“They have nowhere to return to. Look at how it looks. And by the way, the world isn’t stopping us.”
Those were the words of Israeli Minister of Finance Bezalel Smotrich at a small gathering at his home recently. Smotrich was speaking about Israel’s occupation of Southern Lebanon at that time, but he could just as easily have said the same thing about Gaza, the West Bank, or Syria.
It hardly comes as news to Palestinians to hear Smotrich talk like this. Israeli impunity has been a permanent fixture of the dynamic that has perpetuated Palestinian dispossession since long before the Nakba even happened.
But never has that impunity been so absolute as it is now, even while Israel’s image in the world, and the global public’s opinion of it, craters.
As we mark three years since the bloody October 7 attack called Operation Al-Aqsa Flood and Israel’s genocidal actions in its wake, it is important for all of us to take stock of what Palestinians, both in Palestine and in the diaspora, have been saying: that the world isn’t stopping Israel.
The three-year, ongoing genocide has answered the question many of us have asked at times: “What would I have done during the Holocaust?”
Many have answered that they would wallow in a denial, which is, in fact, a racist cover for the fact that they support the genocide.
But for a far greater number, the answer has been either indifference or a casual, “what can I do about it” shrug.
The indifference, the denial, and the support for the genocide are all rooted in the same phenomenon: the utter devaluation of Palestinian lives.
It doesn’t stop with the genocide either. While I view the producers of the controversial Israeli documentary NAZA as very noble, it is certainly the case that they are telling the world nothing Palestinians have not been saying for decades and have been screaming from the rooftops since the genocide began.
Yet, when it comes from Palestinians, no one listens. This can’t be explained merely by claiming that the aggrieved party is assumed to be biased. So-called moderates and liberals do not devalue the testimonies of African Americans, women, or migrants, let alone Ukrainians, to the same degree, although all marginalized groups experience this sort of doubt of their experience. But Palestinians are especially unheard and disbelieved.
That is a dehumanization that extends far beyond Israel and even far beyond Zionism around the world, to people who have little real stake in either. It is that widespread.
That dehumanization has been part of the Palestinian experience since the beginning of the British Mandate. But now, it combines with a level of Israeli impunity that has helped to unleash the worst parts of the settler-colonialist, nationalist movement known as Zionism.
And that dehumanization has, in fact, been a part of the process that has expanded Israeli impunity, which has grown steadily since before the Nakba.
The impunity of the Nakba brings us to the genocide in Gaza
In 1947-48, the Zionist army was able to carry out most of the dispossession of Palestinians even before declaring the independence of the Israeli state and facing the decidedly half-hearted invasion by the neighboring states.
But at that time, the expulsion of 800,000-1,000,000 Palestinians, the total erasure of entire Palestinian towns and villages, and the destruction of Palestinian life could be carried out in relative secrecy. There were no smartphones to broadcast the tragedies Palestinians were experiencing, and only a handful of international reporters were even trying to get the news out to a Western world that, in the wake of a global conflict, was not particularly interested.
To some degree, at least, Israeli impunity depended on the majority of the world’s public being unaware of what was happening. Political leaders had no such excuse, however, and this is where we see how widespread the devaluing of Palestinian life was even at that time.
By 2023, the genocide was widely broadcast. People watch it every day. Indeed, one of the few things the people of Gaza have that others do not is ubiquitous smartphone technology and sophisticated use of video testimony.
And yet, it made no difference. Yes, people saw it, and many were outraged and acted, protesting their government’s support of such atrocities. Yet in three years since the genocide began, there have been only the most cosmetic efforts to stop it, despite the public pressure.
Indeed, even Donald Trump’s order to Israel to finally stop the full-scale slaughter in September of 2025 was precipitated not by any Israeli atrocity against the civilians of Gaza but because of Israel’s attack on Palestinian negotiators in Qatar, one of Trump’s business partners. That led to Trump’s peace plan, which Hamas accepted to stop the wholesale slaughter in Gaza.
At no point did Israeli actions against the Palestinian people prompt real action against it from any quarter that had any influence over Israel.
Making impunity absolute
Israeli impunity, already a considerable factor in its treatment of the Palestinians, was now absolute.
For decades, Israel dispossessed, occupied, brutalized, and killed Palestinians with little repercussion. Yet there was at least the perception, the concern, in Israel that there was a line they could not cross. And there was evidence that there were some limits, even if those limits still allowed Israel unprecedented leeway in gradually pushing Palestinian freedom farther away.
Israeli leaders would push the envelope, walk up to the line they perceived, and step just over it, to see if they would be pushed back. For the most part, the only country they were worried about was the United States.
And sometimes the U.S. would push back, in a limited way. Jimmy Carter pressed Menachem Begin into the Camp David Accords. Ronald Reagan opened talks with the PLO. George H.W. Bush forced Israel into the Madrid Peace Conference, while his son used a threat of loan guarantees to convince Israel to alter one controversial piece of the apartheid wall it was building in the West Bank. Bill Clinton pressured Benjamin Netanyahu into signing the Hebron Agreement.
