The war in Gaza has given rise to unprecedented protests in the West and divided the international community between nations supporting and condemning Israel. It has also led to countries like South Africa and Nicaragua initiating legal action against Israel that has resulted in equally unprecedented indictments. But despite dividing Western societies and the international order in hitherto unimaginable ways, popular mobilisation against the war remains far greater in Western Europe and North America than elsewhere.[1] It is true that demonstrators in the West are challenging the complicity of their own governments in the war. But it is still surprising that we have seen no sustained upsurge of anti-Western let alone anti-Israeli demonstrations in other parts of the world despite their long history of protest.
Why might people in the world outside the West no longer be so actively engaged with the Palestinian cause? Because, I shall argue, it is seen as representing a juridical rather than political claim tethered to an increasingly discredited international order still dominated by the West. The Palestinian struggle has, after all, been presented as a humanitarian cause whose ultimate goal is the creation of a new or at least more inclusive state by legal means and mediation. But there is something belated about such a vision for Palestine, just as there is about Israeli expansionism, both characterised by dated desires. As a people awaiting decolonization, Palestinians are latecomers to a story that has in the meantime turned into a tale of postcolonial failure. And to create a nation by conquest and settlement, Zionism repeats a historical narrative that has long lost legitimacy.
The belatedness of this politics might account at least in part for both Israel and Palestine losing popular support outside the West. For if pro-Israeli demonstrations are vanishingly rare there, pro-Palestinian ones also tend to be short-lived, relatively modest in size and so rarely dominate the political and media landscape in these countries as they have done in the West. Few have pushed their governments to do more than register diplomatic protests against the war. Why has the long-standing sympathy of non-Western populations for Palestine resulted in so little popular mobilisation? It is a situation too widespread to be attributed to the fear that governments in Asia or Africa might have in antagonising the West, or in losing control of their own citizens. Nor can it be accounted for by so many people being taken up with more pressing matters.
South Asia, for example, home to the world’s largest Muslim population, is normally at the forefront of protests concerning its coreligionists. Yet it has seen few sizeable demonstrations in Pakistan and Bangladesh. Its anglicised elites share the views of protestors in Europe and America but are unable to manufacture comparable mobilisations. This is all the more surprising because South Asia, too, has witnessed the indiscriminate attack of an army upon a civilian population under its control, an attack that killed perhaps over a million people and is widely considered a genocide. This happened in 1971, as part of the civil war between Pakistan’s western and eastern wings. Given the Cold War context of the conflict, Pakistan’s pro-Western government and army was indirectly supported by the NATO powers, and it took an armed intervention by India to stop the war and free the new nation of Bangladesh.
Just as in Gaza today, the Pakistani civil war inspired widespread protests in the West and a massive fundraising campaign for aid and relief work. In doing so, it created part of the culture of protests against genocide that we have seen playing out in Europe and the Americas. And yet no Pakistani has been held accountable for crimes against humanity to this day. While the genocidal conflict in Bangladesh had to be addressed politically, the Palestinian cause appears to lack a politics. Not only does it possess a divided leadership, but neither Hamas nor the Palestinian Authority appeals to the world beyond the West. Like the Rohingya or Uyghur, understood in the language of international human rights law as the victims rather than protagonists of history, Palestinians have become tragic figures lacking sovereignty and so any compelling vision of a future that demonstrators might support.
‘Operation Al-Aqsa Flood’, as the Hamas attack initiating the war was called, also failed to inspire popular support outside the West even in the brief moment of its initial success. There was no uprising among Palestinians in Israel and the West Bank or demonstrations elsewhere in the Middle East and the Muslim world.[2] Only Iran and its allies in the ‘Axis of Resistance’ were forced by its unexpected occurrence to take what they thought was cautious and measured action against Israel, so as to lend some credibility to their claims of supporting Palestine. But they were subjected in return to punishing strikes conducted by Israel with the active assistance of its Western allies. Hamas played the role of Gavrilo Princip, whose assassination of a Habsburg archduke activated the military alliances that destroyed Europe in the First World War without being central to it.
