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View all search resultsA pause in violence is neither peace nor justice
So severe and devastating have the actions of the Israeli government and military been that they have managed to elicit sympathy merely for pausing the slaughter.
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People walk amid the destruction in Gaza City, Palestine, on Saturday, a day after a ceasefire took effect. (AFP/-)
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sraeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his right wing government have ensured that Palestinians, pro-Palestinian groups and activists, and anyone with a sense of decency are willing to give them almost anything just to stop the mass killings in Gaza.
So severe and devastating have the actions of the Israeli government and military been against the Palestinian people that they have managed to elicit sympathy merely for pausing the slaughter, even briefly. All of a sudden, recognition of a Palestinian state feels unnecessary, even awkward, at a time when recognitions inundate the news.
The unfair and imbalance treatment are made starker by United States President Donald Trump’s blunt declaration that if Hamas failed to comply, “Israel would have my full backing to finish the job of destroying Hamas,” and by the fact that the 20 point plan was drafted with only Trump and Netanyahu at the center of the process, without Hamas or Palestinian representatives.
While most of us pray that the plan will work, those accepting such an imbalance plan without caution are either living under the rock the whole time, or having an ahistorical frame of mind. We have seen time and again how Netanyahu has sabotaged agreements, including his own, to derail the path toward a two-state solution.
The so-called peace plan arrived as a tightly packaged narrative: Israel as besieged democracy, Palestinians as either security problems or supplicants for economic aid. In practice, the plan formalized many of Israel’s long-standing demands: control over strategic territory, a securitized arrangement for any Palestinian entity and the cementing of Jerusalem as Israel’s undivided capital, while offering Palestinians a mere promise of economic development and administrative autonomy, stripped of real sovereignty.
To Netanyahu, this arrangement read less like compromise than vindication. It gave political cover to expansionist aims while recasting the denial of Palestinian rights as rational, necessary and even merciful.
Viewed through the lens of coercive control, a concept drawn from studies of domestic abuse but here applied to statecraft, the strategy is chillingly familiar. Coercive control is not merely episodic violence; it is a continuous choreography of domination that includes surveillance, restriction of movement, deprivation of resources and humiliation designed to make resistance futile and inevitable dependence.
