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Arab regimes moving toward normalization in the aftermath of the Abraham Accords—the agreements brokered by the United States in 2020 to normalize relations between several Arab states and Israel—faced a problem: their populations did not regard it as legitimate. The Arab liberal press set about supplying the legitimacy normalization lacked. That press, the Gulf-financed, secular-oriented media that styles itself the voice of Arab moderation, had its method: Acknowledge Palestinian suffering, concede the dispossession, and strip that acknowledgment of every political obligation it ever carried.

Three months after the Accords were signed, the Lebanese columnist Hazem Saghieh wrote in Asharq Al-Awsat (The Middle East) that “the Palestinian cause no longer intersects with the national concerns of the rest of the Arab states.”¹ He did not deny Palestinian suffering or contest the justice of the cause. “Palestinian bitterness is perfectly understandable,” he wrote, “especially as settlement expansion, land confiscation, and the shrinking of the two-state solution continue to stifle an undeniable right.” He acknowledged Palestinian rights, then absolved Arab states of any obligation to act on them.

A few months earlier, when the Emirates announced its normalization, the paper’s former editor-in-chief, the Saudi columnist Abdulrahman Al-Rashed, had done the same. Al-Rashed had previously run Asharq Al-Awsat and then Al-Arabiya, the Gulf’s dominant 24-hour news channel, making him the most powerful journalist in Gulf-financed Arab media for nearly two decades—the Arab world’s Thomas Friedman. He began with the concession: “The losers, all these years, have been the Palestinians. Normalization takes place in their name, and they reap nothing from it—no return of lands, no recognition of the state.”² Having made it, he pivoted: “Every Arab country has the same right to manage its international relations, including its relationship with Israel. This is a sovereignty matter that each country decides based on its interests, not based on what the Palestinians or other Arabs want.”

Neither column disputed the Palestinian cause. Both columnists acknowledged the suffering and the dispossession and, in the same breath, removed that cause from Arab politics. The grievance remained legitimate. The political claim it had once carried, they withdrew. The cause was acknowledged as just because it had been decoupled from any obligation to act on it.

Withdrawing the political claim serves two parties. The first is Israel, whose regional project depends on invulnerability to any future threat—a doctrine of permanent security that demands the annihilation of any recurring one. In Gaza and across Palestine, that includes civilians, children, and future generations. The doctrine defines the enemy as a permanent existential danger, so its removal can always be reframed as self-defense. Normalization is how Israel secures that invulnerability, converting states that were, at least notionally, frontline adversaries into partners or passive bystanders. Egypt in 1979, Jordan in 1994, the Abraham Accords states in 2020, and the Saudi track that has run intermittently since—each subtraction removes a source of leverage and tightens the encirclement of the one party left without a state, the Palestinians.

The second party served is the Arab regimes: Normalization is how they secure arms and diplomatic cover, and the technology to contain their own dissidents, including surveillance systems, crowd-control arsenals, and intelligence infrastructure. Israel buys regional invulnerability; the Arab regimes buy survival. The Palestinians are the residue that both parties write off.

For this arrangement to hold, political normalization requires ideological normalization. The Arab liberal press supplies it. Its arguments have been stable: Palestinian intransigence, rather than Israeli colonization, is the obstacle; realism means accepting Israeli hegemony; the Palestinian cause has cost the Arabs more than it was worth. Resistance becomes the crime; accommodation, the cure.

The Arab liberal press spans newspapers, television, and social media. It includes the pan-Arab dailies Asharq Al-Awsat and Al-Hayat; the television news channels Al-Arabiya and MBC; and a social media system that coordinates and amplifies the same arguments. All are Gulf-financed and broadly advance the same editorial line. Saghieh wrote for Al-Hayat before Asharq Al-Awsat, while Al-Rashed ran Al-Arabiya before Asharq Al-Awsat. These are the leading outlets of a formation that extends well beyond them.

That formation’s flagship is Asharq Al-Awsat—the paper both columnists now write for. It was launched in London in 1978 under Saudi patronage, around the time Egypt signed the Camp David peace treaty with Israel, the first peace agreement between Israel and an Arab state, thereby removing the Arab world’s largest military power from the Arab military front against Israel. In exchange, Egypt received American military and economic aid. The arrangement set the template: Arab states would normalize with Israel and receive American patronage, while the Palestinian cause would be managed separately, then deferred, then abandoned. The paper became the flagship pan-Arab venue for the political language of that order—the equivalent of the Financial Times or Le Monde in the Arab world.

It targeted the Western-oriented educated professional class across the Arab world and its diaspora—those whose financial interests are served by the regional order sustained by normalization, and whose alignment with it determines whether it becomes broadly acceptable. Their power is social and economic rather than political: they shape what is considered reasonable, legitimate, and safe for business. Their opinions, once shaped, travel downward into the institutions and conversations that govern public life.

The Arab public still stood with Palestine; the regimes no longer did. They were bound to Israel and, through Israel, to the abandonment of Palestine. The Arab liberal press’s task was to make that abandonment acceptable—to persuade the public to trade Palestinian claims of return and sovereignty, along with resistance to a future defined on Israeli terms, for promises of prosperity, modernization, and normal life.

The paper manufactured consent, amongst the class it cultivated, to the political direction of the Arab regimes sustained by American protection, whose survival now depended on alignment with Israel. It designated which Arab claims could survive in the public imagination and which could not. The Palestinian cause was not to survive: by the time of the Abraham Accords, normalization had become the regional default.

The Abraham Accords were the first Arab-Israeli agreement to bypass Palestinian statehood, but once Israel’s genocide in Gaza began, the Arab public could not be sold Israeli integration. Eleven weeks into the genocide, with the international community again calling for a Palestinian state, Al-Rashed published “This Is the Way to Get Rid of Hamas.”³ He called on the international community to establish a Palestinian state, “so that there will be no movement like Hamas, and so that there will be no existential danger to the Israelis.” Palestinian statehood, in this account, existed to protect the occupier. Its sovereignty would extend only as far as Israeli security permitted—a state to contain Palestinian politics rather than express it.

“The international community then has the right to dictate to the Palestinians about preventing Hamas, the Brotherhood, and the extremists,” Al-Rashed wrote. In 2020, he had reserved the sovereign right of Arab states to decide—“based on their interests.” In 2023, he transferred that sovereign right to the international community and turned it against the Palestinians: the right to establish the Palestinian state, and the authority to dictate the terms of its sovereignty. Sovereignty, in this discourse, is positional: an attribute of everyone in the region except its victims.

Facing enraged populations and their own exposed complicity, the Arab regimes proposed a Palestinian state at the Security Council—stripped, in advance, of everything that would make it one: no control over borders or airspace, no military, no sovereignty, no right of return. The United States vetoed it and produced the Trump plan instead—a plan Trump declared would have the U.S. “take over the Gaza Strip” and “own it.” UN Resolution 2803 endorsed that plan in November 2025, and the Arab regimes welcomed it.

What the regimes welcomed, the press, once again, made thinkable. “‘New Gaza’ and ‘Green Rafah’ are the two catchwords of a rubric coming at us with promises of a prosperous future for Gaza,” Saghieh wrote of the Trump Board of Peace’s reconstruction scheme.⁴ “The French Riviera was proposed as the model to emulate.” He described a “paradise on earth” that was being built in the 58 percent of the Strip behind Israel’s yellow line, and “hell” in the rest. He cited former Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert calling one reconstruction project “a concentration camp for Palestinians.” “As for the displacement of Gaza’s population, the genocidal war and its repercussions, and the political future of the Palestinians, that is all swept under the rug,” Saghieh added. “But it doesn’t silence the innocent question: What is objectionable about making Gaza resemble Dubai or the Riviera?”

To ask the question, Saghieh had first to concede the horror—the displacement, the genocide, the concentration camp named as such by an Israeli prime minister—and then set it aside. The Israeli public needed no such innocence about its eliminationist intent. Eighty-two percent support the ethnic cleansing of Gaza’s entire population; 47 percent support killing all civilians in cities the army occupies. What the Israeli public states as intent, the Arab liberal press poses as a question.

The innocent question was a pretext. Saghieh’s critical posture was theater—no different from the Arab regimes’ statehood proposal. Both ended in capitulation to the terms of the Trump plan. For years, the Arab liberal press had sold the Arab public a position it called realism—that the power balance favored Israel and the United States, which sustains it, and that the only realistic response was capitulation.

With the killing of Yahya Sinwar and Hassan Nasrallah, the leaders of Hamas and Hizb-Allah, the realism argument found its moment. Israel, Al-Rashed wrote, was in “a stronger position than before,” no longer pressured to negotiate with the resistance.⁵ In an October 2024 column titled “Israel Does Not Intend to Stop,” he argued that “the Lebanese army should carry out its duty of protecting the borders, and end Hizb-Allah’s military role.” Without this, Israel would “continue its military operations until the coming spring, until the elimination of the last armed fugitive in Lebanon, and the country will have been destroyed because of it, and Hizb-Allah will be finished militarily and politically.” The threat was Israeli; the duty, the guilt, and the ruin were all Lebanese.

To Al-Rashed, Hizb-Allah’s coming elimination would vindicate the argument: Resistance had sealed its own fate by refusing to capitulate, and what remained for Lebanon was to accept the terms. Resistance was futile, and worse than futile—it was what licensed the destruction. On the second anniversary of October 7, he returned to where the argument began. Al-Aqsa Flood, he claimed, had given Israel a license to destroy a list of regional targets it had already prepared.⁶ Hamas’s attacks were like Gamal Abdel Nasser’s closure of the Straits of Tiran in 1967, an opening Israel had been waiting for to settle its confrontations with Egypt, Syria, and Jordan. “Tens of thousands of Gaza residents,” he wrote, “perished because of Hamas.”

Israel has killed over 73,000 Palestinians. Its own military intelligence database recorded 83 percent of those killed as civilians. More than 1,000 of them were babies under the age of one. Hamas did not do this. The UN Commission of Inquiry confirmed in June 2026 that the deliberate targeting of children is among the key elements establishing Israel’s genocidal intent.

In the days that followed, Saghieh widened the circle of the accused: The resistance shared the blame for Israel’s genocide, and so did the Arab public. The “Levant’s mainstream political culture,” he wrote, was afflicted by “inveterate inertia.”⁷ It had shown itself unwilling to recognize realities, accept Israeli-American regional power, or carry out the “radical reviews” that would have abandoned resistance. The culture was “incapable of practicing self-change.” “This task,” he wrote, “was left to Israel,” and Israel “undertook to complete it with genocidal spite.”

