Historian Zach Foster has spent years studying how ideas about Palestine were made — and who made them. Today, he says, those same narratives are collapsing in real time.
“Every settler colonial movement is the same,” says Foster, founder of Palestine Nexus and a senior law fellow at the Rutgers Center for Security, Race and Rights. “United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand … they all have the same logic, which is the annihilation and elimination of the native.”
The same vision is playing out in real time for the world to see.
“We don’t need academics to theorize it,” he says. “We can see it live-streamed every day for 729 days.” From global protest flotillas to shifting U.S. polls, from the Trump administration’s “New Gaza” plan to Israel’s collapsing international impunity, Foster sees both horror and historic change.
In this follow-up to our 2023 interview, he traces the radical transformation in public opinion, the rise of global solidarity movements, and why even the language of colonialism is no longer something Israel’s backers can disguise.
This conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity. Watch the full video of the interview on YouTube.
We spoke to you nearly two years ago, shortly after Oct. 7, 2023, in a conversation that offered a smart primer on the history and myths people needed to make sense of the Israel-Palestine conflict. Looking back, what has shifted most since then?
On the eve of Oct. 7, 2023, the vast majority of Americans supported Israel. Consistently over the course of many decades, Pew polls have shown that a majority of Americans had supported Israel over the Palestinians when asked that question at a very high level.
Today, for the first time, a majority of Americans support the Palestinians more than they do Israel. But it goes beyond that. There was a CBS poll conducted in June 2024 in which about 61% of U.S. voters support an arms embargo on the state of Israel. That number climbs to somewhere in the 70s among Democratic voters. You’re talking about the overwhelming majority of the Democratic voter base supporting a complete and total arms embargo on Israel — for more than a year now. That’s a sea change in public opinion.
Israel is losing support in the Global North. You see the strikes and the protests in Italy. The Netherlands is cutting off shipments of F-35 spare parts to Israel. You have Ireland, Colombia calling it a genocide. Now with the Global Sumud Flotilla, you have hundreds of nationals across dozens of countries who are trying to break the siege on Gaza — which is pulling in governments around the world to issue statements condemning Israel’s actions.
Israel’s impunity is collapsing faster than it ever has in all of its 78-year existence.
The whole world has been watching the flotilla saga unfold. Is it shifting discourse in a lasting way, or is this more of an action of symbolic solidarity?
The attempts to break the siege on Gaza are, of course, symbolic in the sense that every boat thus far has been intercepted by Israeli naval forces, who have then proceeded to abduct and kidnap civilian peace activists in international waters — which is a clear violation of international law [and] something the Israeli government boasts about.
The Israeli government posts videos incriminating its own armed forces carrying out abductions in international water; the ICC only needs to cite the Israeli government’s own tweets as evidence for its war crimes. It’s quite remarkable.
But these acts are having deep and profound impacts. You have nationals of dozens of countries on these boats. When a resident of New York gets abducted by the Israeli army, Zohran Mamdani speaks about it. When a Mexican activist gets abducted, Claudia Sheinbaum speaks about it. When an activist from Colombia gets abducted, Gustavo Petro speaks about it. So you’re seeing mayors, heads of state around the world speak out in much more forceful ways than they have in the past.
What you’re seeing now is not just one or two ships, as in previous attempts to break the siege. We had 50 ships try to break the siege. There were reports that one of the ships had actually broken through and reached Gaza’s territorial waters. The first Sumud Flotilla had one ship, and the second Sumud Flotilla had 50 ships. Now we have another dozen-some ships en route to Gaza. They just left Italy [on Oct. 2], and there’s going to be another round after the current one.
When you apply this kind of global pressure on Israel, it’s having its impact. Everyone sees that. I’ve been invited to the Sumud Flotilla. People who, before Oct. 7, weren’t even really that active, didn’t really know much — everyone’s volunteering to get on a ship. You have the entire world over saying, ‘Put me on a ship. I want to help do what I can.’ They’re going to keep coming. They’re not going to stop.
An activist just declared on Twitter a few hours ago that [they’re] willing to put up millions of dollars for the next wave of ships. This is a real global effort coming not from governments, not from corporations, but from civil society, and it’s having a huge impact. It’s all people are talking about. It’s raising awareness and applying pressure on our governments.
Did you think Italy wanted to send its own ships to accompany those boats that were carrying its own citizens? No, of course not. [Prime Minister] Giorgio Meloni is one of Israel’s strongest supporters. It’s not that the governments want to act — they’re being forced to act.
