The violence in Gaza—credibly identified as genocide by scholars and legal experts alike—has now unfolded for over 600 days. This warfare against Palestinians living there is backed by the US politically and materially, by both major political parties. The Biden administration, and now the Trump administration, aligned themselves with ethnic cleansing plans by providing weapons to Israel, as well as limiting domestic protest and international backlash. For instance, when the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants against Israeli and Hamas leadership last year, Biden—then president—condemned them.
The Trump administration has proven more willing to pursue negotiations with Palestinian and Arab actors without Israeli input. But it has still largely backed Israel’s vision for managing the Gaza strip and its humanitarian needs in two crucial ways.
First, by attempting to gut aid organisations and establish distribution points run by a newly founded Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), an initiative backed by Israel and the US. This is not merely a logistic or organisational shift, but a way to instrumentalise aid to achieve Israeli war aims. The head of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in the Occupied Palestinian Territories described the distribution scheme as “engineered scarcity.” This new organisation of aid is also a way to sequester Palestinians into smaller and smaller areas of Gaza, changing realities on the ground that the Netanyahu government hopes will be difficult to reverse.
Outrage has quickly spread at the images of chaos and dehumanisation that unfolded at these new aid sites. UNRWA’s commissioner-general, Philippe Lazzarini, has described the distribution sites as a “death trap”, with “scores of injured & killed among starving civilians”. GHF quickly lost its executive director, who left citing fundamental humanitarian concerns. It has also been vocally opposed by international aid organisations and experts.
The second, more fundamental, way in which the US has continued to back Israel’s vision is by ignoring the need for Palestinian governance and input. This applies not only to managing the Gaza Strip in the short term, but also to pursuing a sustainable de-escalation of the conflict that does not rely on population transfer and repression.
US allies, chafing at the Trump administration’s aggressive policy and rhetoric on other fronts such as the Ukraine-Russia war, tariffs, and so on, have seemingly been more willing to diverge from American positions on Israel. Some countries have threatened action against Israeli leadership, such as sanctions, and many are pushing to recognise the state of Palestine diplomatically as well as scrambling to return to discussions of a two-state solution. Saudi Arabia and France, for example, have organised a “peace forum” this month to restart this process.
These gradual shifts in rhetoric and policy are preferable to outright support for ethnic cleansing, but they still miss crucial issues. Specifically, the global response to worsening conditions in Gaza has been predicated on returning to a two-state process without addressing the limitations of the Oslo peace accords, which were first signed in 1993. There has also been no discussion of the need to update this framework, given what has unfolded in Palestinian politics more generally. Any process that does not take this into account will at best fail. At worst, it will create yet another unsustainable status quo that will explode, yet again, in mass violence.
The peace process that unfolded following the signing of the accords ultimately led to Palestinians being more, not less, repressed. Their freedom of movement was increasingly constrained. They became more fragmented politically, as well as being disempowered in novel ways. The power differential between the Palestinians and the state of Israel is one reason for this, as is the role played by the US as a biased mediator. However, the dynamic that was least considered then, and continues to be disregarded by international actors today, is the issue of Palestinian buy-in.
All talk of returning to the two-state framework—if it even remains feasible—continues to exclude the pressing need for the Palestinian people’s input into and support of the process. Instead, international actors centre their policy proposals on the idea that tweaks in Palestinian leadership are enough, that the Palestinian people will accept having no say in what happens to them.
It is true that the Oslo accords allowed for the Palestine Liberation Organisation, the official representative organisation of the Palestinian people, to be a party to negotiations with Israel for the first time. They also allowed for some members of the PLO to return to the occupied territories in an official capacity. However, true consideration for Palestinian national claims and objectives was always missing. Actual Palestinian sovereignty over some of the land was never seriously considered.
Moreover, the international community, and the US in particular, helped to demobilise the PLO as a political body, instead making the Palestinian Authority (PA)—the governing body in the occupied territories—the centre of the discussion. This has meant that, since then, Palestinians outside the occupied territories—in Israel, in the diaspora, in East Jerusalem, and so on—are no longer represented.
The US also helped to limit the PA’s democratic accountability within the territories, and created the conditions for the split in governance between the West Bank and Gaza Strip—in addition to backing the octogenarian president of the PA, Mahmoud Abbas, in his consolidation of control. As a result, the PA and its leadership are highly unpopular and perceived by Palestinians as an imposition by external actors. Hamas has also dropped in popularity further since the beginning of the war on Gaza, and there were protests against Hamas leadership both before and after the October 7th attacks on southern Israel. Given this illegitimacy, the current Palestinian leadership, arguably for both main parties, is limited in its ability to generate support for any future peace initiative.
This is important because the Palestinian people should have a say in what happens to them. Not only because it is just, but also because it is a prerequisite for any sort of meaningful way out of war and destruction. Palestinians have to be convinced of such a process, and of the likelihood that it will achieve a better life for them. This is especially so following the collapse of the Oslo framework, which ended up leaving the Palestinians worse off than before.
Instead, international actors have thrown their weight behind a two-state solution with the persistently undemocratic PA. They are hoping, perhaps, that this unrepresentative, now unelected organisation will lend a veneer of legitimacy to whatever agreement is reached—even if that means ramming it down the throats of the Palestinian people. Palestinians have not been able to vote in elections for 15 years. When parliamentary elections were last held in 2006, Hamas, not the president’s Fatah movement, won a majority. Indeed, it is for this reason that international pressure pushed Abbas to convene the PLO’s central council in April. He unilaterally changed the bylaws that govern positions within the organisation and created the new role of “vice president” to set up his successor Hussein al-Sheikh. No matter that al-Sheikh polls at 2 per cent with Palestinians, and no matter that most opposition factions withdrew from the proceedings.
Initiatives that have attempted to challenge this state of affairs have not received adequate international attention. One example is the Palestinian National Conference, an initiative to revitalise the PLO. The group has had some support from host country Qatar, but has not played a significant role in the global discussions of a future peace process.
It is clear that the US cannot act as a mediator. The world does not trust Washington to play this role after all that has transpired. That might be unsurprising. What is surprising, and disturbing, is that every other international power has not learned any lessons from the past three decades of suffering. Instead, they continue to bet on business-as-usual—in which the Palestinian people are robbed of their political agency and right to self-determination, and expected to acquiesce.