Just as Serbian nationalism cannot account for the First World War, despite Princip’s role in its beginning, neither can the Gaza war be understood solely in terms of the Israeli-Palestinian dispute. Like the attacks of 9/11, that of October 7, 2023, became an opportunity to remake a whole region if no longer the world itself. In this sense the Gaza war is a legacy of the War on Terror rather than the Palestinian struggle, whether in terms of the legal precedents invoked, the military tactics deployed, or the regional ambitions at play. It can even be argued that Israel and the US took Hezbollah and Iran rather than Hamas as their enemies, and that it was the chance to reshape the Middle East by weakening these enemies that ensured Western support for the war. Thus, the German chancellor’s much-quoted remark that Israel was doing the “dirty work…for all of us” in bombing Iran.
Eliminating Hamas and displacing Palestinians were Israeli aims which the West tolerated if it did not fully support, just as it had tolerated the special interests and wartime excesses of other regional proxies, from Saddam Hussein in Iran to Saudi Arabia in Yemen. But, of course, the war in Gaza and beyond cannot be compared to such predecessors either in scale or in terms of its global consequences. The risks involved in destroying even the semblance of international law by encouraging and participating in war crimes, all against the backdrop of mass protests and worldwide disapproval, represents something more than the West taking advantage of an opportunity. Yet another gamble to shore up Western dominance globally, it signals not the strength that the use of force is meant to project, but rather weakness as with all forms of excessive violence.
This weakness is everywhere evident. The deployment of Israeli violence has as its context a fragile coalition government whose deeply unpopular prime minister is under investigation for corruption. This government could have announced a unilateral peace plan after repelling Hamas, when it spoke from a position of absolute moral as well as political strength. It chose instead to turn the attack into an opportunity for adventurism out of weakness, seeking to reassure Israelis shocked at the fragility of their security by promising them an inordinate revenge. European states participated in the war under the whip-hand of an unpredictable US administration to which they are now expected to pay tribute in the form of enforced trade deals. And America itself is being torn apart socially as much as constitutionally by a politics at least rhetorically heading in the direction of civil war.
None of these countries has been able to control the rapidly growing anti-war sentiment of their own citizens. But their weakness only encourages fantasies about remaking the world by relying upon military power abroad and police repression at home, while at the same time allowing governments cut off from public opinion to succumb to the threats and promises of pressure groups. It is the polarization of politics in Western Europe and North America following the Cold War that allows states there to free themselves from public opinion. This happened in 2003 with the invasion of Iraq, by which time the consensual ideal of Cold War politics in the West had disintegrated. Freed from the pressure of public opinion by their own internal conflicts, Western states have again jumped at or been cajoled into the opportunity provided by Hamas to remake the region under Israeli dominance in a way that can only weaken their own democracies further.
The war’s wide canvas has deprived Hamas of a strategy while devastating that of its backer, Iran, whose support for Palestine was about gaining a political stake in the Arab world to claim power among its Sunni population.[3] Israel represented a rival for such dominance but was not necessarily the target of Iran’s nuclear program, which was meant to serve as leverage for a deal with the West allowing for Iran’s reintegration within the international order. To pursue this strategy of regional dominance and international reintegration, Iran cultivated proxy militias in Lebanon, Iraq, and Yemen as well as equipping itself with missiles and drones as deterrence. But its very restraint was used against Iran, which could otherwise have tried following its neighbours, Pakistan and India, in crossing the nuclear threshold to negotiate a modus vivendi with the West afterwards.
The real difference between the War on Terror and the Gaza war, apart from their differences of scale, has to do with the West’s unwillingness to put troops on the ground in its more recent conflicts. It operates now through proxies, whether Israel in the Middle East or Ukraine in Europe, providing each with funds, arms and logistical support so extensive that it would be ridiculous to describe these wars as anything but US-led ones. Rather than representing contrasting examples of Western policy in which one invasion can be condemned and another approved, the wars in Ukraine and Gaza are parallel conflicts. Meant to secure Western dominance in Eastern Europe and the Middle East, they belong together and can no longer be fitted back into the genealogies of inter-ethnic strife between Russians and Ukrainians on the one hand or Israelis and Palestinians on the other.