How do you read Trump’s 20-point plan? He’s laid out this very highly managed future for Gaza, excluding Hamas, proposing this sort of international board. Is it just political theater?
Donald Trump gave Benjamin Netanyahu a gift with this so-called 20-point plan, because the plan does not require Israel to end the siege on Gaza, it does not require Israel to withdraw its forces from the Gaza Strip. In fact, it explicitly gives Israel the right to remain in Gaza until Israel deems Gaza no longer a threat.
I’d like to actually just quote from this agreement, because it’s quite remarkable.
This is point number 13: Hamas and other factions agree to not have any role in the governance of Gaza, directly, indirectly, or in any form. All military, terror, and offensive infrastructure, including tunnels and weapon production facilities, will be destroyed and not rebuilt … New Gaza will be fully committed to building a prosperous economy and to peaceful coexistence with their neighbours.
Point number 16 – this is critical. Israel will not occupy or annex Gaza … the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) will withdraw based on standards, milestones, and timeframes linked to demilitarization that will be agreed upon between the IDF, ISF, the guarantors, and the United States.
It says it right there. The IDF determines when Hamas has been demilitarized, when 100% of the tunnels have been destroyed. You think the Israeli military is gonna come out and say, ‘Well, guys, we’ve destroyed 100% of Hamas’s arms. We’ve destroyed 100% of the tunnels’? Do you think Israel is going to declare that after Netanyahu spoke in Hebrew, literally hours after the text of this agreement was released, [saying] our forces will remain in Gaza forever?
So this is a plan for the permanent subjugation and enslavement of 2 million Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. The whole text reeks of colonialism. There wasn’t a single Palestinian involved in the production of this 20-point plan or any of the key decisions here.
They won’t be involved in governing Gaza. That will go to Tony Blair, the war criminal responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. He should be in prison! The British government is one of the key perpetrators and instigators of this conflict in the first place; it was because the British government in 1917 declared their support for a Jewish national home in Palestine that we are where we are today — and now the solution to the genocide in Gaza is putting another British official in charge of Gaza?
Israel’s impunity is collapsing faster than it ever has in all of its 78-year existence.
This is why we teach the history of colonialism. They’re even calling it New Gaza. New Gaza! I mean New England, New Jersey, New York. What does this remind you of? They’re not even hiding the colonialism.
Who’s ultimately in charge of the whole process? It’s Donald J. Trump himself, the person who has already shipped $8 billion in arms to Israel. The person who says if Hamas doesn’t agree to this, he grants Israel the right to continue the genocide.
So it’s permanent enslavement, if you accept the agreement, or it’s ongoing genocide if you don’t. Those are the options presented to Palestinians right now.
What choice, what agency do they have?
It’s a surrender agreement. After two years of ongoing, relentless aerial bombardments, of siege and blockade, of intentionally trying to starve the population of Gaza — we have over 400 people who have starved to death every day. We’ve had what are known as Witkoff massacres — the aid massacres in which Palestinians, starving to death, go to collect a box of rations and then get slaughtered along in the process. And that has been ongoing since the end of May. The aid organization that has been slaughtering Palestinians has been sponsored by and funded by the United States government, the same government that is now in charge of the post-war plan for Gaza. It’s dystopian.
I saw a poll on Oct. 2 that a majority of Palestinians in Gaza do not support this plan. I don’t know how you get accurate polling data in Gaza right now, but I don’t think Palestinians in Gaza or Palestinian civil society supports us. We had a statement from the Palestinian Human Rights Council declaring that it’s incumbent upon all world leaders to speak out against this plan.
It’s shameful that the Arab monarchies have bought into this. And then you even have a list of Muslim countries, like Turkey and Indonesia, calling on Hamas to effectively unilaterally surrender. It’s a shocking level of complicity and support for a government that has been carrying out the Holocaust of the 21st century.
Editor’s note: As of publication, Hamas has accepted portions of the Trump administration’s 20-point “New Gaza” proposal but continues to reject core provisions related to Israeli military control and governance. Both parties remain engaged in indirect negotiations, and no ceasefire has been formally implemented.
You were in Palestine recently — can you talk about your experience there?
I spent about a month in Palestine in July and August. I met with Palestinians who have been displaced from the Jenin, Tulkarm and Nur Shams refugee camps. About 40,000 to 45,000 Palestinians were violently uprooted from their homes in those three refugee camps and forced out by gunpoint in the middle of the night in December 2024 and January 2025.
