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In 1956, at a French villa in Sèvres, Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, outlined what he called a “fantastic” plan. The Muslim population of southern Lebanon was, in his telling, a problem with a solution. Israel would take the south; what remained of Lebanon would be remade. “It would be possible to establish a Christian state there,” he said, “and the southern border of Lebanon should be the Litani River.”

Britain and France had convened Sèvres over Gamal Abdel Nasser’s nationalization of the Suez Canal—the occasion for a war against Egypt. The canal, closed to Israeli shipping, provided one pretext for Israel to enter that war. The fedayeen in Gaza—Palestinian fighters crossing back into the lands from which they had been driven in 1948, raiding the settlements built on their confiscated land—provided another. But beyond its stated aims, the Suez war gave Ben-Gurion his opening to advance Israel’s expansionist agenda.

Beneath both pretexts ran Israel’s strategic objective: to weaken Egypt before its military power consolidated; to expand Israeli territorial control through Gaza and the Sinai—the land bridge to the canal—under cover of a jointly orchestrated operation; and to complete in Gaza what 1948 had left unfinished. The Protocol of Sèvres formalized the agreement: a colonial document in which three powers arranged a region that belonged to none of them, the military operation planned in advance, its public justifications assembled to follow. Among those made refugees by the invasion it authorized was my father, expelled from Gaza in a war Western histories describe as an Israeli act of defense.

Seventy years later, in 2026, Ben-Gurion’s words resurfaced. As Israeli forces destroyed every bridge over the Litani River and displaced more than a million Lebanese, Defense Minister Israel Katz declared that “all houses in villages near the border in Lebanon will be destroyed—according to the model of Rafah and Beit Hanoun in Gaza.” The return of more than 600,000 residents south of the Litani, he added, “will be completely prohibited.” Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich went further still: “The new Israeli border must be the Litani.” These were Ben-Gurion’s words, restated with the confidence of an imperial order that has never needed to conceal itself. It requires only that those it most threatens mistake each new pretext—the canal, the fedayeen, Hizb-Allah—for the cause of what is being done to them.

In Lebanon, the Maronite right, a political formation more than a century in the making, gave that confusion its most complete articulation. It took shape under the French Mandate with a self-conception as a Western, Christian presence in an Arab-Muslim region—France its enabling condition, the Crusades its usable past. Pierre Gemayel founded the Phalange, its most explicit political expression, after attending the 1936 Berlin Olympics, modeling it openly on the European fascist movements he had observed there. Michel Chiha gave it its intellectual coherence—the principal ideologist of an independent Lebanon, who argued that Lebanon was Phoenician and Mediterranean, a civilization apart from the Arab world that surrounded it. It produced a political culture oriented toward Europe and America as something deeper than patronage—an identity, a Christian, Phoenician, Mediterranean Lebanon emphatically not Arab, not Muslim, and not bound by the fate of the region that surrounded it. That dream—”Western Lebanon,” neutral, prosperous, facing Paris and Washington with its back to the Arab world—has never entirely dissolved.

It persists today in the structural ties of the Lebanese bourgeoisie—Maronite at its core, but extending into the Sunni merchant class—to the West: the American University, the French schools, the emigration networks in Paris, São Paulo, Detroit, Los Angeles. Their economic life runs through Western financial systems, and that same order defines their cultural self-conception. Hizb-Allah represents, for this class, a civilizational affront to what they have always insisted Lebanon must be.

From this political culture came, with a terrible internal logic, the military alliance with Israel. By the 1970s, the Palestine Liberation Organization, under Yasser Arafat’s leadership, had built a state within a state with its own military infrastructure, political institutions, and popular mobilization among Lebanon’s Shia and poor Sunni populations. Its presence tilted the civil war’s balance toward the Lebanese left and its allies and threatened Maronite political dominance at every level: military, structural, demographic. The Maronite right experienced this as a civilizational threat—to their dominance, their dream, their Lebanon—and invited Israel in. Israel under Menachem Begin and Ariel Sharon wanted the PLO’s military capacity destroyed and a friendly Maronite government installed. Pierre Gemayel’s son Bashir was their candidate—the man who would sign the peace treaty that would have detached Lebanon from the Arab front against Israel. Each needed the other to achieve what neither could alone.

The project culminated in 1982. Israel invaded Lebanon, and Gemayel was elected president-elect under its military occupation. When he refused to sign the peace treaty, he was assassinated days before he took office. Israel expelled the PLO from Lebanon, driving them into exile in Tunis. Eighteen years of Israeli occupation followed. The Maronite right turned the consequences of the invasion it had invited into a narrative in which it cast itself as the victim of foreign presences that had dragged it into conflicts not of its making.

After Rafik Hariri’s assassination in 2005, that narrative hardened into ideology. “Lebanon First”—the slogan of the March 14 coalition and its successors—captured a real political claim: that the decisions about when Lebanon goes to war, and at what cost, had long been made by Palestinian, Syrian, and Iranian armed presences on its soil rather than by the Lebanese state. A more immediate condition compounded it: Hizb-Allah had built a parallel state, with its own economy, its own institutions, its own courts, and a consistent willingness to obstruct governments that did not serve its interests. In this ideology, Hizb-Allah—the resistance movement the occupation generated—is the narrative’s primary exhibit, the sole impediment to Lebanese sovereignty.

Within that sovereignty claim, Hizb-Allah’s weapons become the source of Lebanese suffering while the sustained Israeli policy of keeping Lebanon weak, fragmented, and unable to threaten the occupation of Palestine goes unnamed. Every Israeli war on Lebanon becomes a consequence of Hizb-Allah’s “adventurism.” Each devastation—the assassinations, the 2006 war, the wars of 2024 and 2026—becomes, in this account, the price Lebanon pays for Iranian influence rather than Israeli expansionist designs.

The reading’s power is its sincerity. Those who hold it have internalized the colonial definition of the threat until they experience it as common sense, as realism, as love of country—and act on it accordingly. Since 2024, Israel’s war on Lebanon has made the implication explicit: once Hizb-Allah is named as the source of Lebanon’s destruction, Israel’s campaign to destroy it becomes, in structural terms, a campaign on Lebanon’s behalf. It is an alignment the Maronite right never states outright but has sustained consistently—nowhere more so than in the demand for Hizb-Allah’s disarmament during the Israeli military campaign prosecuting the same objective.

Their fantasy is that, after Hizb-Allah is destroyed, Lebanon emerges liberated, sovereign, finally free to become the Western-oriented state it was constituted to be. The fantasy holds only if the historical record goes unexamined. The 1982 invasion, carried out under American guarantees, produced eighteen years of occupation—and the resistance movement that ended it. That movement, Hizb-Allah, is the very one whose elimination is now being sought. Oded Yinon, a senior Israeli Foreign Ministry official, proposed—also in 1982—the fragmentation of Lebanon along sectarian lines as an explicit strategic objective. Ben-Gurion had outlined the same objective at Sèvres in 1956. The American-Israeli design has never been obscure. And yet, after two and a half years of watching Israel’s genocide in Gaza unfold, of watching the wars it has justified, the annexation of the West Bank and the laws passed in the Israeli Knesset to execute Palestinians, some of us have drawn the opposite conclusion about who the enemy is.

A Lebanese Christian friend I have known since childhood told me, a few weeks into this latest Israeli assault, that what concerned him was neither the bombing nor the invasion. Shia families from the south were moving north, into Christian towns, into neighborhoods his family had lived in for generations. “If we let them in,” he said, “they will stay, and in the end we will be the ones forced to leave.” When I asked whether they were not also Lebanese, he was brief: “Their loyalty is to Iran.” In his account, Lebanon needed a deal: direct talks, an agreement that would restore Lebanese sovereignty. “You will never see Israelis walking in Beirut,” he said, “but to stop the war we have to make a deal with them.”

The francophone schools and Mandate institutions that gave him his certainties—that a deal with Israel was realism, that Washington’s endorsement was necessary—did not reach everyone. A career soldier I know, a Lebanese Christian from a poor family in the rural north, served with the Lebanese Army in the south in the years after the July War, during standoffs along the Blue Line as Israeli forces regularly crossed into Lebanese territory. During one such confrontation he drew his weapon on an Israeli unit. His commanding officer was brought to the location—Joseph Aoun, not yet commander of the Lebanese Armed Forces, now President of Lebanon. When debriefed on why he had drawn his weapon, he answered with conviction: “because they crossed the Blue Line, occupied Palestine, and crucified Jesus.”

The Lebanese who fears Hizb-Allah more than the Israeli colonial project has internalized the colonial definition of the threat—and mistakes the colonizer's enemy for his own. The state now reflects that same formation. The soldier's conviction found no place in it.

As Israel wages a ground invasion of southern Lebanon, Benjamin Netanyahu has ordered the army to expand the buffer zone, citing his control over half of Gaza, the Yarmouk Basin, and Mount Hermon in Syria as the model. The Lebanese government has once again banned Hizb-Allah’s military activities and demanded that it surrender its weapons. The demand calls for dismantling the force whose resistance produced the 2000 withdrawal. Prime Minister Nawaf Salam has condemned its strikes as “irresponsible acts outside the authority of the Lebanese state.” President Joseph Aoun has sought direct negotiations with Israel.

The Lebanese government will enter these talks with no leverage. No leverage means only concessions—and the first concession, disarming Hizb-Allah, is the condition for civil war. Netanyahu has announced his willingness to enter them—talks whose stated agenda is the disarmament of Hizb-Allah and a peace agreement, to be conducted while Israel continues its ground invasion and military campaign, on terms it has already shown it alone will set.

The ceasefire with Iran, announced on April 8, was declared to cover “an immediate ceasefire everywhere, including Lebanon.” Netanyahu’s office announced that Lebanon was excluded; within hours, Israel launched a bombardment of Lebanese territory, killing more than 250 people. Donald Trump confirmed the exclusion. Lebanon was being asked to disarm the only force that has ever compelled Israel to withdraw from its territory—while Israel bombed it, annexed its southern land, and decided when and whether its civilians could return home. The Lebanese government, having made the colonizer’s enemies its own, sought negotiations with Washington—and in doing so treated the administrator of its subjugation as the guarantor of its sovereignty.

What Israel hopes to install in Lebanon, the Iranian monarchist diaspora—exiled since 1979, organized around restoration—had already been recruited to provide for Iran. When the American-Israeli bombing of Iran began in late February, those Iranians gathered in cities across Europe and North America, waving the Lion and Sun flag alongside the flags of the countries they now lived in—and Israel’s. They held portraits of Reza Pahlavi and chanted restoration slogans: “Long live the king, Pahlavi will return.” Pahlavi described the bombing as a “humanitarian intervention” and declared his transitional government ready to assume power.

That crowd had a history—and a class character. The Iranian monarchist diaspora is the formation that survived the revolution with the most to lose: the educated professional middle class, the technocratic and commercial elites, the secular nationalists whose material and cultural life the Pahlavi state had organized. When the revolution came in 1979, they left—and they carried a self-conception rooted in an Iran emphatically pre-Islamic: they named their children Cyrus and traced the wound in Iranian civilization to the Arab conquest of Persia in the 7th century. The National Endowment for Democracy funded exile political organizations including Reza Pahlavi’s National Council of Iran; London-based outlets like Iran International broadcast Persian-language content into the country. Israeli strategic interest cultivated the same diaspora as a constituency for regime change. The diaspora had internalized the colonial definition of the Iranian problem until the military campaign became, for it, the instrument of Iranian liberation. The Islamic Republic was the obstacle to civilization—the Arab wound’s latest form. Trump and Netanyahu would remove it.

During the rallies, word spread that an American strike on the Shajareh Tayyebeh school in Minab had killed 168 people, most of them children. The chanting continued. An Iranian friend watching the same rallies called our mutual friends who supported the war—Zionists. She said it without hesitation. The people those slogans claimed to speak for had come of age inside Iran under a regime that imprisoned filmmakers like Jafar Panahi, criminalized opposition, and foreclosed every channel through which political life might organize itself. That repression was real, and it belonged to them—not to the diaspora that had built its political identity around the Pahlavi order. Sanctions had deepened those conditions for decades: a generation grew up with degrees and no economy to enter, the rial collapsing around them. None of that suffering belonged to what was happening in the diaspora. It belonged to a different story—one the rallies had no use for.

That story began in 1951, when Mohammad Mossadegh nationalized Iranian oil. Two years later, British intelligence and the CIA overthrew him and restored the Shah—the same punishment Nasser would discover when he nationalized the Suez Canal, with Britain, France, and Israel as its instruments. The security apparatus that followed—SAVAK, which the CIA and Mossad built—dismantled every independent political institution, leaving the mosque as the institution the state could least effectively suppress. The United States and Israel, who had built the machinery that produced the revolution, were conducting a “humanitarian intervention” in 2026 to reverse it. The diaspora that welcomed the strikes had organized its political identity around the order the revolution ended—and the intervention sought to restore.

Six weeks after the bombing began, a ceasefire left the Islamic Republic intact. Trump called the mission accomplished: regime change achieved. But the Islamic Republic’s core structures and personnel remained in place. The transitional government that had announced its readiness to assume power was still in exile. The diaspora that had organized four decades of exile around the moment of restoration was left with a declared victory—and a restoration that never came.

The collaborator authority the diaspora failed to restore already exists in Palestine—not as a project awaiting installation, but as a finished form, produced through a peace process rather than a coup, administering the dispossession it was constituted to manage. It is called the Palestinian Authority.

In December 1987, Palestinians rose in the First Intifada—through mass civil action, popular committees, general strikes—and forced a political reckoning that brought Palestinian representatives into direct negotiations with Israel for the first time, at Madrid in 1991. For Palestinians in exile, the Intifada had done what decades of diplomacy had not—return, for the first time, felt close. We were at lunch, late August 1993, when my father left the table to take a call from his uncle, a prominent businessman who had been a principal financier of PLO social and civil institutions. Arafat had just called his uncle, informing him of secret negotiations in Oslo. The response was immediate: sign nothing without lawyers reviewing the terms. Arafat’s reply was brief: “I already signed.” My father returned to the table and sat quietly repeating “Arafat signed” to no one in particular, as though saying it again might make it mean something different. Then he began to curse Arafat. He had signed the Oslo Accords in Tunis—an agreement that installed him at the head of an authority administering continued occupation—and the formal signatures followed two weeks later in September, on the White House lawn.

What the world celebrated as peace, others understood immediately as capitulation. The uprising forced the opening; the negotiations took what the uprising had won. The Oslo Accords converted that achievement into an instrument, deferring the central questions indefinitely—land, sovereignty, the right of return. They transformed the PLO into the Palestinian Authority: a leadership that, for the first time in the history of national liberation, consented in writing to continued occupation; that turned the struggle for sovereignty into the administration of dispossession; and that designated the resistance movement of its own people a terrorist organization, setting aside the UN resolutions affirming the Palestinian right of return. Israel conceded nothing. Oslo buried the Intifada—and with it half a century of struggle and sacrifice—beneath a peace process that laundered occupation as self-rule and subjugation as compromise. It produced a political class that experienced that compromise as a career rather than a defeat.

Mahmoud Abbas embodied that class. He was one of the Accords’ principal architects. He had been present at their making, and had chosen to make them his political home, to inhabit their terms as the only shape political life could take. The PA’s institutional survival depended on the international funding that made subcontracting the occupation its first obligation and foreclosed every other political option. Pressed during Israel’s 2014 assault on Gaza to account for his silence, he said: “What are we supposed to do? Recognize Hamas as a resistance movement?”

In recent years, when Western governments extended diplomatic recognition to a Palestinian state, each announcement was greeted as though recognition itself were liberation—the same exchange Oslo had made, repeated and celebrated again, sovereignty declared in the absence of the land or the rights that would make it real. Meanwhile, Israel is now consolidating permanent control over Area C—comprising the majority of the West Bank, containing its aquifers, its arable land, its contiguous territory, the material conditions of any viable Palestinian state. The PA designates the resistance to that annexation, in its own official language, as the security problem it is charged with managing on Israel’s behalf—and its security coordination with Israel remains operational. In the PA, the design found its finished form: a collaborator government that polices the dispossession its people have never stopped resisting—and calls it governance.

Ben-Gurion did not need to impose this design from outside. He needed only to create the conditions under which each formation would cultivate the design from within—the Maronite right through sectarian entrapment, the diaspora through monarchist restoration, the PA through administered dispossession. The words he spoke at Sèvres in 1956 have not required revision. They required only time, and the work of formations that had learned to render the design invisible to themselves while advancing it for others. A project this dependent on our confusion has always known something about us that we have not yet finished knowing about ourselves.

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The Arcade War Machine — by Norman Harman (@NorrieHarman)

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Israel is a lie. Not just because it was founded on a lie, but because lying was required to make its existence appear natural, moral, and inevitable. They built a world out of the lie, and then taught the world to believe it. They said they were coming to a land without a people. They said they were coming to a barren desert, a wasteland of rocks, thorns, and swamps—and that they made it bloom. But Palestine was neither empty nor barren—for thousands of years there had been farmers who knew and loved the land through olives, onions, strawberries, and oranges. It was a country with newspapers and magazines, cinemas and theaters, a developed civic and agricultural life. None of this could appear in Zionist propaganda, because the existence of a people would have exposed the fraud on which the entire story depended. So the people had to be written out of the story before the land could be taken. That is why Israel is a lie.

The tragedy is that even we—Arabs—have begun to believe this lie. The greater tragedy is that the world has accepted the original lie and continues to believe the lies Israel tells about itself—its innocence, its survival, and its restraint.

What the world’s acceptance of these lies made possible was a war against Iran—built on pretexts nobody believed, with objectives shifting by the day, producing ruin nobody will account for. Netanyahu, at least, has been candid. This, he said from the first day, is what he has hoped to achieve for forty years: forty years of warnings about an Iranian bomb that never materialized, forty years of failed attempts to drag Washington into his war. It took an American president of singular arrogance, indifferent to the world he was driving into chaos, to finally give him what he wanted.

Trump exploited the Iranian people—their wounds, their aspirations, their rights—as the war’s justification. These are not invented grievances, but neither Trump nor Netanyahu will ever be their champion. Within days Trump had dropped the demand for “regime change” and replaced it with the demand to choose Iran’s next “great and acceptable” leader, from the same government, himself. The Iranian people had gone from justification to afterthought—they had served their purpose, which was the license their suffering provided.

This war presents itself as a crusade for freedom against theocracy, between a people and their oppressors. What it enacts is the oldest binary: colonizer and colonized. And the colonial project advancing under that guise is Greater Israel—a biblical mandate, a regional plan, and a map that has been waiting for this moment.

Greater Israel is a territorial claim. It imagines a region stretching from the Nile to the Euphrates: running northeast through the Sinai, north up the Mediterranean coast through Palestine and Lebanon into Syria, and east to the Euphrates in southeastern Turkey, where the river rises. From there, it traces the river south through Syria and Iraq, with its southern arc taking in Jordan and the northern reaches of the Arabian Peninsula. This is the territory Netanyahu has called a “historic and spiritual mission” to claim.

