Wasting time emboldens Israel’s genocide of Palestinians

Israel attacking Rafah poses “a grave and imminent threat that the international community must urgently confront,” said the prime ministers of Spain and Ireland yesterday. In a joint letter to European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, Prime Ministers Pedro Sanchez and Leo Varadkar asked “the Commission [to] undertake an urgent review of whether Israel is complying with its obligations, including under the EU-Israel Association Agreement, which makes respect for human rights and democratic principles an essential element of the relationship.”

Too late, and not a chance of better late than never. Not to mention that, despite the genocide taking place in Gaza, which is a clear admission on Israel’s part of its intention to erase the Palestinians, both leaders have called for implementing the two-state paradigm as “the only way to make sure this cycle of violence does not repeat itself.”

Genocide, though, is annihilation, not a “cycle of violence”.

Backward diplomacy is all the EU has to offer Palestinians, keeping in line with how the colonised population has been coerced into waiting and waiting under the pretext of bureaucracy and abiding by international law. Israel, on the other hand, is not forced to wait, although it prolongs its colonial violence according to its own agenda.

If the two-state compromise allowed Israeli colonisation to arrive at the point of committing genocide, how is it going to safeguard Palestinians from annihilation? Sanchez and Varadkar have yet to explain this, as have the UN and every government, institution, entity and individual still clinging on to this macabre two-state farce. Genocide is both the result of Israeli colonisation and the defunct two-state paradigm, there is no separating the two. And world leaders are ensuring that each step taken to purportedly protect Palestinians only inscribes their own complicity in the Palestinian people’s elimination from Gaza.

READ: $20bn cost of Gaza post-war reconstruction, UN trade body says

Even at such an alarming time, EU leaders are calling for a review into the obvious, just to check if Israel is complying with human rights obligations in Gaza. Which means that the death toll of Palestinians killed by Israel, those tortured, those buried under the rubble, the mass starvation, the bombing of trucks carrying humanitarian aid, the forced displacement, the rendering of Gaza uninhabitable through widespread destruction of its civilian infrastructure, are collectively still not enough proof that Israel is violating every human rights norm imaginable. And that the definition of genocide remains tethered solely to the Zionist narrative that created the colonial monstrosity in Palestine. If world leaders are still debating genocide at this point, then their leadership should be called into question.

Calling for reviews into the obvious merely buys more time for Israel’s killing spree to continue. So many violations were committed by Israel long before this genocide that the time for reviewing is surely over. There is no time for debate, no time for masquerading as proponents of Palestinians’ rights. How much time for debate did Western leaders spare when it came to foreign intervention of countries ruled by undesirable leaders? Fabrications were enough to destroy countries and create failed states in the name of human rights and democracy. But when a population is being annihilated, and there is ample evidence of this happening before our eyes, the aggressor is spared and merely “reviewed” for possible misconduct. Because of course, when it comes to Israel, even proof of genocide becomes a hypothetical matter.

OPINION: The unrepentant West: Olaf Scholz and the right to commit genocide in Gaza

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.