Law and Order
Palestinian politics is belated in two ways. It invokes an increasingly moribund international order while being minoritised within a political project outside it. Hamas’s attack privileged tactics over strategy, relinquishing control of the new political situation it had created to provide opportunities for its enemies instead. In this sense Operation al-Aqsa Flood can be seen as the defining moment in Hamas’s long history of collaboration with Israel rather than a break with it.[4] Perhaps its operation was meant to prevent Palestinians from being shut out of another effort to reshape the Middle East by way of Donald Trump’s ‘Abraham Accords’. But it has resulted in an even more violent version of this plan being imposed upon the region by force. Its attack has not given Hamas the leverage to build a new political order, let alone imagine one beyond the status quo defined by the United Nations and international humanitarian law.
Tying Palestine to an international order from which it has never benefitted might be a mistake. From the late 1960s to the 1980s, the Palestinian cause was a model for resistance movements worldwide. For the IRA, the Red Brigades and Red Army Factions, the PLO served as a pioneer in the globalization of protest. Today, it does not serve as a model for anyone, having been absorbed into the histories of other and more general forms of resistance, from apartheid to settler colonialism.[5] In this way it is seen as the heir to someone else’s history and represents the unfinished work of the past rather than any new future. There is little effort to redefine terms like apartheid and settler colonialism for the Palestinian cause, unlike the way in which words like revolution were redefined in Algeria or Vietnam in a living tradition of political thought.
The terms used to describe the Palestinian struggle tend to be unchanging, legalistic, and have only very recently been challenged. In an article in the Columbia Law Review, for example, Rabea Eghbariah shows how problematic the resort to such categories is and proposes instead to foreground the Nakba or catastrophe as an alternative. Apart from being a conceptually rich Palestinian term, the Nakba names a specific history of oppression, with Eghbariah writing that “If the endpoint of genocide leaves the entire group exterminated, and that of apartheid leaves the entire group segregated, then the endpoint of the Nakba leaves the entire group displaced.”[6] It is the incompletion of ‘ethnic cleansing’ that defines the Nakba as a political and not merely juridical term. It names an ongoing struggle, not a fully-executed crime calling only for legal redress.
It is precisely the incompleteness of Palestine’s ethnic cleansing that spurs the genocidal fantasies of the Israeli far-right, whose desire to ‘finish the job’ is premised not upon any existential threat posed by its enemies but because they can apparently be so easily eliminated. Analysed by the anthropologist Arjun Appadurai, such violent desires for national wholeness and homogeneity lack any objective political meaning.[7] This might be why Israel’s objectives in the Gaza war remain so uncertain and capable of opportunistic expansion. For however much the Palestinians are displaced, and however far Israel’s borders expand, Jews must live alongside Arabs as a small minority. The paradox of Israeli power is that it can only dominate the Middle East as a Western proxy and never in its own right. The more power Israel displays the less independent it becomes.
While Eghbariah wants the Nakba to replace terms like apartheid and settler colonialism as an alternative legal category, we might see in its incompletion the sign of a politics yet to come. It throws into relief the loss of a political future in much of the existing debate about Palestine, one dating to the end of the Cold War, which eliminated political space for revolutionary movements and absorbed them into the international order. This absorption can be tracked from the Oslo Accords of 1993 for Israel and Palestine to the Good Friday Agreement of 1998 for Northern Ireland. It was a situation that also gave rise to new political movements, from the rise of Hamas to the second Intifada. But they, too, have sought international recognition in juridical terms rather than by any demonstration of sovereignty, which they have substituted with violence as a negotiating tactic.
The process by which Palestine has been absorbed into the international order as a juridical and humanitarian rather than political problem now promises the normalization of Arab and Muslim relations with Israel at the expense of Palestinians themselves. Rather than a failure of the negotiations that had allowed Palestine to be absorbed by the international order, it is arguably their success that has deprived this cause of its global reach. By focussing the attention of Palestinians and their supporters on the West and the international institutions it dominates, these negotiations have increasingly led them to disavow other political visions and instruments to attend to international law instead. And in doing so they have foregone any autonomous political project and claim to sovereignty.
