Criminal Court, but still do The New York Times Netanyahu would not be completely immune to the moral blame. He would rather not see Israeli authorities in the same category as Vladimir Putin, the deposed Sudanese dictator Omar al-Bashir or the terror leaders of Hamas. It fuels some optimism about the chances of success of the talks. For the million Palestinians who have fled in Rafah, the last part of Gaza where no tanks have yet thundered through, but also for the hostages, this is a matter of life and death.
