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palestinian rights
As Lists of Companies Complicit in Its Crimes Grow, Will Israel Finally Pay a Price?
Reports, databases, and sanctions remain insufficient—and risk becoming meaningless—unless they are followed by sustained monitoring and practical action.
Oct 10, 2026
Let’s start with the good news. The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights has added 61 companies to its database of businesses involved in activities linked to illegal Israeli settlements, expanding the list from 158 to 214 companies.
Why is this good news? Because it further illustrates a degree of seriousness within the international community to move its position on Israel from the realm of language to that of action.
Yet more good news: Five previously listed companies were removed after the office determined that their involvement in the relevant activities had ended.
For the Israeli mindset to change, the consequences of occupation, annexation, and genocide must become unmistakable.
This matters because it suggests that the mechanism can work: Sustained scrutiny can influence corporate behavior, and supporting Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestine can carry a price.
Expectedly, the updated list has been welcomed by Palestinian and international human rights organizations, though, rightly so, they insist that such lists are not enough unless followed by direct government action and expanded to other facets of the Israeli military and economy.
But before focusing on what else needs to be done, we must acknowledge the significance of such reports, especially when placed within the larger context of global initiatives aimed at isolating Israel and its extremist leadership.
First, the 2026 update demonstrates continuing institutional commitment by the UN Human Rights Office. The database was not a one-off initiative issued under temporary political pressure. Its continued expansion and revision show that corporate involvement in Israel’s illegal settlement enterprise remains subject to international scrutiny.
Second, the addition of 61 companies reflects extensive research and follow-up by the UN, supported by information from Palestinian civil society and human rights organizations. The database is therefore not simply symbolic: It documents the international corporate networks that sustain and profit from Israel’s settlement project.
Third, the removal of five companies suggests that the mechanism can produce results. Its impact remains far below what Palestinians need, but the removals indicate that companies can end relevant activities and subsequently be removed from the database.
The list also provides civil society with credible material for accountability and boycott campaigns. More importantly, it can help move such efforts beyond individual consumer choices toward action by governments, financial institutions, and regulatory bodies.
This is particularly relevant as Western governments begin taking measures of their own.
On September 8, 12 countries—Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Iceland, Ireland, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, and the United Kingdom—announced their intention either to introduce national restrictions or support European restrictions on trade with illegal Israeli settlements. Britain went further, banning settlement goods and moving against companies involved in settlement construction.
The significance was difficult to miss. Heavyweights such as Britain, France, and Canada were no longer merely condemning settlement expansion; they were beginning to attach economic consequences to it.
But here lies the challenge: Reports, databases, and sanctions remain insufficient—and risk becoming meaningless—unless they are followed by sustained monitoring and practical action.
What is the worth of sanctions if they are not enforced, expanded, and accompanied by political pressure capable of changing Israeli behavior?
Decisions, lists, and threats are double-edged swords. They can become launchpads for sustained and meaningful political action. Or they can be used to mollify civil society, allowing politicians to buy time and votes while avoiding any fundamental policy change.
However, there is a way to help distinguish between the two.
An independent international monitoring group, composed of and supported by civil society figures with recognized moral authority, could systematically track governments that have committed to sanctions, boycotts, or trade restrictions: What was promised, what was implemented, what loopholes remain, and whether measures are producing tangible consequences.
Monitoring these governments is becoming almost as important as monitoring Israel itself.
The same principle applies to UN reports. Palestinian and international civil society organizations must incorporate their findings into the growing global boycott and accountability movement, while governments must ensure that companies under their jurisdiction are not contributing to illegal settlement activities.
Considering that Israel continues its genocidal assault on Gaza while accelerating settlement expansion and annexation measures in the West Bank, none of these steps can ever be sufficient on their own. They are, however, meaningful steps in the right direction.
Palestinians expect—and deserve—far more than the bare minimum. The situation in the occupied territories is simply too urgent for symbolic politics. Every passing day should bring another measure of accountability: another restriction, another divestment, another sanction, another political or economic consequence.
Israel has operated for decades on the assumption that it is effectively untouchable—that condemnation will remain rhetorical, reports will gather dust, and Western governments will ultimately retreat when meaningful pressure becomes politically costly.
That assumption must end.
For the Israeli mindset to change, the consequences of occupation, annexation, and genocide must become unmistakable. Sanctions cannot merely be announced; they must be enforced. Boycotts cannot remain symbolic; they must carry an economic cost. International law cannot simply be invoked; it must have consequences.
The real measure of these initiatives, therefore, is not how many companies appear on a list or how many governments announce sanctions. The real measure is whether these actions can finally impose a political and economic price on Israel high enough to make occupation, annexation, and genocide unsustainable.
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California Overrules School Districts to Censor Palestine
The systematic pattern that has developed within California school districts is alarming: File complaints citing antisemitism whenever schools, educators, or students show support for Palestine, then appeal at the state level to overrule the districts.
Oct 08, 2026
The views, analysis, and opinions expressed in this article belong solely to the author. They do not represent the official stance, policy, or position of Berkeley Independent Study, the Berkeley Federation of Teachers, the Berkeley Unified School District, or any affiliated organization.
Colorful, progressive posters fill the walls in Room 202 of Berkeley High School's Independent Study Program. A Rainbow Coalition poster features Fred Hampton with the phrase, "In Unity, there is survival." The Black Panther Party, IWW Local 8, Somos El 99%, Louise Olivereau, Marie Equi, environmental justice, and other progressive causes are represented.
Palestine posters fit in with the milieu of the room. "Berkeley Educators for Palestine," "Stop the Bombing, Free Free Palestine," and "Stop the Israeli-US Genocide in Palestine" are included.
What is uncommon is to bypass teachers and administrators and go straight to a civil rights complaint, unless the complaint is about Palestine, and the people making the complaint are connected to the Brandeis Center.
These posters, along with one titled "Standing with Muslims Against Islamophobia and Racism," resulted in an official complaint filed through the District Civil Rights and Compliance Office of the Berkeley Unified School District (BUSD). No teachers or staff were aware of any concerns surrounding the posters until they were contacted by a district-hired attorney.
Jonas LaMattery-Brownell, Berkeley Federation of Teachers (BFT) co-site representative at Berkeley Independent Study (BIS), told me in an interview, "Some colleagues of mine who were most targeted by the investigation were Jewish, and were horrified that support for Palestine was getting weaponized against them and the school."
Public schools are accustomed to resolving issues in-house. It's not uncommon for students to feel discomfort, and for parents to voice their concerns with teachers and administrators. These concerns often result in meaningful discussions and a better educational environment for everyone.
What is uncommon is to bypass teachers and administrators and go straight to a civil rights complaint, unless the complaint is about Palestine, and the people making the complaint are connected to the Brandeis Center.
Antisemitism Charges
Kenneth Marcus, former Trump official and founder of the Brandeis Center, wrote openly about filing “high-profile cases alleging unlawful antisemitic harassment” in "Standing up for Jewish Students" (Jerusalem Post, 2013). Marcus writes, “These cases—even when rejected—expose administrators to bad publicity... The only way to win these cases is to file them, even when we see some or most rejected.”
The Brandeis Center filed a 41-page complaint in 2024 with the US Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights against BUSD, alleging that “BUSD teachers are using BUSD resources to teach anti-Israel propaganda and promote walkouts demeaning Israelis and calling for the elimination of Jews."
BUSD Superintendent Enikia Ford Morthel testified before Congress that "antisemitism is not pervasive in [the] Berkeley Unified School District" after conducting 12 investigations of complaints filed through the District Civil Rights and Compliance Office. In Berkeleyside, the Berkeley Jewish Parents for Collective Liberation called the Brandeis Center claims "tired, fully investigated, and determined to be baseless."
Liz Jackson, director of K-12 Legal Defense and former senior attorney at Palestine Legal, interviewed multiple witnesses to determine the veracity of the Brandeis Center complaints. Addressing the claim that students during the walkout were screaming "Kill the Jews," Jackson told me in an interview, "I've talked to a lot of students and teachers who were supervising or participating in the walkout and no one can verify that. There was definitely not a chant that was loud that students were chanting in unison. I think it's probably fabricated based on what else they fabricate."
Jackson is aware of about 20 complaints filed over the last two years, all of which involve Palestine. The allegations typically fall into the following categories:
- True, but not antisemitic;
- Fabricated; and
- A grain of truth, but grossly exaggerated.
Jackson states: "They paint a picture by blurring a mix of 1, 2, and 3 to create a picture of rampant, systematic antisemitism. They are manufacturing a curriculum causation theory, which is that teaching about Palestine causes antisemitic bullying."
According to Jackson, the small group of "parents who are pushing this stuff are largely from abundantly resourced, owning class families, while the children who are targeted are largely working class refugees." In 2024, the Brandeis Center tax forms reported $18 million in grants following the Hamas attacks when many official complaints were launched.
The norm is that complaints are filed, usually by parents or external organizations, citing Palestine and claiming antisemitism, then BUSD hires its own attorneys to investigate.
