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war & peace
Justice Without Exception: Palestinianism and the Global Call for Disarmament
Palestinianism insists that disarmament must extend beyond arsenals to include the dismantling of the systems that arm injustice: unchecked power, selective law, and institutional silence.
Oct 29, 2025
Each October, the United Nations observes Disarmament Week—a global call to reduce weapons, promote peace, and raise awareness about the human cost of armed conflict. Held annually from October 24 to 30, this observance invites governments, civil society, and individuals to reflect on the roots of violence and the pathways to peace. In 2025, as the world confronts escalating conflicts and humanitarian crises, the objectives of Disarmament Week resonate with renewed urgency.
This essay argues that true disarmament must dismantle not only weapons but the global systems that perpetuate impunity and selective justice. It invites reflection on how Palestinianism reframes peace—not as the absence of conflict, but as the restoration of dignity.
Palestinianism as Ethical Framework
Palestinianism has emerged as a global ethical framework. It links Palestinian resistance to struggles for justice worldwide—from South Africa’s fight against apartheid to Indigenous and anti-racist movements. It also exposes the failures of global governance, where law is bent by power, and silence becomes complicity.
Palestinianism insists that disarmament must extend beyond arsenals. It must include the dismantling of the systems that arm injustice: unchecked power, selective law, and institutional silence. In this sense, Disarmament Week is not only about reducing weapons—it is about confronting the ideologies and structures that perpetuate violence.
Systemic Violence and International Law
The war on Gaza illustrates a spectrum of violence prohibited under international humanitarian law, particularly the Fourth Geneva Convention. United Nations agencies and humanitarian organizations have documented patterns including indiscriminate attacks on civilians, destruction of medical facilities, targeting journalists, and denial of humanitarian aid.
Observers describe these violations in layered terms:
- Genocide: Acts that may reveal an intent to erase a people.
- Medicide: The deliberate targeting of healthcare systems and personnel, violating medical neutrality.
- Ecocide: The destruction of farmland and water systems, threatening survival and livelihoods.
- Epistemicide: The silencing of memory through attacks on journalists, schools, and archives—an attempt to erase not just lives but legacies.
These crimes are lived realities, reflecting the erosion of norms meant to safeguard humanity. They reveal what jurists call the “architecture of impunity”: a UN system paralyzed by vetoes, and a world where accountability is rationed by politics.
Expanding the Meaning of Disarmament
The integration of Palestinianism into the discourse of Disarmament Week adds new dimensions to the very definition of disarmament. It shifts the focus from weapons alone to the systems that sustain violence: impunity, silence, and structural inequality. Disarmament, in this light, becomes not only a technical goal but a moral imperative—a commitment to dismantling the conditions that allow injustice to persist. It is about restoring dignity where it has been denied, and ensuring that peace is not built on erasure, but on recognition.
Global Contradictions and the UN Mandate
Palestinianism reveals contradictions at the heart of international governance. States pledge “never again,” yet stand idle as starvation and mass displacement unfold. The International Court of Justice affirms that obligations under humanitarian law are owed to all humanity, yet enforcement remains elusive.
This gap between principle and practice is not unique to Palestine, but it is most brutally exposed there. It raises a critical question: Is international law a shield for the vulnerable, or a tool for the powerful?
Disarmament Week offers a moment to confront these contradictions. It reminds us that peace is not the absence of war—it is the presence of justice. It calls on the international community to uphold the rule of law, protect civilians, and ensure that disarmament is not selective.
Global Solidarity and Recognition
Despite paralysis at the level of great powers, civil society, universities, international organizations, and media across the globe have responded with unprecedented solidarity with the Palestinian people. Student movements have organized teach-ins, professional associations have spoken out, and grassroots campaigns have mobilized worldwide.
Global media outlets have amplified Palestinian voices, countering narratives that erase suffering or normalize occupation. A growing number of governments have also recognized the State of Palestine, affirming the right of its people to self-determination and challenging decades of diplomatic stalemate.
These developments show that Palestinianism is not confined to the Middle East. It is a transnational consciousness, affirming that justice for Palestine and Palestinians is justice for humanity.
Personal Reflection as a Health Professional
As a health professional, I have had the privilege of visiting several Palestinian refugee camps. There, I witnessed not only the daily hardships of displacement, but also the resilience of families determined to preserve dignity under the harshest conditions. Working alongside local health and social organizations, I saw how disabled refugees in particular faced compounded layers of exclusion—yet also how communities mobilized to support them with courage and creativity.
I remember a child in a wheelchair, smiling as he recited poetry in a crowded clinic. His voice was soft, but his presence was defiant—a reminder that dignity resists even in rubble.
