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.

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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(This article follows Part I, “Peace and Its Instruments,” which examined the ongoing effort to re-engineer “peace” into an evolving system of colonial control in Gaza.)

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October 7 did not begin a new war; it reopened one that had never ended.

The “peace process” had given that colonial war its institutional form—rebranding occupation as peace and reducing the Palestinian national liberation struggle to a mandate handed to the Palestinian Authority: to administer the occupation Israel no longer wished to manage alone. Arab regimes and elites had accommodated it on the belief that history had concluded and liberation with it, that freedom could only be negotiated within occupation, that Palestinians could secure only a semblance of rights within Israel’s terms of domination. For thirty years, that conviction set the limits of the possible.

Oslo, “A Palestinian Versailles”

The Oslo Accords, signed in 1993 between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization after the First Intifada (1987–1991), were presented as the beginning of peace and coexistence. In practice, they created a system of limited Palestinian autonomy under continued Israeli occupation.

The First Intifada had transformed the Palestinian struggle from a local revolt into a global cause. Through mass protest, strikes, and civil disobedience, it forced the world to confront the legitimacy of Palestinian demands. As pressure mounted, Israel and the U.S. devised a political framework to contain the uprising rather than address its causes.

They found a willing counterpart in Yasser Arafat and the PLO, exiled in Tunis since 1982. Detached from the movement inside Palestine and estranged from its people, Arafat’s leadership entered secret negotiations in Oslo—undermining the official Palestinian delegation then negotiating in Madrid.

Arafat and a handful of subordinates faced an entire corps of Israeli Foreign Ministry experts—without legal counsel and negotiating in English, a language they barely knew. What followed was a capitulation: unilateral concessions that entrenched Israel’s control over borders, resources, and security, transforming occupation into a system of managed Palestinian autonomy.

Arafat’s recognition of Israel’s “right to exist” carried with it renunciations of the PLO Charter, of armed struggle, and of UN resolutions affirming the Palestinians’ right of return—a surrender that alienated many Palestinians, especially in Gaza, where three-quarters of the population are refugees or their descendants. Israel, by contrast, conceded nothing, offering only a token acknowledgment of the PLO as representative of the Palestinian people.

Israel dictated the terms and preserved the architecture of domination. The Oslo framework gave that system its institutional form: the Palestinian Authority—created by Oslo—became the occupier’s subcontractor, managing life under occupation instead of ending it, dependent on foreign aid, constrained by Israeli approval, and accountable not to its people but to its patrons. The framework made Israeli security the organizing principle of Palestinian governance—an assurance granted to Israel even as its violations of Palestinian security went unchecked.

In this way, the gains of the First Intifada were undone. Half a century of struggle and sacrifice was buried beneath a “peace process” that redefined occupation as self-rule and subjugation as compromise.

The Oslo Accords established a precedent—the notion that progress and stability could be achieved only through collaboration with Israel, guaranteed by U.S. power. From Oslo to the Abraham Accords, successive concessions were made under the illusion that accommodation would appease Israeli power. It did not.

Over time, a sense of inevitability took hold—the conviction that the U.S. alone defined the terms of progress and decline, and that history itself moved within its orbit. Across the Arab world, voices that once spoke the language of liberation began to echo the rhetoric of pragmatism, presenting accommodation as realism and dependence as reform. Resistance gave way to reliance, and the collective will to struggle was slowly extinguished.

Bound by their dependence on U.S. economic and political support, Arab governments signed treaties and normalization deals that aligned them with the very order they once opposed. Through shared security frameworks, surveillance cooperation, and trade corridors, they were integrated into a colonial system organized around Israeli supremacy.

Unlike earlier peace efforts that at least gestured toward Palestinian inclusion, the 2020 Abraham Accords abandoned even the pretense. They bypassed Palestinians entirely, offering no remedy for occupation, settlements, or refugees—and no mention of repatriation and compensation. Both had been dismissed as impossible.

By late 2023, the normalization project reached its zenith. At the UN General Assembly that September, Netanyahu unveiled a map of a “New Middle East”: a vision of regional integration from which Palestine had vanished. For three decades, that illusion—the belief that peace could be achieved through subordination and accommodation—defined the regional order. It ended on October 7.

There is no peace between the occupier and the occupied, only the struggle of one to end the other.
— Ghassan Kanafani

The Morning After

In October 1993, Edward Said published The Morning After, his first response to the Oslo Accords. His warning was unsparing: a people who accepted subordination as the price of recognition would inherit neither freedom nor independence.

Thirty years later, in October 2023, history came full circle. The myth he exposed in The Morning After collapsed, and the moral and political language of resistance he kept alive now defines the region’s horizon—the terms through which justice, liberation, and legitimacy are once again being measured. The struggle he feared was slipping away has returned to the center of political life.

Out of that collapse has come a renewed sense of political agency. Palestinian negotiators representing today’s resistance factions have risen above the posture of submission that shaped the Oslo years. They have rejected the logic that underpinned those agreements, insisting instead on terms that reflect national, not administrative, aspirations—speaking from a position of strength rather than dependence.

The Palestinian Authority, born of Oslo and still captive to its logic, remains bound by a different refrain—one that might as well be: we will accept anything so long as you recognize us. When a number of Western governments recently extended diplomatic recognition to a Palestinian state, the PA greeted it as triumph—as though recognition itself were liberation. Yet what matters more than recognition is sovereignty: what kind of state it is, and whom it serves. For all the recognition granted, Palestinian freedom remains confined within boundaries drawn by U.S. hegemony and Israeli design.

As Oslo’s illusion gave way, so too did Israel’s—each sustained by the same fiction that peace could be achieved through domination rather than equality. For Israel, October 7 was not only a military surprise but an existential crisis that revealed the fragility of the Zionist myth of permanence. What unraveled that day was not only a separation fence but a worldview. A settler society built on paranoia had lived its nightmare: the breach of its frontier, the failure of its army, the sight of its own vulnerability.

The October 7 operation collapsed a self-image built over seventy-five years. The myth of the fortress—of the army that never fails, the intelligence that never sleeps—died that morning. The moment carried the same undertone as 1973, when the October War made visible the vulnerability of Israeli power, only this time there was no comparable horizon of victory. The old methods—war, deterrence, occupation—no longer achieved their objectives, only destruction.

Out of the shock came a new logic of survival. The state sought to restore its authority through destruction, turning war into a project of political and mythical renewal—stability through domination, survival through conquest. Israel revived the founding ambition of Zionism itself: to reorder the land through the removal of its people, to recreate permanence through erasure. What began as a military response became an ideological restoration—the return of Zionism as both method and belief.

What was meant to reaffirm Israeli dominance instead revealed its limits—and with it, the fragility of the international system built to protect it. Two years of unconditional U.S. support achieved none of Israel’s military objectives. The U.S. and the wider West now fear the consequences of this war: the erosion of their institutions, the collapse of their narrative, the revelation of their complicity.

Israel’s defeat in Gaza exposed both the limits of its military power and the depth of its dependence on the U.S. The war revealed a state far weaker than it believed itself to be—without U.S. resupply, intelligence, and diplomatic protection, it could not sustain military operations.

This dependence has stripped Israel of autonomy. Having lost the capacity to act on its own, it now follows U.S. policy wherever it leads. Inside Israel, this reality has become the subject of open dispute; officers and ministers across the spectrum speak of decisions being made “in Washington, not Tel Aviv.” What was once whispered—that Israel’s war, its ceasefire terms, and even its internal politics are being managed from the White House—is now said aloud.