The Palestine posters at BIS were found by BUSD to be one-sided, but not discriminatory, citing insufficient evidence that any student expressed discomfort. The complainants appealed to the California Department of Education (CDE), which overruled the district and found the posters discriminatory, mandating antisemitism training for all BIS staff.
CDE Intervention—Assembly Bill 715
The game-changer is Assembly Bill 715, which passed in October 2025 despite "overwhelming opposition from educators, students, and civil rights advocates," including the American Civil Liberties Union, California Teachers Association, Arab-American Anti-Discrimination Committee, and Jewish Voice For Peace. AB 715 states:
This bill would establish that discriminatory bias in instruction and school-sponsored activities does not require a showing of direct harm to members of a protected group and would not require members of a protected group to be present while the discriminatory bias is occurring for the act to be considered discriminatory bias. If the governing board or body of the local educational agency finds that instruction or school-sponsored activities are discriminatory, as provided, the bill would require corrective action to be taken, as provided.
The Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism brought together hundreds of scholars from Holocaust history, Jewish studies, and Middle East studies to provide the following definition of antisemitism: "Antisemitism is discrimination, prejudice, hostility,or violence against Jews as Jews (or Jewish institutions as Jewish)." Additional guidelines include that antisemitism is not "supporting the Palestinian demand for justice and the full grant of their political, national, civil, and human rights, as encapsulated in international law."
According to Mr. LaMattery-Brownell: "It's basic humanity to say that we stand for Palestinian self-determination. Free Palestine is talking about freedom for a people. That's not discrimination. Unless you think that freedom for some people is unfair to everyone else."
CDE Case 2026-0259 found the BIS Palestine posters discriminatory for two reasons
- Conveying a "pro-Palestinian/Muslim message with no corresponding expression of support for Israel/Jews," ignoring the Holocaust posters mentioned elsewhere in the letter; and
- Conveying "an anti-Israel/Jewish message referencing 'genocide' in Palestine without any corresponding negative reference to the Hamas attack on Israel in October 2023."
The Hamas attack on October 7 took the lives of approximately 1,200 Israelis. Since then, according to the United Nations, the Israeli military has taken the lives of approximately 72,000 Palestinians. There is a 60-fold discrepancy here. The imbalance lies in the facts.
The term "genocide" is explicitly referenced by the CDE as "an anti-Israeli/Jewish message." This assumption is unsubstantiated. Many Jewish students, parents, and staff have spoken out in Berkeley in support of Palestine and against the US and Israeli-led genocide, and over 1,400 Israeli academics signed a petition calling for an end to the war in Gaza in 2024. Critiquing genocide and wars is an act of civic responsibility for all citizens, Israelis and Jewish Americans included.
Following October 7, the Brandeis Center claimed that "Jewish and Israeli students have since been subjected to nonstop antisemitic bullying and harassment by their teachers and peers, in hallways, in classrooms, and in school yards." BUSD investigations have found otherwise. And BUSD teachers have experienced the opposite.
Teacher Harassment
Candiss Youngblood, an art teacher at Berkeley High School (BHS) interviewed for this article, was the subject of five different civil rights complaints. Her offense? She wears a patch, approved by administrators, with a heart and rose that states, "Free Palestine."
Students organized a Grief Circle that Ms. Youngblood participated in following the casualties after October 7. The students made a template poster that read, "My hope for Israel and Palestine," followed by open space to communicate their wishes. The posters were hung up for display at BHS, but "late that night, after hours," Ms. Youngblood reported, "admin went and took them all down." Ms. Youngblood was told that the Grief Circle was a "misuse of district funds."
Investigations and disciplinary action followed. Ms. Youngblood was written up for purchasing art supplies from a dollar store that were never used. Harassment followed as parents accused her of antisemitism in mass emails and students hid behind bushes outside her windows to photograph her classroom. "It was scary to be here," said Ms. Youngblood. "Admin wasn't saying we couldn't wear stuff, but they also weren't preventing any harassment from the community."
Weaponizing support for Palestine as antisemitic is coming not just from extremists trying to control public education, but from the State of California.
Ms. Youngblood was a witness to a complaint issued against the Berkeley High Safety Committee, of which she was a member, because they added a norm to combat white supremacy. According to Ms. Youngblood, ActNowK12.org charged that "we were using that norm as a way to silence their participation in the meetings." ActNowK12.org is a collaboration of California Jewish Grassroots Groups and the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) that offers its website as a means to report antisemitism.
Dan Brownson, a BUSD clerical worker and former Berkeley Council of Classified Employees (BCCE) union rep was asked to defend a BUSD staff member investigated for wearing a keffiyeh. Brownson told me in an interview that the complaint was filed by ActNowK12.org, and the investigation revealed that no specific student or parent actually complained. Brownson said: "They asked how it might make an Israeli or Jewish student feel to see the keffiyeh. I said, are we going to go on feelings now?"
Brownson was asked to represent the staff member on account of his own experience fighting spurious claims of antisemitism and dealing with an administrator who yelled at him for refusing to take down a pro-Palestine poster in his cubicle unless the administrator could show him where he was breaking the law, which she could not. Brownson was fired at the end of the year before obtaining a new position.
Mandated Trainings Across California
The ambiguity of the law surrounding an educator's freedom of political speech gives Assembly Bill 715 unprecedented power. Weaponizing support for Palestine as antisemitic is coming not just from extremists trying to control public education, but from the State of California. Appeals of complaints are underway across the state and corrective actions are being widely dispersed.
The entire staff and student body of King Middle School in BUSD were mandated a training on antisemitism by the CDE following a SSWANA (South Asian, Southwest Asian, North African) assembly due to students wearing Palestinian flags; chanting,"Free Palestine"; and excluding Israel from some maps.
District-wide trainings on antisemitism were mandated in the Oakland Unified School District (OUSD) after the CDE overturned multiple cases involving a Palestine teach-in, Palestine posters, a Palestine flag without a corresponding Israeli flag, and Arab American Heritage Month materials omitting Israel from some regional maps.
Conflating support for Palestine with antisemitism sets a dangerous precedent that threatens human rights everywhere.
The Sequoia Union High School District settled a federal lawsuit for $325,000 alleging widespread antisemitism including pro-Hamas propaganda from teachers and discriminatory grading; the settlement included mandatory antisemitism training for all staff. Exhibit A of the settlement mentions "the denial of the Jewish people's right to self-defense" under its expanded definition of antisemitism.
Additional lawsuits in BUSD and the Santa Ana Unified School District over ethnic studies curricula that included Palestine cited antisemitism as did accusations against the Mountain View-Los Altos District who terminated a contract with Acosta Educational Partnerships. All high school teachers and administrators in the Manhattan Beach Unified School District (LA County) were mandated antisemitism training after an AP US History teacher posted slides describing the genocide in Gaza.
Trainings on antisemitism have commenced in BUSD and OUSD with more to come. Authentic teachings on antisemitism are welcome in public education, as are factually relevant discussions on Israel-Palestine. But the systematic pattern that has developed within California school districts is alarming: File complaints citing antisemitism whenever schools, educators, or students show support for Palestine, then appeal at the state level to overrule school districts where the CDE intervenes.
Labeling the BIS Palestine posters discriminatory sends a chilling message of censorship against Palestine throughout BUSD. Conflating support for Palestine with antisemitism sets a dangerous precedent that threatens human rights everywhere. Responding to the CDE decisions, Jackson stated, "They're anti-Arab, they're anti-Palestinian, and they violate our free speech rights and rights to learn."
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October 7: The World Must Stop Starting the Story in the Middle
Three years have passed. Much has changed, and far more has been destroyed. But the question that existed on October 6 did not disappear on October 7, and all the war that followed has not erased it: When will Palestinians live freely on their own land?
Oct 07, 2026
Three years have passed since October 7, 2023, yet much of the world still begins the story on that morning.
As if Palestinians suddenly woke up that day and decided to enter history.
As if Gaza had not already been under blockade. As if the West Bank and East Jerusalem had not already been under occupation. As if settlements, checkpoints, arrests, home demolitions, and land confiscation had not already been part of everyday Palestinian life.
Three years later, what has happened in Gaza can no longer be reduced to the word “response.”
I am not writing today to justify the killing of civilians, Palestinian or Israeli.
A civilian life does not need a nationality to be worthy of protection.
But I refuse to accept October 7 as an eraser—wiping away everything that came before it and becoming an open-ended justification for everything that followed.
When an Israeli is killed, we are told to go back to October 7.
When a Palestinian is killed, we are told: Remember October 7.
When Gaza is destroyed, its people displaced, and its children killed, the answer is the same: October 7.
But if we are asked to remember that day, then we should also be allowed to ask a simple question: What was there on October 6?
There were millions of Palestinians already living under occupation.
More than 2 million Palestinians in Gaza had been living under blockade for years.
In the West Bank, Palestinians lived among checkpoints and settlements, without freedom of movement on their own land, while Israeli settlers moved through the same territory with rights and protection denied to the Palestinians who live there.
There were prisoners in Israeli jails. Homes were being demolished. Land was being confiscated.
None of this began on October 7.
Palestinians carry the memory of the Nakba of 1948, the occupation of 1967, and decades of settlement expansion, displacement, and blockade.
