Protecting Israel’s narrative also protects genocide

According to US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee, there is a ‘complication’ when Palestinians want their own state on their own land. Speaking during an interview with Bloomberg, Huckabee undoubtedly awarded Israel with further impunity for its ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people, when severing the link between Palestinians and their land, as US foreign policy has been doing for decades.

Asked if the US envisages a Palestinian state, Huckabee replied, “I don’t believe anyone can say ‘it’s impossible, it’ll never happen’ — but if someone wants to declare that this is the exact strip of geography that is going to be the future Palestinian state, that’s where the complication comes from.”

Pressed for clarification, Huckabee elaborated, “Israel has a little, narrow strip of real estate.” Comparing the settler-colonial entity to “Muslim-controlled countries”, he stated, “So when people say ‘Israel has to give something’, you kind of scratch your head and say, okay, let me see if I get this right.”

Therefore, according to Huckabee, countries that did not colonise Palestine should give land to Palestinians so they can have their state outside of colonised Palestine. “If the idea is that Israel need to carve out more and more land, maybe that’s why they are resistant to that.”

No mention of colonialism, of colonial genocide, of colonial expansion. For Israel’s narrative, such simple statements create the indigenous out of the colonisers. The narrative, however, doesn’t work. It is only sustained through violence, because Israeli settlers can never be indigenous to Palestine.

Israel’s resistance has nothing to do with ‘carving’ out of their own land, since the land does not belong to the settler-colonists. But it opposes relinquishing control over stolen land, because that would mean an admission of colonialism. Unfortunately, the international community has aided Israel too much in maintain the deceptive depiction. The two-state compromise is the international community’s major input in maintaining Israeli colonialism and, as a result, rendering Palestinians permanent refugees.

Meanwhile, the US is doing its best to discourage world leaders from attempting the conference co-hosted by France and Saudi Arabia, which will centre on the two-state paradigm, with Israel’s security always a prime concern. A cable on the matter partly reads, “The United States opposes any steps that would unilaterally recognise a conjectural Palestinian state, which adds significant legal and political obstacles to the eventual resolution of the conflict and could coerce Israel during a war, thereby supporting its enemies.”

Israel will always feel coerced because of its own coercion applied against Palestinians. The only part of the cable quoted here which reflects truth is the phrase “a conjectural Palestinian state”. Symbolic recognition does not lead to statehood. The US opposition to symbolism has nothing to do with possible further steps being taken to etch symbolism into reality. On the contrary, US rhetoric merely shapes the illusion that the conference can alter the current genocidal status quo. Which means that if no action is taken towards decolonisation, both the conference and the US warning will aid Israel in its ongoing colonisation of what remains of Palestinian land.

Back to Huckabee’s comments, there is no doubt that Israel’s “little, narrow strip of real estate” will be protected by the world’s powers, even by those debating on whether to recognise a Palestinian state. It is not the land that world leaders are protecting, however, but Israel’s colonial narrative about the land. And since the colonial narrative cannot be dissociated from land and people, world leaders continue protecting Israel’s genocide.

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