In strategic terms, Israel has ceased to be Washington’s outpost and has become its client. It no longer shapes events on behalf of the U.S.; it relies on the U.S. to shield it from the consequences of its own actions. The Gaza war made that hierarchy visible—the so-called regional power cannot wage war, end one, or even sustain its army without American approval, weapons, and money.

The myth of Israeli self-reliance dissolved with that revelation; the very dependency that sustained its dominance now defines its decline. The war has left Israel more isolated than at any point in its history. Its image, long protected by Western media and political patronage, has unraveled beyond repair. The distortions that once inverted victims and aggressors can no longer conceal what the world has seen. No amount of propaganda or control over digital platforms can restore what has been lost—the legitimacy of a state that has made permanent war its only language.

The genocide was broadcast to the world, and that visibility has globalized the Palestinian question. It is no longer a regional issue but a mirror of civilization itself. The revolt that began in Gaza has already transcended its geography.

What empire once controlled through narrative, it now confronts through exposure. Images once meant to be concealed have escaped censorship and created solidarity; the oppression of one people has revealed the structure of domination that governs all. Palestine has turned from the world’s forgotten question into its defining one, revealing the bankruptcy of those who speak of peace while practicing domination. Across continents and movements, it no longer stands as one cause among others—it has become the measure of justice itself.

This is not the hope of immediate victory—that Palestine will be free soon—but the hope born of restored vision, that after October 7 Palestinians can once again see freedom conceptually, morally, and spiritually. What makes this vision powerful is that it reclaims the terrain of imagination and meaning—the ground colonialism works hardest to occupy. To see freedom is to act toward it: to rebuild what was broken, to organize what was scattered, to give form to a future no longer defined by conditions set or denied by others.

Three decades after The Morning After, Said’s warning has turned inside out. A generation that inherited the ruins of Oslo has refused the logic of its defeat. What began as a collapse of illusion has become the recovery of history itself—a people who once fought to be seen are again shaping how the world sees. The struggle is not finished, but its direction is clear—and, for the first time since the First Intifada, that direction belongs to the Palestinians.

In every situation, however dominated, there is always an alternative. One must train oneself to think in terms of the alternative—not the accepted or the status quo—and to refuse the belief that the present is frozen.
— Edward Said

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(This is the first of two linked articles on the idea of the “colonial peace.” Part I traces how peace—once conceived as a moral ideal—has been co-opted into an instrument of control, turning Gaza’s reconstruction into a program of recolonization. Part II follows the genealogy of this system back to Oslo, where the vocabulary and architecture of this peace were first devised.)

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In Gaza, the return of families to the ruins of their neighborhoods has defeated a project of population transfer sustained by two years of siege, bombardment, and unconditional U.S. support. For a settler-colonial state built on expulsion and expansion, that defeat is intolerable—and so the war has not ended; it has only changed its form. Israel and the U.S. are turning Gaza’s most basic human needs into instruments of coercion—food, medicine, and reconstruction granted as privileges or withheld as punishment. Where force could not impose surrender, a political plan will serve instead.

This plan assumed diplomatic form at the Sharm El-Sheikh Peace Summit this month, which concluded with the Trump Declaration for Enduring Peace and Prosperity. It was presented as a new peace initiative. In reality, it was not a proposal with enforceable terms but a diplomatic declaration—a moral narrative crafted to legitimize what had already been arranged behind the scenes. It provides political cover for the 20-Point Plan for Gaza Reconstruction and Regional Stability, presented by Trump in September, which had faced backlash for its overtly neo-colonial design.

While the 20-Point Plan establishes structures of governance, policing, and economic subordination, the declaration defines how those mechanisms will be sold—as peace, as stability, as reform. Marketed as a Gaza peace plan built on concealed terms of surrender, it revives the central question that every so-called peace initiative since 1947 has been designed to evade: Can there be peace without equality, freedom without sovereignty, or justice without return?

Since the 1947 Partition Plan, every document, conference, and initiative has spoken in the name of peace. But each invocation marked another stage in the domestication of resistance—the end of struggle, not of occupation. Peace has become the language through which domination is refined: the conversion of Palestinian rights into Israeli security guarantees, the disciplining of resistance into compliance, the quiet pacification of a people to keep the master’s order intact.

The Palestinian cause has never been a search for peace but a struggle for freedom and return. The word peace has long been emptied of meaning; it no longer signifies reconciliation or justice. It has become a colonized term—stripped of substance and redeployed to manage subjugation.

What was once a moral ideal has become a linguistic weapon, a word whose very use reveals the persistence of empire. It now circulates detached from the realities of occupation, dispossession, and racial supremacy, legitimizing Israeli domination and the American order that sustains it. The architects of this order speak of peace as an abstraction—divorced from land, rights, and sovereignty. Palestinians—and the wider Arab world—are no longer invited to accept the vocabulary of peace; they are made to repeat it, compelled to embody it, and disciplined for refusing it.

The question is not whether there will be peace, but what kind of peace—and for whom.
—Ghassan Kanafani

The terms of this so-called peace reveal their colonial logic in institutional form. At the economic level, the 20-Point Plan establishes an international supervisory body—publicly named the Board of Peace—to manage all foreign donations, reconstruction contracts, and tender approvals for Gaza. Arab states would provide most of the funding, while the Board—chaired by the U.S. president and including Israel, Egypt, Gulf donors, and former British Prime Minister Tony Blair in an advisory role—would exercise final authority over every decision.

Under the plan, both Israel and the U.S. retain veto authority within the Board, effectively granting them control over every reconstruction payment. Siege enforcement is thus transformed from a military blockade into an economic-administrative system. The 20-Point Plan presents Gaza’s administration as “locally led, internationally supervised”—the formula used by U.S. and Israeli officials to describe external control through the Board of Peace.

A related initiative, circulated in August as the GREAT Trust—the Gaza Reconstitution, Economic Acceleration and Transformation Trust—extends this logic from administration to territory. Though not formally part of Trump’s 20-Point Plan, it functions as a financing mechanism designed to attract private investment under the same governance rules. Its structure—foreign trustees, external oversight, conditional access to land—mirrors the plan’s architecture.

The GREAT Trust was conceived as an investment-driven reconstruction vehicle, backed by Gulf capital and U.S. oversight. Framed as economic aid for Palestine, it places Gaza’s reconstruction under the supervision of the sole global power—one whose idea of peace rests on domination through extraction, dependency, privatization, debt, and corporate rule.

Beneath this economic design lies its political counterpart. The draft language of the 20-Point Plan makes all disbursements contingent on compliance with “security and governance benchmarks.” These benchmarks draw directly from Trump’s 2020 Peace to Prosperity plan—his so-called “Deal of the Century,” unveiled and abandoned in the same year after universal rejection but quietly absorbed into every subsequent proposal for conditional Palestinian sovereignty. They require recognition of Israel as a “Jewish state,” renunciation of armed resistance, and adherence to Israeli-defined “counterterrorism” criteria.

Another precondition for the Palestinian Authority to assume any role in Gaza is that it must first accept a series of “institutional reforms” and “alignment with the new governance framework.” These include rewriting the school curriculum to reflect Israel’s version of history, ending support for the families of martyrs and prisoners, disarming Palestinian organizations, renouncing the right of return, recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, and formally adopting Israel’s security doctrine.

The Trump Declaration for Enduring Peace and Prosperity speaks of “dismantling extremism,” “ending the normalization of violence,” and “addressing the conditions that enable extremism.” It never names occupation, siege, or apartheid as those conditions. “Dismantle extremism and radicalization in all its forms… no society can flourish when violence and racism is normalized,” words written as though Israel stood outside the moral field they describe. The document is a study in moral inversion—the oppressor making the violence of the oppressed the central problem, sanitizing the structural violence that produced it.