These experiences deepened my understanding of Palestinianism as more than an abstract principle. It is lived in the bodies of children denied healthcare, in the aspirations of students studying in overcrowded classrooms, and in the perseverance of families who rebuild after every demolition. Palestinianism, for me, is therefore not only a global framework of justice and peace—it is also a lived ethic of solidarity, rooted in the faces and stories of people I had the honor to serve.
Conclusion: Justice Without Exception
Palestinianism is a call to conscience. It affirms that the denial of rights in Palestine threatens the universality of human rights and the credibility of international law.To embrace Palestinianism is to affirm justice without exception—not as a slogan, but as a standard and a criterion.
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Supporters of Peace in Gaza Must Work to Ensure That No One Will Be Forced to Leave
Israeli and US leaders must commit to the Trump peace plan’s promise that no one will be expelled from Gaza.
Oct 26, 2025
Amid some extremely cautious optimism for peace following a tenuous and incomplete ceasefire in Gaza, any hope for Gaza’s future depends significantly on a little-noticed point in President Donald Trump’s original 20-point peace plan.
The plan’s 12th point says, “No one will be forced to leave Gaza, and those who wish to leave will be free to do so and free to return.” The plan goes even further, saying, “We will encourage people to stay and offer them the opportunity to build a better Gaza.”
Although there are reasons to doubt many elements of the Trump “peace plan”—which neither side has agreed to in full—the assertion that no one will be forced to leave Gaza represents a major reversal: Prior Israeli and US government policy clearly aimed to force some or all Palestinians from the Strip.
Indeed, Trump’s previous plan to turn Gaza into the “Riviera of the Middle East” involved displacing Palestinians outside the Strip. Last March, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stated his support for the “realization of the Trump plan” and what some Israeli and US leaders euphemistically called “voluntary migration.”
Ending the displacement of Palestinians as well as the mass killing and destruction of Gaza’s infrastructure are clear requirements for anything approaching peace.
“This is the plan. We are not hiding it,” Netanyahu said. That same month, the Israeli cabinet approved the creation of a so-called Voluntary Emigration Bureau charged with moving Palestinians out of Gaza and to other countries such as Libya, Indonesia, and the Republic of the Congo.
The mass expulsion of Palestinians by the Israeli government has been a major feature of the last two years of violence following the October 7, 2023 attacks by Hamas and allied forces, which resulted in the deaths of around 1,200 Israelis and foreigners. In a new report published by Brown University’s Costs of War Project, I compiled the best available international data to document how the Israeli military has displaced almost everyone in Gaza over the past two years: 2,026,636 people or around 92% of the strip’s pre-war population. Many have been displaced multiple times: on average, three to four times for every displaced person. Around 45% of the displaced have been kids.
The displacement has extended to the West Bank, where some Israeli leaders have also supported ethnic cleansing. In the last two years, 43,624 Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem have been displaced from their homes by the Israeli military and police forces, government-backed Israeli settlers, Israeli government demolition orders, and other violent causes. Broader Israeli and US wars in the region have displaced an additional 3.2 million people in Iran, Lebanon, and Israel itself, as well as what are likely thousands more in Yemen and Syria.
According to numerous experts, the mass displacement of Palestinians—nearly 12,000 per day on average in Gaza alone—constitutes the war crime of “forcible transfer,” which is a crime against humanity under international law. Sens. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) and Jeff Merkley (D-Ore) concluded in a September 2025 report that “the facts demonstrated overwhelmingly” that Israel was “implementing a plan to ethnically cleanse Gaza of Palestinians and dealing a death blow to the vision of a future Palestinian state that would include Gaza and the West Bank.” Any implementation of the original Trump plan to displace Palestinians to other countries would constitute further war crimes and ethnic cleansing. It would also continue a pattern of ethnic cleansing dating to the founding of the Israeli state in 1948 and Israeli military forces’ expulsion of more than 700,000 Palestinians in what Palestinians call the Nakba—the catastrophe.
The lives of millions of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, and ultimately the lives of millions of Israelis, hang in the balance as the world waits to see if Netanyahu’s government abides by the current ceasefire and commits to a full end to its war or if it re-commences its assault and genocide as it has in prior ceasefires.
Since the announcement of a deal this month, thousands of displaced Palestinians have filled roads walking in search of their homes in a vast landscape of grey rubble. The sight of people trying to return home amid such destruction offers a glimmer of hope while reflecting the immensity of the challenges ahead.
