It has been one year since 7 October 2023. One full year of watching unfathomable levels of death and destruction of the Palestinian people, particularly in Gaza, as well as that of people in surrounding countries. One year of unceasing shock and horror. To paraphrase Palestinian attorney Lara Elborno, every day has been the worst day.
The Israeli military has besieged the Palestinians of the Gaza Strip, conducted a continuous aerial bombardment campaign, and invaded and sacked major urban centers. Official counts point to over 41,000 Palestinians killed, over 96,000 more injured, and over 90 percent of the Gaza Strip’s population displaced. But these are underestimates. A study in The Lancet argued (in July 2024) that more than 180,000 Palestinians will be killed by year’s end, even if the Israeli genocide in Gaza had stopped that summer. The dedicated work of journalists and ordinary citizens have enabled us to witness many of the over 16,500 murdered children incinerated, decapitated, or otherwise slaughtered—only to watch others dug up from beneath buildings, collected into bags, or otherwise endlessly searched for. They have recorded countless videos confirming Israeli snipers targeting anything that moves, including their own captives. Israel has targeted and killed more than 172 journalists, 296 aid workers, and 885 health workers. More than 10,000 Palestinians are reported missing or presumed dead under the over 40 million tons of debris and rubble.
Israel’s targeting of civilian infrastructure, its dramatic restriction of the flow of medical and food supplies and cutting off of electricity in the Gaza Strip, has damaged or destroyed 84% of health facilities, 87% of school buildings, 60% of residential buildings, 80% of commercial facilities, 92% of primary roads, and every university in Gaza. Israel has deliberately starved the Palestinians, producing famine in parts of Gaza, while gunning down those collecting flour in other parts. Mass graves and sites of mass executions continue to be discovered in the aftermath of Israeli military raids across the territory. The International Court of Justice (ICJ) determined that the South African government’s charge of genocide against the Israeli government is plausible and has issued multiple sets of provisional measures against Israel, all of which it has ignored.
Just as Palestinians had warned that Palestine is a paradigm and Gaza is both a site and a method, Israel unleashed a new level of ferocity in the West Bank. Its armed forces, alongside deputized setters, have intensified land confiscation, settlement construction, home demolitions, and generalized repression of political organizing. Before then, local and international human rights organizations were already decrying 2023 as the worst year in terms of rights abuses for Palestinians in over two decades. Since 7 October both the Israeli military and settlers have killed over 770 Palestinians, injured more than 14,600 Palestinians, and displaced over 4,500 Palestinians in the West Bank. This is to say nothing of the over 9,500 Palestinian political prisoners currently held in Israeli prisons, a number that represents double the pre-7 October figures. More than 3,300 of these political prisoners are “administrative detainees” (i.e., held without charge). These Palestinians, many of them children kidnapped in the middle of the night, are never afforded the label of “hostages.” The Israeli government has imposed an effective siege on its prisoner population, drastically reducing access to electricity, water, and food, while escalating its cell block raids and prisoner assaults. Leaked videos and mainstream media reports of systematic torture and rape have exploded in the past year, and as with Gaza, these Israeli policies have a longer history.
Today, the Israeli state is viciously applying the paradigm of Palestine and the method of Gaza to Lebanon as it blockades the country, levels entire apartment blocs, and initiates its long-awaited and hoped-for invasion. In the past year, Israel has killed over 2,000 people in Lebanon, injured another 10,000, and displaced over 1.2 million. This death and destruction preceded its current ground invasion and relies on the targeting of civilian infrastructure.
The past year has made horrifyingly vivid, often in real time, the cost of maintaining and intensifying the regimes of settler colonialism, apartheid, and genocide that constitute Israel. Israel as a political and military establishment, rather than a single leader or government, is responsible for the current campaign to obliterate the Palestinian people in and from their homeland. It is similarly responsible for the wholesale destruction of apartment blocks, villages and towns, and critical civilian infrastructure in Lebanon—and, as we write this, in Yemen as well. The realities the Palestinians, Lebanese, and so many others throughout the region confront today are a predictable culmination of the imperative to establish a Jewish-majority state in Palestine against the will of its native people and the surrounding African and Arab peoples. It could not be achieved nor sustained without the force of arms, and the colonial logic that renders inferior all other collective life and claims to sovereignty.
