Before ‘28

Eighty years is too long to wait

Free Palestine before ‘28

I am not Palestinian and I cannot claim to speak for Palestinians, but I give this work as a mere offering. I can only hope that it rings true in the minds of the people who must live the horrors we seek to end. To silence ourselves in deference to an identity would serve no purpose.

I am not Israeli. I see the issue of Palestinian freedom as an issue of oppressor and oppressed rather than as a two-sided conflict, yet I still acknowledge the humanity and inextricable interests of Israeli people in the issue and it’s necessary solution.

The only solution is a one-state solution. This is known to any who are honest and uncompromised by vested interests. A two-state solution would never have resolved issues such as the rights of Palestinian refugees whose origins lie in present-day Israel. These rights were recognised in UN General Assembly Resolution 194. Records of refugee status have been maintained through the decades. No political solution can erase the inalienable human rights of these refugees.

The two-state solution stands revealed now for the nonsense that it has always been. There is no plan to force Israeli settlers from the occupied territories. There is no hope for a Palestinian state with territorial integrity. The people of this state would have no protection from Israeli strikes and incursions. Western nations can not be trusted to respect any political autonomy in a Palestinian state because they freely delegitimise and sanction factions whose politics they dislike, labelling them “terrorists”. 

Supporters of a two-state solution do not explain how they will establish justice by giving only 22% of the land of mandate Palestine to the Palestinians – they seem instead to think that because Palestinians are suffering they should be grateful to accept less than is their due.

The two-state solution has always been a false hope that is exploited by those who perpetuate a system of apartheid and perpetrate a genocide. The two-state solution has also been cynically used by supporters of Israel’s genocide. The two-state solution has been embraced by cowardly political leaders throughout the world who wish to pretend that they support peace and justice while throwing their energies into ensuring the continuation of violence and injustice. 

From the inception of the Zionist project by the British Empire there has been a calculated strategy of keeping Palestinians and their allies on the back foot. They created a racial hierarchy of reporting and of policy. Despite the indigenous residency of Palestinians and the migrant status of most Jews, Jewish rights became something that were presumed and had to be argued against, while Palestinian rights were assumed to be null and had to be argued for.

Our leaders fear the consequences of opposing genocide and seem to think that they will never pay a price for supporting genocide. Such people obey lawless power and spurn powerless law, but true law is an instrument of the people and an expression of their power. When the people awaken, the leaders will rush to have been always against the genocide.

The racist double-standard continues. If a Palestinian commits a crime or atrocity it is taken as evidence of Palestinian terrorist barbarism, yet the very same act could be carried out by Israelis ten or one hundred times and the explanation is that it is a response to Palestinian terrorist barbarism.

As I write we have just witnessed weeks of stories of the brutality, torture, rape, starvation and medical neglect evident on the faces and bodies of those released from Israeli captivity. Our news media have greeted this with silence. Yet when three prisoners of war were released from captivity in a besieged and deliberately starved territory there is an international outcry over the fact that they are gaunt and weak. History will know and judge this reporting for the pro-genocide propaganda that it is.

We can no longer accept this racist framing. We can no longer try to meet disputants halfway when their minds are full of evil racist hate. We can no longer pander to the misapprehensions of the misinformed public. We must strike back mercilessly. Nonviolence does not mean that we will leave people with the comfort of their self-serving lies. If reality causes people pain the real culprits in their suffering are those who convinced them to live in the zone of genocidal fantasy.

Palestinians have been shackled ever since 1948 with the cruelty of having to negotiate for rights  that were declared “universal” for everyone but them. They were made stateless in a Zionist settler colonial project that only took root because it was also a British and US imperial project. 

The very people who made them stateless have used their own crime as a justification for treating Palestinians unfairly in negotiations. Their statelessness was used to defer recognition of their human rights as if they had somehow not yet achieved the status of human. Though framed as temporary this state has lasted generations and now the very same people treat the historic offences against Palestinian rights (which are still causing harm today) as a mere past grievance to be tutted about and shrugged off. The reaction to oppression is framed as the problem, not the oppression itself, and the victims are expected to be penitent for their “terrorism” and offer recompense.

The Oslo “Peace Process” was a process leading to no possibility of peace, and the two-state “solution” is no solution. No matter how much Palestinian officials have offered to sacrifice they have been condemned invariably as intransigent for not agreeing to relinquish rights which they have no power to relinquish. Meanwhile Israel is trapped in a web of extralegal entanglement, shackled to the Palestinian people and their ultimate emancipation. The phrase “final status issues” was left hanging in the air after Oslo as a direful reminder that Israel can only exist in its current form by continuing a genocidal conflict indefinitely, or by seeking a brutal final solution of mass death and ethnic cleansing.

