Even in the midst of great slaughter and suffering, Israel’s attempts at ethnic cleansing face insurmountable challenges. What may seem to be brazen acts fuelled by total impunity are actually desperate and deranged acts in a colonial genocide that has become dysfunctional. Bloodlust and fanaticism have come to over-ride cold strategic calculation. Ultimately Israel has no way of achieving the ethnic cleansing of Palestine and it cannot withhold rights from its Palestinian subjects forever.

I write this article in response to a passage that shocked me in the epilogue to Pankaj Mishra’s book The World After Gaza (2025):

As the climate crisis brings forth a world of barbed-wire borders, walls and apartheid, and cruelty in the name of self-preservation receives singularly wide sanction, most recently in Donald Trump’s electoral triumph, Israel will most likely succeed in ethnic-cleansing Gaza, and the West Bank as well.

There is already too much evidence that the arc of the moral universe does not bend towards justice, powerful men have always made their massacres seem necessary and righteous. It’s not at all difficult to imagine a triumphant conclusion to the Israeli onslaught, or its retrospective sanitizing by historians and journalists as well as politicians.

My dismay comes in no little part from how good the rest of Mishra’s The World After Gaza is. These words felt like a betrayal that hit me as an unexpected gut-punch. This is not because of my belief in the cause of Palestinian freedom. I am not letting my heart blind me to reality, in fact I believe the inverse to be true. Mishra is evincing a privileged form of defeatism. At the end of a wonderfully sober book Mishra for some reason surrendered to sentimentality. It is the inverse of baseless optimism, but it is no less self-indulgent for the fact that it makes him feel bad.

I am not a Pollyanna. I do not think that humanity is continually becoming less violent through some law of Whiggish progress. In the abstract I do not deny that what Mishra claims is possible or even probable in other circumstances. It is not hard to recall other times when horrific genocides have been turned into triumphs, and then even spawned genres of historical fiction in which the victims become the villains. From stories of Richard the Lionheart, to John Wayne Westerns, to American Sniper, this shit does keep happening. But Mishra uses the absolute term “always” far too blithely. Hitler was a “powerful” man by any normal measure but he did not manage to leave legacy in which history judges his massacres as “necessary and righteous”.

Like the Israelis, Hitler believed he could write a grand story through mass violence in the manner that had served so well in British and US colonial genocides. He was wrong. The Zionists are wrong. The world was not the same in 1939. It was not the same in 1947. It was not the same in 2023.

Colonial genocides work by destroying indigenous histories. Israel has spent decades slowly destroying the physical manifestations of historical Palestinian presence but still has come nowhere near the sort of erasure seen in the US, Canada, Aotearoa and Australia. Now they are engaged in the most futile acts of memoricide imaginable. They destroy mosques, churches, libraries and universities, but it is documented by a million Palestinian cameras and even uploaded injudiciously by their own genocidal personnel. They are not destroying Palestinian identity, they are making Palestinians one of the most recognisable groups on the planet.

Timing is everything. Aimé Césaire claimed that Nazism was only colonialism practised at home. “They tolerated Nazism before it was inflicted on them… because, until then, it had been applied only to non-European peoples.” Perhaps there is some truth here, but what might the world have looked like had Britain and France not declared war during the invasion of Poland? What would the world have looked like if Germany’s leader were a patient imperialist more like his Anglo role models? What if Germany had spent decades of playing divide-and-conquer, signing and breaking treaties then always blaming their own perfidy on the innate violence of the barbaric slavs? They might easily have replicated the success of Anglo settler-colonies.

Césaire might be right about the racist hypocrisy of Europeans, but the German-led Axis powers killed 26 million Slavs and 6 million Jews in the space of less than 6 years. No other racial slaughter in history matches this intensity. The public response in the Axis home countries was roughly no more nor less contended than that shown by British people in response to the violence of the slaughter at Ombdurman in 1898 or the brutality meted out in suppressing the Indian Mutiny.

The reason Germany could not repeat the genocidal successes of other European powers was circumstantial and seemed to be completely independent of the skin colour of the victims. The scale of the slaughter was too large and the war was not confined to the intended victim groups. Most importantly, though, they lost the war.

