LONDON — As American-backed mediators toil in Doha to transform the tenuous truce in Gaza into a more enduring cease-fire, critics from Kosovo to Palestine say Western peacemaking has once again become ensnared by a “both-sides” script that obscures the distinction between occupier and occupied. They claim that “in its pursuit of symmetry and suspension of responsibility in the face of crimes against large numbers of people,” Western peacemaking transforms issues about war crimes into “controversies over stories,” Dec. 7, 2025.
From Kosovo to Gaza: How Western peacemaking learned to ‘balance’ everything
In the late 1990s, the Kosovo Rambouillet talks served as one of the early templates. Western negotiators had drafted a lengthy settlement in advance, then pushed Belgrade and Kosovo Albanian leaders to sign a NATO-enforced deal that would honour Yugoslavia’s borders but hold out the prospect of “substantial autonomy” for Kosovars. As reconstructed in a 1999 report by Le Monde diplomatique on the negotiations, critics argued that the plan betrayed NATO red lines and outsourced accountability for Serbian state crimes to an unimposing tribunal outside the main table. Legal scholars would later contend that this sort of peace-building regarded war-crimes trials as an optional add-on to ceasefires, not a central component of lasting peace — Western peacemaking, in outline.
During the mid-1990s, the same reasoning had reached Israel–Palestine. Critics like Edward Said, as well as Norman Finkelstein’s 1996 study of the Oslo accords, held that they secured “official Palestinian consent” to further occupation while presenting Israeli and Palestinian “claims” as if they were on a par, although Israel continued to have overriding control of land, borders and security. Historian Avi Shlaim’s 2013 retrospective on the collapse of Oslo would later explain how successive Israeli governments had claimed to be pursuing peace while using these negotiations as diplomatic cover for increased settlements.
The Gaza war: A ‘both-sides’ script in real time
Those patterns are evident once more in Gaza. Qatar’s prime minister has cautioned that the current truce is “a pause only, a break,” not a genuine ceasefire, with Israeli forces still occupying chunks of the enclave and Palestinians still being killed under a U.S.-mediated proposal promising an eventual international force and phased withdrawal. However, official statements from Western capitals continue to couple demands for humanitarian access with injunctions for “calm on both sides,” even as the death toll in Gaza since Oct. 7, 2023, has exceeded 70,000 people, according to estimates quoted by the U.N. and leading news agencies.
In Gaza, critics say, Western peacemaking has once again been centred around negotiating the terms of a cease-fire and on designing a postwar administration while appearing to wash its hands of accountability, whose courts and commissions may never fully materialise. In a recent Al Jazeera column, “The illusion of Western peacemaking,” Arius warns that when a mediator presents sheer unbalanced duelling as a conflict between two equal forces, allegations of war crimes and even genocide can be downplayed to mere talking points.
Media narratives and the quest for “balance”
The same “both-sides” reflex appears in coverage of the conflict. According to one media-monitoring report, at the time of January’s ceasefire announcement, many Western headlines were focused on diplomatic choreography and political victories while relegating the level of Palestinian destruction to a footnote.
Other content analyses, ranging from one in 2024 by Al Jazeera Media Institute concerning Western coverage of Palestine and a recent quantitative survey of over 2,900 BBC articles on Gaza, have the ability to establish systematic tendencies towards foregrounding Israeli security narratives vis-à-vis diminishing Palestinian experiences as casualty figures. For policy analysts, this media “balance” aligns neatly with Western peacemaking: talk that closely mirrors official talking points about tragedy “on all sides” helps acclimate domestic audiences to diplomatic formulas that bracket questions of blame and defer hard conversations about justice.
Justice, double standards and what happens now
It may be that Western peacemaking must begin from pragmatic self-interests, defenders of the established approach say: without some semblance of autotelic interests being pursued by the mediator (‘That’s for your own good’), they say, leaders in Jerusalem or Ramallah or Pristina tighten their doors to Western mediators and truce settlements wither. Accountability mechanisms, diplomats say, must operate at a pace that differs from ceasefire deals.
But an increasing body of scholarship and activism argues that deferring justice sabotages peace itself. The peace-building of Bosnia and Kosovo suggested that ignoring accountability had strengthened those who had gained from ethnic cleansing, while the selective application of international law in other conflicts made inevitable charges of Western double standards. From Kosovo to Gaza, the critics say, the trouble is not peacemaking as such but a certain kind of Western peacemaking: one that deals with crises while leaving their causes alone, and that treats law as a tool shed that can be opened or closed according to whose allies are in the dock.