When Tucker Carlson asked Mike Huckabee, the United States Ambassador to Israel, whether Israel was entitled to the sovereign territories of Arab states across the region, Huckabee did not hesitate: “It would be fine if they took it all.” This Zionist vision claims a vast territory; the order behind it reaches further still. Every state within its shadow—Iran, the Gulf states, Turkey, Egypt, and the states of North Africa and the Horn, from Morocco to Somalia—faces two futures, and no others. The first is subservience: a regime autocratic and loyal enough to Israeli and U.S. power to contain whatever resistance its population might generate. The second is fragmentation: the breaking of a state into sectarian and ethnic cantons warring with each other, too consumed by internal conflict to organize any external resistance.

A state that accepts subservience is held up as proof that the region can be integrated peacefully. A state that has been fragmented is held up as proof that resistance leads to ruin. What the order cannot accommodate is a state that remains coherent, armed, and refuses both conditions—and so, as long as the lie that is Israel exists, the wars will continue: wars to destabilize, wars to neutralize, wars to expand, each one pulling another state into subservience or leaving it in ruins.

The assault on Iran is the latest act in a single continuous war against every force in the region that resists the order Israel and the U.S. have imposed over decades. That order’s foundation is the permanent dispossession of Palestine—and from that conquered center, the violent reorganization of the entire region around Israeli dominance.

Palestine is the question on which every other question in this region depends. Every war has been fought to settle it, and every negotiation has been calculated to defer it. What is happening now is the latest attempt to liquidate it, and in that sense, Gaza and Iran are two theatres of the same war. The genocide in Gaza established the terms under which Iran is now being destroyed: that a campaign of mass killing could be conducted in full view of the world, with the financial and military backing of the U.S., while the world watched. What the Security Council delivered, veto after veto, was time—time for the killing to continue, time for the facts to become irreversible. What the world allowed in Gaza, it is now allowing in Iran—and the killing it allows in Iran, it will allow again.

There is a kind of knowledge that comes from being on the receiving end of this order. We learn that power, at a certain threshold, no longer requires convincing lies. Justification becomes perfunctory—a formality performed for a world that had already decided the killing was acceptable.

We have been here before. Not we as in the Western world, which calls itself civilized while deciding, again, that it may start war without consequence. We as in those for whom the wars have never stopped.

Board of Peace — by Norman Harman (@NorrieHarman)

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In the years after the First World War, colonial rule could no longer be openly declared. The language of self-determination had entered international discourse; outright annexation had become ideologically untenable. The mandate system, devised at Versailles, offered a solution: colonial control named as “trusteeship,” foreign rule extended without limit, sovereignty not denied but deferred. The administered population would be guided, prepared, readied for self-governance—and the preparation would continue as long as the administering power found it useful.

Following this model, Palestine was placed under British mandate in 1920. That mandate held the ground until Zionist settlement could advance; by 1948, Palestinian society had been destroyed.

106 years later, the mandate has returned. Gaza is being offered peace as foreign administration rather than sovereignty—management whose purpose is not development but despair, the slow kneading of a population into permanent subordination.

To this end, Donald Trump has signed the Board of Peace into being—“The Greatest and Most Prestigious Board ever assembled at any time, any place.” A leaked resolution vests all legislative and executive authority over Gaza in this board, including emergency powers and control over the administration of justice. Trump serves as Chairman, holding sole final authority over its decisions. Netanyahu sits on the Board, alongside its architects. Palestinians do not.

Below the Board sits a National Committee for the Administration of Gaza, described in the leaked resolution as a “vetted, technocratic, apolitical” Palestinian body. It operates under Nickolay Mladenov, formerly the UN’s Middle East envoy. Under the British mandate, Herbert Samuel arrived in 1920 as High Commissioner for Palestine; Mladenov arrives in 2026 as High Representative for Gaza. The titles repeat, as does the vocabulary: development, trusteeship, security, order. Samuel came to hold the ground until Zionist settlement could advance. Mladenov comes to administer a territory the settler-colonial project has failed to empty.

The mandate has returned because military force failed. Israel’s war achieved none of its objectives: not the destruction of Hamas, not the “total victory” repeatedly promised by Netanyahu, not the ethnic cleansing Israel attempted in Gaza. The Palestinian people remain. Palestinian resistance remains. Where military force failed, administration takes over—made possible by Western liberal discourse, which provides the moral cover, and Arab collaboration, which furnishes the political legitimacy.

The moral cover requires two voices—one for the conquest, one for the conscience. The voice for the conscience speaks of peace; the voice of conquest knows that peace is the means by which conquest advances. It speaks plainly when it thinks no one is listening. During the Great Palestinian Revolt of 1936—an uprising against British rule and the Zionist colonization it enabled—David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s founding prime minister, was debating whether to accept a British partition plan. He named the logic without ornament: “Peace is indeed a vital matter for us—it is impossible to build a country in a permanent state of war—but peace for us is a means. The end is the complete and full realization of Zionism”—which is to say, the end of Palestinian presence on the land. The Western audience does not hear this. It is not meant to. In its place, hasbara offers the language the West prefers to hear.

As Edward Said wrote, “Zionism appealed to the West not because it was just, but because it was familiar.” It persuaded because liberalism recognized its own voice in Zionism’s self-description—as democratic, peace-seeking, victimized, righteous, and humane even in the exercise of force—an image calibrated to the Western conscience. And so Israeli violence becomes regrettable but necessary, while Palestinian resistance remains incomprehensible—fanatical, barbaric. Israel is “us.” Arabs are not.

Under the cover of this rhetoric, the Arab states are recruited to supply the political legitimacy—through UN Resolution 2803, by endorsing Trump’s plan and taking seats on the Board of Peace. Their participation was planned long before they were asked. In the 1970s, Henry Kissinger devised the sequencing: Arab governments would recognize the irreversibility of the Jewish settler colony first; the Palestinians would come “only at the end of the process,” once isolated and “under control.” By then there would be nothing left to negotiate.

Ben-Gurion, again, named the goal precisely: “For only after total despair on the part of the Arabs… may the Arabs possibly acquiesce in the Jewish Land of Israel.” Not defeat—despair. The mandate, the sequencing, the isolation, the collaboration of Arab governments, the denial of political standing—all designed to wear a population into submission.

The Arab governments, addressed as partners in peace, now sit where they were once meant to resist. They occupy seats in the structure, speak its language, and provide regional validation. But contrary to Kissinger’s plan, the Palestinian people have not surrendered. The despair has not arrived.

Which brings me back to Gaza, and to the terms now being imposed upon it. Trump’s 20-point plan, Sharm El-Sheikh’s Phase One ceasefire terms—the only terms the Palestinian resistance agreed to—and the Davos Board charter, which does not mention Gaza at all, now circulate as a single “agreement,” allowing U.S. and Israeli officials to imply Palestinian consent to provisions that were never accepted.

The last Israeli soldier’s body has been returned, and Phase One of the ceasefire has been formally concluded. Phase Two has begun, and already the pretext has shifted to total demilitarization—the condition that will be used to justify the continuation of the siege. That demand was never part of the agreement. “The next phase of the Gaza ceasefire is disarming Hamas and the demilitarization of the Gaza Strip,” Netanyahu told the Knesset. “The next phase is not reconstruction.” Disarmament has thus been elevated into a condition Israel alone defines, verifies, and can always declare unmet.

Disarmament has always preceded dispossession. After the revolt of 1936, the British set about disarming the population: mass searches, the seizure of arms, the demolition of homes where weapons were suspected to be hidden—preparing the ground for the Nakba. Disarmament is Trump’s first demand now. This mandate inherits the same logic—to ensure that should the opportunity arise again, the population will be as defenseless as it was in 1948.

The next phase, as Netanyahu made clear, is not reconstruction but partition. Inside the Yellow Line, where Palestinians remain, there will be no reconstruction, no infrastructure, no return to what was. The land has already been made uninhabitable by more than two years of Israeli bombardment. Those who remain will be pressured into leaving.

Outside the line, in the sixty percent Israel controls, the “planned community” awaits. In Rafah, where Israel razed an entire city, Palestinians will be corralled into controlled zones where entry requires passage through Israeli checkpoints and biometric registration. Surveillance will govern access to movement, to services, to food. Economic transactions will be monitored through “electronic shekel wallets,” in coordination with COGAT, the branch of the Israeli military that governs Palestinian civilian life. Compliance is the condition of life. The choice is the wasteland or the reservation.

Neither is meant to be lived in; both exist to make leaving Palestine the only imaginable relief. Every element of this design has been set in place—except the will of the people it was designed to break. Joseph Massad, writing on Trump’s plan, identified it precisely: “The only uncalculated factor in this entire ‘peace’ scam, to which the United Nations has now lent its name, is the continued struggle and steadfastness of Gaza’s Palestinians—a resolve that has refused to diminish after more than two years of Israeli barbarism.”

Palestinian steadfastness did not begin with this mandate and will not end with it. The refusal to leave—what Palestinians call sumud, steadfastness—has its own roots, its own memory, its own sources. It draws from sources the mandate cannot reach and cannot exhaust. The British failed to break it; so did the Israelis and the Americans. So did the Palestinian Authority when it tried.

This steadfastness, and the costs of sacrifice against Western imperialism, remain invisible in the discourse that shapes Western understanding. Very little is said in liberal discourse about the Nakba, or about what realizing Zionism entailed for its victims. Nothing is said about the European colonial history from which Zionism drew its force, or about the settlement of Palestine by European Jews as a colonial project to establish a “Jewish State.” And so a brutal history of racist colonial supremacy is permitted to repeat—licensed by a discourse that begins from a premise it insists cannot be questioned: Israel has the right to exist, Israel has the right to defend itself.

To us, for whom Zionism was an idea imposed upon Palestine, the concealed truths about Zionism are the ones that matter most. Our society was destroyed in 1948, its place taken by a Jewish state built to settle the land with Jews from all over the world. We were dispossessed, expelled, and slaughtered. Those of us who remained on our land in the 1948 territories now live under Israeli apartheid—through more than a hundred racist laws that privilege Jews over all others, including the Nation-State Law, which declares that the right to self-determination in the land belongs exclusively to the Jewish people. Palestinians in the West Bank live under military occupation; Gaza has been besieged since 2007.

To name these things is to name what had to be concealed for this mandate to pass as peace. To understand its grammar—its sequencing, its recruitment of collaborators, the vocabulary that names it peace, the despair it is designed to produce—is not analysis for its own sake. It is how we counter with our own history, our own institutions, our own will. Every Palestinian who has watched the last two years unfold now knows the structure assembled against us. To know it, and to refuse the roles it assigns, is the ground on which we stand.

Held by the Land — by Miss AL Simpson (@missalsimpson)

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It is one of the quieter accomplishments of Western discourse on Palestine that Palestinian Christians are still treated as an anomaly—something to be discovered, explained away, and then politely ignored. Yet Christianity’s earliest geography is Palestinian: Jerusalem, Bethlehem, and Gaza, with communities that gathered there centuries before Europe became Christian. The disappearance of this history is not an accident of ignorance but a political requirement, produced at the meeting point of Israeli state narrative and Christian Zionist theology. Together they authorize only two permissible versions of us: absence, or a carefully managed presence. We are a minority, the story insists; Israel protects us from Muslims; our faith arrived with Western missionaries; the Bible mandates our dispossession. The point is not only that these claims are false, but that they are useful; they convert a colonial relation into a moral tale.

To call Palestinian Christians a minority is not to offer a neutral description; it is to perform an administrative reduction. It turns a people into a category—a remnant to be counted, a fragment to be managed, and, when convenient, displayed as proof of Israeli protection. The word minority does not describe; it assigns us to a role in someone else’s story: the “good” native who proves the occupier’s tolerance, the endangered sect who requires a patron, the exception meant to excuse the rest. It names Palestinian Christians not as we are, in our history and in our ordinary life, but as we are meant to appear—detached from Palestine as a political reality, and reattached to Palestine as a religious spectacle.

This, however, is not how we have ever understood ourselves: not as a community petitioning for special shelter, but as Palestinians—part of the same dispossession, spoken for in the same foreign vocabulary, and asked to survive by agreeing to the terms of our own subordination.

Palestinian Christians are not a minority in the sense that matters. We are part of one people. What binds us to Palestinian Muslims is not only a shared history, but a shared formation—what in Arabic we call akhlaq: the moral grain of a person shaped by household and neighborhood, by the ordinary disciplines of daily life, by an instinctive knowledge of what is owed to family, to a neighbor, to a stranger. This is what the word minority is designed to obscure: not that we share a history, but that we share a soul.

When the Franks invaded—never dignified as “crusaders” in Palestinian memory—Christians were still the largest single group in parts of Palestine. They resisted alongside Muslims. When the Nakba came, being Christian made no difference. Christian and Muslim were expelled together, dispossessed together, erased together. For Israel, Palestinians have always been one enemy. This, at least, is a truth Israel has understood correctly.

Once the status of minority is assigned, Israel can stage itself abroad as our protector. The claim is designed for export. Israel’s dependence on American evangelical support rests on the carefully cultivated belief that Israel safeguards Christianity in the land of its birth. Remove that image and the theological claim buckles; with it buckles the mass evangelical constituency whose political backing has been converted into policy, funding, and impunity.

The performance is constant. In late July 2025, at a Christian gathering in Jerusalem, Netanyahu declared that “Israel is the guardian of Christianity in the Middle East.” The following month, Israel’s Jerusalem Municipality froze all bank accounts belonging to the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate—one of the oldest Christian institutions in the world—leaving it unable to pay salaries, maintain schools, or meet basic operating costs.

At the same time, the municipality demanded over $190 million in back taxes on 882 church-owned properties, challenging exemptions long treated, under the “status quo,” as continuous from Ottoman practice through the British Mandate, Jordanian rule, and early Israeli administration. As Father Issa Musleh put it, the aim is “to squeeze everything that is Palestinian, Christian and Muslim, in the Holy Land in order to displace them and push them out.”

Palestinian church leaders now speak openly of what Rev. Munther Isaac has called “a systematic attempt to empty Jerusalem of its Christian community.” The disappearance of Palestinian Christians would not settle the question of Palestine, but it would deliver to imperial discourse the framing it requires: a civilizational confrontation—Islam against Judaism, East against West—with Israel installed as custodian of values the West congratulates itself for defending. For this fiction to hold, Christianity must be severed from Palestine, emptied of its indigenous continuity, and reassigned to Europe as birthright.

The truth, however, runs the other direction. Christianity did not travel eastward from the West; it took shape here, in Palestinian towns, languages, and lineages, long before Europe claimed it. We did not convert to a foreign faith; our land and our communities are where that faith was born. Israel, therefore, is not defending Western civilization. It is destroying one of its original sources.

This civilizational framing depends, in turn, on a prior claim: that Jews were “there first,” and that Palestinian presence—Christian or Muslim—came later. But the division that hardened into Judaism and Christianity began as a disagreement within a single people, not as an encounter between separate nations. The earliest Christians were Jews who came to believe that Jesus of Nazareth was the awaited Messiah. Centuries later, when Islam came, many of these same families embraced it. Genetic studies confirm what the history already suggests: religions changed; the people did not. Judaism precedes Christianity as a religion, but neither precedes the people of this land. As a people, we never left.

Many Western churches have adopted this fiction with ease. Viewing Christianity through a European lens, they speak and act as though the faith were born in Rome or Geneva rather than in Bethlehem and Jerusalem. American evangelical delegations travel to “stand with Israel,” and the itinerary is itself a script, one in which the stones are visited and the indigenous Christians are not. In early December 2025, more than one thousand American evangelical pastors and Christian influencers attended the Friends of Zion Ambassadors Summit in Israel. As Rev. Jack Sara, a Palestinian evangelical leader, wrote afterward, they “walked where Jesus walked—but refused to walk beside His followers who are struggling to survive here.”

The logic these delegations follow divides the world into those who bless Israel and those who curse it—no third position, no space for a Christianity that refuses to sanctify Palestinian erasure. John Hagee, founder of Christians United for Israel—the largest pro-Israel organization in the United States—states it with brutal clarity: “the man or the nation that has blessed Israel has been blessed of God, and to the man or the nation that cursed Israel the judgment of God came in spades.” Indigenous Christians cannot appear in this theology except as a problem, because we are believers who are also the dispossessed; and a binary that rewards blessing and punishes “cursing” has no place for Christians who refuse to bless their own eradication.

But what these delegations treat as biblical mandate is not ancient. It was manufactured in 1909, when Cyrus Scofield’s Reference Bible helped make a particular interpretation of scripture a standard in American evangelicalism. In its margins, he inserted notes that taught millions of readers to treat Genesis 12:3 (”I will bless those who bless you…”) as a religious command to support Jewish colonization of Palestine. That this interpretation had no basis in two thousand years of Christian theology, that it trained readers to read the Old Testament as if the New had not been written—none of this prevented its success. An interpretation drawn entirely from the Old Testament, owing nothing to the teachings of Christ, became, for millions of American evangelicals, simply what the bible says.

After 1948, once the Israeli state was established, Scofield’s notes no longer appeared as interpretation. They appeared as prophecy fulfilled. Jewish sovereignty in Palestine became, for these American evangelicals, not a political claim but a divine requirement—and prophecy, once believed, seeks confirmation in the world. It finds it, sooner or later, in institutions.

Israel supplied it. Its 2018 Basic Law declares that the right to national self-determination is “unique to the Jewish people.” No biblical text demanded this. A Jew born in Brooklyn can invoke this right, while a Palestinian Christian whose ancestors worshipped in Jerusalem before Europe was Christian cannot—cannot return, cannot claim, cannot appeal to a law that has already decided, before any case is heard, that the land belongs to others.

That is the power of discourse: it can turn the indigenous into aliens, transform exile into a permanent condition disguised as legality, and make the dispossessed appear, in the very vocabulary that names them, as interlopers in their own land.

Against this—against the theology, the law, and the long repetition of convenient fictions—only plain statement will serve. We are not a minority. Israel does not protect us, nor have we ever asked it to. Christianity was not imported from the West. Scripture does not command our eradication.

The burden, for Palestinian Christians, lies in the particular cruelty of a faith weaponized against its own people—and in the bitter irony that being Christian permits us to be heard by the very Western Christians who enable our removal, but only so long as we do not speak as Palestinians.

Being Christian does, at times, open doors that remain closed to Palestinian Muslims. In Western discourse, a Palestinian Christian voice is often received as more credible and more familiar—therefore less threatening. But this reception, which presents itself as openness, operates as a filter. The Palestinian Christian is heard so long as what is said confirms what the listener already believes. The moment that voice names dispossession or assigns colonial responsibility, access becomes fragile. It is withdrawn not because the truth is unclear but because it has ceased to be useful.

The access, in other words, was never to speech—only to script. And that script has a function. The colonial framework assigns us a role: evidence of Israeli tolerance, proof that the conflict is religious—”Muslim hatred of Jews”—rather than political dispossession. To speak politically is to malfunction, to fail at the role we have been given. This is why articulation is not a privilege granted to us, but a refusal of the role we are assigned.

