By Horace Palacio:
Yesterday, from Belmopan, the Government of Belize issued a statement about violence in a land more than twelve thousand kilometers away. It condemned escalating attacks by Israeli settlers against Palestinian civilians in the West Bank, called on Israel as the occupying power to protect the population, and reaffirmed that the occupation itself is unlawful and must end.
And somewhere in Belize, somebody read that and asked the honest question. Why does a small country with potholes to fix keep raising its voice about a war on the other side of the world?
Today I will answer that question properly. First the facts of this moment, then the century of history behind them, told fairly, and finally why this quarrel touches Belize far more directly than most Belizeans realize.
Start with what is happening right now, because the numbers are staggering. United Nations officials told the Security Council this month that the West Bank has reached a breaking point. Settler violence stands at the highest levels since UN monitoring began twenty years ago, more than 1,400 documented attacks this year across 260 communities, an average of six attacks every single day, dozens of Palestinians killed, roughly 3,800 driven from their homes in 2026 alone, among them more than a thousand children. UN investigators describe a repeating pattern, an outpost rises beside a Palestinian village, the harassment begins, the wells and grazing lands are cut off, the attacks come, and when the families finally flee, the land is taken. Israeli lives have been lost in this spiral too, and Belize’s statement mourned all civilian victims, as it should.
But none of this began this year. To understand it, you must walk back a century, and you must walk fairly, because this is the story of two peoples and one land, and each carries a wound the other rarely sees.
The Jewish people trace three thousand years of history, faith, and longing to that land, and by the late 1800s, fleeing massacres and hatred across Europe, a movement arose to rebuild a Jewish homeland there. In 1917, Britain, then conquering the region from the Ottomans, promised support for that homeland in a territory whose population was overwhelmingly Palestinian Arab, people rooted in those hills and orchards for countless generations. One land, promised in different ways to two peoples. Nearly everything since flows from that.
Then came the Holocaust, six million Jews murdered in Europe, and with it an unanswerable case for refuge. In 1947 the United Nations voted to partition the land into two states, one Jewish, one Arab. Jewish leaders accepted. Arab leaders rejected what they saw as the carving up of their homeland. War followed. In 1948 Israel declared independence and survived invasion by its neighbors, and in that same war some 700,000 Palestinians fled or were driven from their homes, a catastrophe they call the Nakba, creating a refugee people whose descendants number in the millions today. One event, two memories, a state born and a homeland lost, both true at once.
The hinge of everything came in 1967. In six days of war, Israel captured the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza. And here is the plain meaning of the word that fills every news report, occupation. It means the Palestinians of those territories have now lived for nearly sixty years under a military authority they did not elect and cannot vote out, while Israel began moving its own civilians into the captured land, the settlers, whose communities now hold hundreds of thousands of people. International law is not vague here. Moving your population into occupied territory violates the Geneva Conventions, and in July 2024 the International Court of Justice, the world’s highest court, ruled that the occupation and the settlements are unlawful and must end. Belize made formal submissions in that very case, and the court’s opinion is the foundation of yesterday’s statement.
There were moments of hope. In the 1990s, the Oslo Accords brought mutual recognition and a promised path to a Palestinian state beside Israel. That hope bled out through an assassin’s bullet that killed Israel’s peacemaking prime minister, through terror bombings that shattered Israeli buses and cafes, through settlement growth that ate the map faster than negotiators could draw it, and through failed summits and a second uprising. Gaza spiraled into its own tragedy, an Israeli withdrawal, a Hamas takeover, a blockade, and war after war.
Then October 7, 2023. Hamas fighters stormed southern Israel and killed about 1,200 people, most of them civilians, and dragged roughly 250 hostages into Gaza, the deadliest single day for Jews since the Holocaust. Israel’s response engulfed Gaza in a war in which Gaza’s health authorities report tens of thousands killed and whole cities pulverized, a war that brought genocide proceedings before the ICJ, a case in which Belize formally moved to intervene last year. A fragile ceasefire finally took hold in late 2025. But while the world watched Gaza, the West Bank burned hotter each year, and that is the fire yesterday’s statement addresses.
Now, Belize’s record, and note something remarkable about it. This is one of the very few foreign policy questions on which red and blue have stood in one line. It was the Barrow government that recognized the State of Palestine in 2011. It was the National Assembly, in 2022, that passed resolutions on the character of the occupation. It was the Briceño government that suspended diplomatic ties with Israel in November 2023 over the bombardment of Gaza, that argued before the world court, that welcomed the 2024 opinion, and that filed to intervene in the genocide case in 2025. Fifteen years, two parties, one consistent voice. Whatever else divides Belmopan, this has not.
Why? Here is the answer, and it sits closer to home than Jerusalem. It sits on our own western border.
Belize is a small nation living beside a larger neighbor that has claimed, in our lifetimes, a vast portion of our territory. We did not answer that claim with an army we do not have. We answered it with law, taking the dispute to the International Court of Justice, the same court, the same law, the same principles now being tested in Palestine. The deepest rule of the modern world order, written in blood after the Second World War, is that territory shall not be acquired by force. That rule is not an abstraction to Belize. That rule is Belize. It is the legal ground beneath every square mile of this country.
So understand what is truly at stake when settlements devour occupied land and the world shrugs. Every time force creates facts and law fails to undo them, the shield that protects every small nation rusts a little more. If occupation can be normalized there, annexation can be normalized anywhere, and the countries that should tremble first are not the great powers. They are the small ones whose only armor is the rulebook. When Belize stands at the United Nations and insists that international law must govern, it is not meddling in a distant quarrel. It is paying the premium on its own insurance policy.
And there is something older than law in it too. We are a people who know what it is to be colonized, to have our land promised over our heads, to win nationhood against the appetite of the powerful. A nation with that memory recognizes the story when it sees it, and loses something of its soul the day it looks away.
Yesterday’s statement called for the protection of all civilians, Israeli and Palestinian alike, and for peace grounded in law, justice, and mutual security, two peoples, two states, side by side. That is not radical. That is the world’s own stated solution, endorsed again by more than 150 nations, waiting only for the courage to enforce it.
Small countries cannot send armies, Belize. We send principles. And in a world where might keeps testing the fence, a small nation’s loudest weapon is its refusal to accept that might makes right.
Yesterday, Belmopan fired that weapon again.
It should never holster it.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author, Horace Palacio, and do not necessarily reflect the views or editorial stance of Breaking Belize News.
The post Why Belize keeps speaking on Palestine, the century behind yesterday’s statement appeared first on Belize News and Opinion on www.breakingbelizenews.com.
By Horace Palacio: Yesterday, from Belmopan, the Government of Belize issued a statement about violence in a land more than twelve thousand kilometers away. It condemned escalating attacks by Israeli settlers against Palestinian civilians in the West Bank, called on Israel as the occupying power to protect the population, and reaffirmed that the occupation itself
The post Why Belize keeps speaking on Palestine, the century behind yesterday’s statement appeared first on Belize News and Opinion on www.breakingbelizenews.com.