The genocide was, in his framing, the consequence of Arab refusal to internalize the colonial hierarchy. With nothing to stop it, and with diplomatic impunity, Israel consolidated a regional order around itself—what Saghieh called an “imperial strategic sphere” that “provides Israel with security” and “obliges everyone to deal with this situation as a fait accompli.” Inside it, the colonized were to recognize the colonizer’s victory, abandon their political claims, and live as subjects of an order they had no standing to contest.

That fait accompli holds through a perpetual exchange of enemies. Permanent security requires a permanent threat, and once one has been neutralized, another must be designated. As normalization advanced, the Arab states adopted Israel’s enemies as their own, shifting the standing antagonist from Israel—once the object of pan-Arab enmity—to Iran and to “extremism.” “As for the ‘cause’ that remains,” Saghieh wrote, “it is the ‘cause’ of the Iranian regime.”⁸

The substitution was collaborative. A year earlier, Al-Rashed had already installed Israel as the region’s strategic savior. “Netanyahu may seem reckless, firing in all directions,” he had written around the first anniversary of Al-Aqsa Flood, “but in reality, he is following a well-structured plan with a clear objective. Few expected him to be capable of this—dismantling the major regional Iranian threats surrounding Israel.”⁵

In May 2026, in the wake of the Israel–U.S. war on Iran, Al-Rashed wrote that the region was witnessing “a conflict between two projects, ‘Greater Israel’ and ‘Greater Iran.’”⁹ Iran, he claimed, had built “a regional empire stretching from the Caspian Sea to the Mediterranean” through four decades of “expansionist wars.” The empire had grown too dangerous to leave standing. Greater Iran had compelled Israel and the international community to “push back, and eventually, destroy the project before it could consolidate itself with nuclear weapons.”

Greater Israel, he dismissed outright. “If Israel truly intended to expand,” Al-Rashed wrote, “it would openly declare, promote, and justify such aims.” Conquest, on this standard, must announce itself before it can be named; a state that expands without declaring is acquitted of expansion. It was, he insisted, a project of “influence and regional dominance,” not territorial expansion. Al-Rashed ignored that Netanyahu had already said he was “very much” connected to the vision of Greater Israel and “absolutely” subscribed to it. He ignored, too, that Israel—the only country in the world without defined borders—has expanded by close to 7 percent since October 7, across Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, and Syria.¹⁰

Still, Al-Rashed absolved Israel of expansionism, dismissed “Talmudic Greater Israel” as “political fiction,” and fixed Greater Iran as the region’s real expansionist threat. Stripped of any expansionist appetite, the “regional dominance” he granted Israel was no longer a threat to resist. It was a settlement to accept.

What remained was stripping Israel’s project of any colonial name—of expansionism in Al-Rashed’s argument, of settler colonialism in Saghieh’s. “The settler-colonial label,” Saghieh had long argued, “isn’t a perfect fit” for Israel.¹¹ “Yes, there were arrivals of foreigners, and expelling and displacing most of the local population in 1948, but that does not mean these actions were linked to a settler project.” He conceded the settlers and conceded the expulsion, but still rejected the settler-colonial nature of Israel. The word Nakba—the name Palestinians gave to the catastrophe of being driven from their ancestral homeland by these foreigners—he did not use. With a fifth of the population Palestinian Arab, he argued, calling Israel “alien to the region” began to “sound rather strange.”

Saghieh’s May 2026 column “What Future With Israel?” argued that describing Israel as a “settler-colonial entity” treats its colonial origin as its permanent and defining characteristic. In his view, this implies that Arab rejection of Israel is based not on its policies or conduct, but on its very existence, making the conflict one of immutable identity rather than political disagreement. The label had done, he wrote, “nothing but make the past govern the future and exclude politics,”¹² leaving no path to political accommodation. Into that closed space, Al-Aqsa Flood arrived. “Accompanied by no small amount of celebration and glorification,” it convinced “a large Israeli majority that neighboring countries harbor nothing toward them but genocidal intent, prevented only by lack of capability.” Together, he argued, they drove Israelis to “this level of genocidal savagery” in Gaza. “Thus Israel was driven, after the October 7 operation, from self-defense into policies of savagery,” Saghieh concluded—“and we were not innocent in causing it.”

He criticized Israel’s genocide while explaining it into justification. He refused to name Israel as colonial. With practiced innocence, he made Palestinians and Arabs the cause of Israel’s genocide.

In this, the Arab liberal press has been consistent. Saghieh’s July 1, 2026, column, “The Framework Agreement and Self-Responsibility,” extended the argument to Lebanon and to critics of the Lebanese-Israeli framework agreement. Those critics—who described the Lebanese state as a “puppet authority” and any agreement with Israel as an “agreement of shame”—were, he sarcastically wrote, “our angels, who in all their history have committed nothing but innocence.”¹³ According to him, these “angels” bore collective responsibility for every catastrophe they claimed innocence of. Their rejection of the agreement, he warned, would only “deepen misery and decline, and give Israeli savagery more fangs of brutality and domination.”

The agreement barred Lebanon from pursuing Israel in any international legal forum; required the Lebanese army to disarm Hizb-Allah on a timeline Israel would verify; conditioned Israeli withdrawal on performance the Lebanese army must prove to Israel’s satisfaction; left Israel’s occupation of Lebanese territory in place indefinitely pending that proof; said nothing about Palestinian refugees—Lebanon’s oldest unresolved claim—and, as always, left Israel’s borders undefined. The collective responsibility Saghieh demanded was the responsibility to accept, without complaint, terms that left Lebanon without recourse.

Such are the terms. The Arab liberal press supplies Israel’s regional hegemony with the language of reasonableness, legitimacy, and managed inevitability. It has acknowledged every crime, named every victim, and conceded every dispossession—only to withdraw every political obligation that acknowledgment once carried. What began in December 2020 as the decoupling of Palestinian suffering from Arab political commitment continues, in July 2026, as the demand that Lebanon accept, without complaint, a settlement written entirely on Israeli terms. What the press calls realism is the acceptance of Israeli hegemony—the acknowledgment of every crime, the concession of every loss, and the delegitimization of every form of resistance that might have contested either.

1. Hazem Saghieh, “Normalization, the Cause, and Some Unspoken Matters,” Asharq Al-Awsat, December 12, 2020. https://aawsat.com/home/article/2679246/حازم-صاغية/التطبيع-والقضية-وبعض-المسائل-المسكوت-عنها

2. Abdulrahman Al-Rashed, “The UAE and Israel,” Asharq Al-Awsat, August 14, 2020. https://aawsat.com/home/article/2448601/عبد-الرحمن-الراشد/الإمارات-وإسرائيل

3. Abdulrahman Al-Rashed, “This Is the Way to Get Rid of Hamas,” Asharq Al-Awsat, December 28, 2023. https://aawsat.com/الرأي/4754726-هذه-هي-الطريقة-للتخلص-من-«حماس»

4. Hazem Saghieh, “Palestine: A Future Without a Past and a Past Without a Future,” Asharq Al-Awsat, November 30, 2025. https://aawsat.com/الرأي/5214285-فلسطين-مستقبل-بلا-ماضِن-وماضِن-بلا-مستقبل

5. Abdulrahman Al-Rashed, “Israel Does Not Intend to Stop,” Asharq Al-Awsat, October 19, 2024. https://aawsat.com/الرأي/5072537-إسرائيل-لا-تنوي-التوقف

6. Abdulrahman Al-Rashed, “October 7 Was Not the Reason,” Asharq Al-Awsat, October 7, 2025. https://aawsat.com/الرأي/5194454-السَّابِع-من-أكتوبر-لم-يكن-السَّبَب

7. Hazem Saghieh, “Questions of the Post-Gaza War Levant,” Asharq Al-Awsat, October 12, 2025. https://aawsat.com/الرأي/5196265-عناوين-مشرقيّة-لما-بعد-توقّف-القتال-في-غزّة

8. Hazem Saghieh, “On Gaza and Palestine and October 7,” Asharq Al-Awsat, October 8, 2025. https://aawsat.com/الرأي/5194867-عن-غزّة-وفلسطين-و٧-أكتوبر

9. Abdulrahman Al-Rashed, “‘Greater Israel’ and ‘Greater Iran’,” Asharq Al-Awsat, May 2, 2026. https://aawsat.com/الرأي/5268410-إسرائيل-الكبرى-وإيران-الكبرى

10. On West Bank land seizures since October 7, see: “Israel seized 12,800 acres of land in occupied West Bank since Oct. 7,” Anadolu Agency. Link And: “Israel approves major illegal settlement expansion in occupied West Bank’s Jordan Valley,” Anadolu Agency. Link

11. Hazem Saghieh, “On the Unity of Massacres in Our Region,” Asharq Al-Awsat, April 23, 2025. https://aawsat.com/الرأي/5135331-عن-وحدة-المجازر-في-منطقتنا

12. Hazem Saghieh, “What Future With Israel?” Asharq Al-Awsat, May 6, 2026. https://aawsat.com/الرأي/5270070-أيّ-مستقبل-مع-إسرائيل؟

13. Hazem Saghieh, “The Framework Agreement and Self-Responsibility,” Asharq Al-Awsat, July 1, 2026. https://aawsat.com/الرأي/5290626-اتّفاق-الإطار-والمسؤوليّة-الذّاتيّة

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Board of Peace — by Norman Harman (@NorrieHarman)

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In the years after the First World War, colonial rule could no longer be openly declared. The American president Woodrow Wilson had made self-determination a war aim; having proclaimed it, the victors could not openly seize the Ottoman provinces as spoils without discrediting the principle they had fought for. 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, and readied for self-governance. 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.

The mandate has returned 106 years after it was imposed. President Donald Trump’s “Board of Peace” plan offers Gaza peace as foreign administration rather than sovereignty, management whose purpose is the slow and permanent subjugation of an entire population.

When Trump signed the Board of Peace into being, he touted it as “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 also sits on the Board, alongside its architects. Palestinians do not.

The Board’s purpose is not only “peace,” that is, the subjugation of Palestinians, but also to provide massive investment opportunities. At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in January 2026, Jared Kushner presented a “master plan” for Gaza: the shoreline where Palestinians now live rezoned for “coastal tourism,” the interior parceled into residential blocks, data centers, and “advanced manufacturing.” An Israeli-Cypriot real-estate billionaire seated on the board had pitched the coast as a “new Mediterranean Riviera with 200 hotels and potential islands.” The Palestinian population is to be penned in the wasteland and the reservation so the shoreline can be sold.