Every accusation in that passage mirrors a defining element of Zionism; what it condemns, it embodies. By invoking “extremism,” “radical ideologies,” and “violence and racism,” the declaration projects Israel’s foundational traits onto Palestinians, transforming Zionism’s racial order into a civilizing mission.

And finally, beneath the political framework lies the psychological one. Its function is disciplinary: to position the U.S. and its allies as moral custodians overseeing the re-education of Palestinians after the war. The framework of “deradicalization” replaces liberation with rehabilitation—it is not an invitation to coexistence but a demand for surrender—the reform of the victim so that the crime may continue unchallenged.

Even the pledge to “address the conditions that enable extremism” and to promote “education, opportunity, and mutual respect” serves the same colonial logic. What is described as education is indoctrination; what is offered as opportunity is containment; what is called mutual respect is the demand to respect the colonizer’s authority—the psychological reconstruction of the colonized to accept the terms of his defeat, all in the name of what is called “lasting peace.”

Beneath its language of reform and reconstruction, the 20-Point Plan functions as a comprehensive system of control—economic, political, and psychological. Through financial dependency, security tutelage, and moral reeducation, it turns Gaza into a laboratory for managed subjugation, where sovereignty is replaced by supervision and resistance redefined as pathology.

These demands are designed to exclude Palestinians from their own future and to turn Gaza into a colonial dependency governed by Western-approved figures who define what it means to be Palestinian—how one may resist, and even how one may remember. The purpose, in the end, is not only to control a territory but to reconstitute a people—to bring Palestinians to the point Netanyahu once described, where they not only cease to resist but come to regret that they ever did.

What Netanyahu envisioned found its language in the Trump Declaration and its machinery in the 20-Point Plan. Together they turned the vocabulary of peace into a system of management. What was spoken as reform became the administration of subjugation—the bureaucratic form of a colonial order that endures by perfecting its means of control.

The colonial system, after having taken the native’s personality, seeks to remake him into something compatible with the colonial world. It calls this the psychological readjustment of the native.
—Frantz Fanon

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How should we understand U.S. presidents and senators competing to outbid one another in loyalty to Israel? And what does it mean when the most powerful politicians on earth reach for Scripture—not as private belief, but as public justification for a foreign state and a colonial project?

The conventional explanations are familiar: strategic interests, military positioning, regional leverage, oil, domestic lobbying. All of this shapes policy; none of it explains the fervor. What requires explanation is the transformation of Israel from ally into sacred cause, from strategy into theology—an attachment that persists even when interests are strained, even when law is inverted, even when Palestinian life is treated as expendable.

The name of that transformation is Christian Zionism: a messianic conviction that history must culminate in Jewish settlement of Palestine and control of Jerusalem as preparation for Christ’s Second Coming. In this reading, history is not a field of human struggle and responsibility; it is a timetable. Palestine is not a living society; it is a stage. And the Palestinians—who disrupt the story by existing—are pushed out of view, or treated as irrelevant.

They are removed from history and from place—including Palestinian Christians whose continuity in the land stretches back two millennia, long before Zionism, and long before the American politicians who invoke Christianity while endorsing their dispossession. A theology that claims Christ’s authority thus produces, in practice, a moral blankness toward those who have lived where Christ lived—whose survival is treated, within the prophecy scheme, as a problem to be managed.

To make this work, Christianity’s moral hierarchy must be inverted. Jesus’ teachings—love your neighbor, blessed are the peacemakers—are subordinated to stories of tribal warfare and ethnic conquest in the Old Testament, the Hebrew Bible. Verses from Genesis and Deuteronomy are pulled from context and reassembled into a modern program: exclusive land rights, permanent entitlement, sanctioned dispossession. The ethical becomes decorative; the territorial becomes binding. What results is not faith as moral discipline, but faith as authorization.

This conviction did not begin with Jewish political Zionism; it anticipated it by nearly a century. Long before most Jews embraced the idea of a nation-state in Palestine, British and American Protestants imagined it, theorized it, and lobbied for it—often with a certainty that exceeded that of the people they claimed to be restoring. Its earliest and most fervent advocates were not Jews, many of whom viewed these ideas with suspicion or outright hostility, but Protestant Christians who saw “restoration” as part of God’s prophetic design.

The decisive vehicle for mass dissemination was Cyrus Scofield’s 1909 Scofield Reference Bible, which placed his study notes beside the King James text—printed as if co-equal with Scripture, so that interpretation was absorbed as revelation. Scofield’s framework taught generations of believers how to see Palestine: as a divine title deed, and as a test of obedience.

Central to that framework is the claim that Jewish “return” to Palestine constitutes a divine mandate. From there the logic hardens. If settlement is prophecy, then opposition becomes rebellion against God; criticism becomes sacrilege; political judgment becomes spiritual transgression. A settler-colonial project acquires the protection of the sacred.

More than 60 million American evangelicals have absorbed this theology. It now functions as durable moral infrastructure for unconditional U.S. support—support that shields Israel from accountability while Palestinians are subjected to genocide, ethnic cleansing, siege, forced displacement, and systematic domination. What presents itself in Washington as faith is, on the ground, a way of making conquest look like obedience, and making the victim’s demand for rights look like an interruption of “God’s plan.”

The System of Dispensations

Christian Zionism did not begin with Scofield’s 1909 Bible. Its roots stretch back to the 16th-century Protestant Reformation, when Martin Luther unsettled traditional Christian teaching.

While Catholic and Orthodox traditions held that Christ had fulfilled God’s Old Testament promises, Protestantism restored the Old Testament to unexpected centrality. These traditions had understood the Old Testament as prophecy fulfilled in Christ; Protestants came to treat it as an unfinished covenant with the Jewish people.

Over time, this emphasis transformed how Old Testament promises were read. What earlier Christians understood as spiritual metaphor, later Protestants—especially Puritans and their successors—interpreted as literal territorial claims. American Puritans imagined themselves as a “new Israel” and North America as their “promised land,” using biblical language to justify the extermination and expulsion of Indigenous peoples.

They developed a political theology of ethnic cleansing that drew its vision of racial and ethnic superiority from the land and conquest stories of the Hebrew Bible—especially the Book of Joshua and the texts on Israelite origins that demand the subjugation and destruction of other peoples. The same interpretive logic would later be applied to Palestine, turning ancient scripture into modern entitlement to the land.

This literalist reading of Old Testament promises found its most systematic expression in dispensationalism. The key to understanding the worldview Scofield built is this interpretive system, which reads the Bible as a series of distinct eras, or “dispensations,” in which God relates to humanity in different ways and assigns specific responsibilities.

Scofield popularized a system that divided history into seven eras. These eras function like a series of contracts between God and humanity—each with its own rules, blessings, and consequences if broken. When humanity fails to keep its side of the contract, God moves on to the next dispensation. God has separate plans for Israel (the Jewish people) and the Church (Christian believers).

According to this view, God’s promises to Israel—the land, sovereignty, and a restored kingdom—were suspended when the Jewish people rejected Jesus as the Messiah. A new dispensation, the “Church Age,” began, understood as a temporary interruption or “parenthesis” in history. In other words, history itself is on hold until God restores Israel. The Church operates on a separate track from the Jewish people until, in this theology, God resumes the original Israel-centered plan.

While dispensationalists believe we are still in the Church Age, Israel’s founding in 1948 was hailed as unmistakable prophetic proof that God’s plan for Israel was reactivating. The milestone was incomplete, however. For evangelicals shaped by Scofield’s teaching, statehood was only the first step. Full prophetic fulfillment requires not only the land’s restoration but also Jewish control of Jerusalem, the construction of the Third Temple, and—ultimately—the conversion of the Jewish people to Christianity.

