On Palestine

When Palestinian families flee their homes under the cover of darkness, carrying only what they can hold, they join a story that has been unfolding for over a century. This exodus, repeated across generations, reveals a pattern that mainstream narratives often obscure: the systematic transformation of a diverse, multicultural Palestine into an exclusionary state project. The tears of children separated from their ancestral olive groves echo the same anguish felt by their great-grandparents in 1948, suggesting that what we witness today is not merely a territorial dispute, but the continuation of a colonial project that began in the late nineteenth century.

This conflict challenges us to look beyond the surface of daily headlines and peace process rhetoric to understand the deeper historical currents that have shaped modern Palestine-Israel. Through examining the evolution of Zionist settler colonialism, the institutionalization of ethnic cleansing, and the emergence of creative resistance movements, we can trace how a relatively small European Jewish immigration movement transformed into a powerful state apparatus that continues to reshape the demographic and geographic landscape of historic Palestine. Most importantly, this analysis reveals why conventional diplomatic solutions have repeatedly failed and what alternative pathways might offer genuine liberation for all people living between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.

The story of modern Palestine begins not in 1948 or 1967, but in 1882, when the first wave of European Jewish settlers arrived with an explicitly colonial mission. Unlike the religious Jewish communities that had peacefully coexisted with Palestinian Muslims and Christians for centuries, these new arrivals came with a revolutionary agenda: to transform Palestine into a Jewish-majority state through systematic colonization. Early Zionist leaders like Theodor Herzl openly described their project in colonial terms, seeking support from European imperial powers who viewed Jewish settlement as a convenient solution to their own "Jewish question" while extending Western influence into the strategically vital Middle East.

What distinguished Zionist colonialism from other settler projects was its unique combination of secular nationalism with biblical claims, creating what one historian called "a movement led by people who don't believe in God, but God nonetheless promised them Palestine." This ideological framework proved remarkably effective at mobilizing both Jewish immigrants seeking refuge from European anti-Semitism and Christian Zionists who believed Jewish return to Palestine would accelerate their own messianic prophecies. British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour, himself an anti-Semite who preferred Jews settle elsewhere than in Britain, exemplified this alliance when he issued his famous 1917 declaration supporting a Jewish homeland in Palestine.

The colonial nature of early Zionist settlement became apparent in its systematic exclusion of Palestinian labor and its explicit goal of demographic transformation. Unlike typical colonial projects that exploited indigenous labor, Zionist organizations promoted "Hebrew labor" policies that deliberately displaced Palestinian workers and peasants. When David Ben-Gurion proclaimed that Zionists were "taking a country away from a people," he articulated the zero-sum logic that would define the conflict for decades to come. Palestinian resistance emerged as early as 1936 in a massive three-year revolt, but British imperial forces crushed this uprising with such severity that Palestinian society lost most of its political and military leadership on the eve of the 1948 war.

By 1948, Zionist military forces had grown from small agricultural settlements into a formidable apparatus capable of implementing what Israeli historians now acknowledge as systematic ethnic cleansing. The transformation of Palestine's demographic balance from a Palestinian Arab majority to a Jewish majority required not just immigration, but the forced expulsion of over 750,000 Palestinians from their ancestral homes. This process, euphemistically called "independence" in Israeli discourse and remembered as the Nakba (catastrophe) by Palestinians, established the fundamental pattern that continues today: the ongoing attempt to maximize Jewish control over Palestinian land while minimizing the Palestinian population remaining on that land.

The year 1948 marked not just the creation of Israel, but the implementation of the most systematic ethnic cleansing operation in Palestinian history. Israeli military forces, operating according to detailed plans prepared months in advance, depopulated over 530 Palestinian villages and expelled approximately 750,000 people—more than half of Palestine's indigenous population. This was not the chaotic byproduct of war, as official Israeli narratives long claimed, but a carefully orchestrated campaign designed to solve what Zionist leaders frankly called "the demographic problem." Palestinian families who had lived on their land for generations were forced to become refugees, while Jewish immigrants from Europe and the Arab world were settled in their emptied homes and villages.

The newly established Israeli state quickly institutionalized this ethnic cleansing through a complex legal and bureaucratic apparatus designed to prevent Palestinian return while facilitating continued Jewish immigration. The Absentee Property Law of 1950 confiscated the lands and homes of Palestinian refugees, transferring this wealth to Jewish immigrants and state institutions. Even Palestinians who remained inside Israel's borders found themselves subject to military rule until 1966, confined to isolated villages and denied freedom of movement in their own homeland. Meanwhile, the Jewish National Fund, controlling over 90 percent of Israeli land, operated under explicit mandates to work only for "people of Jewish race, religion, and origin."