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 that 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. It is 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: First, Arab governments would recognize the irreversibility of the Jewish settler colony; 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. These governments collaborate because American protection sustains them, and that protection now requires alignment with Israel and the abandonment of Palestine—a trade their populations reject and their rulers can no longer avoid.

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 were 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. This condition will be used to justify the continuation of the siege. This 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 now Trump’s first demand. 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 60 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 place 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 new 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.

A note, added July 2026.

This article was published on February 5, 2026, before the Board of Peace had ever met. It has met again and again since—in Washington, on conference sidelines, and in June at a Cyprus resort, where its members gathered to “recalibrate”—and produced nothing. The reconstruction fund holds no money; of the billions pledged, none has arrived. What contributions the board did receive never reached that fund; they went into a private JPMorgan account that answers to no outside auditor. The board’s charter admits no oversight and bars no self-dealing; Trump holds final say over every dollar.

An instrument built this way was never going to restrain Israel, and it didn’t. Phase One required an end to the killing, a pullback to the Yellow Line, the full entry of aid, the opening of the Rafah crossing. Israel honored none of it. It pushed the line deeper, expanding its control from the 53 percent the deal set to 64 percent, and drove toward the 70 percent Netanyahu had ordered it to take; it let in a fraction of the aid it had promised; it never opened Rafah as the deal required. Since the ceasefire began, Israel has killed more than 1,000 Palestinians.

In July, Hamas dissolved its government and offered to hand civil authority to the National Committee the board itself had installed—a body Israel had kept out of Gaza since the day it was formed. The move was meant to strip Israel of its stated reason for barring the committee. Hamas’s spokesman, Hazem Qassem, called the dissolution a step to “remove any pretexts for the occupation”; Israel tried to kill him three days later.

Israel kept the committee out regardless, now demanding disarmament first. But disarmament was never among the ceasefire terms the Palestinians signed at Sharm El-Sheikh; no second phase was ever agreed. Israel and the Board of Peace, where Israel sits as a founding member, made disarmament the precondition for everything else: for aid, for reconstruction, for the ceasefire itself. The board’s own envoys had put it in writing months before Hamas’s concession: should Hamas refuse to disarm, Israel’s commitments under the truce would be “null and void.” What they demanded, in the end, was that a people under occupation stand defenseless before their occupiers.

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Held by the Land — by Miss AL Simpson

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It is one of the quieter accomplishments of Western discourse on Palestine that Palestinian Christians are still treated as an anomaly—something to be discovered, explained away, and then politely ignored. Yet Christianity’s earliest geography is Palestinian: Jerusalem, Bethlehem, and Gaza, with communities that gathered there centuries before Europe became Christian. The disappearance of this history is not an accident of ignorance but a political requirement, produced at the meeting point of Israeli state narrative and Christian Zionist theology. Together, they authorize only two permissible versions of us: absence, or a carefully managed presence. We are a minority, the story insists; Israel protects us from Muslims; our faith arrived with Western missionaries; the Bible mandates our dispossession. The point is not only that these claims are false, but that they are useful; they recast a colonial relationship 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. We are not a community petitioning for special shelter but are 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. And what followed made no difference either: the same confiscated land and denied permits, the same checkpoints and closures, the same laws written to keep us on the margins of the state that took our country. 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 and hypocrisy are 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.

This freeze on bank accounts followed from the municipality demanding 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 the 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 provide imperial discourse with the framing it requires: a civilizational confrontation—Islam against Judaism, East against West—with Israel installed as the 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 in 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, or biblical sites, 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 the 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 the 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

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

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On December 7, 2025, while touring the ruins of the Gaza cities Beit Hanoun and Jabalia, the Israeli occupation army’s chief of staff, Eyal Zamir, informed his troops that the “Yellow Line”—the demarcation beyond which Israeli forces have not withdrawn under the October ceasefire—is now “a new border line.” 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.

In the lexicon of Israeli territorial expansion, “security” has become 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 because “security,” in the Israeli usage, is a perpetual emergency to be sustained—one that authorizes permanent expansion precisely because it cannot be pronounced complete.

Israel remains the only UN member state that has never declared its own borders. Its founding declaration deliberately omitted them, and no law has drawn them in the 77 years since—an omission that is itself a statement of intent. Israel has not defined the limits of what it has not finished taking. And now the taking continues by a mechanical logic, each move prepared by the last.

Colonial expansion in the postcolonial era—an era that declared such expansion impermissible in the 1960 Declaration on Decolonization, that enshrined self-determination in the UN Charter’s first article, that congratulates itself on transcending the crudities of the civilizing mission—demands 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.

The method has a history, and the history has a name: the Nahal system. Kibbutzim like Nahal Oz in the Gaza envelope (territory in Israel within 7 km of the Gaza Strip), 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; civilian settlements became facts requiring defense; defense required buffer zones; buffer zones 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 the Oslo years to place settlement expansion beyond the reach of any building 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 has 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, it 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: a 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 preceding it, never at the occupation preceding the resistance, never at the dispossession that started everything, yet is treated as having started 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 colonialism always makes when force cannot complete the work: from overt assault to administered rule, from genocide to domestication.

A purported aggressor population requires oversight, administration, and, ultimately, re-education: hence, a “Board of Peace” to oversee a people never consulted on the board’s composition or mandate. Part of that re-education would involve what Netanyahu describes as “deradicalizing” Gaza, making an explicit comparison to 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 if resistance to colonization were madness, and subjugation the cure. The United States ran the same cure on Native American children, in boarding schools founded on the formula “kill the Indian in him, and save the man”—re-education aimed at what a people remembered rather than at what it had done.

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. Resolution 2803 hands Gaza to the Board of Peace and a committee of vetted technocrats; the PA is promised a role only after it completes a “reform program” whose sufficiency Israel will judge—a deferral designed never to end.

But the model will be exported. Arab states—and what Israel’s “buffer zones” have left of Lebanon and Syria—are being recruited to the same role, as subordinates rather than equals. 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.

Ten days after Eyal Zamir declared his new border, on December 17, Israel approved its largest export deal in history—$35 billion in gas to Egypt, a deal its minister of energy had announced as entrenching Israel as “a leading regional energy power on which our neighbors depend—and which they need,” and one that, given Egypt’s economic weakness, would in his words “make them think twice about taking any steps.” Gas and water technologies are also being dangled before Syria and Lebanon, on the minister’s stated condition: “the day Iran’s grip on the region is broken,” and Hizb-Allah ceases, in his words, to pose “a terrorist threat.”

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.

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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

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Resolution 2803, passed by the Security Council on November 17, 2025, once again asks the world to believe that the United States is the neutral arbiter that will oversee the “pathway” to Palestinian self-determination. It asks us to accept that the very country which has, for the duration of this genocide, supplied Israel with the bombs that have killed over 70,000 Palestinians, shielded Israel from every attempt at international accountability, and sanctioned the International Criminal Court 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 so-called “pathway” at all. That it continues regardless shows that we’ve 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 resolution’s language is horribly revealing in what it both includes and deliberately omits. Nowhere does it reference UNSCR 242 and 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 International Court of Justice’s July 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, UNSCR 2803 “welcomes the constructive role” of the United States, 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 represents 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 created.

Under the 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 latest “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 leaving Israel free to evade its commitments. The goal has never been peace. It has always been to make Gaza uninhabitable and force Palestinians into exile. And for those who remain, trusteeship will attempt to achieve what two years of bombardment could not: their complete submission.

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 sought to secure Arab compliance with a regional order in which Zionist colonization is treated as legitimate and permanent. 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 are signatories to a joint statement urging the resolution’s “swift adoption.” These states have watched the destruction of Gaza for over two years; they 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, 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, not 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, that is—will grow up under the authority of the very powers that enabled their suffering. The Stabilization Force will not stabilize; it will suppress. Palestinians are treated as incapable of self-rule, while figures such as Trump and former British prime minister Tony Blair are presented as the administrators equipped to supervise and discipline them.

The pathway to statehood leads nowhere. Before it can even be considered, the PA must reform itself to satisfaction. The resolution does not define the reform program; it borrows it, by reference, from Trump’s own 2020 plan: 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, judged by those who seek to dispossess them, forever.

Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur, warns 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 77 years. Yet, 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 them.

Still, somehow, we are told 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 same arguments were used in defense of the Oslo Accords. We have seen where that pragmatism led: to the entrenchment of settlements, fragmentation of Palestinian territory, transformation of the PA into a subcontractor for Israeli security; and inexorably 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, nor contingent on Palestinian “reforms” or “good behavior,” but immediately, as the ICJ has demanded. It would require an end to the killing, the reconstruction of the territory this war has razed, 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 the accountability that the United States has spent two years sanctioning out of existence: for the destruction of Gaza, the decades of dispossession, the systematic violations of international law 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 objects of decisions made by states whose primary concern is regional hegemony, not justice.

None of this will happen through Resolution 2803. Nor will it do so through the Board of Peace, International Stabilization Force, or a conditional pathway to a state that Israel’s leaders have already declared they will never accept. It will happen, if it does so 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 all the euphemisms and recognizes that a peace built on the denial of rights is not peace; merely a more sophisticated form of domination.

In the meantime, we are left with a Resolution described by the U.S. Ambassador to the UN as “historic and constructive,” which changes nothing fundamental while providing diplomatic cover for the status quo. The ceremonies will be held, the statements issued, 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 that of the exhausted, the defeated, the subjugated.

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 when it is, it will not be written by the United States, by Israel, or by the trustees they have appointed over Palestine.

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In September 1993, the world was asked to believe that the Palestinian struggle had ended with the Oslo Accords. Signed by Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) after the First Intifada, the Oslo Accords were presented by their sponsors as the beginning of peace and coexistence. The Intifada—the popular uprising that swept the occupied West Bank and Gaza from 1987—had transformed the Palestinian struggle 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 United States opened a diplomatic track designed to contain the uprising rather than address its causes.

The same track had run through the 1991 Madrid Conference, where the official Palestinian delegation, drawn from the occupied territories and led by Haidar Abdel-Shafi of Gaza, negotiated publicly and refused the terms on the table. Israel and the United States found a willing counterpart in Yasser Arafat and the PLO, exiled in Tunis after Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon drove them from Beirut. Detached from the movement inside Palestine and estranged from those it claimed to represent, Arafat’s leadership entered secret negotiations in Oslo, in a back channel that undermined the Palestinians’ own delegation.