That history does not make the killing of civilians acceptable. But neither does it make acceptable the claim that this conflict began on October 7.
There is a difference between condemning an act and using that act to erase everything that came before it.
Three years later, what has happened in Gaza can no longer be reduced to the word “response.”
A response cannot be a blank check. October 7 cannot become a permanent justification for killing, destruction, displacement, and hunger, or for making an entire people pay the price year after year.
Even the ceasefire announced in October 2025 did not end the tragedy. The devastation remained. Families continued searching beneath the rubble for the bodies of their loved ones. And the killing did not stop entirely.
At the same time, the occupation in the West Bank did not pause and wait for the war in Gaza to end. Land continued to be confiscated. Settlements continued to expand. Checkpoints continued to cut Palestinians off from one another.
And this is where the heart of the matter lies.
Palestinians are not asking for a privilege denied to others.
They want to live freely on their own land. To move through it without needing permission from an occupying soldier. To feel that their homes, their land, and their children’s future are safe.
These are not extraordinary demands.
They are the ordinary conditions of life that most people in the world enjoy without ever having to think about them.
So, three years later, it is not enough to ask: What happened on October 7?
We must also ask: What was done to Palestinians before that day, and what is being done to them now?
The world is not being asked to choose between Palestinian blood and Israeli blood, or to find excuses for the killing of civilians by either side.
It is being asked to stop reversing the relationship between the occupier and the occupied.
Palestinians are not a people occupying another people’s land.
Palestinians are the people living under occupation.
That is not an emotional statement. It is a fact that cannot be removed from any serious reading of what happened before October 7, on October 7, or after it.
Three years have passed. Much has changed, and far more has been destroyed. But the question that existed on October 6 did not disappear on October 7, and all the war that followed has not erased it: When will Palestinians live freely on their own land?
So if the world truly does not want to see another October 7, it is not enough to remember what happened on that day.
It must also remember what existed the day before.
What had existed for decades before that.
And what still exists at this very moment.
The occupation.
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The Problem With Israel Goes Much Deeper Than 'Netanyahu’s Extremist Government'
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is a war criminal, but he is not the problem; he has overseen the genocide in Gaza, but he inherited a social and political order structured around Palestinian dispossession and erasure.
Oct 07, 2026
Israel has killed more than 1,300 Palestinians in Gaza since the so-called “ceasefire” took effect a year ago, more than the number of Israelis killed on October 7, 2023. The supposedly unlimited “right” to genocidal retaliation invoked ever since has left at least 74,000 dead.
This quotidian slaughter is not new. For years, it was normalized under the euphemism of “mowing the grass,” as Israel repeatedly brought its impunity and overwhelming military superiority to bear against a defenseless, besieged population: in 2008, 2012, 2014, 2018, and 2021.
As a result, a generation of Palestinians in Gaza has been condemned to life and death under the deadly gaze of an Israeli panopticon. Even before the latest escalation, they endured the constant hum of drones overhead; the repeated reduction of homes and entire neighborhoods to rubble; and the mourning of shattered lives, families, and futures. Each time, Israel invoked “self-defense.” Yet the staggering asymmetry of the violence told a different story.
Changing this unconscionable status quo requires confronting the history that produced it, challenging not only the notion that one individual is responsible, but the deeper myth that Zionism simply “went wrong.”
In Gaza, the fiction of “collateral damage” has reached its most grotesque inversion. The term has long been deployed to assuage Western consciences, casting our own violence as regrettable but invariably legitimate, while violence committed by others remains categorically inexcusable, even barbaric. Yet the purpose of such overwhelming force is clear: to make the price of resisting an illegal occupation unbearable, while American weapons and diplomatic protection ensure that Israel bears remarkably little of the cost.
And Gaza is but one front. Across Israel and the occupied territories, a system of apartheid is enforced through law, military rule, and state-backed settler violence. Beyond Palestine, Israel has repeatedly bombed its neighbors, terrorizing the region in the name of “counterterrorism.” As Palestinian Ambassador Majed Bamya captured this fundamental double standard before the United Nations Security Council: “Is there an international law for them, and an international law for us? Do they have the right to kill, and the only right we have is to die?”
The horrors of Gaza, and the scale of Western complicity, have begun to rupture the indifference that has long emboldened Israel’s unchecked exercise of military power. Public opinion is shifting, even as political elites struggle to contain it. This has often come at the expense of basic democratic principles, laying bare the contradictions at the heart of Western “liberalism.” Yet even some of Israel’s sharpest critics in mainstream US politics, such as Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), have repeatedly and mistakenly located the problem in “Netanyahu’s extremist government.”
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is a war criminal. But he is not the problem. He did not invent the occupation or build apartheid alone. He has overseen the genocide in Gaza, but he inherited a social and political order structured around Palestinian dispossession and erasure. He may be forced out in coming elections. But the ideological forces that made him possible will remain. Changing this unconscionable status quo requires confronting the history that produced it, challenging not only the notion that one individual is responsible, but the deeper myth that Zionism simply “went wrong.”
The Settler-Colonial Origins of Zionism
From its origins in the late 19th century, Zionism was shaped by a colonial imagination that rendered Palestinians largely invisible, treating a country inhabited by an overwhelming Arab majority for at least 1,200 years as though it were terra nullius. Or, in the words of a popular Christian Zionist slogan of the day, “a land without a people for a people without a land.” But the Zionist ambition to create a Jewish homeland in a territory with a small Jewish minority raised an unavoidable question: What was to be done with the people already living there? The contradiction between Zionist territorial and demographic ambitions and Palestinian presence would shape the ensuing century of dispossession, conquest, and conflict.
It is in this sense that, as Patrick Wolfe famously observed, “The question of genocide is never far from discussions of settler colonialism.” Unlike traditional colonialism, which generally sought to dominate territories for the economic benefit of a distant metropole, settler colonialism seeks total societal transformation, remaking the conquered territory into a permanent home of a new settler state. “Territoriality,” or control over the land, is its “irreducible element,” and its underlying logic is not primarily one of exploitation but that of elimination. Settler colonialism, in short, “destroys to replace,” making invasion “not an event but a structure.”
“Every native population in the world,” Jabotinsky observed, “resists colonists as long as it has the slightest hope of being able to rid itself of the danger of being colonized.” That, he acknowledged, “is what the Arabs in Palestine are doing.”
In response to this characterization, Zionists often adopt the language of decolonization, recasting Zionism as the national liberation movement of an Indigenous people. It is true that Jews have a deep historical and religious connection to the land. It is true that Zionism was conceived as a national movement. And it is also true that virulent, increasingly eliminationist antisemitism across Europe made Jewish life increasingly untenable. But none of these facts negates Zionism’s colonial structure.
Nor did its founding ideologues necessarily disguise that reality. The “founding father” of political Zionism, Theodor Herzl, appealed to Cecil Rhodes for support for his movement precisely because it was “something colonial.” He further envisioned the prospective Jewish state as “a portion of a rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism.” Aptly named institutions, including the Jewish Colonization Association and the Jewish Colonial Trust, formed part of the movement’s political and financial infrastructure.
That colonial orientation helped Zionism secure the patronage of the British Empire. With the 1917 Balfour Declaration and British Mandate, London threw its imperial weight behind the creation of a Jewish “national home” for a largely European diasporic population. The national aspirations of the existing majority Palestinian population, indeed, even its existence as a people with political rights of its own, were denied outright. Britain’s support reflected not simply sympathy for Jewish self-determination, but a combination of geopolitics, antisemitism, and Christian philosemitism.
As historian Rashid Khalidi has argued, Britain thus enabled the Jewish community in Palestine to develop the institutional capacity of a proto-state while systematically subverting Palestinian nation-building efforts. When Palestinians revolted against this colonial order from 1936 to 1939, British forces, aided by Zionist militias, brutally suppressed the uprising. By its end, Khalidi notes, some “10% of the adult male population was killed, wounded, imprisoned, or exiled.”
Zionist leaders understood the roots of Palestinian resistance perfectly well. Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the ideological pioneer of Revisionist Zionism, from which much of the Israeli right traces its lineage, embraced territorial maximalism. Yet he was not ignorant to Palestinian aspirations. “Every native population in the world,” Jabotinsky observed, “resists colonists as long as it has the slightest hope of being able to rid itself of the danger of being colonized.” That, he acknowledged, “is what the Arabs in Palestine are doing.”
David Ben-Gurion, the mainstream leader of the pre-state Jewish community and Israel’s future first prime minister, similarly recognized the roots of the conflict. “Let us not ignore the truth among ourselves,” he remarked. “Politically we are the aggressors and they defend themselves.”
The Partition and the Nakba
After World War II, a financially exhausted Britain, facing mounting anti-colonial pressures from India to Egypt and escalating anti-British violence by Zionist paramilitaries, abandoned Palestine and handed the problem to the newly established United Nations. The UN promised to serve as a new experiment in democratic internationalism, yet it remained profoundly shaped by the colonial order that it had inherited. Most colonized peoples still lacked representation when, in 1947, the General Assembly adopted Resolution 181, calling for the partition of Palestine into a Jewish state and an Arab territory.