Sanctions and Sacrifice
The Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement is a good example of the way in which Palestine has been absorbed into the international order. The 2005 declaration by Palestinian civil society organizations instituting it came in response to the International Court of Justice declaring Israel’s wall on occupied Palestinian territory illegal. It sought to bypass or at least supplement the failed political initiatives of the past and appeal directly to civil society organizations and people of conscience to follow the anti-apartheid movement’s example and pressure their countries to punish Israel. Premised upon the failure of Palestinian politics, the movement’s measures were meant to compel Israel to end its occupation, recognize its Arab citizens as equals, and enable the return of refugees to their homes and the restitution of their properties.[8]
The legalistic rather than political character of the movement is evident in its defining reference to apartheid, whose dismantling in South Africa bears little relation to what is possible in Palestine. While demography defined the politics of both places, the statistical imbalance between blacks and whites in South Africa could not but spell the end of apartheid there. The situation in Israel and the Occupied Territories is completely different and far more sustainable. The international BDS movement that helped end apartheid in South Africa, moreover, attracted the support of Western governments not just because it had popular support, but only with the end of the Cold War and once South Africa was no longer needed as an ally against communism. The situation in the Middle East is again different, given Israel’s crucial role as a proxy of the West.
While undoubtedly creating a global community of supporters, it is not clear how the BDS movement seeks to accomplish its aims by acting as the supplement of an inactive international order which itself is a substitute for a genuine Palestinian politics. In the absence of such a politics, BDS claims to impose the kind of restrictions on Israel that the UN apparently should and thus speaks in the place if not the name of the international community. Sanctions, however, emerged from the blockades and gunboat diplomacy of colonialism to be internationalised after the First World War. Their role both in the League of Nations and the UN has been problematic, rarely changing the policies of targeted states while harming their citizens.[9] Having in recent decades been imposed exclusively on non-Western states, sanctions are also not very popular in the Global South.
The BDS movement is overwhelmingly Western in its reach and appeal, not least because there are few Israeli products or institutions to be boycotted in other parts of the world. Its founding announcement, for instance, is available on the movement’s website in many European languages, with Turkish the only exception besides Arabic and Hebrew. In contrast to the PLO during the Cold War, the non-West correspondingly plays little role in Palestinian politics apart from its representatives casting symbolic votes at the UN. Yet even in the West it is not clear whether BDS has been able to threaten the viability of Israeli companies and institutions. What the movement has done is increase its support among restricted groups like students and academics, though it seems unlikely that an ethics of consumer choice can lead to real political change.
Boycotting Israeli goods and institutions is easily done, given the country’s small size, and serves to displace political with moral action. Extending BDS to American or European institutions working with Israel can be a more effective and truly global policy, since it is such international support that enables Israel far more than its own institutions do. It would also allow for the participation of people in the Global South, some of whose countries possess a long history of such boycotts. But this expansion represents a more difficult task for those in the West, as the fate of anti-war protests at US universities and on the streets of European cities has illustrated. The backlash and legal proscription they and those supporting them now face has turned the movement around. From an ethics of consumer choice, it has become a politics of self-sacrifice.
This turn promises to detach BDS from a punitive and juridical logic to define it by the heroism of voluntary sacrifice set against the law rather than occurring in its name. It has brought the movement closer to anti-colonial practices like Gandhi’s non-cooperation. His call to renounce British goods, honours, and positions in colonial India was meant not as a punitive but sacrificial act. Only by undergoing such privation did the Mahatma think Indians could free themselves from the world of their opponents. But in doing so they also sought to convert the British by the non-violent force of their sacrifice. Punitive boycotts, thought Gandhi, were futile, with an appeal to one’s opponent crucial in the resolution of disputes. By dividing and so humanising these opponents, such an appeal allowed them to escape the violence of their own ascribed identities.[10]
Important about non-violent forms of sacrifice is the appeal and so opening to an opponent made voluntarily and thus out of strength. Rather than a display of suffering which Gandhi held reduced its subjects to victims without moral agency, such an appeal depends upon their sovereignty. In this way the Mahatma’s non-violent appeal serves as a counterpoint to the violent appeal of war. Both appeals draw upon and deploy the same sacrificial logic. And it was because the two were connected in this way that Gandhi thought a conversion was possible from one to the other. But for this the sacrificial agency of an appeal to one’s enemy must displace the humanitarian vocabulary of victimhood. For humanitarianism deprives the victim of moral as much as political agency, which is attributed instead to perpetrators. It refuses any relationship between the two besides their mediation by a third party representing the international order.