Nine months of displacement for having committed the crime of being expelled from their homes in 1948 — or rather, for having committed the crime of having their parents and grandparents be expelled from their homes 78 years ago. That’s why they’re rounded up in the refugee camps, and that’s why they’re a problem for Israel: They’re a symbol of the Palestinian refugee cause. The mere fact that there are still millions of Palestinian refugees in the world is a constant thorn in the side of Israel, because it’s a constant reminder of the Nakba, of Israel’s mass ethnic cleansing operations in 1948. Now Israel is ethnically cleansing them again, and they’ve been forced out of their homes.
I met with Palestinians who have been separated from their family members. They’ve been separated from their places of employment. They don’t have access to the same resources they had access to before. Now they’re living in more rural areas, they don’t have easy access to bakeries or grocery stores, so their life expenses have dramatically risen.
I met with Palestinians sheltering in schools. You have now schools in places like Tulkarm and Jenin that have been taken over, and you now have hundreds of Palestinian refugees from those refugee camps now displaced in these schools. I met a family of eight people living in a tiny classroom, sharing bathrooms with hundreds of people. They told me, ‘I have to stand in line for three hours to take a shower, because there’s one shower shared among 400 people.’
You have many Palestinians who can’t afford rent. They’re sleeping with family members, with friends, in the open air. You literally have Palestinians in the West Bank sleeping in the open air — it’s a Gaza 2.0
That’s the situation with the refugees. You obviously have the ongoing settler violence. I was in Masafer Yatta, where an Israeli settler murdered a Palestinian in the south Hebron Hills, on camera. And what happened to the Palestinians who were eyewitnesses to that murder? They were all arrested for having committed the crime of witnessing a murder on camera.
His body was held in Israeli custody. This is very common practice; you have hundreds of bodies sitting in Israeli freezers. These are all Palestinians who have been murdered in prison, murdered by Israeli military forces, and Israel holds the bodies. It’s a sadistic practice that Israel’s been doing for decades. The Palestinians who witnessed the murder went on hunger strike to get the body back, and then Israel banned them from having an actual funeral where they could invite people. What happened to the murderer? He was free in less than 24 hours, and now he’s roaming around the West Bank, and he’ll probably kill someone else.
That’s Israeli justice, where the victims’ families are arrested, but the perpetrator is let free. And that happens in the West Bank on a daily basis. Settler attacks are no longer a weekly or monthly phenomenon. They happen daily now all across the West Bank, in the south Hebron Hills, in the area around the E1 zone, in Khan al-Ahmar, in the Jordan Valley — all the Palestinians living in the Jordan Valley face constant attacks — in the north, near Hamsa, the Palestinians in Beita are attacked frequently. I mean, wherever you go in the West Bank.
Now even in Areas B of the West Bank — areas that are ostensibly under Palestinian civil authority like Sebastia — you have the Israeli army carrying out raids, taking over property. In just the past two years, more land has been annexed then, then since the Oslo period.
So Israel is annexing land. Israeli terrorists are terrorizing Palestinians. They’re ethnically cleansing Palestinians from the refugee camps. They’ve added more roadblocks, more closures. There’s over 900 closures in the West Bank. You can’t go anywhere in the West Bank without being blocked by a roadblock where you’ll sit for hours in the sun waiting to see what will happen. Will they arrest you, carry you off to a torture dungeon?
You have more Palestinians being arrested under Israel’s policy of administrative detention than at any point in history. You have over 10,000 Palestinian detainees lingering in Israel’s torture dungeons, where, over the past two years, they’ve killed more than 50 Palestinians by starving them to death, torturing them to death, raping them to death. We have a case of house Israeli forces raping Palestinians on camera. This is the reality for Palestinians in the West Bank.
Just last week, they closed the Allenby border crossing, turning the West Bank into an open air prison the same way they did in Gaza, where there’s no exit point. You’re locked in. You can’t go anywhere. Your life is under the control of the most genocidal army in the entire world.
We can end the siege. We can end the blockade. We can apply more pressure. It is in our hands.
It’s a bleak picture. Even with global opinion changing, it seems like any kind of resolution will require real international pressure from governments. Is that how you see this situation changing?
Imagine if there were not five or 50, but 500 flotillas. That would be logistically difficult for Israel to intercept 500 boats. What if there were 5,000 boats? You’re telling me Israel is going to manage to capture, abduct, kidnap 50,000 activists? I don’t think so.
We can end the siege. We can end the blockade. We can apply more pressure. It is in our hands.
