Since the start of the current attacks on Gaza, Israel has enjoyed unequivocal support from the European states and the USA. In the last few days, it has been reportedly recruiting African states as well to contribute their share and part-take in war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and genocide by assenting to accommodate the forcibly removed Palestinians from Gaza.
So far, Israel’s indecent proposals have been supposedly extended to the DRC, Chad, and Rwanda. Especially the latter can come as little surprise given the attempt by the UK to disregard international law and export to Africa its incompetence concerning sustainable and humane migration policies and its fulfillment of international obligations. The EU has signed similar bargains with Morocco, Tunisia, Turkey, and Libya, while Italy has closed its deal with Albania. Sooner or later the Israeli government will make attempts there too if it does not succeed elsewhere in strong-arming or offering a high enough prize for the unacceptable.
For decades Israel as the occupying power has successfully shifted its obligations and duties to UN agencies, humanitarian organizations, and donor states, which happily offer humanitarian and developmental aid to rebuild after every bombardment into ruinous oblivion by the Israeli army.
Yet, it is Israel that as the occupier has obligations under the Geneva Conventions. Among them is the duty to ensure that no measures are taken against the civilian population it occupies cause physical suffering or any other measures of brutality. The occupying power has to ensure food and medical supplies for the population under occupation. Israel has done everything to achieve the contrary. As of January 5, the UN humanitarian chief warned that Gaza had become uninhabitable while Doctors Without Borders (MSF) declared Gaza gone with nothing left.
Israel’s actions over the last weeks have been groundbreaking. The disregard for Palestinians’ rights and lives has been taken to a new, until now unimaginable extreme. Keeping alive the idea of two states benefits, as has until now, only Israel. It serves its continuing colonization of the Palestinian land and evictions of the Palestinian inhabitants. Since the 1990s the “question of refugees” has been pushed into the future and to the end of the “peace process”. However, it is not a question. It is a right. A right of the Palestinian refugees to return to their homes from which the Israeli militias and Israel forcibly expelled them during the 1947-1948 Nakba. It is a right enshrined in UN Resolution 194 and recognized by the International Court of Justice. The reason why it has been disregarded by the state of Israel from the start and violated for the last 75 years lies in the foundational aim of the Israeli state to ensure as great as possible if not total ethnic-Jewish majority and domination in the land between the river Jordan and the Mediterranean Sea. This aim violates the basic principles of equality of all humans and demands daily oppression of the Palestinians; it is unacceptable and unworthy of consideration.
There are 2,3 million people in Gaza that Israel wishes to “cleanse,” as has been unabashedly stated by Israeli politicians and public figures. Israel’s impunity for its total disregard of international law and its ability to dump its obligations onto others must be stopped. If warnings that Gaza has become uninhabitable because of the devastation Israel has caused are taken seriously, then the solution should be straight-forward: it is high time that Israel enables the 2.3 million people trapped in Gaza to be evacuated to the Israeli territory – for the great majority of them this will present only a rightful recognition of their right of return.
The Palestinian right of return has been postponed until now into an undefined future. What hangs in the balance now is the future. The right of return of the Palestinian refugees, all 6.5 million of them, has to be where we start. It has to be the first obligation Israel fulfills. The international community can, as has been suggested by the UN experts, ensure a protective presence, that will safeguard the security and well-being of the returning Palestinian refugees. Especially given the current situation in Israel, where violent hatred and hate speech directed against Palestinians are spread with impunity.
The solution is not in searching for a new home. It is time the Palestinians return home.
Kristina Božič is a journalist. She has a degree in law and has written for the main Slovenian media, while her work in English has appeared in London Review of Books, BalkanInsight and Kosovo 2.0. She is among the contributors to the website Mesanec. For almost two decades she has worked to tell forward stories of people who fight for a better tomorrow and raise alarm about systemic injustices.
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