This blunt instrument, deployed disastrously in Palestine and elsewhere, treated pluralism itself as a “problem” to be solved. Rooted in the colonial logic of divide and rule and a European conception of ethnonational citizenship, it cast the solution to communal conflict as demographic engineering: the pursuit of homogenization and the construction of “racially specific landscapes.”
Palestinians rejected partition. The Zionist leadership accepted it. But that familiar fact obscures the extraordinary concession Palestinians were being asked to make. Despite constituting some two-thirds of the population, they were expected to accept the creation of a Jewish state on more than half of the country, including some of its most densely populated and economically valuable regions.
As historian Walid Khalidi observed, this was hardly a choice at all. Instead, the Palestinian Arabs, he wrote, “were dubbed the aggressor for not meekly submitting to the dismemberment of their country.” Compounding this sense of injustice was the conviction among many Palestinians that they were, in effect, being asked to pay reparations for Europe’s crimes, crimes in which they had played no part.
In the war that followed, Zionist forces carried out expulsions and massacres that drove 750,000 Palestinians from their homes. As a result, the majority that were living within the territory that became Israel were forcibly displaced. Whether this came from a single, centrally directed policy remains historically disputed. But as Benny Morris has observed, soldiers did not require explicit instructions to understand the possibilities war had created. By 1948, “transfer was in the air.”
The Rise of the Settler Movement
The Nakba transformed the human geography of Palestine. Israel emerged with a Jewish majority and control of 78% of historic Palestine, while the Palestinians who remained within its borders were reduced to a minority and subjected to the violence of military rule. The new state then set about making the wartime transformation permanent, above all by ensuring that those who had been expelled could not return.
In 1950, Israel enacted two laws that helped consolidate this new order. The Law of Return granted Jews in the diaspora citizenship in Israel, while the Absentees’ Property Law facilitated the state seizure of the land and homes belonging to Palestinians. Much of this property was subsequently redistributed to new Jewish immigrants and Holocaust survivors. Many moved into homes from which Palestinians had only recently been forcibly displaced, leaving behind their possessions and family photographs still hanging on the walls.
The imperative of maintaining Jewish political supremacy meant that the millions of Palestinians now brought under Israeli control could not be incorporated as equal citizens
While these catastrophes differed enormously in scope, scale, and character, the dissonance was nonetheless profound: Jews driven from expropriated homes in Europe were resettled in homes from which Palestinians had been expelled in the pursuit of another ethnonational project. Though largely repressed, the parallel did not go entirely unremarked. Israeli poet Avot Yeshurun captured this historical entanglement, writing that, in this sense, “the Holocaust of the Jews of Europe and the Holocaust of the Arabs of the Land of Israel are one Holocaust of the Jewish People.”
Nor did Palestinians simply accept their newfound condition of exile. Refugees repeatedly crossed the newly imposed borders, keys in hand, to return to their homes or tend their fields. Israeli forces responded with lethal force, killing thousands of Palestinians from 1949-1956, most unarmed. Resistance soon developed, which Israel regularly invoked to justify raids, reprisals, and collective punishment against Palestinian communities across their borders.
Violence, dispossession, and exile transformed the Palestinian refugee camps of neighboring states into crucibles of revolutionary nationalism. From this political ferment emerged political and militant organizations such as Fatah, the Palestine Liberation Organization, and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.
Then came the 1967 War. In six days, Israel seized the West Bank and East Jerusalem from Jordan, Gaza and the Sinai Peninsula from Egypt, and the Golan Heights from Syria. The Sinai would later be returned to Egypt under a land-for-peace agreement. Elsewhere, the conquest of territories associated with the biblical Land of Israel, was celebrated by many Israelis as nothing short of a “miracle,” unleashed a messianic fervor that invigorated the Israeli right.
Religiously and politically motivated settlers began moving into the occupied territories, creating irreversible “facts on the ground” that bound the land ever more tightly to Israel while intentionally foreclosing the possibility of future territorial compromise. At the same time, the imperative of maintaining Jewish political supremacy meant that the millions of Palestinians now brought under Israeli control could not be incorporated as equal citizens. Instead, they remained subjects of an occupying power, governed separately and unequally.
Occupation “From the River to the Sea”
The settlement project, initially driven by religious ideologues and later expanded with the help of the state through subsidies and other economic incentives, steadily carved Palestinian territory into disconnected enclaves, divided by settlements, bypass roads, checkpoints, walls, and the military infrastructure that followed to sustain and protect them.
At the same time, Israel worked to suppress Palestinian political organization and national identity. Palestinian political organizations and political activity and expression were outlawed or severely repressed. Newspapers and publications were subjected to censorship. Flying the Palestinian flag was prohibited, and even artwork incorporating its colors could invite repression.
As this history has sought to demonstrate, Israel is an anachronistic settler-colonial project. What is required, then, is a belated decolonization.
Occupation reached deep into Palestinian life. A growing permit regime governed construction, movement, and access to land and resources. Wells and irrigation systems also required Israeli approval. Palestinians faced restrictions on activities ranging from fishing in their own waters to cultivating their own land. These restrictions were enforced not only by soldiers and settlers but through a Kafkaesque bureaucracy that made domination a feature of daily life.
By 1987, two decades of domination and humiliation erupted into the First Intifada, a spontaneous, decentralized, and overwhelmingly unarmed uprising. Palestinian engaged in civil disobedience. Israel responded with brutal force. Tens of thousands of Palestinians passed through Israeli prisons, while soldiers were ordered to break the bones of protesters, killing more than 1,000 Palestinians, including 240 children.
The violent repression of the Intifada created the conditions in which groups like Hamas emerged, much as Hezbollah had arisen in response to Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon. Yet the uprising also demonstrated that permanent occupation could not continue without stimulating resistance, helping open the political process that culminated in the Oslo Accords starting in 1993.
Oslo, flawed from the outset and failing to confront many of the conflict’s fundamental questions, collided with powerful forces determined to prevent a negotiated settlement. In 1994, Israeli settler Baruch Goldstein entered Hebron’s Ibrahimi Mosque and massacred 29 worshipers (National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir displayed a prominent photo of him in his living room for decades). This incident became a catalyst for Hamas’s turn toward suicide bombings, feeding an escalating cycle of violence that steadily eroded the political ground beneath Oslo.
Then, in 1995, an Israeli settler, Yigal Amir, assassinated prime minister Yitzhak Rabin. Amir was an extremist in his methods. But the belief that Israel was an inviolable trust of the Jewish people that animated him was hardly confined to the political fringe. Likud, led by Benjamin Netanyahu, has long rejected Palestinian statehood. Its 1977 party platform declared that “the right of the Jewish people to the land of Israel is eternal and indisputable” and “between the Sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty.”
Rabin’s was one of the most consequential assassinations in modern history. It dealt a devastating blow to a fragile, imperfect peace process and helped clear Netanyahu’s path to power. Netanyahu himself had participated in the incendiary political campaign against Oslo that portrayed Rabin as a traitor for negotiating with Palestinians.
Toward a Free Palestine
In the decades since, Netanyahu’s cultivation of the ultranationalist and Jewish-supremacist forces that define Israel’s political mainstream has helped him maintain an extraordinary grip on power. Meanwhile, Western leaders sustain the fiction of a two-state solution, invoking it with ritualistic devotion even as successive Israeli governments expand apartheid, imprison prominent Palestinian leaders, kill with impunity, and reject Palestinian rights and sovereignty outright.
As this history has sought to demonstrate, Israel is an anachronistic settler-colonial project. What is required, then, is a belated decolonization. First and foremost, this means an immediate end to the genocide. But it also demands justice: the renunciation of Jewish supremacy, reparations for historical dispossession, accountability for past and present crimes, and the upholding of the right of return for Palestinian refugees.
That can only happen through the dismantling of the political and legal structures that make one people’s rights and freedom contingent on the denial of those same rights and freedoms to others. In short, it necessitates an end to Zionism as it has long been practiced as an exclusivist political project and the realization of a free Palestine, confronting the one-state reality as it is and pressing for its transformation into a genuine democratic state for all its citizens.
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With the Trial of 'Ulm5' Activists, Germany Looks More and More Like a Police State
The trial of five Palestinian rights activists, now approaching its final stage, has exposed for all to see not only Germany’s increasingly neofascist playbook for silencing dissent but complicity in Israel’s genocide.
Oct 02, 2026
Germany is a country with a long and complex relationship to authoritarianism. It is also of course the country that gave birth to the most evil political regime, Nazism, in the modern era.
The Allies agreed on the denazification of Germany as a goal after the end of World War II, but the general consensus is that it wasn’t a success. Some high-ranking Nazis were put on trial and sentenced to death, others were removed from public positions, but the majority of Nazis were reintegrated into postwar German society and even landed high-ranking positions.
Now, Germany is again displaying worrying signs of authoritarianism, as evidenced by the meteoric rise of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party. However, Germany’s love affair with authoritarian rule runs deeper than the current surge of the AfD. Its legal and judicial system has become notorious for its restrictions on freedom of speech and its penchant for framing dissent “not as a democratic expression but as a threat to public order.”
The treatment of the Ulm5 young activists is in clear violation of European human rights law.
