Your position on Palestine now reveals something fundamental about you

As we mark the 2nd anniversary of the October 7 attack, let's look at what it revealed about Israel, Palestine, and the world at large.

As we mark the anniversary week of the October 7 attack and its aftermath, I want to briefly look at what that horrific event, carried out by Hamas and resulting in civilian deaths and hostage-taking, and the ensuing genocide perpetrated by Israel have revealed about Israel, Palestine, and the world.

I will take two Palestinian academics as my anchor today, as they have captured this moment with remarkable precision in a recent webinar hosted by the Palestinian Policy Network, Al-Shabaka (literally “network” in Arabic), moderated by Tariq Kenney-Shawa : political economist Leila Farsakh from the University of Massachusetts, and Abdaljawad Omar from Birzeit University, Ramallah.

Omar asks, also in a recent piece published in Mondoweiss, how historians will look at the date of October 7, 2023:

“As the beginning of the spiral into monstrosity and the hyper-forms of techno-fascism that feed on rubble and displaced flesh. Or perhaps as the first cracks in an imperial juggernaut and its outpo…