After 1945 things would become even more difficult for would-be settler colonials. In the wake of World War II a more determined ethos of universality took hold of the world than had occurred in the wake of World War I. Human rights were for all humans. Notably absent were the racist notions of the need for “tutelage” that allowed European powers to grab more territory as “League Mandates” after WWI.

The UN Charter, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and various conventions and treaties all pointed to a non-racist world order – on paper at least. This did not end imperialist genocides, nor the cruel depredations of neocolonialism, but it set the scene for the end of most direct colonial regimes and it made new settler colonial projects legally and morally anathema. The Shoah gave some validation of Zionist arguments for the need for a Jewish homeland and they were backed by duplicitous manoeuvrings by the UK and the US. Thus a partial blind eye was turned to this particular settler-colonial project on the basis of pretending that a “just and lasting settlement” would come at some future date. This contingent approval for a clearly insupportable injustice always needed the concealment of a mask of temporary expedient. Even as generations were born and died Israel’s existence is only regularised by a fig-leaf of future just resolutions for Palestinian refugees and occupied populations.

In 1947 the UN General Assembly proposed a partition plan in Palestine. The British knew that Zionist paramilitary leaders would not accept this and they knew that the paramilitary forces (Haganah, Irgun and Lehi) would be able to take the entirety of Palestine. Britain gave a green light to Jordan to invade and occupy the West Bank. Her Majesty’s Government was sufficiently in favour of this move that they defied a UN arms embargo to supply necessary weapons. The reason that the British did this was to further their ends of power projection into the oil-rich Arab-populated lands of the region. They wanted Israel to be insecure – a bleeding sore and a permanent source of conflict with Arabs.

This was the worst possible outcome for the Palestinian people. Had Israel taken the entirety of Mandate Palestine the remaining Palestinian population would have been large, if not a majority. The sort of ethnic cleansing required to change that would have destroyed the Zionist pretext of fighting a war, especially in the absence of an “invasion” by neighbouring Arab countries. Likewise, a partition of Palestine would have been a huge injustice in itself, and yet would have left Palestinians in a far better position in future years and decades. A Palestinian state could have sought redress as a wronged peer with a theoretically equal voice in international fora. These are simplified counterfactuals, but I hope they illustrate that the end result of losing 78% of mandate Palestine was calculated (if only incidentally) to leave Palestinians in the weakest and least secure position possible. They were effectively pawns in game of world domination.

The US inheritors of British imperial designs achieved that world domination, and control of Middle Eastern oil was arguably the keystone of the architecture.

While we are on the subject of deranged schemes it is worth recalling that wilful Zionist fantasies of a land without a people for a people without a land were never sustainable. Even the most hardline “realist” revisionist forms of Zionism were and still are deluded. To cleanse enough of the Palestinian population to make a stable “democratic” Jewish state would take either the expulsion or mass murder of millions. Killing that many would immediately create a pariah state. On the other hand, expelling them does not erase them, their identity, nor their legal rights. People whose great-grandparents were expelled from Palestine in the Nakba still have a legal claim to the right to return. People being slowly forced out of the West Bank and Jerusalem have a right of return and if things continue as they currently are will have a clear case to be considered refugees rather than migrants. Israel cannot write the story they want no matter how much Palestinian blood they use.

What path does Mishra see by which Israel will now be able follow to achieve what it could not over eight decades of trying? How would this happen?

There is clearly a crisis in the US empire and in global capitalism. I think that this is why the Gaza Holocaust is happening. Israel could have stopped its current onslaught at any time before now, leaving a battered Gaza to suffer until it finds the next pretext for “mowing the lawn”. Instead it is relentless. It has also conducted unprecedented operations in Syria and the West Bank, and is trying hard to end the power of Hezbollah entirely. No one should mistake the fact that there is an urgency in these actions. Supporters around the world are also acting as if impelled, burning up political capital furiously to provide diplomatic and discursive cover for the most documented atrocities in human existence.