These prerequisites set the stage for what dispensationalists believe comes next. The Rapture arrives first—when born-again Christians are suddenly taken from Earth to meet Jesus in the air. This is followed by the Tribulation—seven years of global chaos under the Antichrist.

During this period, the Third Temple is constructed in Jerusalem (on the Haram Al-Sharif, where the Al-Aqsa Mosque now stands). Some Jews accept Jesus as the Messiah, while the vast majority who refuse face slaughter. The Tribulation culminates in the Battle of Armageddon and the Second Coming, when Christ returns to defeat the Antichrist’s armies and establish his thousand-year reign from Jerusalem.

This elaborate prophetic fantasy—reading like an apocalyptic thriller—shapes the foreign policy of the world’s most powerful country. In this belief system, supporting Israel is obedience to God; opposing it is defiance of God. For its adherents, this is not politics but a sacred duty, carried out through campaign donations, lobbying, foreign aid, and war.

The Grifter Who Rewrote Scripture

Scofield did not invent dispensationalism; he followed John Nelson Darby, the 19th-century British preacher who first divided the Bible into “dispensations” and insisted on separating the Church and Israel as two distinct peoples of God. Scofield built on Darby’s work, and with wealthy backers willing to fund publication, created the distribution machine that carried dispensationalism into millions of American homes.

Beneath his religious credentials, however, Scofield was a grifter. He abandoned his wife and two daughters, reinvented himself repeatedly, and left behind a trail of fraud and broken trusts. In the late 1870s, he was implicated in fraudulent schemes in St. Louis and even jailed for forgery before his sudden “conversion” in 1879. Shortly thereafter, he relocated to Texas, attached himself to a well-connected evangelical network, and secured a pastor position—a meteoric transformation from conman to church leader.

There he preached Darby’s dispensationalism, cultivated wealthy patrons who bankrolled his ministry, and built the platform that would launch his Reference Bible. That platform—and the networks behind it—would soon link Scofield directly to the centers of imperial power in New York and London.

Scofield, Oxford, and the Balfour Moment

Joseph Canfield’s 1988 biography, The Incredible Scofield and His Book, documents what happened next. By the early 1900s, Scofield’s fortunes shifted dramatically. He was introduced into the Lotos Club—an exclusive New York gentlemen’s club for political and financial elites—by Samuel Untermeyer, a Jewish lawyer and outspoken Zionist advocate with ties to the Rothschild network. Untermeyer’s backing gave Scofield access to circles of money and influence he could never have entered alone.

For Untermeyer, the value was strategic: harnessing Christian support for Zionist aims by presenting them as biblical imperatives. Zionism required the backing of Christian imperial powers to succeed, making Scofield’s evangelical reach invaluable to the political project. Untermeyer’s connections linked Scofield to Zionist-financial circles, including the Rothschilds, and through them to the imperial and Zionist networks that would author the Balfour Declaration.

At the same time, Scofield found another ally in London. In 1908, during a trip there, he met Henry Frowde, Oxford University Press’s London director and a member of the Exclusive Brethren, followers of Darby’s dispensationalism. Frowde took up the project immediately, and in 1909 the press published The Scofield Reference Bible.

For a fringe preacher with a checkered past, the endorsement of Oxford was extraordinary. It gave his notes legitimacy they never could have gained on their own. As the first widely distributed, systematically annotated Bible in English since the Geneva Bible of the 1560s, it reached millions and carried dispensationalism far beyond the small circles where Darby had sown it. Oxford’s name had backed his framework since 1909, giving his interpretations credibility during the years Britain was preparing what would become the Balfour Declaration.

In 1917, Oxford University Press issued a revised edition of The Scofield Reference Bible. Ten months later, the Balfour Declaration pledged British support for a “national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine, addressed to Lord Walter Rothschild. The 1909 edition had already separated Israel and the Church into two distinct peoples and warned that nations would be blessed or cursed depending on how they treated Israel. But the 1917 revision went further, adding blunt notes that “Israel is to be restored to the land” and that “Palestine is promised to the descendants of Abraham.”

These additions corresponded neatly with Balfour’s pledge, giving the impression that the Bible itself had always taught Jewish return to Palestine. In reality, it was Scofield’s commentary distorting the text to serve a political agenda. As Britain embraced Zionist aims, millions of American evangelicals were being taught through his notes that these events fulfilled prophecy. His commentary reframed imperial policy as divine will, putting Darby’s prophecy charts into plain notes in the margins of the most trusted Bible in the English-speaking world. Religion and empire were now aligned.

1967: When Prophecy Seemed Fulfilled

Scofield lived to see this initial alignment between religion and empire but died in 1921, decades before its full implications would become apparent.

In 1967, Oxford issued The New Scofield Reference Bible to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the 1917 edition, a modernized version that refreshed his notes for a new generation. Just months later, Israel captured East Jerusalem and the West Bank in the Six-Day War. Until then, Israel had not controlled the core biblical territories—Jerusalem, Hebron, Bethlehem, Jericho, and Nablus. The war changed that overnight.

Once Israel occupied the “land of the Bible,” the logic of biblical promise gained unprecedented momentum. For Jewish Zionists, it strengthened religious Zionist currents that had existed on the margins, emboldening claims that “Judea and Samaria”—the biblical names for the West Bank—had to be reclaimed and settled. For Christian Zionists, the war brought renewed certainty that prophecy was unfolding literally. Scofield’s prophetic scheme looked vindicated: Jewish control of Jerusalem had long been one of his essential steps toward the end times.

The 1967 edition gave Scofield’s system fresh authority, putting his notes back into millions of hands just as world events seemed to confirm them. Through the 1970s and 1980s, evangelical publishing, televangelism, and prophecy conferences flourished, backed by wealthy donors and publishing houses. Israel’s victory and Scofield’s Bible reinforced one another, binding evangelicals more tightly to the belief that modern wars in the region were unfolding according to God’s plan. Long after his death, Scofield’s name still sanctified war, occupation, and the erasure of a people.

From Footnotes to Foreign Policy

The prophetic certainty generated by Israel’s 1967 victory created fertile ground for mass-market prophecy literature. This is not to say all evangelicals embraced reflexive support—dissenting voices existed. But the dominant current, institutionalized through key evangelical leaders, made Christian Zionism a litmus test of evangelical political identity.

Hal Lindsey’s The Late Great Planet Earth (1970) became the decade’s best-selling nonfiction book. Lindsey popularized Scofield’s framework by reading Cold War events into biblical prophecy—casting the Soviet Union, China, and the European Common Market as signs that Christ’s return was imminent. The book’s influence reached beyond evangelical circles when it was adapted into a 1979 film narrated by Orson Welles, demonstrating how deeply Scofield’s system had penetrated American culture.

Televangelists carried dispensational prophecy into mass-market religion, but Jerry Falwell transformed it into political power. The Baptist preacher mobilized millions of evangelicals into Republican politics, declaring that God had given Palestine to the Jews and that America’s duty was to defend Israel at any cost. When Israel bombed Iraq’s nuclear reactor in 1981, Prime Minister Menachem Begin phoned Falwell to help sell the attack to the Christian public—even gifting him a private jet. Falwell obliged, defending Israel’s actions on television and establishing himself as a trusted ally of the Israeli state.

By the 2000s, John Hagee institutionalized what Falwell had politicized. The Texas megachurch pastor founded Christians United for Israel (CUFI) in 2006, creating an evangelical counterpart to AIPAC. Its annual Washington summits turned Scofield’s reinterpretation of Genesis 12:3 into lobbying strategy. The verse—God’s promise to Abraham, “I will bless those who bless you, and whoever curses you I will curse”—was originally about individuals who helped or harmed Abraham personally. Scofield recast it as a warning that modern nations would be blessed or cursed depending on how they treated the modern state of Israel.