To say that Israel drove us out is to refuse the status of grateful minority. To say that our churches predate Western missions, that Christian communities gathered in this land while Europe was still pagan, is to refuse the status of relic—to insist that we are not remnants of a vanished past but bearers of a continuity that predates the very traditions now invoked to displace us. To say that the land was never empty, and that no scripture mandates our elimination, is to refuse to be anyone’s biblical alibi. And to insist that we are one people—bound to every Palestinian, Christian and Muslim alike—is to refuse the assignment itself.

The Christian who speaks politically is accused of not really speaking as a Christian. But this is precisely why the speech matters. It introduces something the discourse cannot absorb: a Christianity that indicts Western Christianity and refuses to let love become a word emptied of justice; a people who were in this land before Zionism named its own arrival a return; a unity that cannot be fractured into manageable minorities. The fictions do not rest; they regenerate. And so we must continue to say what should not need saying, to those who have already arranged not to hear it.

For Alya, on your first Christmas

The Bugs Bunny Gambit — by Norman Harman (@NorrieHarman)

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Earlier this month, while touring the ruins of Beit Hanoun and Jabalia, the occupation army’s Chief of Staff informed his troops that the “Yellow Line”—the demarcation beyond which Israeli forces have not withdrawn under the ceasefire—is now “a new border.” He acknowledged what every Palestinian already understood, what we have understood for decades: the temporary becomes permanent, the ceasefire line hardens into the frontier of annexation, and what is taken is never returned.

“Security” has become, in the lexicon of Israeli territorial expansion, what “the civilizing mission” was to the nineteenth-century colonial powers—an infinitely elastic concept that justifies whatever is done in its name, and whose fulfillment remains perpetually deferred. Security is never achieved, never declared sufficient, never allowed to reach a point at which the taking of land might finally cease. And this is precisely because security, in the Israeli usage, is a permanent emergency to be sustained—one that authorizes permanent expansion precisely because it cannot be declared complete. Israel remains the only state in the world with no internationally declared boundaries—an omission that is itself a statement of intent. You do not define the limits of what you have not finished taking. And the taking continues by a logic now mechanical, each move prepared by the last.

Colonial expansion in the postcolonial era—an era that has declared such expansion impermissible, that has enshrined self-determination in its founding charters, that congratulates itself on transcending the crudities of the civilizing mission—requires its alibis. You cannot simply conquer and announce that you are conquering; the international order no longer permits such candor, though it permits everything else. You must conquer while proclaiming peace. You must dispossess while offering “prosperity.” You must cage a population while speaking of “stabilization.” And so the vocabulary of security provides not explanation but permission, not justification but alibi.

This history has a name: the Nahal system. Kibbutzim like Nahal Oz in the Gaza envelope—those attacked on October 7, now invoked to justify the Yellow Line—were themselves products of that doctrine, which converted ceasefire lines into permanent borders. Founded as military outposts along a provisional armistice line, they became civilian communities that required protection. Military outposts became civilian settlements; settlements became facts requiring defense; defense required buffer zones, which will become settlements in turn.

This is what “facts on the ground” means—the Hebrew uvdot bashetach: build first, justify later; possess first, legalize after. When justification is required, it is always supplied as “natural growth”—the phrase that emerged during Oslo to exempt expansion from any freeze. Families have children, children need homes, homes need land, land needs security—and security needs land.

The logic moves only in one direction, like a ratchet that cannot turn back. Israel takes, and if there is no response, the taking is normalized, absorbed into the status quo, treated as though it had always been so. The new boundary—no longer contested, no longer even visible as a boundary, simply the way things are—becomes the baseline for the next taking. If there is a response, the response is extracted from its context, stripped of its history, presented as unprovoked aggression, as terror, as proof of what Israel has always said about the impossibility of peace. And this becomes the justification for an escalation that establishes an even more favorable position than before. Israel advances whether there is resistance or acquiescence, whether the world condemns or applauds, whether the taking is called defense or war.

The ratchet has its narrative equivalent: the clock that is always started late. The question “who started it?” is answered by beginning the clock at the Palestinian action, never at the siege that preceded it, never at the occupation that preceded the resistance, never at the dispossession that started everything and is made to start nothing. History is punctuated so that Israeli violence registers as response and Palestinian violence as aggression—a framing so embedded in Western media grammar that it has become reflex.

The framing has never been clearer, and once Palestinians are established as aggressors they can be treated as such—bombed, starved, displaced, with no limit imposed by law or conscience. And when even this fails to produce what it was designed to achieve—submission, the final collapse of resistance—the method shifts, and the ceasefire in Gaza marks that shift. Resolution 2803—Trump’s "Comprehensive Plan to End the Gaza Conflict"—enacts the turn that colonial method always makes when force cannot complete the work: from overt assault to administered rule, from genocide to domestication.

An aggressor population requires oversight, administration, and ultimately re-education—hence a “Board of Peace” to oversee a people not consulted on its composition or mandate. Part of that re-education would involve what Netanyahu describes as “deradicalizing” Gaza—a comparison he invites explicitly, citing Germany following World War II. The target is Palestinian society itself—its memory, its political consciousness, its capacity to name what has been done to it. The comparison presents Palestinians as a defeated aggressor population, collectively culpable, requiring long-term external control—as though resistance to colonization were madness, and subjugation the cure.

But Gaza is only one front in an architecture of expansion that spans the region. In Gaza, domination is administered directly—through continued killings, aid obstruction, stalled reconstruction, coerced displacement, and the slow work of “deradicalization”—until subjugation or, even better, depopulation. Across the Arab world, where colonization is physically impossible, the strategy differs. Domination is instead delegated to compliant regimes. In the West Bank, the Palestinian Authority has for three decades provided the proof of concept—autonomy without sovereignty, security coordination without political agency, an elite collaborator class administering the occupation on behalf of the occupier. That arrangement has now been discarded in Palestine itself, but the model will be exported.

Arab states are being recruited to the same role—along with what Israel’s “buffer zones” have left of Lebanon and Syria—not as equals, but as subordinates. They are expected to contain their own populations in exchange for regime survival, and to abandon Palestine as a political cause—and with it, the right of return for those of us still waiting. This week, Israel signed its largest export deal in history—$35 billion in gas to Egypt—designed, in its Minister of Energy’s words, to make “our neighbors, including Egypt, dependent on the State of Israel for the next fifteen years.” Gas, electricity, and water are also being offered to Syria and Lebanon “in exchange for security guarantees.”

The expansion continues. Through military fait accompli, resource dependency, U.S. pressure at the UN, and “peace plans” that function as ultimatums, what cannot be secured by military force is secured politically. Palestinians are expected to recognize Israel, renounce resistance, and accept the legitimacy of a state built on our dispossession—while Israel acknowledges nothing, cedes nothing, and reckons with nothing.

Normalization is the political name for this arrangement—the point at which injustice stops needing justification and begins calling itself peace. “Deradicalization” is its internalization—the colonial relationship no longer imposed from without but reproduced within, a region reduced through re-education to servility and amnesia. And so the expansion continues.

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Gaza Painting in an Exhibition — by Norman Harman (@NorrieHarman)

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I visited an exhibition of the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish recently—personal artifacts, handwritten letters, a rich archive of his life and work. Among the artifacts was a letter he wrote from his first arrest to his brother Ahmed. He had been held since Thursday, he wrote, and did not know how long it would last. He described the cold, the sleeplessness, the interrogations, the clothes that were too small—but said the worst of all was being forbidden to write. This was the first moment he had been permitted pen and paper.

This exhibit is an archive of a voice that survived, that made it through. Such archives are rare—not because Palestinians lack poets or history, but because the machinery of erasure works on memory itself. Palestinian narrative has been buried from two directions: a Western apparatus that frames Palestinians as a threat rather than a people, and an internalized colonial perspective that made Arabs strangers to their own tradition.

Arabic culture and literature form a centuries-deep tradition—one that produced not only Darwish but the language and sensibility he drew from. The colonial project made us strangers to it. In elite schools across the Arab world, we were educated in French or English, taught more about the Second World War than about our own history, trained to see ourselves as grateful subordinates to a culture we could admire but never fully join. The purpose was not domination but alienation. We were severed from our own language, history, and memory. We were made strangers to ourselves.

If colonial education alienated us from ourselves, the discourse Edward Said called Orientalism taught Western audiences to see us as a threat. “Islam” was constructed as the civilizational opposite of the West—not through encounter with Muslim societies as they actually existed, but through projection and fantasy. The characterization intensified after the Cold War, when Western strategists needed a new enemy. Islam became monolithic: fanatical, irrational, medieval, incapable of separating religion and state, hostile to modernity. As Bernard Lewis put it in 1990, the Islamic world represented “the perhaps irrational but surely historic reactions of an ancient rival against our Judeo-Christian heritage.” Two billion people across dozens of countries, speaking different languages and shaped by distinct histories—collapsed into a single threatening essence.

This imagined Islamic other was then mapped onto Arabs specifically. The Arab became the face of Islamic threat, even though most Muslims are not Arab and the Arab world itself is vast and varied. In Western political culture, the Arab was recast as the fanatic, the terrorist, the suicide bomber—stereotypes that hardened into foreign-policy doctrine after 9/11.

Within this framework, the Palestinian question was stripped of its political and territorial nature. We were no longer resisting because we had been dispossessed of our land, expelled from our homes, subjected to military occupation. We resisted, it was said, because we were Arabs, and because our “civilization” was incompatible with the modern, democratic, Western values that Israel claimed to embody.

The brilliance of this framing, from a Zionist perspective, is that it transforms a colonial conflict into a civilizational one. There is no need to address 1948, the Nakba, the refugees, the settlements, the occupation, the checkpoints, the house demolitions—the concrete history of our dispossession. Instead, one is offered “the only democracy in the Middle East” surrounded by barbarism. Israel becomes the frontier outpost of Western civilization, and we become undifferentiated members of a hostile civilizational mass.

The “civilization vs. barbarism” binary works on multiple levels at once. It recasts resistance as irrational violence rather than political action. It renders Palestinian deaths less grievable because they are the deaths of those marked as “barbarians.” It conditions Western audiences to identify with Israel automatically, since Israel is imagined as “like us” while Palestinians belong to “them.” And it forecloses the possibility of seeing Palestinians as they are: a people with a history, with claims, with rights under international law—not representatives of an alien civilization, but human beings subjected to dispossession.

That narrative, however, could not endure indefinitely. October 7 forced something open. The world was confronted with the irreducible presence of Palestinians themselves—speaking, grieving, resisting, insisting on being seen as a people with a history and a claim. In its own way, the Al-Aqsa Flood made that peoplehood visible, forcing a story long told about Palestinians to be told, slowly and painfully, by Palestinians themselves.

But Al-Aqsa Flood also exposed something else: who would stand with Palestinians, and who would not. Gaza absorbed the full weight of Israeli military power with no external actor willing to intervene meaningfully. Arab regimes capitulated, choosing Washington over Gaza. International institutions performed concern without consequence. And the ceasefire frameworks that followed formalized this abandonment, offering Israel the cover of a “process” while Palestinians were left isolated inside it.

This pattern is not new.

“How large the revolution, how narrow the journey, how grand the idea, how small the state.”

Mahmoud Darwish wrote this in his poem In Praise of the High Shadow, composed after Sabra and Shatila—the 1982 massacre in which Lebanese Phalangist militia, under Israeli supervision, entered two Palestinian refugee camps in Beirut and slaughtered thousands of civilians over three days. Yasser Arafat and the PLO had evacuated to Tunis under American guarantees, but the international monitors meant to protect civilians were withdrawn; the refugees were left encircled by Israeli forces who let the militia in and lit flares through the night to help them see. Arab regimes looked on.

In the poem, Darwish addressed the PLO fighters directly. He questioned the trappings of statehood, suggesting the cause was always larger than anything a state could contain. The revolution was vast, the idea grand. The state proved small.

More than forty years later, that pattern has returned: a process offered as peace, abandonment formalized beneath it.

Today, Resolution 2803—urged forward by the Palestinian Authority and the same Arab states—shrinks liberation into a file administered by foreign powers. And in Rafah, the narrow journey returned in its most literal form: resistance fighters trapped behind the ceasefire line, hunted and killed one by one while the world insisted a ceasefire existed. Starved, encircled, abandoned.

In Praise of the High Shadow was among the artifacts in that exhibition. Standing before it raised questions: What language would Darwish have found for this genocide—for the children starving, the hospitals bombed with impunity, the families erased from the civil registry? But one pressed harder than the others: What would he have written about the fighters besieged in Rafah?

Many contemporary Palestinian writers have found language for it—language of precision and moral clarity. One line stayed with me: “We pride ourselves on the fact that they did not surrender and fought until their last breath… but we forget that all of us surrendered to our own helplessness, and were content to just watch.”

The tradition that produced Darwish has not vanished. In his cell, he was eventually permitted pen and paper. In Gaza, the machinery works to ensure no one will be permitted at all—journalists killed, poets buried under rubble, archives destroyed. But narrative is not so easily killed. Palestinians have been written out of history before—by the British, by the Zionists, by Arab regimes, by a Western consensus that declared we did not exist. Each time, the story returned. It returned because it was true, and because those who lived it refused to stop telling it.

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UN - by Norman Harman (@NorrieHarman)

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Once again, we are asked to believe that the US is the neutral arbiter that will oversee the “pathway” to Palestinian self-determination. This is the premise of Resolution 2803, passed by the Security Council on November 17, 2025. It asks us to accept that the country that has, for the duration of this genocide, supplied Israel with the bombs that have killed over seventy thousand Palestinians, shielded Israel from every attempt at international accountability, and sanctioned the ICC for issuing arrest warrants against Israeli officials will now preside over a “Board of Peace,” chaired by Donald Trump himself, to decide Gaza’s future.

No one is celebrating. No one, so far as I can tell, believes in this pathway. That it proceeds anyway shows we have arrived at a form of politics so debased that even the pretense of credibility has been abandoned. What remains is naked power, arranging the facts on the ground, while the vocabulary of peace provides its cover.

The language of the resolution is revealing in what it includes and what it deliberately omits. Nowhere does it reference Resolution 242 or 338, the foundational texts that established the inadmissibility of acquiring territory by force. Nowhere does it mention the illegality of Israeli settlements, the annexation of Jerusalem, or the systematic dispossession that created the refugee population in the first place. The ICJ’s 2024 advisory opinion—which affirmed in unambiguous terms that Israel’s presence in the Occupied Territories is unlawful and must end immediately—is passed over in silence, as though it had never been issued. Israel is required to do nothing. No timeline for withdrawal, no end to its assassinations, no halt to settlement expansion on the very land the resolution claims to reserve for Palestinian self-determination.

Instead, we have a resolution that “welcomes the constructive role” of the US, demands the disarmament of Palestinian resistance, and establishes an International Stabilization Force whose purpose, stripped of its euphemisms, is to ensure that Palestinians cannot resist while Israel’s occupation continues. And while this resolution is an admission that two years of relentless violence failed to accomplish the occupation’s war objectives, its architects now hope to achieve them through the quieter mechanisms of administration. This is a new mandate over Gaza—a two-year American trusteeship that continues the logic of the British Mandate under which Palestine was first fragmented and Israel was created.

The resolution represents the same colonial logic—administering Palestinians on behalf of those who dispossess them, presuming they require foreign supervision rather than the self-governance guaranteed by international law. This is the familiar pattern in which administration claims to serve the colonized while, in fact, serving the colonizer. Every scheme devised by outside powers invokes the welfare of the natives while ensuring that the natives themselves have no say in their own political future.

And still the Palestinian Authority—which claims to represent the Palestinian people—has welcomed this resolution with the predictable mixture of exhaustion and misplaced hope that has characterized its posture for three decades now. The drafting, the negotiations, the final text: all of it proceeded without meaningful Palestinian participation. What does it mean to welcome a document that was written about you, without you?

Nor is the PA alone in its accommodation. The arc of imperial policy has long been to secure Arab compliance with a regional order in which Zionist colonization is treated as legitimate and permanent. What is perhaps most dispiriting is the eagerness with which Arab and Islamic states have embraced this arrangement. Qatar, Egypt, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Indonesia, Pakistan, Turkey—all of them signatories to a joint statement urging the resolution’s “swift adoption.” These are states that have watched the destruction of Gaza for over two years, that have witnessed what even the most cautious legal scholars now describe as genocide; their response is to urge swift adoption of a resolution that rewards the perpetrators with continued control over their victims.

Such complicity requires the right branding. A “Board of Peace” sounds benevolent, even hopeful. An “International Stabilization Force” carries connotations of order restored, of chaos contained. A “pathway to statehood” suggests movement, progress, a destination that might one day be reached if only we demonstrate sufficient patience and good behavior. But these are names designed to disguise rather than describe. The Board of Peace will not bring peace; it will administer a territory whose population has endured two years of siege and slaughter, whose infrastructure has been systematically destroyed, whose children—those who survived—will grow up under the authority of the very powers that enabled their suffering. Palestinians are treated as incapable of self-rule, while figures such as Donald Trump and Tony Blair are presented as the administrators equipped to supervise and discipline them.

The Stabilization Force will not stabilize; it will suppress. And the pathway to statehood leads nowhere, because it is not a pathway at all but a holding pattern, a mechanism for deferring indefinitely the question of Palestinian sovereignty while maintaining the fiction that sovereignty remains possible. Before this “pathway” can even be considered, the PA must reform itself to satisfaction: rewrite school curricula to adopt the Israeli narrative, recognize Israel as a Jewish state with Jerusalem as its capital, renounce the right of return, and end support for families of prisoners and martyrs—in short, erase Palestinian history and rights as the price of discussing Palestinian statehood. External administration will continue until Palestinians prove themselves worthy of self-governance to the satisfaction of their overseers—ensuring the Board’s control remains indefinite, contingent on Palestinian performance as judged by those intent on dispossessing them.

Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur, has warned that this resolution “runs counter to the Palestinian right to self-determination” and “consolidates Israel’s unlawful presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory.” She is correct, and her critique deserves wide attention. But warnings, however principled, change nothing. The international system has issued warnings, passed resolutions, affirmed rights, and expressed concern for seventy-seven years, and the Palestinian people remain stateless, occupied, and in Gaza, two years into a genocide. We have always known that the international system was designed not to liberate the colonized, but to domesticate.

And still we are told that this resolution is the best that could be achieved under the circumstances, that the alternative was worse, that we must be “pragmatic” and “realistic.” These are the same arguments that were made in defense of the Oslo Accords, and we have seen where that pragmatism led. To the entrenchment of settlements, the fragmentation of Palestinian territory, the transformation of the PA into a subcontractor for Israeli security, and, inevitably, to the Abraham Accords. Pragmatism without principles is simply capitulation in installments.

What would a genuine resolution look like? It would begin by affirming, without equivocation, that the Israeli occupation is illegal and must end—not at some unspecified future date, not contingent on Palestinian “reforms” or “good behavior,” but immediately, as the ICJ has demanded. It would demand an end to the killing, the reconstruction of Gaza, and the establishment of an independent Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital.

It would recognize that Palestinian self-determination is unconditional—an inherent right that does not depend on readiness, compliance, or humanitarian need, and cannot be subject to the approval of the occupying power or its allies. It would establish mechanisms for accountability—for the destruction of Gaza, for the decades of dispossession, for the systematic violations of international law that have been documented by every credible human rights organization on Earth. And it would ensure that Palestinians themselves are the primary agents of their own future, not the objects of decisions made in Washington, Tel Aviv, and the capitals of states whose primary concern is regional hegemony rather than justice.