History is written by the winners, but how practically can Israel “win” in terms of full ethnic cleansing? If Egypt (for example) agrees to take the entire population of Gaza tomorrow there will still need to be a forced expulsion. It would be just the first difficult step in a long process that would cause a massive popular and institutional backlash.

The winners are always those who can write the history. By the same token, no victory will ever be complete until the story of the victory is believed. Who will ever believe in the triumph of Israel over the baby-beheading rapist terrorists with what we have seen? Even the biased Western media can’t spin everything, and Israel’s genocidal machinery is writing an indelible story of obscene criminality.

There is a global reservoir of digitally-enhanced folk-memory that will keep intruding into the mainstream, even reaching the confused victims of Western news media. Around the globe there is shared a language of chants and sayings such as “every Zionist accusation is a confession”. We know of unforgettable crimes that are seared into our hearts. We know names of the dead. We can inform people about Refaat Alareer, Hind Rajab, and Hossam Shabat. We have poetry. We have music. We have statistics; photographs; running jokes; books; documentaries, dedicated news outlets, websites, logos, a brand of cola, and a massive podcast ecosystem.

Palestine solidarity activists have, by pure circumstance, developed a durable shared identity. We have the gravity of the weight of all of the tears we have shed. That will stay for our lifetimes and when the contention dies it is our stories that will inform our friends, family and neighbours about what really happened. Israel cannot silence the voices of Palestinians with all its weapons and prisons, and it has no way of extinguishing the global voices of solidarity. We cannot be forced to stop and we have no reason to stop until Palestine is free.

Israel killed journalist Fatima Hassouna just the day after it was announced that a documentary about her was accepted to be shown at Cannes this year. It is hard to believe that this is a coincidence, and what they have done is to create another enduring symbol. What impact will that documentary have now? Can it be imagined that the people who watch it will ever be able to accept future Zionist lies? Assuming it was a deliberate act, the killing of this young woman is surely meant to demoralise. It is surely meant to be a brazen display of impunity. It is surely meant to force the flak-wary leaders and organisers of the Western world to commit further to the fictions of hasbara, trapping them in a web of absurdity. But they are skinning the sheep that their forefathers have profitably shorn for decades.

Israelis are destroying the myths that have sustained 80 years of slow genocide. The frontline troops that have let their chauvinist self-belief and hatred of Palestinians lead them to make unwise advertisements of their own criminality, and the highest leaders seem to think that showing the world a face limitless brutality will create assent and compliance. How could anyone think that they will succeed this way?

The resistance is inextinguishable. That is why it is only a matter of time before Palestine is free.

Only a matter of time.

Only.

But time is not trivial. People are suffering and dying. This week we saw children incinerated in their tents. Their dying agonies should reach the world, should move the world, should shake the world like a thunderclap, but they are just another irreplaceable loss, their agonies another irreversible obscenity. Each day brings more. Perhaps that is the thing that made me feel the greatest sense of hurt when reading Pankaj Mishra’s assertion that Israel will can easily succeed in its genocide. By doing this Mishra endorses the delusion that keeps the violence going.

When I say that Palestinian liberation is inevitable it is not from optimism. It is not comfortable nor comforting because it means that each new day’s suffering is as futile and arbitrary as it is inhuman. What I mean to convey is that the more we do to end this, the fewer people will suffer. That is all.

This genocide no longer serves a purpose, not for Israel, not for the US. The US empire is retrenching, but like the cruel colonial powers of the past it is flailing destructively as it withdraws, its leaders believing they will never face justice. Maybe they are correct. Israel, on the other hand, cannot win this fight and with each passing day of violence they inflict future harm on their children and grandchildren. They inflict harm on their own future selves.

Others will pay a price too. Israel needs an international support structure to continue this Holocaust. Currently Western and many other leaders around the world are siding with power against what is right. We need to make them know that a time will come when they will pay. Their names will be dirt. Some may face prosecution. Everything is recorded. Everything is known. If they want to keep their careers they had better be in the vanguard of those who one day (as Omar Akkad says) will always have been against this.

Not if, when.

It will be.