Genocide Israel is living in the past

“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.”