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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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For Alya, on your first Christmas

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

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On December 7, 2025, while touring the ruins of Beit Hanoun and Jabalia, the 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 declared complete. Israel remains the only UN member state that has never declared its own borders: its founding declaration omitted them deliberately, and no law has drawn them in the seventy-seven 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 has declared such expansion impermissible, that has enshrined self-determination in its founding charters, that congratulates itself on transcending the crudities of the civilizing mission—requires its alibis. You cannot simply conquer and announce that you are conquering; the international order no longer permits such candor, though it permits everything else. You must conquer while proclaiming peace. You must dispossess while offering “prosperity.” You must cage a population while speaking of “stabilization.” And so the vocabulary of security provides permission rather than explanation, alibi rather than justification.

The method has a history, and the history has a name: the Nahal system. Kibbutzim like Nahal Oz in the Gaza envelope—those attacked on October 7, now invoked to justify the Yellow Line—were themselves products of that doctrine, which converted ceasefire lines into permanent borders. Founded as military outposts along a provisional armistice line, they became civilian communities that required protection. Military outposts became civilian settlements; 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: the clock that is always started late. The question “Who started it?” is answered by beginning the clock at the Palestinian action, never at the siege that preceded it, never at the occupation that preceded the resistance, never at the dispossession that started everything yet is treated as the start of nothing. History is punctuated so that Israeli violence registers as response and Palestinian violence as aggression—a framing so embedded in Western media grammar that it has become reflex.

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

An aggressor population requires oversight, administration, and ultimately re-education—hence a “Board of Peace” to oversee a people never consulted on the board’s composition or mandate. Part of that re-education would involve what Netanyahu describes as “deradicalizing” Gaza—a comparison he invites explicitly, citing Germany following World War II. The target is Palestinian society itself—its memory, its political consciousness, its capacity to name what has been done to it. The comparison presents Palestinians as a defeated aggressor population, collectively culpable, requiring long-term external control—as though resistance to colonization were madness, and subjugation the cure. 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 itself. 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 are being recruited to the same role—along with what Israel’s “buffer zones” have left of Lebanon and Syria—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 Zamir declared his new border, on December 17, Israel approved its largest export deal in history—$35 billion in gas to Egypt, an agreement its minister of energy had greeted as a demonstration of “our neighbors’ reliance on Israel,” telling reporters that Egypt’s economic weakness meant the deal “will make them think twice about taking any steps.” Gas and water 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, US pressure at the UN, and “peace plans” that function as ultimatums, what cannot be secured by military force is secured politically. Palestinians are expected to recognize Israel, renounce resistance, and accept the legitimacy of a state built on our dispossession—while Israel acknowledges nothing, cedes nothing, and reckons with nothing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This pattern is not new.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

92% of homes damaged or destroyed.

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

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

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

More than 12,000 massacres.

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

Over 2,200 entire families completely exterminated.

Over 10,000 people missing or buried under rubble.

Over 25,000 children orphaned.

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

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

95% of Gaza's schools damaged or destroyed.

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

9 out of 10 children are malnourished.

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

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

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

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

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

No hospital in Gaza is fully functioning. None.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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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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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