Editorial | Palestinian sovereignty

Dominica’s prime minister, Roosevelt Skerrit, is obviously well-intentioned in floating the possibility of inviting Palestinians to relocate to his country.

Indeed, it is a worthy humanitarian gesture from the leader of a small Caribbean country who is likely to be not sickened by the dehumanisation and famine being inflicted on the residents of Gaza, and to a lesser extent, the occupied West Bank.

However, in his readiness to offer relief to suffering Palestinians, Mr Skerrit and his colleagues in the Caribbean Community (CARICOM), must be careful not to unwittingly play into the hands of Israel by aiding the displacement of the Palestinian people and being accessories to another Nakba. Or worse.

So, while Mr Skerrit and other CARICOM leaders may, in the scheme of things, open their countries to normal and orderly Palestinian emigration, their more immediate action must be pressure Israel’s allies in the West to pressure the Jewish state to end its effective blockade and its use of food and water as a weapon in its war against Hamas. The starvation of Gaza must end!

Even as they continue to insist on the freedom of the remaining Israel hostages held by Hamas, the extremist anti-Israeli group that controlled Gaza, CARICOM leaders, as they did at their July summit in Jamaica, must also maintain their demand for an unconditional ceasefire in the war.

FORMALLY RECOGNISE

Further, they should clearly tell Britain and Canada, with which CARICOM has good relations, that they should formally recognise the state of Palestine, without caveats that provide Benjamin Netanyahu and his far-right Israeli government room within which to wiggle and contort, without effectively moving on a two-state resolution to the Palestine-Israeli conflict. This must include the right of any Palestinian who leaves Gaza to return when it is safe to do so.

The Gaza war began 21 months ago as a legitimate Israeli response to the cross-border incursion by Hamas fighters and their allies, in which they indiscriminately killed about 1,200 mostly Israelis and took 200 hostages. The war has since morphed in one of the great moral outrages of the times, with its blatant disregard for humanitarian law and the rules of war.

Indeed, Israel can’t with any reasonableness claim any more that it is primarily pursuing a fight against Hamas. Rather, it is imposing collective punishment on the people of Gaza.

Israeli bombs have flattened almost all the buildings – including hospitals and schools in Gaza – a narrow, flat, 25-mile long, featureless, coastal strip about the size of the Jamaican parish of St James that had a pre-war population of 1.2 million. Gazans have nowhere to hide.

But it is not only bombardment Gazans have faced. That has been accompanied by Israeli actions to limit the flow of food, water, electricity and petrol into the territory. Israel, for example, banned the United Nations Palestinian relief agency, UNRWA, from operating in its territory, undermining the UN’s ability to deliver food to starving Palestinians.

Recently, Israel and the United States contracted a private outfit to deliver and distribute relief in, but the arrangement proved chaotic, worsened by the fact that Israeli troops, purportedly to keep order, have fired on people scrambling for food.

HUNDREDS HAVE DIED

Hundreds of Gazans have died as a result in these shootings, adding to over 60,000 killed so far in the war, and nearly 150,000 injured. It is believed hundreds, if not thousands, of bodies lie beneath the rubble of Gaza.

Hunger and malnutrition in Gaza, the United Nations has said, has crossed the threshold into the famine. Nearly 2,000 people, especially children and women, have already died

Even as the catastrophe emerged, Mr Netanyahu and his ministers, as well as US president Donald Trump, suggested Gazans should move to nearby countries, while the territory would be developed into the so-called Riviera of the Middle East. Nothing was said about the right of return.

What Palestinians heard in these proposals was another Nakba. The Catastrophe – 1948 expulsion/migration of Arabs from Palestine after the partition and Israel’s creation in 1948 and the war that followed.

As this newspaper has long insisted, Israel’s right to exist must be respected, but within the borders that existed prior to the 1967 Arab-Israeli, as has been mandated in several United Nations Security Council resolutions. This delineation presumes an independent Palestinian state. This means Israel giving back occupied territories – including dismantling its settlements in the occupied West Bank – rather than seeking to further expand its boundaries.

In the current environment, even well-intentioned suggestions/invitations for significant numbers of Gazans, and other Palestinians, to find refuge in the Caribbean, without certainty of the right of return, is potentially problematic. CARICOM, therefore, should develop a clear, coordinated policy on the issue.

One way the community can help to facilitate these rights is to urge powerful countries in the West that have influence over Israel to follow this region in recognising Palestine as a sovereign state – an entity and place to which citizens belong.

They must do so without escape hatches. The right to self-determination is inalienable, a principle the West applied during the Balkans wars of the 1990s.