As long as Israel continues to insist on being a majority Jewish state controlling the majority of the former Mandatory Palestine they will be inimical to Palestinians. This has nothing to do with conflict, nor any action of resistance by Palestinian groups. Palestinians are enemies of the state of Israel merely by existing. The inalienable human rights of Palestinians cannot be realised while Israel exists on the terms its political leaders insist upon. Thus, Israel has long been engaged in a slow but intensifying genocide that seems to be heading inevitably towards the logic of extermination. 

For Palestinians the situation becomes ever more horrific. The violence keeps increasing in tempo and magnitude. Officials documented over 60,000 deaths in Gaza from October 2023 to January 2025. The vast majority of these were from the direct trauma of armed violence and they represent only a fraction of those who died prematurely through the total effects of war, including undocumented violent deaths as well as preventable deaths from health conditions, exposure, neglect, poisoning, and malnutrition. 

Along with the shocks of armed mass violence, Palestinians face an ever more oppressive web of apartheid control. In Hebrew this is known as hafrada which, as with the Afrikaans word apartheid, can be translated as “separateness”. Like the Indian Pass Laws of California, the Nuremburg Laws, and South African Pass Laws these practices make a false pretence of serving a security purpose. 

Apartheid practices cannot serve as a counter-insurgency strategy as they deliberately create a monolithic group based on ethnic identity, not on insurgent activity. Such a strategy seeks to incapacitate resistance rather than ending it, and because its oppression provokes the very resistance it claims to oppose, the ultimate logic is that security only comes from complete enslavement or extermination. Apartheid is inherently genocidal.

Enhanced by technology Israel’s apartheid tactics are ever more pervasive. The controlling electronic presence began by taking streets and public spaces then moved into homes as mobile phones were turned by spyware into bugs, trackers and hidden cameras.  Through biometrics the techno-apartheid has invaded people’s bodies themselves. The digital world is full of paranoid spies and aggressive guards who pose real world danger. A post merely expressing a wish for Palestinian freedom can lead to time in a brutal political prison system under “administrative detention” or after being found guilty by a military court of “incitement”.

The control and fear is everywhere. Violent death can come from an innocent misstep. On February 10 2025 a woman who was 8 months pregnant was shot dead because she looked at the ground in a manner considered suspicious. Terror and coercion are constant and inescapable. 

Israel also uses automated systems to control the bodies of Palestinians physically. The high technology approach of “frictionless” automated control is a dystopian abomination. It strips all autonomy from subjects, making all life a prison sentence of constraint and insecurity. 

For both Israel and the US any challenge to a self-appointed imperium beyond their legal territory is to be met with fetishistically robotic forms of control and killing. The proponents become ever more murderous and inhuman by cultivating a fixation on clinical, sterile, detached “precision” killing. The victims die screaming in bloody chaos, in fear, and in agony, but we privilege the perspective of distant operators and their superiors who call this abomination “surgical”.

“AI” near instantaneously generates death lists of any required number of targets. This is death by datafication. Those deemed terrorists are “proven” to be terrorists by the fact that a computer programmed to designate them as terrorists did so. It is a closed loop; a deadly tautology. In Gaza it is clear that the “AI” system was simply a fast way of producing “signature strike” victims based on phone movements, rather than any sightings of individuals. They use the phrase “artificial intelligence” as if conjuring magic, invoking a sophistication that doesn’t exist. These are just signature strikes produced with great rapidity. They probably produce far more false positives among civilians who haplessly carry unshielded mobile phones than positives among armed resistance members who evade such detection.

The self-fulfilling datafication that defines “terrorists” follows in a tradition of racists, fascists and other megalomaniacs. Those who used phrenology and physiognomy to “prove” low intelligence, criminality, and racial inferiority have been succeeded by racist digital heirs. A whole science is being developed to create a body of knowledge in which “Palestinian” is a subspecies of “terrorist”. This comes to predominate in the crafted and truncated epistimologies that dominate in bureaucratic, journalistic, political, criminological and (above all) military milieux.

The fascistic minds of the oppressors view all Palestinians as actual or potential monsters. They create cruel rituals to cement in their own minds the supernatural evil of their chosen enemies. Prisoners are stripped, blindfolded and bound hand and foot. They are forbidden movement and speech. 

