The US creates convenient loopholes for Israel

Seizing 70 percent of Gaza is not part of US President Donald Trump’s 20-point plan, Secretary of State Marco Rubio stated on Tuesday at the House Appropriations subcommittee meeting. “We have a plan. That plan does not envision such a thing. Netanyahu made that statement, but it is not part of the plan,” Rubio said.

Point 16 does state that Israel will not occupy or annex Gaza. However, it also includes a loophole for Israel to exploit. The Israeli military is supposed to hand over occupied territory to the International Stabilisation Force “according to an agreement they will make with the transitional authority until they are completely withdrawn from Gaza, save for a security perimeter presence that will remain until Gaza is properly secure from any resurgent terror threat.”

The Yellow Line, at first ostensibly marking areas in which Hamas was not operating, has now expanded into the unmarked Orange Line. Israel’s primary justification was its security narrative which it based on Hamas’s refusal to disarm – a premise which the US Board of Peace, mostly through Nickolay Mladenov, has repeatedly asserted. The lines have been blurred for a long time, as they usually are rhetorically, to allow colonialism to appropriate territory unhindered.

Rubio repeated Mladenov’s reiteration that reconstruction happens based on Hamas’s willingness to disarm, although he does not directly link disarmament as the justification for Israel’s military occupation of Gaza. Between what Mladenov asserts directly, and what rubio hints at, Israel has the perfect excuse for manipulating Point 16 of the US plan for Gaza to its advantage.

Not to mention the discrepancy between the weapons used by Hamas and Israel’s military technology, funded also by Western countries. However, for the Board of Peace, the US and the West, the discrepancy is justified because of the need to vilify the colonised in order for Israel’s security narrative to gain political relevance.

The question, therefore, should have never been about Hamas’s willingness or unwillingness to disarm. Israel should have been put continuously in the spotlight – not to validate its purported justifications, but to expose the colonial logic behind genocide and the ongoing forced displacement, which leaves Gaza’s territory vulnerable to appropriation. If the US was truly against annexation and military occupation, Point 16 would contain no loopholes to accommodate Israel’s colonial enterprise.

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