What might an appeal to the enemy look like without the mediation of third parties? The two main forms that pro-Palestinian protests have adopted in the West are the student encampment and the street march. What if encampments included memorials to the Israeli hostages held by Hamas? Rather than creating a false equivalence between Israeli and Palestinian victims, such a gesture would deny the racialised demographics Israel and its Western allies depend upon. It would also make the encampments more difficult to clear. The marches, for their part, might pair Palestinian flags with local ones. This would allow demonstrators to represent their country more than its government, while daring the latter to attack its own flag during police actions against them. An appeal refuses the enemy’s oppositions rather than reversing their values. It therefore goes beyond merely proclaiming one’s own morality in sympathizing with victims.
Neither the sacrificial practices of BDS supporters nor those of Palestinians targeted by Israel in Gaza and the West Bank have to my knowledge been seriously or at least popularly conceptualised in the non-violent terms Gandhi described. With some exceptions, though none that have been taken up by global protests against the Gaza war, such acts of sacrifice rarely appeal to and so humanize Jews or Israelis, despite the fact that only by gaining the support of some among the latter does the Palestinian cause have any hope of success.[11] But the Mahatma would have argued that the possibility of non-violence lies inherent in the very act of sacrifice, which might be one reason why the pro-Palestinian movement among groups like American and British students contains such a disproportionately large number of Jews within its ranks.
Gandhi held that sacrifice has no necessary connection to violence and must therefore be forcefully subordinated to it for such a relationship to be naturalised. This is certainly the case with Hamas fighters, whose sacrificial authority not only manifests itself in violence but depends upon the subordination of Palestinian agency more generally as well as by the instrumentalization of its non-violent or at least non-military forms of sacrifice. For the civilians left defenceless and depoliticised by Hamas following its attack of October 2023 are meant to be seen only as victims and so press upon the conscience of the world in familiar humanitarian ways. Indeed, their suffering is required for the Palestinian cause to gain traction globally, since Hamas is unable to mobilise support for any political project in its own name.
The French sociologist Didier Fassin has argued that the sacrifice of Palestinians is also required by the European states supporting Israel. Having gone through all the ‘realist’ reasons for why such countries might continue this support, whether out of fear, convenience or profit, he comes to the conclusion that key to it is a psychic factor. Such support, Fassin claims, allows countries complicit in the Holocaust to expiate for their historical guilt by letting another genocide unfold in which Israelis can in effect join their former persecutors by the sacrifice of Palestinian scapegoats.[12] While he doesn’t explore this idea further, Fassin comes close to the theory of sacrifice proposed by his compatriot, René Girard, who has recently become a key thinker for the American right. This understanding of Palestinian sacrifice mirrors that of Jesus in Christian tradition. For it was the sacrifice of an innocent that allowed for the atonement of one’s own sins.
The Mirror-World of Humanitarianism
Unlike its European supporters, Israel endows its foes with moral and political agency, if only to hold them all culpable for crimes. Yet many of those supporting the Palestinians appear content in reducing them to victims. But as the passive subjects of human rights law, Palestinians become playthings of the international order and its inner conflicts, from great power competition to proxy war.[13] It is this situation that provides the context for a great deal of pro-Palestinian diplomacy by countries in the Global South, all of which masks the relative dearth of popular protest in the world outside the West. But this also makes such diplomacy a deeply ambiguous exercise. By resorting to international courts, for instance, Palestinians and their supporters seek to redeem the UN system. But they may also show it to be a farce and so destroy it in the process.
While it is meant to put pressure on Israel and its supporters, turning to international courts also represents a political failure for Palestinians.[14] Judicial decisions without the power of enforcement, either by sanctions or military action, are useless even as propaganda to win over public opinion and so change political decisions in the West. For the time it takes to achieve such results is both longer than, and cancelled out by, the military consequences of what we might call pro-Palestinian lawfare. It is possible to argue, for instance, that labelling the Gaza war a genocide or indicting Israeli leaders for war crimes pushes them to act with even more impunity, since they neither have any reputation left to lose nor any way to resolve the conflict without facing punishment for their actions. Law without enforcement is therefore not just futile but self-destructive.
