1. Zionism as an impasse

Zionism is moored in a foundational impasse. I have argued elsewhere that what defines the Zionist project today above all is how stuck it is, how unable it is to move past its own past and surpass the violence of its foundation.Footnote ¹³ Israel is, in essence, a settler colonial project defined by the stuntedness of its conquest; a project unable to move from the foundation of order to the maintenance of order. And this impasse and its frustrations are a structure of feeling in Israeli society that has now come up right to the surface. The only way to come to terms with the Gaza genocide is to start with these historical and structural contradictions of Zionism as a settler colonial project, as they collide with and are shaped by persistent forms of Palestinian resistance and refusal.

But what does Zionism’s impasse have to do with how resolutely its genocidal war has been supported by the self-ascribed liberal democracies of the west? And supported even at the cost of considerable social and global turmoil. Not only is this genocide not Israel’s alone by any means, but there is also enough evidence to suggest that the Israelis themselves have been surprised by just how far they have been allowed to go.Footnote ¹⁴ The Gaza genocide is simply inconceivable without continuous western support; American aid has accounted for 70 percent of the Israeli military budget since October 2023, and the US alone has flown 800 military cargo planes to Israel in 600 days of genocide—an air bridge that has averaged nearly one and a half planes a day. This is to say nothing of German arms and ceaseless British surveillance and intelligence support.

To come to terms with the seeming necessity of all but limitless western support for the genocide is to come to terms with the arguably singular place of Zionism in the ordering of the contemporary world, especially after 1967. I do not intend here to hash out the whole nature of the relationship between Zionism and the US-led global order. This relationship has no single cause and is acutely overdetermined: it is both foreign and domestic, symbolic and material, ideological and economic, historical and structural. Indeed, at times, deference to Zionism in western politics appears entirely rote and ritualistic, just an ingrained part of the pageantry of bourgeois electoral politics and its rhetorical common sense. I mean here instead to point to the ideological vocation Zionism has in the broader history, and in particular the role it has played in the ideological foreclosure of the worlding posed by the demands of decolonization.

In saying this, I do not mean to separate at all the ideological from the plain—vulgarly plain—imperial or geopolitical function of the Israeli state within this order (these are of course co-constitutive). Israel quite simply is the garrison or forward base of US-led imperialism in the heart of the Arab world, in precisely the terms the British once imagined it would play for them. And it plays this role—and this is the important part—in an Arab world that has historically been integrated into global capitalism precisely through war and militarization.

This is exactly what is missed by some of the critiques aimed at an anti-imperialist reading of the role of Zionism in the imperial order. These critiques will claim, for example, that Israel destabilizes the region, heightens tensions, and as such is inimical to US “interests,” and so we need to think of things like lobbies. What this misses most fundamentally is a grasp of the contemporary operations of value. It misses that dispossession, extraction, super-exploitation, and the generation of value from racialized, expendable, and surplus populations do not rely on stability and robust order, or even coherent conditions of social reproduction; they rely on the denial of development, on the demoralization and defeat of peoples, on waste and ruination—it is the capitalization of disposability itself.Footnote ¹⁵ And in this frame, Zionism as essentially a state of permanent and expansionist war on the region—that is, as an impasse—helps ensure exactly the necessary political arrangements for the accumulation of capital. This is, in turn, compounded by the derivative nature of bourgeois capitalist class formations in the region, not least in the Gulf—perhaps the most formidable counterrevolutionary bloc in the region—and where class power is entirely entangled with American financial institutions and military patronage, and more recently, Israeli security technology.Footnote ¹⁶

To put this differently, insofar as US-led imperialism in the region seeks either conditional capitalist development for states in its orbit or state collapse and de-development for states that are not, then Israeli military power remains the most effective tool for the removal of strategic obstacles.Footnote ¹⁷ Zionism is and has always been a geopolitical impasse to the most basic forms of sovereignty in West Asia and beyond. It is not a coincidence that the Israeli state became integral to the US after the 1967 War; that is, after it demonstrated its capacity to decisively destroy the emergent experiment of Third Worldist, pan-Arab socialism in Egypt and, to a lesser degree, in Syria. It is in the same period that Israel becomes a crucial ally and military partner of apartheid South Africa and Rhodesia as they wage a rearguard war against decolonization in southern Africa, and a key player in US-led dirty wars in Central America. This vocation has remained consistent and, if anything, become more explicit; when in June 2025 Israel launched a war on Iran, one of the last remaining sites of Third World sovereignty in West Asia, the German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said, “This is dirty work that Israel is doing for all of us.”Footnote ¹⁸ It is precisely in this sense that we need to remember that the settler colonial form is not only not external to but remains constitutive of Euro-American imperialism.