The acceleration in impunity began in earnest not under Donald Trump or “Genocide Joe” Biden, but under Barack Obama.
It happened at the very beginning of Obama’s presidency. He came into office promising a total freeze on settlements in the West Bank. He even had the public support (privately might have been quite different) of his first Secretary of State, the notoriously pro-Israel Hillary Clinton.
But his effort failed, thanks largely to the opposition of his own party leadership to the idea. Netanyahu learned from that episode that the lines that had been drawn to limit Israeli action were imaginary.
Netanyahu had halted his bombing of Gaza that began in December 2008 in deference to the incoming president and his desire to improve relations with the Arab world that had been badly damaged by George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq. But now that he saw that the Democrats, Obama’s own party, wouldn’t back him up even in a policy explicitly designed to promote a two-state solution and ostensibly bring peace to an Israel that had just emerged from the Second Intifada, Netanyahu knew he could push the envelope even farther than he had previously imagined.
The periodic bombings of Gaza, including the use of the torturous chemical weapon, white phosphorous, the expansion of the use of Gaza as a showcase for Israel’s newest weapons, and the increasing strangulation of the Strip followed, along with gradually accelerating settlement expansion all accelerated.
Obama, discouraged, shifted his focus away from the Palestinians after that, concentrating instead on the Iran nuclear deal. Astute Palestinians—which, almost by definition, included few of PA President Mahmoud Abbas’ inner circle—recognized that their best hope for help from Washington had evaporated.
Obama’s final message to Israel—when he abstained from a toothless vote on a Security Council resolution regarding Israeli settlements—was only a final sign of his inability to take a less biased approach to Israel and Palestine.
The Trump and Biden years were the expression of the impunity that Obama had accelerated. The Palestinians were descending into near-total invisibility as Trump moved the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem and encouraged other countries to do the same. Biden labored tirelessly to reach a deal to normalize relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel, convincing Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman to lower his asking price to some vague commitment to a “plan” for a Palestinian state at some indeterminate date in the future.
Gaza starved. Protesters in the Great March of Return were shot under the pretext that they had…well, flown kites. Settlements expanded, and settler attacks grew more common and fiercer.
The only thing that concerned the United States government and its self-proclaimed Zionist President Biden was Netanyahu’s efforts to destroy Israel’s Jewish “democracy,” which threatened to further diminish Israel’s standing among Democratic voters. Palestinians simply didn’t matter, if they were even acknowledged to exist at all.
And then came October 7.
The world changes, but indifference to Palestinian life stays the same
Governments around the world expressed outrage at the attack on October 7, 2023. Initially, a few questioned the stories that were coming out, of babies being beheaded and other fantastical atrocities. Palestinian objections to the lack of substantiation of these stories were summarily dismissed.
The reality of that attack was awful enough, but dealing with reality would also have meant dealing with context. It would have meant trying to understand why Palestinians all over the world, including those who would express outrage over the killing of civilians once that was made clear, were rejoicing at the sight of their people breaking free of the open-air prison of Gaza and setting foot on a homeland from which they had been cast out and forbidden to enter for 75 years.
It would have meant grappling with the kind of reality that settler-colonial states have been forced to grapple with, usually long after it could make any real difference.
And that is why Palestinians have been thoroughly dehumanized by so many.
When we look to explanations for why governments act so impotently about Palestine, there are numerous factors that contribute. There is the pro-Israel lobby in the U.S., and less powerful counterparts in some European states. There is still the collective guilt about the Holocaust, a guilt which, if the Western states don’t make the Palestinians pay for it, they will be forced to pay the price of their own murderous antisemitism themselves. And there is the place Israel holds in a capitalist environment increasingly dependent on weapons and tech industries, in which Israel plays an outsized role.
But what about states like China, or some in the Global South? What about the Arab monarchies, who pay just enough lip service to the Palestinian cause to quiet their own domestic audiences, but are often complicit in crimes against the Palestinian people?
I have argued for years that the reason for this behavior, the reason the Israel lobby can be so successful, is that world leaders see the Palestinian people as a major threat. Not in a military sense, not even in a fully political one.
Rather, the threat that Palestinians represent is a popular one.
Many groups of people have struggled for decades, for centuries, under the yoke of one oppressive system or another. But the Palestinians are a people who had a homeland, and were forced off it, yet they have remained, refused to surrender and move on. They have also survived, while so many other Indigenous people have been killed off, assimilated, or seen their numbers drastically reduced.
Israel is far from the only settler-colonial state in the world. But it is one of the few that is still actively fighting to eliminate the Indigenous people it displaced.
Should the Palestinian people regain their homeland, build a future, and thrive there, even if only on part of it, it would invigorate decolonization and anti-oppression movements around the world. It would give hope to the impoverished and disenfranchised, dispossessed, and oppressed people in all states around the world.
This is the reason Palestinians must be dehumanized and crushed, because a Palestinian triumph would bring hope and inspiration on a scale that few other events could accomplish.
That’s why the world “isn’t stopping” Israel. It’s why the genocidal chapter that started on October 7 continues. And it’s why the rest of us absolutely must stand with the Palestinian people.
