The war in Gaza that began in October 2023 has killed more than 73,000 Palestinians and triggered what critics describe as a fundamental reassessment of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. A new analysis argues the violence exposed the Zionist project as a settler-colonial enterprise built on ethnic cleansing and the systematic erasure of indigenous Palestinians — claims that reflect growing international scrutiny of Israel's policies but remain fiercely contested.
The article traces the Zionist movement to the late 19th century, describing it not as an indigenous Middle Eastern movement but as a European colonial solution to what Europeans called the Jewish Question, imposed upon Palestinians. It says the project has rested on three foundations: unwavering western support, Arab fragmentation, and the creation of irreversible facts on the ground until dispossession becomes accepted reality. Yet Palestinians have remained attached to their land and historical rights since the Nakba 78 years ago, frustrating what the piece calls the central objective of eliminating the Palestinian presence.
Oslo's Collapse and the Two-State Illusion
The Oslo process, the analysis argues, tried to transform the Palestinian struggle for liberation into a project for managing occupation. 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 Zionist state continued creating irreversible realities that rendered an independent Palestinian state — even one demilitarised, territorially fragmented and deprived of genuine sovereignty — virtually impossible.
The events of October 7, 2023 fundamentally shattered the political status quo, the piece says. The genocide that followed 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. Israeli claims to western liberal democracy and the rule of law suffered perhaps their greatest crisis of credibility since the establishment of the state.
Global Solidarity and Western Decline
The war 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. 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 Palestinians and denying their inalienable rights.
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 once again became one of the defining questions in contemporary debates over colonialism, racism, international law, human rights and national liberation.
Gaza 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 Theory of Twelve Pillars
The article lays out what it calls the Theory of the Twelve Pillars, identifying the principal sources of Zionist strength. The first set concerns demographic and territorial control: 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. 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. Less than half of the world's Jews have resettled in Palestine. Demographic trends suggest Palestinians in historic Palestine now equal or exceed the Jewish population.
The second set 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. 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 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. Gaza altered international public opinion, particularly among younger generations, universities, labour unions, professional associations and social movements. Important sectors of western societies increasingly distinguish between support for Jewish communities and unconditional support for Zionist state policies.
Legal and Narrative Shifts
Legal scrutiny before the International Court of Justice, the International Criminal Court and domestic courts across several jurisdictions has eroded that support, though legal institutions alone won't 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.
About half of the 15.5 million Palestinian people live outside historic Palestine. The political, economic, financial, academic and media centres that shape international opinion and policy lie beyond Palestine. 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. 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 piece says the Palestinian liberation movement must reclaim its Arab, Islamic and universal dimensions. Palestine has never been merely the concern of an isolated people seeking national independence. Gaza demonstrated that the Zionist enterprise seeks to institutionalise a regional order founded upon military supremacy, political dependency, economic subordination and permanent fragmentation. Palestine remains the central civilisational question confronting the Muslim world. The liberation of Palestine and the renewal of the Ummah have become mutually reinforcing historical processes.
Palestine should continue to serve as a unifying cause for people of conscience regardless of religion, ethnicity, nationality or political affiliation, the article says. It now occupies a place similar to that held by South Africa during the last decades of the 20th century. The historic responsibility facing Palestinians and their allies is greater than resisting the immediate consequences of occupation. It's 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 central challenge confronting the region is the Israeli Problem: the existence of a sovereign settler-colonial state whose political structure is built on the exclusion of the indigenous population and whose survival depends on territorial expansion, military dominance, regional fragmentation and permanent western backing. The strategic objective cannot remain confined to resisting the consequences of Zionism. It must become the systematic dismantling of the structures upon which the Zionist project depends.
The struggle concerns the future of an international order that claims to be founded upon justice, equality and human rights. 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 is neither immutable nor exempt from the broader patterns of history. Like other settler-colonial enterprises before it, it rests upon structures that are historical constructs and can therefore be dismantled.
Why This Matters:
This analysis represents a significant shift in how critics frame the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — not as a territorial dispute between two national movements, but as a colonial question that must be resolved through decolonisation. Whether one accepts this framing or not, the arguments reflect a growing international conversation, particularly among younger generations and Global South movements, that challenges the diplomatic assumptions of the past three decades. The death toll in Gaza, the collapse of the two-state consensus, the expansion of settlements, and the rise of global solidarity movements have created political conditions fundamentally different from those that shaped Oslo. The question facing diplomats, activists and ordinary people is whether the international system can produce a just resolution — or whether the conflict will continue to escalate as the gap between law and practice, between principle and policy, grows wider. The human cost of that uncertainty is measured daily in Palestinian and Israeli lives.