It’s in the hands of the people, because our governments aren’t doing anything, and anything they’re doing is just trying to placate their own domestic publics. That’s what the declaration of support for a state of Palestine was: an attempt to silence the public, to give the Palestinians a fig leaf, a meaningless, empty declaration to distract people from Israel’s ongoing genocide, to pretend as if they’re doing something when they’re actually doing nothing. In fact, in the same breath that they declare that they recognize the state of Palestine, they’re continuing to send arms to Israel so that Israel can continue the genocide. It’s so duplicitous.
It still seems that until the United States does something different, nothing can truly change. You talked about the shift in American public opinion, but do you think that we will eventually get to a different political reality?
There’s no doubt about that. Unfortunately, it’s going to happen too slowly to provide any respite to the people of Gaza or the West Bank — or Lebanon, Syria, Iran or Yemen. Political change happens very slowly. The first attempts to boycott, sanction, divest from apartheid South Africa were going back to the mid-’70s. When did South Africa fall? In the mid ’90s.
It will take 10, 15 years for the 18- to 29-year olds, who understand what’s happening and call it a genocide and support an arms embargo to Israel, to reach positions of authority and influence.
There will be a rise in pro-Palestine politicians in the United States. They’re starting to realize that it’s a winning issue. If you speak out for the Palestinian people, as Zohran Mamdani has been doing, you’ll understand that it’s a winning issue for you — especially on the Democrat side, but now also on the Republican side, where large majorities of young Republicans are now hostile to Israel.
The loudest voices on the Republican side — people like Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens — are speaking out now. They’re calling it a genocide. They’re extremely hostile to Israel. They think the Israeli influence in the United States plays a nefarious role. MAGA is now drifting away from Israel.
The Epstein affair was deeply damaging to Donald Trump. They’re angry about that, and they’re angry about Charlie Kirk. If you look at Max Blumenthal’s reporting, he was clearly shifting gears on Israel and was pushing back on the Zionist donor class in the weeks leading up to his assassination. He rejected an offer from Netanyahu and an offer from [Bill Ackman] in the weeks before he was assassinated — this was the number one financial backer of his [Turning Point USA] organization.
These people were harassing him. They were texting him every day, giving him talking points, and he felt bullied. He said that on Megyn Kelly’s show. The Republican Party is moving, and it’s shifting quickly — of course, far too slow for the people of Palestine.
Much of the reason public opinion has shifted is because of what we have seen on our phones for the last two years. But we’re also seeing major social media platforms moving to silence that dissent. Will that change Americans’ attitudes?
If you look at who the Israeli government is trying to buy off these days, they’re really scraping at the bottom of the barrel.
How do you compel somebody to take money to speak out in support of a country that is carrying out a genocide, according to Doctors Without Borders, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, multiple U.N. bodies, U.N. Special Rapporteur for the Occupied Palestinian Territories Francesca Albanese, multiple Israeli human rights organizations including the Israeli Physicians for Human Rights and B’Tselem, including Al Haq and all the Palestinian NGOs?
There’s virtually unanimous consensus [among] every respectable human rights organization in the world, the U.N., 800 genocide scholars who came out in October 2023 saying there’s a high risk of genocide. Even the New York Times, which has been whitewashing Israel’s crimes for two years, that publishes hoaxes on Hamas’s alleged mass rape, is now publishing op-eds from genocide experts calling it a genocide. There’s no debate anymore.
So who is Israel now recruiting? American influencers who know nothing about Israel or Palestine. Their content is completely empty. [Even with TikTok taking a pro-Israel direction], I don’t know how you convince 18- to 29-year-olds to support a government that has been murdering three school buses full of children every day for 729 days. You can’t unsee that. I just don’t understand how you’re going to be able to change the algorithm in such a way that actually matters. It’s too late.
We also know the death toll likely far exceeds official reported numbers. You’ve talked to a lot of Palestinians; can you characterize for our audience the true loss?
It’s only fair to the people of Gaza that we assume the numbers are dramatically higher than they are, because Israel won’t allow Western journalists into Gaza, because Israel has destroyed much of the infrastructure, because Israel has slaughtered 250 Palestinian journalists so we don’t even have reporting.
In the past few weeks, I’ve noticed a decline in the number of reports coming out, especially out of North Gaza. They’ve killed all the journalists. They killed Hassan Shabbat, they killed Anas Al-Sharif. They’re killing journalists every week, so we don’t really have any sense of the full magnitude of the calamity. We’ve seen reports from highly respected academic journals — from The Lancet, that estimated that the full death toll was 180,000 more than a year ago. Not only do you have all the direct deaths, but you have all the indirect deaths: all the people that are dying from diseases, from their lingering wounds that are festering because they can’t receive the care they need, from people dying from a common cold and the flu because their bodies are famished and [their] immune system is weaker.