The Ulm5 trial underway in Stuttgart, and now approaching its final stage, has exposed for all to see not only Germany’s increasingly neofascist playbook for silencing dissent but complicity in Israel’s genocide.
In the early hours of September 8, 2025, five young pro-Palestinian activists broke into the German branch of Israeli arms manufacturer Elbit Systems in Ulm, southern Germany. Once inside, they broke windows and destroyed furniture and technical equipment. They also sprayed slogans on the walls, such as “Free Palestine” and “Germany finances, Israel bombs.” No one was injured in the attack, and the activists not only remained on site but called the police themselves and waited to be arrested.
Since their arrest, the five activists—Daniel Tatlow-Devally (an Irish citizen), Leandra Rollo (a Spanish-Argentinian citizen), Crow Tricks and Zo Hailu (British citizens), and Vi Kovarbasic (a German citizen)—have been held in separate prisons and under highly degrading conditions. They are subjected to solitary confinement conditions lasting 23 hours a day, with just a couple of very short family visits per month. Irish politicians who visited Daniel Tatlow-Devally in prison were shocked by what they witnessed.
The Ulm5 activists are being treated like terrorists; in fact, they are being treated in a similar fashion as were the kidnappers, bank robbers, and murderers of the militant “Red Army Faction” group during their arrest in the 1970s. It is thus no coincidence that the trial of the Ulm5 activists is being held at Stuttgart-Stammheim, the very venue where the terrorist trials of the 1970s were held.
The defense team of Ulm5 has asked repeatedly why the trial is being held at high-security Stuttgart-Stammheim courthouse when the five defendants merely caused property damage without anyone being hurt, but no answer has been provided. Yet the answer is clear. It’s because German authorities treat Palestine solidarity as support for terrorism. In the eyes of current German laws, especially in connection with the long-standing political assertion that “Israel’s security is Germany’s raison d’état,” the genocidal party must, by necessity, be protected and those who protest against its crimes must, by extension, be treated as nothing more than criminals or plain terrorists.
Conveniently enough, the Ulm5 pro-Palestinian activists are being charged under Section 129 of the German Criminal Law, which is directed toward ordinary organized crime and criminalizes “whosoever forms an organization, the objectives or activities of which are directed toward the commission of crimes, or whoever participates in such an organization as a member, recruits for it, or supports it.” Section 129 has two components. Subsection (a) is labeled “forming terrorist organizations” and applies to “whosoever forms an organization whose aims or activities are directed at the commission of murder… or genocide… or crime against humanity… or a war crime;” subsection (b) is directed toward any person or organization whose aim is to cause “serious physical or mental harm to another person;” commit offenses against the environment; and commit offenses under the provisions of the Weapons of War Act.
If anything, 129a applies to Israel for carrying out genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. Israel’s crimes against Palestinians have been well documented by scores of international bodies and international human rights organizations while many Holocaust scholars, including Israeli organizations, have concluded that Israel’s actions in Gaza should be treated as a case of genocide. Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups also committed crimes against humanity on October 7, according to international human rights organizations such as Human Rights Watch.
Charging the Ulm5 pro-Palestine activists under Criminal Code Section 129 is a criminal act in itself by the German authorities. It shows that Germany is unwilling to tolerate any dissent or protest and will employ the repressive apparatus of the state to the possible maximum extent in order accomplish this goal. Indeed, this is not the first time that Criminal Code Section 129 has been used to suppress protests. A nationwide raid was carried out in May 2023 against the climate change protest group “Last Generation” after, ironically enough, the parliamentary body of the AfD had called on the Federal Government to examine the conditions for a ban on the organization, alleging that it was in violation of the constitutional order. And in March 2025 German public prosecutors filed charges against five members of the group for “forming a criminal organization.”
In Berlin alone, more than 3,000 climate activists have been sentenced over the past few years, according to the German newspaper Die Zeit.
Both climate activists and pro-Palestinian activists are being thoroughly pursued in Germany by its police state. Marginalized groups in cities like Berlin and elsewhere are also feeling “the politics of extreme policing,” as Berlin-based journalist and author Hanno Hauenstein put it.
The grotesque Ulm5 trial has multiple critical hearings scheduled for the month of October (the trial is slated to end in January 2027) as prosecutors seek to convict the young activists with being members of a criminal organization, which carries a sentence of up to five years in prison. The defendants are always handcuffed when they walk into the courtroom and are held in a bullet-proof glass cage.
This is an image straight out of Vladimir Putin’s Russia or Kim Jong Un’s North Korea. Or perhaps what one might have expected to see with the AfD in power. But it’s all quite revealing of how far contemporary Germany has gone into becoming once again a police state. And if this state of affairs has become again “normal” in mainstream German society, it is nonetheless an utterly disgraceful situation for the rest of Europe. The treatment of the Ulm5 young activists is in clear violation of European human rights law, as the defense lawyer of one of the accused young activists has already argued, and using the Criminal Code 129 to target protest movements and activists is plain fascism.
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This 2024 UN Resolution Should Be the Model for US Policy Toward Israel
We need not only an indefinite halt to the shipment of all US weapons to Israel; we must also have legiSocial Schedulingslation that defines the conduct that the US demands of Israel as essential to restoring land and full rights to the Palestinian people.
Oct 02, 2026
With the US midterm elections drawing near, the growing support among the US public for the salvation and liberation of the Palestinian people is tremendously heartening and indicative that Israel’s 80-year war and lawless reign of terror and annihilation must and will come to an end. It is also encouraging that global Jewry writ large does not support the Israeli regime’s genocide and occupation of the Palestinians.
Dramatic evidence of global support for Palestinians came on September 16, 2026 when Emmy, Grammy, and MTV award-winning singer Ed Sheeran received tremendous backlash for kicking the singer Macklemore, champion of Palestinian rights, off his music tour. Sheeran said he did it under pressure from Boston Patriots football team and stadium owner Robert Kraft and other stadium owners. The situation escalated into a snowballing public relations disaster for Sheeran, with his entire tour lineup—including pop group Lukas Graham, singer Finneas, Aaron Rowe, and his own backing band Boega—withdrawing from the tour in solidarity with Macklemore.
Attempting to reverse his losses, Sheeran then issued a tearful apology at his Philadelphia concert on Saturday, September 19, which many have criticized as turning attention to his own pain and shame, rather than that of the Palestinians.
Given the way in which the US and Israel easily bulldozed the world’s elites into accepting the Board of Peace, we turn to a way to pressure the US governments, and all governments, to do the right thing: boycott.
The massive pro-Palestinian energy demonstrated by the Sheeran incident, on top of the already pronounced movement of US and world sentiment toward Palestinians, suggests success for pro-Palestinian candidates in the US midterm elections, and possibly the edge that will shift the control of the US House and Senate to the Democratic Party.
However, even with a shift in Congress to the Democrats, we need not only an indefinite halt to the shipment of all US weapons to Israel; we must also have legislation that defines the conduct that the US demands of Israel as essential to restoring land and full rights to the Palestinian people.
Fortunately, a detailed description of the conduct that the US must demand of Israel with respect to the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT) is clearly laid out in United Nations General Assembly Resolution ES/10/24, overwhelmingly approved by the UN General Assembly on September 18, 2024. The Occupied Territory includes all of Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem.
Here are the basic requirements of Israel with respect to the Occupied Territory under Resolution 10/24:
- Withdraw all its military forces, including from air and maritime space;
- Immediately cease all new settlement activity, evacuate all settlers from occupied land, and dismantle parts of the separation wall it constructed inside the occupied West Bank;
- Repeal all legislation and other measures discriminating against the Palestinian people;
- Return land and other immovable property as well as all assets seized from any natural or legal person since the occupation began in 1967 and return all cultural property and assets taken from Palestinians and Palestinian institutions; and
- Allow all Palestinians displaced during the occupation to return to their place of origin and make full reparation for the damage caused by its occupation.
This is what, at a minimum, must become US policy toward Israel.
Trump and Israel have attempted to bury Resolution 10/24 under a US-commandeered Security Council Resolution 2803 of November 17, 2025 (Russia and China abstained), that created a so-called “Board of Peace.” This entity has acted as a diplomatic-public relations shield for the continued Israel genocide against the Palestinian people, the occupation and bombardment of much of Lebanon, the surreptitious expansion of its illegal occupation of southwest Syria, and all the killing that goes with it. The board allows Israeli occupation of the Gaza Strip to continue; no legitimate framework for Palestinian self-determination is provided.
Under cover of the Board of Peace, Israel continues to have control of what happens to Palestinians while it continues its brutal settler-colonial enterprise based on daily killing and abuse of Palestinians in Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem.
It is important to understand that General Assembly Resolution ES/10/24 still stands as a recognized action of the UN General Assembly, instructive not only to the US but all UN Member States, regardless of its de facto cancellation by the US and Israel that resulted in the creation of the Frankenstein’s monster Board of Peace.
