For Palestinians, to exist is to resist Israel's war of annihilation

Middle East Eye

a day ago

In a speech to the UN General Assembly on 22 September 2023, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu brandished a map in which the occupied Palestinian territories were no longer distinguishable from Israel, as he threatened Iran while touting the future glories of artificial intelligence (AI) and a world in which Israel would lead the region into a limitlessly bright future.
Less than a month later, Israeli AI-driven technologies such as Lavender, Gospel, and Where's Your Daddy - developed in partnership with US corporate giants like Microsoft, Google and Amazon - exponentially boosted target banks, resulting in the murder of tens of thousands of Palestinian men, women and children, wiping out entire families in one fell swoop.
The following year, at the 27 September 2024 General Assembly, Netanyahu doubled down on his earlier claims, further amplifying his division of the world: "As Israel defends itself against Iran in this seven-front war, the lines separating the 'blessing' and the 'curse' could not be more clear."
By then, at least 41,000 Palestinians had already been killed in Gaza by Israeli air, naval, artillery and ground attacks. This against a people - needless to say, but still needing to be said - with no air force, air defences, navy, or mechanised units, not to mention bomb shelters or, most of the time, electricity.
What is finally becoming clear to more and more people is that, as far as Israel is concerned, Palestinian resistance begins with simply existing.
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This resistance through "being" then extends to all other human activities: breathing, sleeping, eating, walking, farming, giving birth, and on, ad infinitum, to everything a person might do in life.
Thus, every Palestinian, by virtue of their very existence, is considered a "legitimate" target.
Carceral geography
Since the inception of Zionism, colonisation in Palestine has exerted every possible effort to erase, usurp and fragment the land and its indigenous people into ever-smaller and less contiguous areas and communities.
We have now reached a point where, in addition to the wholesale destruction in Gaza, there are towns and cities in the occupied territories where Palestinian residents must pass through checkpoints simply to exit their own homes.
In some towns, Palestinians must pass through checkpoints just to exit their own homes.
This extreme spatial fragmentation has been replicated inside Israel's vast prison system - at least until the more recent mass kidnappings and torture of Palestinian hostages, primarily from Gaza but also from the West Bank.
Netanyahu's brazen display at the UN in 2023, his aim to expand the Abraham Accords at the expense of any possibility of Palestinian self-determination, the relentless atomisation of Palestinian land and society, and mass incarceration without charge, trial or hope of release - are all elements of the incendiary mix that exploded in Operation al-Aqsa Flood on 7 October 2023.
No matter one's opinion of it, the stated aim of the operation was to unify a deeply fragmented Palestinian population under the banner of resistance - with the support of other resistance movements - while capturing prisoners of war and hostages to exchange for Palestinians held hostage in occupation prisons.
The sentiments expressed by prisoners in the first exchanges between Israel and Hamas are so distant from western conceptions of individual personhood as to seem almost incomprehensible.
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Muhammed al-Arda, understanding all too well the enormity of the collective sacrifice involved, declared: "If you gathered all the poems, elegies, proverbs and sayings of the land, they would not do justice to Gaza."
Another said: "Our freedom was paid for by the blood of the martyrs of Gaza. We owe them a debt that can never be repaid."
Narrowing the frame
The propaganda of so-called liberal democracies narrows the horizons of thought, severely limiting our ability to make sense of what is actually happening.
When the official 9/11 Commission recommended the need to "bureaucratise imagination", it was not forecasting some future Orwellian dystopia, but describing the world we were already living in.
With all the terminology used in discussing Israel and Palestine - genocide, apartheid, settler colonialism, anti-Zionism, and more - the key missing words remain "imperialism" and "national liberation".
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We cannot, for instance, even speak about Palestinian armed resistance - their political or military strategies, successes or failures - without first making a disclaimer of some kind.
Under the standards his administration has set for ordinary civilians, it would seem that President Donald Trump's own team should be charged with consorting with "terrorists", as they negotiated the release of dual US-Israeli citizen and soldier Edan Alexander.