This alliance between evangelical fundamentalism and the political establishment shaped U.S. foreign policy through successive administrations. The merging of prophecy with policy meant that Israel could no longer be judged by secular standards—not international law, not human rights norms, not even American strategic interests. Republican and Democratic administrations alike came to treat Christian Zionism as both voter base and justification for unconditional support.

The Culmination

Donald Trump’s first-term decisions—recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital in 2017 and relocating the U.S. embassy there—were celebrated by evangelical circles as confirming dispensationalist predictions, demonstrating how completely this belief system had captured policy. His 2019 recognition of Israeli annexation of the occupied Golan Heights further aligned U.S. actions with dispensationalist expectations.

By 2025, this belief system had secured positions at the highest levels of government. Mike Huckabee, appointed U.S. ambassador to Israel, openly frames Israel’s modern state as a fulfillment of biblical destiny, urging U.S. leaders to see Jerusalem as a divinely ordained “title deed” from God to Abraham’s heirs. In one Jerusalem speech, he declared: “We have the opportunity to be representatives not only of our government, but also representatives of Jesus Christ.” He subsequently announced that the U.S. is no longer pursuing a two-state solution, calling the West Bank “Judea and Samaria.”

In his book American Crusade, U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth frames support for Israel as a Christian mission, calling for an “American crusade” in defense of Western civilization. His tattoos incorporate medieval crusader symbols—one reading “Deus Vult” (”God wills it”), the First Crusade’s battle cry—making his religious zealotry publicly visible.

Senators Ted Cruz and Lindsey Graham invoke scriptural logic. In his June 2025 exchange with Tucker Carlson, Cruz grounded his stance in biblical promise, paraphrasing Genesis 12:3 in its Scofield-reinterpreted form: “those who bless Israel will be blessed, and those who curse Israel will be cursed,” and adding, “I’d rather be on the blessing side of things.” At a rally in South Carolina, Graham took the distortion further: “If America pulls the plug on Israel, God will pull the plug on us.”

Emboldened by this dispensationalist consensus, Israeli leadership had become increasingly brazen. Benjamin Netanyahu framed Israeli expansion in explicitly biblical terms. He presented territorial conquest as a “historic and spiritual mission” to secure Greater Israel, invoking scriptural language to describe the occupied West Bank as Israel’s ancient homeland and rejecting the concept of occupation itself. In August 2025, announcing new settlement expansions, he declared this was “not the end—it’s the beginning.”

A month later, in September 2025, Trump and Netanyahu jointly announced a 20-point plan said to end the genocide in Gaza. It began as a 21-point proposal that Trump presented to Arab and Muslim leaders, who welcomed it. According to Arab officials, one point would have barred Israel from annexing the West Bank, but that clause was excluded before the announcement.

The final text requires the Palestinian Authority to complete a reform program “as outlined in President Trump’s peace plan in 2020.” That 2020 “Peace to Prosperity” blueprint contains the key: it requires Palestinians to formally recognize Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people and to forfeit claims to Jerusalem by accepting it as Israel’s sovereign, undivided capital. These are the precise preconditions that Scofield outlined as necessary for Christ’s Second Coming.

Securing these demands brings a millennial pattern to completion. For a thousand years, Western Christian empires have pursued Jerusalem—with shifting theological justifications but consistent imperial methods. Medieval Crusaders sought to establish Christian sovereignty over the holy city. Modern dispensationalist theology requires Jewish sovereignty as a prerequisite for Christ’s return.

The theological frameworks differ, but the perpetrators and methods remain constant: Western Christian empires treating indigenous presence—Muslim and Christian alike—as obstacle to be removed for religious supremacist ends.

Scofield’s interpretation of the Bible resonated with Americans because it mirrored the logic that they had already deployed across their own continent: Indigenous peoples cast as obstacles to God’s plan, land theft framed as divine right, Old Testament language deployed to bless ethnic cleansing. Israeli territorial expansion would provide Jewish control of Jerusalem, which this theology demanded to trigger the end times.

American evangelicals and the Israeli state converged in mutual dependence, each requiring the other’s success. The dispensationalist system supplied the checklist; the shared history of settler colonialism supplied the methods.

What began as notes in a study Bible became the ideological apparatus through which American power justifies the dispossession of the very communities where the faith was born. When American politicians invoke Genesis in defense of Israeli policy, they are not speaking metaphorically. They implement Scofield’s 1909 interpretations with weapons and diplomacy and defend the dispossession as the will of God.

The dispossession this theology justifies extends with particular irony to Palestinian Christians. Communities that trace unbroken lineage to the apostles themselves—in Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Nazareth, Ramallah, Gaza—and that sustained their faith through two millennia of changing empires were erased through the modern Christian Zionist vision. Dispensationalism required the land be emptied of all its indigenous people to make space for a political project conceived in imperial capitals and carried out through decades of occupation, siege, and slaughter.

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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.

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Israel has publicly affirmed it will not send a delegation to Qatar or Egypt to finalize a ceasefire agreement. Now that Hamas has accepted the ceasefire terms, Netanyahu will escalate the genocide.

This has been the pattern—April 2024, March 2025, July 2025, and now again. Each time the resistance factions agree to a ceasefire, Israel does not treat it as a moment to stop. It treats it as proof that genocidal violence delivers results, and so it must be continued and intensified.

True to the settler state’s imperative of domination, Netanyahu has announced Operation Gideon’s Chariots 2—an assault to occupy Gaza City—while simultaneously declaring that ceasefire talks will resume under the shadow of invasion, to secure the release of captives and end the war only on terms “acceptable to Israel.”

Israel will never accept any arrangement that leaves Palestinians on their land with the capacity to resist, because Zionist colonization requires Palestinian dispossession. As Ze’ev Jabotinsky, founder of Revisionist Zionism, admitted, “every native population in the world resists colonists as long as they see any hope of ridding themselves of the danger of being colonized.”

Any concession or ceasefire that leaves room for Palestinian presence sustains that hope—and it is that hope that must be extinguished. This is the essence of Jabotinsky’s “iron wall” doctrine: reject compromise and enforce submission through mass killing and collective punishment, deterrence through terror.

In 1923 he wrote:
“Only when not a single breach is visible in the iron wall, only then do extreme groups lose their belief, and the influence transfers to moderate groups. Not before then will they abandon all hope of getting rid of the Jews, and only then will the moderates come to us and offer concessions.”

The same logic is visible today. When Hamas accepts a proposal, it is not taken as a step toward ending the genocide but as proof that making the people of Gaza pay the price of resistance works—that greater violence will extract greater concessions.

Why would Israel accept any proposal when reducing Gaza to rubble, occupying Gaza City, and driving out its people all serve the expansionist aims of the Zionist project? After all, Netanyahu’s father, Benzion Netanyahu, was Jabotinsky’s personal secretary.

Amid Arab collusion and global silence, every agreement is only a pause. Since Israel reneged on the last ceasefire on March 18, 2025, more than 10,500 Palestinians have been killed.

Had Hamas rejected the mediators’ proposal, the refusal would have saturated mainstream media as vindication for the slaughter, blaming Palestinians for their own suffering. Now that they have accepted, the genocide proceeds uncontested—no sustained reporting of Israeli crimes, no international sanctions, no Arab states breaking ties. Acceptance is met with indifference, refusal with blame—every path open to Palestinians is twisted to serve Israel’s colonization of Palestine.

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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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.

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.