Arafat and a handful of PLO subordinates faced a corps of Israeli Foreign Ministry experts in law and diplomacy. They negotiated in English, a language they barely knew, and with no legal counsel. 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. Within weeks of the signing, the Palestinian intellectual Edward Said wrote, “Let us call the agreement by its real name: an instrument of Palestinian surrender, a Palestinian Versailles.”

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. The surrender alienated many Palestinians, especially in Gaza, where nearly three-quarters of the population are refugees or their descendants. The people whose return to the homes from which they were expelled in 1948 had just been signed away. Israel conceded nothing, offering only a token acknowledgment of the PLO as the representative of the Palestinian people.

The Palestinian Authority—Oslo’s own creation—became the occupier’s subcontractor: administering the occupation Israel no longer wished to manage alone, dependent on foreign aid, constrained by Israeli approval, accountable not to its people but to its patrons. The Oslo Accords made Israeli security the organizing principle of Palestinian governance—an assurance granted even as Israeli violations of Palestinian security went unchecked.

Everything the First Intifada had won was thus undone—half a century of struggle and sacrifice buried beneath a “peace process” that redefined occupation as “self-rule” and subjugation as “compromise.”

For the Arab states, the Oslo Accords established the rule: progress and stability could be achieved only through collaboration with Israel, guaranteed by US power. Over time that rule hardened into a sense of inevitability—the conviction that history had concluded and liberation with it, and that the United States alone defined the terms of progress and decline. Across the Arab world, voices that had once spoken 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 had opposed. Shared security frameworks, surveillance cooperation, and trade corridors integrated them into a colonial system organized around Israeli supremacy.

Unlike earlier peace efforts that had at least gestured toward Palestinian inclusion, the 2020 Abraham Accords abandoned even the pretense of it. Brokered by Washington to establish formal relations between Israel and Arab states, they bypassed Palestinians entirely, offering no remedy for occupation, settlements, or refugees. Repatriation and compensation went unmentioned; both had long been dismissed as impossible.

The normalization project reached its zenith at the UN General Assembly in September 2023, when Netanyahu unveiled a map of a “New Middle East”: a vision of regional integration from which Palestine had been erased. The map was a boast; the project declared all but complete. For three decades, the illusion that stability could be built on the abandonment and erasure of Palestine had defined the regional order. It ended on October 7.

In October 1993, Said had laid out the whole case in “The Morning After,” his response to the Oslo Accords in the London Review of Books. Self-determination, he wrote, “has a meaning only if freedom, sovereignty and equality, rather than perpetual subservience to Israel, are its goal.” Thirty years later, the illusion he exposed collapsed. The moral and political language of resistance he kept alive now defines the region’s horizon. The struggle he saw slipping away has returned to the center of political life.

As Oslo’s illusion gave way, so too did Israel’s, each sustained by the same fiction of peace through domination. The myth of the fortress died on October 7—the army that never fails, the intelligence that never sleeps. A settler society built on the promise of security and leisure saw both fail in a single morning.

The shock drove that society back to the foundational logic of Zionism: the settler-colonial ambition to reorder the land by expelling its native people, to make permanence out of ethnic cleansing. The wound would be healed by war, deterrence restored by destruction. The resistance in Gaza would be wiped out, its population expelled and scattered. Two years later, with unconditional U.S. military, diplomatic, and ideological support, Israel has achieved none of it: Hamas has not been destroyed, the people of Gaza—displaced again and again—have not been expelled, the captives were released through the negotiation Netanyahu had refused, and the “total victory” he vowed has eluded him.

The war has left Israel more isolated than at any point in its history. Its image, long curated by Western media and political patronage, has collapsed; the distortions that once inverted victims and aggressors no longer conceal what the world has seen. Gone is the legitimacy of a state that has made permanent war its only language.

The genocide is being broadcast, and the broadcast has globalized the Palestinian question. What empire controlled through narrative, it now confronts through exposure. Images have outrun censorship and created solidarity across borders; many of those images have been filmed by Israeli soldiers themselves. The oppression of one people has revealed the structure of domination that governs all. Across continents and movements, Palestine has ceased to be one cause among others—it has become the measure of justice itself.

What October 7 restored, amid the devastation of Gaza, was not victory but vision. For a generation, freedom had meant what the occupier would permit. Palestinians around the world can once again see it whole—an idea, a moral claim, a spiritual horizon. That vision 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 is broken, to organize what is 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 rejected the logic of its defeat. It was the discipline he had taught all along. “To every situation,” he said in conversation the year after the Accords, “there’s always an alternative. What one must train oneself is to think the alternative, and not to think the accepted and the status quo or to believe that the present is frozen.” The collapse of illusion has become the recovery of history—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.

(This article follows Part I, “Trump’s Gaza Plan and the Pacification of a People,” which examined the ongoing effort to re-engineer “peace” into an evolving system of colonial control in Gaza.)

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Reconstruction Market — by Norman Harman

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In Gaza, families returning to the ruins of their neighborhoods have defeated Israel’s project of expulsion, sustained by two years of siege, bombardment, and unconditional U.S. military, diplomatic, and moral support. For the settler-colonial state of Israel, 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 United States are turning food, medicine, and reconstruction into instruments of coercion—granted as privileges, withheld as punishment. Where force has been unable to impose surrender, a political plan will serve instead.

This political plan assumed diplomatic form on October 13, 2025, at Sharm El-Sheikh, where the Peace Summit produced the Trump Declaration for Enduring Peace and Prosperity. Its sponsors offered the declaration as a new peace initiative. It was nothing of the kind: a declaration without enforceable terms, a moral narrative crafted to legitimize what had already been decided, the 20-Point Plan for Gaza Reconstruction and Regional Stability, unveiled by Trump in September 2025 and denounced from the first for its overtly neo-colonial design.

The 20-Point Plan supplies the machinery of governance, policing, and economic subordination; the declaration supplies the vocabulary of peace, stability, and reform. What is marketed as a Gaza peace plan rests on concealed terms of surrender.

Every document, conference, and initiative since the 1947 UN Partition Plan has spoken in the name of peace. The plan itself gave 56 percent of Palestine to European Jewish settlers who, through decades of British-backed coercion, purchase, and legal manipulation, had failed to acquire even 7 percent of it. But each invocation of peace marked another stage in the domestication of the Palestinian cause—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 a colonized term—emptied of meaning, redeployed to manage subjugation. It now circulates detached from occupation, dispossession, and racial supremacy—a word in the service of Israeli domination and the U.S. order that sustains it. Palestinians are no longer invited to accept the vocabulary of peace, nor is the wider Arab world. They are made to repeat it, compelled to embody it, and disciplined for refusing it.

When asked in 1970 why the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) would not join peace talks with Israel, its spokesman, the Palestinian writer Ghassan Kanafani, answered, “You don’t mean peace talks exactly. You mean capitulation, surrender.” He refused the word for what it demanded: the colonizer already holds the land, and the colonized hold only their claim to it—the one concession the talks exist to extract. Two years later, Israel assassinated Kanafani with a car bomb in Beirut. His refusal left one question: What kind of peace, and for whom? The plan now on the table answers it: a colonial peace, for the colonizer.

The 20-Point Plan establishes an international supervisory body, the Board of Peace, to manage all foreign donations, reconstruction contracts, and tender approvals for Gaza. The plan names the Board’s chairman—the U.S. president—and a single member, former British prime minister Tony Blair. It leaves the rest unnamed. Arab states are to provide most of the funding; the Board will exercise final authority over every decision.

That authority runs through the U.S. president’s chairmanship, while Israel retains control over Gaza’s crossings. Between them, no payment is disbursed, and no shipment enters without their consent. The plan thus converts the siege from a military blockade into an economic-administrative system. Gaza’s administration, the plan promises, will be the work of a “technocratic, apolitical” Palestinian committee under the Board’s “oversight and supervision”—administration in Palestinian hands, authority in the masters’,

The plan’s design first appeared in a prospctus called The GREAT* Trust (Gaza Reconstitution, Economic Acceleration and Transformation), which circulated in Washington, DC in August. The Trust was drawn up by Israeli businessmen, with financial modeling from the Boston Consulting Group, the firm where Netanyahu worked in the 1970s. It proposed a foreign trusteeship over Gaza until a “reformed and deradicalized Palestinian Polity” is ready to govern. In the plan, the trusteeship returns as the Board of Peace, and the investors’ vocabulary returns as governance: foreign trustees, external oversight, conditional access to land. Framed as economic aid for Palestine and courting Gulf capital, the Trust makes reconstruction an investment vehicle of a U.S. order whose idea of peace rests on extraction, dependency, privatization, debt, and corporate rule.

Gaza’s funding, the plan rules, stays in the Board’s hands “until such time as the Palestinian Authority has completed its reform program.” The reform program is defined by reference to Trump’s 2020 Peace to Prosperity plan—his “Deal of the Century,” unveiled and abandoned that year, rejected by Palestinians and the Arab League alike, yet quietly absorbed into every subsequent proposal for conditional Palestinian sovereignty. The Peace to Prosperity plan’s terms require recognition of Israel as “the nation state of the Jewish people,” renunciation of armed resistance, and adherence to Israeli-defined “counterterrorism” criteria. Should Hamas refuse, the 20-Point Plan is explicit: Aid and reconstruction proceed only in “terror-free areas” handed over to international forces. Relief advances exactly as far as submission does.

The program, as spelled out by those proposals, demands rewriting the school curriculum to reflect Israel’s version of history, ending support for the families of Palestinian martyrs and prisoners, renouncing the right of return, and recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. Only then may the Palestinian Authority assume a role in Gaza—a role bought with the renunciation of the cause itself.

The signatories of the 2025 Trump Declaration for Enduring Peace and Prosperity pronounce themselves united in their “determination to dismantle extremism and radicalization in all its forms,” and insist that “no society can flourish when violence and racism is normalized.” The declaration never names dispossession, ethnic cleansing, occupation, siege, or apartheid as the conditions that produce the “extremism” it vows to dismantle.

Every word of the declaration is written as though Israel stood outside the moral field it describes. This is the oldest maneuver of colonial apologetics: making the violence of the oppressed the central problem while sanitizing the structural violence that engenders it. By invoking “extremism,” “radical ideologies,” and “violence and racism,” the declaration projects Israel’s foundational traits onto Palestinians. It recasts Zionism’s racial supremacy as a civilizing mission. The mission embodies everything the declaration condemns.