General Assembly Resolution ES/10/24 not only incorporates all previous UN General Assembly, Security Council, and Human Rights Council resolutions pertaining to Israel’s illegal occupation of the OPT, it incorporates the landmark opinion issued in July 2024 by the International Court of Justice, the world’s highest court, which said that Israel’s occupation violated international law and should end "as rapidly as possible” and set a deadline for September 18 2025. That deadline has come and gone, requiring that new measures be taken.
In this moment, it is necessary for the political and financial elites of UN Member States to muster the courage to enforce General Assembly Resolution ES/10/24’s terms by cutting trade, commercial, and diplomatic ties with Israel. However, given the way in which the US and Israel easily bulldozed the world’s elites into accepting the Board of Peace, we turn to a way to pressure the US governments, and all governments, to do the right thing: boycott.
Many have likened the boycott of Ed Sheeran to the broader and intensifying global Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) campaign launched in 2005 to put economic, cultural, and political pressure on Israel to conform to international law, as the culmination of a Kairos moment which could and should lead the United Nations to boycott Israel as it did South Africa.
In 1985, the United Nations led a decades-long campaign of General Assembly resolutions calling upon member states to boycott, sanction, and embargo South Africa to end the country's system of apartheid. This led, in 1994, to South Africa officially ending its system of apartheid with the election of Nelson Mandela as the nation’s first Black president in the country's first fully democratic, non-racial general election.
Mohsen Mahdawi, Palestinian Buddhist peace activist, Columbia University graduate student, and the Fellowship of Reconciliation’s 2026-2027 Walter and June Wink Fellow, told us in an interview that the world is witnessing a pivotal moment as global civil society is coming together in ever-increasing numbers to demand that international law and human rights, including for Palestinians, be at the center and forefront of international actions.
“One important part of this,” he said, “is the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions Movement, which has been criminalized and shut down” however unsuccessfully, as was attempted by kicking Macklemore off of the Ed Sheeran concert tour.
Mahdawi said further:
People all over the world are not waiting for governments to liberate Palestine. We know that love, not hate, and the need for justice can and will concur. Through BDS, we are witnessing and manifesting a nonviolent global transformation not only for Palestine but the whole world, as the liberation of all humanity is deeply interconnected and interdependent. Macklemore is encouraging this and has shown that people who defend Palestine will prevail.
Mahdawi is convinced that the liberation of Israelis from their own moral injury, spiritual damage, and violation of Judaism’s core moral and ethical teachings also will occur.
“Government and institutional change at all levels will take some time,” he said. “In the meantime, we exercise our First Amendment Right to Free Speech and through speaking our truth, we manifest collective empathy, which is part of our innate nature, and manifest change. This is stronger than all of the weapons and censorship that they have.”
Sahar Alsahlani, board member of the Council on American-Islamic Relations in New York (CAIR-NY) and board member of the Parliament of World Religions, the oldest and largest interfaith organization in the world, concurs.
She said: "This is the moment for organizers for Palestine in the US to demand that requirements of UN General Assembly Resolution ES-10/24 become the requirements of US policy toward Israel, and to back up this demand by dramatically increasing BDS mobilization."
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Macklemore and the US Cultural Revolution for Palestine
The attempt to punish Macklemore ultimately placed Robert Kraft, Ed Sheeran, and the entertainment establishment itself under unprecedented scrutiny. Far from silencing the message of Palestinian freedom, their actions amplified it.
Sep 24, 2026
Page Six Hollywood recently declared: “War of Open Letters Erupts Between Pro-Israel and Pro-Palestine Factions in Hollywood.” Only a few years ago, a headline like this would have seemed unthinkable.
The article described an increasingly open struggle between pro-Palestine and pro-Israel forces within the entertainment industry. On one side are artists and other industry figures taking a clear stand against Israel’s genocide in Gaza; on the other are defenders of Israel attempting to deny that genocide in the face of irrefutable evidence.
Yet even this framing failed to tell the whole story. What is unfolding is far more consequential than a quarrel among celebrities or a “war of open letters.” It is part of a brewing cultural revolution in American society—one that has now reached the highest echelons of the country’s cultural establishment. And in that struggle, Israel is losing—and losing badly.
When the pendulum swings this far, neither Kraft’s money nor the stadiums he controls can stop the movement.
Though the article acknowledged that support for Palestine has become powerful enough to divide Hollywood openly, it concealed the scale of the transformation underway by presenting the moment as a "war" between two factions.
Long before Israeli filmmakers, production companies, and actors established a significant presence in Hollywood, the industry’s cultural infrastructure routinely elevated Israel at every opportunity. Film and television constructed a glossy image of a heroic nation whose establishment and continued survival were portrayed as miraculous, while the dispossession and violence underpinning that narrative were largely erased from view.
Palestinians, Arabs, and Muslims, meanwhile, were almost invariably cast in a negative light: the uncultured and menacing "other," supposedly possessing no legitimate claim to civilization, no recognizable morality, and no history or identity worthy of serious consideration.
Indeed, Hollywood played a central role in the systematic dehumanization of Palestinians in Western popular culture. When thousands of actors, filmmakers, producers, and artists begin taking principled public stands for Palestine—often at considerable professional risk—we can therefore speak confidently of a cultural shift of historic proportions.
Susan Sarandon, Mark Ruffalo, Penélope Cruz, Javier Bardem, Joaquin Phoenix, Tilda Swinton, Olivia Colman, Emma Stone, Cynthia Nixon, and Riz Ahmed are only some of the most visible names on an ever-expanding list of morally driven and courageous artists confronting an archaic industry establishment.
The story, however, extends far beyond Hollywood. Consider the major controversy that recently erupted in the US following Macklemore’s removal from the remaining dates of Ed Sheeran’s Loop Tour.
Macklemore is far more than a pro-Palestine singer. The Grammy-winning rapper and songwriter is a gifted political storyteller whose career has combined mainstream artistic success with an enduring commitment to social causes. Since the beginning of the genocide, he has emerged as one of the most powerful voices of Palestinian solidarity in the US and beyond.
During Sheeran’s recent concerts at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey, Macklemore expressed solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza and the occupied West Bank, called for a "free Palestine," and performed "Hind’s Hall," his protest anthem honoring Hind Rajab, the Palestinian child killed by Israeli forces in Gaza.
The response to Macklemore’s courageous stand was immediate, but also predictable. The billionaires who controlled the venues reached for the weapon still at their disposal: financial power. Robert Kraft, the owner of Gillette Stadium, refused to allow Macklemore to perform there.
Sheeran, who appeared to underestimate the gravity of the moment, went on the defensive. “I am not complicit,” he declared, insisting that Macklemore’s removal had been the promoter’s decision rather than his own. But such a weak response by one of the world’s most influential musicians, particularly while an artist on his own tour was being punished for speaking out, could hardly be presented as a politically "neutral" position.
In the past, the story might have ended there. Macklemore would have been isolated and his career placed in jeopardy, while Sheeran, the promoters, and the stadium owners continued largely untouched.
Those days are gone. Global solidarity with Macklemore—and, by extension, with Palestine—spread so rapidly that the people responsible for his removal were forced to issue a succession of defensive and sometimes contradictory explanations.
By then, however, the damage had been done. Sheeran faced mounting boycott calls, protests, and even the suspension of his music by an Irish radio station. Finneas, Lukas Graham, and Aaron Rowe withdrew from the tour, while Beoga, Sheeran’s backing band, also pulled out. Artists and public figures began speaking openly about the genocide, freedom of expression, and the power of billionaires to dictate the political boundaries of art.
Podcasters and social-media commentators also mobilized, reaching audiences of millions and digging deeper into the controversy. They began asking who Kraft was, examining his longstanding relationship with Israel; his campaign against Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions; and the enormous financial machinery behind his political advocacy.
The attempt to punish Macklemore ultimately placed Kraft, Sheeran, and the entertainment establishment itself under unprecedented scrutiny. Far from silencing the message of Palestinian freedom, their actions amplified it.
Ultimately, this is not a story about two feuding artists, just as Hollywood’s transformation cannot be reduced to two camps trading open letters. Both are manifestations of a much larger cultural upheaval rooted in grassroots American society, where people from diverse backgrounds are finally opening their eyes to Israeli crimes and to the extraordinary influence Tel Aviv has long exercised over their country.
Beyond the occasional opinion poll, that story rarely makes headlines. But when the pendulum swings this far, neither Kraft’s money nor the stadiums he controls can stop the movement.
Nor can they silence Macklemore’s cry of "Free Palestine"—a cry now echoed by millions of people throughout the world.
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From Oslo to Displacement: 33 Years That Changed the Map of Palestine
Between the handshake of 1993 and the map of 2026 lies the story of 33 years. At its heart is one question: Who controls the land—and who is still able to remain on it?
Sep 16, 2026
On September 13, 1993, Yasser Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin stood on the White House lawn and shook hands before the world.
For Palestinians, that image carried a larger hope: that a transitional process would lead to the end of occupation and the establishment of a Palestinian state.
The five years that were supposed to be transitional passed.
Then 20 years. Then 20.
Now, 33 years have passed.
Perhaps we do not need the thousands of pages written about Oslo to understand where we have arrived.
We only need to look at the map.
Israeli settlements have expanded. Outposts have spread across the hills. Roads connect many of them to Israel and to one another. Palestinian land has been confiscated or become increasingly difficult to reach.