These aren't isolated policy proposals—they reveal the architecture of a new regional order.

What emerges 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.

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.

In the United States, no political commitment is more absolute, more bipartisan, or more immune to the constraints of law, evidence, and human cost than support for Israel—and none is more nakedly theological. Biden met Israel’s war cabinet in October 2023, weeks into the bombing of Gaza, and declared himself a Zionist. Blinken, in Tel Aviv the same week, introduced himself as a Jew, not as Secretary of State. Trump moved the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem in his first term, recognizing it as Israel’s capital—his second term will only accelerate the settlement project, advance annexation, and extend the Greater Israel project.

Those commitments rest on doctrine. Christian Zionism—a dispensationalist reading of scripture that demands Jewish control over all of historic Palestine as a precondition for Christ’s Second Coming—is the dominant eschatology of American evangelical Christianity, the largest single voting bloc in the United States. It is the ideological foundation of Washington’s unconditional support for Israel.

The doctrine that now justifies Palestinian dispossession runs through the American project from its origins. Puritan settlers wielded the Old Testament as their warrant. They were the new Israelites; New England was their promised land; the people they found there were Amalekites—the scriptural enemy marked for total destruction. The biblical command 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.” These settlers read it as genocidal mandate and acted on it as colonial entitlement.

Manifest Destiny extended the Puritan project from New England to a continent. God, they declared, had ordained American expansion westward, and the people already living there stood, as the Amalekites had stood, between a chosen people and their promised land. The slaughter of Native Americans was celebrated as fulfillment of divine will—the same genocidal logic, the same scriptural warrant, applied from coast to coast.

The Protestant Reformation turned the Old Testament into a colonial instrument. While Catholic and Orthodox traditions read it through Christ—its promises fulfilled, its commands absorbed into a new covenant—Martin Luther’s translation of the New Testament into vernacular German in 1522 placed scripture directly in the hands of ordinary believers, stripping away the interpretive authority of the Church. The conquest narratives, the chosen people, the promised land, the command to destroy Amalek: settlers across the colonial world inherited them as live instructions—and indigenous peoples across four continents bore the consequences.

Before Luther, before the Puritans, before Manifest Destiny, there was Columbus. Sailing in 1492, he crossed the Atlantic to find a western route to the East—to fund a crusade to retake Jerusalem from Muslim rule. He documented these intentions in his diaries, his letters to the Spanish crown, and in his Book of Prophecies (1502), in which he declared himself divinely appointed to hasten the end of days and fund Christianity’s final battle for the Holy City. What he found instead became the means to that end—and the Americas entered history as collateral for a holy war.

That holy war has never ended. Pete Hegseth, Trump’s Secretary of Defense who now commands the most powerful military on earth, carries “Deus Vult” tattooed on his chest—the battle cry Pope Urban II used in 1095 to launch the First Crusade.

Christian Zionism is that colonial doctrine’s contemporary form—five centuries of scriptural conquest logic translated into American foreign policy. It underwrites Israeli settlements, funds evangelical lobbying in Washington, and provides the moral vocabulary through which American politicians justify unconditional support for a state engaged in the genocide of the Palestinian people. It is why Congress rose to applaud Netanyahu—a man overseeing that genocide—as though allegiance to Israel were a condition of American political life. The same creed that sanctified the destruction of indigenous peoples across four continents now targets Palestine.

Christian Zionism condemns the Jews it supports—to conversion or damnation at the moment of Christ’s return. The alliance between Jewish and Christian Zionists rests on a paradox neither side names. Jewish Zionists accept evangelical money, political support, and diplomatic cover while fully aware that their Christian benefactors expect them to convert or face divine judgment. Christian Zionists back Israeli expansionism and fund Israeli settlements while believing that the Jews they support are destined for damnation unless they convert. Palestinian destruction is the alliance’s only honest purpose.

Palestinian Christians are what that alliance most needs to disappear. We have inhabited this land since Christianity’s origins—our communities uninterrupted, predating the Crusades and every colonial project that has sought 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. The Jerusalem Declaration of 2006, signed by Palestinian Christian leaders from across denominations, condemned Christian Zionism as false teaching that perverts Christianity to serve imperial interests. Archbishop Atallah Hanna 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.”

Behind that declaration lies a presence no colonial project has been able to erase. American Zionism required Palestinian division—between Christian and Muslim, between those who resist and those who administer, between those who carry the memory and those Israel demands forget. The demand for our division is the demand for our disappearance. We predate the Zionist claim to this land, the Crusader claim, the Roman claim—descended from the same Jewish and Canaanite communities the Bible describes, communities that accepted Christ and never left. The oldest Christian communities in the world are Palestinian. How does a Christian Zionist doctrine that demands our elimination reconcile with that?

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What does it mean when a colonial power assigns the work of domination to the very people it subjugates? The question is not rhetorical. It goes to the heart of the Palestinian predicament today, and to the elaborate fiction that surrounds what is called the “peace process.” For what has been constructed in Palestine since 1993 is not the foundation of a future state but something far more insidious: a system in which the colonized are made responsible for administering their own subjugation, in which the oppressed are transformed into instruments of the oppressor, and in which the language of self-governance is deployed to mask the deepening of occupation.

The relationship between Israel and the Palestinian Authority (PA) exemplifies a logic that students of colonialism will recognize immediately—the logic of indirect rule, of subcontracted domination. The British perfected this system in India and Africa; the French employed it across the Maghreb and in Indochina. Its genius lies in its economy: rather than bearing the full cost and condemnation of direct rule, the colonial power installs a local elite whose interests become bound to the perpetuation of the colonial order itself. Oslo and its economic counterpart, the Paris Protocol, were celebrated in the West as the foundations of Palestinian statehood. But what they produced was statehood’s opposite: a fragmented territory, an economy imprisoned by dependency, and a Palestinian leadership made responsible for policing its own people on Israel’s behalf.

The Oslo Accords

Oslo was not a peace agreement. It was, to call it by its proper name, an instrument of capitulation. Conducted in secret by a handful of PLO officials—none of them lawyers, none of them with maps adequate to the task, none of them, it must be said, with democratic mandate from the Palestinian people—the 1993 accord bypassed not only the Palestinian delegation negotiating in Washington but the entire collective achievement of the First Intifada. That uprising, which shook the Israeli occupation between 1987 and 1993 and forced upon the world a recognition that Palestinians could not simply be ignored or wished away, had earned something precious: the beginning of international acknowledgment that Palestinian national rights were not simply humanitarian concerns but political ones requiring a political solution.

And what did Oslo do with this achievement? It squandered it. In exchange for recognition of the PLO—a recognition that cost Israel nothing and committed it to even less—the Palestinian side received only the promise of “limited self-administration.” Not sovereignty. Not statehood. Not even a commitment that such things might eventually be discussed on terms other than Israel’s. The central questions—the fate of the settlements, the status of Jerusalem, the right of return for the millions of refugees created by 1948—were “deferred,” which is to say they were conceded in advance. For in any negotiation, to defer a question indefinitely while the stronger party consolidates its grip on the disputed territory is not to postpone resolution but to predetermine it.

To implement this arrangement, the accords created the PA as a governing body in the Occupied Territories. Yasser Arafat and the Fatah leadership, returning from their long exile in Tunisia, assumed its helm. Let us be clear about what this meant. The PLO—which had been, whatever its faults, a national liberation movement representing Palestinians everywhere, from the camps of Lebanon to the diaspora of the Americas—was transformed overnight into a local municipal administration under occupation. Edward Said called it at the time a “Palestinian Versailles,” and nothing in the intervening years has proven it to be any different. It was an agreement that exchanged the struggle for liberation for the privileges of authority under continued subjugation.