The international community's response to this massive displacement revealed the profound double standards that continue to characterize global attitudes toward Palestinian rights. While the United Nations established principles affirming the right of all refugees to return to their homes, and repeatedly reaffirmed this right specifically for Palestinians through Resolution 194, no meaningful pressure was applied to enforce these decisions. Instead, the international community funded Palestinian refugee camps that were supposed to be temporary but became permanent features of the regional landscape. The message was clear: Palestinian displacement was acceptable in ways that would have been unthinkable for European populations in the same period.

During the first two decades after 1948, Israel consolidated its control over 78 percent of historic Palestine while developing the ideological and institutional frameworks that would guide future expansion. The remaining 22 percent was divided between the West Bank (controlled by Jordan) and Gaza (controlled by Egypt), creating the fragmented Palestinian territories that persist today. Israeli leaders like David Ben-Gurion understood this partition as temporary, explicitly telling colleagues that they would eventually acquire the remaining territories when circumstances permitted. This patient, incremental approach to territorial expansion—taking what was possible at each historical moment while preparing for future opportunities—became the hallmark of Zionist strategy and would prove devastatingly effective in the decades that followed.

The 1967 war fundamentally transformed the Israel-Palestine conflict by bringing the remaining Palestinian territories under direct Israeli military control, but also by creating new dilemmas for Israeli strategy. Suddenly controlling the entire territory between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, Israeli leaders faced the challenge their predecessors had tried to avoid: governing a large Palestinian population that, if granted equal rights, would threaten the Jewish demographic majority essential to Zionist ideology. The solution they devised was a system of differentiated control that maintained Israeli sovereignty while denying Palestinians citizenship, creating what would eventually be recognized as a form of apartheid more sophisticated and comprehensive than South Africa's racial regime.

Israeli government ministers, representing the broadest possible Zionist consensus from socialist to religious parties, made three crucial decisions in the months following the 1967 conquest. First, they would not ethnically cleanse the occupied territories as they had in 1948, recognizing that such a massive operation would be difficult to implement and impossible to justify internationally. Second, they would exclude the West Bank and Gaza from any future peace agreements, effectively annexing these territories while maintaining plausible deniability about their intentions. Third, they would deny citizenship to the occupied population, creating a system of permanent disenfranchisement that turned nearly two million Palestinians into subjects of Israeli rule without rights or representation.

This system operated through a carefully designed matrix of control that fragmented Palestinian territory while maintaining the fiction of eventual withdrawal. Jewish settlements, built exclusively for Israeli citizens and connected by roads that Palestinians were forbidden to use, carved up the West Bank into isolated enclaves surrounded by military checkpoints and barriers. Gaza, too densely populated for extensive settlement, became what Israeli officials privately called a "human warehouse"—a space where Palestinians could be contained and controlled while Israel maintained security dominance. The goal was to create what one Israeli general called "a situation in which Palestinians would continue to live like dogs, and whoever wishes may leave."

The 2005 withdrawal of Israeli settlers from Gaza perfectly illustrated the sophistication of this strategy. Presented to the world as a dramatic sacrifice for peace, complete with televised scenes of weeping settlers, the "disengagement" was actually a strategic redeployment designed to strengthen Israeli control over the West Bank. As the Israeli official who negotiated the withdrawal later explained, the goal was to freeze the peace process indefinitely while transferring settlers from the economically unviable Gaza Strip to more valuable West Bank territories that Israel intended to keep. Gaza remained under Israeli military control, with its borders, airspace, and maritime access completely dominated by Israeli forces, creating what even British Prime Minister David Cameron acknowledged was essentially a prison camp for nearly two million people.

The emergence of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement in 2005 marked a fundamental shift in Palestinian strategy, moving from dependence on failed diplomatic processes to building grassroots international pressure modeled on the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa. Palestinian civil society organizations, recognizing that decades of negotiations had only facilitated further Israeli colonization, issued a unified call for global solidarity based on three basic demands: ending the occupation of Palestinian territories, granting full equality to Palestinian citizens of Israel, and respecting the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes. This approach bypassed the fragmented and compromised Palestinian leadership to appeal directly to international public opinion and conscience.

The BDS movement's power lay not just in its economic impact, though major corporations like Veolia and G4S eventually withdrew from Israeli projects, but in its ability to reframe the entire conflict. Instead of accepting the manufactured complexity that had paralyzed diplomatic efforts for decades, BDS presented the issue in clear moral terms: Palestinians were the victims of systematic oppression, and people of conscience worldwide had a responsibility to refuse complicity in that oppression. This message resonated particularly strongly on university campuses, where a new generation of activists, many with no personal connection to the Middle East, recognized parallels between Palestinian struggles and other justice movements they supported.

