Don’t Call it a Ceasefire

Putting a stop to ethnic cleansing is the only genuine cease fire that can be had

A moratorium.

A humanitarian pause.

A conflict pause. 

A Trojan Horse for the delayed bombing to come.

Call it any one of these neatly crafted phrases.  But don’t call it a ceasefire. 

On Wednesday, November 22^nd, word began to percolate that a “cease fire” was on the horizon in Gaza. These two words, among the orbiting calls of “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing,” rang from protests and social media posts, were strung across headlines and expressed from heads of state condemning the Israeli military’s disproportionate siege on Gaza.  

For 47 consecutive days, the Israeli military bombarded the Palestinian people of Gaza with zealous disregard for human life. The numbers of dead Palestinians cannot begin to tell the story of an endless ballad of bloodshed that we may never fully comprehend.  

Among the bloodiest days were the last one. Particularly during the hours before the cease fire. On Friday morning, as minutes ticked off before the pause on bombing, the Israeli military accelerated its offensive and bombed homes and refugee camps, destroyed the Abu Hussein school operated by the United Nations and massacred displaced refugees. 

The Palestinian death toll skyrocketed, in those liminal hours, as bombs dropped and bodied fell along with them for the final time. This was the storm before the “cease fire,” the deceptive phrase used by western state enablers and their corporate media proxies.  

A cease fire denotes permanence, finality, a conclusion to violence. Not deceptive contingency, transience, or as the hundreds more killed on Thursday and Friday morning before its imposition embody, a green light to murder as many Palestinians as possible before the clock ticks pause.    

A “cease fire,” mainstream media outlets dubbed it.

But the enhanced violence that unfolded in the precedent hours and minutes before the pause revealed that it is anything but. That it will bring, following its four-day tenure, no cessation, stoppage, or slowing of genocidal militarism.  

Rather, this opportunistic barrage unveils that Netanyahu and his enablers, most notably Joe Biden, are invested in the very opposite. This “conflict pause” is, in function, two things: first, an opportunity to free fifty Israeli hostages; and second, an opportunity to perform that Israel is “humane” and “civilized” to a global community that has closely observed its boundless barbarism, and in turn, witnessed the inhumanity that Palestinians in Gaza have faced for decades. But this time, in the darkest hue of collective punishment and apocalyptic rage.

This is no cease fire.

Calling it as such overlooks the genuine objective behind this conflict pause, the humanitarian pause that Israel openly violated before it, and the augmented genocidal violence that awaits on the other side of it.

What is the aim? Ethnic cleansing.

A process that is neither paused nor stopped during this four-hour stretch, when more than a million Palestinians pushed from northern Gaza remain interlocked between homelessness and being pushed even further south. When 900,000 displaced Palestinians from the central and southern corridors of Gaza move waywardly in between bombed buildings and shuttered hospitals, with the only pathway for medical care across the border in Sinai. 

A circumstance, even after a genuine cease fire is had, concludes with every single Palestinian in Gaza having to come face to face with the sobering reality that their homeland has been irreparably destroyed and is utterly uninhabitable. Whereby choosing to remain – among the remains of memories past and dead bodies present – risks their health, the well-being of their children, and their very lives as a mounting Israeli occupation bent on annexation rolls in.    

Israel wants to make that option, of remaining in Gaza, impossible for its native Palestinian population. That is the aim of this pause and every inch of this military campaign surrounding it.

This is no ceasefire.

There have been no cease fires for 47 days and 75 years. 

Only the voracious violence of a nation committed on eating up as much land as possible, and a global appetite for Palestinian death that seemingly knowns no bounds.

Putting a stop to that endless appetite for Palestinian death, which feeds the ethnic cleansing of Gaza, is the only genuine cease fire that can be had.

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Khaled A. Beydoun is a law professor and author. He publishes his insights daily on his socials at @khaledbeydoun.