“I’m going to Gaza City even though there are no conditions for life there—no infrastructure, no fresh water,” one of the displaced, Naim Irheem, insisted to one of the few news outlets reporting from Gaza. “Everything is extremely difficult, truly difficult, but we must go back. My son was killed, all my daughters were wounded. Still, I want to return. We’ll pitch a tent and live in it, however it can be done.”
Ending the displacement of Palestinians as well as the mass killing and destruction of Gaza’s infrastructure are clear requirements for anything approaching peace. Israeli and US leaders must commit to the Trump peace plan’s promise that no one will be expelled from Gaza.
This promise—and the entire peace process—may prove to be yet another cynical ruse, much like the Israeli government calling past expulsion “voluntary migration.” For now, supporters of peace must work to ensure that no one will be forced to leave Gaza, that the displaced can return home as international law requires, and that they receive aid and reparations for their displacement.
These must be among the first steps toward real peace and justice that will require holding perpetrators accountable for their crimes and addressing Palestinians’ rightful demands to return to homes from which they were displaced beginning in 1948.
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Halloween in the Age of Extermination: When Horror Comes Free in Gaza
Everything sold in the US—fear, death, darkness, and mass destruction—is handed to Palestinian children freely, but with real blood, real tears, and real destruction.
Oct 24, 2025
While walking through an American shopping mall, I was struck by many Halloween sections: plastic skulls, hanging ghosts, mock gravestones, jack-o’-lanterns with terrifying faces, and zombie costumes for children. Everything was crafted with care—for fun. Even private gardens and doorways were adorned with these symbols of fear. But the real shock came as I entered the halls of an international cybersecurity and technology conference. Some companies had installed dancing skeletons, singing skulls, and smoke-spewing props to attract visitors to their booths.
When I asked about it, they replied: “It’s October. People are getting ready for Halloween—with all its spooky decorations and traditions.”
Yet amid this polished spectacle, I couldn’t help but think of the children in Gaza. There, no costume is needed to experience horror. Everything sold here—fear, death, darkness, and mass destruction—is handed to them freely, but with real blood, real tears, and real destruction.
Halloween: From Ritual Death to Commercial Spectacle
Halloween originated in Europe from the ancient Celtic festival of Samhain, when people believed spirits returned to Earth at the end of harvest. Over time, it evolved into a global commercial event, with families spending over $10 billion annually on decorations, costumes, and candy.
On this day:Jack-o’-lanterns glow with grotesque faces.
Skulls hang from doors.
Children dress as the dead or the undead.
The blood is real.
The skulls are not plastic.
And horror is not celebrated—it is survived.
Gaza: Horror Without Celebration
It is a cruel irony that the final week of October—when Halloween is celebrated—is also United Nations Disarmament Week (24-30 October), a time meant to promote peace. Yet since October 2023, more than 68,000 people have been killed in Gaza, including thousands of children. Over 170,000 have been injured, and nearly 2 million displaced. Hundreds have died from hunger and malnutrition, including more than 100 children.
These children, supposedly protected by the Convention on the Rights of the Child, found no shield from death or fear.
They do not ask for candy—they search for their families and friends, if they are still alive. Moreover, they search for water, food, medicine, and survival.
On Halloween, children fear the dark.
In Gaza, children live in darkness.
On Halloween, skulls are sold.
In Gaza, skulls are pulled from the rubble.
From Horror to Justice and Mercy
Where is the justice the world so proudly proclaims in its forums and conferences?
Where is the voice of international humanitarian law, created to protect civilians in war?
Where is the echo of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which promised dignity and equality for all?
What if the billions spent on Halloween were redirected to aid children in Gaza—and everywhere?
What if we replaced manufactured horror with real joy?
What if this occasion became a moment of global solidarity?
Instead of celebrating death, let us learn to end it.
Instead of decorating our homes with skulls, let us rebuild the homes that were destroyed.
Instead of fearing ghosts, let us stand with those who have lost their loved ones.
A Human Wish
I wish Halloween—this year and every year—could become a celebration of mercy and love, not death and fear.
That jack-o’-lanterns would glow with messages of solidarity, not monstrous grins.
That our doors, gardens, and conferences would display the faces of children who lost their families and schools—not plastic skulls.
I wish we could redefine fear as a gateway to compassion,
And redefine celebration as a call for justice and human rights.
Conclusion: Halloween as a Mirror of Conscience
Halloween is not a holiday that must be canceled—but one that must be understood.
In a world where images of death are consumed as entertainment, we must restore humanity to the victims.
In a time when homes are adorned with skulls, perhaps we should adorn our hearts with mercy.
As Mother Teresa once said, “If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other.”
Children in Gaza do not need masks.
They need justice and a global conscience that does not turn away—and does not disguise itself.
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