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): 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 outpost, the sign of the end of their imagined permanence. And perhaps as our end—our bodies scattered, dispersed, maimed beyond recognition. And maybe as something else: the endurance of the unbearable, the persistence of what was meant to be erased, the resurrection of a people who refuse to vanish. I am not sure.”
No one is. But we all try to presage.
I believe we all agree that Israel functions as a dependent colony of European powers and the United States. It was built and designed that way. I have discussed this from several different angles over the past two years. You can look to my pieces on philo-Zionism (you can read the sections on Pappé and Makdisi on this post) , or even last week’s post on the Balfour Declaration. Israel’s wars against Palestinians, Lebanese, Yemenis, and Iranians have always relied on the goodwill of other states—the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, France, and others—that supply it with the weapons it uses against these countries.
There is a structural problem Israel faces. On the one hand, it claims to be a refuge for Jews worldwide, an independent power capable of protecting them from antisemitism. This is where the “super- Sparta” idea, the notion that Israel can stand alone, isolated against a hostile world, holds ideological power. The historical trauma of antisemitism mutates into the conviction that Israel must rely solely on itself and build its own forms of power. Yet it cannot. It has repeatedly failed to generate sufficient military strength to truly stand on its own and always depended on the alliances that sustain and arm it.
Two years into the genocide, Israel’s structural problem has become the Western world’s problem. It always was but now Israel is losing the moral and political support of people across the globe, including in the US and the UK. And that creates a contradiction. What is it going to be?
There are a couple of options, Omar contends. One is to reshape the legal environment by criminalizing Palestinian activism and organizing abroad through proxies and lobbies. This is what we have seen across Europe, the UK, and the US in full force over the past six months.
Another is to try to change the world in its own image. “This is why Gaza is not just Gaza, and Palestine is not just Palestine. Israel offers a blueprint for a future humanity shaped by techno-fascism,” says Omar—the use of technology and violence to dominate and reorganize life itself. The bulldozing of Gaza, the reconstruction plans framed as real-estate ventures or a “Middle East Riviera,” the creation of an efficient killing machine—these are the components of that model. “The goal is to change the world in Israel’s image, expecting its Western allies eventually to catch up. In doing so, Israel evokes the colonial, racial, and genocidal histories of those very powers. A nostalgic exercise projected into the present, reminding them of how their own states were once built.”
According to Omar, Israel seeks to avoid isolation through the criminalization and repression of support for Palestinians, and the constant instrumentalization of antisemitism. These efforts are already in full force. A glimpse of the Labour government’s recent attempts follows in the next section. Yet what has been exposed is too vast and too deep a chasm to be contained. For Palestinians in the diaspora, this moment offers an opportunity to transform global consciousness and reshape how the world understands their struggle. And on that front, there is tangible progress.
Palestine has become an ethical compass. For many of us. A position on Palestine now reveals something elemental about who a person is. Whether they possess basic human decency. Whether they are fair in the simplest sense. Whether they can see clearly or remain lost in the fog built by propaganda. Whether they have a working heart and mind. Whether they are good people in this world or the next, or as the Arabs say ‘fid dunya wal akhira.’
Actor Mark Ruffalo said in a conversation with Mehdi Hasan that he no longer sees some of his friends—those who kept repeating the atrocious claim that all Palestinians are terrorists or human shields, and in either case deserve to die. He thought those people were his friends. No longer.
These ruptures are more significant than many realise. Hence the panic among the leaders of the so-called liberal world order. Hence the absurd responses to millions of people filling the streets in protest everywhere.
Professor Farsakh sees a revolutionary potential in this moment, reminiscent of the Arab Uprisings. But the point of inflection, in her mind, lies not in European capitals but, as she puts it, “believe it or not, in the persistence of Palestinian resistance on the ground and in the renewed attempts to revive the PLO [Palestinian Liberation Organization] amid the collapse of the Palestinian Authority’s legitimacy.” Across the spectrum, there is now a growing awareness and a shared effort to imagine an alternative political future.
She also believes that this revolutionary potential lies, paradoxically, in the collapse of the two-state solution. The recent wave of recognitions of a Palestinian state by various governments is significant and symbolic. It acknowledges that Palestinians possess political rights and a right to self-determination. But the manner in which this right can be realized is now evident. It cannot be through territorial partition, for Israel was never committed to a two-state arrangement. It can only be through a democratic polity grounded in equality for all who live on the land.