None of this will happen through Resolution 2803. It will not happen through the Board of Peace or the International Stabilization Force or the conditional “pathway” to a statehood that Israel’s leaders have already declared they will never accept. It will happen, if it happens at all, through the sustained refusal of Palestinians and their allies to accept arrangements that perpetuate injustice in the name of peace. It will happen through the insistence that international law means something, that the rules that govern the behavior of states cannot be selectively applied to protect the powerful while abandoning the weak. It will happen through the cultivation of a political consciousness that sees through the euphemisms and recognizes that a peace built on the denial of rights is not peace but a more sophisticated form of domination.

In the meantime, we are left with this resolution—this “historic breakthrough” that changes nothing fundamental while providing diplomatic cover for the continuation of the status quo. The ceremonies will be held, the statements will be issued, and the world will move on to other concerns. And in Gaza, amid the rubble and the grief, a population will awaken each morning to discover that the “pathway” to their freedom has been paved with their own dispossession, that the “peace” on offer is the peace of the exhausted, the defeated, the subjugated.

Under the British Mandate, ceasefires were used not to end violence but to redistribute power—disarming Palestinians while granting Zionist forces freedom of movement under the guise of restoring order. Since the ceasefire began, Israel has expanded restricted zones, obliterated entire families, blocked aid, and denied the wounded evacuation through Rafah. Each violation met with silence, each act demonstrating what the resolution was designed to permit: total Palestinian compliance while granting Israel complete freedom to evade its commitments. The goal has never been peace. It has always been to make Gaza uninhabitable, to force Palestinians into exile, to complete through trusteeship what military pressure could not.

This is not the end of anything. It is, as the representative of South Korea noted with unintentional accuracy, “not the end, but a new beginning”—a new beginning of the same old story, told in the same old way. But the ending is not yet written, and it will not be written by them.

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That Palestine belongs to the Jews was, for most of the nineteenth century, a Christian Protestant claim. Long before most Jews embraced a nation-state in Palestine—many viewing it with suspicion, some with open hostility—British and American Protestants had already formulated it, argued for it, and lobbied to realize it. They treated Jewish sovereignty over Jerusalem as a precondition of Christ’s return—Jewish restoration as the instrument, Christian eschatology as the end.

By the late nineteenth century, Jewish political movements recognized in it something usable: a pre-existing Christian infrastructure of territorial advocacy, grounded in biblical warrant and backed by Western power. They took the infrastructure and left the eschatology to those who had worked it out. After 1948—and with accelerating commitment after 1967—the American state deployed that same infrastructure in defense of Israeli territorial expansion, until the evangelical vote and the Israeli state became foundational to U.S. foreign policy. With each adoption, the authorization widened—and at no stage did Palestinian presence enter its frame.

Today, the movement numbers in the tens of millions, organized into lobbying groups, pilgrimage circuits, and broadcasting empires. The theology has not softened. It assigns the land to one people by divine covenant. It treats the indigenous inhabitants as an obstacle to be cleared. It awaits an apocalypse in which the Jews it now supports will either convert or be annihilated. That continuity—across a century and a half—is inseparable from a single book.

That book is the Scofield Reference Bible—a Bible with a theology printed in its margins. Published in 1909 by Oxford University Press and annotated by the American minister Cyrus Scofield, it carries the entire text of the King James Version alongside a system of notes and cross-references. The notes tell the reader what the scripture means. The reader is not asked to agree. Scripture and commentary are presented as a single authority, with no seam between what scripture says and what Scofield says it means.

John Nelson Darby supplied the framework. An Anglo-Irish preacher of the Plymouth Brethren, he divided scripture in the 1830s into seven eras and made the return of the Jews to Palestine the pivot on which the final era turned. Scofield supplied the distribution. He abandoned his wife and two children and served time for forgery in the late 1870s. A religious conversion launched his ministerial career in 1879. In the early 1900s, as Joseph M. Canfield documents in The Incredible Scofield and His Book, patronage arrived through Samuel Untermeyer—a Jewish lawyer, committed Zionist, and associate of the Rothschild network—who introduced Scofield into the Lotos Club, an exclusive circle of New York political and financial elites. The man who had forged signatures would claim to fix the meaning of scripture.

The network was in motion before he arrived. In 1891, William Eugene Blackstone—a Methodist layman operating in the same dispensationalist tradition—delivered to President Benjamin Harrison a petition signed by over 400 prominent Americans: J.P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, chief justices of several state supreme courts, editors of major newspapers, members of Congress. The petition demanded the restoration of Palestine to the Jews on explicitly biblical grounds, six years before Theodor Herzl published Der Judenstaat and convened the First Zionist Congress. When Herzl later entertained Uganda as an alternative Jewish homeland, Blackstone sent him a copy of the Bible with passages on restoration marked—Palestine was non-negotiable because God had designated it.

Institutional legitimacy came through Oxford. During a 1908 trip to London, Scofield met Henry Frowde, Oxford University Press’s London director and a follower of Darby’s theology, who agreed to publish his Bible. In 1909, Oxford published the Scofield Reference Bible, and Oxford’s imprint gave his commentary a credibility it could not otherwise have claimed. His notes on Palestine, on Israel’s restoration, on the cursing of nations that failed to support the Jewish people, now carried Oxford’s name.

Dispensationalism—the system Scofield’s Bible installs—reads scripture as a sequence of distinct eras in which God relates to humanity through different covenants, each with its own terms and consequences. At the system’s center is a sharp distinction between two peoples of God, Israel and the Church, on separate historical tracks. The theology holds that the Jewish people rejected Jesus as Messiah, and that God suspended his promises to them—a divine title to the land, sovereignty, a restored kingdom in Jerusalem. A new era opened, the Church Age, which the theology describes as a parenthesis in a design that remains Israel-centered. History is on hold. The modern State of Israel therefore arrives as a theological event: the sign that the parenthesis is closing, the suspended promises reactivating, the prophetic timetable running again. That timetable runs toward an apocalypse in which the Jews gathered in Palestine will convert or be annihilated—both outcomes equally fulfill the prophecy.

Followed through, the implications are total. History ceases to be a field of human struggle and becomes a timetable governed by prophecy. Palestine is converted from a living society into a stage set for apocalyptic drama. Its inhabitants become theologically invisible. Their dispossession registers within the scheme as correction. Christianity’s ethical content is inverted to sustain this: the New Testament’s explicit moral structure—love your neighbor, blessed are the peacemakers, the last shall be first—gives way to Old Testament passages reassembled into a modern program of exclusive territorial entitlement. Faith becomes authorization: a system for blessing what it was once meant to judge. The scheme admits no crime. Before the violence reaches them, the theology has already erased them.

The Protestant Reformation opened the interpretive space. By restoring the Old Testament to centrality, it broke from Catholic and Orthodox traditions that had understood scripture’s promises as fulfilled in Christ and their territorial content as spiritualized or superseded. What earlier Christians had read as spiritual metaphor, Puritans and their successors took as territorial claim.

Deploying this theology, they justified the dispossession and extermination of Indigenous peoples in North America. In the conquest narratives of Joshua, in texts on Israelite origins that demand the subjugation of native inhabitants, they found a political theology of ethnic cleansing. The settlers who cast themselves as Israel became, in time, the primary sponsors of a new Israel’s settlement. The method was the same: indigenous presence cast as obstacle, displacement framed as obedience, Old Testament conquest narratives doing the moral work the New Testament refused.

That same logic, once institutionalized, revealed its political force within a decade. In 1917, Oxford issued a revised edition of the Scofield Reference Bible. Ten months later, the Balfour Declaration—addressed to Lord Walter Rothschild—pledged British support for a “national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine. The 1909 edition had already separated Israel and the Church into distinct peoples and warned that nations would be blessed or cursed according to how they treated Israel. The 1917 revision went further, adding explicit notes that “Israel is to be restored to the land” and that “Palestine is promised to the descendants of Abraham”—an alignment with Balfour’s commitments that requires no explanation.

As Britain engineered the conditions for Zionist settlement in Palestine, Scofield’s margins taught millions of American evangelicals to read these events as fulfilled prophecy. What Darby worked out in prophetic charts, what Scofield rendered in study notes, and what Oxford endorsed with its institutional authority now aligned with the decisions of the British Empire—the theological and the imperial fused into a single apparatus, each authorizing the other.

Scofield died in 1921. He did not live to see what his Bible would become.

The 1967 war confirmed what was already in motion. In that year, Oxford issued a modernized Scofield Reference Bible, and months later Israel captured East Jerusalem, Hebron, Bethlehem, Jericho, and Nablus—the core biblical territories it had not previously held. Jewish sovereignty over Jerusalem, one of the prerequisites in the dispensationalist sequence, had arrived through military conquest. For Jewish religious Zionists, previously a marginal current within Israeli political life, the victory was vindication. Their claim—that “Judea and Samaria” must be permanently held and settled—moved from the fringes of Israeli politics toward its governing assumptions. For Christian Zionists, the war confirmed that prophetic events were unfolding on the schedule the theology had long anticipated. The war synchronized these movements—Jewish settler ideology and Christian dispensationalism now running on the same prophetic clock. Their mutual reinforcement became a precondition for the political consolidation that followed.

When Israel bombed Iraq’s nuclear reactor in 1981, Prime Minister Menachem Begin phoned Jerry Falwell before contacting President Ronald Reagan. Begin later gave Falwell a private jet and enlisted him to defend the attack on American television. Falwell obliged, completing a circuit Scofield had wired in 1909: prophetic obligation and political favor running through the same wire, indistinguishable in current. Begin had discovered that American evangelical infrastructure could absorb and authorize Israeli military decisions faster than any diplomatic channel.

John Hagee institutionalized what Falwell had demonstrated. Genesis 12:3 records God’s promise to Abraham: “I will bless those who bless you, and whoever curses you I will curse.” Scofield recast it as a warning to modern nations: any government that fails to support the State of Israel invites divine judgment. In 2006, Hagee founded Christians United for Israel (CUFI) as an evangelical counterpart to AIPAC, and its annual Washington summits turned Scofield’s reinterpretation into lobbying strategy. Dissenting evangelical voices existed; they did not set institutional direction. This reinterpretation of a single verse is the theological foundation on which unconditional U.S. support for Israeli policy rests—the mechanism by which a Bronze Age covenant became twenty-first-century foreign policy doctrine.

The theology has secured a direct line into American foreign policy. Mike Huckabee serves as U.S. ambassador to Israel and declares in Jerusalem that American officials are “representatives not only of our government, but also of Jesus Christ.” He has signaled that Washington no longer pursues a two-state solution, using “Judea and Samaria” where international law says the West Bank—Scofield’s terminology in the mouth of the American state.

In the Senate, Ted Cruz grounds his foreign policy in Genesis 12:3. In a June 2025 exchange with Tucker Carlson, he paraphrased Scofield’s reinterpretation—those who bless Israel will be blessed, those who curse Israel will be cursed—and added, “I’d rather be on the blessing side of things.” Lindsey Graham took the logic to its conclusion at a South Carolina rally: “If America pulls the plug on Israel, God will pull the plug on us.” The verse has migrated from Scofield’s margins to the Senate floor intact.

The clearest measure of that capture is a Secretary of Defense: Pete Hegseth. His book American Crusade frames U.S. military commitment to Israel as a Christian mission in defense of Western civilization. His body carries medieval crusader symbols as permanent tattoos—among them “Deus Vult,” the First Crusade’s battle cry. Hegseth makes the continuity visible. What the Crusaders announced as God’s will from the walls of Jerusalem in 1099, what Scofield encoded in his margins in 1909, and what Hegseth carries into the Pentagon in 2025 are expressions of the same mandate, each borrowing authority from the one before it.

The apparatus is visible in what it now produces.

In September 2025, Netanyahu signed off on the E1 settlement expansion, which will bisect the West Bank and sever it from East Jerusalem. “There will be no Palestinian state,” he declared. “This place belongs to us.” He frames Israeli territorial expansion as a “historic and spiritual mission,” calls the West Bank “Judea and Samaria”—the same biblical terminology Huckabee deploys from Jerusalem—and rejects the term occupation. American dispensationalism and the Israeli settler project now share a single vocabulary. Scripture in Washington authorizes conquest in Jerusalem; conquest in Jerusalem confirms prophecy in Washington.

Weeks later, that convergence produced a diplomatic form. Trump and Netanyahu jointly announced a plan to end the genocide in Gaza. Trump had presented 21 points to Arab and Muslim leaders, who welcomed them. The announcement contained 20: the clause barring Israeli annexation of the West Bank had been removed. The final text conditions Palestinian relief on acceptance of the terms set out in Trump’s 2020 “Peace to Prosperity” plan: formal Palestinian recognition of Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people, and forfeiture of any claim to Jerusalem by accepting it as Israel’s sovereign, undivided capital. A plan to end a genocide demands as its preconditions what Scofield’s system identified as necessary for Christ’s Second Coming—the prophetic checklist and the diplomatic settlement now a single document.

The full weight of this arrangement falls, with historical precision, on Palestinian Christians. These communities—in Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Nazareth, Ramallah, Gaza—trace continuous lineage to the apostolic age. The moral grammar that made their dispossession legible as righteousness reproduced itself intact across four centuries and two continents. It kept working. The theology American officials invoke while endorsing that dispossession was worked out in a nineteenth-century English drawing room, disseminated by a convicted American fraudster backed by a Zionist financial network, and stamped with the authority of Oxford University Press. It claims biblical title over the land where the people it has helped destroy have worshipped, buried their dead, and raised their children for two thousand years—a people the world’s most powerful government now deems theologically irrelevant to the land they have never left.

Israel has bombed the Church of Saint Porphyrius in Gaza—the third-oldest church in the world—twice since October 2023. No senator who has cited Genesis 12:3 on the floor of Congress has entered the Church of Saint Porphyrius into the record.

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Several Western countries—including France, the UK, Canada, and Australia—plan to recognize a Palestinian state at the UN General Assembly in the coming days. While this is being celebrated as a breakthrough for Palestinian rights and a step toward justice, what is less examined are the conditions attached to this recognition: territorial demilitarization, governance reforms, and guarantees for Israel's security.

Western diplomatic endorsement offers Palestine the form of statehood while denying its substance, reducing it to a reservation where the colonized surrender liberation for the right to administer their own subjugation.

Demilitarization ensures Israel faces no resistance: Palestinians get a paper state stripped of defense, deemed "viable" only if it secures the very colonial order that dispossessed them. At the same time, colonial governance reforms install a Palestinian ruling class—disciplined, donor-dependent, and willing to enforce the occupation on Israel's behalf. In both, what is sacred is the colonizer's security, and what is forbidden is the colonized's right to defend themselves.

Most revealing of these conditions is France's omission of the Palestinian right of return. This exclusion stems from demographic reality: Jews were never a majority in historic Palestine. Even today, Palestinians remain the majority between the river and the sea, with just as many living in forced exile. A Palestinian state defined by Israeli security cannot allow millions of refugees to come home. Their return would present a "demographic threat" to the state and would decisively strip Israel of its claim to be both Jewish and democratic. Recognition therefore excludes return, making "statehood" not a remedy but the permanent formalization of the Nakba.

Taken together, these conditions construct a colonial protectorate designed to contain the Palestinian struggle for liberation while serving colonial interests. Palestinians would control neither borders, currency, nor resources. No real economy could develop—only aid dependency and engineered underdevelopment.

Self-determination would be reduced to population control and administrative management while decisive power remains with Israel. Palestinian society would be managed through security coordination, denied prosperity and the right to shape its own future. Sustaining such a protectorate requires local intermediaries, and the Palestinian Authority provides the model: a collaborator regime installed to give the illusion of self-governance while legitimizing occupation.

Such arrangements embody the containment approach to colonial control, but this is only one design. While Europe tries to co-opt demands for liberation through managed partition, America backs Israel's annexationist drive to expand settlements and forcibly expel Palestinians. Edward Said captured this settler-colonial logic: "Put them in reservations or just exterminate them."

Europe is moving to fix Israeli sovereignty at the 1967 borders, offering Palestinians a demilitarized pseudo-state on the remaining 22% of historic Palestine. This follows the liberal Zionist formula: a dependent reservation, aid-managed and controlled through security coordination. The goal is securing the spoils of 1948 while placating European publics outraged by the genocide in Gaza.

For Israel's right, even European containment proves inadequate. Settler-colonial logic demands not only territorial domination but the complete removal of Palestinians from all of historic Palestine. The U.S. sustains this drive, backing annexationist designs that demand total territorial and demographic control. Washington bankrolls and shields expansion and expulsion, while America's Christian right sanctifies ethnic cleansing as a biblical precondition for the Second Coming of Christ.

To advance this project, Israel has accelerated settlement construction in the West Bank to render the 1967 borders futile before any symbolic Palestinian state can take shape, treating Europe's "managed decolonization" as an obstacle rather than a solution. But Israel's furious annexations—its rush to seize more land—are not a display of strength but of panic, the reflex of a colonial project that senses its impunity slipping.

This frantic response—including threats to punish states that recognize Palestine—shows that Israel and the U.S. are aligned against Europe, effectively splitting the West. Palestinians can exploit this dynamic, but understanding why this is such a polarizing issue requires examining what Palestinian statehood means to each side's agenda. This analysis reveals that statehood under these conditions is a fiction—a fiction that carries two truths at once.

On the one hand, recognition is a trap because a Palestinian state on the 1967 borders cements the loss of everything stolen in 1948, abandoning the right to justice for the Nakba. A state on these terms forfeits the right of return, consigns Palestine to dependence, and reduces liberation to administrative management under Israeli supremacy.

On the other hand, recognition is also a step forward. For decades, the U.S. and Israel have dictated that Palestine does not exist politically—only a "disputed territory" with no right to statehood. Granting political status, even with conditions, breaks that frame. It affirms Palestine as a state with rights under international law: territorial integrity, treaty membership, and recourse to international courts. It strengthens Palestinian cases by defining them as state-to-state violations rather than "internal disputes," and it gives endorsing states grounds to treat Israel as an occupier of another sovereign state—the legal and moral basis for sanctions.

Coming from close Western allies, this acknowledgment signals that Israel is losing the narrative in the very capitals it depends on. Israel and the U.S. fight it so fiercely because they know even symbolic statehood, however compromised, builds momentum and chips away at Israel's global legitimacy. It undermines their regime of perpetual occupation. This shift in global discourse is not liberation, but it's not meaningless.

It matters because Zionism thrives on global legitimacy. When Western allies begin to challenge Israel's absolute impunity, its moral cover thins. The significance lies not in the illusion of statehood on the ground but in the fractures recognition exposes in the international order: between Europe and the U.S., between law and power, between Israel's image and its colonial reality.

This brings us to the U.S. veto paradox. The colonial containment formula Europe is advancing is intended to be Israel's escape route from accountability for the genocide in Gaza, a device that rewards mass killing with the fabrication of a pseudo-state. But Europe's plan requires UN backing to deliver the complete formula. Yet the U.S. veto is automatic, the last line of defense for Israel. By blocking Palestine's UN membership, the veto prevents Europe from implementing the complete containment strategy while failing to stop bilateral recognition.