Yet Zionism also becomes indispensable in the 1970s along broader adjacent formations and axes. The ideological vocation of Zionism in the west also intensified in this period. This too happened in the shadow of the 1967 War. But it also happened in the shadow of the global New Left and its renewed anti-racist and anti-imperialist demands. The early 1970s were a period not only of systemic crisis but also of multifront challenge: ongoing decolonization wars and redistributive initiatives like the New International Economic Order (NIEO) coming from the global South, and the New Left, the Black Power movement, and renewed Indigenous radicalism in the global North. The question of Palestine was central to these challenges, and not simply as a symbolic fulcrum. The Palestinian Revolution, which reached its heights in the 1970s, with the city of Beirut as its hub, was a pivotal material site in the emergence and circulation of Third Worldlist thought and practice.Footnote ¹⁹ The links to Cuba, Vietnam, Algeria, and Kurdistan are today well established, but so too, slowly, are the links to the Black Panthers, the American Indian Movement (AIM), Irish republicans, and beyond.

Ideological Zionism was central to the response to all this. But at stake was not simply or even principally the reinforcing of the Israeli state project; at stake more fundamentally was the reinforcing of the western-led imperial order and its racial regimes. Zionism became part of the toolkit in the broader western rebuttal of the demands of decolonization. It is not simply that Zionism (and its corollary philo-semitism) is the west’s post-Holocaust ideological absolution; it is also—and in ways that are inversely related—that Zionism has functioned as the west’s post-colonial alibi. In other words, Zionism became integral to the extension of western-imperial worlding, not just in closing the chapter on Nazism—without ever interrogating the racial structures that underpinned European fascism—but also against the alternative world posited by the anticolonial demand, and its renewed calls in the 1970s. Zionism became and remains part of the very operation of the west’s racial regimes in ways that might survive the challenge of decolonization—if anything, this has just become clearer, if much cruder, with time.

We know that Israel—as the west’s explicit moral reparation for the Holocaust—has long functioned as the exception that proves the rule of the west’s transition to a rules-based, liberal, humane, and humanitarian postwar era. The person who probably best diagnosed this function was Robert Meister in his sweeping account of the postwar moral order. Meister identified the perceived exceptionalism of the Israeli state as a core constitutive component of the postwar human rights discourse regime. “In post-Holocaust debates about human rights,” he wrote, “the violence that Israel uses to defend itself has become a laboratory for the violence that the ‘world community’ (and especially the US) would be obliged to use in protecting an Israel that could not defend itself. The post-Holocaust security of Israel thus stands as the constitutive exception on which 21st-century humanitarianism is based.”Footnote ²⁰ Sami Khatib explained that this means that it is precisely in the name of preventing a return to the exceptional violence of the 20th century that Israel must remain above the law: “The project and mission of preventing the return of such exceptional violence would necessitate granting the self-declared survivor and victim-state, the state of Israel, impunity and constitutive exemption from international law.”Footnote ²¹ In this sense, every act of violence Israel administers—up to and including genocide—is “self-defense,” and every act of violence against Israel is a residue of a past evil that is always-already a violation of the liberal humanitarian order. Israel is founded on a monstrous exceptionalism; as a source of absolution for a west, now repackaged as “Judeo-Christian” civilization, it must retain an ontological innocence or infallibility. Read as such, the west’s real reparation for the Holocaust appears as the gifting to Zionism of not just the right to colonialism, but a kind of super-colonial prerogative, a birthright to domination.Footnote ²²

This was a gift to oneself as much as anything else. The global order forged in the aftermath of the Second World War and reaffirmed in the aftermath of the Cold War is, then, to a significant degree, premised on western support for Zionism. It is in part Zionism, now entirely synonymous with anti-antisemitism, that allows the west to reposition itself from persecutor and beneficiary to savior. Zionism, then, might be thought of as the constitutive exception that authorizes the western liberal order in reaffirming a white Christian innocence after the Holocaust—something that I think is both clearly still operative and under duress today.

