Before Any Evidence Is Heard
Arcade Joe — by Norman Harman (@NorrieHarman)
In January 2024, the International Court of Justice found it plausible that Israel was committing genocide in Gaza and ordered provisional measures under the Genocide Convention. The ruling changed nothing. One year later, in January 2025, Israel has killed more than 50,000 Palestinians in Gaza and erased entire cities. The bombs continue. The siege holds. Across parliaments, newspapers, and universities in the Western world, the demand that Palestinians justify Al-Aqsa Flood persists with undiminished urgency, as though the court had ruled on some other matter entirely. The international order is functioning as designed—Palestinian suffering generating demands for Palestinian accountability, Israeli colonial violence generating demands for Palestinian restraint. October 7 forced this asymmetry into view. The asymmetry preceded it by a century.
The demand for justification is constructed to foreclose the questions it claims to ask. It assigns the initiation of violence to Hamas alone. It recasts a century of occupation, siege, dispossession, and systematic violence as background, then treats Palestinian action as the rupture that requires explanation. It attributes the destruction of Gaza’s civilian population to Hamas. It removes Israel from the sentence.
Governments that fund the genocide press the demand. Media organizations that normalize the violence amplify it. Political institutions absorb the ICJ ruling without altering their position.
The demand is a verdict: it determines who stands trial before any evidence is heard.
The historical record does not sustain this claim. Israel’s violence against Palestinians has never required Palestinian resistance as its occasion—not in 1948, not in 1982, not across decades of occupation and siege preceding Al-Aqsa Flood. The demand erases a century of violence that required no Palestinian provocation and preceded Palestinian military organization.
In a Beirut interview in 1970, Ghassan Kanafani named the structure the demand serves: negotiation with the power that imposed subjugation becomes “a conversation between the sword and the neck.” The demand operates through the same mechanism. It takes what Israel has done to Gaza—the bombed hospitals, the erased neighborhoods, the severed water lines—and converts it into an argument against the people Israel is destroying. The worse the violence, the stronger the case against resistance. To answer the demand on those terms concedes the premise: Palestinian action requires authorization from the structure it confronts.
The historical record, read without that premise, locates accountability in the condition that produces resistance. When the Oslo Declaration was signed in 1993, 110,000 Israeli settlers lived in the West Bank and Gaza. Seven years later, when the process collapsed, the number reached 195,000. By 2023 it exceeded 700,000. Expansion accelerated across every phase of negotiation, agreement, and declared ceasefire. Israel met every political concession with ethnic cleansing and deeper fragmentation of Palestinian territory. The pattern holds: occupation without horizon, siege without legal basis, dispossession without acknowledgment, and violence that has never required Palestinian provocation to sustain itself.
The Oslo process rehearsed the verdict in advance. It required Palestinians to account for their resistance as the precondition for political recognition. It recast capitulation as vision and security coordination as strategy. The demand fixes attention on Al-Aqsa Flood and its immediate antecedents. It excludes the longer structure—the one that produced the First Intifada, the Second Intifada, and the Great Revolt of 1936.
The demand intensifies as Palestinian suffering increases. It treats Palestinian suffering as evidence of Palestinian culpability. It uses the genocide Israel is perpetrating against Gaza’s civilian population as an argument against resistance. The genocide is the clearest demonstration of the conditions that produce Palestinian resistance. This inversion—in which the occupied bear responsibility for the occupation’s violence against them—is the demand’s purpose, held consistently across a century.
To refuse the demand is to place accountability where the record places it: on the structure that has produced, across more than a century, the conditions from which Al-Aqsa Flood and every comparable moment have emerged. The demand will persist because it belongs to that structure. Its urgency rises as the question it displaces becomes harder to avoid. The condition that produces Palestinian resistance—occupation, siege, and systematic dispossession—will continue to generate resistance in proportion to its intensity. The demand for Palestinian justification does not address this structure. It ensures the settler-colonial order is never what stands trial.
The world is waking up.
The truth is being seen.
The sun will not stay behind the clouds and Gaza is not alone.