Every civilizing mission needs a civilizing curriculum. The Kenyan novelist Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, writing of the colonial school, described the sequence now prepared for Gaza: “The night of the sword and the bullet was followed by the morning of the chalk and the blackboard.” The declaration positions the United States and its allies as moral custodians overseeing the re-education of Palestinians. The curriculum decides what it means to be Palestinian—how one may resist, and even how one may remember. The framework of “deradicalization” replaces liberation with rehabilitation—it is not an invitation to coexistence but a demand for repentance.

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 duty to respect the colonizer’s authority—the psychological reconstruction of the colonized to accept the terms of his defeat, so that the crime may continue unchallenged, all in the name of “lasting peace.”

The purpose, in the end, is to reconstitute a people. It is written into the name of the GREAT Trust, which promises the “Reconstitution” of Gaza. Reconstruction is the pretext; the people are the project. Netanyahu published the doctrine under his own name in December 2023, writing in the Wall Street Journal that “Palestinian society must be deradicalized”—its schools, its sermons, its civil society remade—and stipulating that “[only then can] Gaza be rebuilt.” The project’s endpoint is a people who not only cease to resist, but come to regret that they ever did. What he prescribed in print has found its language in the Trump Declaration and its instruments in the 20-Point Plan. Together they have turned the vocabulary of peace into a system of management—and what was spoken of as reform has become the administration of subjugation, the bureaucratic form of a colonial order that endures by perfecting its machinery of control.

(This is the first of two linked articles on the “colonial peace.” Part I traces how peace passed from moral ideal to instrument of control, turning Gaza’s reconstruction into colonization by other means. Part II follows this system back to the 1993 Oslo Accords, where its vocabulary and architecture were first devised.)

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Several Western countries—France, the UK, Canada, and Australia among them—have recognized a Palestinian state at the UN General Assembly. Their governments present the move as a breakthrough for Palestinian rights. The recognitions, however carefully drafted, record something real. Israel’s impunity, once axiomatic, is cracking. But recognition arrives with conditions: demilitarization, governance reforms, and guarantees for Israel’s security. The conditions offer Palestine the form of statehood while denying its substance.

Recognition on these terms is capitulation. It is a pact written by the colonizers to entomb the Palestinian cause under the language of liberation. Demilitarization ensures Israel faces no resistance: Palestinians get a paper state stripped of defense, deemed “viable” only if it protects the state that dispossessed them. Governance reforms install a Palestinian ruling class—domesticated, donor-dependent, and willing to enforce the occupation on Israel’s behalf. In both conditions, what is sacred is the colonizer’s security, and what is forbidden is the colonized’s right to defend themselves.

Most revealing is what the conditions omit: the right of the refugees of 1948 and their descendants to go home. France demanded disarmament, reform, and elections from the Palestinian leadership and prescribed the attributes of the state; it demanded nothing to secure return. The New York Declaration on the Peaceful Settlement of the Question of Palestine and the Implementation of the Two-State Solution—the blueprint the recognizing states adopted at the conference France and Saudi Arabia co-chaired in 2025—concedes return a single passing clause and consigns the “refugee question” to an undefined future framework.

The UN General Assembly endorsed the New York Declaration on September 12, 2025, with 142 votes in favor, 10 against, and 12 abstentions. The recognitions followed nine days later, state by state, on the terms the Assembly had adopted.

A right of return would undo Israel’s founding act. Israel stands on land confiscated from the refugees by a 1950 law that declared them “absentees,” and by a law of the same year that grants a “right of return” to every Jew on earth while denying it to the people it expelled. Disarmament comes first; return may come never.

Taken together, these conditions construct a colonial protectorate to contain the Palestinian liberation struggle. Palestinians would not control borders, currency, or resources. The economy—“economically viable,” in the Declaration’s promise—would live on aid, kept underdeveloped by design. The Declaration spells out the promise release of the Palestinian tax revenues Israel withholds, integration into the global capitalist monetary and financial system, and a program of reconstruction and development. The plan would revise the 1994 Paris Protocol—the annex to the 1993 Oslo Accords that handed Israel control of Palestinian customs, currency, and trade. The United States and Israel oppose it, and it has not been implemented. What remains is a diplomatic road map on paper—and the status quo of occupation on the ground.

Palestinians would count their own population, run their own municipalities, and coordinate with the army encircling them; Israel would still make every decision that matters. Power at that remove needs local hands, and the Palestinian Authority provides the model: a collaborator regime that stages self-governance while legitimizing occupation.

In his 1971 essay “The Specter of the Palestinian State,” Ghassan Kanafani classified such a “state”—formed of the West Bank and Gaza, “instigated, overseen and dominated by Israel”—as “part of the complete surrender to an Israeli military victory.” Its purpose, he wrote, would be “to develop the victor’s military, political and economic superiority.” He was describing a proposal from 1971. He was also describing this one.

A proposal does not survive fifty-four years unless it serves something more durable than diplomacy. Colonialism has always had two answers to a native people who refuse to disappear: contain them or remove them. Containment is the first—the answer the United States gave with the reservation and South Africa with the Bantustan—. It is Europe’s formula for Palestine: endorsed by 142 states at the General Assembly, but written and driven by the capitals that armed Israel. It freezes Israeli sovereignty at the 1967 lines. It offers a disarmed pseudo-state on the remaining 22 percent of historic Palestine—the West Bank and Gaza. The formula might placate publics outraged by the genocide, but it would indisputably secure the spoils of 1948.

The United States, which invented the reservation, now backs the second answer: removal. The settler project wants all of historic Palestine with no Palestinians in it—“transfer,” in Zionism’s own vocabulary. Washington supplies the means and the cover: arms and money for expansion and expulsion, and the veto that shields both from consequence.

Israel treats Europe’s formula as an obstacle to annexation. It races to seize the remnant of historic Palestine reserved for the pseudo-state before any symbolic state can take shape on it. In August, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich announced the revival of E1—a settlement project east of Jerusalem that would cut the West Bank in two and sever East Jerusalem from it—and declared that the plan “buries the idea of a Palestinian state.” Israel’s planning authorities then approved 3,401 housing units there. But the speed betrays panic: A state assured of its impunity does not hurry, and Israel is hurrying.

The panic extends to threats against the recognizing states themselves. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu wrote to their leaders accusing them of feeding antisemitism in their own countries—Macron’s call for statehood, his letter charged, “pours fuel on this antisemitic fire”—and gave Paris until the Jewish new year to change course. His foreign minister moved to close the consulate in Jerusalem through which France deals with the Palestinians.

The two colonial answers, so long compatible, now collide: Israel and the United States stand against Europe, and the West splits over the question of Palestine. The state on offer remains a fiction; the recognition of it is a fact, and the fact cuts both ways.

On the one hand, recognition is a trap: A state on the 1967 lines cements the loss of everything stolen in 1948 and abandons the right to justice for the Nakba. It forfeits return and entrenches dependence. The tell is in the drafting: Every recognition of Palestine is written as a re-recognition of Israel. The state France proposes must accept its own disarmament and fully recognize its colonizer. The commitments the recognizing capitals extract run from the Palestinians toward Israel’s security, never the reverse.

On the other hand, recognition is also a step forward. For decades, the United States 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. Claims grounded in Palestine’s statehood now are endorsed by some of Israel’s closest allies. The recognizing states thereby forfeit an alibi: The legal grounds for sanctioning Israel’s occupation have existed since 2012, when UN observer status gave Palestine treaty membership and standing before international courts. Recognition strips away one excuse for ignoring them.

Most of the world recognized Palestine long ago—147 of the UN’s 193 member states before September’s wave. Nearly the same number endorsed the New York Declaration. What the wave adds is Israel’s own patrons—France, the UK, Canada, and Australia. Recognition from close Western allies signals that Israel is losing the very capitals it depends on—and that its moral cover is thinning. Israel and the United States fight the wave so fiercely because even symbolic statehood builds momentum. The significance lies less in what materializes on the ground than in what the recognitions expose: the distance between Europe and the United States, between law and power, between Israel’s image and its colonial reality.

Hence the U.S. veto paradox. Europe’s recognition drive seeks to convert managed Palestinian dependence into internationally certified statehood, offering Israel an escape from accountability for the genocide in Gaza. Days before the recognitions, a UN commission of inquiry concluded that Israel is committing genocide, and the Genocide Convention obliges states to prevent it. The recognizing capitals answer that obligation with ceremony while continuing to arm and trade with Israel. Full UN membership of a Palestinian state would give this containment formula its institutional seal, presenting dependency as sovereign equality.

But Washington’s veto of Palestinian membership denies Europe that seal without stopping bilateral recognition. The United States therefore blocks the mechanism meant to bury the question while preserving recognition’s disruptive effects: Israel’s rule appears more plainly as the occupation of a recognized state, the Western alliance divides, and the political excuses for withholding sanctions weaken. In defending annexation, Washington obstructs the containment strategy designed to preserve Israel’s legitimacy—the second answer devouring the first.

There is no victory here for Palestinians; recognition does not restore sovereignty or reverse dispossession. But the process—Europe breaking with the United States over Palestine, Israel baring its settler-colonial nature—matters because it widens the fractures on which Israel’s impunity depends. The recognitions were meant to settle the question of Palestine. Instead, they have reopened it—and a question reopened by the colonizer’s own allies is no longer the colonizer’s to close.

First published September 20, 2025, two days before the recognitions were announced; revised after the vote.

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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.

Fishermen of Gaza — by Norman Harman

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Throughout the war on Gaza, Israel has presented the Palestinian resistance’s rejection of each ceasefire as a “rejection of peace,” as the Palestinians opting for their own genocide. Each time the resistance has accepted, Israel has taken that acceptance as confirmation that its pressure is working, and has answered with more force.

In May 2024, the United States, Egypt, and Qatar presented Hamas with a ceasefire proposal. Hamas accepted on May 6. That same day, Israel launched its ground assault on Rafah. Netanyahu called the ceasefire proposal “far from Israel’s basic requirements” and a “failed attempt to torpedo Israel’s entry into Rafah,” then sent a delegation to Cairo while the Israeli army advanced. Over the following year, Israel erased Rafah, demolishing its buildings by the tens of thousands and making the ground uninhabitable, leaving no city behind.

When diplomatic or popular pressure against the genocide mounts, the United States brokers a ceasefire. Israel enters the ceasefire, takes its desired parts of the agreement, and resumes its assault.

