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Throughout this period, the global community has seen as the Israeli state has systematically destroyed the Gaza Strip, claiming the lives of many thousands of Palestinians and maiming an unknown quantity more. In a similarly perilous move, Israel continues to systematically attack medical, education, water supply and sewage systems to guarantee that normalcy cannot return in the territory.

Global Stances

Global stances to Israeli operations have included vocal backing and unconditional support in the opening phase of hostilities on the Gaza Strip after 7 October 2023, then came voiced apprehensions and anguished deliberation, to, lately, intermittent declarations of alarm and hollow warnings that persistent assaults may, at some unspecified time, lead to an weapons restrictions or a reduction in commercial ties. Over recent weeks, there have also been greatly celebrated proclamations of conditional recognition of a Palestine as a state. The paradox is deeply troubling: hesitantly accepting a state as it, and its citizens, are being systematically destroyed.

Current Developments

As I write this, uncertainty surrounds Donald Trump’s plan to conclude hostilities and hope is mounting for a reciprocal release. While an end to the bombing, the liberation of prisoners on the two factions and enabling assistance into the territory would bring temporary respite in an profoundly dismal situation, it would be a mistake to consider the proposal as a landmark achievement for the Palestinian cause. Trump’s vision is an additional American-Israeli concoction cooked up without any input from Palestinians that would preserve continuous Israeli authority over the territory’s destiny.

Global powers have consistently ignored to Palestinian voices or taken seriously the survival risk presented by Israel to Palestinian life, and this has not significantly shifted despite the growth in symbolic concern. To the contrary, For over 75 years, Palestinians have suffered through the world insisting that Israel’s safety considerations – as interpreted by Israel – are of greater significance than Palestinian rights and existence.

Two Forms of Violence

Consequently Palestinians face two constant manifestations of force: Israeli violence directly inflicted upon our persons, land and society, and global indifference, where only our destruction leads international actors to acknowledge our presence and acknowledge our basic rights – but just marginally.

This understanding comes from observing up close, for a quarter-century, how this pattern of international approach and functioning manifests. Despite two years of carnage in Gaza, and all that has been revealed about the actual goals, that approach is happening again as I write this, with international actors endorsing a plan that does very little to ensure inclusion of Palestinian voices over their future.

Empty statements has been the standard procedure for decades. The cost has been catastrophic.

A Magic Pill

During the final days of September 2000, I entered the Palestinian negotiating team as a legal advisor engaged with the talks with Israeli counterparts. This marked an important transition for me: I am the daughter of Palestinians born prior to the 1948 events, the systematic removal of historic Palestine. My family, differently from many of Palestinians, did not escape in 1948 and later gained legal status, making their home in Nazareth, in a state that rejected them. In the time of the Six-Day War, they decided to emigrate to abroad, where I was brought up, raised and educated. I had not lived in Palestine before becoming part of the delegation except for a few months at a time. At that point, I had chosen to being in the region for a extended time. I entered the process as a legal expert after a colleague, also a legal representative, informed me that one of the defects of the “Oslo peace process” was its ambiguity. I had assumed, naively, that the delegation could correct that problem.

This was the height of the negotiation period, as it was called, which started during President Bill Clinton in that year with the symbolic gesture between Israeli Prime Minister Rabin, the head of government, and the PLO chairman, the representative. By means of various understandings, the Palestinian Authority was created and the West Bank and Gaza Strip were additional partitioned, with more barriers placed across. Fundamental questions such as boundaries, settlements, the status of exiles and Jerusalem were deferred without timeline.

The diplomatic efforts became a illusory solution making the occupation disappear to the international community.

These issues were now bilateral issues for Israel and the Palestinians to address directly, with the international community supposedly observing as impartial monitors. But they were not neutral, and the key players were not equivalent. The United States was then and remains Israel’s biggest supplier of arms and political backing and European nations is Israel’s largest trading partner. Earlier in this peace talks, the Palestinian side requested guarantees, mainly from Washington, that the asymmetry in power would be addressed. Those promises were implicitly given but routinely disregarded, throughout decades of negotiations.

Starting that decade, international praise for diplomatic efforts was widespread. But what finally occurred is that continuous demands for a partition plan that avoided concrete implementation of Palestinian sovereignty and liberty took the place of calls for an end to Israeli control. The “peace process” became a magic pill obscuring the situation to the international community, hiding its growth, omnipresent and ever more violent form. The Palestinian cause was now diminished to a bargaining chip requiring concessions, with the historical displacement of the land concealed to be forgotten.

Settlement Expansion

Once this framework was embraced, the Israeli government used the cover of the “peace process” to create and develop Israeli settlements, accurately thinking that these established realities would strengthen their position at the bargaining table. And along with colonies arrived residents and checkpoints and an {expanding