In WWII, Germany’s most fanatical SS troops were merely led in columns by scarce Allied soldiers, yet even a Palestinian child is treated like Hannibal Lecter. This is humiliation. This is often painful torture. This is dehumanisation that makes human victims into mere objects, and often obstacles, to those who have power over them. Yet the most important function of this ritual is to reify in Israeli minds the animalistic violence that they choose to see in Palestinians. The ritual sends a message that each Palestinian is like a lethal poisonous animal and could at any time choose to explode in an action-movie frenzy of homicidal/suicidal rage.

The weapons used to kill, maim, incapacitate and poison Palestinians; the technology used to monitor and control Palestinians; and the self-fulfilling racially-informed “science” that defines Palestinians are all developed in a dynamic discourse with other jurisdictions and with other target populations. We know that whatever we allow to happen to Palestinians will come to us in time.

Like the rules of the Jim Crow era in the former slave states of the USA, the rules of hafrada are the formal tip of an iceberg of a wider ideology of violent racial supremacy. Among those in uniform the fanatical, the callous and the overly obedient can be equally deadly. Inevitably the disparity in power creates opportunities of impunity for rapists, sadists, and murderers. Palestinians have no meaningful protection from Israelis in uniform.

Out of uniform, civilians exercise nearly as much control, enjoying nearly as much impunity as their official compatriots. The selfish and greedy take property, including people’s land and personal homes, with sanction and protection from the state of Israel. In this they act outside of their recognised territory and in ways that blatantly violate its own laws and constitution, with the two wrongs somehow combined into a grotesque legalistic parody of a right.

Settler fanatics inflict cruel harm for reasons beyond material gain. Out of hatred and fervour for the cause of a Greater Israel, they attack people, vanadalise homes, burn trees, kill or steal livestock, cut water lines and even poison wells. Israeli soldiers provide protection for them even when they are committing blatantly criminal and morally indefensible acts.

The complexity and diversity of the oppression of Palestinians cannot be summarised here. The historical nature of the Palestinian genocide is such that it has always sought to cloak itself by denying the existence of Palestinians as a people and by the outright erasure of important historical events such as massacres. As the lies of Zionist historiography were exposed, and as the Palestinian people fought successfully to show the world that they existed as such, the cloaking of the genocide shifted to the pretence of counterinsurgency and counterterrorism. 

After the First Intifada the genocide began to hide itself increasingly through a proliferation of trivialities. This is an expected part of genocide, which Lemkin first defined as encompassing everything from censoring poetry to the “organized murder” of millions of Jews. In genocide “different actions” are used to a single end. The slow and longstanding nature of the Palestinian genocide, and the requirements of Israeli hasbara (propaganda) dictate that its intensification came first came in the form of petty injustices creeping into every aspect of life, making simple existence a painful struggle. 

Stolen land and homes, destroyed infrastructure, and demolished houses are made irreplaceable by Israeli authorities. Life is deliberately calculated to be intolerable and it has become clear that Israel is using this banal torment as a way of coercing young Palestinians into migrating away. 

As the genocide intensifies the violence exceeds the bounds of pogrom and becomes a periodic Holocaust. There is no longer a credible pretence that the pauses between the massacres are opportunities to work towards a peaceful solution. That scam is played out. The era of plausible denial of genocidal intent is gone and we are in an era of implausible denial. Vanishingly few ordinary people believe Israel’s lies about its peaceful aims, but the international leaders need to pretend to believe the lies. (When the tide turns and reality finally pops the bubble of hallucinogens that enwraps the Western world, they will wring their hands and proclaim “nobody could have known”.)

As the genocide becomes ever harder to deny, the anti-Palestinians in all parts of the world have decided they will not concede a millimetre. They have doubled-down on embracing brutal and murderous bullying while becoming ever more histrionic about antisemitism and Israeli victimhood. They have backed themselves into a corner. There is no reasoning with them. They can only be defeated and forced to accept peace.

It may seem hopeless to coerce the 16th most powerful military state on the planet when it has nuclear weapons and the apparently immutable support of the 1st and 6th most powerful military states, yet Israel lives by its international legitimacy. To survive it needs Western backing. We can, however, force Western governments to end their support of Israel’s genocide.

The legal and scholarly consensus has already been settled. The International Court of Justice may be subverted to rule against it, but the fact of the genocide is already established beyond reasonable doubt. At this stage the fight for formal recognition of the genocide has effectively become a litmus test of whether international law is real or merely a mask for the exercise of raw power.

The problem of the illegitimate exercise of power is nothing new. By nature, those with power do not respect the rule of law and are only constrained by the fear of arousing the power of the masses. International law has largely evaded democratic constraint and has been twisted into a system of imperial tyranny. This too is a spreading cancer. 