The veto can deny Palestine a seat at the UN, but it cannot prevent states from recognizing it and treating Israel as an occupier—grounds for banning products made in Israeli settlements, halting arms sales, and suspending trade. The result is paradoxical: by trying to sustain Israeli expansion, the veto blocks the diplomatic cover Europe offers while enabling the recognition that opens Israel to sanctions. There is no victory here for Palestinians; recognition does not restore sovereignty or reverse dispossession. But the process—Europe breaking with the U.S., Israel exposing its settler-colonial nature in its raw form—matters because it accelerates the unraveling of the old order.

700 days.
10,000 martyrs in the last 100 days.
No less than 64,000 Palestinians killed.

The genocide continues.

The International Association of Genocide Scholars declared Israel's actions in Gaza a genocide.
Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, UN experts, and B’Tselem all say the same.

Palestinians knew it all along.

They screamed it into your phones, into your homes.

And still, the world chose not to hear.

Nothing is real until the West names it. That is hegemony.

And still the genocide continues.

Five times Hamas agreed to ceasefire proposals.
Five times Israel chose genocide instead.
Five times the United States vetoed at the UN—blocking ceasefires, blocking aid.

Israel broke the last ceasefire on March 18. Since then, 11,768 Palestinians have lost their lives.

83% of Gaza’s martyrs are civilians—five out of six.
Even the “most moral army in the world” admits this in its intelligence files.

More than 64,300 Palestinians killed as of day 700.
Most of them women and children.
20,000 children killed—one classroom of children slaughtered every day.

These numbers are not abstractions. They are lives ended, families destroyed, histories broken.

95% of Gaza’s schools lie in ruins.
For the third year in a row, Gaza’s children will not attend school.

To destroy education and obliterate culture, to kill or scar the children who carry both forward—this is colonialism. This is how you exterminate a people.

No hospital in Gaza is fully functioning.
1,670 medics killed.
139 civil defense workers killed.
780 aid security staff killed.

Those who heal, those who rescue, those who safeguard aid and civil life—eliminated to make Gaza unlivable.

At Nasser Hospital, even journalists were targeted live on-air.
Five killed on location.
Another 270 hunted down since the start of the deadliest war for media workers in modern history.

Colonialism kills not only the victim but the witness. Because images of mutilation and starvation undo the Western myth that Arabs are barbaric and the West is civilized.

A child starves to death every day and a half in Gaza.
373 lives stolen by starvation—134 of them children.

The IPC confirmed famine in Gaza—the first ever declared in the Middle East. Entirely man-made.
Meanwhile, Israel wages a $45 million ad campaign built on the slogan: "There is food in Gaza. Any other claim is a lie.”

Under pressure, Israel and the United States launched the Gaza Humanitarian Fund—a scheme run by private contractors at sites the UN calls “death traps” and “militarized humanitarian assistance.”

Aid lines became killing grounds after May 27.
2,362 killed.
17,434 wounded.
45 missing.

Twice as many Palestinians massacred queuing for food as Israelis killed on October 7.
1,034 killed in the occupied West Bank—including 210 children.

This is not about October 7. This is not about Hamas.

Netanyahu never hid the nature of this war.
A war of fundamentalist fantasy drawn from biblical stories.

For Netanyahu, Gaza is Amalek—an invocation of biblical annihilation to justify ethnic cleansing.

A supremacist Jewish state demands a Palestine cleansed of Palestinians.

This is what “self-determination” for settlers really means.
This is what Israel’s “right to exist” looks like.
This is what “never again” enables.

Paint and Concrete, Gaza — by Norman Harman (@NorrieHarman)

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Each time Palestinian resistance factions have accepted a ceasefire proposal since this war began—in May 2024, in March 2025, in July 2025, and again now—Israel has responded by treating Palestinian compliance as confirmation of a strategy rather than as an opening toward settlement. Hamas’s acceptance of the latest proposal has been answered with the announcement of Operation Gideon’s Chariots 2, a ground offensive aimed at occupying Gaza City, and with Netanyahu’s declaration that negotiations may continue—to secure the release of captives, on terms, as he has stated, “acceptable to Israel.” The acceptance, in other words, changes nothing. The killing continues.

What makes this legible as doctrine—and removes it from the category of circumstantial opportunism or governmental improvisation—is that its logic was stated with complete candor more than a century ago. In 1923, Ze’ev Jabotinsky—the founder of Revisionist Zionism, whose political inheritance Netanyahu’s movement has always claimed—wrote with frankness about what Zionist colonization required: “Every native population in the world resists colonists as long as it has the slightest hope of being able to rid itself of the danger of being colonized.” The lesson he drew was that hope itself had to be destroyed.

His iron wall doctrine stipulated that Zionists must refuse all compromise and enforce submission through sustained mass violence, until Palestinians, having exhausted every prospect of removing the colonizers, would surrender to terms acceptable to the colonial project. Only then, Jabotinsky wrote, would “extreme groups lose their belief, and the influence transfer to moderate groups”—moderate meaning, in this usage, those prepared to accept whatever remained after dispossession had run its course.

Each Hamas acceptance is therefore read within Israeli strategic calculation as evidence that the killing yields results, and that further killing will yield further compliance. The ideological genealogy of this policy has never been concealed: Benjamin Netanyahu’s father, Benzion, served as Jabotinsky’s personal secretary, and the political movement Netanyahu has led has always declared Revisionist Zionism as its inheritance. Reducing Gaza to rubble, occupying its cities, driving its people toward the sea—these are the policy itself, fully continuous with what the iron wall has always demanded. Any arrangement that leaves Palestinians on their land with the capacity to resist sustains precisely the hope the doctrine requires be extinguished, and any agreement short of total submission is, within this doctrine, a problem to be corrected by further violence.

Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s National Security Minister and the most openly eliminationist member of Netanyahu’s governing coalition, resigned when the January ceasefire was signed and returned the day the killing resumed on March 18. The coalition’s survival and the genocide’s continuation are not parallel interests—they are the same interest, expressed through the same minister’s movements. The genocide is at once a war aim and an instrument of Netanyahu’s political survival.

The mechanisms nominally available to constrain this—Arab state mediation, UN resolutions, international ceasefire arrangements—have been absorbed into a structure of managed impunity that produces neither accountability nor interruption. Since March 18, more than 10,500 Palestinians have been killed; Arab states have neither withdrawn their ambassadors nor suspended normalization, nor closed their airspace to Israeli traffic, nor done anything that would register as consequence. International sanctions have not materialized, and the killing has continued without sustained documentation in the press of the countries that supply the weapons and the diplomatic protection that make it possible. The mechanisms exist; they have simply been made to coexist with the genocide they are supposed to prevent.

What the present moment lays bare is a precise account of why every path offered to Palestinians leads to the same destination. Had Hamas rejected the mediators’ proposal, that refusal would have dominated international coverage as confirmation of a formula that has served since 1948: that Palestinians are by nature intransigent, responsible for what is done to them. Having accepted, they watch the genocide continue uncontested, their compliance passing through the international system without consequence, acknowledgment, or accountability. Acceptance is met with indifference; refusal with condemnation; every position in the architecture serves the completion of the same colonial project. Jabotinsky described this logic with complete candor in 1923. What has changed is the scale of the arsenal available to enforce this doctrine and the character of the international silence surrounding it—which should be recognized for what it is: active, deliberate consent, constructed over decades by the same states whose weapons make the genocide possible.

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The Arcade War Machine — by Norman Harman (@NorrieHarman)

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Europe spent centuries perfecting the art of colonial violence—in the Americas, in Africa, in Asia. It wielded this barbarism and called it “civilization.” It was only when those same methods—racial hierarchy, ghettoization, extermination—returned home under the banner of Nazism that Europe recoiled. But its horror was selective, and after a brief pause, those methods found new sponsors for export.

Zionism became that sponsor through a process of colonial reversal—where claims of seeking refuge became the cover for adopting the oppressor’s methods. In fleeing the ghettos and death camps of Europe, Zionism absorbed the racial hierarchies and settler-colonial ethos of the West, becoming a project of domination and ethnic cleansing.

Mobilizing Jewish trauma as ideological fuel, victims became colonizers. The project was new, but the myths that served as justification stayed the same: spreading civilization, making the desert bloom, fulfilling divine destiny—only now backed by Western guilt and Christian Zionist fervor.

The result was a racial state based on religious supremacy, eventually enshrined in Israel’s 2018 Nation-State Law: the right to national self-determination is unique to the Jewish people. Two tiers of humanity, codified in law. The structure mirrors Nazi racial laws—legal supremacy for the chosen group, legal subordination for all others.

But the similarities run even deeper. Zionism resurrected the logic of Lebensraum—or space to live—a term used by the Nazis to justify expanding eastward by displacing or exterminating native populations to make room for the so-called master race. Under Zionism, the logic stayed identical: seize land for the chosen people, expel Palestinians. The myth of eternal Jewish victimhood provided the narrative that turned historical suffering into pretext for permanent aggression.

Zionism learned the wrong lessons from the Holocaust. When Israel now imprisons, starves, and exterminates Palestinians, it does so with impunity enabled by Western guilt and moral cover—not because it forgot the Holocaust, but because it absorbed Nazi methods while appropriating the Holocaust’s moral authority.

The resemblance is undeniable. Proposals to deport Palestinians to Egypt and Arab countries echo the Madagascar Plan. Images of starving children in Gaza evoke the concentration camps. The language used to describe Palestinians—human animals, cockroaches, beasts walking on two legs—mirrors Nazi discourse.

Dehumanizing language enables violence. Bombing, starvation, and displacement become routine once targets are rendered subhuman. Genocide follows naturally. The template remains unchanged.

The methods simply alternate. When he’s not employing Nazi discourse, Netanyahu, true to form, recites the colonial script: “This is a war between civilization and barbarism.” “We are the children of light,” he proclaims. But as Edward Said reminded us, the colonizer always projects barbarism onto the colonized. The colonizer kills—but always in the name of civilization, never conquest.

The colonial system has always created, and continues to create, its own rationales. In this case, if Palestinians resist, they prove they are security threats requiring neutralization. If they comply, they demonstrate that more pressure will achieve complete submission. If they exist, they occupy land the state requires. Their very presence becomes the threat that justifies their removal.

In 2017, Bezalel Smotrich—now Israel’s Finance Minister—laid out what would become a blueprint for official policy: his so-called “Decisive Plan,” offering Palestinians three options: leave the land, remain in Israel as second-class residents with no national rights, or resist. For those who remain, he insisted, “according to Jewish law, a certain inferiority must always exist.” For those who resist, he declared, “then the Israeli army will know what to do.” When pressed on whether this included killing families and children, Smotrich replied without hesitation, “war is war.”

Today, that same ideology guides the highest levels of Israeli power, where a far-right government openly enacts the logic of expulsion, subjugation, or extermination as state policy. It is no longer limited to rhetoric—it is now legislative. Last year, the Knesset passed a resolution explicitly rejecting the establishment of a Palestinian state anywhere in historic Palestine, “under any future political arrangement.” This month, it passed a vote declaring the West Bank “an inseparable part of the Land of Israel” and affirming Israeli sovereignty over even more of Palestine.

In practice, the implementation of these resolutions had already been underway—fully aligned with the colonial playbook: in the West Bank, settlement expansion; in Gaza, total destruction—annihilating its homes, neighborhoods, and infrastructure, and forcing mass exile.

But how does this settler-colonial regime metastasize, in this day and age? Through Western funding, media cover, and moral silence. The answer lies in how the West remembers—and how it forgets.

There is no remembrance day for the 90 million Indigenous lives erased by European settlers across the Americas. None for the 10 million killed in the Congo under King Leopold. None for the 30 million who died in British-engineered famines in India. But for the West, there is Holocaust Remembrance Day—because this time, Europeans did to Europeans what they had long done to the rest of the world.

We are reminded of it daily, even as its logic is repeated—by those claiming to act in its name. The selective memory reveals a hierarchy of grief: when colonial violence targets the Global South, it disappears from consciousness. When it targets Europeans, it becomes the defining moral trauma of modernity.

The victims of yesterday have become the colonizers of today. That is the unspeakable truth. And the so-called civilized world funds it, shields it, and calls it peace.

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/redlightgreenlight — by Amadon (@amadon)

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What is unfolding in Gaza today follows the brutal logic of colonial underdevelopment. It represents the deliberate degradation of a people's capacity for survival and self-determination through colonial techniques perfected across centuries. Beyond becoming the theater where genocide plays out in real time, Gaza has also been transformed into a laboratory where engineered famine and the co-opting of education work in concert to achieve the complete negation of Palestinian survival as a people.

The Inversion of Sustenance

In March 2025, Israel imposed a siege on Gaza that lasted 11 weeks, blocking food, medicine, fuel, and basic supplies—even stopping UN aid deliveries. The blockade exacerbated an already dire humanitarian crisis, with UNICEF reporting that at least 66 children have died from starvation since the start of the genocide and an average of 112 children receive daily treatment for malnutrition.

In response to mounting international pressure surrounding the siege, Israeli and U.S. officials developed the Gaza Humanitarian Fund (GHF)—a controlled aid delivery system operated by private military contractors. But instead of providing humanitarian relief, the aid distribution sites operated by the GHF have become the scene of countless massacres. Described by UN officials as "death traps" and "militarized humanitarian assistance," these sites have recorded over 600 deaths and over 4,000 injuries since May 27.

These deaths were not a series of unfortunate events but the direct results of American mercenaries and the Israeli occupation army using indiscriminate force against civilians. Recent testimony published by Haaretz reveals Israeli soldiers received direct orders to open fire on unarmed civilians queuing for aid, with soldiers describing the locations as "killing fields" during their mission—informally dubbed "Operation Salted Fish"—where they used live ammunition, grenades, and mortars against crowds seeking food.

Meanwhile, American contractors working these sites told the Associated Press their colleagues fired live ammunition "in all directions" at Palestinians seeking food, with videos capturing guards celebrating—"Hell yeah, boy!"—after shooting into crowds.

The calculated nature of this approach is what makes it particularly devastating. Starvation is being wielded not as a consequence of war, but as a weapon of war. This is not a distribution mechanism designed to provide equitable access, protect the vulnerable, or ensure population survival—it's intended to crush the will of an entire people by turning their most basic human need into a death sentence.

When seeking food becomes lethal and pits the starving against each other, entire social structures collapse, trust in collective organization disintegrates, and children develop fundamentally altered relationships with safety and community.

The normalization of extreme violence around basic survival needs rewrites the social DNA of a society, embedding generational trauma that compounds across time—destroying the cultural foundations that allow communities to function, heal, and rebuild.

Destroying Tomorrow

For the second year in a row, high school students in Gaza were unable to sit for their final exams. The Israeli genocide has not only killed more than 16,600 students and wounded over 26,000 in Gaza and the West Bank since October 7, 2023—it has also deliberately targeted education in a campaign to dismantle Gaza's intellectual and cultural foundation.

Some 280 government schools and 65 UNRWA-run schools have been destroyed—part of the nearly 90% of Gaza’s educational infrastructure that has been damaged or demolished. As a result, 630,000 students are currently deprived of their right to education.

The story is no different at the higher levels of education. These institutions once preserved national memory, stood as pillars of future reconstruction, and nurtured a culture of self-reliance under siege, producing doctors, engineers, and professionals whose education was both a necessity and a form of resistance. Today, not a single university remains standing. Every single one has been obliterated.

The humanitarian impact extends far beyond these statistics: in January 2025, UNICEF reported that over 1 million Palestinian children in Gaza are in need of mental health and psychosocial support—and will carry the trauma of this genocide for the rest of their lives.

This is nothing short of a war on Palestinian minds—coordinated violence designed to traumatize and break an entire generation of children while simultaneously destroying their educational foundations. When Israel flattens universities, burns libraries, and turns classrooms into mass graves, it is not just Gaza's infrastructure being destroyed—it is the knowledge that sustains resistance, the culture that reinforces identity, and the children who carry both forward.

Like colonial projects before it, Zionism understands that severing the next generation from its roots is essential to destroying the Palestinian cause. Burn the books, kill the teachers, dismantle the native education system—and the memory of a nation fades. This reflects Ben-Gurion's core strategy of dispossession through generational amnesia—the belief that "the old will die and the young will forget." Robbed of agency and autonomy, an uneducated people can be more easily subjugated.

This targeting of an entire educational infrastructure is a central piece of the settler colonial puzzle.

The primary objective is to ethnically cleanse Gaza entirely. The so-called "Trump Plan" that Israel is working to implement calls for the transfer of Palestinians from Gaza into Egypt, and eventually from the West Bank into Jordan—and beyond. This would effectively erase Palestinian presence, claim, and continuity on the land.

Once displaced, these refugees face two dead ends: assimilation or dependency. In assimilation, they gradually adopt a new language and culture, becoming disconnected from their cause. In dependency, those who resist assimilation remain stateless and voiceless—fed and sheltered, but stripped of agency, dignity, and political relevance.

That’s where education comes in. Whatever Palestinians remain will be "de-radicalized" through domesticated education—education stripped of its empowering and liberating potential and perverted to tame and pacify. This domestication is designed to dehumanize and disfigure Palestinian consciousness, transforming education into a psychological weapon used to alienate Palestinians from their history and culture.

Negating Palestine

The weaponization of hunger and the corruption of education are not separate crises—they are complementary tools in a comprehensive architecture of erasure. When Palestinians are forced to risk death for flour, when mothers cannot find baby formula for their infants, when children develop trauma around basic survival, the Zionist intent becomes undeniable: there is no future for Palestinians in Palestine.

When mis-education distorts reality and history, turns Palestinians against their own heritage, and strips knowledge of its radical or transformative potential, the colonial project reaches completion.

This is the logic of settler colonialism perfected—starve the body, kill the mind, break the spirit. Those who survive the genocide and the famine will be too traumatized, too uneducated, too severed from their roots to mount organized resistance.

For 77 years, through an ongoing Nakba that continues to this day, the Palestinian cause has endured massacres, imprisonment, and exile—and grown more stubborn with each effort to crush it. Every generation of Palestinians has faced a new iteration of the same colonial doctrine: eliminate them, scatter them, subjugate them, and they will disappear.

Yet here we are, witnessing not Palestinian defeat but Palestinian persistence. Sumoud. Every child who survives this genocide joins a lineage of defiance that spans generations. You cannot kill an idea whose time has come.

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Living Room Extravaganza — by Norman Harman (@NorrieHarman)

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On June 13, Israel launched a surprise attack on Iran, with full military and political backing from the United States. The official justification was Iran's nuclear program—despite a lack of credible evidence that it posed any immediate threat or was being weaponized. The real objective was to collapse the Islamic Republic, fracture its leadership, and trigger regime change.

The opening Israeli strikes against Iranian military and nuclear targets were officially carried out under the codename Operation Rising Lion. The name was chosen for its layered symbolism. It references the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament), Numbers 23:24: "Behold, the people shall rise up as a great lion…"—a verse circulated by Israeli officials in the lead-up to the assault.

