Israel after October 7: Between decolonisation and disintegration

A year has passed since October 7, 2023, and it is time to explore if we have a better understanding of this monumental event and everything that followed it.

For historians like me, a year is usually not enough to draw any significant conclusions. However, what happened in the past 12 months falls within a much wider historical context, one that stretches back at least to 1948, and I would argue, even to the early Zionist settlement in Palestine in the late 19th century.

Therefore, what we can do as historians is place the past year within the long-term processes that have unfolded in historical Palestine since 1882. I will explore two of the most important ones.

Colonisation and decolonisation

The first process is colonisation and its opposite – decolonisation. Israeli actions both in the Gaza Strip and the occupied West Bank in the last year gave new credence to the use of these twin terms. They transited from the vocabulary of the activists and academics of the pro-Palestine movement to the work of international tribunals such as the International Court of Justice.

Mainstream academia and media still refuse to define the Zionist project as a colonial, or as it is referred to more accurately a settler-colonial project. However, as Israel intensifies the colonisation of Palestine in the next year, that might prod more individuals and institutions to frame the reality in Palestine as colonial and the Palestinian struggle as anticolonial and dispense with tropes about terrorism and peace negotiations.

Indeed, it is time to stop using misleading language peddled by US and Western media, like “Iran-backed terrorist group Hamas” or “peace process”, and instead talk about Palestinian resistance and decolonisation of Palestine from the river to the sea.

What will help in this effort is the growing disrepute of the Western mainstream media as a credible source of both analysis and information. Today, media executives are fighting tooth and nail against any change in the language, but they would eventually come to regret its place on the wrong side of history.

This change of narrative is important because it has the potential to affect politics – more specifically the politics of the Democratic Party in the United States. The more progressive Democrats have already embraced a more accurate language and framing of what is happening in Palestine.

Whether this will be enough to effect change in a Democratic administration should Kamala Harris win the election remains to be seen. But I am not sanguine about such a change unless the processes of social implosion within Israel, its growing economic vulnerability and international isolation put an end to the hollow Democratic efforts to resurrect the dead “peace process”.

If Donald Trump wins, the next US administration will be the same as the current one at best or it would openly grant Israel a carte blanche at worst.

Regardless of what happens in the US election next month, one thing will remain true: As long as these twin frames of colonisation and decolonisation are ignored by those who have the power to stop the genocide in Gaza and the Israeli adventurism elsewhere, there is a little hope for pacifying the region as a whole.

The disintegration of Israel

The second process that surfaced in full force in this last year was the disintegration of Israel and the possible collapse of the Zionist project.

The original Zionist idea of planting a European Jewish state at the heart of the Arab world through the dispossession of the Palestinians was illogical, immoral and impractical from the onset.

It has held on for so many years because it has served a very powerful alliance that for religious, imperialist and economic reasons, has regarded such a state as fulfilling the ideological or strategic objectives of whoever was part of that alliance, even if sometimes these interests contradicted each other.

The alliance’s project of solving a European problem of racism through colonisation and imperialism in the midst of the Arab world is entering its moment of truth.

Economically, an Israel that is engaged not in a short successful war as in the past, but in a long war with little prospect of a total victory, is not conducive to international investment and economic bonanzas.

Politically, an Israel that commits genocide is not as attractive any more to Jews, especially those who believe that their future as a faith or a cultural group does not depend on a Jewish state and in fact might be more secure without it.

The governments of the day are still part of the alliance, but their membership depends on the future of politics all together. By this I mean that the catastrophic events over the past year in Palestine, alongside global warming, the crisis of immigration, increasing poverty and instability in many parts of the world have exposed how distanced many political elites are from their peoples’ elementary aspirations, concerns and needs.

This indifference and aloofness will be challenged and every time it is successfully confronted, the coalition that sustains the Israeli colonisation of Palestine will be weakened.

What we did not see in the past year is the emergence of a Palestinian leadership that reflects the impressive unity of the people inside and outside of Palestine and the solidarity of the global movement of support for them. Maybe it is too much to ask at such a dark moment in Palestine’s history, but it will have to occur, and I am quite positive it will.

The next 12 months are going to be a worse replica of the past year in terms of the genocidal policies of Israel, the escalation of the violence in the region and the continued support of governments, backed by their media, for this destructive trajectory. But history tells us that this is how a horrific chapter in the chronology of a country ends; it is not how a new one begins.

Historians should not predict the future but they can at least articulate a reasonable scenario for it. In this sense, I think it is reasonable to say that the question of “whether” the oppression of the Palestinians will end can now be replaced with “when”. We do not know the “when”, but we can all strive to bring it about sooner rather than later.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.