Today, Sharm el-Sheikh will host the most high-profile gathering of global leaders in the Middle East of recent years. Donald Trump, Keir Starmer, Emmanuel Macron, Pedro Sánchez and others are meeting “to end the war in the Gaza Strip, enhance efforts to achieve peace and stability in the Middle East, and usher in a new era of regional security and stability”.
If the ceasefire holds, this language is an augur of the future. One where there is no reckoning, no addressing of root causes. Only a hurtling into the imperatives of cleanings-up and workings-out. All the while illegal occupation continues, and another chapter of Israel’s violations is furtively closed without accountability not only for Israel, but for its sponsors.
There is an Arabic expression, hameeha harameeha – meaning “its protector is its thief”, that comes to mind as those who have plied Israel with weaponry gather to figure out how to achieve peace in Gaza. Over the coming weeks and months, a Gaza even more devastated than what has been shown to the world so far will come into view. Already the colossal scale of what needs to be rebuilt is becoming clear. People are returning to their homes in Gaza City to find a wasteland flattened to the horizon by bombs and then bulldozers. In the images of the area, even the sunlight looks different and otherworldly. I couldn’t figure out why, until I realised it was because there were no structures to filter it. No shade, no shadows. A home returned to is just a plot on which to pitch another tent and wait for aid. But this time, with less risk of being bombed in your sleep.
People in Gaza have been released from the fear of death, but what of the life they now face? What of the thousands of orphans, and the wounded or maimed children with no surviving families? It is not just the infrastructure of large parts of Gaza that has been destroyed, it is also the social fabric. Family lineages across two, three, four generations have been wiped out. What of the thousands of parents who have buried their children? And of all those who have collected the body parts of their loved ones? How to even begin to think about addressing such mass trauma when there isn’t even a roof to gather under? I asked a man from Gaza about his brother, who had lost all his children and his wife in one strike. Where is he now? “Just constantly walking around, circling the rubble” of the site where they died. “Lost.”
The death toll will certainly rise, as bodies that could not previously be retrieved are pulled out of the rubble. At least 10% of Gaza’s population has been either killed or injured, and that is a conservative estimate.
It is important that these facts are not simply totted up and brushed aside as the costs of war. The assault must end, but the terms on which it is ended, and on which the path to peacemaking and reconstruction is based, are crucial. The crimes that have been committed cannot be redressed, or even prevented from recurring, if the conditions that enabled their perpetrators continue.
This is a difficult thing to insist on when you are dealing with a genocide. The scale of the death and violence, the erasure of the conditions for life, make the cessation of that erasure the most urgent, the only focus. But with that comes exculpation, and worse. Already Donald Trump is taking a victory lap for his peacemaking, after enabling what has taken place for months. Jared Kushner praised Israel’s conduct: “Instead of replicating the barbarism of the enemy, you chose to be exceptional.” Starmer lauded Trump for securing the deal, and focused on the importance of letting in humanitarian aid. He will, No 10 has said, pay “particular tribute” to the US president in Sharm el-Sheikh. And so now we have a crime without criminals, a genocide without génocidaires, a wretched population who, we are to believe, have been brought low by Hamas, and must be fed and watered while the world works out what to do with them. An entire history across Palestine of Israeli impunity and dominion, one of repetitive ethnic cleansing, military rule, expansion of settlements – and now explicit rejection of Palestinian self-determination – is erased, again.
This time, that exoneration, that framing of what has happened as tragic and finally over, is even more urgent, because the responsibility of countries that have supported Israel and silenced its critics is clearer than ever. Of course you would rush to Sharm el-Sheikh if you were representing a government that provided arms, restricted protest and refused either to endorse declarations of genocide, or to observe the rulings of the ICC when it issued an arrest warrant for Benjamin Netanyahu. Peace in Gaza represents an opportunity to forget; to erase from the collective consciousness an era in which some western countries took a bludgeon to international norms and institutions, and indeed their own domestic politics, in order to force through the destruction of Gaza.
But many all over the world who have witnessed the massacre, and all that went into sustaining it for two whole years, will not so easily forget. The secure future of those in Gaza, and Palestine in general, is not something that can be delivered by the thieves-turned-protectors. Without the empowerment of the Palestinian people and their self-determination, there can be no faith or trust in Israel or its allies to deliver that constantly invoked “lasting peace”. The killings have mercifully stopped for now in Gaza, but there must now be a refusal to normalise what will follow – a return to a status quo in which we all keep on pretending that Palestinian life is viable under the authority of Israel.
Palestinians will continue to be killed, their homes stolen, their prisoners tortured and detained without due process. What has been learned in the past two years cannot be unlearned, despite all the energy that will be expended to make that happen. The Palestinian cause cannot be returned to the fringes of “complex”, marginal politics, a framing that has enabled two years of devastation. That devastation’s perpetrators disqualified themselves long ago from any mandate over the people they have aided in killing and shattering. What will now be revealed in the body count and wreckage in Gaza should make that impossible to deny.
As the world leaders descend, a line from TS Eliot’s Gerontion hangs over Sharm el-Sheikh: “After such knowledge, what forgiveness?”
Nesrine Malik is a Guardian columnist
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