We don’t know how many people have been incinerated by the bombs. We don’t have their bodies; there’s no way to even account for them. We don’t know how many people are still in Israel’s torture dungeons. It will probably be years before we know the full scale of the destruction and the death toll.
We have seen a troubling rise in antisemitism, including the recent shooting at a U.K. synagogue. You and others have talked about how accusations of antisemitism have been weaponized to silence legitimate criticism of Israel. How can we reconcile the real rise of antisemitism with this weaponization, and what would a better conversation about antisemitism look like?
Israel’s supporters want you to believe that Judaism and Israel are the same thing, that Zionism is the 3,000-year manifestation of the Jewish tradition, that — according to the chief rabbi of the U.K. — Zionism leaps off every page of the siddur.
A few months ago, the deputy of the board of British Jews — the most important British Jewish organization — expelled two of its members for writing an open letter criticizing Israel’s actions in Gaza. So you’re telling me, if you’re critical of what Israel is doing in Gaza, you can’t sit on the board of a Jewish organization? What does that mean? It can’t possibly be a Jewish organization if the only litmus test for membership in the organization is being pro-Israel. That has nothing to do with Judaism. So it’s not a Jewish organization, it’s an Israel organization. It’s a genocidal organization.
So then, when I go protest in front of a Jewish community center or synagogue that waves the Israeli flag and sings the prayer for the State of Israel, a prayer wishing safety on the IDF that is carrying out a genocide, on Saturday morning — I’m the anti-semite?
No. No, it’s the organization that is endangering Jews by conflating Judaism with genocide. So they’re inviting antisemitism. If you go back over the past two years, you have countless incidents that I would describe as manufactured antisemitism. You have a Zionist get up in the square, in the public square in New Haven, Connecticut, on campus. You know, “I’m a Jew! I support Israel!” — trying their best to instigate antisemitism. The same happened at Columbia and on countless campuses. I wrote a piece on this.
They’re doing everything they can to conflate Judaism with the State of Israel. [NYU Professor] Scott Galloway just said in an MSNBC interview that “the Jews aren’t allowed to prosecute a war.” That’s a direct quote. He said “the Jews.” Look at the statements of [Anti-Defamation League CEO] Jonathan Greenblatt. He always says “the Jewish people and the Jewish state,” in sync, in tandem. “Antisemitism is anti-Zionism.”
But when you conflate the Jewish people with the Jewish state, and you say the Jewish people are responsible for what the Jewish state is doing, and you’re surprised that people carry out attacks at synagogues on Yom Kippur? You’re inciting people to do that.
The community is toxic. They’re wrapping a genocidal flag around their institutions and then get mad when they face blowback for doing that. Of course killing innocent people is horrible, and of course I would condemn anyone attacking anyone for showing up to a shul on Yom Kippur — that’s evil. But so is what those Jewish institutions are doing by wrapping Judaism in a genocidal apartheid state.
We are also seeing a shift in opinion from especially young Jews. You have also written extensively about the rich history of Jewish anti-Zionism. How do you see that tradition gaining ground?
For most of the history of Jewish Zionism, most Jews were opposed to Zionism. I don’t think people realize that.
The first Jewish Zionist came about in the 1870s. You could call them proto-Zionists — people like Judah Alkalai in Serbia, people like Moses Hess in Germany. So Zionism has been a Jewish phenomenon since the 1870s. In the 1880s the American Jewish community came out extremely hostile to Zionism. The Reform Movement issued a statement in 1885 declaring itself non- Zionist: ‘We don’t want to have anything to do with this state. We are American. We want to be American citizens. Don’t associate us with a foreign country.’ They believed that this would call into question their loyalty to the United States, and that was the attitude of American Jews well into the mid- to late-1930s.
Even people that supported this idea of cultural revitalization, what you might call cultural Zionism — Samuel Untermeyer was one of them in the 1930. He opposed political Zionism and the establishment of his Jewish state. So did Albert Einstein. So did Hannah Arendt. These people were hostile to political Zionism because they believed that states should be representations of all their citizens.