The accords carved the West Bank into Areas A, B, and C—an alphabet soup of fragmentation that confined Palestinian “self-rule” to isolated enclaves comprising just 18% of the territory. Israel retained security control over Area B and complete control over Area C, which constitutes 60% of the West Bank and contains nearly all its natural resources, its aquifers, its arable land. What was announced to the world as Palestinian self-governance was in reality Israeli rule by another name, a system in which settlements expanded, bypass roads multiplied, and Israel tightened its grip on every border, every water source, every road of consequence—while the PA was charged with keeping order among its own dispossessed population.

The fragmentation was not only territorial but psychological, which may in the end prove the deeper wound. By severing communities, by making the simple act of traveling from one Palestinian town to another a gauntlet of checkpoints and permits, Oslo dismantled the collective space necessary for national consciousness and organized resistance. Its system of “security coordination” bound the PA to suppress dissent and pursue resistance members, often in direct alignment with Israeli intelligence priorities.

In Jenin, for example, the PA moved against its own people under the Orwellian banner of “Protect the Homeland”—a demonstration of how thoroughly subcontracting succeeds in turning the colonized into instruments of their own subjugation.

Economic Dependency: The Paris Protocol

If the Oslo Accords constructed the political architecture of subcontracted domination, the Paris Protocol of 1994 erected its economic scaffolding. This agreement, largely ignored by Western commentators eager to celebrate the “peace process,” bound the Palestinian economy to Israel with chains that have only tightened over three decades. It deprived the PA of any meaningful fiscal sovereignty by placing customs duties and value-added taxes on goods destined for Palestinian markets entirely in Israel’s hands.

These revenues—which constitute the bulk of the PA’s operating budget—are “transferred” to the Palestinians only at Israel’s discretion, withheld whenever compliance must be enforced or punishment administered. What was presented as economic coordination has functioned in practice as a system of coercion, turning livelihood itself into an instrument of political control.

In 2024, Israel’s Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich deducted $26 million from Palestinian tax revenues, triggering a financial crisis that left thousands of public-sector workers without full salaries. This was the system’s very logic made manifest—the reduction of autonomy to appearance, the deployment of economic dependency as an instrument of discipline.

Colonial powers have always understood the utility of economic leverage. By controlling livelihoods, they secure compliance; by enriching a small collaborating elite, they create a constituency for the continuation of colonial arrangements; by impoverishing the majority, they breed the despair and disorganization that make resistance difficult.

The Paris Protocol reproduces this pattern in Palestine with remarkable precision. A privileged few—those connected to the PA leadership, those positioned to benefit from the monopolies and import licenses that Oslo’s architects distributed—have prospered even as unemployment, poverty, and hopelessness have spread among the population at large. Far from preparing the ground for sovereignty, the protocol institutionalizes subordination, ensuring that economic freedom, like political freedom, remains structurally unattainable.

For Israel, the arrangement is both cost-effective and politically convenient. By outsourcing civil administration and security to the PA, it avoids the expense and international scrutiny of direct occupation. By controlling revenues through the Paris Protocol, it wields economic dependency as another form of discipline. Meanwhile, settlements expand and the occupation deepens. What appears to foreign observers as progress toward statehood is in fact the refinement of domination—a colonial system made more efficient, more deniable, more permanent.

From the First Intifada to Gaza’s Blockade

The Oslo and Paris accords were framed as the pathway to Palestinian statehood, but they were bookended by two moments that reveal a different trajectory altogether: the 1991 Madrid Peace Conference and the 2006 Palestinian legislative elections. Between them came the Second Intifada, which erupted in 2000 after the collapse of Oslo’s hollow promises and widespread disillusionment with the “peace process.” Understanding what subcontracted occupation has wrought requires tracing this arc.

Madrid was the political fruit of the First Intifada. That uprising—led not by the PLO leadership in Tunis but by Palestinians on the ground, organized through popular committees and sustained by collective sacrifice—forced a global recognition of the Palestinian cause that decades of armed struggle from exile had failed to achieve. For the first time, Israel was compelled to negotiate not from goodwill but because the cost of continued occupation had become intolerable.

But two years later, in Oslo, that achievement was bartered away in secret talks, as Arafat and the Fatah leadership traded the gains of the Intifada for their return from exile, for political authority, for the trappings of governance that the PA would provide. The people who had made the First Intifada were not consulted. The prisoners who had led the uprising remained in Israeli jails.

The Second Intifada, which erupted after Ariel Sharon’s provocative visit to the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound in September 2000, expressed in violent form the accumulated frustrations with Fatah’s stewardship—the corruption, the collaboration, the manifest failure to deliver anything resembling liberation. It ended in 2005 under the weight of brutal Israeli repression, followed by Israel’s unilateral withdrawal of settlers and soldiers from Gaza and the dismantlement of its settlements there. But this withdrawal was not a concession; it was a strategic repositioning. Gaza was to become an open-air prison, blockaded from land, sea, and air, its population subjected to collective punishment whenever resistance manifested itself.

The following year, legislative elections were held in the West Bank and Gaza. Widely regarded by international observers as transparent and fair, they produced a decisive victory for Hamas. Thirteen years after the signing of the Oslo Accords, the Palestinian people rendered their verdict on that bargain—a resounding rejection of the PA’s corruption, its complicity, its failure. And how did the self-proclaimed champions of democracy in Washington, Tel Aviv, and European capitals respond? They moved instantly to nullify the result, imposing sanctions on the Hamas-led government, cutting off the funds on which the PA depended for its patronage networks.

Under the supervision of U.S. General Keith Dayton, PA security forces were armed and trained specifically to confront Hamas, escalating internal tensions and fueling the clashes that would tear the Palestinian national movement apart. By 2007, Hamas had taken control of Gaza while Fatah consolidated its rule in the West Bank. The division became permanent, giving Israel the pretext it required to tighten its occupation and impose on Gaza the blockade that persists to this day—a blockade that has reduced two million people to conditions that international observers have repeatedly described as uninhabitable.

The trajectory could not be clearer. What began in Madrid with hard-won recognition of Palestinian rights was reduced in Oslo to subcontracted authority, and by 2006 had fractured into rival administrations in Gaza and the West Bank, each too weak to challenge Israel effectively, each available to be played against the other. At every stage, Israel has exploited these divisions to tighten its grip, treating Palestinian disunity as proof of incapacity for self-rule.

What is offered in place of genuine sovereignty is the appearance of choice—elections held under occupation, negotiations conducted without leverage, the trappings of authority without its substance. And when those choices do not conform to Israel’s terms, they are dismissed outright, with Palestinian division invoked as evidence that there is no “partner for peace.”

The result is a circular logic that entrenches domination—Israel manufactures fragmentation, exploits it to expand control, and then cites it as the reason why peace cannot be achieved.

The Path to Liberation

While Israel profits from this colonial system of subcontracted control, the costs for Palestinians have been devastating. They face the double burden of resisting occupation while overcoming internal divisions that fracture the struggle itself. The political rivalry between Fatah—clinging to its authority and its accommodations with the occupation—and Hamas, which has refused to abandon the language and practice of resistance, has weakened the collective capacity to challenge a system designed to perpetuate itself.

The PA has accommodated itself to the reality of occupation, displacement, and dispossession. It has adopted the vocabulary of its patrons, speaking of “peace” and “security coordination” and “confidence-building measures” when what is required is resistance to an ongoing injustice. Hamas, whatever one thinks of its methods or its ideology, has at least maintained the fundamental position that occupation must be opposed, not managed. These divisions serve Israel’s interests perfectly. As long as Palestinians remain fractured, as long as their leadership is divided between those who administer occupation and those who resist it from impossible circumstances, the system will persist.