East Jerusalem is increasingly surrounded by settlements. Area C, more than 60% of the West Bank, remains under extensive Israeli control over planning, construction, and land.
In Area A, which was supposed to be under Palestinian civil and security control, Israeli forces continue to enter Palestinian cities and refugee camps and carry out arrests, demolitions, and road closures.
In Jenin, Tulkarm, and Nur Shams refugee camps, more than 33,000 Palestinian refugees displaced since early 2025 remain unable to return home.
And then there is Gaza—part of the same Palestinian territory Palestinians entered Oslo believing would one day become their state.
If two states are made impossible, can anyone defend a permanent one-state reality in which Palestinians and Israelis do not enjoy equal national and political rights?
Between the handshake of 1993 and the map of 2026 lies the story of 33 years.
At its heart is one question: Who controls the land—and who is still able to remain on it?
Less than five months after Oslo was signed, Israeli settler Baruch Goldstein entered the Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron during dawn prayers in Ramadan and opened fire on Palestinian worshippers, killing 29.
Less than two years later, Israeli extremist Yigal Amir assassinated Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin because he opposed the political path Rabin had pursued.
The events were different, but both revealed early on the strength of the forces opposing any process that might eventually end Israel's occupation of Palestinian territory.
Negotiations continued.
So did settlement expansion.
And this became Oslo's central contradiction: Palestinians were negotiating over a state while the land on which that state was supposed to exist was changing beneath their feet.
Perhaps no place illustrates this more clearly than E1.
The area lies between occupied East Jerusalem and the Israeli settlement of Ma'ale Adumim. Its importance is not simply how many settlement homes may be built there, but what construction would do to the map.
Expansion in E1 threatens Palestinian territorial continuity between the northern and southern West Bank and further separates East Jerusalem from its Palestinian surroundings.
If the international community still speaks seriously about a Palestinian state on the 1967 borders, with East Jerusalem as its capital, where exactly is that state supposed to exist if the territory itself continues to be fragmented?
Governments can issue endless statements supporting two states.
But maps do not read statements.
They record what is built, who controls the land, and who is allowed to reach it.
The same contradiction appears in Area A.
The division of the West Bank into Areas A, B, and C was meant to be temporary. Yet what was temporary has become almost permanent, while the boundaries created by Oslo do not prevent Israeli forces from entering areas supposedly under Palestinian control.
Since early 2025, large-scale Israeli military operations have displaced more than 33,000 Palestinian refugees from Jenin, Tulkarm, and Nur Shams camps. Many remain unable to return.
For me, this is one of the most painful images of the post-Oslo era: A Palestinian refugee, whose family was displaced once before, being displaced again—this time from the refugee camp itself.
There are political arguments about Oslo, security arrangements, and who violated which agreement.
But what language describes a refugee becoming a refugee for a second time?
Settlement expansion, too, is often reduced to an image of houses appearing on a hill.
But for Palestinians living nearby, a settlement is not simply a house.
It is also a road, a checkpoint, a gate, an outpost, a field a farmer can no longer safely reach, and a grazing area a shepherd can no longer use.
During the first eight months of 2026, the United Nations documented more than 1,600 settler attacks resulting in Palestinian casualties or property damage across 275 communities.
But numbers alone do not explain what happens afterward.
Can the farmer return to his field after an attack?
Can the shepherd return to the same hill tomorrow?
Can a family continue to live where every journey to its land becomes a confrontation?
Consider Al-Mughayyir, northeast of Ramallah.
By early September, more than 56 settler attacks resulting in casualties or property damage had been documented there during 2026.
Settlement outposts have expanded around the village, while access to agricultural and grazing land has become increasingly restricted.
On September 2, two Palestinian children were shot and killed by Israeli forces there amid another period of settler attacks and military operations.
At that point, settlement expansion is no longer simply construction on a hill.
It becomes a system of pressure on a village and on the ability of its people to remain.
Then there is water.
A Palestinian farmer may legally own his land. But what does ownership mean if he cannot water it?
This question is especially acute in the Jordan Valley.
In Bardala this year, Israeli forces demolished seven agricultural greenhouses covering about 11 dunums and destroyed the water networks connected to them.
It may sound like a small incident beside the headlines of war and killing.
It is not small to a farmer waiting for water to save his crop.
If water disappears for days, he may lose a harvest. If the problem continues, he may lose his income. If access to water becomes a permanent struggle, farming itself may become impossible.
And when farming becomes impossible, a Palestinian does not simply lose a crop.
He loses one of the strongest reasons he has for remaining on his land.
This is why displacement does not always begin with a bulldozer demolishing a home.
The house may remain standing while the field goes dry, grazing land shrinks, the road closes, and attacks continue.
Eventually, a family packs its belongings and leaves.
From a distance, that departure may look voluntary.
But it did not happen in a vacuum.
And then there is Gaza.
Not because Gaza and the West Bank have experienced the same reality.
They have not.
But both were part of the Palestinian territory Palestinians entered Oslo believing would eventually become their state.
In 2005, Israel removed its settlements from Gaza and withdrew its permanent ground forces from inside the territory. While settlements disappeared from Gaza, the settlement project continued expanding in the West Bank.
After Hamas took control of Gaza in 2007, Israel imposed a severe blockade, while Egypt also maintained restrictions on the Rafah crossing.
On October 7, 2023, Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups launched a large-scale attack on Israel. Israeli civilians and soldiers were killed, and hostages were taken into Gaza.
That is a fact, and it should be stated.
But it does not tell the story of what followed.
By September 9, 2026, the reported Palestinian death toll in Gaza since October 2023 had reached 73,669, with 174,652 people reported injured, according to Gaza's Ministry of Health.
Entire neighborhoods have been devastated. Families have been displaced repeatedly. Hundreds of thousands of homes have been damaged or destroyed, alongside hospitals, schools, roads, water networks, and other essential infrastructure.
In September 2025, the United Nations Independent International Commission of Inquiry concluded that Israeli authorities and security forces had committed and were continuing to commit genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. In June 2026, the commission issued further findings concerning violations against Palestinian children and concluded that the deliberate targeting of children had resulted in acts of genocide,, crimes against humanity, and war crimes.
Israel has rejected those findings and denied committing genocide.
But Gaza does not need legal language or statistics alone to tell its story.
Ask one family a simpler question: Is there still a home to return to?
And in the West Bank, ask another: Will Palestinians still be able to remain on their land at all?
The experiences are different.
But in both places, the ability to remain has itself become a political and human question.
Put these realities on one map, and the picture becomes difficult to ignore.
In Gaza: killing, destruction, and repeated displacement.
In East Jerusalem: settlement expansion, demolitions, and displacement.
In Area C: settlements, outposts, and pressure on Palestinian communities.
In E1: a threat to territorial continuity.
In the Jordan Valley: a struggle not only over land, but over the water that determines whether people can farm and remain.
These realities are not identical.
But they lead back to the same question: Who will still be able to remain on the land?
After 33 years, it is no longer enough for governments to say they remain committed to the two-state solution.
If the world genuinely wants two states, it must protect the physical possibility of a Palestinian state now—an independent and sovereign state on the 1967 borders, with East Jerusalem as its capital.
Stopping settlement expansion, preventing displacement, protecting Palestinian land and water resources, and halting projects that destroy territorial continuity are not issues that can be postponed until another negotiation.
They determine whether there will still be something left to negotiate.
But if the international community continues to speak about two states while, on the ground, one state consolidates control over the territory between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River, then another question can no longer be avoided: If two states are made impossible, can anyone defend a permanent one-state reality in which Palestinians and Israelis do not enjoy equal national and political rights?
It is not for me, or for this article, to decide on behalf of Palestinians and Israelis what the final political arrangement must look like.
But one principle should be simpler than every map and every negotiating formula: The future cannot be the permanent domination of one people by another.
Either there are two real states: Israel and an independent, sovereign Palestinian state on the 1967 borders with East Jerusalem as its capital.
Or, if the reality created on the ground makes that solution impossible, there must be one democratic state in which Palestinians and Israelis live with equal rights and equal citizenship.
The international community cannot defend the two-state solution in words, accept one-state control in practice, and reject equal rights within the reality that emerges.
In September 1993, the world watched Arafat and Rabin shake hands
The question then was: When will the Palestinian state be established?
Thirty-three years later, another question comes first: What land will remain for that state—and who will still be there to live on it?
Maps do not record intentions.
They record outcomes.
When a farmer is prevented from reaching his land, when a shepherd loses his grazing ground, when water no longer reaches a field, when a home is demolished, and when a refugee is displaced again from a refugee camp, it is not only individual lives that change.
The map changes.
That is why the question is no longer simply: Where is the Palestinian state?
It is also: Is there still enough connected land for such a state to exist—and will Palestinians still be able to remain on it?
We can disagree over the name, borders, or structure of the eventual solution.
But no permanent solution can mean one people enjoying full national and political rights while another remains under its control without the same fundamental rights.
A bombing may stop. A military raid may end. A bulldozer may leave. A checkpoint may be removed.
