Above: an occupier tank being blown up by resistance forces in north Gaza, image by Islamic Republic News Agency
For this extermination effort to succeed in erasing the Palestinians, its targets would need to be extirpated from their land, and thereby be made much easier to neutralize. The “Israeli” Nazi entity wishes it could put the Palestinians in the same situation that the Native Americans or the Australian Aboriginals are now in; that Palestine’s indigenous people could be too numerically reduced, and too lacking in allies or physical power, to existentially threaten the state which oppresses them.
Ultimately, all the states that subjugate their indigenous inhabitants will be overthrown; this process won’t look the same throughout each of the different locations, but it will happen. And perhaps the greatest point of vulnerability for this colonial order, both narratively and economically, are the lands in which Palestine’s indigenous people continue to fight. There’s no way to break their will, because they’re doing the only thing they can do.
Should “Israel” succeed in forcing 700,000 Gazans from the north to the south, then those Gazans largely won’t be able to survive. The north is in great part where the Gaza strip’s vegetation exists, with the environment below Khan Yunis being far drier in comparison. So the struggle to keep this land isn’t just about avoiding even more overcrowding in the south; it’s about avoiding overcrowding that would happen inside a place where resources are already far too scarce. The Palestinians don’t just have every right to stay in their home; they have every right to live, which is what’s at stake here. For hundreds of thousands of people right now, it’s either fight for north Gaza, or die in a desert concentration camp. And this makes their drive to resist all the greater.
This is an essential factor behind the membership growth of Hamas since October 7: the only path forward is to fight back. And this is why the effort to paint the resistors as villains simply can’t succeed: when humanity sees this situation, it can easily understand which side is in the right. As the Zionist entity embarks on its effort to officially annex the West Bank, which would entail the same kind of ethnic cleansing project, those who counter-attack there will also be recognized as heroes. Outside Zionism’s insular propaganda bubble of lies and hatred, nobody can look at these developments and believe that “Israel” is an innocent victim. And this is a crucial reason why “Israel” has already died.
If “Israel” could cleanly expel the remaining Palestinians, reaching a kind of “final solution” that brings the colonial project to a new stage, this would afford Zionism greater stability. It would let the entity say to the world “we’ve reached peace,” and argue that the Palestinian question isn’t even worth thinking about anymore; “Israel” could become the more sustainable type of state that the USA or Australia are. But this is entirely a fantasy. Such a scenario of total victory for the colonizers is the only way the “Greater Israel” political faction could realize its goal for massive expansion, and the only way this could happen is through an insane number of wars. Wars that the entity isn’t capable of winning, because the indigenous peoples it seeks to annihilate are in far too strong of a strategic place.
“Israel” can’t even subdue the guerrilla forces inside Gaza and the West Bank; it’s experiencing failure after failure in the fight against these resistors, which has demographically shrunken its small pseudo-empire. More than half a million “Israelis” left Palestine and didn’t return during the first six months after October 7, while a quarter of the remaining “Israelis” have considered leaving since then. And it’s increasingly likely that they’ll decide to flee too. As the “Israeli” economic, security, and even energy situations get worse, this is going to ensure that Zionism’s ethnic supremacist project unravels; because the entire basis for Zionism is to keep Palestinians a small minority inside the Jewish state’s territories. Faced with the prospect of losing this crucial advantage, “Israel” feels its only option is to keep expanding the conflicts, which ensures that all aspects of its crisis will worsen.
A Palestinian state will come into being; that’s the trajectory of all these events. And by that point, what remains of “Israel” won’t be able to survive. Every corner of the land will become free, helping catalyze a larger revolutionary transition; an upheaval that the colonial economic order can’t withstand.
Because the colonial genocides of North America were so successful, the ruling class within the USA and Canada managed to delay their own demise. Had their indigenous opposition been as strong as the one “Israel” faces, these states would long ago have been defeated; instead, they’ve been able to become core forces in the system of global monopoly finance capital. Though this has given them a much greater longevity than they would have had otherwise, they’ve still come to be threatened by an internal population which has an interest in their defeat. Our finance capitalists are imperiled by the existence of a post-industrial working class, increasingly large and discontented, that could throw off the capitalist dictatorship and establish a workers state. And when the Palestinians end Zionism, the monopolists will lose an indispensable strategic outpost, hastening the collapse of their system.
The original settler-colonial states could only survive by evolving to the next stage in their imperial development, becoming vessels for an international financial order which supersedes individual nations. The colonial economic structure still exists, but it’s now in a different form than it first was; during capital’s monopoly stage, the “core” countries now export capital rather than goods. As was the case during colonialism’s initial era, the peripheral countries remain exploited; but a shift in the power balance is now happening, and Palestine’s liberation will be instrumental in completing this process.
Palestine has been able to ensure its victory because the Zionist movement got delayed in when it could begin the war against Palestine. As historian Tony Judt has concluded, by that point humanity had reached a stage of development that made Zionism’s evils untenable:
One nationalist movement, Zionism, was frustrated in its ambitions. The dream of an appropriately sited Jewish national home in the middle of the defunct Turkish Empire had to wait upon the retreat of imperial Britain: a process that took three more decades and a second world war. And thus it was only in 1948 that a Jewish nation-state was established in formerly Ottoman Palestine. But the founders of the Jewish state had been influenced by the same concepts and categories as their fin-de-siècle contemporaries back in Warsaw, or Odessa, or Bucharest; not surprisingly, Israel’s ethno-religious self-definition, and its discrimination against internal “foreigners,” has always had more in common with, say, the practices of post-Habsburg Romania than either party might care to acknowledge. The problem with Israel, in short, is not—as is sometimes suggested—that it is a European “enclave” in the Arab world; but rather that it arrived too late. It has imported a characteristically late-nineteenth-century separatist project into a world that has moved on, a world of individual rights, open frontiers, and international law. The very idea of a “Jewish state”—a state in which Jews and the Jewish religion have exclusive privileges from which non-Jewish citizens are forever excluded—is rooted in another time and place. Israel, in short, is an anachronism.
Less than a hundred years after 1948, these new strengths for the anti-colonial cause have made “Israel” enter into a terminal decline. The Palestinians have already won, letting all the other peoples who colonialism has subjugated gain the power to achieve their own victory. The Russian people’s success at combating imperialism in Ukraine helped inspire the Al Aqsa Flood Operation, catalyzing a whole new stage in the struggle; next, Al Aqsa Flood will help inspire many more to take actions that change where history goes.
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