But there is another entwined dimension to all of this—the colonial world. In an essay on (and in part against) the periodization of the 20th century, Charles S. Maier wrote that above all, it was narratives of moral atrocity that transfixed contemporary historians. Maier’s essay is focused on a sketch of the structural changes that defined this century: the rise and fall of nation-state territoriality that had been eventually laid to waste with the neoliberal restructuring of that quarter century of transition, 1965–1980, that changed the world in “one of the axial crises of the modern era” (a crisis, it needs adding, that was in part shaped by the demands of postcolonial states for a restructuring of global trade and unequal exchange).Footnote ²³ But these changes and their connection to the dominant moral narratives, Maier said, were out of view.

Global history was dominated instead, he wrote, by “two competing narratives” of moral atrocity: a western moral narrative of the Holocaust (and sometimes Stalinist Communism in a “totalitarianism” package) versus a non-western or global South moral narrative of colonialism and imperialism. These narratives, said Maier, are often rightly intertwined, but they are hardly of the same or even similar status, form, or political effect. The western narrative of the Holocaust has not only been institutionally sacralized (a form of civic religion in the west, as some have it) but it has “achieved a certain closure”; in the language of Meister, this is a narrative that renders its object, and that object’s violence or evil, past. In turn, the proponents of this narrative, writes Maier, have emerged with a profound distrust of transformative politics and the state; they are, in another grammar, resolutely anti-revolutionary. By contrast, the non-western or anti-colonial (this term is mine, and not Maier’s) narrative is at best tolerated in western academic institutions and emphasizes not closure but the abiding endurance of world-making structures of race and unequal exchange. Politically, the proponents of this narrative draw precisely the opposite conclusion of their counterparts: political transformation and revolution remain essential to historical justice. One is a redemptive narrative of western liberalism’s progress, the other a critical narrative of western liberalism’s enduring injustices.

The relation here, though, is more than competing (if entangled) narratives. The west’s moral narrative centered on the Holocaust and, I would add, on Zionism as the redress for the Holocaust, is at least one of the means by which the west refuses the reckoning with the historical injustices at the heart of the ongoing history of colonialism. To push this one step further we might locate these competing narratives along the historical split between anti-imperialism (which was almost always anti-Zionist) and human rights (which was almost always defined by exceptionalism around Zionism) as two opposed grammars of internationalism and global change that Salar Mohandesi shows us clashed precisely in the 1970s and saw the gradual displacement and capture of the former by the latter.Footnote ²⁴ Maier is right: the narratives are at odds, but one only functions at the expense of the other. To put this more directly, I’d say: western support for Zionism in part allows the west not just to close the chapter on Nazism and interwar fascism—as a temporary aberrant episode internal to Europe—but also to essentially absolve historical whiteness and its enduring racial structures in the process, in effect foreclosing the world-historical demands of decolonization.

How does this work? There are two principal mechanisms: one is post-Holocaust memory politics that makes the Holocaust exceptional and pegs its redress to Zionism; and the other is the “new antisemitism” discourse that makes antisemitism reducible almost entirely to anti-Zionism and now primarily a problem of the postcolonial world and the anticolonial left.

In the first mechanism, this works first by severing any historical connection between colonialism and European interwar fascism. The racial-colonial structures and inter-imperial conflicts of late 19th- and early 20th-century Europe that were constitutive of fascism disappear. And with them the lessons of everyone from Césaire to Arendt. The Holocaust becomes an exceptional, incomparable, and aberrant lapse, severed from the actual histories of racialization, colonial extermination, and ethno-nationalism that incubated it. In turn, colonial genocidal violence everywhere else from the Americas to Algeria and Namibia—let alone in Palestine—is by extension denied its part in a shared universal historical consciousness.

The vigilantly policed uniqueness and incomparability of the Holocaust becomes the grounds for the denial or disavowal of colonialism. “The belief in the Holocaust’s uniqueness, thus, serves,” writes Lara Fricke, “not only as a confession, but also as a refusal to confess to the crimes of colonialism.”Footnote ²⁵ This uniqueness, Fricke insists, “serves as a barrier from actual responsibility in the form of structural transformation and decolonization”; in effect, she writes, it allows European states to evade tackling structural racism and ongoing colonial power relations.Footnote ²⁶ But this process (what Fricke reads in the German case as the affective transformation of shame into pride) demands the “external validation” and “witness” that only one entity can really provide—the Israeli state. Israel is the necessity that logically results from the Holocaust’s alleged uniqueness—“the uniqueness of the Holocaust and support for Israel are seen as interconnected.”Footnote ²⁷