Netanyahu even placed a note inscribed with the verse at Al-Buraq Wall, which colonial narratives call the "Western Wall" or "Wailing Wall," framing the operation as divinely sanctioned.

The name also invoked Iran's own imperial imagery. Before the 1979 revolution, Iran's national emblem featured a lion and rising sun—the symbol of the Shah. By naming the operation Rising Lion, Israel was not just signaling military strength; it was also exploiting Iran's internal tensions—appealing to monarchist nostalgia and subtly casting the strike as a blow not just against the Islamic Republic, but in alignment with a different vision of Iranian identity.

The irony, of course, is that the Shah's regime was itself oppressive and undemocratic—installed through a U.S.-led coup in 1953 against the democratically elected Mohammad Mossadegh, whose crime was seeking to nationalize Iran's oil production.

Israeli and American planners seem to have believed that by decapitating Iran's military command and hitting key infrastructure, they could provoke unrest, weaken state cohesion, and unravel the government from within.

But Operation Rising Lion failed. The symbolism was bold. The targeting was precise. But the strategy unraveled. The Islamic Republic did not fall. The nuclear program survived. And despite temporary air superiority, Israel could not deliver regime change. The lion rose, roared—and recoiled.

Even with deep internal tensions, Iranians rallied around the flag in the face of external attack. The distinction between opposing those in power and defending the nation remained clear: when foreign forces strike, even government critics close ranks.

Beneath that unity, however, lies a fractured society—divided along ethnic, political, and generational lines. Over 60% of the population is under 35, many of whom are disillusioned by limited freedoms, a collapsing currency, chronic inflation, and high youth unemployment. The visible wealth of elites—especially those tied to the IRGC—intensifies public resentment.

But none of this internal discontent translated into collapse. On the contrary, the Israeli assault unified the population, at least temporarily—and Iran hit back.

Israel suffered notable retaliation. Though largely downplayed in U.S. media, Iranian ballistic missile strikes caused significant damage in Israel, particularly in Tel Aviv and Haifa—and placed mounting domestic and infrastructural strain. Trump himself acknowledged this, saying Israel was hit "very hard."

In the days that followed, the U.S. launched Operation Midnight Hammer, deploying B‑2 strategic bombers—aircraft originally built to penetrate deep Soviet defenses. According to Pentagon briefings, the planes took off from Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri, flew nearly 18 hours across continents, and dropped 14 GBU‑57 bunker-busters on the Fordow and Natanz facilities. Simultaneously, a U.S. Navy submarine in the Arabian Sea fired over two dozen Tomahawk cruise missiles at Isfahan. The bombers then refueled midair and flew back.

Aircraft carriers and aerial refueling tankers were positioned throughout the Arab region. The message from Washington was calibrated: demonstrate overwhelming capability, reassure allies, and avoid a ground war. But beneath that calibration was a threat. The strike was a preview—an unmistakable signal of what could come next. A show of force meant to compel capitulation without full-scale escalation.

The next day, Iran responded—not by escalating, but by signaling. It targeted the U.S. Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar, the largest American military installation in the region. But the strike came only after advance warnings were issued to both Qatari and American officials. Aircraft were evacuated. Airspace was cleared. No casualties occurred.

Iran could have struck U.S. naval assets in the Gulf or the Indian Ocean, but doing so would have triggered direct escalation. The message was measured: project power, but avoid war.

Iran wanted to de-escalate by showing it could expand the conflict—to disrupt oil flows through the Strait of Hormuz and destabilize the Gulf region—without crossing a red line. As with its response to Qassem Soleimani's assassination, it retaliated for optics, not escalation.

Iran’s choice of Qatar was no accident. Of all the Gulf states, Doha had the best chance of repairing ties with Tehran. Iran had supported Qatar during the Gulf blockade from 2017 to 2021, and that goodwill still matters. By striking Al Udeid, Iran demonstrated reach, without jeopardizing a relationship it could afford to salvage.

In the end, Israel couldn't afford a war it couldn't finish—and the U.S. seemed unwilling to stake its global standing on a fight it couldn't control.

From the American perspective, the pieces landed exactly where they were meant to. Trump is reaping the rewards of what he calls “negotiating through force.” He responded to Iran’s hardline stance in nuclear negotiations first by greenlighting Israel’s assault—then by stepping in directly.

He sees himself as setting a new rule for the region: if a side refuses to play ball, he'll pressure them through military force, then offer a ceasefire on his own terms. Trump claimed that both Israel and Iran asked him to broker the ceasefire. In practice, the U.S. remains firmly aligned with Israel—while keeping the door open for Iran to capitulate, either now or under renewed American pressure later.

From Israel’s perspective, the war had become untenable. Iranian missiles overwhelmed air defenses and struck deep into occupied Palestine, causing escalating physical, economic, and psychological damage. The state’s foundational promise—that it could protect its citizens while waging wars across multiple fronts—was no longer credible.

This revealed the fantasy Israeli society had been conditioned to believe: that war happened elsewhere, that the Iron Dome and American defenses would keep conflict at the borders. War was something to watch on television, not something to survive in bomb shelters.

The reality exposed Israel’s underlying vulnerabilities. As a settler population drawn from dozens of countries, many citizens still carry second passports—a population with options. The state’s cohesion depends on security, and its survival depends on perceived invincibility. In a prolonged crisis, emigration becomes a real possibility.

The financial cost was staggering. Losses are estimated between $11.5 billion and $17.8 billion, representing 2.1–3.3% of Israel’s $540 billion GDP. These figures include military expenditures, infrastructure damage, and the cost of intercepting Iranian missiles.

Israel’s high-tech sector—responsible for 64% of exports and a fifth of its GDP—suffered workforce shortages as thousands of reservists were pulled from critical roles. Business closures, suspended flights, and labor gaps in agriculture and construction compounded the strain.

Israel entered the war with three primary goals: destroy Iran's nuclear program, cripple its ballistic missile capabilities, and collapse the Islamic Republic. None were achieved.

Iran's nuclear infrastructure at Natanz, Fordow, and Isfahan may have been damaged—but not eliminated. Recent evidence suggests the damage was far less significant than claimed. Despite Israeli and American declarations of success, the program remains intact.

To make matters worse, Iran has now legally terminated all cooperation with the IAEA. UN surveillance cameras have been removed from all nuclear facilities.

Reports also indicate that Iran still possesses over 400 kilograms of uranium enriched to 60% purity. While below weapons-grade, that stockpile—if further enriched—could potentially yield 8 to 10 nuclear warheads within weeks.

Iran's missile forces also remained functional. Even in the final hours of the war, Iranian rockets continued to hit Israeli targets. As for regime change, it never materialized.

Without full U.S. involvement, the war risked turning into a grinding, protracted conflict. Despite the effectiveness of Israel's initial surprise assault and high-level decapitation strikes, it wasn't enough to bring down the government.

But Netanyahu did succeed in one regard: avoiding a war of attrition. He knew how deeply it terrifies Israelis—and how surely it would destroy him.

What ultimately made the war unsustainable from Iran’s perspective was Israel’s ability to establish air superiority and secure operational freedom for its air force.

On the surface, Iran’s response may have looked coordinated: swift replacement of commanders, sustained missile barrages, and carefully selected targets. But beneath that show of resolve was a state under immense internal strain. The war exposed vulnerabilities Iran had long managed to suppress—many now too visible to ignore.

In the first hours of the war, Iran lost several top military leaders, including the Chief of the General Staff, the Commander-in-Chief of the IRGC, the Commander of the IRGC Aerospace Force, and the head of its air defense division. The newly appointed head of the Khatam-Al-Anbiya Central Headquarters—a wartime command structure equivalent to a joint chiefs office—was also killed, along with his replacement just four days later.

In the days that followed, additional senior commanders were targeted and killed, including the Deputy Head of IRGC Intelligence, the Deputy Head of IRGC Strategic Operations, and other senior intelligence officials.

Just as alarming was the extent of internal infiltration exposed during the war. Authorities reported dismantling dozens of drone-launching cells and sabotage networks. Operatives and weapons were found across multiple provinces, and truckloads of smuggled UAVs were intercepted near major cities. Surveillance and communications systems were also found to be compromised. The surprise attack revealed not only external threats, but serious internal security vulnerabilities.

Regionally, the balance had shifted decisively against Iran over the past year—Lebanon, Syria, Iraq were no longer in its favor. Iran's original deterrence doctrine was based on forward defense—anchored by its regional allies. Hizb-Allah was the core of that defense. Iran entered this war in the worst possible condition: without the tools it had spent years building for such a confrontation.

A major IRGC Quds Force official—head of its Palestine Corps overseeing support for Hizb-Allah and Palestinian factions—was assassinated just days before the war ended. Known as Haj Ramadan, his real name was Mohammad Saeed Izadi.

His killing capped a systematic campaign against Iran's regional command. It began with Razi Mousavi, the Quds Force's logistics chief in Syria, killed in December 2023; followed by Brig. Gen. Mohammad Reza Zahedi, Quds commander for Syria and Lebanon, killed in the April 2024 strike on Iran's consulate in Damascus. The final blow came in June 2025, when Izadi was killed in Qom, dismantling the top tier of Iranian coordination for regional resistance.

Iran knew it had to stop the war and rebuild its fractured internal security system. With its defenses so thoroughly exposed, the American threat felt very real. That urgency is what pushed Iran to accept the ceasefire quickly.

Iranian airspace was dangerously vulnerable. Although government-affiliated media circulated unverifiable claims—such as bringing down F‑35s and capturing enemy pilots—no formal state statements confirmed these incidents, and there is no evidence they occurred or that Iran possesses such capabilities.

Despite managing to hit Israeli defense installations and sensitive infrastructure, Iran lost far more than it inflicted. Had the war continued, it risked becoming another Iraq scenario—facing the full weight of U.S. power and, like Saddam, losing everything in the end.

After the ceasefire, public celebrations broke out across Iran. Despite the casualties and damage, many saw it as a victory: the government had survived an Israeli-American attempt to bring it down, and they had applied enough pressure to force a halt in the fighting.

But it was only a ceasefire—no formal agreement, no conditions, no guarantees. The only official acknowledgment came in the form of a Truth Social post by Trump. Iranian officials confirmed that nothing had been signed, and that the pause in hostilities was only conditional on Israel doing the same.

Observers from AP, Reuters, and others described the ceasefire as fragile and informal—not underpinned by any binding framework. Given the lack of formal terms and mutual distrust, most analysts view it as a temporary pause—not a durable peace.

But while Iran celebrated survival and Trump claimed victory, Netanyahu had his own reading of the moment.

Netanyahu has been lobbying for military confrontation with Iran since 1996. It has defined his career. He has spent decades warning of Iran's nuclear ambitions, presenting himself as the only leader capable of stopping them. But for Netanyahu, Iran is not just a defining achievement of his political career—it's a lifeline.

There's a darker calculation beneath the surface: peace would be Netanyahu's undoing.

Absent war, calls for accountability grow louder—under international law, through internal judicial scrutiny, and over his failure to prevent the October 7 operation. Ending the war would bring renewed pressure: a corruption trial repeatedly delayed, a stalled judicial overhaul, and a fracturing coalition.

As long as the war continues, Netanyahu remains insulated. Emergency powers remain in place. Headlines focus on national security. Legal proceedings stall. Political opposition splinters. What threatens him most is the prospect of peace.

It was precisely this desperation that drove him to unprecedented candor following the ceasefire. In a televised interview with Kan News (Israel's public broadcaster), Netanyahu said, "After the establishment of Israel, we faced a unified Arab world—and we gradually fragmented it. We succeeded in dividing the Arabs, who had been united when the State of Israel was founded."

This quote was widely circulated because it so openly articulated what is usually left unsaid: Israel's long-term strategy deliberately aims to weaken and divide neighboring states to prevent coordinated opposition. Israel functions as a strategic outpost for global power, enforcing a regional order that keeps Arab and Muslim states disunited, dependent, and dysfunctional.

Since its creation, Israel has pursued a strategy of regional dominance built on four pillars: an ironclad alliance with the United States, exclusive nuclear weapons possession, the most advanced conventional military in the region, and the fragmentation, destabilization, or co-optation of rival states through the existential dependence of their despots on American power.

This strategy takes different forms across the region. For compliant neighbors like Egypt and Jordan, the method is economic dependency—heavy reliance on U.S. aid with clear conditions against challenging Israel. For resistant states like Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, and Iran, the goal is destroying state coherence through sanctions, warfare, and civil conflict, then blaming their instability on governance failures.

The doctrine remains constant, but the methods evolve. Trump saw the Iran war's aftermath as an opportunity to shift from military fragmentation to diplomatic management. But Netanyahu's need for endless war collided directly with this evolution.

Netanyahu required perpetual conflict for political survival; Trump needed this war to end to launch a grander hegemonic project. Same imperial goals, incompatible timelines—creating an irreconcilable contradiction. For now, Trump's timeline prevailed.

After the ceasefire, Netanyahu didn't speak of reconciliation. He said the war "made Israel a great power." It wasn't a declaration of peace—it was a declaration of entitlement to maintain unchecked regional dominance.

Trump sees this moment differently. He has stated he wants to "start loading up" the Abraham Accords by bringing in more "moderate" Arab nations, even suggesting that Iran could have joined, while simultaneously calling Iran "the primary problem." His broader strategy emphasizes expanding the circle of Arab-Israeli normalization and erecting a stronger regional bulwark against Iran.

He has also floated dramatic proposals for Gaza—such as U.S. control and relocating Palestinians. The colonial logic becomes clear in his regional envoy's words: "Peace in the region means a better life for the Palestinians. A better life is not necessarily tied to the physical space that you are in today," Steve Witkoff told the Times of Israel—colonial speak for ethnic cleansing.

Reinforcing this vision, Witkoff said, "We think we're going to have some pretty big announcements on countries that are coming into the Abraham Peace Accords… maybe people would never have contemplated," underscoring the ambition to normalize the Israeli annexation of Palestine on a regional scale.

This is not a region at peace, but a pacified Arab region carved into zones of cooperation and containment—isolated, surveilled buffer zones and trade corridors managed from Tel Aviv. Enforced by regional collaborators. A gated region where security flows upward and repression trickles down, where Israel and its allies dictate the flow of movement, money, and memory.

The most dangerous colonialism is the kind that calls itself reform. The Abraham Accords are exactly that: a colonial contract—imposed without popular consent, disguised in diplomacy, and enforced by those who traded their people's dignity for a seat at the table of their own subjugation.

This colonial contract succeeds because it builds on decades of carefully constructed narrative warfare. For years, U.S. and Israeli strategists have relied on narrative architecture as much as airstrikes. Iran vs. Arabs. Sunni vs. Shia. Moderates vs. Radicals. Each false binary crafted to fracture regional solidarity and obscure the nature of the conflict.

In Arab capitals, these narratives took hold. Gulf-aligned media parroted official lines. Think tanks warned of Iranian expansion while ignoring occupation. Palestinian liberation was reframed as sectarian agitation—or dismissed as foreign interference. Normalization was sold not as betrayal, but as protection. Collaboration with Israel became the price of stability.

Arab regimes offered only performative condemnation throughout the Gaza genocide, their calculus unchanged: stability at the top mattered more than legitimacy at the bottom.

To achieve this, Trump has openly intervened in Netanyahu's corruption trial, using U.S. military aid as leverage and demanding the case be dropped or pardoned—framing it as a political witch hunt and threatening to withhold billions in aid if Israel doesn't comply.

He has actively positioned himself as Netanyahu's defender—amplifying his image, shielding him from prosecution, and using Netanyahu's legal troubles to pressure him into ending the war on Gaza and advancing the Abraham Accords. The wider political price Netanyahu will have to pay for ending the Gaza war remains unknown—regardless of whether his trials are suspended, quietly dropped, or simply delayed indefinitely.

But Trump's pressure hasn't worked yet. Netanyahu—true to form—deflects, lies, and procrastinates. He clings to negotiation terms designed not to end the violence, but to prolong the genocide. His political survival still depends on permanent crisis until the goal of ethnically cleansing Gaza is achieved, and then he can focus on the West Bank, creating a fundamental contradiction with Trump's timeline.

The historical precedents driving both of them are clear. Trump wants his Obama moment—a Nobel Peace Prize won through regional dealmaking, regardless of substance. Netanyahu is haunted by what happened to Ehud Olmert—a political death sentence for ending the 2006 Lebanon War without victory, leaving Hizb-Allah intact and his career in ruins. These parallel obsessions explain why Trump pushes for any ceasefire he can brand as success, while Netanyahu demands total Palestinian elimination before considering any deal.

The standoff is playing out through careful diplomatic choreography. Netanyahu has dispatched Ron Dermer, his Strategic Affairs Minister and closest confidant, to meet with Witkoff. Netanyahu himself is scheduled to visit the White House in the coming days—most likely to conclude the direction of this high-stakes bargain. The mechanisms of leverage and obstruction are converging toward a decisive moment.

But beneath the diplomatic theater, the reality remains unchanged. Blood continues to be spilled, massacres carried out, and systematic starvation inflicted on over two million people.

A clear consensus extends beyond Washington and Tel Aviv to the palaces of Arab capitals: explicit agreements and unspoken understandings around a single goal—eliminating the resistance in Gaza, even if it means committing genocide against an entire people.

Missing from this entire framework is the voice of those it schemes to control.

Palestinians reject this colonial vision entirely. The renewed Abraham Accords propose installing a technocratic government in Gaza—one approved by the U.S., Israel, and their Arab partners—while excluding any faction they disapprove of. They call it stability. What they really want is to bypass Palestinian democratic will, erase political diversity, and handpick a leadership that poses no threat to Israeli dominance.

The Palestinian national fabric includes all Palestinians—no one has the right to exclude anyone. If fascists like Smotrich and Ben-Gvir can participate in Israel's democracy, why are Palestinians told who they can and can't elect? Why is every other nation allowed to decide its future—except Palestinians?

The renewed Abraham Accords may offer normalization for regimes, but for Palestinians, they offer humiliation. Palestinians will not accept a future imposed from the outside. We demand the right to choose, to resist domination, and to shape our destiny on our own terms. Palestinians have the right to be equal to other peoples of the world. And Palestinians—especially the youth of today—will not accept to be enslaved under any circumstances: not by the Occupation, not by the racist apartheid regime, and not by American dictates.

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Portrait of Yahya Sinwar, The Legacy of Resistance — by La Vaun Yonqui (@la_vaun)

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1987 was not the first Palestinian intifada. Before the Stone Intifada was the Great Palestinian Revolt of 1936—three years of armed resistance against British colonial rule and the Zionist settler project it funded, armed, and protected. The revolt ended with the British White Paper of 1939, which promised limits on Jewish immigration and Palestinian independence within a decade, and with the confiscation of more than thirteen thousand Palestinian weapons, while the same mandatory power kept arming the Haganah and the Jewish Settlement Police. Nine years later, stripped of weapons and promised a state, Palestinians received instead the Nakba.

Trump’s plan calls for the demilitarization of Gaza. It also calls for the transfer of Palestinians to other countries. In Palestine, these two demands have never arrived separately, and they have always arrived in that order—disarmament comes first, and transfer follows through the vacuum it creates.

