We have a ceasefire agreement, but this is not the end

Three weeks into the Israeli assault on Gaza that followed the October 7 attack, Palestinian-American intellectual Saree Makdisi wrote something that has been with me for the past 15 months: “What we are witnessing … is perhaps the first amalgamation of old-fashioned colonial and genocidal violence with advanced state-of-the-art heavy weaponry; a twisted amalgamation of the 17th century and the 21st, wrapped and wrapped in language that harkens back to primitive times and thunderous biblical scenes involving the smiting of whole peoples.

Makdisi wrote before the Israeli ground invasion of Gaza had begun. But the horror he and the world witnessed was already unimaginable. We all saw Israel’s supersonic fighter jets pulverize American-made 2,000-pound missiles into Gaza’s skyline, obliterate its jam-packed refugee camps, melt tin-roofed houses with the flesh and bones of those inside, and exterminate thousands of people it had displaced. from their ancestral homes – many of them are just on the other side of fences breached on 7 October.

At the time, it was hoped that Makdisi’s words would be a kind of epitaph. Perhaps this one last spasm of shocking brutality would force the world to confront the reality of Israel’s apartheid regime and history of ethnic cleansing. Instead, the live-streamed slaughter of children and their families continued for more than a year, live and direct, straight into our feeds.

I thought again of Makdisi’s words in the middle widespread reports (which cited officials on all sides of the conflict, incl Donald Trump), that Hamas and Israel had agreed to a ceasefire, hopefully – finally – bringing the past 15 months of genocide to an end. This time they read like a possible prologue. What Israel has done to Gaza may herald a new era of state violence with no rules and no crimes. Everything is permitted and nothing will be prosecuted. No children have access to the snipers. Missiles are programmed to enter hospitals and doctors. Drones will bomb your home and then burn you alive in the tent you set up to protect your family from the cold. An army will arrive and declare where you live a kill zone. And if you get killed, why were you in the kill zone? You must have been a terrorist. Israel did all of these things to the people of Gaza while world leaders watched, and they did so with the full political and military support of the United States. Other states will have taken note.

Any decent person should hope that the ceasefire holds, but even if it does, the end of the genocide is not the end of the story. Palestine is still not free and we have not even begun to come to terms with what Israel has done to Gaza. It may take years for us to know the true death toll, although it will be much, much higher than the official figures. We will never be able to fully quantify how deeply the people of Gaza have been scarred by these atrocities.

According to the world’s leading human rights organizations, these have been crimes. It has been a genocide. To accomplish this, Israel needed two things. It needed an incessant supply of weapons, which fortunately were provided by the United States in violation of its own laws. And it required the Biden administration to take a sledgehammer to even the slightest pretense that international law and the so-called liberal order underpinned by the United States since the end of World War II have any meaning.

The United Nations, created in the wake of this war to prevent such horrors, was rendered impotent by raised arms by Robert Wood and Linda Thomas-Greenfield as they defied the will of almost every other nation on earth to stop the slaughter.

International aid and medical organizations, built by design to be apolitical in the service of helping those in the harshest conditions, were routinely shot at, bombed, banned and reviled.

The International Criminal Court and the International Court of Justice, ostensibly founded to bring the world into line with the rule of law rather than the laws of the jungle, have become targeted for sanction primarily by the Honorable Members of the United States Congress. Although polls showed that the majority of Americans consistently wanted a cease-fire in Gaza, their representatives showed chilling respect for a foreign country that was killing children at a faster rate than any other in recent history.

Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is now desired of the ICC for crimes against humanity. When he arrived to address Congress last summer, he received a minute-long standing ovation, then was applauded dozens more times. At the time, the official death toll was almost 38,000. Netanyahu and Biden and all who supported them will likely continue to live a life of comfort and security. They will be fine. There is no justice in any of this.

But amid this breakdown in morality, proportionality and the very principles of international law, Hamas – the supposed target of the hell Joe Biden and Netanyahu unleashed in Gaza – has not budged.