In any case, international courts do not work like domestic ones, since they do not hand down decisions and penalties as if they were adjudicating on behalf of a sovereign state within its own jurisdiction. International law rather operates by the mutual and voluntary agreement of the two or more sovereign states that happen to be parties to any dispute. These states are bound by the law not out of necessity but to the same degree as their enemies in a kind of honour system. Only in cases where a country has been defeated in war and its government dissolved do courts dispense decisions as they would in domestic law, for those brought before such tribunals no longer represent a sovereign party to any convention. If undefeated states refuse to abide by such an honour system, there is very little the courts can do apart from setting precedents for future decisions.[15]
It is the belatedness of Palestinian politics, I have been arguing, that has resulted in its cause being bound up with the West. It has even become the last defender of the West’s own ideals as represented by international human rights law. And by the same token this cause has been subordinated to more general concerns about the precedent set by Western support for Israel, leading to diplomacy on behalf of humanitarian ideals among non-Western states. Palestine may serve as a test-case for the continued survival of the international order, a kind of canary in the coal mine, but chiefly for the sake of others as it has no sovereignty of its own. American support for the war may similarly have less to do with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict than with setting another precedent in legitimising a new kind of war against future threats to the US itself.[16]
Hamas and its supporters may not always subscribe to the UN’s humanitarian order, even as they must defend Palestinians in its name.[17] This produces a mirroring of the arguments made by their Zionist adversaries.[18] The Holocaust as the trauma of Jewish nationhood is matched by the Nakba. The Jewish ghettos and pogroms of Europe’s past are paired with Gaza as well as Palestinian villages divided by Israeli walls and roads in the West Bank. The Jewish right of return is countered by demands for the return of Palestinian refugees. The Temple Mount as a religious symbol has its equivalent in Al-Aqsa. We even have a counterpart of Anne Frank in Hind Rajab. Each side claims prior occupation of the land in a global context where indigeneity characterizes anti-immigrant parties or the powerless remnants of colonial dispossession.
The victimology of one side is matched by that of the other in an intimacy that shows up the failure of a truly political imagination, which requires a real opposition and not just claims to represent exactly the same ideals.[19] But this is because such ideals are drawn from the humanitarian principles of the international order. Neither side disagrees that the terms in which the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are argued, anti-Semitism, terrorism, genocide, colonialism, or apartheid are bad things. They must be disavowed for oneself and attributed to the enemy in mutual accusations of hypocrisy. The conflict thus has the peculiar distinction of being defined by the mutual mirroring and agreement of its rivals. It is like a perverse fulfilment of Gandhi’s argument that the sacrificial ideals shared by violent and non-violent actors allowed for one to be converted into the other.
But the Mahatma’s politics of conversion required not only the sacrificial agency of an appeal but a true disagreement with one’s opponent as well. And it is this that the international order’s humanitarian principles render impossible, which is why Gandhi advocated the non-violent breaking rather than claiming of the law to transform it from without. He also realised that identifying as a victim, the only acceptable role for any party in the international order, entails building up a stock of narcissistic resentment that will one day burst out in unfathomable levels of violence. For the victim always rues the loss of moral and political agency, which must be reclaimed in any way possible even by switching positions with an enemy in a form of violent identification. In the Gaza war this identification has been described as a projection, with Israel attributing its own acts and intentions to its enemies both by imagining them doing what it does and producing for them what it seeks to prevent for itself.[20]
Right-wing Zionism is defined by the contradiction between victimhood and agency. On the one hand it relies for its persuasive force on the narrative of unending Jewish victimhood. And on the other it repudiates this victimhood by claiming agency in its most supercharged form by justifying violence. Such a relationship between victimhood and agency cannot be seen as merely instrumental in character, with the former ‘weaponized’ for the latter. It is part of a psychic economy whose cost Gandhi had warned Europe’s Jews of in the run-up to the Second World War. He advised them to forsake the language of victimhood even if it meant choosing the mode and manner of their own deaths.[21] The Palestinian tradition of celebrating martyrdom as a voluntary act has so far managed to escape the logic of victimhood drawn from humanitarianism.[22] But it is the latter that defines protest in the West while preventing it in the rest of the world.
A Politics for the Future
Remarkable about the war in Gaza has been the caution of Palestine’s allies in supporting it given the forces arrayed against them. Apart from Iran and its proxies, drawn into an unforeseen conflict foisted on them by a struggle between the military and political wings of Hamas, no Middle Eastern country has put any obstacle in the way of Israel’s disproportionate response to the attack against it. States further afield have been concerned with the large questions of regional order and international law that have arisen in the war. Apart from calling for a ceasefire and legal proceedings, all they envision is the creation of a powerless Palestinian state managed by the international community on the model of Bosnia, Kosovo, South Sudan or East Timor. Such a goal might be necessary but hardly constitutes a political ideal even for its proponents.
