Blessed Land, Cursed Resolutions: Prophetic Warnings Against Imperialist ‘Peace’ in Palestine

The United Nations has long been an instrument of Western hegemony: when it called for the partition of Palestinian land in 1947 through the UN General Assembly’s Resolution 181, when the United States used its disproportionate UN veto power multiple times throughout the past two years of genocide to protect the Zionist entity, and more recently, when the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) passed Resolution 2803, approving the establishment of a “Board of Peace,” analogous to the British High Commissioner during the era of the British Mandate. In other words, imperialist powers are yet again demanding that Palestinians trust the vague promise of eventual statehood from the same forces that have enabled and profited from their colonization and genocide.

Resolution 2803 is essentially the colonial architecture of the British Mandate repackaged into the modern-day context. The British Mandate was preceded by the establishment of the Sykes-Picot order in 1916, through which Britain and France split the dead remains of the Ottoman Empire between themselves like vultures. A year later, the 1917 Balfour Declaration was issued by the British government, declaring that Britain would ensure “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object.” The British Mandate then assumed official administrative control of Palestine in 1922 via the support of the League of Nations, positioning itself as a means of “preparing” the indigenous people of Palestine for self-rule while also facilitating the theft of Palestinian land for the eventual inception of the Zionist entity in 1948.

Resolution 2803 likewise posits the Board of Peace’s role as a transitional authority that would supposedly guide Gaza towards stability, eventual statehood, and integration with the Palestinian Authority. The Board, headed by Trump and composed of international actors with zero Palestinian input or leadership, would be authorized by the Resolution to deploy an International Stabilization Force (ISF), which would work alongside Israel and Egypt to oversee the complete demilitarization of Gaza and the dismantling of armed resistance forces–while, of course, no such stipulations would be imposed on the Zionist entity or its military arsenal.

The Resolution discusses the reconstruction of Gaza, the funds and resources for which are contingent on compliance with the terms of the Resolution, but does not in any way address or demand accountability from the Zionist entity, nor any nations or institutions that have enabled and normalized the genocide. This is even though the UN has also recently released a report that Israel’s genocide of Gaza has erased 69 years of human development, with Gaza suffering “the most damaging economic collapse ever recorded,” and that the funds required for reconstruction are estimated to be around $79 billion.

This comes even though the Israeli entity has repeatedly violated ceasefire agreements over the past two years, including the latest one, during which it has killed hundreds of Palestinians in Gaza and carried out airstrikes in Lebanon. Furthermore, while Israeli forces continue to block the entry of food and critical humanitarian aid into Gaza, they have allowed mobile phones to be delivered—several of which have reportedly exploded while being handled by Palestinians in Gaza, in a manner similar to the pager explosions targeting Lebanese civilians a year earlier.

The Resolution is backed by the complicity and participation of neighboring neocolonial Arab regimes, namely Egypt, the Palestinian Authority, Jordan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates, which had been previously pressuring Hamas to disarm and relinquish sovereignty over the Gaza Strip. As has become especially evident in the last two years, these Arab and Muslim regimes do not serve the popular will or interests of their people, nor are they in service to the Ummah; instead, they are propped up to preserve imperialist and Zionist interests in the region.

The Prophet ﷺ was reported by Al-Nu’man ibn Bashir to have said: “The parable of the believers in their affection, mercy, and compassion for each other is that of a body. When any limb aches, the whole body reacts with sleeplessness and fever.” (Sahih Al-Bukhari 6011, Sahih Muslim 2586) When we look at the state of the Muslim world today, it is clear that Palestine is not the only land that is colonized. It is through the colonization of the surrounding Muslim lands that the colonization of Palestine is enabled and maintained.

The Resolution is clearly an attempt to stifle the Palestinian resistance and to subject the Palestinian people of Gaza to a similar neocolonial grip which has seized the throats of its fellow Arab and Muslim nations–an attempt which the armed resistance factions of Gaza, including Hamas, have firmly rejected, maintaining that Palestinians in Gaza should determine the governance of Gaza, and that “assigning the international force with tasks and roles inside the Gaza Strip, including disarming the resistance, strips it of its neutrality, and turns it into a party to the conflict in favor of the occupation.”

