Gaza Ceasefire: The Normalisation of the Israeli Settler Project

Jack Waldo Peirce, MA Middle Eastern Studies

Those familiar with my writing (namely, my grandfather and the generous souls who kindly support my Substack page) will be aware that my articles are never bereft of attempts at humour—normally of the underwhelming, self-deprecating variety. The subject about which I concern myself today, however, seems somewhat beyond the reach of my half-baked comedic efforts. Since Hamas’ unprecedented attack on Israel on October 7th – which saw nearly 800 civilians killed, and 251 people taken hostage – Israel has waged a new war on Gaza, killing at least 61,000 Palestinians in the process. A peer-review study in the Lancet indicates that the overall death toll is likely much higher. Over 17,000 of those killed by Israel have been children.

The recent war constitutes just one, particularly dark episode in a conflict that has endured for over one hundred years. The struggle over Palestine took on a new meaning in 1948, when Israel expelled over 75 per cent of the indigenous population in a process of ethnic cleansing known to Palestinians as the Nakba (catastrophe). Israel and its supporters refer to the event as Israel’s War of Independence.

The nominal distinction here reveals a broader characteristic of the conflict: the struggle to foster any consensus regarding its nature. So interspliced and imperceptibly interlocked are the myriad factors that perpetuate it, and so well obscured are some of its truths, that the options most readily available to anyone attempting to loosen these fatally twisted knots are to either speak of it in entirely essentialist terms (e.g. Israel, coloniser, Palestine, colonised; Israel, victim, Palestine, terrorist) or to lose oneself somewhere in the mire of nuance. One generally needs a book or two for the latter. The third and more elusive path is to try and maintain a grip on the shadowy interstices whilst also zeroing in on a contemporarily more significant element.

After 471 days of war in the Gaza Strip, a fragile ceasefire was brought into effect on January 19th. Whilst I felt a melancholic joy when news of the ceasefire broke, my mind soon turned its attention towards the potentially destructive (genocidal) implications of the agreement. Enshrined in any ceasefire deal is an acknowledgement that the conditions returned to are on some level a normal and acceptable state of affairs. The conditions, whose normalisation has been sanctioned by the brokering parties (most significantly, the US), are those of a genocidal settler-colonial project. Israel’s actions in the West Bank in the days following the ceasefire’s initial implementation ratified these sombre premonitions.

I should note that I use genocidal not in the condemnatory moral sense, nor in the politically inextricable legal sense. Rather I apply it in its original sense—that laid out by Polish-Jewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin when he coined the term in 1944. In Palestine we are all observing an ever crystalising reality, in which people are being eliminated, not as individuals, but as a people: as Palestinians. This elimination can be achieved by various means and does not require the industrial mechanisation of killing commonly associated with the term. Lemkin, a survivor of the Holocaust, died in 1959 believing his efforts to secure an effective legal understanding of genocide to have failed. The recurrent failure of international courts of law to bring perpetrators of genocide to account are an unfortunate testimony to this reality.

That Israel’s eliminatory project is the “norm” in Palestine is nothing new. However, to have it so unashamedly officialised as it has been by this ceasefire agreement, and by the leaders involved, is an enormous cause for concern. Israel’s military actions in the West Bank, which have killed a multitude of Palestinians since January 19th; the increasing restrictions on the movement of Palestinians; the transfer of oversight of the West Bank into the hands of the radical Israeli government (a de jure annexation); and the denial of money transfer from the Palestinian Authority are all evidence of an Israeli desire to impoverish, destabilise, and destroy Palestine’s indigenous population, outside the obfuscating parapets of war.

This desire for Palestine’s ethnic cleansing has been taking political shape mainly through Israel’s far-right forces. Bezalel Smotrich, Israel’s finance minister, “overlord” of the occupied West Bank, seven years ago published his “Decisive Plan.” What has since become known as “Smotrich’s doctrine” outlines an “endgame” for the current conflict. Within this, the “demographic challenge” presented by Palestinians will be solved as follows: Palestinians will renounce any claims to nationhood or emigrate elsewhere. Should they instead choose to resist this end, Smotrich has no problem “killing those who need to be killed,” whether they be men, women, or children—“in war as in war,” he says. The recent conflict has been conducted by Israel almost unerringly along these lines.

Far-right members of the Knesset have since spoken accordingly of the potential “voluntary emigration” of Palestinians from the occupied territories. Those familiar with mass population transfers of the past will have come across a bleak array of euphemisms like this, which shroud processes of ethnic cleansing. “Ethnic unmixing” was a term bandied about with complete moral surety during the Turkey-Greece population exchanges of the early 1920s, for example.

In a more international context, Donald Trump, in the weeks following the ceasefire, has tried his best to surpass 1920s administrators in his verbal allusions to ethnically cleansing Palestine. “You’re talking about probably a million and a half people [in Gaza],” Trump shared with reporters. “We just clean out that whole thing and say: ‘you know, it’s over.’” With the US serving as de facto metropole to Israel’s colonial project, to have an American president speak so brazenly of ethnic cleansing constitutes a severe threat to the Palestinian nation.

In this context, the fevered, apocalyptic dreams of Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir (former Minister of National Security, who resigned from Netanyahu’s government upon the ceasefire’s implementation) are very real possibilities. Indeed, they are in many ways the simple continuation of the Israeli settler-project. Moreover, this “Decisive Plan”,the inauguration of a Kahanist republic, is wanted by 25 percent of Israelis. With the centre-left in Israel faltering, this is the ascending vision for the future of Palestine. With all this in mind, despite the ostensive respite of the ceasefire, the genocide of the Palestinian people cannot be spoken about in the past tense. The past fifteen months could only be the beginning.

As despondent a picture as my analysis depicts, hope never wholly submerges itself beyond the horizon. History is constantly ruptured without indicators perceptible to contemporary human eyes, delivering us from moments of peril to those of joy. Where does the hope lie, then, in the Palestinian case?

The Israeli population is the largest and most likely shareholder in the business of bringing about a more permanent peace with Palestine. 70 per cent of the public is against the government’s handling of the conflict: their central focus is the safe return of hostages. The question of whether the Israeli people can translate this desire for hostage return into holding the government to the ceasefire will perhaps have been answered by the time you read this article. (Note that this hope lies merely in holding the ceasefire and, regrettably, not in any end to the wider settler project.) The latter expectation feels markedly beyond Israeli society’s current imagination. As I inauspiciously discovered in a hostel in rural New Zealand, the most seemingly rational Israeli can be transformed into a foghorn for Zionist propaganda at the mention of Palestine.

Trump and the US represent the state actor most capable of forcing the hand of the Israeli government from clenched and combative to open and collaborative. This might be incongruous with current events: the future under Trump is appearing increasingly bleaker by the day. However, it is not so naïve to imagine that he, in all his frivolity and flammability, might just wish to pursue something else more interesting, something more likely to seal his place in history.

The most realistic source of hope, nevertheless, is the resilience of the Palestinian people. As I write, more than five hundred thousand Palestinians have returned to the demolished northern part of the Strip, to try and rebuild their lives amongst ruins and rubble. It is their continued resistance which has kept the genocidal actions of the Israeli state in full view. If Palestinians remain in Palestine, the Zionist project loses.