The design did not originate with Trump. Theodor Herzl, the founder of modern political Zionism, described transfer in 1895, proposing to “spirit the penniless population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries, while denying it any employment in our own country”—departure engineered through economic pressure, executed, in his own words, “discreetly and circumspectly.” By 1937, when the British Peel Commission proposed partition and recommended the forced removal of Palestinians from the territory designated for a Jewish state, David Ben-Gurion, chairman of the Jewish Agency and the architect of what would become the Israeli state, wrote: “We must assist in this transfer. We must insist on this point.” The design has not changed since.

In June 1982, Israel invaded Lebanon. Ariel Sharon, then Defense Minister, designed the operation to destroy the PLO, which had built its political and military infrastructure in West Beirut over the preceding decade. After months of siege and the systematic bombardment of civilian neighborhoods, the United States brokered an evacuation agreement: PLO fighters would leave Lebanon, and in exchange, explicit American guarantees would protect the Palestinian civilians remaining behind. Philip Habib, President Reagan’s special envoy and the American official who negotiated the evacuation’s terms, delivered those guarantees personally. Weeks later, the Phalangists—the Lebanese Christian right-wing militia that had fought alongside Israel throughout the invasion—entered Sabra and Shatila and massacred up to thirty-five hundred Palestinian refugees while Israeli forces controlled the perimeter and lit the night with flares. The guarantors did not intervene. The guarantee had secured departure. The massacre it was meant to prevent came anyway.

After the Oslo Accords in 1993, the PLO criminalized Palestinian resistance as Israeli settlement accelerated. The settler population grew from a hundred and ten thousand to nearly a million. But the figures miss what Oslo was. It was the moment the Palestinian leadership recognized Israel and received no recognition of a Palestinian state in return—trading the single instrument of pressure they possessed for a process Israel was never required to complete and never did.

The Palestinian Authority that emerged from Oslo managed the population of an occupation while the occupation expanded around it, made responsible for Israel’s security while Israel remained responsible for nothing, collecting taxes for a sovereignty it did not possess and policing a people whose dispossession it had agreed not to contest—arresting, in some cases at Israel’s direction, the same men and women who had sustained the intifada. Disarmament was offered in the name of the Peace Process, and the Peace Process delivered what its authors designed it to deliver: Israeli control of land, water, borders, and movement, ratified and enforced by Palestinian hands.

The language changes with the decade. Pacification. Security guarantees. The Peace Process. Demilitarization. The demand beneath the language does not. In each iteration: an armed Palestinian presence, a negotiated or coerced disarmament offered as the condition for something better, and then the something better that never arrives—replaced by the assault the disarmament made possible.

Hamas has said it will relinquish governance of Gaza—that another Palestinian body may administer civilian life there. What it will not do is disarm. Palestinians draw this distinction from the lessons of 1936, of Beirut, of Oslo. A disarmed population is a population subject to whatever its disarmers decide to do with it. A century of evidence has made the disarmers’ intentions sufficiently plain; no further demonstration is required. Ghassan Kanafani identified the structure in 1972: the local reactionary leadership, the surrounding Arab regimes, and the imperialist-Zionist alliance. The three enemies have not changed. What changes, in each iteration, is the combination in which they operate and the Palestinian community they fall upon.

To demand disarmament now—as Israel starves Gaza, displaces its population, destroys its infrastructure, and, week by week, tightens the pressure to cross into Egypt—is to demand the removal of the one obstacle standing between what is happening and its completion. Gaza will not be emptied with weapons in it. Every Palestinian who lived through 1948, or was born into its aftermath, or carries in their family the memory of a village that no longer exists on any map the Israeli state will acknowledge, understands why the weapons must go first. What Trump calls the condition of peace is the condition of expulsion.

The weapons are evidence that someone is still present, still counting, still refusing to be spirited across the border discreetly and circumspectly.

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Over 100,000 tons of bombs dropped on Gaza. More than Dresden, Hamburg, and London combined during World War II.

92% of homes damaged or destroyed.

More than 1.9 million displaced, many forced to flee multiple times.

The UN estimates 42 million tons of debris cover Gaza. Clearing and rebuilding could take 80 years and cost over $80 billion.

This is not war. This is annihilation. This is genocide.

More than 12,000 massacres.

At least 54,000 Palestinians killed, including 16,850 children.

Over 2,200 entire families completely exterminated.

Over 10,000 people missing or buried under rubble.

Over 25,000 children orphaned.

The ICC has issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant for war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Genocide charges are being pursued at the ICJ, backed by UN reports documenting the use of starvation, the targeting of medics, and the systematic destruction of civilian life.

95% of Gaza's schools damaged or destroyed.

What's left of a society when its fabric has been systematically unraveled?

9 out of 10 children are malnourished.

96% of Gaza's population faces food shortages, 95% of agricultural land unusable.

90% of Gaza's population has no access to safe drinking water.

Famine is imminent. Children are dying from hunger and dehydration.

The WHO reported that 57 children died of malnutrition in just the first two months of renewed aid blockade in 2025.

The Lancet estimates actual death toll may exceed 186,000—including deaths from destroyed hospitals, contaminated water, starvation, and disease.

No hospital in Gaza is fully functioning. None.

More than 500 aid workers, including 315 UNRWA staff, killed.

More than 230 journalists killed—the deadliest conflict for media workers in modern history.

600 days. The evidence is overwhelming. The intent is clear.

Amnesty International has directly accused Israel of genocide; Human Rights Watch has documented widespread war crimes and supported the ICJ case.

Yet Western governments continue shipping weapons. The UN Security Council remains paralyzed by vetoes. Media outlets still debate whether this constitutes genocide while we watch limbs blown off starved children in real time.

We have heard the children's cries muffled from under the rubble. We have seen them walk through fire. Literally.

The international system has failed completely. Rubble, famine, and ethnic cleansing are not unfortunate byproducts—they are the intended result.

Every government that enabled this bears responsibility. Every institution that failed to act is complicit. Every delay, every veto, every shipment of arms has Palestinian blood on it.

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The Grand Workshop of Archaeological Illusions — by La Vaun Yonqui (@la_vaun)

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In 1838, an American Protestant theologian named Edward Robinson traveled to Palestine with a Bible, a list of Arabic place names, and a conviction that the two belonged to each other. He was not an archeologist. He did not excavate. He walked the land with his interpreter, Eli Smith, listened to Palestinians name their villages, and declared that beneath those names lay the lost geography of the Old Testament. Jeba was Gibeon. Beisan was Beth-shan. Lubya was Lavi. The method was phonetic. The premise was theological. The output, published in 1841 as Biblical Researches in Palestine, founded a discipline. It authorized a way of reading the land in which its present inhabitants became incidental to a scriptural past that overruled them.

Robinson’s move was methodological in form and foundational in effect. He assumed the scriptural account and built a scholarly apparatus to confirm it. The Hebrew scriptures became the map, Palestine the territory the map described, and fieldwork the process of matching one to the other. Contradictory evidence became a problem of interpretation. Regardless of the outcome, the premise held.

When the archeologist William F. Albright arrived in Palestine in 1919, he took Robinson’s framework and made it institutional. Biblical archeology took shape as a discipline organized around a prior certainty: the scriptural narrative was historically reliable unless proven otherwise, and excavation existed to verify it. The burden of proof ran one way. A scholar entered the field already certain that Joshua had conquered Jericho, and spent his career locating the evidence. The text set the questions. Excavation supplied the answers. When the answers did not arrive, the questions were rephrased.

This produced confirmation by assignment. A destruction layer became Joshua’s conquest because Joshua was supposed to have conquered there. A gate complex at Megiddo became Solomon’s because Solomon was supposed to have built there. Chronology ran backward from text to soil. The premise was never the variable.

Generations of American and Israeli archeologists trained in this framework fanned out across the land with trowels and scriptural concordances, searching for Joshua’s walls, David’s palaces, Solomon’s stables, the trail of the Exodus through Sinai. The discipline was funded, credentialed, and entrenched in university departments from Johns Hopkins University to Hebrew University of Jerusalem. And then it started digging, and site by site, decade by decade, the evidence it unearthed destroyed the premise it had been built to confirm.

The First Temple is the clearest case. It is the structure around which the scriptural account of Jerusalem is organized, the axis on which the modern claim to the city turns, the foundation stone of a political architecture that has needed, for a century and a half, a Solomonic predecessor to rest on. Solomon built it. Nebuchadnezzar destroyed it. Its site, we are told, lies beneath Qubbat As-Sakhra, the Dome of the Rock. Still, the archeological record yields none of this. Excavations around Al-Haram Al-Sharif—the compound the Zionist discourse renames Temple Mount, after a building the ground has never produced—have been conducted repeatedly through the twentieth century under conditions as permissive as any archeologist could demand, politically welcomed and institutionally backed. They have yielded, from the tenth century BCE, no foundation course, no dressed ashlar, no cultic deposit, no fragment of the bronze and cedar the text describes in its long inventories of craftsmanship. The building is not in the ground.

Shlomo Sand, an Israeli historian writing from inside the scholarly apparatus constructed to find what is not there, has stated the finding plainly: “Unfortunately, we have no archeological evidence of the existence of a First Temple.” The absence itself is the evidence. No further season of excavation will supply what a century of excavation has not. The pillar on which the claim to the city rests was never quarried, never placed, never there.

David’s capital, Solomon’s empire, the united monarchy’s regional power—excavations across Jerusalem have produced no monumental architecture, no palace, no administrative complex, no wall at the scale the text requires. The structures at Tell el-Mutesellim and Tell Jezer—rendered in the archeological literature as Megiddo and Gezer and long attributed to Solomon’s building program—were redated by later archeologists to the ninth century BCE, generations after the reign the text assigns him. At the Davidic stratum, the ground discloses a small highland settlement. The imperial capital does not arrive. Israel Finkelstein, working from within Israeli archeology itself, has described the united monarchy as, at most, a modest chiefdom in the hills. Sand’s own summary of the same stratum is that Jerusalem was, at most, a “fortified stronghold.” The kingdom the text builds into an empire does not rise from the soil.

Kathleen Kenyon’s excavations at Tell es-Sultan—the site the archeological literature calls Jericho—demonstrated in the 1950s that the city’s walls had collapsed centuries before Joshua’s arrival in the text. Et-Tell, rendered as Ai and made the second city of the conquest narrative, stood abandoned during the period the invasion was said to occur. At Tell el-Qedah, which the literature calls Hazor, the destruction layer Yigael Yadin first read as Joshua’s proved, under later dating, to belong to a wholly different period. Surveys across the hill country disclose the opposite of conquest: continuity. The settlements the text would later gather under the name Israelite emerged from within the local population. No army descended from outside. The conquest the text narrates left no conquered to find.

Egyptian administrative records—scrupulous in their accounting of labor, population, grain, and military movement—contain no entry for a mass departure of enslaved Israelites. Archeological survey of the Sinai, where a population of the size the text describes would have scattered, across forty years, pottery and refuse and burial ground and hearth, has returned none of it. Sand, again, wrote:

Yet there is not a single mention of any “Children of Israel” who lived in Egypt, or rebelled against it, or emigrated from it at any time ... No traces have been found in the Sinai desert of any significant movement of population through it during the said period.

The people the text brings into the land from outside never departed the place the text brings them from. There was no outside. There was no arrival. The origin was a composition.

The scholarship had invented its subject. Philip Davies, Professor of Biblical Studies at the University of Sheffield, had named what the discipline was studying: not the Israel of the Bible, not the Israel of history, but a third entity the discipline had invented by mistaking its own reading of the text for evidence of a past. Davies wrote:

It owes everything to Bible reading, nothing to critical reflection, and very little indeed to historical research.

The discipline had invented what it claimed to study and had kept on inventing it, because without the invention the scholarship had no subject.

Keith W. Whitelam, a biblical scholar, named what the invention accomplished. Opening The Invention of Ancient Israel: The Silencing of Palestinian History with the premise the discipline had spent a century refusing to say out loud—”the construction of history, written or oral, past or present, is a political act”—Whitelam extended Davies’s case into a prosecution. Writing in 1996 from within British biblical scholarship, he argued that the discipline had produced, under the authority of Western universities and the institutional prestige of the humanities, a fiction that served a specific political function, and the fiction required the erasure of a specific people.

The erasure was structural. Whitelam frames the arrangement as a paradox: ancient Israel given substance and power as a scholarly construct while Palestinian history, within the same institutions, is given neither substance nor existence. A discipline that produces one people’s past as substance and another people’s past as absence has, in the production itself, taken a political position. Biblical studies dispossesses on the page; the state dispossesses on the ground. The two are the same act with two instruments. The Palestinians, stripped of history by the discipline, are stripped of existence by the state that followed. The whole enterprise, presented to the world as objective scholarship, is bound to the political narrative the state requires—the narrative of a land that was empty and barren until Zionism “made it bloom.”

In October 1999, Ze’ev Herzog—professor of archeology at Tel Aviv University, later director of the Institute of Archeology there—published an article in Haaretz titled Deconstructing the Walls of Jericho. Herzog’s opening sentence delivered what Sand had named from the excavations and Davies had named of the discipline:

This is what archeologists have learned from their excavations in the Land of Israel: the Israelites were never in Egypt, did not wander in the desert, did not conquer the land in a military campaign and did not pass it on to the 12 tribes of Israel. Perhaps even harder to swallow is the fact that the united monarchy of David and Solomon, which is described by the Bible as a regional power, was at most a small tribal kingdom.

The sentence read as a list of absences. No Egypt. No wandering. No conquest. No tribal inheritance. No regional power. The empire the text had built into a kingdom stretching from the Euphrates to the border of Egypt was, in the ground, a small highland chiefdom. Herzog noted, near the end of the article, that the most decisive proof of this reduction was a detail the text’s authors never supplied: we do not know the name of this kingdom. The empire the text narrated could not be located in the ground, in the records of surrounding powers, or in its own nomenclature.

Herzog framed the finding as consensus: those who “once went into the field looking for proof to corroborate the Bible story” now, in their professional majority, confirmed its absence. The invention had failed on its own terms, in its own field, by the testimony of its own practitioners. The archive produced by the apparatus encounters, at last, the archive it cannot construct its way around.

What the invented history required was the disappearance of the people the land already held. What the disappearance required, in turn, was that no trace of those people’s continuity remain readable. The scholarship wrote them out of the past. The maps wrote them out of the present. The state that followed wrote them out of the land. A century and a half of this work, accumulated across every register in which a people can be rendered absent, produced the Palestinian condition as the world has learned to mistake it: a people who must justify their presence on ground they have never left.

They have never left, and the evidence of that is written in the body itself. In 2017, a team publishing in the American Journal of Human Genetics sequenced the genomes of five Canaanites buried at Sidon around 1700 BCE and compared them directly to modern populations of the region. In 2020, a larger team publishing in Cell sequenced seventy-three individuals excavated from nine Bronze Age sites across the southern Levant—among them Tel Hazor, Megiddo, Yehud, Abel Beth Maacah, Tel Shaddud, Baq’ah, and Ashkelon—and extended the analysis. The finding converges across both studies: the population the archeological record identifies as Canaanite—the population the scholarly project of ancient Israel was built to displace from its own past—is ancestral to the Palestinians and the other Levantine peoples of the region.

The 2020 paper’s own modeling reported that Palestinians derive 81-87% of their ancestry from Bronze Age Levantines, “relating to Canaanites as well as Kura-Araxes culture impact from before 2400 BCE.” The continuity is total. The descent is direct. The majority of every Palestinian’s genetic inheritance is Bronze Age Canaanite. The research was conducted by Israeli scholars at Hebrew University, Tel Aviv University, and the Israel Antiquities Authority, in collaboration with researchers in Europe and the United States. The bones came from sites across the Canaanite world, most of them inside historic Palestine. The apparatus that invented ancient Israel to displace the Palestinians has, in its own laboratories, documented the Palestinians as the living descendants of the people that apparatus was built to disappear.

The scholarship that invented ancient Israel and the mapping that invented empty Palestine both needed the same thing: a population whose documentary record could be suppressed. Neither the scholarship nor the mapping anticipated the patience of Palestinian archival labor. For decades, from exile, the Palestinian geographer Salman Abu Sitta has assembled the counter-record. Ottoman tax registers. British Mandate cadastral surveys. Village-level property deeds. Family land titles dating to the nineteenth century. Aerial photographs held in the archives of the powers that produced them. Every village that existed in Palestine before 1948—every one of the four hundred and eighteen later depopulated, every one of the hundreds destroyed—is documented in Abu Sitta’s atlases by location, by boundary, by population, by crop, by the families who worked its land. The evidence of Palestinian presence, it turned out, was not missing. It had been produced by the imperial apparatuses that governed the land and then preserved in the archives those apparatuses left behind. Abu Sitta has spent his scholarly life making it legible.

The record he compiled cannot be un-compiled. The villages whose names the renaming project erased were named, by their inhabitants, in documents the occupying states themselves produced. The population that the terra nullius doctrine treated as absent was counted, house by house, by the tax collectors of three successive empires. The agricultural economy that the invented antiquity required to be primitive or absent was surveyed, measured, and recorded in ledgers now held in Istanbul, London, and Jerusalem. Palestinian presence before the Nakba stands in the record as documentary fact, produced by the dispossessors themselves, now cataloged by the dispossessed.

The counter-archive is compiled. The apparatus that invented one people’s past and erased another’s stands exposed, in its own laboratories, by its own instruments, in the ground it excavated. What remains is a state still removing from the land the people it has documented—an operation no longer covered by the scholarship that authorized it.

This is the second essay in a series on American Zionism and the silencing of Palestine. Part 1, Messianic Myths and Colonial Ambitions, traced the theological doctrine—scripture read as title deed, the indigenous read as Amalek—from the Puritans to the Christian Zionism that now organizes American support for Palestinian dispossession.

A companion essay, Scofield’s Bible and the American Embrace of Zionism, examines the textual apparatus—Cyrus Scofield’s 1909 Reference Bible—through which that doctrine became the operative theology of American Christian Zionism.

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In the years after his first voyage in 1492, Christopher Columbus assembled a manuscript he called the Libro de las Profecías—the Book of Prophecies—a compilation of scriptural passages and apocalyptic commentary arguing that his westward sailing had been divinely appointed to hasten the end of days. The gold of the Indies, he wrote to Ferdinand and Isabella, the Catholic monarchs who had financed his expedition and completed the Christian reconquest of Spain that same year, would fund the final crusade to retake Jerusalem and deliver the Holy City into Christian hands before Christ’s return. The Americas entered European history as collateral for that war. The peoples who already lived there entered it as an obstacle scripture had already named. Five centuries later, the same warrant—scripture read as title deed, conquest read as covenant, indigenous life read as scriptural obstruction—organizes American support for the dispossession of the Palestinian people.

That warrant did not originate with Columbus. The Spanish crown sailed under papal bulls—Inter caetera, issued by Alexander VI in 1493—that divided the non-Christian world between Spain and Portugal and commanded the conversion or subjugation of its inhabitants. Scripture authorized conquest through ecclesiastical mediation, and the Church held the keys. What the Protestant Reformation did was break the lock. Martin Luther’s translation of the Bible into vernacular German in 1522 placed the text directly in the hands of ordinary believers and stripped away the Church’s interpretive monopoly. Conquest narratives, chosen people, promised land, command to destroy Amalek: the colonial world inherited them.