This disavowal of colonial history through Holocaust memorialization is then not simply a form of disavowal—Europe just washing its hands of its colonial past. It is supremely productive, and in fact entirely consistent with what we might think of as the common sense of a liberal presentism that continuously fashions new alibis for imperialism. Alberto Toscano connects this common sense-as-alibi directly to the Gaza genocide: “One of the mechanisms that governs the reproduction of our liberal common sense is that of discursively and spectacularly transforming structures into events, durable if mutable apparatuses, and sedimented histories of violence into sublime and monumental singularities. This is one of the dynamics that allows the ‘never again’ to become an alibi for ‘again’.”Footnote ²⁸

The second mechanism is arguably even more critical. This is where the “new antisemitism” discourse is decisive: by making Zionism entirely continuous with anti-antisemitism, the west all but entirely displaces contemporary antisemitism onto the postcolonial world. Antisemitism as a now transhistorical essence is seen as primarily, maybe even exclusively, a problem of the Black and Brown peoples of this world, and especially the Arabs and Palestinians. Palestinians are seen to be so singularly motivated by antisemitism that it figures almost like a congenital condition inherited at birth. In other words, the new antisemitism demands and gets its own subject, the new antisemite.Footnote ²⁹

This has been the logical end of this discourse from its very start. In 1969, the Austrian essayist Jean Améry—considered a forerunner of the new antisemitism turn—wrote “Virtuous Antisemitism,” in which he stated directly that the new antisemitism “now dressed up as anti-Israelism, is located firmly on the left.”Footnote ³⁰ “For it is the left,” he went on, “that is providing antisemitism with a nefarious dialectical veneer of virtuousness.”Footnote ³¹ In another article of the same year, “The New Left’s Approach to ‘Zionism’,” he sharpened his tools: “What did it take for the global left … to embrace a hatred of Israel that, if left to run its course, of this much I am sure, can only serve the evil and unjust scourge of antisemitism? How did Marxist dialectical thought come to lend itself to the preparation of the coming genocide?”Footnote ³² In terms that have barely changed since, Améry targeted what he saw as a “crass oversimplification” that cast the Israel in the role of “oppressor.” This oversimplification was powered, he wrote, by “the myth of the liberation struggle that is both social-revolutionary and national in character” held by the young revolutionaries of the New Left in Europe and which meant that they “coalesced around the resistance of the Palestinians Arabs.”Footnote ³³ Reading Améry, it becomes quickly clear that it is these anti-imperialist linkages and solidarities that he finds most troubling: “Vietnam, the struggle of the Bolivian guerrillas, the resistance movement in Greece, the Black Panther movement, the El Fatah—they all suddenly became indistinguishable.”Footnote ³⁴

American public discourse, as ever, got a dumbed-down version of these same anxieties and preoccupations. In 1973, Israeli-South African diplomat Abba Eban took to the pages of the American Jewish journal Bi-Weekly Congress to implore American Zionists to make the case that anti-Zionism was antisemitism. A year later, in 1974, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) took up the task, publishing The New Antisemitism as arguably the foundational text of this turn in American Zionism; this was followed in 1982 by a book by another set of ADL stalwarts in Nathan and Ruth Ann Perlmutter’s The Real Anti-Semitism in America. Both these texts—replete with crass racism—targeted the multiracial and anti-imperialist left (what they called “black extremist and left revolutionary organizations”) as the carriers of the new antisemitism.Footnote ³⁵

These remain the basic contours of the discourse today. In February 2024, as the genocide was raging, Noah Feldman—who should be best known for his complicity in the American destruction and occupation of Iraq—recycled much of these same arguments in his (originally titled) essay, “The New Antisemitism.”Footnote ³⁶ A slapdash run through history quickly makes way for the same consistent target: the anti-imperialist and anti-Zionist left. Feldman recognizes that antisemitism might still be a problem on the far right, “But the most perniciously creative current in contemporary antisemitic thought,” he tells us, “is more likely to come from the left.”Footnote ³⁷ This is, quite unequivocally, the principal topic of his essay, which is little more than a rearguard defense of the Zionist project. “Antisemitism is morphing again, right now, before our very eyes,” he claims. Things like describing Zionism as a settler colonial project or talking of its links to imperialism and white supremacy, even calling the Gaza genocide a genocide, are all signs, for Feldman, of potential, even “unconscious,” antisemitism since they are all in effect mutated rehashes of the antisemitic trope that Jews are all-powerful. Like Améry, Feldman worries about a kind of historical role reversal: “The core of this new antisemitism lies in the idea that Jews are not a historically oppressed people seeking self-preservation but instead oppressors…” If nothing else, the new antisemitism discourse has been strikingly consistent. The throughlines are dogged: the same attachments to a transhistorical unwavering notion of Jewish victimhood, the same consistent targets in the anticolonial left, and, it has to be said, the same lazy cynicism run right across this discourse.