A politics of the Palestinian future might therefore have to occur outside the international order as it did during the Cold War. It was the first Intifada in 1987 which snatched leadership out of the hands of the exiled PLO and handed it to Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. This hastened the Oslo Accords and allowed for the Palestinian cause to be appropriated by the international order. Today Palestinian politics stands in ruins under Israeli control and might again have to be revived abroad. But to do this its supporters may have to move beyond movements like BDS, inspiring as they have been, to focus on creating a viable leadership and so political agency between Palestinians living in their historical homeland and the diaspora.
Yet the Palestinian diaspora seems curiously lacking in the potency of its political imagination, perhaps because it has been wedded to the international order since the Oslo Accords. Also subjected to state violence in their countries of origin, diasporas of Sri Lankan Tamils or Indian Sikhs, by contrast, play a powerful role in defining and funding political movements globally, just as the diaspora of Irish Catholics had before them to say nothing of Jews. And these movements often have only a tangential relation to international law and human rights. Could the branding of Palestinians as a forever displaced population have robbed their diaspora of permanence and so political legitimacy? This layering of impermanence upon belatedness may define Palestinian politics in the West, but in the world outside it we see a plethora of new political projects emerging.
Several such projects are unfolding in the Middle East itself, with the war in Gaza leading to the collapse of Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria and the remaking of a regional order that can neither be defined by the Israeli-Palestinian conflict nor yet controlled by any great power. Syria’s new leadership, after all, has ostensibly set aside the Palestinian cause together with its own history of violent militancy. Instead, it focusses on Syria’s political integrity and its readmission to the international order as a sovereign state willing to engage with Israel. If the HTS regime in Syria represents the conclusion of Islamic militancy in the region, the fate of Hamas signals Islamism’s worldwide collapse. Similar is the recent dissolution of the PKK, itself the last of the Cold War’s movements of nationalist rather than Islamist militancy in the region.
These events suggest that while the end of the Cold War might have destroyed Palestinian politics, the period of depoliticization that followed it is also coming to a close. The political remnants of the Cold War had included nationalist and religious forms of militancy as much as their opponents in states like Baathist Syria. These have now all been swept away along with transitional movements such as Al-Qaeda and ISIS that had emerged in the Cold War’s wake. It is in this context that we should also place the destruction of Hamas and Iran’s ‘Axis of Resistance’, as much as the collapse of the Palestinian Authority along with international law itself in the Gaza war. This destruction has opened the door to a politics which can no longer be defined by Arabism or Islamism to say nothing of international human rights law.
It is perhaps because they recognize the belatedness of Palestinian politics as it has existed since the end of the Cold War that global mobilisations against the Gaza war have occurred without reference to any political party or project with an identifiable leadership and plan. The solidarity expressed by this kind of protest is therefore humanitarian rather than political by definition, because it calls for justice and assistance for the war’s victims in the name of international human rights law alone. But any solidarity premised upon the absence of Palestinian sovereignty is doomed to failure because it cannot propose a viable future for them. Yet apart from stopping the war and putting those responsible for it on trial, protests against the carnage in Gaza have no vision of such a future besides the inspirational though tellingly negative slogan, ‘Free Palestine’.
[1] There is already some scholarly work on this phenomenon. See, for instance, Bruno Huberman, “Is Latin-America pro-Palestine? Israel’s arms diplomacy, solidarity, and the genocide in Gaza,” Middle East Critique (July 2025): 1-23.
[2] For this strategic failure and subsequent efforts to counteract it, see Leilah Seurat, “The new Hamas insurgency: how the embattled group is drawing Israel further into an unwinnable war,” Foreign Affairs, 26 August 2025 (https://www.foreignaffairs.com/israel/new-hamas-insurgency?fbclid=IwY2xjawMb42BleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHrAz8qQW7OHT9kE17pK8_cFPIJy5n9ZvbvNIpaA4G3Oj6tJg3w9IhEqe0TxV_aem_OFazJNp4GPkYzEo_elvbzA).
[3] For a detailed study of Iranian strategy, see Vali Nasr, Iran’s Grand Strategy: A Political History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2025).