They were hostile because they understood that Zionism embraced the same fascistic tendencies of the Italian fascists and the Nazis, and that’s why they rejected Zionism. In the Pale of Settlement in the Russian Empire, same story. The majority of Jews were anti-Zionists. They belonged to the Bund party in 1938 and ’39 in Poland, where you had 1.5-2 million Jews. [About] 55% of Jews voted for the anti-Zionist Bund on the eve of the Holocaust, because the Bund said, we’re fighting antisemitism in Poland. We’re gonna fight for workers’ rights in Poland. We’re gonna fight for your rights here. Our slogan is, we are here.
The Zionists said no. They actually partnered with the antisemites. They established partnerships and alliances with the antisemites. They did that in Poland, Italy, Germany — the Zionist movement signed an agreement with the Nazis called the Haavara Agreement, in which they pumped money into the Nazi German economy at a time when Jews around the world were boycotting Nazi Germany. This was the famous Haavara Agreement in which about 20,000 Jews moved from Germany to Palestine on condition that they buy German manufactured goods and prop up the Nazi economy, when it was being boycotted by Jews around the world.
So the Zionists embraced antisemitism; the anti-Zionists rejected it. The same was true in the U.K., where the only member of the British Cabinet who opposed the ballot for the Balfour Declaration was Samuel Montague, and he said, ‘I’m British. What do you mean? I belong in Palestine.’ Whereas it was Arthur Balfour who, in 1905 sponsored legislation to keep Jews out of Britain, known as the Aliens Act. So it was the antisemites that were supporting Zionism. They didn’t want Jews coming to the U.K., they wanted Jews to go to Palestine.
So the world’s antisemites, world over, had been hugging Zionism for decades.
We haven’t even mentioned Jews in Muslim and Arab countries, in places like Morocco, where you had 250,000 Jews. Jews in all those countries were either non-Zionists or anti Zionist well into the late 1930s and 1940s, all for the same reason. They understood that a movement to transform a Palestinian Arab country into a Jewish one, to transform a Muslim- and Arab-majority country into a Jewish country would have blowback on Jews living in Muslim and Arab majority countries. And they were exactly right about that. That’s exactly what happened.
So Jews have been hostile to Zionism from the origins of Zionism’s rise well into the 1940s. And then recently, over the past few years, we’re once again seeing Zionism collapse. JVP has grown 10 times, maybe more like 20 times over the past two years. You have anti-Zionist congresses and conferences popping up everywhere. The global anti-Zionist network has blown up in the past two years.
We’re once again seeing a complete sea change, especially among young Jews, in their attitudes and opinions towards Zionism in the State of Israel. And there’s a simple reason for that, which is that settler colonial movements invariably result in the annihilation of the native.
Every settler colonial movement is the same. United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand — they all follow the same trajectory. The same with the French settler colonial states and places like Mozambique and Angola. They all have the same logic, which is the annihilation and elimination of the native.
In the case of Israel-Palestine, we don’t need that to be theorized by an academic. We can see it live streamed every day for 729 days. Now everyone’s realizing that Zionism is achieving its ultimate vision, which is ‘a land for people, for people without a land’ — that was the vision to begin with.
What reasons do you see for optimism? And what is the biggest optimism trap we need to avoid falling into after two years of this horrific conflict?
We already talked about the shift in attitudes towards Israel in the United States — the world superpower and the primary backer, financially, politically, diplomatically, economically, of the State of Israel. There’s a before and there’s an after. Before 2023, Israel was like any other state in the world: It participated in Eurovision. Its soldiers wandered around the world, in Nepal and in Mexico and everywhere else. Its flag was proudly waved by Jewish institutions. That impunity is ending at its fastest clip in history, and I think that is something to be optimistic about.
But you’re right. There’s a lot to be wary of. I think these declarations of support for a Palestinian state are are actually harmful, because they’re distracting us from from the real issue, which is the genocide and the apartheid regime that Israel is imposing on the West Bank and its murderous campaigns in Lebanon, Syria, Iran and Yemen. So we have to be vigilant, and we can’t let our guard down, because as soon as we do, they’ll stop taking action.
The only reason they took action in the first place is because we demanded them to, so we can’t let our guard down. We have to keep advocating, keep fighting, keep protesting, keep boycotting, keep sanctioning, keep divesting, keep carrying out direct action, keep up the Sumud flotillas. We can’t let up, and it’s easy to let up. It’s easy to be exhausted after two years of genocide, and none of us can even pretend to have [faced] one drop of what the Palestinians in Gaza have been facing. But we need to keep up the pressure.
It’s easy to become complacent, to become exhausted and burn out. But the people of Gaza don’t have that option. I just would encourage everyone to double, triple and quadruple down. People’s lives are on the line.
