Israel's war on Palestinians will not end until the apartheid system is dismantled

Middle East Eye

5 hours ago

More than 600 days into what many now call a "genocide war" in Gaza, even staunch supporters of Israel are beginning to question its motives. Some have started using the term "genocide" to describe Israel's actions.
Yet focusing solely on Gaza obscures a broader, long-standing strategy - one targeting the Occupied West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Palestinians inside Israel's pre-1967 borders.
To oppose genocide effectively, it is not enough to condemn what is happening in Gaza. We must also reject the systematic dehumanisation, dispossession and legal discrimination that Israel enforces against Palestinians everywhere.
Western commentators such as Piers Morgan and former White House spokesperson Matthew Miller were slow to criticise Israel's conduct in Gaza, even as their platforms helped justify it for months. Their delayed condemnation reveals a deeply entrenched presumption: Israel is "right until proven wrong", while Palestinians are "wrong until proven otherwise".
This imbalance stems from colonial privilege and Israel's near-total control over Palestinian life - from the river to the sea. By controlling every aspect of life, including electricity, water, movement and economic access, Israel reshapes Palestinian communities to serve its own interests and directly manipulates Palestinian politics.
New MEE newsletter: Jerusalem Dispatch
Sign up to get the latest insights and analysis on Israel-Palestine, alongside Turkey Unpacked and other MEE newsletters
And in this regard, it is crucial to return to the beginning.
Blueprint for control
The term "Gaza Strip" only emerged after the Nakba of 1948.
Before that, there was the Gaza District, which covered approximately 1,196 sq km. After the Nakba, it was reduced to just 365 sq km - less than one-quarter of its original size.
The model of siege, deprivation and periodic warfare has been viewed as a blueprint for civilian control, and it drew virtually no meaningful international sanctions
Before 1948, the Gaza District was home to 150,000 Palestinians. Following the Nakba, the population of the newly formed Gaza Strip swelled to 280,000 - 80,000 of them original residents, and another 200,000 refugees who had fled from elsewhere.
For Israel, Gaza came to represent the logic of "minimum land with maximum Arabs", in order to secure "maximum land for minimum Jews".
In the decades that followed - especially after the Oslo Accords - Gaza was transformed into a closed system. Calorie rations were kept at subsistence levels, electricity and water were tightly controlled, and movement was heavily restricted.
From 2008 through to September 2023, Israel launched four major military assaults on Gaza, killing around 6,300 Palestinians.
Despite the scale of destruction, no senior Israeli political or military official has ever been held accountable.
This model of siege, deprivation and periodic warfare has been viewed as a blueprint for civilian control, and it drew virtually no meaningful international sanctions.
Follow Middle East Eye's live coverage of the Israel-Palestine war
The architect of this strategy was then-Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. His 2005 Disengagement Plan was rooted in demographic calculations. With more than one million Palestinians and just 9,000 settlers in Gaza, the economic and political cost of direct military rule had become untenable.
During meetings with US officials in 2004, Sharon made clear that he expected American backing for expanding settlements in the West Bank in exchange for withdrawal from Gaza.
And that is precisely what happened. The number of settlers in the West Bank increased from 250,000 to 500,000, not including those in East Jerusalem.
Legislated supremacy
At the same time, under successive Likud governments, a raft of legislation was passed to erode the civil rights of Palestinian citizens of Israel.
The 2011 Nakba Law authorised the finance minister to withhold public funds from institutions that commemorate the Nakba.
The 2017 Kaminitz Law gave the state sweeping powers to demolish "unauthorised" structures - disproportionately impacting Palestinian towns.
The 2018 Nation-State Law made Hebrew Israel's sole official language, downgraded Arabic to a "special status", and affirmed that only Jewish settlements merit state support.
More recent laws have empowered Israeli authorities to deport the family members of alleged "terrorists" without due process, and to criminalise any public expression deemed sympathetic to Palestinian resistance.
Cumulatively, these laws entrench a racialised hierarchy of citizenship that privileges Jewish lives over Palestinian ones.
Expanding conquest
In late 2024 and early 2025, the Knesset approved a wave of building permits that enabled the seizure of both state-owned and privately held Palestinian land around Hebron - a scale of expansion not seen since 2007.
In Hebron alone, around 5,000 olive trees were uprooted. Jenin and Nur Shams refugee camps were razed.
Between October 2023 and mid-2025, Israeli forces killed roughly 900 Palestinians and arrested nearly 14,000 in the West Bank - many held without charge under sweeping administrative detention orders.
Why Israel is accelerating its expansionist plan in the Naqab Read More »
Israeli authorities also demolished at least 227 Palestinian homes in East Jerusalem and other Palestinian towns inside Israel during that same period, citing minor zoning violations to justify large-scale demolitions.
Meanwhile, under the pretext of "developing the Negev (Naqab)", Israel revived the 2011 Mokedim ("Focal Points") plan in 2024. Tens of thousands of dunams have since been slated for confiscation, threatening the homes of around 85,000 Bedouin citizens.
The plan seeks to forcibly concentrate Bedouin communities into state-recognised townships while bulldozing so-called "unrecognised villages".
Israel's current posture is not merely a reaction to the events of 7 October 2023.
It is the latest expression of a century-long campaign to dehumanise and criminalise Palestinians. This narrative has been widely accepted in western media and politics, conditioning global audiences to side with Israel regardless of its actions.
It took almost two years of daily images documenting Gaza's devastation for the world to finally shift its stance. But Gaza is not a "bug" in Israel's system - it is a feature. It is a demonstration of the extreme measures Israel is willing to deploy against any Palestinian population.
Designed brutality
The genocide in Gaza is not an aberration - it is the logic of the system laid bare. One cannot condemn what is happening in Gaza while ignoring everything else Israel has done to the Palestinian people.
Some Israeli political factions, and their international allies, now realise the scale of the disaster can no longer go unnoticed - that accountability may be inevitable. And so they have moved to the damage-control phase.
This is not about fits of rage but a system built to distort reality and preserve Israeli and Jewish supremacy
Precisely for this reason, it is more urgent than ever to remind the world that this system will continue unless it is dismantled. Anyone who truly opposes genocide must also oppose the structures of Israeli control over Palestinians everywhere.
This is not about "fits of rage" or temporary moments of excess. It is about a system designed to distort and forcibly reshape reality in order to preserve Israeli and Jewish supremacy over Palestinians.
Now, as during the Second Intifada, with elections on the horizon, more Israeli voices will speak out against Netanyahu - not out of opposition to the war itself, but because the international backlash has grown too costly.
Fearing sanctions and international boycotts, they will try to engineer an "Oslo 2.0" - a "peace process" filled with promises, yet like its predecessor, ultimately designed to entrench control after the genocide in Gaza.
And so, the next Palestinian disaster becomes only a matter of time.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.