How has the United States been so wrong about a ceasefire in Gaza?

December 30, 2023, People's Organization for Progress Ceasefire March, Newark NJ

As we pass 300 days since a one-day attack, part resistance and part massacre, we continue to bear hourly witness to an ongoing Genocide. Anyone can livestream the completely disproportionate response to that attack that is a trifecta of war crimes: collective punishment, forced displacement, and ethnic cleansing. And where those news reports, pictures and videos have become less prevalent in your timeline, it’s because of a lack of phone service, electricity, and a dwindling number of journalists who have avoided the Israeli assassination machine. 

All the while, another media story is competing for our attention: A media and political narrative that the U.S. --from Biden to Blinkin to Harris--is spending every possible moment working toward a ceasefire. But even a discussion of a ceasefire misses a critical disconnect between the electorate and our political “leaders" -- a ceasefire denotes an end to a period of violence, not an end to the long historical war of occupation and settler colonization. 

Since 1948, when the Nabka started, there have been countless ceasefires. Yet the core problems remain largely undiscussed and deliberately misunderstood, therefore entirely unaddressed. The core problem: God is not a real estate agent. Ethnic cleansing and removal of Indigenous populations are not new in our modern history -- the "Manifest Destiny" of the U.S. that tells that long trail of tears. The violent and systematic removal of Palestinians to establish Israel used the name of God to assuage the guilt of land thieves, murderers, and occupiers. 

Palestine was, disingenuously, “a land without a people, for a people without a land.” And while very few questioned the desire of Jews, especially those that had just survived an eradication attempt in Europe, to have a place where they felt safe, from history it is known that one can not build safety on slaughter, displacement, and occupation of the land of others. A Palestinian and an Indigenous North American would hear echoes in each others’ stories.

For the past 76 years, the U.S. foreign policy relationship with Israel has been driven mainly by Israel's position, that it faces an existential threat from its surrounding Arab neighbors. To the tune of $310 billion (adjusted for inflation), the U.S. has supported Israel's occupation of 2 million people in Gaza and millions more in the West Bank, its wars with neighboring Arab countries, and its pursuit of land acquisition under Israel's own "Manifest Destiny." Does that money buy safety and freedom, or is it settler colonialism for a Zionist-imperialist State?

January 26, 2024, Vigil for victims in Gaza, Livingston, NJ

It is in this contradiction that we see why a ceasefire is a specious objective. A ceasefire can’t un-murder tens of thousands of Palestinians killed not individually but in whole families, whole buildings, and whole blocks since October 7. A ceasefire can’t break the Israeli blockade on food, medicine, and water; in fact, the government and military blockades have been adopted by civilians, taking it upon themselves to personally starve Palestinians to death. But U.S. foreign policy still acts as if supporting Israel is supporting “Western values” of democracy, equality, justice. When, in actuality, it’s supporting the true Western foundations of racism, violence, and dehumanization.

A ceasefire can’t dismiss the history of land theft and occupation. A ceasefire cannot absolve murder. A ceasefire cannot cleanse those of us, citizens of countries that are sponsoring this human horror with our tax dollars. It cannot bring a right to return to stolen lands. Stolen first by Jewish militias, then by the Israeli Army, and now “officially” stolen by the Israeli government, with tacit approval by Israeli courts. A ceasefire may bring a brief reduction of the noise of bombs, and the screams, and then silence, that follow, but cannot end this long war. 

But the Israeli assassination of Ismail Haniyeh can certainly delay even that moment of peace, allowing the immoral slaughter in Gaza to continue. Israel refusing a Hamas ceasefire proposal before essentially recycling it and proposing it as their own enables the slaughter of children and babies in Gaza to continue. The U.S. continuing to ship billions of dollars worth of purely offensive weapons to Israel allows the slaughter of grandparents, refugees, and people with disabilities to continue.

It should be enlightening to those who get excited when President Biden announces we’re nearing a ceasefire, that the main hinderance in the negotiations was Israel refusing to include conditions that would make it permanent. But really there is no such thing as a permanent ceasefire -- ceasefires are holding places as we wait for the war to explode, again. Wars may end when parties achieve some agreement as to acceptable restitution. But what diplomacy has occurred has been but a trickle, next to the free flowing tap of U.S. dollars and weapons that can only prolong the conflict, literal weapons of war, suitable only for continuing the violence, not ending it. It’s such a stark contradiction, talking up a peace pushed further away by every 2,000 pound bomb, signed, sealed, delivered, and dropped.

The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Public Square Amplified.