We know that, historically, much of this turn in the 1970s was animated by the worries of Zionist activists and Israeli politicians, not least in the wake of the anti-racist gains made by UN General Assembly Resolution 3379 that, in 1975, identified Zionism as a form of racism and racial discrimination. But as Sean Malloy, among others, writes, all of this discourse had less to do with the Israeli state per se and more to do with “transnational, grassroots organizing that sought to link anticolonial liberation movements across the globe with activists in the United States and Western Europe.”Footnote ³⁸ The new antisemitism discourse, writes Malloy, emerges in the 1970s as part of global counterinsurgency “aimed at shoring up Zionism and defeating not only resistance in Palestine, but also any form of coordinated Palestinian solidarity across national, racial, and ethnic borders.”Footnote ³⁹

The triumph of the “new antisemitism” discourse, then, is not the State of Israel’s alone by any means; it is also—and maybe primarily—the west’s. And its efficacy is precisely in how it simultaneously absolves historic whiteness and forecloses the anticolonial. In other words, it is not about the displacement of some collective guilt around racial supremacy, but, on the contrary, the restructuring of that supremacy. In Germany for example, one can hear in the same breath an emphatic affirmation of Zionism as part of German “state reason” (staatsräson) and at the same time a lament that migrants in Germany have created a problem of “imported antisemitism”; the latest iteration of this came from German Chancellor Merz (talking mere months after Germans had voted to make an ultra-right, and arguably neo-Nazi, party the second largest in parliament).Footnote ⁴⁰ Or, take Germany’s new citizenship law that now requires applicants to declare their belief in the state of Israel’s right to exist, in effect using Zionism as the purportedly “anti-racist” means of racializing discipline aimed at Germany’s nonwhite (and principally Muslim) populations. In this single mechanism, Germany can drape itself in the garbs of anti-racism precisely as it not only forecloses any reckoning with the anti-migrant racism at its core but in fact expands and conceals this racism at perhaps the most emblematic site of the endurance of colonial history in our present—postcolonial migrancy.Footnote ⁴¹ Zionism in this instance becomes the vehicle of an “anti-racist” Islamophobia wielded at the heart of the decolonial demands around migration.

Put differently, through these mechanisms, Zionism affords the contemporary racial regime in the west both a moral veneer and a means of camouflage. At work in a place like Germany—only the most parodic end of the western spectrum—is not an actual reckoning with the histories of fascism and Nazism but the leveraging of German culpability into disciplinary racial instruments in what has been called (by someone who happened to be previously quite taken by the German politics of memory) “philosemitic McCarthyism.”Footnote ⁴² In the UK, Zionism as anti-antisemitism was used to destroy the prospects of the most formidable (maybe the only) anti-imperialist social democratic movement in British history. In the US, Zionism as anti-antisemitism becomes the instrument of a broad clampdown on left-wing dissent that mobilizes and expands the full powers of the deportation regime in the name of civil rights and “Jewish safety.” It was neither incidental nor merely symbolic that the White House tweeted a picture of the student activist they had just effectively kidnapped, Mahmoud Khalil, behind the words “Shalom Mahmoud”—this was the operation of a (white) philo-semitism used as a tool of racial discipline through the border apparatus. This is the actual and barely concealed content of western anti-antisemitism. Alana Lentin sums it up with the directness it demands: “At stake in the mission to ostensibly save Jews is the west’s attempt to save itself.”Footnote ⁴³

Zionism in this sense is integral to the very construction of the west as a moral order that not only never has to account for its own racial supremacist structures or colonial histories, but that can in fact extend these structures in new garb. It is not just that many of the components that went into interwar fascism—white supremacy, racial nationalism, settler colonial elimination, global-scale predatory dispossession, Europe’s “Jewish question”—remain uninterrogated and the west never has to actually face itself, but that they are as a result extended in new forms and under the guise of some sort of transition past all of this. In other words, the ideological vocation of Zionism is not actually that it affords some kind of correction of Europe’s discredited past at someone else’s expense (Palestinians paying for Nazi history), but that it affords an extension of the logic of that past in a form that appears as its disavowal.