In January 2025, a phased ceasefire took effect. Its first phase held for six weeks. Hamas released thirty-three Israeli captives, Israel freed some 1,900 Palestinian prisoners, and aid entered Gaza, though never at the levels required by the deal. The part of the ceasefire that mattered lay in the second phase: full withdrawal and a permanent end to the war. Israel took what the first phase delivered and refused to open the second.

When the six weeks ran out, mediators proposed a bridge: Hamas would release the Israeli-American captive Edan Alexander and the remains of four dual nationals to buy time for phase-two talks. Hamas accepted on March 14. Israel dismissed the offer and on March 18, with backing from the United States, resumed the war it had refused to end, killing more than 400 people in a single night.

The genocide continued over the next four months. Israel’s bombardment killed more than 8,000 Palestinians, and in July the pattern ran again. Talks in Doha collapsed over the question that decided all the others: whether Israel could resume the war when the sixty-day truce expired. The United States withdrew its team, blaming Hamas for showing “a lack of desire to reach a ceasefire.” Within weeks, Israel’s cabinet approved the plan to conquer Gaza City.

In August, Egypt and Qatar brought back substantially the same sixty-day truce, and Hamas accepted it on August 18. It changed nothing: the Gaza City plan was already set, and on August 20, Defense Minister Israel Katz approved Operation Gideon’s Chariots II, the plan to occupy the city and empty it of its people. Netanyahu then declared that talks could resume only on terms he called “acceptable to Israel”—the requirement that Hamas disarm and surrender power all at once.

Refusal would have led to the same place. Had Hamas turned the proposal down, the offensive would have proceeded exactly as it did: the refusal recast as its cause, the plan Israel had already made recast as the Palestinians’ choice.

The United States has stood behind every proposal, as the power that arms Israel and the only one that can make Israeli refusal cost something. It has not. Negotiation binds a state only when refusal is more expensive than agreement, and the United States, which could transmit Palestinian acceptance, will not make Israel pay for ignoring it.

The other powers that might have constrained Israel at the margins have not. Arab mediation, UN resolutions, the ceasefire agreements themselves remain in place, but none carries a cost for Israel. The Arab governments that have normalized relations with Israel have preserved those ties, and no sanction has threatened the material support on which the war depends. Since Israel resumed the war in March, more than 10,000 Palestinians have been killed, while every mechanism meant to stop it runs beside the killing: present, intact, consenting.

Acceptance of a ceasefire changes nothing, and refusal would change nothing, because no Palestinian answer can alter an outcome Israel is free to impose. Through every round, the United States has carried the proposals and withheld the one thing that might have moved Israel: a cost. As the killing has gone on, the same diplomacy that has brokered the talks and the same press that has reported them have converted the failure of negotiations—whatever answer the Palestinians have given—into proof of Palestinian guilt. What Israel has imposed by force has entered the record as a choice the Palestinians have made.

A note from July 2026.

When I wrote this essay in August 2025, the war it described had no visible end; two months later, an end of a kind was announced. That October, a ceasefire took effect under a plan bearing Donald Trump’s name, and its first phase delivered to Israel, at once, what Israel had declared itself to be fighting for: Hamas released the twenty living Israeli captives. In exchange, Israel freed some 1,950 Palestinian prisoners.

What followed had happened before. The later phases turned on a single demand, that Hamas disarm, a condition that was never part of the signed agreement. Israel and the American-led Board of Peace raised it, after the fact, into the precondition for every part of the agreement: for aid, for reconstruction, for the ceasefire itself. Hamas reiterated what it had declared before the ceasefire was ever signed: that it could not yield its right to armed resistance short of “an independent, fully sovereign Palestinian state.” To disarm was to stand defenseless under occupation.

On July 6, 2026, Hamas dissolved its government and offered to hand civil authority to the committee the Board of Peace had created—the body Israel had barred from entering Gaza—removing the pretext that Hamas’s own rule stood in the way. Israel kept the committee out and demanded, once again, that Hamas disarm.

No agreement has ever bound Israel, and this one binds it no more than the rest. The agreement required Israel to withdraw from Gaza in stages; instead, it seized more land, and now holds nearly 70 percent of the Gaza Strip. It required the full entry of aid; Israel holds it to a fraction. In the first nine months of this ceasefire, Israel has killed more than 1,140 Palestinians.

Israel signed the ceasefire and goes on as before, seizing more Palestinian land, starving the living, killing at will, doing in the name of peace what it has always done in the name of war.

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/redlightgreenlight — by Amadon

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“Gaza will be totally destroyed.” Israel’s finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, made that promise on May 6, 2025, at a settlements conference in the occupied West Bank. It was the nineteenth month of the genocide.

The population of Gaza—more than 2 million people, displaced and starved through nine weeks of total blockade—would be “concentrated,” Smotrich said, in a narrow strip in Gaza’s far south, between the Egyptian border and the Morag Corridor. Israel had just carved that corridor across Gaza, severing Rafah from Khan Younis. The rest of Gaza would be emptied. Once concentrated there and “totally despairing,” Palestinians would leave “in great numbers to third countries.”

Three weeks later, on May 27, Israel launched the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), a new aid system backed by the United States, which approved $30 million to fund it in June. It would run four aid distribution sites: three in or beside the zone Smotrich had named, and the fourth on the Netzarim Corridor, the line that cuts northern Gaza off from the rest of the territory. There would be no aid distribution site north of that line.

Israel built the GHF to empty Gaza. Every feature of it serves that end. The food sits in the south because Israel wants the population in the south. Three of the four compounds sit near the Egyptian border because Israel intends Palestinians to cross it.

First, Israel dismantled the system that had previously been feeding Gaza. On March 2, 2025, it sealed the crossings, even though a ceasefire was still in effect. For the next eleven weeks, nothing entered Gaza: no food, no medicine, no fuel, no aid of any kind.

The purpose was explicit. Defense Minister Israel Katz said blocking aid was “one of the main pressure levers” against Hamas. Nine weeks into the blockade, the United Nations reported that the food system was collapsing and children had “gone hungry.”

For decades, UNRWA, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, had distributed food across Gaza through some 400 points. The network was organized around a simple humanitarian principle: Bring food to where people are, because the most vulnerable cannot travel for it. Israel outlawed the agency, killed more than 300 of its staff, and bombed its schools and shelters while displaced Palestinians were inside. The GHF then replaced UNRWA’s 400 distribution points with four. Under the new system, aid no longer reaches the people. The people must reach the aid—and many cannot.

The four sites are located as far as twenty kilometers from where much of the population shelters—roughly four hours on foot each way for a box of food. Their irregular opening times are announced on Facebook in the middle of the night. Lines form before dawn; supplies sometimes run out within minutes. The distance and timing form a filter that overwhelmingly favors the young and able-bodied. The people whom aid exists to protect—the elderly, the disabled, the wounded, mothers with children they cannot carry—are cut off by design.

Before the first site opened, the UN issued a statement warning that the plan would leave those least able to move without supplies. It would turn control over the means of survival into “a pressure tactic” within a military strategy. UNICEF said the plan would use aid as “bait” for those who could move, forcing an “impossible choice between displacement and death.”

Palestinians who reach the compounds are funneled through metal chutes and forced to scramble across open ground for a box of food. Israeli soldiers and the armed American contractors running the sites have repeatedly fired on the crowds. Israeli soldiers told the Israeli newspaper Haaretz that they had been ordered to open fire on unarmed crowds queuing for aid. “It’s a killing field,” one of them said.

Soldiers call the mission “Operation Salted Fish,” after the Israeli version of the children’s game “Red light, green light,” in which players creep forward and must freeze on the caller’s word, or be sent back. Soldiers run the game with gunfire. They fire on Palestinians who advance before the announced openings. When the shooting stops, the crowds know they can approach.

Whistleblowers among the American contractors working the sites confirmed that fellow mercenaries fired live rounds at Palestinians waiting for food. One video captured an exchange between contractors after a burst of gunfire toward the crowd:

“I think you hit one.”

“Hell yeah, boy!”

By early July, after five weeks of operation, more than 500 Palestinians had been killed and more than 4,000 wounded at the GHF’s sites. The head of UNRWA called the system “a death trap.”

Israel wields starvation as a weapon of war. The GHF was never built to protect the vulnerable or keep a population alive. It was built to crush the will of an entire people by turning their most basic human need into a death sentence. By making the search for food lethal and forcing the starving to compete for scarce boxes, Israel also attacks the social bonds upon which collective survival depends.

Deliberate starvation, Alex de Waal writes in Mass Starvation, damages each person’s “web of obligations,” forcing the struggle for individual survival to displace reciprocity and collective responsibility. The “severing of community relations,” he warns, “may prove to be even more significant in the longer term” than the risk of death itself.

Israel’s purpose in Gaza is to starve the north until its people move south, to concentrate them against the border, and to drive them out through what Israeli officials call “voluntary emigration,” a euphemism for ethnic cleansing. Israel no longer conceals the next stage. Defense Minister Katz has ordered the army to plan a “humanitarian city” on the ruins of Rafah. Palestinians would be screened, moved into it, and never allowed north again.

The method is old. In the summer of 1942, the Nazi authorities liquidating the Warsaw Ghetto offered three kilograms of bread and one kilogram of marmalade to every starving Jew who reported “voluntarily” for deportation. Beyond Gaza, the international legal order built after 1945 rests on the understanding that even war has rules, and that starving civilians is a crime anywhere. That order ends wherever the world permits its rules to be abandoned. By luring the starving to aid sites, then slaughtering them, Israel and the United States send a message to the poor and the colonized everywhere: the protections were never for them, and they can be starved, herded, and driven out in daylight, without consequence.

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

The British had a name for such arrangements: indirect rule. In Egypt, from 1883–1907, Consul-General Lord Cromer’s “veiled protectorate” was the model, ruling the country while a nominal Khedive, or viceroy, remained on the throne. The French called it administration indirecte. Both empires understood the logic: rather than pay the full cost of direct administration and bear the international condemnation that comes with it, the colonial power installs a local elite whose interests are bound to the colonial order. The colonized are made responsible for administering their own subjugation; the language of self-governance is deployed to legitimize the occupation it claims to be dissolving; and the occupier acquires, in the oppressed, an instrument of its own authority. The local elite does not simply comply; it collaborates. The arrangement has made compliance and survival identical—willing because dependent, and dependent by design.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

These revenues are the bulk of the Authority’s budget. The salaries of teachers, doctors, and civil servants depend on Israeli approval. What was called economic coordination was political discipline. Palestinians’ livelihoods became Israel’s instrument of forcing compliance.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Arcade Joe — by Norman Harman (@NorrieHarman)

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In January 2024, the International Court of Justice found it plausible that Israel was committing genocide in Gaza and ordered provisional measures under the Genocide Convention. The ruling changed nothing. Now, one year later, Israel has killed more than 50,000 Palestinians and erased entire cities. Israel’s genocide continues; its siege of Gaza holds. In parliaments, international forums, and media studios throughout the Western world, Palestinians are still being pressed to denounce Operation Al-Aqsa Flood with undiminished urgency, as though the ICJ had ruled on some other matter entirely. The international order has never existed to protect Palestine; it has always been the guarantor of its dispossession.

