Since 4:00 p.m. on 14 May 1948, the Palestinian cause has been one of a homeland seized by force, a land torn from its people by Zionism through weapons and terror.

The Israeli entity was established on the blood and remains of Palestinian villagers. At 4:11 p.m. on the same day, the United States, under President Harry Truman, officially recognised the Israeli occupation as a state, fully endorsing the Zionist project in the region while disregarding the massacres and forced displacement inflicted on Palestinians at that time.

For more than seven decades, there have been continuous efforts to shift the Palestinian cause from that of a stolen homeland to a humanitarian issue. At times, it was even reduced to secondary matters designed to provide the occupiers with justifications for their presence on Palestinian land. The attempts to “humanise” the Palestinian cause began with the establishment of institutions such as the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, the International Committee of the Red Cross, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, the Organisation of the Islamic Conference for Supporting the Palestinian People, and many others.

All of these institutions were created with the support and blessing of the United States, aiming to provide aid to Palestinians as refugees, without addressing the core issue, their right to return to their land and the erasure of the label “refugee” from the Palestinian identity.

Since then, thousands of organisations and agencies have emerged, all concerned with refugee affairs, embedding the refugee status deeply into the collective consciousness. Over time, many refugees began to focus on what these organisations offered in terms of aid and services, rather than on their right to return. This did not happen because they gave up their rights, but because of deliberate and calculated policies backed by enormous resources and funding.

Yet a portion of the Palestinian people has remained steadfast, holding firmly to their compass, demanding the right of return, dignity, and self-determination. Their methods have varied reviving Palestinian heritage, producing national literature in exile, pleading in international forums, and raising their voices against those who legitimised the Israeli occupation.

These demands have also included armed resistance. Over the decades, there have been numerous uprisings and confrontations. After each wave of resistance, the attempt to humanise the Palestinian cause resurfaces with force through institutions offering humanitarian services, aimed at distracting Palestinians from resistance, absorbing their anger, and distancing them from the ideas of liberation and return.

As years passed, reducing the Palestinian cause to a humanitarian issue became a global policy. Following the United States, the European Union, the Arab League, and most governments around the world adopted this approach. Supporting the Palestinians came to mean funding UNRWA and similar institutions.

This might be understandable from distant nations, but it represents a serious failure on the part of Arab countries specifically, which transformed their support for Palestine into mere financial contributions to UN agencies.

Since 1948, armed Palestinian movements have resisted the occupation. Initially weak and poorly resourced, they gradually became more organised, especially with the rise of Fatah in the 1960s. Armed struggle gained momentum, and calls for establishing a Palestinian state and securing the right of return grew louder.

In the 1970s, the armed struggle intensified through leftist parties like the Popular Front and the Democratic Front. These movements sought to curb the occupier’s ambitions, but their influence waned later due to the decline of nationalist and leftist ideologies and the growing ferocity of Israeli violence.

Islamic movements emerged in the 1980s, presenting a new challenge to the occupation. As resistance escalated, Israel attempted to contain it politically, leading to the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993 with the Palestine Liberation Organisation, which tasked the Palestinian Authority with ending armed resistance.

Meanwhile, Israel continued its settlement expansion, isolated Gaza, seized Jerusalem, and began constructing the apartheid wall in 2002. The ultimate goal was to reframe the Palestinian cause once more as a humanitarian issue, far from any real political or legal demands, chief among them the right of return.

Each time armed resistance flared up, the humanitarian framework reappeared with full force to recast the Palestinian image: not as a people demanding justice, but as victims in need of food. Nowhere is this dichotomy more evident than in Gaza, where armed resistance cries for the right of return, while international organisations rush to deliver aid, creating a scene deliberately designed to distract people from the essence of their cause.

Then came the defining moment: on 7 October 2023, Gaza ignited a spark that shook Israel and the world. The occupation sensed this time was different, not a mere operation, but a genuine existential threat, as its leaders admitted.

Since that day, nearly two years later, Israel has continued its aggression against Gaza, committing horrific massacres in an effort to bury the idea of return once again, extinguish the flame of resistance, and replace it with aid, medicine, and food.

What is happening today is the intensification of the humanitarian crisis to justify a return to the old path: “Do not talk about homeland, take flour and medicine instead.” This is what Israel is doing with precision: total destruction, displacement, starvation, deprivation of medical care, followed by opening border crossings to allow aid trucks under the banner of a “humanitarian solution".

The United States joins in, calling for aid delivery, the return of Israeli captives, the resumption of education, and the reopening of hospitals, reducing the entire cause to a cold humanitarian framework.

As if the sacrifices of the Palestinian people since 1948, the hundreds of thousands of martyrs, the millions wounded, the tragedies of displacement and destruction were all for a food voucher or temporary UNRWA job. These wars were never for a pill or a schoolbag. They were for a stolen homeland.

Over time and through compounding crises, the concept of homeland is being transformed in the minds of generations into a long-term humanitarian emergency. Then comes the proposed solution: peace, border openings and resumption of life, not return. And so, humanitarian organisations become the heroes of the scene, sending the message: “Eat and drink, but do not mention the right of return.”

Who said Palestinians must suffer for demanding their homeland? Or that they must choose between aid and their land?

The blood spilled in Gaza was not in exchange for sacks of flour, and the siege was not for the sake of a temporary job. The Palestinian people do not want quick fixes that recycle the catastrophe every few years. The only solution is for the refugees to return to their land, for legitimacy to be stripped from the occupation, and for this historical farce to end.

The international system was built to reduce human beings to numbers, their causes to crises, and their homelands to “emergencies”. But Palestine has never been an emergency, and its cause cannot be folded under piles of aid. In Gaza, every martyr declares: “I did not die for a bag of flour, but for a homeland.” And in every tent, a hoarse voice cries out: “We are not refugees forever.”

Those born under bombardment will not accept to be buried under the world’s humanitarian scraps. Palestine will remain the cause of a people who want to return, not merely to be fed.

The views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Pearls and Irritations.