The text they held was specific. The Hebrew Bible’s conquest narrative, set down in Deuteronomy and Joshua, describes a people chosen by God, given a land already inhabited, and commanded to take it. The inhabitants are named—Canaanites, Hittites, Amorites, Perizzites, Hivites, Jebusites, Amalekites—and the command is explicit. “You shall devote them to complete destruction… you shall make no covenant with them and show no mercy to them.” The land is described as already promised; the peoples on it are described as already condemned. The text does not present this as conquest. It presents it as the execution of a prior verdict—a verdict scripture itself supplies. The settler arrives as instrument, carrying out a judgment already written. This is the structural move the Old Testament makes available, and it is the move every colonial doctrine that has cited it has taken: the land is promised, the people are Amalek, the killing is obedience.

The Puritans were the first to apply the unmediated text at settler scale. Landing in New England in the 1620s and 1630s, they read themselves as the new Israelites, the land as their promised inheritance, and the Wampanoag, Pequot, and Narragansett peoples who already lived there as Amalekites—the scriptural enemy marked for annihilation. The command in First Samuel was unsparing: “Now go and strike Amalek and devote to destruction all that they have. Do not spare them, but kill both man and woman, child and infant.” They carried it out. On the morning of May 26, 1637, English forces under Captain John Mason, with Mohegan and Narragansett allies, surrounded the Pequot fort at Mystic and set it on fire. English soldiers cut down those who tried to flee the flames at the palisade. Mason counted as many as seven hundred dead by the end of the morning, and wrote in his Brief History of the Pequot War that God “laughed his Enemies and the Enemies of his People to Scorn, making them as a fiery Oven… Thus did the Lord judge among the Heathen, filling the Place with dead Bodies.” The continent beyond New England would be read the same way.

That reading scaled. In 1845 the journalist John O’Sullivan named the doctrine that had been operating since Plymouth. Writing in the Democratic Review, he declared it the “manifest destiny” of the United States “to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions.” Providence had allotted the land. The people already on it were in scriptural trespass.

The execution followed. Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act in 1830 and marched the Cherokee, Muscogee, Seminole, Chickasaw, and Choctaw nations off their lands at gunpoint; four thousand Cherokee died on the march west. The continent was cleared the same way, decade after decade, village by village, from Sand Creek in 1864 to Wounded Knee in 1890. The peoples the Puritans had read as Amalek were nearly gone from the land they had read as promised. At contact, the indigenous population of the continent is estimated at between five and ten million; by 1900, fewer than three hundred thousand remained.

Christian Zionism is the doctrine’s current form. Its textual spine is the Scofield Reference Bible, published by Oxford University Press in 1909, which embedded into the annotations of the King James Bible a reading of scripture that made the Jewish return to Palestine the precondition for Christ’s return. Sales exceeded two million copies by the end of the Second World War; for most of the twentieth century it was the functional study Bible of American evangelicalism, teaching generations of readers that supporting a Jewish state in Palestine was an instruction of scripture. That teaching is now organized political force. John Hagee founded Christians United for Israel in 2006; the organization claims more than ten million members and describes itself as the largest pro-Israel lobby in the United States—larger than AIPAC. Hagee preaches the doctrine plainly: the land belongs to the Jewish people “today, tomorrow, and forever.” The covenant the Puritans read over New England is now being read over Palestine, by an organization funded through a country that underwrites the reading with weapons.

The alliance between Jewish and Christian Zionism rests on a paradox neither side names. Christian Zionists believe that the Jewish presence in Palestine is the precondition for a Second Coming at which those same Jews will be given a final choice: conversion to Christ or damnation. Jewish Zionists accept the money, the lobbying, and the diplomatic cover while knowing what the benefactors believe. The two movements diverge in eschatology and converge in operation: a Jewish state in Palestine, expanded, defended, and funded, with the Palestinians who live there cleared from the land.

The alliance has claimed the office of the American state. Biden met Israel’s war cabinet in October 2023, days into the bombing of Gaza, and declared himself a Zionist. Blinken, in Tel Aviv, told Netanyahu, “I come before you not only as the United States Secretary of State, but also as a Jew.” Trump moved the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem and recognized the city as Israel’s capital—a theological act performed by the American presidency. No political commitment in American life is more nakedly theological than support for Israel, and none is more immune to law, evidence, or human cost.

The alliance is most visible on the floor of the legislature. While Israeli forces conducted the genocide in Gaza, Netanyahu addressed a joint session of the United States Congress. The chamber rose in standing ovation dozens of times. Democrats and Republicans rose together; Christian Zionists and Jewish Zionists rose together. The ovation was the alliance performing its own coherence. The chamber that applauded is the chamber that funds the genocide.

The doctrine has a problem it cannot solve. Palestinian Christians have inhabited this land since Christianity’s origins. Our communities are continuous; our churches predate the Crusades by centuries, and every colonial project since has tried to organize the land around our absence. Our existence refutes the claim that Palestine was empty, waiting, divinely reserved for another people’s return—and for Christian Zionism, that refutation is intolerable.

That intolerance has met its answer. In August 2006, four Palestinian patriarchs and bishops—Latin, Syriac Orthodox, Anglican, and Lutheran—issued the Jerusalem Declaration, naming Christian Zionism a “false teaching that corrupts the biblical message of love, justice and reconciliation.” Archbishop Atallah Hanna of the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Jerusalem was more direct: “Those who call themselves ‘Christian Zionists’ are not Christians at all. Their ideology and rhetoric have no connection to Christian values. A true Christian stands with the oppressed, not the oppressor.” Hanna also refused the sectarian division it imposes: “We, Christians and Muslims of the Levant, will remain one united Ummah, with Al-Quds as our compass and Palestine as our cause.”

The Declaration is one expression of a presence that predates every claim made on the land. Palestinian Christians predate the Zionist claim, the Crusader claim, the Roman claim. We are descended from the Jewish and Canaanite peoples the Bible names—including those the conquest narrative marked for destruction. Our ancestors accepted Christ and never left; the oldest Christian communities in the world are Palestinian, and we remain on the land the doctrine claims for its own. That is the fact Christian Zionism cannot absorb, cannot afford to acknowledge, and has not been able to erase.

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In January 2006, Palestinians held legislative elections that observers—American, European, and Arab—certified as free and competitive. Hamas won a majority. Washington and the European Union rejected the result, suspending aid and isolating the elected government. Within eighteen months, Palestinian Authority security forces had been trained and armed under the American general Keith Dayton to enforce, from within, the rule of the party Hamas had defeated.

The British had a name for such arrangements: indirect rule. Cromer’s Egypt was the model—a “veiled protectorate” in which a British consul-general ran the country for a quarter century while a nominal Khedive remained on the throne. The French called it administration indirecte. Both understood the logic: rather than pay the full cost of direct administration and bear the international condemnation that comes with it, the colonial power installs a local elite whose interests are bound to the colonial order. The colonized are made responsible for administering their own subjugation; the language of self-governance is deployed to legitimize the occupation it claims to be dissolving; and the occupier acquires, in the oppressed, an instrument of its own authority. The local elite does not simply comply; it collaborates. The arrangement has made compliance and survival identical—willing because dependent, and dependent by design.

This was the logic the Oslo Accords brought to Palestine. Signed in 1993, with the Paris Protocol of 1994 as their economic counterpart, they were celebrated in the West as the foundation of Palestinian statehood. What they produced was a fragmented territory, an economy imprisoned by dependency, and a Palestinian leadership answerable to the occupier and charged with policing its own people on its behalf.

Oslo had been negotiated in secret. From 1987 to 1993, Palestinians had risen against the occupation—through popular committees, mass strikes, sustained collective sacrifice. The First Intifada had forced the United States and the Soviet Union to convene the Madrid Conference of 1991, where Palestinian national rights were addressed for the first time as a political question. The Palestinians who had represented their people at Madrid came from Gaza and the West Bank, not from the exiled PLO leadership in Tunis. They were still negotiating publicly in Washington when Oslo was signed in secret.

Oslo’s negotiators were a handful of Fatah officials within the PLO, none of them lawyers, who had no maps adequate to the territory they were conceding, and who held no democratic mandate from the Palestinian people whose lands and rights they were disposing of. The people who had organized and sustained the Intifada were not consulted. The prisoners who had led it remained in Israeli jails. Yasser Arafat and the Fatah leadership were not negotiating a path to liberation. They were negotiating the terms of their own administration of the occupation. What collective resistance had won, the negotiating table dissolved.

In exchange for Israel’s recognition of the PLO—a recognition that cost Israel nothing and committed it to even less—the Palestinian side received the promise of “limited self-administration.” Sovereignty was not mentioned. Statehood was deferred. The negotiators consigned the central questions—the fate of the settlements, the status of Jerusalem, the right of return for the millions displaced in 1948—to a category of “final status” issues to be addressed at some unspecified future point. Those fundamental questions had been conceded in advance: to defer them indefinitely while Israel consolidated its hold on occupied territory was to predetermine the outcome.

To administer this arrangement, the Accords created the Palestinian Authority as the “Interim Self-Government” for the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Whatever its failures, including its lack of internal democratic structure, the PLO had been a national liberation movement with the capacity to speak for Palestinians across Lebanon, the Gulf, the Americas, and the camps of Jordan and Syria; Oslo reduced it overnight to municipal administration of enclaves for the occupying authority. Edward Said called the agreement a “Palestinian Versailles.”

Arafat, returning from exile to what the world called a triumph, was succeeding the Israeli military governor—a fact that General Danny Rothschild, then head of Israeli civil administration in the Occupied Territories, stated without embarrassment: “We have retained power in the Occupied Territories, despite the transfer of authority that recently took place.”

The Accords divided the West Bank into Areas A, B, and C. Palestinians received full authority over Area A, 18% of the territory. Israel retained security control over the rest, and full control over Area C—60% of the West Bank, containing the aquifers, the arable land, the resources. Settlement construction continued, and often accelerated. Bypass roads multiplied, severing Palestinian communities from one another and from their land. What was announced as self-governance was Israeli dominion reorganized. The administrative costs went to the Palestinian Authority; the benefits accumulated to Israel.

This fragmentation was material. It was also social, and the social wound may prove the deeper. Movement between Palestinian towns became a gauntlet of checkpoints and permits. The collective space on which national life depends was dismantled. The Authority, bound through “security coordination,” was made to identify, pursue, and suppress anyone who organized resistance. Against this, the denial of a state was the lesser injury. The Palestinian people were administered in ways designed to make the sustained exercise of national will difficult to organize and dangerous to attempt.

The Paris Protocol of 1994 was Oslo’s economic counterpart and bound the Palestinian economy to Israel. Western commentators, eager to celebrate the peace process, passed it over in silence. The Authority was stripped of fiscal sovereignty: customs duties and import taxes were placed under Israeli administration, and revenues transferred to the Palestinians at Israel’s discretion. The grip has only tightened across three decades. Israel has used this discretion to punish Palestinian political decisions—withholding revenues for the duration of the Second Intifada (2000–2005), for sixteen months after the 2006 Hamas victory, again after UNESCO admitted Palestine as a full member in 2011, again after the 2012 vote at the United Nations recognizing Palestine as a non-member observer state—and has continued to do so since the start of the genocide in Gaza in October 2023. These revenues are the bulk of the Authority’s budget. The salaries of teachers, doctors, and civil servants depend on Israeli approval. What was called economic coordination was political discipline. Livelihood became Israel’s instrument of compliance.

By controlling the economic conditions of a dependent population, a colonial administration secures compliance without visible force; by enriching a connected local elite, it creates a constituency invested in the arrangement; by impoverishing the majority, it produces the disorganization and despair that make resistance difficult to sustain. The Paris Protocol achieves all three ends—a compliant elite, an impoverished majority, a disciplined population—through a logic with a long colonial genealogy. In 2024, after Norway, Spain, and Ireland recognized the Palestinian state, Israel’s Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich suspended Palestinian tax revenues indefinitely. The Protocol had always granted this power; what was new was that the colonial administrator stopped pretending it hadn’t.

What the PLO leadership traded away in Oslo and Paris, Palestinians would spend the years that followed paying for. Each round of negotiations through the 1990s confirmed what the previous round had revealed: Israel would not concede the settlements, would not concede Jerusalem, would not concede the right of return. By 2000, what the arrangement had been built to do was unmistakable.

The Second Intifada erupted in September 2000 after Ariel Sharon’s deliberate provocation at the Al-Aqsa Mosque. It was the answer to seven years of Oslo: continued settlement expansion, deepening territorial fragmentation, a Palestinian Authority that had delivered no liberation. Those seven years had revealed how little the peace process had altered the occupation.

By 2005 Israel had defeated the Intifada militarily in the West Bank—through mass incarceration, targeted assassinations, the construction of the separation wall, the reoccupation of West Bank cities in Operation Defensive Shield, and the killing of approximately 4,300 Palestinians. But in Gaza, the cost of occupation had become unsustainable, forcing Israel’s unilateral withdrawal that same year. Armed resistance had achieved what decades of negotiation had not. The world called it a concession.

The withdrawal removed the direct cost of occupation—soldiers inside Gaza, settlers to defend—while leaving Israel in full control of Gaza’s borders, airspace, and economy. Goods in and out passed through Israeli checkpoints. The population registry stayed under Israeli control. The fence and sea perimeter were patrolled by Israeli forces. The strip became a reservation whose population Israel could punish collectively whenever it chose.

Less than a year after the withdrawal, in January 2006, Palestinians went to the polls. The elections were a political judgment on thirteen years of Oslo’s management. Hamas won because the Authority’s record was indefensible: its corruption documented, its complicity in the occupation visible, its promises exhausted. The electorate had not become more extreme; the alternative—continuing Oslo—had become insupportable.

The result was unacceptable to the colonial order. The international response—sanctions, isolation, training and arming of Fatah-aligned PA security forces against the elected Hamas government under General Dayton—confirmed what the Oslo framework had always implied: Palestinian democratic choice could be tolerated only when it produced acceptable outcomes.

Through the first half of 2007, Fatah and Hamas forces confronted each other in Gaza, culminating in Hamas’s consolidation of control over the strip in June. The resulting split—Gaza under Hamas, the West Bank under an Authority dependent on Israeli and international permission—was what the Dayton plan had been designed to produce. The Western press has called it an accident of Palestinian political culture or a consequence of Hamas’s commitment to violence. The split has, in fact, served the occupation: two factions, each too weak to challenge it; the Authority bound to act against Hamas, Hamas refusing reconciliation on Oslo’s terms. The split is cited by those who produced it—as proof that Palestinians lack the political coherence for self-governance, and as proof that Israel has no negotiating partner.

Palestinians today must contend with an occupation that has never ended and an Authority that serves it. The Authority has accepted managed subjugation and adopted the vocabulary of its patrons—”security coordination,” “confidence-building measures,” “the peace process” that never arrives. Hamas, and all other factions of the Palestinian resistance—whatever the consequences of their methods or the limits of their governing record—have refused the premise that occupation is to be administered rather than resisted. What is offered today as “reconciliation” amounts in practice to a demand that the resistance accept the terms of the collaborator—a demand expressed in the language of Palestinian unity while serving to extend the reach of colonial subcontracting. Subcontracting is not peace, and collaboration is not sovereignty. Subcontracting was meant to end Palestinian politics. It has produced its opposite: the only Palestinian politics that remains is the refusal of the arrangement.

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In January 2024, the International Court of Justice found it plausible that Israel was committing genocide in Gaza and ordered provisional measures under the Genocide Convention. The ruling changed nothing. One year later, in January 2025, Israel has killed more than 50,000 Palestinians in Gaza and erased entire cities. The bombs continue. The siege holds. Across parliaments, newspapers, and universities in the Western world, the demand that Palestinians justify Al-Aqsa Flood persists with undiminished urgency, as though the court had ruled on some other matter entirely. The international order is functioning as designed—Palestinian suffering generating demands for Palestinian accountability, Israeli colonial violence generating demands for Palestinian restraint. October 7 forced this asymmetry into view. The asymmetry preceded it by a century.

The demand for justification is constructed to foreclose the questions it claims to ask. It assigns the initiation of violence to Hamas alone. It recasts a century of occupation, siege, dispossession, and systematic violence as background, then treats Palestinian action as the rupture that requires explanation. It attributes the destruction of Gaza’s civilian population to Hamas. It removes Israel from the sentence.

Governments that fund the genocide press the demand. Media organizations that normalize the violence amplify it. Political institutions absorb the ICJ ruling without altering their position.

The demand is a verdict: it determines who stands trial before any evidence is heard.

The historical record does not sustain this claim. Israel’s violence against Palestinians has never required Palestinian resistance as its occasion—not in 1948, not in 1982, not across decades of occupation and siege preceding Al-Aqsa Flood. The demand erases a century of violence that required no Palestinian provocation and preceded Palestinian military organization.

In a Beirut interview in 1970, Ghassan Kanafani named the structure the demand serves: negotiation with the power that imposed subjugation becomes “a conversation between the sword and the neck.” The demand operates through the same mechanism. It takes what Israel has done to Gaza—the bombed hospitals, the erased neighborhoods, the severed water lines—and converts it into an argument against the people Israel is destroying. The worse the violence, the stronger the case against resistance. To answer the demand on those terms concedes the premise: Palestinian action requires authorization from the structure it confronts.

The historical record, read without that premise, locates accountability in the condition that produces resistance. When the Oslo Declaration was signed in 1993, 110,000 Israeli settlers lived in the West Bank and Gaza. Seven years later, when the process collapsed, the number reached 195,000. By 2023 it exceeded 700,000. Expansion accelerated across every phase of negotiation, agreement, and declared ceasefire. Israel met every political concession with ethnic cleansing and deeper fragmentation of Palestinian territory. The pattern holds: occupation without horizon, siege without legal basis, dispossession without acknowledgment, and violence that has never required Palestinian provocation to sustain itself.

The Oslo process rehearsed the verdict in advance. It required Palestinians to account for their resistance as the precondition for political recognition. It recast capitulation as vision and security coordination as strategy. The demand fixes attention on Al-Aqsa Flood and its immediate antecedents. It excludes the longer structure—the one that produced the First Intifada, the Second Intifada, and the Great Revolt of 1936.

The demand intensifies as Palestinian suffering increases. It treats Palestinian suffering as evidence of Palestinian culpability. It uses the genocide Israel is perpetrating against Gaza’s civilian population as an argument against resistance. The genocide is the clearest demonstration of the conditions that produce Palestinian resistance. This inversion—in which the occupied bear responsibility for the occupation’s violence against them—is the demand’s purpose, held consistently across a century.

To refuse the demand is to place accountability where the record places it: on the structure that has produced, across more than a century, the conditions from which Al-Aqsa Flood and every comparable moment have emerged. The demand will persist because it belongs to that structure. Its urgency rises as the question it displaces becomes harder to avoid. The condition that produces Palestinian resistance—occupation, siege, and systematic dispossession—will continue to generate resistance in proportion to its intensity. The demand for Palestinian justification does not address this structure. It ensures the settler-colonial order is never what stands trial.

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