Israeli leaders understood the existential threat posed by this delegitimization campaign and responded with unprecedented resources to combat it. University administrations came under intense pressure to suppress Palestinian solidarity activism, while governments were lobbied to criminalize BDS activities. The fierce reaction to what were often symbolic gestures—like academic associations voting to boycott Israeli institutions—revealed how dependent Israeli power had become on international legitimacy and support. When even liberal American Jewish organizations began distancing themselves from Israeli policies, it became clear that the consensus that had sustained Israeli impunity for decades was beginning to crack.

Perhaps most significantly, the BDS movement connected Palestinian liberation to broader struggles for justice worldwide, from Ferguson to Athens to Mexico City. Activists began recognizing that Israeli military and surveillance technologies tested on Palestinians were being exported globally, making Palestinian oppression not just a humanitarian issue but a matter of international security and human rights. When images of Israeli tear gas canisters appeared in Ferguson and Israeli-trained police forces were deployed against protesters worldwide, the connections became impossible to ignore. This internationalization of the Palestine solidarity movement created new possibilities for sustained pressure that transcended the traditional limitations of Middle East diplomacy.

By 2014, even US Secretary of State John Kerry was forced to acknowledge what activists had been arguing for years: the two-state solution was effectively dead. Decades of Israeli settlement expansion, wall construction, and territorial fragmentation had made the creation of a viable Palestinian state impossible, while the supposed peace process had served mainly as cover for continued colonization. The revelation that Israel had been systematically undermining every diplomatic initiative while publicly supporting negotiation exposed the fundamental dishonesty of the entire framework. Palestinian Authority leaders, enriched by their collaboration but increasingly isolated from their own people, could no longer maintain the fiction that their strategy was leading toward liberation.

The collapse of the two-state paradigm opened space for more radical visions of transformation that had been marginalized by the diplomatic process. Palestinian intellectuals like Edward Said had long argued that the conflict could only be resolved through decolonization—the dismantling of the racist structures that privileged Jewish citizens while denying basic rights to Palestinians. This approach recognized that the problem was not simply Israel's occupation of territories captured in 1967, but the entire Zionist project of ethnic exclusion and demographic manipulation. From this perspective, genuine peace required not partition but democratization: the creation of a single state that guaranteed equal rights to all inhabitants regardless of their ethnic or religious background.

Israeli society's drift toward extremism ironically made this transformative vision more realistic than moderate alternatives. As Israeli politics moved steadily rightward, with openly fascist parties entering the government and racist legislation becoming routine, the liberal Zionist dream of a "Jewish and democratic state" became increasingly untenable. Young Israelis, recognizing that their society was heading toward international isolation and moral bankruptcy, began seeking alternatives to the militaristic nationalism that had defined their upbringing. Organizations like Breaking the Silence and Combatants for Peace, composed largely of military veterans, began articulating critiques of Israeli policy that went beyond tactical disagreements to question fundamental assumptions about Jewish supremacy and Palestinian inferiority.

The path toward a democratic transformation of historic Palestine remains fraught with challenges, from the trauma and mistrust accumulated through generations of conflict to the practical questions of how to redistribute resources and reconcile competing narratives. Yet examples from South Africa, Northern Ireland, and other deeply divided societies suggest that even seemingly intractable conflicts can be transformed when sufficient pressure makes the status quo unsustainable. The key insight from Palestinian resistance movements is that change will come not through the benevolence of the oppressor but through organized struggle that makes oppression more costly than equality. As international solidarity grows and Israeli isolation deepens, the question is not whether fundamental change will come, but whether that change will be peaceful or violent, inclusive or exclusionary, healing or vengeful.

The Palestine-Israel conflict reveals a fundamental contradiction at the heart of the modern international system: the tension between universal human rights principles and particular ethnic or religious privileges. For over a century, the Zionist project has sought to reconcile these incompatible goals by maintaining a Jewish-majority state through systematic displacement and disenfranchisement of the Palestinian population. This approach required constant expansion of territory and increasingly sophisticated mechanisms of control, from the initial ethnic cleansing of 1948 through the apartheid system that governs Palestinians today. The failure of countless diplomatic initiatives reflects not the complexity or intractability of the conflict, but the impossibility of achieving justice while preserving structures designed to maintain ethnic supremacy.

The emergence of the BDS movement and the collapse of the two-state solution create unprecedented opportunities for transformative change, but only if we abandon illusions about reforming an inherently unjust system. Real solidarity with Palestinian liberation means supporting not just the end of military occupation, but the democratization of the entire territory between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. This requires building sustained international pressure that makes the current system unsustainable, while developing visions of equality and coexistence that can inspire both Palestinians struggling for freedom and Israelis seeking escape from an increasingly militarized and isolated society. The lessons of other liberation struggles suggest that such transformation is possible, but only through organized resistance that places justice above expediency and human rights above ethnic privilege.