The genocide in Gaza since October 2023 has killed more than 73,000 Palestinians, and the article argues that the scale of the destruction has turned the Palestinian question into what it calls the "Israeli Problem." That’s the bluntest fact in the piece. Not diplomacy. Not process. A state project, backed by western powers, has spent more than a century trying to make a people disappear, and Gaza has dragged the whole arrangement into the open.
The State Project and Its Costs
The article says the Zionist movement emerged in the late 19th century and sought to establish a settler-colonial state in Palestine through the mobilisation of western imperialist powers and an enduring alliance with dominant forces in the international system. It says Zionism was never an indigenous movement of the Middle East, but a European colonial solution to what Europeans called the Jewish Question, imposed upon the Palestinian people. The language is tidy enough in the archives. The result has been anything but.
For more than a century, the piece says, the Zionist project has rested on three strategic foundations: unwavering political, military and financial support from the West; the fragmentation of the surrounding Arab and Islamic environment and its preoccupation with internal conflicts; and the deliberate creation of irreversible facts on the ground until dispossession is accepted as political reality. Palestinians, it says, have frustrated the central objective of eliminating their presence or forcing their submission and have remained attached to their land, identity and historical rights since the Nakba of 1948.
The article says the Oslo process tried to transform the Palestinian question from a struggle for national liberation, self-determination and independence into a project for managing occupation, and says its failure is beyond dispute. Israeli settlements expanded dramatically. Palestinian land steadily diminished. The Palestinian Authority evolved into a fragmented entity with severely limited authority under occupation. The state kept building. The paperwork kept moving. The promised horizon kept shrinking.
Oslo’s Empty Machinery
The piece says the Zionist state continued creating irreversible realities on the ground that rendered the establishment of an independent Palestinian state, even one demilitarised, territorially fragmented and deprived of genuine sovereignty, virtually impossible. Then came 7 October 2023, which it says fundamentally shattered the political status quo and exposed the bankruptcy of the assumptions that had governed regional politics for more than three decades.
The genocide that followed, the article says, brought the moral and political end of the Oslo paradigm and the illusion that the conflict could be resolved through endless negotiations under overwhelming asymmetry. The myth of the two-state solution finally collapsed under the weight of political reality, and Israeli claims to western liberal democracy and the rule of law suffered perhaps their greatest crisis of credibility since the establishment of the state.
The piece says the genocide dealt a devastating blow to Benjamin Netanyahu's vision of a "New Middle East" and to projects such as the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor, or IMEC. Gaza restored Palestine to the centre of regional and international politics, disrupted normalisation and demonstrated that no regional order can achieve lasting legitimacy while excluding the Palestinian people and denying their inalienable rights. That’s the old trick of statecraft: redraw the map, rename the corridor, call it peace, and hope the bodies don’t interrupt the branding.
The article says the world witnessed the emergence of the largest global solidarity movement for Palestine in modern history, with millions marching in capitals across East and West. Universities, labour unions and grassroots civil society organisations became arenas of political and moral confrontation with the Zionist state and its global networks of support. Palestine, it says, once again became one of the defining questions in contemporary debates over colonialism, racism, international law, human rights and national liberation.
Global Solidarity, Institutional Limits
Gaza, the article says, exposed the deep moral crisis within the western political establishment and highlighted the declining ability of the United States and its allies to impose their preferred narratives or translate overwhelming military superiority into enduring political outcomes. Despite unprecedented western diplomatic, military and financial backing for Israel, Washington proved unable to restore Israel's international legitimacy, isolate the Palestinian resistance or stem the tide of global solidarity.
The piece says about half of the 15.5 million Palestinian people live outside historic Palestine and that the political, economic, financial, academic and media centres that shape international opinion and policy lie beyond Palestine. It argues that the task is to rebuild an effective solidarity movement across the world and transform it into an organised global force capable of driving the liberation struggle forward. It says this role goes far beyond humanitarian relief or symbolic solidarity and demands an organised global movement capable of operating simultaneously across political, legal, economic and cultural arenas.
The article says the Palestinian liberation movement must reclaim its Arab, Islamic and universal dimensions and that Palestine has never been merely the concern of an isolated people seeking national independence. It says Gaza demonstrated that the Zionist enterprise seeks to institutionalise a regional order founded upon military supremacy, political dependency, economic subordination and permanent fragmentation. Palestine, it says, remains the central civilisational question confronting the Muslim world and the liberation of Palestine and the renewal of the Ummah have become mutually reinforcing historical processes.
The piece says Palestine should continue to serve as a unifying cause for people of conscience regardless of religion, ethnicity, nationality or political affiliation, and says it now occupies a place similar to that held by South Africa during the last decades of the 20th century. It says the historic responsibility facing Palestinians and their allies is greater than resisting the immediate consequences of occupation and is to participate consciously in the long historical process of dismantling the political, intellectual and institutional structures that have sustained the Zionist project for generations.
The article lays out what it calls the Theory of the Twelve Pillars, identifying the principal sources of Zionist strength. It says the first set of pillars concerns demographic and territorial control, including Jewish exclusivity as the governing principle of the state, the exclusion and displacement of Palestinians, continuous settlement expansion and the methodical creation of irreversible facts on the ground. It says more than 125 years after the emergence of political Zionism and nearly eight decades after the Nakba, Palestinians remain rooted in their homeland and steadfastly committed to their identity, their historical rights and the right of return. It says less than half of the world's Jews have resettled in Palestine and that demographic trends suggest Palestinians in historic Palestine now equal or exceed the Jewish population.
The second set of pillars, the article says, maintains Israel's military, intelligence and technological supremacy, including the militarisation of society, sustaining military and technological superiority, monopoly over nuclear weapons, and security and intelligence dominance. It says the direct military confrontation with the Islamic Republic of Iran demonstrated that overwhelming technological superiority, even when combined with American military support, cannot by itself compel political capitulation or restore unquestioned strategic deterrence.
The third set of pillars concerns Israel's international and regional positioning, including dependence upon western political support, the mobilisation of world Jewry in service of the Zionist project, preserving regional fragmentation and cultivating alliances with minorities, separatist movements and authoritarian regimes in pursuit of regional hegemony. The article says Gaza altered international public opinion, particularly among younger generations, universities, labour unions, professional associations and social movements, and that important sectors of western societies increasingly distinguish between support for Jewish communities and unconditional support for Zionist state policies.
Legal scrutiny before the International Court of Justice, the International Criminal Court and domestic courts across several jurisdictions has eroded that support, the piece says, but legal institutions alone will not transform political realities. Independent journalism, digital media, social networking platforms and unprecedented documentation of the Gaza genocide have weakened Zionist control over narrative. Every step toward greater cooperation within the Arab and Muslim worlds, every effort toward regional integration and every expansion of ties among anti-colonial movements across the Global South directly challenges Zionism's longstanding strategic assumption that permanent regional fragmentation is both desirable and sustainable.
The article ends on the same hard edge it began with. The struggle, it says, concerns the future of an international order that claims to be founded upon justice, equality and human rights, and a world prepared to normalise genocide, apartheid and permanent occupation in Palestine ultimately places those principles at risk everywhere. The coming period demands a new strategic vision, political organisation and disciplined patience for a protracted struggle. The Zionist project, it says, is neither immutable nor exempt from the broader patterns of history and, like other settler-colonial enterprises before it, rests upon structures that are historical constructs and can therefore be dismantled.