The absurdities abound and multiply, as does the impunity: mere hours after Alexander's release, the Israelis assassinated journalist Hassan Eslaih, reducing to rubble the hospital where he was being treated after a previous assassination attempt.
They went on to execute 12-year-old Mohammed Bardawil, the sole surviving witness to the actions of Major Nikolai Ashurov and Israeli tanks during the execution of UN field security supervisor Kamal Shatout, during the massacre of 15 Palestinian paramedics and other civilians on 23 March 2025.
Since Alexander's release, the litany of new weapons tests, executions, forced displacement to new kill zones, systematic hospital destruction, and the use of starvation as a tool of genocide has continued apace.
Breaking the spell
As the "two-state solution" fades further into fantasy in the minds of western leaders - buying time for Israel to steal more Palestinian land, destroy more homes, and displace and kill more people - it might be time to open the floodgates of imagination.
While many credit student movements and public opinion with ending the US war in Vietnam, the more decisive factor - rarely acknowledged - was the insubordination of US soldiers. Urban uprisings also pulled the National Guard away from overseas deployment.
How many more generations will be enslaved to guard the imperial front of US interests, upholding a totalitarian, colonial ideology that dominates their lives?
In Vietnam, whole units were known to refuse orders, sabotage operations, and refuse to engage in combat. "Fragging" - the use of fragmentation grenades against overzealous officers - was not limited to a few isolated cases. One book alone, Fragging: Why US Soldiers Assaulted Their Officers in Vietnam, documents 500 such incidents.
We have become so accustomed to self-incriminating social media posts by Israeli soldiers - cheering the demolition of homes, mosques, hospitals, schools and universities; prancing around in women's clothing in vandalised and destroyed homes - that it is almost impossible to conjure anything else.
But can we even imagine these same soldiers refusing orders, let alone bearing arms against their commanding officers or staging a revolt?
How many "existential" wars will they be expected to fight? How many more generations will be enslaved to guard the imperial front of US interests, upholding a totalitarian, colonial ideology that dominates nearly every aspect of their lives - and every aspect of Palestinian life?
Once there was "denazification"; then came "de-Baathification". Did they work? What about "de-Zionisation"? Could it work? Could we even imagine a democratic Palestine, from the river to the sea? Is this genocide yet another attempt to forestall that inevitability - by etching irreversible traumas into bodies and minds?
From Balfour to the present
As we travel down the road of Sykes-Picot 2.0 - with Syria's newly installed regime negotiating with Israel, and Lebanon on the path to becoming a protectorate - we are witnessing the culmination of processes set in motion by the 1917 Balfour Declaration.
These processes were vividly imagined in Abdelrahman Munif's Cities of Salt, and most cogently analysed in Ghassan Kanafani's The Revolution of 1936–1939 in Palestine, written in the shadow of the Naksa, the 1967 "setback" and what has come to be known as Black September.
Kanafani's text, as Palestinian editor and educator Hazem Jamjoum has noted, "has everything to do with the imperialist victory over the Arab and internationalist liberation movements in the 1970-1971 war in Jordan."
As if written today, Kanafani notes in his introduction: "In the years 1936–39, the Palestinian revolutionary movement was dealt a devastating blow by the three formations that have since evolved to become the major forces working against the people of Palestine: reactionary Palestinian leaders, Arab regimes surrounding Palestine, and the alliance between Zionism and imperialism."
As the US shores up support among Gulf oil and other Arab regimes while silencing dissent on imperial policies regarding genocide and famine in Gaza, and as Mahmoud Abbas's collaboration forces repress uprisings in the West Bank, what has actually changed?
We are at a crossroads. The forces arrayed against justice in and for Palestine remain largely the same, though their firepower and technological reach have expanded dramatically, as shown by the entourage of CEOs accompanying Trump to Saudi Arabia, including Palantir's openly genocidal Alex Karp.
But Palestinian resistance must not only be further understood, it must be embraced by anyone who hopes to retain earthly and spiritual value while rejecting the despair and nihilism spreading across the political and cultural spectrum.
Israel and its western allies have made their choice unmistakably clear: total destruction, mass population transfer, genocide, and full compliance with their agenda. Most Arab regimes have also chosen to lavish Trump with gifts while offering not a single loaf of bread for Gaza.
As the lines are drawn, the question remains: who else will join the struggle for justice, and what form will it take?
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.