Zionism, in its various right-wing, liberal, and left-wing manifestations, continues to be the animating ideological force that justifies cruel violence while marking entire peoples, communities, and neighborhoods for death. It was Labor Zionism that pioneered supremacist strategies, such as the conquest of both labor and land, in the early twentieth century. Labor Zionism planned and executed the Nakba, developed Israel’s nuclear arsenal, occupied the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and Golan Heights, annexed East Jerusalem, and established the first settler colonies in these territories.
The United States enables and sustains these racial and colonial logics. Unequivocal diplomatic, military, and economic support for Israel with zero red lines remains a core pillar of US foreign policy since at least the 1970s. The United States does not only bear responsibility for the actions and policies of Israel—it is actively waging genocide against Palestinians in Gaza, expropriating land in East Jerusalem and the West Bank, committing war crimes against residents of Lebanon, and threatening any and all who dare to challenge Israeli and US policies. It is supplying the military equipment, sharing intelligence, and deploying its navy, air force, and troops to buttress Israel’s position, threatening would-be challengers, and imposing its shared vision of the future. Domestically, the unprecedented suppression of anti-genocide and anti-war protest and speech, on university campuses and throughout the public sphere, is another front on which the United States is fighting alongside Israel.
US and Israeli insistence on “finishing the job” of genocide in Gaza and their attempts to eradicate armed resistance in the region have dealt an irrevocable blow to the international order and promise to unravel it altogether. Several beacons of hope emerge in the face of this crumbling edifice, not least of which has been the Republic of South Africa’s charge of genocide against Israel at the International Court of Justice, followed by Nicaragua’s charge of aiding and abetting genocide aginst Germany because of its provision of arms. These interventions have illuminated a chasm between the Global North and the Global South regarding the unrealized promise of equality between states and the application of universal norms. Efforts like those by Malaysia to restrict the use of veto at the UN Security Council in cases of atrocity crimes signal faint glimmers of hope of much-needed and overdue reform.
A year into this genocide, the learning curve when it comes to understanding Palestine as a liberation struggle remains steep. Similarly, far too many refuse to see Hamas as a sociopolitical phenomenon integral to Palestinian society and politics, now and in the future. This failure to understand Palestine as a site of anti-colonial struggle makes it impossible, even for those who might feel some “sympathy,” to effectively resist the statist logics and justifications of counter-terrorism. “Human shielding” has become a euphemism for describing an unconventional armed force so that there is no distinction between Hamas’s military and political wings, no distinction between active participation and idleness. It is as if there is not an entire body of law legislated by a global anti-colonial majority in the late 1970s that regulated this very confrontation. Instead, the United States and Israel insist that they confront a novel adversary and have the unregulated right to obliterate. The same colonial logic is now being imposed upon Hizballah and the Lebanese, Syrians, Palestinians, and many others in Lebanon. It is an eliminationist logic that will never stop of its own accord.
While there is no military solution to the broader historical dynamics that produced the moment we are in, armed struggle is a right of colonized peoples and the liberation of Palestine requires multiple forms of resistance, armed and otherwise. History has shown that the logic of Zionism and the policies of successive Israeli governments is to obtain the maximum amount of Palestinian land with the minimum number of Palestinian people. Palestinians, Lebanese, and Arabs have the right to self-defense and to realize self-determination. Israel and the US fully understand that the Hamas attack sought to shatter the status quo, and have responded with a determination and ferocity that shed all pretenses of proportionality.
The atrocities Israel is carrying out against Palestinians and Lebanese have been met with complicity at best, and with enthusiasm at worst, by the United States, Western European states, and the states of the Arab League. The racial and colonial frame through which Zionism has repeatedly attempted to dehumanize Palestinians, Lebanese, and Arabs as a whole has paved this path. Everyday people have rejected this attempt, in Palestine, in Lebanon, and far beyond. The future is unclear, and could very well be worse than the present. It is that future which is now at stake.