Within that order, Palestinian suffering generates demands for Palestinian accountability; Israeli colonial violence generates demands for Palestinian restraint. Palestinian resistance is cast as terrorism, irrational violence, or hatred of Jews—so that the settler-colonial project can advance while its violence goes unquestioned.

Malcolm X saw it plainly after visiting the Khan Younis refugee camp in Gaza in 1964: “The problem that exists in Palestine is not a religious problem. It is a question of colonialism. It is a question of a people who are being deprived of their homeland.” While Israel suppresses that truth, its expansion continues unimpeded: more land is seized, more settlements are built, more Palestinians are displaced, more communities are fragmented, each new fact on the ground is made harder to reverse.

The historical record is unambiguous. In 1948, Israel expelled 750,000 Palestinians, destroyed 530 of their villages, and established a Jewish state on their ancestral land—then recast the conquest and expulsion as a defensive war against Arab aggression. The story that took hold was of a small, valiant, besieged Western Jewish population fighting for survival against a vast, undifferentiated Arab mass bent on its destruction. The victory was real. The lie was that Israel had fought a defensive war against an overwhelming Arab force.

Plan Dalet, a Haganah blueprint drawn up in March 1948, called for the depopulation of Palestinian villages and the seizure of territory beyond the UN partition boundaries. It was activated in April 1948, a month before Israel declared statehood and before a single Arab army entered Palestine. By May 15, 1948, when the Arab armies intervened, more than 250,000 Palestinians had already been driven out. By then, the expulsion was well underway, and Zionist forces had begun seizing territory that had been assigned by the UN partition plan to the Arab state of Palestine.

The Arab armies were not the overwhelming force depicted in the mythology that followed. By early 1949, Zionist forces, armed with far superior European weaponry, had grown to 115,000 troops—more than twice the combined strength of the Arab armies. The most effective Arab force, the Arab Legion, was not a force of liberation, but a British colonial instrument commanded by the British officer John Bagot Glubb. It operated primarily within territory the UN had assigned to the Arab state, even as Zionist forces seized parts of that territory.

Israeli aggression recast as a defensive response became a recurring template. In 1956, in response to Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser’s nationalization of the Suez Canal, Britain, France, and Israel concluded the secret Protocol of Sèvres outside Paris. Under its terms, Israel would attack Egypt, providing Britain and France with a pretext to intervene in the conflict.

In 1967, Israel again attacked Egypt first, destroying the Egyptian air force on the ground and seizing the Sinai Peninsula, Gaza, the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Golan Heights in six days. Fifteen years later, in an address to the Israeli National Defense College, Prime Minister Menachem Begin conceded that Israel had initiated the war: “We must be honest with ourselves. We decided to attack.” Again, an attack initiated by Israel was recast as a defensive necessity; in both cases, war produced territorial expansion for the settler-colonial project.

For the first twenty-five years after Israel’s founding, no Arab country had initiated a war with Israel. That changed on October 6, 1973, when Egypt and Syria launched a coordinated offensive to recover the territories Israel had seized in 1967. The United States intervened, airlifting more than 22,000 tons of weapons and supplies to Israel over thirty-two days. Britain had sponsored the settler-colonial project through 1948; by 1973, the United States had replaced Britain as the imperial guarantor of Israel’s survival.

The 1978 Camp David Accords were the most significant diplomatic achievement to emerge from that guarantee. Brokered by US President Jimmy Carter, they provided for the return of Sinai to Egypt in exchange for Egyptian recognition of Israel. The Palestinians were not party to the agreement. Their land, their rights, and their future were negotiated without them, confined to a framework of limited autonomy that offered neither sovereignty nor statehood.

The Oslo Accords between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization were supposed to deliver Palestinian self-determination. When they were signed in 1993, approximately 264,000 Israeli settlers lived in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. By the end of 2023, that number had risen to more than 746,000. While Palestinians were required to renounce armed resistance as the price of recognition, Israel nearly tripled the settler population. Settlement expansion has never stopped.

Israel has maintained a siege of Gaza’s 2 million inhabitants since sealing the territory in 2007. In 2018 and 2019, Palestinians in Gaza marched unarmed toward the Israeli-imposed perimeter fence in what they called the Great March of Return. Over seventy weeks, Israeli snipers killed over 200 of them. The protests ended; the siege did not.

October 7, 2023 was the consequence of the siege, fragmentation, and dispossession imposed by Israel and permitted by the international community. When Hamas inflicted a military defeat that day, Israel reached for the same inversion it had used since 1948, detaching Palestinian resistance from the colonial conditions that produced it and recasting Israel’s aggression as self-defense.

Israel buried that defeat beneath an atrocity narrative. Western governments and media amplified unverified claims of mass rape and beheaded babies and used them to foreclose scrutiny of what followed. Those claims remain unsubstantiated. Fifteen months after October 7, Moran Gez, an Israeli prosecutor handling cases arising from that day, admitted: “In the end, we have no complainants.” The overwhelming majority of rape allegations, she acknowledged, could not meet the threshold of proof in court. The UN team that examined thousands of photographs and videos provided by Israel found “no tangible indications of rape” in the material. The beheaded-babies claim originated with ZAKA, an Israeli organization whose leaders were caught fabricating atrocity propaganda.

The facts changed nothing. Long after the claims had been discredited, they continued to be cited in parliaments, incorporated into legal submissions, and repeated on news channels. The demand for Palestinian condemnation does not require truth. It requires consensus. And repetition produces that consensus more reliably than evidence ever could.

Under that cover, the pattern resumed. Israeli cabinet ministers announced plans to reestablish Israeli settlements in Gaza. Israel has killed more than 50,000 Palestinians, displaced nearly the entire population of Gaza, engineered famine, and destroyed hospitals, universities, and other civilian infrastructure. Israel’s genocidal campaign is not a reaction to October 7; it continues the settler-colonial project Israel has advanced over decades through siege, fragmentation, repeated mass killing, and expulsion.

Across every phase, the settler-colonial project has followed the same logic: the expulsion of 750,000 Palestinians in 1948, the near tripling of the settler population while Palestinians were required to renounce armed resistance, the siege of Gaza since 2007, and the killing of unarmed marchers at a fence. Before any evidence is heard, Palestinians are required to answer for their resistance so that Israel can act without restraint, and without ever having to answer for what it has done.

This essay was first published in January 2025. The casualty figures reflect what was known at the time of publication. Footnotes have been updated to reflect subsequent reporting and investigations.

The unsubstantiated nature of the October 7 atrocity claims is documented in detail by The Electronic Intifada. On the rape narrative: Ali Abunimah, “Israel still can’t find any 7 October rape victims, prosecutor admits,” The Electronic Intifada, January 6, 2025; Ali Abunimah, “Israeli rights group admits it helped spread false claims about 7 Oct. rapes,” The Electronic Intifada, May 19, 2024, citing the findings of the UN team led by Special Representative Pramila Patten, which examined thousands of photographs and videos provided by Israel and found no tangible indications of rape. On the beheaded-babies claim and the ongoing rape narrative, The Electronic Intifada has documented extensively that these claims originated with ZAKA, an Israeli organization whose leaders were caught fabricating atrocity propaganda; see the publication’s 7 October investigations archive. For the most recent comprehensive investigation, see Ali Abunimah, “Israel’s 7 October rape hoax gets a 300-page reboot,” The Electronic Intifada, May 14, 2026. For the foundational ZAKA exposé, see Max Blumenthal, “Scandal-stained Israeli ‘rescue’ group fuels October 7 fabrications,” The Grayzone, December 6, 2023.

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Watchtower — by Norman Harman (@NorrieHarman)

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In his 1923 essay, “The Iron Wall,” Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the founder of Revisionist Zionism, wrote that “every indigenous people will resist alien settlers as long as they see any hope of ridding themselves of the danger of foreign settlement.” Because the Palestinians would resist while hope remained, the task he set for Zionism was the destruction of Palestinian hope. Every Israeli policy since the founding of the state has been a war on that hope—through expulsion, dispossession, siege, and slaughter. A century of that war, however, has not broken the Palestinian hope for liberation.

The first sustained test of that logic came in April 1936, when Palestinians called a general strike against decades of Zionist settler colonialism, sponsored since 1917 by British rule. Mass immigration under imperial protection had more than quadrupled the settler population, from 84,000 at the first British census in 1922 to over 350,000 by the time of the strike, nearly a third of all inhabitants, although the settlers owned barely 5 percent of the land. The colonial threat was demographic, not territorial: a settler society with its own institutions and armed militias and a declared aim of becoming the country’s majority. The strike grew into the Great Revolt, a three-year uprising and the longest armed challenge to British rule anywhere in the Arab world. A six-month general strike, among the longest in modern history, gave way to a peasant insurgency in the hills, waged by farmers, workers, and fighters against both the Mandate and the settler project it protected.

Britain answered with the full weight of empire. It deployed tens of thousands of troops, bombed villages from the air, demolished homes, and imposed collective punishment. By 1939, Britain had broken the revolt, killing thousands, jailing or exiling the leadership, and disarming the rest.

Disarmament of the Palestinians was the aim, and the White Paper of 1939 was its instrument. In it, Britain proposed an independent Palestinian state within ten years—Arab and Jewish populations together, under conditions designed to prevent either from dominating the other—and limited Jewish immigration to 75,000 over five years, after which it would require Arab consent. The price of the agreement was Palestinian disarmament. British authorities confiscated 13,000 Palestinian weapons while the same mandatory power continued to arm and train the Haganah, the Jewish Settlement Police, and the other Zionist militias it had relied on to crush the revolt—and would later claim to restrain.

Nine years later, the White Paper revealed its purpose. Disarmed and undefended, Palestinians received, instead of the promised state, the Nakba—the expulsion of 750,000 people by the Zionist militias and the newly declared state of Israel, the destruction of 531 villages, and the seizure of 78 percent of historic Palestine.