It is the continuity of the west as a civilizational project itself that is in play—again in precisely the terms that the prosecutors of this genocide have so consistently incited. If, as Dušan Bjelić working through Cedric Robinson tells us, Europe as a civilizational order was always grounded in its own racialism and internal histories of slavery that precede the colonial encounter, then what I’m saying is that Zionism in part allows this “civilization of racialism” to survive the challenge of decolonization.Footnote ⁴⁴ Zionism is the (increasingly damaged) moral alibi of the racial-colonial global order. Or, as Houria Bouteldja rhetorically asks with typical precision, “Is philo-semitism not the last refuge of racial humanism?”Footnote ⁴⁵

This is Zionism as impasse. It is an instrument in the ideological blockage of the possibility of a transition to a decolonized world that might challenge the persistence of racial hierarchy, and in which Europe and America might have to answer for their colonial histories and those histories’ endurances. In this sense, what its proponents claim is true: Zionism is a rampart of white western civilization against its detractors. And as such, Zionism exceeds its object—the so-called Jewish state—many times over. We read this point of excess precisely in what Max Weiss calls anti-anti-Zionism as a form of counterinsurgent knowledge production not reducible to the project that is the Israeli state. Anti-anti-Zionism, at bottom, tells us Weiss, is simply anti-anti-racism on a global scale.Footnote ⁴⁶

All of this becomes sharper if much more disjunctural with the Gaza genocide. “With this genocide against Palestinians,” writes Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, “it is clear how much the West is invested in keeping Zionist Jews as mercenaries of the white supremacist imperial order that continues to fashion the world in which we live…”Footnote ⁴⁷ But this investment is doubled down on just as this mercenary function creaks and wobbles. The logical ends of Zionism risk its very vocation for the west. This moral absolution, this pristine sense of white Christian innocence, this perfect cudgel against the reparative demands of decolonization, this fantasy of an only briefly interrupted but self-salvaged arc of liberal progress, that were all enabled by Zionism, now feel threatened by it. The genocide, wrote Chris Hedges, “will forever shatter the myth that we, or any Western nation, respect the rule of law or are the protectors of human rights, democracy and the so-called ‘virtues’ of Western civilization. Israel’s barbarity is our own. We may not understand this, but the rest of the globe does.”Footnote ⁴⁸

2. Unworlding along the colonial frontier

If the rest of the globe understands, it is because the impasses are clearer than ever. It is not hard to see the Zionist project moored in its foundational abyss and flailing lethally beneath the weight of resistance and its own contradictions. And it is equally not hard to see how this project operates not only as an imperial protectorate but as a pillar in the west’s racial regime and the tip of a spear aimed directly at the anti-colonial left.Footnote ⁴⁹ There is nothing coincidental about Palestine sitting at the heart of a renewed global left consciousness and its cultures of dissent everywhere. It is, in fact, the only conclusion of any coherent reading of the balance of forces.

The globe has been split again right along its colonial axis. But this axis does not run neatly along a global North/South divide. And its racial regimes are as unstable as they are necessary. Millions in the global North, in the geographies that align with the boundaries of the west, have been mobilized against the genocide. Here, opposition to the genocide takes shape in a social order strained to breaking point by crises of capital, organized state abandonment, relentless downward class pressure, deep polarization, and the collapse of public trust. A social order, crucially, in which imperial war is no longer a stabilizing domestic force (the wages of empire are simply not what they used to be). For many on the left in the North, now increasingly the children of racialized classes themselves, a reckoning with the racial-colonial foundations of the world is neither felt as a threat to the gains of labor nor seen as something that can just be deferred or bracketed in variants of economism or workerism. Palestine has become a way into their own struggles.

