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Having failed – or vaguely attempted – to calm the situation in Palestine, the international community, especially Western governments, is hiding behind light condemnations of the escalating violence, Le Monde concluded in a recent editorial.
In the article, the French newspaper decried what it describes as a toothless international community with no clearly dominant global power and no definite consensus on how to address the question of Palestine, including Israel’s continued violations of UN resolutions.
Western countries “have accompanied the military escalation between the armed factions of Gaza and Israel with their worn-out and classic words,” writes Le Monde. The repeated – but powerless – calls for dialogue emphasize the “disconnect between diplomatic semantics and the terrifying reality on the ground, which has been observed for years, undermines the credibility” of the international community, said the editorial.
It cited the US’ continued support for Israel, in the form of a blank check, as one of the clearest indications of why Israel has few or no reasons to change course. As fears mounted in recent days of full-scale military confrontation between Israel and Hamas, the UN Security Council called for a meeting to deliberate on the situation and urged parties to show restraint.
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But Washington’s opposition to any strong-worded condemnation of Israel meant the meeting achieved nothing of substance. While another UNSC meeting has been scheduled for this Sunday, the broad expectation is that there will yet again be no consensus. For Le Monde, “the Israeli-Palestinian conflict reveals, like other crises, an obvious fact: there is no such thing as the ‘international community.’”
In lieu of a reliable international community, what we have is “a fragmented, competitive, tormented world, with no hegemonic power.” Even more worrying for fervent proponents of an effective liberal world order, “the Covid-19 epidemic has accelerated the disintegration of classic multilateral frameworks.”
In Europe, the reluctance to confront Israel on its discriminatory policies towards Palestinians stems from two attitudes, according to Le Monde. For some countries, namely France, there is the prevailing warning against “importing” the Israeli-Palestinian conflict or unwittingly condoning the resurgence of anti-Semitism.
In the second category of countries, namely in Eastern Europe and Germany, there is the existence of an assertive anti-Semitism that confuses anti-Zionism with racism against the Jewish community.
As such, argues Le Monde, “the European Union has given up on exerting any pressure on Israel, while the occupation continues unabated and the colonization progresses.”
Further complicating the picture is Hamas’ attacks on Israeli targets. The group’s firing of rockets at Israeli cities has become the most repeatedly used argument by pro-Israel commentators to shun any criticism of Israel’s disproportionate response or the expansion of the illegal settlements in Palestinian territories.
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Regarding the possibility of peaceful cohabitation, Le Monde contends that “the unprecedented scenes of lynching and confrontation between a minority of Jews and Arabs” in recent days has put to rest most people’s dreams of Arab-Jewish coexistence in Israel.
The result is that an increasingly far right-leaning Israeli political establishment can continue racializing and stigmatizing Palestinians and Arab Israelis while invoking the security card.
This means that those who only conceive of the conflict from a security lens – and this seems to be the majority position among global powers – are bound to raise eyebrows at any “unfair” or “emotional” condemnation of Israel by saying that it has a “legitimate right to protect itself.”
“The Palestinian question is exhausting, but it cannot be exhausted without a political solution,” writes Le Monde. But, it appeared to concede, increasingly emerging from global powers’ attitude to recent escalations is the sad conclusion that many countries simply want to “turn the page.”
This also means that, as securitization prevails over an honest exploration of a political solution, even the much-invoked “two-state solution catechism” may end up becoming a way of delaying – even averting – a genuine global reckoning on the Palestinian tragedy.