The question now is how Palestinians will articulate that vision. This process is already unfolding across different spaces and generations. The diaspora has a vital role to play, as do those enduring the realities of occupation and siege. Their challenges are extreme. Not only they must remain on the land in the face of a genocidal campaign but they also need to reconstruct an emancipatory political project from within the ruins of Palestine e. Yet initiatives have begun through national conferences, local assemblies, and new movements seeking to define what a different tomorrow might look like. A new generation is beginning to imagine itself politically, with a clarity not seen before.
History offers perspective. In 1948, Palestinians were left without leadership. It took two decades for political reorganization to emerge from the workers and students of Kuwait, Lebanon, and Syria, through Baathists, Arab nationalists, and the early circles of Fatah. Much of that work was invisible for years before it crystallized into the guerrilla movements of the 1960s. “We may not see the outcome immediately, but the groundwork is being laid,” says Farsakh. “Today there are some fifteen million Palestinians—half inside historic Palestine, half in exile—articulate, mobilized, and working with legal, diplomatic, and media strategies unimaginable seventy-five years ago. They are operating across levels and across borders, sustained by international solidarity that did not exist even thirty years ago.”
There are, of course, darker possibilities. The first is that Israel might, in the end, succeed in eliminating a large number of Palestinians from Palestine. Not all, perhaps, but many. It is a possibility that cannot be dismissed.
The second is the existing fragmentation not only among Palestinian factions but among political entities and individuals around the world. As I have written earlier, nothing is and will ever be the same after Gaza. We have witnessed a genocide and, at the same time, witnessed our inability to prevent or halt it. How we respond to this witnessing, this knowledge, this reckoning is the question. What are we going to do with these hollowed-out, disgraced supranational organizations and their moral and structural emptiness?
The far right seems to have an agenda and is rushing to fill that void because it recognizes opportunity in collapse. From MAGA in the United States to the resurgent populisms of Europe, right-wing movements are advancing through the ruins of discredited institutions, using Gaza’s destruction as both distraction and lesson. Meanwhile, the left—and the Palestinian movement within it—remains dispersed. There are extraordinary individuals and groups working across legal, political, and media fronts, but their efforts lack the infrastructure that sustained past struggles. We need to build that infrastructure anew. We need to develop the institutions capable of sustaining a political project that transforms the cause from one of survival into one of renewal.
Can we? Some days I wake up with a firm of course we can. Some days I don’t know. Everything looks bleak. But who has the luxury of being hopeless? If Palestinians in Gaza still persist, who are we to lose hope? Hope is not a strategy, yes, but it is essential to keep our political imagination alive. And that is all we need: solidarity and political imagination.
As Mandela once said, it always seems impossible until it is done.
Questions for an Upended World
To the lamentable Labour leader, also known as the prime minister of the UK:
(In early July 2025, the UK government designated Palestine Action, a nonviolent direct action network that targets arms factories supplying Israel, as a terrorist organization, a decision that has since sparked ongoing protests across the country.)
How is it that an organization (Palestine Action) calling for an end to arms sales to Israel is designated a terrorist group, while those protesting this decision—including the elderly and the disabled—are manhandled and arrested, even as Palestinians endure relentless bombardment and starvation? How is it that the perpetrator of genocide is acceptable, yet those protesting it are branded as terrorists?
(Last week, a 35-year-old British citizen of Syrian descent, Jihad al-Shaime, attacked worshippers with a knife at a synagogue in the Manchester suburb of Crumpsall on Yom Kippur, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar, killing two people. In the aftermath, the British government declared that continuing pro-Palestine demonstrations in the wake of this attack was “un-British” and “dishonourable.” Yet people continued to take to the streets in support of Palestine. Starmer has since suggested that the chants at these protests—such as “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”—may have contributed to the attacker’s “radicalisation.”)
How can the supposed root of the ‘radicalisation’ of a mentally unstable Manchester man, already facing assault charges, a rape investigation, and known allegiance to ISIS, be the chants and slogans heard at pro-Palestine protests in the UK? In which credible social science paper is such causation, or even correlation, argued or demonstrated? Why conflate the Palestinian right to live on their land with a terror attack in Manchester?
More broadly: What kind of straw man fallacy are we being forced to live inside?