[4] For the history of this collaboration interrupted by breakdowns meant to secure a better deal for Hamas, see Tareq Baconi, Hamas Contained: The Rise and Pacification of Palestinian Resistance (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2023).
[5] For an analysis of the comparison between apartheid South Africa and Israel, see Saul Dubow, “Apartheid in South Africa and Israel/Palestine: A Case of Convergent Evolution?” Palestine/Israel Review, 1 no. 2 (June 2024), https://scholarlypublishingcollective.org/psup/pir/article/doi/10.5325/pir.1.2.0001/388309/Apartheid-in-South-Africa-and-Israel-Palestine-A.
[6] Rabea Eghbariah, “Toward Nakba as a legal concept,” Columbia Law Review, vol. 124 no. 4 (May 2024): 974.
[7] Arjun Appadurai, Fear of Small Numbers: An Essay on the Geography of Anger (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006).
[8] See “Palestinian civil society calls for boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel until it complies with international law and universal principles of human rights, 9 July 2005,” BDS (https://bdsmovement.net/call).
[9] See, for example, Nicholas Mulder, The Economic Weapon: The Rise of Sanctions as a Tool of Modern War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2022).
[10] For a consideration of the politics of appealing to or addressing one’s opponent in the Israeli context, see Itamar Mann, “On the law, politics, and ethics of BDS,” The South Atlantic Quarterly, vol. 114 no. 3 (July 2015): 670-79.
[11] For such exceptions, see Issa Amro and Zak Wittus, “It’s time for Jews to join Palestinians in civil resistance to the occupation,” Forward, 11 August 2021 (https://forward.com/opinion/474065/its-time-for-jews-to-join-with-palestinians-in-civil-resistance/); and Hadas Binyamini, “What is the duty of the Israeli left in a time of genocide?” +972 Magazine, 3 January 2025 (https://www.972mag.com/duty-of-the-israeli-left-in-genocide/?s=08).
[12] Didier Fassin, Une Étrange Défaite: Sur le Consentement à l’Écrasement de Gaza (Paris: La Decouverte, 2024): 169-70.
[13] There are many critiques of humanitarianism, but for a body of work looking at its intellectual and legal history the writing of Samuel Moyn is indispensable. See, for instance, Samuel Moyn, Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2019).
[14] See, for instance, David Chandler, “International Law in the Shadow of the Silent Majorities,” in Tor Krever, ed., “On International Law and Gaza: Critical Reflections.” London Review of International Law (2024): 27-8, https://doi.org/10.1093/lril/lrae012.
[15] For a call to question the capacity of ‘lawfare’ in advancing political goals, see Nimer Sultany, “Roundtable on occupation law: part of the conflict or solution,” Jadaliyya, 22 September 2011 (https://www.jadaliyya.com/Details/24424/Roundtable-on-Occupation-Law-Part-of-the-Conflict-or-the-Solution-Part-V-Nimer-Sultany).
[16] See, for instance, Naz Khatoon Modirzadeh’s article, “’Violent, Vicious, and Fast’: LSCO Lawyering and the Transformation of American IHL,” Harvard National Security Journal, vol. 17, issue 1 (2025): 1-81.
[17] See, for example, the Iranian supreme leader’s speech, “Zionists’ crimes won’t be forgotten even after it is destroyed by the grace of God,” Khamenei.ir, January 9, 2024, https://english.khamenei.ir/news/10469/Zionists-crimes-won-t-be-forgotten-even-after-it-is-destroyed.
[18] For the fetishism of the international order among many pro-Palestinian activists and their refusal to recognise the problematic character of terms like genocide, see A. Dirk Moses, “More than Genocide,” Boston Review, Nov. 14, 2023, https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/more-than-genocide/.
[19] For a consideration of such competing victimhood narratives, see Neil Caplan, “Victimhood in Israeli and Palestinian national narratives,” Bustan: The Middle East Book Review, vol. 3 (2012): 1-19.
[20] For a good account of such projection, see Fassin, Une Étrange Défaite, 143-44.
[21] For Gandhi’s advice to the Jews, see the fifth chapter of my The Impossible Indian: Gandhi and the Temptation of Violence (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012).
[22] Martyrdom is not the only way of repudiating victimhood among Palestinian intellectuals. See, for example, Mohammed El-Kurd, Perfect Victims and the Politics of Appeal (London: Haymarket Books, 2025).
