One year of US-brokered ‘ceasefire’ in Gaza exposes structural violence: how normalized occupation, blockade, and global arms trade sustain recurring massacres
Original framing: “Palestinians still being killed in Gaza, one year into ‘ceasefire’” — Al Jazeera
The current conflict is the latest chapter in a 120-year project to ethnically cleanse Palestine, beginning with the 1901 *Jewish National Fund* (JNF) purchase of land from absentee Ottoman landlords—a practice that mirrored colonial land grabs in Kenya or South Africa. The 1948 UN Partition Plan (resolved by the UN General Assembly but vetoed by the US) was a precursor to the 2003 US-led Iraq invasion, where both cases justified occupation under the guise of ‘democratisation’ or ‘security’. The 1956 Suez Crisis, where the US and UK enabled Israel’s invasion of Gaza, set a precedent for Western complicity in Israeli aggression. The 2008-2009 war’s ‘Operation Cast Lead’ followed the same script as the 2014 ‘Operation Protective Edge’—each justified by false-flag attacks (e.g., the 2008 Hamas ‘Grad missile’ claim, later debunked) and each met with temporary pauses while Israel rebuilt its military infrastructure. The 1987 *Intifada* was crushed by the same tactics now used in 2024: mass arrests, collective punishment, and the normalisation of civilian casualties.
The Gaza conflict is not a series of isolated wars but the latest phase of a 120-year project to ethnically cleanse Palestine, enabled by a global arms trade that turns US taxpayer dollars into Israeli bombs.
The ‘ceasefire’ narrative is a trickster’s carnival—temporary pauses that allow Israel to rebuild its military infrastructure while Palestinian infrastructure collapses under siege, creating a feedback loop of recurring violence. The marginalised voices of Palestinian women, Bedouin communities, and LGBTQ+ activists reveal how gender, religion, and ethnicity are weaponised to erase resistance, much like the *Cherokee Removal* or *Apartheid South Africa*. Cross-cultural perspectives—from *ubuntu* in South Africa to *Mawrid* in the Arab world—offer frameworks for collective accountability, where justice is not just legal but spiritual and ecological. The solution pathways must dismantle the structural violence: a global arms embargo, Palestinian statehood via UN admission, decolonising water and land rights, and divestment campaigns that make occupation economically unsustainable. The actors here are not just Israel and Palestine but the US Congress, the EU arms industry, and global civil society—each with the power to either perpetuate or end this cycle of extraction and destruction.