The question of Palestine today, then, brings to the surface both colonial history’s endurances and this history’s contemporary new deformations. Colombian president Gustavo Petro was right when he said in an already much-cited speech that “Gaza is a rehearsal for the future.”Footnote ⁵⁰ But it is also a rehearsal of the past; a past that has never been overcome. The exterminatory logic that Petro identifies as ready to be unleashed through climate fascism’s racial sorting mechanisms has always been there. Indeed, the entailments of colonial history in the Gaza genocide are in every image we see and every utterance we hear. Anyone who has seen the image of the stacked dead buffalo carcasses of the Great Plains, slaughtered by the US cavalry as a means of the starvation and forced displacement of the Oceti Sakowin, cannot help but see that image again in the piles of spoiled food and dumped bags of flour on the edges of a besieged and starved Gaza. Anyone who has read the great 19th century liberal Alexis de Tocqueville insist on the “unfortunate necessities” of burning harvests and emptying silos in the conquest of Algeria, cannot but hear that insistence again in the countless statements by western liberals, like British human rights lawyer turned Prime Minister Keir Starmer, that held that the Israelis had the right to cut all water, food, and power from the Strip.Footnote ⁵¹ Anyone who has seen the 1904 image of the Congolese father staring down at the severed foot and hand of his five-year-old daughter in Belgium’s reign of terror cannot help but see that image again in the thousands of maimed and amputee Palestinian children in Gaza. What rains down on Gaza’s families in the shape of 2000 pound bombs dropped down with laser guided system precision on exactly the right living room in exactly the right home, in the name of self-defense, is not just the fruit of technological-military supremacy; it is also the cumulative force of five hundred years of colonial extraction and racial reason distilled into this single object of mass death—the signature of colonial modernity.

It is tempting to read a straight historical line in all this. But this would be to miss not just how much maintenance and upkeep the racial regimes around white supremacy continue to need, but also the contemporary strategic urgencies to which support for Zionism now responds.Footnote ⁵² Zionism at its most annihilatory is being doubled down on and wielded by a ruling class in the west that sees it not just as a tool for the foreclosure of decolonial demands but increasingly as a model to emulate in an age of all but permanent crisis. We might, with Richard Seymour, read this as part of a far-right paranoid turn that responds to polycrisis by seeing disaster everywhere and promising its followers the total eradication of its enemies.Footnote ⁵³ But it is just as much a feature of the liberal political machinery for whom fealty to Zionism as a synonym for what it calls “Jewish safety” is the perfect camouflage for punching left. The enduring structures of colonial history are obligatory inheritances, but the strategic ends to which they are put are fungible and dynamic.

If what orders the world as world has been laid bare, then so too have the enduring global stakes of anticolonialism. There is an insight into the anticolonial tradition lost and found in the fallout of the genocide. As Musab Younis reminds us, one of the core insights of this tradition is that racial hierarchy does not simply exist on a global scale; it produces this very scale; race hierarchy is a stabilizing force, “protecting the spoils of the world’s original bifurcation.”Footnote ⁵⁴ In turn, not only was the work of anticolonialism only achievable on the scale of the world, but also “by the same token, the assault on the anticolonial project began here, ranged against its imagined worlds.”Footnote ⁵⁵

Herein lies Palestine’s bind. The more its struggle points to the imagined worlds of the anticolonial, the more fiercely it has to be negated. In Zionism’s necessity to the coherence of a morally absolved western civilization, Palestinians too have become a “necessary exception”; their disappearance a seeming requirement for the completion of the west’s redemptive arc.Footnote ⁵⁶ Dylan Saba puts this in even more emphatic terms: “This is the dilemma of Palestine: Its condition is the condition of the modern world.” “Colonialism,” he writes, “remains the structure of the world order, and from the perspective of modernity, Israel must survive and win. From the perspective of modernity, colonialism can be lamented, but never opposed.”Footnote ⁵⁷

And yet the skies are darker than usual still. What is being crushed in the obliteration of Gaza is not only the persistence of the desire for a genuinely decolonial world, but it would also seem, the viability of worlding of any kind in this historical conjuncture. In both all but destroying the institutions of liberal internationalism that gave the western-led world its coherence as a world, and at the same time further foreclosing the decolonial demand of a world otherwise, the genocide seems to be both the expression and acceleration of the disintegration of the very possibility of worlding itself today.Footnote ⁵⁸ If, as Samera Esmeir writes, in the modern age, becoming of the world requires becoming international, and remaining of the world demands joining the international institutions that house the world and delimit it, what happens when these institutions begin to implode?Footnote ⁵⁹ What comes after worlding captured by international order? What comes after the hypocrisy of liberal humanitarianism and international humanitarian law? What is the world without the viable fiction of a figurative humanity?

