“The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born; now is the time of monsters,” Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci wrote in 1929.
These words come to mind as I observe apartheid Israel disintegrating rapidly, in the historic sense of the word. It is a settler colony that is failing its mission, namely annihilating the native population and replacing them with “civilised” settlers. As the apartheid regime slowly implodes, the Palestinians, especially the Palestinians of Gaza, are paying a horrific price.
The “Jewish state”, as it defines itself, has committed unimaginable war crimes and has violated countless international laws. And it has managed to get away with all these crimes thanks to unlimited support provided by the colonial West.
Nonetheless, the collapse is proceeding at a steady pace. Many have failed to understand that this disintegration is inevitable, including, paradoxically, the leadership of the Palestinian people. It is for this lack of foresight that Palestinian leaders signed onto the Oslo Accords and made the racist “two-state solution” a national slogan camouflaged as “independence”.
Oslo effectively erased the settler-colonial nature of Palestinian oppression and instead presented it as an “ancient war” over the ownership of land. By signing the accords, Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat completely disregarded the reality of settler colonialism the Palestinians were suffering in.
Immediately after the handshake between Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1993, Palestinian scholar Edward Said wrote: “Now that the euphoria has faded a little, we can take a closer look at the agreement between Israel and the PLO with the necessary cool head. It turns out that it is way more inadequate and unbalanced for most Palestinians than many initially assumed. The vulgar staging of the ceremony at the White House, the humiliating performance of Arafat as he thanked the world for giving up most of the rights of the Palestinian people, and the laughable role of Bill Clinton as a 20th century Roman emperor accompanying his two vassal kings in the rituals of reconciliation and submission: All this could only temporarily obscure the truly unbelievable extent of the Palestinian surrender.”
Sometimes I wonder whether Arafat and the rest of the leadership of the PLO had read Said, Frantz Fanon, Amilcar Cabral, Ghassan Kanafani or any of the anticolonial figures of their time.
Political Zionism, claiming to represent “the Jewish nation”, emerged in 19th century Europe, and it naturally emulated the European ideologies of the time. It claimed “the right” to establish its own state in any territory in the world, no matter where. It set its eye on Palestine, claimed that it was “a land without a people for a people without a land” and did what Europeans had already done in Africa, the Americas, Australia, New Zealand and parts of Asia.
Genocide – as so many anticolonial works have documented – is and has always been an intrinsic component of settler colonialism. They are inseparable. And that is the case for settler-colonial Zionism.
One cannot understand the ongoing livestreamed slaughter of the two million people of Gaza and the bragging about it by the majority of Israelis on social media without relating it to that colonial hegemonic ideology.
Since its creation, Israel has systematically pursued the “elimination” of the native. Gaza right now is paying the price for what Israel’s leading fascist historian Benny Morris has argued is the Israeli failure to “transfer” all Palestinians out of Palestine in 1948.
That is because in 1948, Gaza became the largest refugee camp in the world, filled with native Palestinians who refused to be ethnically cleansed and genocided and who have constantly reminded the Israelis of the “unfinished job”. They are now bearing the wrath of genocidal Israel intent on establishing its claim as a fact – that “there is no such thing as Palestinian people”.
But the prosperity of apartheid and settler colonialism is part of history now. A state founded on them cannot survive.
Amid the genocide in Gaza, this may not be as obvious, but let us remember that the downfall of South Africa’s apartheid regime began in the darkest moments of South African history in the late 1980s when everything looked so bleak. At that time, people did not realise that the racist regime was disintegrating and a new dawn was approaching.
Resistance, in its various forms, mixed with the highest level of “sumud” (steadfastness) has become the norm in Gaza. This resistance and sumud are expected to spread throughout historic Palestine and other places.
Gaza has become the centre of the universe. If it falls, the Global South will follow suit. The world has no option but to dismantle the only remaining apartheid regime committing an unprecedented genocide in the 21st century.
Sometimes I dream of having the ability to visit the future and come back with a message. In the future, I drive my car on the coastal road from Gaza in the south to Haifa in the north, listening to Fairuz’s angelic voice and telling my daughters about the horrific past when a state called Israel forbade us from seeing the rest of our country. I tell them about a time when the world stood idle while Israel butchered tens of thousands of children and women and when ultimately people of conscience decided that enough is enough.
As American writer Mike Davis so eloquently put it: “What keeps us going, ultimately, is our love for each other, and our refusal to bow our heads, to accept the verdict, however all-powerful it seems.”
I come back from the future full of optimism that “the time of monsters” will be over soon.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