The Nakba did not end Palestinian resistance. The catastrophe scattered Palestinians across Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, the West Bank, and Gaza, and the camps they were driven into became the organizing centers of a reconstituted movement. The United Nations affirmed their right of return in Resolution 194. Israel refused to implement it. From the camps in Gaza and Jordan, fedayeen fighters launched raids into Israel. Israel responded with reprisals against civilian populations. At Qibya, on the night of October 14, 1953, Ariel Sharon’s Unit 101 demolished forty-five houses with civilians still inside, killing sixty-nine people. The reprisals were designed to pressure Arab governments into suppressing the fedayeen, and they largely succeeded. Egypt and Jordan policed the armistice lines, arrested fighters, and broke up the raiding networks to spare themselves the next Israeli blow.

They also radicalized a generation of Palestinian refugees who had watched Arab governments fail to restore their rights and watched Israel punish their communities for resisting. Out of that radicalization, Yasser Arafat founded Fatah in 1959. The Palestine Liberation Organization followed in 1964 under Arab League sponsorship—an attempt to contain Palestinian nationalism, to give the cause a manageable address controlled by the states. In June 1967, Israel launched a war that defeated three Arab armies in six days. It seized the West Bank, Gaza, East Jerusalem, the Sinai, and the Golan Heights and displaced another 300,000 Palestinians. The rout discredited the Arab states as guardians of the Palestinian cause and buried the pan-Arab promise that their power would one day restore Palestine.

What the Arab armies had lost, Palestinian fighters reclaimed in the name of their own cause. In the early morning of March 21, 1968, Israel sent tanks, paratroopers, and aircraft into Jordan to destroy the PLO base at Karameh. Palestinian fighters and the Jordanian army held their ground. By nightfall, Israel withdrew, having suffered losses it had not anticipated. The PLO—created a few years earlier as an instrument of Arab state control—became the institutional expression of Palestinian dispossession: a people organizing for return.

The PLO’s transformation at Karameh brought recruits, resources, and a new political authority—and made it a target. By 1970, the organization had built a state within a state in Jordan, controlling territory and operating independently of the Hashemite crown. A US-backed monarchy could not hold a sovereignty it did not control, and it would not bear the cost of the resistance it sheltered. In September 1970, the Jordanian army crushed the PLO’s presence, killing thousands of Palestinians in what came to be known as Black September. Another Arab regime had chosen its own survival over the Palestinian cause—as each would, for none could free Palestine without breaking the order on which its own power rested. The PLO reestablished itself in Lebanon, which became the next front against Israel.

In 1982, Israel invaded Lebanon to destroy Palestinian nationalism once and for all. Ariel Sharon, by then minister of defense, was its architect. Israel besieged West Beirut for eighty-eight days until the PLO agreed to evacuate, surrendering its armed presence. American guarantees explicitly covered the unarmed Palestinian civilians who would remain in the camps after the fighters left. Philip Habib, President Ronald Reagan’s special envoy, delivered those guarantees. Within weeks, Israel’s Phalangist allies entered Sabra and Shatila under Israeli perimeter control, their way lit by Israeli flares, and massacred up to 3,500 people. As before, disarmament had come first. The massacre followed.

The PLO relocated to Tunis, operating in exile and increasingly removed from the daily reality of occupation. Across the 1980s, the distance between the Palestinians living under Israeli control and their leadership widened. In December 1987, they rose without it. The First Intifada came from within occupied society—from the camps, the universities, and the streets—as the direct expression of life under occupation. Students, workers, women, and children carried out a largely unarmed six-year uprising whose moral and organizational force proved harder to break than any armed campaign.

Crushing the Intifada cost Israel more, at home and abroad, than it could bear. Israel came to the Madrid Conference in 1991 under that pressure. The conference was the first time Palestinians from the occupied territories negotiated their own future. What followed, however, reorganized the occupation that Madrid had opened a process to end.

While the official Madrid negotiations continued, Israel and the PLO conducted secret back-channel talks in Oslo, Norway. The Palestinian delegation at Madrid was never told about them. The PLO leadership in Tunis, which had played no role in the Intifada, negotiated directly with Israel behind the backs of the Palestinians who had fought for six years to win the right to sit at the table. The Oslo Accords of 1993 recognized the PLO as the representative of the Palestinian people and created the Palestinian Authority. The occupation continued. The settlements accelerated. Israel deferred the final status negotiations—statehood, borders, Jerusalem, return—to a process it never completed. The PLO got recognition and a passage home from exile. The Palestinians who had carried out the Intifada got the Authority—an apparatus built to administer the occupation they had risen against.

Under Oslo, the Authority’s primary obligation was Israel’s security. It arrested those who had built the Intifada, in some cases at Israel’s direction—Hamas’s founder Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, among them, and hundreds of the movement’s activists. It presided over territory where the settler population grew from 110,000 to nearly a million across the Oslo years. The Authority administered the occupation as it expanded all around it—and called the arrangement a peace process.

Seven years of Oslo had left Palestinians with self-rule over scattered enclaves but no sovereignty, an agreement but no state. The settlements expanded, the checkpoints multiplied, and statehood was deferred year after year during the so-called peace process. The conditions for revolt were already in place. On September 28, 2000, Ariel Sharon walked onto the Al-Aqsa compound—the third-holiest site in Islam, in occupied East Jerusalem—accompanied by hundreds of riot police, a calculated assertion of Israeli sovereignty over the place Palestinians hold most sacred. The Second Intifada began the next day. The uprising cost thousands of Palestinian lives. In 2002, Israel reoccupied the West Bank cities it had nominally transferred to the Authority under Oslo. The self-rule had been Israel’s to revoke all along.

By 2005, the resistance had made direct Israeli control of Gaza too costly to hold. Israel was defending about 9,000 settlers among roughly 1.3 million Palestinians—a tiny enclave where its soldiers kept getting killed. Citing the cost of defending isolated settlements, the demographic weight of ruling so many Palestinians, and the aim of consolidating the larger West Bank settlements, Sharon, now Israel’s prime minister, withdrew Israel’s settlers and soldiers from the strip while keeping control of its borders, airspace, and sea. The world called it the end of the occupation. The occupation continued by other means.

Hamas had become Gaza’s strongest Palestinian force. The Islamic Resistance Movement, born there at the outbreak of the First Intifada in 1987, was an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, with an armed wing and a far wider social base that was built across the Oslo years through clinics, schools, and charities that filled the spaces the Authority left empty. In January 2006, it won the Palestinian legislative elections. International observers, including former President Jimmy Carter, declared the vote free and fair. The United States and the European Union cut off their aid to the Authority. At the same time, Israel froze the Palestinian tax revenues it collected on its behalf. These sources made up most of the Authority’s budget. Washington dispatched an American general to arm Fatah forces against the elected government. The attempt failed.

When Hamas consolidated control over Gaza in 2007, Israel imposed a comprehensive siege that has never been lifted—a collective punishment of more than two million people for a political choice, maintained for nearly two decades.

Between 2008 and 2021, Israel launched four wars on Gaza—one under Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, three under his successor Benjamin Netanyahu. Israeli officials called the strategy “mowing the lawn.” Every few years, the army would bombard Gaza, degrading Hamas and the other armed factions to restore deterrence, then accepting that the resistance would grow back and have to be cut down again. Each military operation assaulted a besieged civilian population, killing hundreds to thousands of Palestinians. The siege continued throughout.

On March 30, 2018, after eleven years of siege, Palestinians in Gaza began marching to the perimeter fence that sealed them off from Israel. They demanded an end to the blockade and the right of return; most were refugees, barred from homes now inside Israel. The march came months after the United States recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and cut its funding to UNRWA, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees. From positions behind the fence, Israeli snipers fired into the crowds. Over the following year, Israeli forces killed more than 200 of the marchers, more than 40 of them children, and wounded tens of thousands. The marchers were unarmed.

On October 7, 2023, Hamas and other fighters broke through the fence that had sealed Gaza off for sixteen years—the latest and most explosive form that resistance had taken after the general strike, the fedayeen, the intifadas, and the marches, each answered by a deepening occupation. Israel responded as the iron wall had always demanded: with overwhelming force. It cut off food, water, fuel, and medicine to more than two million people, bombed hospitals, schools, and shelters, and reduced most of Gaza to rubble, killing more than 70,000 Palestinians, over 20,000 of them children.¹

This was genocide, and the institutions named it only slowly. In 2024, the International Court of Justice found genocide plausible and ordered Israel to prevent it—binding orders Israel defied. Amnesty International concluded it was genocide that same year. Nearly two years in, a United Nations commission of inquiry reached the same conclusion, and the International Association of Genocide Scholars found that Israel’s conduct met the legal definition of genocide. By Israel’s own military intelligence, 83 percent of those it killed were civilians.

Jabotinsky’s iron wall prescribed overwhelming force as the instrument for extinguishing Palestinian hope—the point at which Palestinians, accepting that resistance was futile, would negotiate on Zionist terms. A century of that force has not extinguished it, and Palestinians remain a demographic majority between the river and the sea. No settler-colonial project has succeeded unless the native population was all but destroyed or driven out. In Palestine, it failed. From that failure, Zionism has drawn the genocidal conclusion its own logic always pointed to: if the hope cannot be destroyed, destroy the people.

It will fail, as every attempt before it has failed. Occupation produces resistance. Resistance is met with force. Force produces the next form of resistance. More than a century of colonial management of Palestine has refused to draw the only conclusion this cycle demands—that the occupation must end. End colonialism and apartheid. Return the land, the homes, the people. Remove the occupation, and you remove the need for resistance. Maintain it, and resistance will return—in another form, in another generation, for as long as the cause remains.

1. Figures updated for this revision (article first published 2024). Casualty totals are from the Gaza Ministry of Health through late 2025 (more than 70,000 killed, over 20,000 of them children), corroborated as a conservative floor by a capture-recapture analysis in The Lancet (January 2025) that found the Ministry under-reporting deaths by roughly 41 percent. The determination that genocide was being committed was reached by Amnesty International (December 2024), the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory (September 2025), and the International Association of Genocide Scholars (resolution of 31 August 2025), following the International Court of Justice’s finding of plausibility (January 2024). The civilian proportion of the dead is drawn from Israeli Military Intelligence’s classified casualty database as of May 2025, reported by The Guardian, +972 Magazine, and Local Call (August 2025).

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