Abolishing this proxy system of control is essential—not only for tactical reasons but for the recovery of Palestinian political coherence. The PA’s reliance on Israel, its complicity in preserving a status quo that benefits only the occupier, undermines any broader struggle for justice and self-determination. What is called “reconciliation” under these circumstances is submission misnamed as compromise, where the rhetoric of peace is weaponized to suppress resistance and delegitimize those who refuse to accept permanent subjugation.

Freedom cannot be granted by the colonizer. This is the lesson of every anti-colonial struggle, and Palestinians will not prove an exception to it. What can be said is that neither the devastation of occupation nor the catastrophe presently unfolding in Gaza has broken the determination of those who refuse to accept their fate. Despite siege, bombardment, and scarcity that would have crushed lesser peoples, resistance continues.

The world may fail to recognize their worth. The powerful may dismiss them as terrorists, as obstacles to a “peace” that was never genuinely on offer. The media may ignore their suffering or frame it in ways that obscure the fundamental asymmetry between occupier and occupied. But the struggle belongs to a history far larger than any single moment—the history in which the colonized refuse the roles assigned to them, in which the oppressed decline to manage their own subjugation, in which peoples who were told they did not exist assert their existence in the only terms their oppressors understand.

The Palestinians are not fated to administer their own dispossession. Sooner or later—and the arc of history suggests it is always later than the oppressed would wish and sooner than the oppressor expects—they will dismantle it.

To write is to resist. For Palestinians, it means challenging the colonial knowledge system that claims the right to define who we are, where we belong, and whether we deserve to exist. In Palestine, writing becomes revolutionary defiance. Edward Said wrote that "the power to narrate, or to block other narratives from forming and emerging, is central to culture and imperialism." Writing reclaims what has been stolen—not only land but memory, identity, and humanity itself.

A settler-colonial project does not just steal land; it must get rid of the people who inhabit it, creating and imposing a false history that renders the colonized invisible or inferior. In Zionist rhetoric, the position is clear. The best outcome is to expel the Palestinians. If that cannot be achieved, the fallback is a rigged agreement that will make life so miserable they will eventually leave. This ideology does not believe in coexistence on the basis of equality.

This vision materialized in the Nakba—not as a past event but as an ongoing process. Israel did not stop at war crimes and ethnic cleansing in 1948—it continues today. Dispossession, displacement, and erasure persist through settlement expansion, land confiscation, siege, and the denial of return. Israeli colonization remains an active campaign to reduce the Palestinian presence, wrapped in biblical, moral, and security pretexts that present dispossession as virtue.

Palestinian resistance is the rational answer to this occupation, yet Western media criminalizes and distorts it, acting as both enabler and accomplice, bending language to shift blame from oppressor to oppressed. Liberation movements become "terrorist organizations." Occupation becomes a "territorial dispute." Dispossession is reframed as a "right to exist," ethnic cleansing as "voluntary migration," apartheid as "security measures." Even the bombing of civilians is sanitized as "precision airstrikes."

The West has long maintained Israel's image as both victim and moral superior. But the spectacle of overwhelming military force unleashed on Gaza has made that fiction harder to sustain. Images of mass displacement, targeted destruction, and deliberate starvation have begun to break through decades of propaganda, especially for younger generations. The old moral shield—the claim that Israel's violence is always reactive, always defensive—has started to crack under the weight of what the world can now see in real time.

These cracks create space for Palestinian voices to reach new audiences and contest the empire's story on their own terms. Writing seizes that space, dismantling the euphemisms of power with lived truths and replacing the colonizer's vocabulary with a record the oppressor cannot control.

Decolonization begins not with the land but in the mind. Colonization's most insidious conquest is not the territory it seizes but the ideologies it implants. Edward Said described how cultural hegemony convinces the colonized to internalize the narratives that justify their subjugation. Over decades, much of the Arab world has absorbed the colonizer's perspective—the belief that Arabs are incapable of acting without Western guidance, that legitimacy comes not from their own societies and values but from Western approval, that Palestinians, and by extension Arabs, must accept a subordinate place.

Hanan Ashrawi recalls her father's words: "Liberate yourself, and you liberate the land." In Palestine, as across the Arab world, the colonization of thought has targeted the symbols of identity. Arabic—through which we articulate our identity—is displaced by Western tongues sold as the sole keys to modernity. Palestinian art and literature are sidelined, our voices drowned out by imperial narratives that brand resistance as barbarism and submission as progress. This assault on culture erodes the confidence to speak, think, and act outside the colonizer's framework.

Writing resists the settler-colonial project's attempt to reduce the oppressed to faceless masses. Palestinian writing reclaims the power to name, define, and remember on our own terms. It produces knowledge from our lived reality, documenting what they try to erase while envisioning what they claim is impossible. And crucially, it tells the stories of real people—the grandmother holding her 1948 key, the olive farmer watching settlers uproot his trees, the Gazan doctor operating without anesthesia—transforming the abstract into the tangible.

Ghassan Kanafani, the Palestinian writer and revolutionary, embodied this principle. In his novels, short stories, essays, and political writings, he chronicled the sacrifices, aspirations, and struggles of a displaced people, revealing both resilience and vulnerability. Storytelling for Kanafani was never detached from the struggle it depicted; whether in literature or political analysis, each work was an act of resistance in itself. It was this union of art and struggle that led one obituary to describe him as "a commando who never fired a gun, whose weapon was a ball-point pen." His writing was a weapon of clarity, exposing lies and affirming the legitimacy of resistance. The pen and the sword were not opposites but complements, equally vital to liberation.

Today, that same weapon faces a new battlefield. Our story is met with algorithmic censorship, criminalized speech, and the smear of antisemitism for any criticism of Israel. Palestinian writers, journalists, and artists are banned from platforms, denied visas, and blacklisted. When our voices do break through, international media strips them of context and adopts the Occupation's narrative to challenge them.

Yet even the barriers of censorship, media distortion, and political repression are not impenetrable. The Palestinian story moves through channels the authorities cannot seal—citizen journalists in Gaza posting in real time despite platform suppression, diaspora communities organizing protests and boycotts across continents, reporters finding ways to publish what others suppress, and artists using murals, music, theater, and film to carry our struggle into streets, galleries, and screens worldwide. Writers and activists connect it to the struggles of Indigenous land defenders in the Americas, anti-apartheid veterans in South Africa, and movements in the Global South who recognize their own history in ours.

Our struggle is part of a shared fight against the machinery of empire, one that exposes how censorship and narrative control are tools of domination everywhere. In standing with Palestine, they stand for their own liberation, and in their resistance, we find the echo of our own.

“How large the revolution, how narrow the journey, how grand the idea, how small the state!” Mahmoud Darwish’s words are a reminder that the Palestinian cause has always been about people—about the right to return, to live with dignity, to exist without permission—and about freedom from oppression everywhere. They cut through the vanity of narrow nationalist ambitions, setting them against the universal ideals of liberation and justice. They measure the vastness of a struggle for freedom against the shrunken horizon of a bantustan reality—a vision reduced to a cage with a flag. The Palestinian idea is not the cramped borders of an Oslo map but the full breadth of a people's right to live free on their land. To accept less is to abandon the revolution that gave it life.

To write is to resist—not as metaphor, but as a daily act of liberation. Every word that rejects erasure and every sentence that refuses the Occupation's language keeps the horizon of freedom visible. Writing carries the memory they try to bury, affirms the humanity they try to deny, and preserves the vision they want us to forget.

As long as we write, we resist—and as long as we resist, the story of Palestine will remain ours to tell.