If we do not win the fight to stop the Palestinian Genocide we will lose the most important battle in the fight against creeping global fascism. The US will continue to accelerate its claims to exercise universal jurisdiction beyond its borders, indicting and extraditing people who have never set foot in US territory.  Moreover, given that Donald Trump has already claimed that he can ethnically cleanse Gaza under “the authority of the United States”, this means that the executive would not even be constrained by US law. Those countries too weak to resist will become zones of lawless power in the mould of the occupied Palestinian territories, or Iraq under occupation.

Meanwhile the fascist creep into domestic politics will be emboldened. Executive branches will increasingly rule through decree. Legislation will become codified tyranny by enacting “laws” that cannot be reconciled with justice. The police and judiciary will increase the level of colluding obeisance they make to plutocratic power expressed in ever more racist, sexist, classist, transphobic, and homophobic reaction. 

The political conversation is the real battlefront that we need to fight on. Genocide apologists hide behind a mask of uncertainty that must be ripped away. The code of journalistic silence has to be broken and politicians must be made to show their hands, choose their side, and see who wants to vote for them once they admit that they support oppression and slaughter. Once the stampede starts, no moderate will want to be the last mainstream political hopeful to be cheerleading a genocide. The remaining fanatic anti-Palestinians will be left with their yapping constituents, revealed as the hateful fringe that they are.

In order to maintain a level of truthfulness we cannot allow the political conversation to be dragged back into the thickets of prevarication. The reality is stark and we cannot tolerate people finally acknowledging the simple morality of ending genocide only to then obfuscate the issue with manufactured complications about implementing the end of that genocide. We have to be sensitive to the human rights of Israelis, but we must accept that some people will pay a price. There is no reason, for example, that any settler who moved to occupied Palestinian territory as an adult should have any right to retain real estate or receive compensation. They are due only humane treatment and welfare provisions that are commensurate with their needs.

Along with many other facts in its favour, a one-state solution provides the clarity that will be needed to end the genocide and restore peace and justice. It is a simple matter of giving equal rights to all of the residents of the territory of Mandatory Palestine. Everyone equal. It may not be easy to achieve, but it is simple to understand and it is simple to demand. There is no other choice.

The rights of current citizens of Israel must be respected, but the resources of the state must be turned away from war and oppression and harnessed to act in recompense for everything that has been taken from Palestinians.

The new democratic state should not be expected to stand alone. The UK and the US owe a massive debt for all they have wrought and they can afford to pay in money and in construction. Those states who voted to partition Palestine also owe a special debt, but all UN member states owe something (if only for allowing Israel to exercise the rights of UN membership when it never even attempted to fulfil the conditions under which it was admitted by complying with UNGA Resolution 194). A revitalised and relegitimised UN can take on the project of building a new Palestine.

Respect should be paid to religious and cultural Jews, to the Hebrew language, and to the name Israel. The new Palestine will be a land that celebrates indigeneity and immigrant culture as complementary. Palestine will be both a bicultural land with intrinsic “Palestinian” and “Israeli” characteristics, and a multicultural land that has always been a fabric woven of many changing threads.

I am not being idealistic. These seeming ideals are just a framework, and within that framework there may be many injustices. Without this framework, however, there will only be endless strife and suffering. Without this both peoples face a future that is bleak. Israel has already become a pariah in much of the world. It cannot resolve its problems with the methods it is currently pursuing. All it can do is fall off the cliff of madness that it teeters on. If Israel’s thought leaders had real freedom of thought they would know this. The world will never forget the Gaza Holocaust, and they will never forgive the next such slaughter. Once Israel becomes too much of a liability the US will no longer protect it or its people. The time to move towards real peace is now.

I have watched events descend into worse and worse violence and destruction. Each time I think this can’t go on; this is too much; the world will not stand for this any longer. And then it just goes on. Most Westerners don’t even get to see the horrors that we see in our social media. The genocide must inevitably end, but if we don’t end it – if we don’t wake the world’s outrage – then the alarm that finally wakes the world will be body count so big that even the Western media and Western politicians cannot ignore the stench of the mass graves. How many people have to die before the world accepts the inevitable?

At each point of new unprecedented horror the anti-Palestinians, in Israel and beyond, have shown that there is no limit to their genocidal thinking. It should be clear now to everyone that there is no crime too ghastly for them to justify, there is no line that can not be crossed. It should also be clear that Israel will only increase its violence over time. Without Palestinian liberation another holocaust is inevitable. It is the global public that must decide that this cannot continue. The people of the West in particular must have a culture change towards democracy and accountability. 

We must internalise this struggle, then externalise it.

Kieran Kelly researches and writes about genocide for his website ongenocide.com