Trumps plan for Gaza breaches international law and must be rejected

In a 2000 critique of the Oslo Accords process, Edward Said observed that at the core of externally imposed models of governance for the Palestinian people was the assumption ‘that after enough punishment and beating, Palestinians would give up, accept the compromises Arafat did in fact accept and call the whole Palestinian cause off, thereafter excusing Israel for everything it has done.’ Ever since the Balfour Declaration of 1917, the external imposition of ‘solutions’ for the situation in Palestine have failed because they avoided a reckoning with Israel’s persistent and manifestly illegal conduct, and refused to recognise the root causes of the situation, i.e., the need to dismantle, in line with international law, Israel’s annexationist settler colonial apartheid regime.

The United States’ latest ultimatum for Palestinians conditionalizes the suspension of Israel’s ongoing genocidal attacks and mass slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza, on a set of unilateral terms dictated by the Trump administration. These terms, cloaked in threats of escalating terror, are in clear and direct violation of international law and the recognised inalienable human rights of the Palestinian people to self-determination and return.

In 2020 the first Trump administration announced its “Deal of the Century”, presented as a ‘Vision for a comprehensive peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians.’ That proposal rejected the application of international law to Palestinians, and affirmed the US’s definitive normalization and support of Israel’s crimes against the Palestinian people, a policy endorsed through the Biden administration’s complicity in genocide. 

The latest US plan reinforces this inherently violent and illegal trajectory, denying Palestinian rights, rewarding Israel’s apartheid and genocide, and repeating the foreseeable, and foreseen, errors of the Oslo Process. 

Rather than imposing or endorsing external and unlawful models of governance in the absence of the consent of the Palestinian people, the international community must prioritise the enforcement of international law. The International Court of Justice’s 2024 Advisory Opinion clearly affirms that Israel’s presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT) is unlawful, that all States are under the legal obligation not to aid or assist in the maintenance of Israel’s illegal presence in the OPT, and must work together to bring the unlawful presence to an end. 

The Court emphasised the significance of Article 47 of the Fourth Geneva Convention which provides that the protected population ‘shall not be deprived’ of the benefits of the Convention ‘by any agreement concluded between the authorities of the occupied territories and the Occupying Power’, and stressed that such agreements ‘cannot be understood to detract from Israel’s obligations under the pertinent rules of international law’. Regardless as to whether representatives of the Palestinian people are coerced into accepting these US demands as a price for seeking to bring a pause to this genocide, international law does not permit the legal rights of Palestinians to be extinguished nor the legal obligations upon Third States to be abandoned.

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The Palestinian right to self-determination encompasses territorial integrity, the right of a people freely to determine its political status and to pursue its economic, social and cultural development, and protection against acts aimed at dispersing the population and undermining its integrity as a people. In direct contravention of this right, the US ultimatum seeks to entrench the denial of self-determination by way of the further fragmentation of the Palestinian people through the isolation of Gaza and its placing under a revised form of alien occupation. 

The ultimatum’s conditionalizing of humanitarian aid on the acceptance of US terms aims to reward Israel’s unconstrained illegality. The refusal of Israel, as the unlawful Occupying Power to agree to and facilitate relief operations in Gaza where the Palestinian population is being starved and destroyed, is an act of genocide. Accountability mechanisms for such egregious violations demand support, including the enforcement of the arrest warrants issued by the International Criminal Court against Prime Minister Netanyahu and former Minister of Defence Gallant, and the use of Third States universal jurisdiction mechanisms. 

Israel’s continued impunity, and its ongoing, persistent, and egregious disregard for international law, including its attacks on United Nations organs and personnel, along with its wilful breach of the Provisional Measures Orders of the ICJ in the South Africa v Israel proceedings under the Convention Against Genocide, is liable to cause the collapse of the international legal system. 

It is against the momentum with which this reality is being challenged, evident in state submissions to the ICJ, in the gradual but increased steps taken by third states to implement sanctions against Israel, and in the recognition of Israel’s genocide –– all underpinned by global protest and rejection of Israeli racism and criminality–– that the US seeks to blackmail Palestinians into capitulating on their inalienable human rights or face utter devastation.

We will continue collectively to strive to ensure international law is enforced and human rights for all respected. Until the Palestinian people have control over our own destiny, when Israel ceases its genocidal conduct, dismantles its discriminatory apartheid regime on both sides of the Green Line, withdraws from unlawfully occupied territory, and facilitates the right of return of Palestinian refugees, the value of externally imposed ‘solutions’ will remain nothing less than complicity in Israel’s criminality and must be rejected.

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