But if a family has lost its home, if a farmer has lost access to his land, if a crop has died because water no longer reaches it, or if a refugee has been displaced once again, the result remains visible on the map.
The land stays where it is.
What changes is who is able to remain on it.
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They Told the World the War Was Over—Gaza Knows Better
A ceasefire cannot mean peace when people are still being killed, buried under rubble, and denied the basic conditions for rebuilding their lives.
Sep 09, 2026
When US President Donald Trump declared in October 2025 that “the war is over,” the statement quickly became part of the international language surrounding Gaza. Headlines shifted. Political leaders began speaking about a post-war phase. The world was encouraged to look forward—to reconstruction, diplomacy, and what might come next.
But from inside Gaza, the distinction between “war” and “peace” has never been so simple. A ceasefire may reduce the intensity of bombardment. It may change the language used by politicians and diplomats. But for Palestinians who remain surrounded by destruction, displacement, deprivation, and the remains of those who were killed, the war does not simply disappear because leaders declare a new phase.
On August 4, Gaza witnessed a devastating reminder of this reality. The remains of 112 Palestinians were buried in a mass funeral in Gaza City, more than two and a half years after they were killed in an Israeli strike on the Sabra neighborhood. The victims included 37 children. Rescue workers spent weeks searching through the ruins for their remains, working with almost no equipment and identifying bodies through fragments, clothing, family testimony, and whatever personal belongings could be recovered.
For the families, the violence did not end when the bombs stopped falling on that neighborhood. It continued in the rubble. And the 112 bodies were not an isolated tragedy. Gaza's Civil Defence has estimated that around 8,000 bodies remain beneath the rubble across the strip. Recovery teams say that removing them will require heavy equipment that is still desperately lacking. Without that equipment, the dead may remain trapped for years.
A ceasefire should be the beginning of ending the violence—not an excuse to redefine its consequences as peace.
This is what it means to tell Palestinians that the war is over. For many people outside Gaza, war is measured by explosions: the number of airstrikes, the intensity of fighting, or the number of military operations reported each day. For those of us living here, war is also measured in what remains after the explosions.
It is measured in the family searching for the body of a missing relative. It is measured in children growing up among destroyed schools. It is measured in homes that no longer exist, universities reduced to ruins, hospitals struggling to function, and displaced families who cannot return to places that once defined their lives. It is measured in the enormous task of removing the dead from beneath the rubble before their families can bury them.
The language of a “post-war” Gaza therefore risks becoming another form of erasure. It suggests that the violence belongs to the past, while the consequences are treated as a humanitarian problem waiting to be solved.
But Gaza cannot simply be rebuilt like a damaged road. A society has been shattered. Families have been separated and destroyed. Communities have disappeared. Hundreds of thousands of people have lost homes. Children have lost years of education. The physical destruction is accompanied by grief that cannot be captured by reconstruction statistics. And yet, international attention has increasingly moved elsewhere.
This is perhaps the most painful part. People around the world demonstrated for Gaza. Students occupied campuses. Human rights organizations documented violations. Workers and trade unions called for solidarity. Millions of ordinary people refused to accept the destruction of an entire population as normal.
But public sympathy does not automatically produce political action. Western governments can express concern while continuing to treat Gaza as a diplomatic file rather than a human emergency. Leaders can call for peace while failing to ensure that Palestinians have the conditions necessary to live with dignity. Statements can be issued, condolences offered, and conferences held—while the consequences of the destruction remain largely the responsibility of Palestinians themselves.
This is why the words “the war is over” matter. Words shape political reality. When a government, president, or media institution describes Gaza as post-war, audiences far from the strip may assume that the emergency has passed. Attention moves elsewhere. Political pressure decreases. The suffering becomes background noise.
But the people of Gaza cannot move on simply because the world has decided to. The 112 people buried in August had already waited nearly three years for a grave. Thousands more remain beneath the rubble. Their families are still waiting. And millions of Palestinians are still trying to understand what “peace” is supposed to mean when they have nowhere safe to return to and so little ability to rebuild what was destroyed.
A ceasefire should be the beginning of ending the violence—not an excuse to redefine its consequences as peace. If the international community truly wants to speak about a post-war Gaza, it must first confront what the war has left behind. That means guaranteeing sustained humanitarian access; enabling the removal and identification of those buried beneath the rubble; supporting the rebuilding of homes, schools, hospitals, and universities; and establishing meaningful accountability for violations of international law.
Most importantly, Palestinians must not be treated merely as recipients of humanitarian assistance. They must be recognized as people with rights, agency, and a future that belongs to them. The world may want to turn the page on Gaza. We cannot. We are still living in the pages that came before.
For those of us here, the war is not an entry in a history book. It is the rubble outside our doors, the empty chair at the family table, the child who cannot return to school, and the grave that took years to become possible. So when the world is told that the war is over, listen to Gaza.
Look beneath the rubble.
Count the graves.
And ask whether peace can truly be declared while thousands of the dead are still waiting to be found.
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Gaza Is Still Waiting to Bury Its Dead
Recovering the dead has become a final test of human dignity
Sep 06, 2026
In every war, there is supposed to come a moment when the guns fall silent and families carry their dead to the cemetery.
In Gaza, that moment has still not fully arrived.
Nearly three years into the war, thousands of Palestinian families are still waiting—not to learn whether their loved ones survived, but for the chance to recover what remains of them from beneath collapsed homes and buried streets.
Many families know almost exactly where their relatives are: beneath a particular building, under a collapsed staircase, behind layers of concrete too heavy to move by hand. Across Gaza, rubble is no longer only evidence of destruction. In many places, it is also a grave.
There should be no disagreement over one principle: The dead have a right to be recovered and buried with dignity, and families have a right to know where their loved ones lie.
The urgent humanitarian question is therefore not only how many people were killed. It is how many are still waiting to be recovered, identified, and buried.
On August 4, 2026, Gaza held a mass funeral for 112 members of the al-Hassayna and Abu Sharia extended family. Their remains had been recovered from homes destroyed in Gaza City’s Sabra neighborhood in November 2023. For nearly three years, their families had waited to bury them.
That funeral was a warning about what time does to the dead—and to those left behind.
The longer remains stay beneath collapsed buildings, the harder identification becomes. Decomposition advances. Bones separate. Personal belongings are displaced. Forensic evidence deteriorates. Gaza’s forensic capacity also remains severely limited.
For families, identification is not a technical detail. It is the difference between a missing person and a known grave. It is the ability to perform a funeral, visit a burial place, and begin mourning with certainty rather than suspicion.
For relatives, the waiting is its own form of suffering. Some families return again and again to the same ruins, pointing to the place where a bedroom, kitchen, or stairwell once stood. They are not asking for certainty about survival; they are asking for the basic certainty of a grave. Until recovery happens, mourning is suspended between memory and rubble.
There are legal consequences as well. Without formal recovery and identification, families can face prolonged uncertainty over death registration, inheritance, guardianship, and other civil matters. A person may be gone in every human sense and still remain unresolved on paper.
The physical challenge is enormous. A 2026 damage and needs assessment by the United Nations, the European Union, and the World Bank estimated that the war had generated more than 68 million metric tons of rubble in Gaza. Some debris are contaminated by unexploded ordnance, asbestos, and other hazardous materials.
Recovering the dead is therefore not a matter of sending people into ruins with shovels. It requires excavators, cranes, fuel, protective equipment, forensic teams, DNA identification capacity, safe humanitarian access, and protection for civil-defense and rescue workers.
Heavy machinery is not a luxury. It is the difference between a body remaining beneath concrete and a family finally being able to bury its dead.
In July 2026, the United Nations Development Programme and the European Union launched a €15 million initiative to support emergency debris removal and strengthen Gaza’s capacity for the dignified recovery and identification of human remains. It is important, but the need is far greater than any single project.
That is why debris removal must treat the recovery of human remains as a central humanitarian priority, not as an afterthought to reconstruction. Sites where people are believed to be buried should be mapped and handled carefully, with procedures for documenting remains, preserving evidence, and notifying families. Rebuilding Gaza cannot mean building over the missing.
What is required now is neither complicated nor impossible.
Humanitarian teams need safe and unhindered access to recovery sites. Excavators, cranes, fuel, spare parts, and specialized equipment must be allowed in without delay. Forensic capacity must be expanded, including DNA identification and proper preservation of remains. Civil-defense, rescue, forensic, and humanitarian teams must be protected.
These are not maximalist political demands. They are the minimum requirements of human dignity.
People will continue to disagree about politics and the future of this conflict. But there should be no disagreement over one principle: The dead have a right to be recovered and buried with dignity, and families have a right to know where their loved ones lie.
A bulldozer should not become a diplomatic bargaining chip. A crane should not require a political breakthrough. Reaching the body of a child should not become another battle.
Civilization is measured not only by what it builds for the living, but by the dignity it preserves for the dead.
Open the crossings and humanitarian routes. Allow the heavy machinery and forensic equipment in. Protect the teams recovering the dead. Give families the chance to bury their loved ones.
Because even after war has taken a life, it should not be allowed to take away a name, a grave, and a final goodbye.
Human dignity does not end with death.
Let Gaza bury its dead.
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