These events are remarkably consistent with a hadith in which the Prophet ﷺ is narrated to have said: “There will always be a group from my ummah manifestly upon the truth, not being harmed by those who forsake them, until the command of Allah comes while they are in that state.” (Muslim, no. 1920.) According to other variations of the hadith, as well as scholarly interpretation, the Prophet ﷺ was explicitly referring to the inhabitants of the Holy Land.

In another hadith, the Prophet ﷺ said: “The beginning of this affair is prophethood and mercy, then it will be caliphate and mercy, then it will be kingship and mercy, then it will be rulership and mercy, and then it will turn into biting like the bite of a predatory animal. So, upon you is jihād, and indeed, the best of your jihād is ribāṭ, and the best of your ribāṭ is in Ashkelon.” (Al-Tabarānī, al-Muʿjam al-kabīr, no. 11138.) During premodern times, and due to their proximity to one another, Ashkelon was often considered to be synonymous with Gaza. 

Allah (sw) has also demarcated the entirety of the surroundings of masjid Al-Aqsa as a blessed land: “Glory be to the One Who took His servant ˹Muḥammad˺ by night from the Sacred Mosque to the Farthest Mosque whose surroundings We have blessed, so that We may show him some of Our signs. Indeed, He alone is the All-Hearing, All-Seeing.” (Quran 17:1) The blessed nature of Palestine and the Holy Land does not merely lie in its religious and spiritual significance, but in large part because it has been a significant site of material change in the historical dialectic.

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From the fight between David and Goliath, to Salah El-Deen’s fight against the Crusaders, to the struggle for Palestinian liberation today–the Holy Land has long been one of the major frontiers where truth and falsehood, justice and injustice, have come to a head–where entire empires have toppled to the ground. In Quran 2:251, Allah (sw) declares: “So they defeated them by Allah’s Will, and David killed Goliath. And Allah blessed David with kingship and wisdom and taught him what He willed. Had Allah not repelled a group of people by ˹the might of˺ another, corruption would have dominated the earth, but Allah is Gracious to all.”

This blessing is not limited to the geographic boundaries of Palestine; it extends worldwide, and this has been especially clear in the past two years. The Al-Aqsa Flood and the struggle for Palestinian liberation as a whole have not only made waves in the surrounding region–they have sparked a global awakening. People who had never heard of Palestine before are now educating themselves and joining the movement. Students attending Western institutions have stood against their universities and sacrificed their degrees and opportunities in solidarity with the resistance. It is this revolutionary power that Resolution 2803, above all else, seeks to neutralize by crushing any sources of ribat and resistance in the Holy Land.

At this moment in time, the movement is facing a lull in momentum, which is in part due to the unfortunate subjection of the cause to capitalist trend cycles, and in part because of the so-called ceasefire–the aim of which was to sell the illusion that things are returning to normal in Gaza. At the same time, Israel quietly continues to commit genocide. While eyes are turned away from Gaza and the masses are distracted, Western powers seek to exert their control over the people of Gaza, to strip away the lifeline that is their armed resistance, and to crush any influence that Gaza’s resistance still holds over the masses worldwide.

The Palestinian people do not need a Mandate, or a Resolution, or whatever may be the name for the same foreign colonial control that has been exerted over them for effectively the last century. There is no justice nor peace to be achieved by stripping Palestinians of their right to self-determination and governance. What Palestinians do need is an Ummah that mobilizes and develops the frameworks necessary to effect material change for them and for all oppressed peoples.

And for that matter, we who inhabit the neighboring neocolonial nations, we who inhabit the imperial core, are also subjugated by the same structures that aim to subjugate the Palestinians. We live under regimes that prop up, enable, and fund atrocities. We live under regimes that do not care to reflect their people’s conscience in the roles they play on the geopolitical stage. In defending the right of Palestinians to govern themselves, so too do we protect our own rights: “Allah would never change a people’s state ˹of favour˺ until they change their own state ˹of faith˺.” (Quran 13:11)

Salma Amrou is an Egyptian-American writer, award-winning poet, and student activist. She serves as a Research Writer for the Palestine Diaspora Movement.

(Vox Ummah)