The loss is empire’s as well. If Gaza is, as Meister recently said, the first post-humanitarian war, then it would seem to usher in a new time.Footnote ⁶⁰ A time in which western state power—now taking its cue from the Zionist project—might lavish in its cruelty and indifference, unencumbered but also unaided by the operative ideologies of the human rights regime. Meister is right that the cruelty of the post-humanitarian age that is replacing the hypocrisy of the humanitarian age will not be any better, but in all likelihood, it also will not be as effective. What will come might be much more ruthless, but it will be without the kind of institutional frameworks and forms of legal authority that can guarantee stable long-term forms of domination and their worlding effects.

This starts in the region. Zionism’s settler form—its open frontiers, expansionism, eliminationism—has, as I’ve noted, long been constitutive of Euro-American imperialism in West Asia. But this has also always produced its own disjunctions, and they may be coming to a head. As Khaled Odetallah notes, everything that we might think of as US-led “political resolution” and “normalization,” up to and including the Abraham Accords, can be thought of as an attempt to manage the secondary contradictions between Zionism’s settler form and its imperial vocation.Footnote ⁶¹ Today, as Zionism’s territorial drive and brittle existential anxieties overwhelm its desire for regional normalization, it is not at all clear that this managerial ploy is still viable.

In turn, the notion that the west might rewrite a regional and then global order from the genocide has already been dashed. There will be no decisive smashing of counter-systemic forces and resistance movements in the region, no India-Middle East-Europe (IMEC) economic corridor that might supplant China’s Road and Belt Initiative in the region, no canal to supplant the Suez Canal. There will be no new great legal global reordering atop the genocide of the Palestinian people, the way the Holocaust and Hiroshima and Nagasaki were the forms of violence that paved the way for the law that followed. There will be no new nomos of the earth written in the ruins of Gaza.Footnote ⁶² If this was the imperial gambit of the genocide, then it has not paid off. It is not only that none of the terms of what we used to be (dubiously) called the rules-based international order remain, but that there is nothing in their place. Even those who have made their very lot in this rigged system have had to admit the collapse. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney might have indulged in a rank hypocrisy at the World Economic Forum in Davos when he confessed that the rules-based order had been a convenient fiction for “the strongest,” but he was not wrong in calling the end of this order, “a rupture not a transition.”Footnote ⁶³ If this is an interregnum, then it is not clear there is any point of synthesis on its horizon. And though Carney conspicuously avoided Gaza and his government’s own complicities, the effects of the genocide are clear. “The incipient fascism of a tiny state in the Mediterranean ought not to have had such terrifying international consequences,” but so central is Israel as a lynchpin of western foreign policy, tells us Seymour, that “its allies willingly followed it into geopolitical disarray and moral abyss. Palestine proved to be, in a curious way, the symptom of the world-system.”Footnote ⁶⁴ Gaza has historically survived an intolerable amount of violence, but, in the words of Palestinian journalist Bisan Owda, as read by Eric Cantona, “This time is different. If Gaza is exterminated this time, the world is inevitably over.”Footnote ⁶⁵ The genocide might just be the unworlding of us all.

To go back to the refrain with which I began, in the struggle against genocide in Gaza hangs the fate of the world. Palestinians in Gaza know that they not only face the full weight of the western-led global order, but that they must actively defy it even when no one else will. They’ve faced the full gamut of the firepower of history’s largest empire and its vassals, which have quite literally emptied their weapons depots on their heads; they have faced the complicity of the Arab state order and its derivative capital class that created land bridges to keep the Israeli economy moving; they have faced a liberal humanism and its epistemic violence, not least in liberal universities, that seems to be premised on their negation and dehumanization. And they know all this. A teenage boy pulled out from the rubble of his home, in which both his mother and sister had been martyred, walks up to the camera, covered in a layer of monochrome gray dust, interrupted only by splashes of deep red blood. He does what so many here do in the face of unlimited mass death and immeasurable loss, he expresses defiance: “May God protect you Gaza. It’s this small,” he says, making a small circle with his fingers, “but the whole world can’t defeat it.” To be Palestinian has always been, in a very real sense, to struggle against the world itself. But like all dreams of decolonization, Palestinian liberation has also always been the audacity of insisting on another world from a position of relative weakness, from the rubble itself, by those with no fixed place on the neatly divided surface of the earth. The claim to a whole by a part that has no part, but only ever made on those terms, as just another part, just a people like any other, part to part, wretched to wretched.