As the Zionist state widened its war across the region, bombing Lebanon and Iran, and dragging West Asia toward regional catastrophe, Western governments and mainstream media institutions shifted attention elsewhere. Palestine disappeared from the front pages. But while the cameras moved, the genocide deepened.
Gaza continued to burn. The West Bank continued to fracture under settler expansion and military terror. Israeli apartheid hardened into openly codified racial supremacy. The machinery of extermination did not pause because the headlines changed.
What defines the present moment is not only the scale of Palestinian suffering. It is also the terrifying normality with which genocide and apartheid now coexist alongside global capitalist expansion. Gaza is starved while stock markets soar. Entire bloodlines are erased while military contractors celebrate record profits. Children die beneath collapsed concrete while artificial intelligence firms, surveillance corporations, and weapons manufacturers accumulate unimaginable wealth. This is the capitalist system functioning exactly as designed.
Since October 2023, the genocide in Palestine has become inseparable from the broader political economy of imperialism. Major American and European arms corporations have all benefited from the permanent war economy generated by Israeli aggression and regional escalation. Bombardment creates procurement cycles. Siege generates military contracts. Every destroyed neighbourhood in Gaza becomes an advertisement for weapons systems, drone technologies, surveillance infrastructure, and urban warfare doctrine.
Gaza has become both a killing field and a showroom for the global arms industry. At the same time, the American technology sector has consolidated unprecedented economic power. Microsoft, NVIDIA, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, Apple, and Tesla have expanded their dominance during the same period in which Palestinians have endured industrial-scale slaughter. Artificial intelligence, predictive targeting systems, biometric databases, cloud infrastructure, and surveillance technologies increasingly intersect with militarised occupation regimes.
Palestine is not external to twenty-first century capitalism. It is embedded within its circuits of accumulation. This is why Western ruling classes have absorbed the genocide without meaningful rupture. Israel remains too strategically valuable as a militarised outpost of empire. And capitalism does not oppose militarism. Militarism is one of its most profitable sectors. War absorbs surplus production. It disciplines labour. It secures trade routes and energy corridors. It expands state surveillance capacities and justifies authoritarian power. Palestine exposes the material foundations hidden beneath liberal rhetoric about ‘human rights’, ‘democracy’, and the so-called ‘rules-based order’.
Gaza: ceasefire as permanent siege
The January 2025 ceasefire was presented internationally as the beginning of de-escalation. Palestinians emerged cautiously from shelters and rubble believing perhaps the most intense phase of extermination had passed. But the ceasefire was never intended to produce peace. Israel refused to commit formally to ending hostilities after the agreement’s initial phase. Hamas nevertheless accepted the terms, after receiving guarantees from mediators including Egypt, Qatar, and the United States.
Those guarantees proved worthless. On 18 March 2025, while negotiations were still ongoing, Israel launched surprise airstrikes in the early hours of the morning, massacring hundreds of Palestinians within minutes. Families sleeping inside damaged homes and displacement tents were incinerated beneath aerial bombardment. Israeli officials later admitted that deception had formed part of the military strategy.
What followed was the continuation of genocidal warfare under shifting humanitarian language: relentless bombing, mass displacement, aid obstruction, engineered famine, and the systematic destruction of Gaza’s capacity to sustain life. Entire family networks have disappeared. Journalists, doctors, academics, aid workers, paramedics, teachers, and United Nations staff members have been deliberately targeted and killed in unprecedented numbers. Hospitals have been besieged and destroyed. Universities flattened. Bakeries bombed. Water systems collapsed. Agricultural land razed. Refugee shelters attacked repeatedly.
It is the deliberate annihilation of the social foundations necessary for Palestinian existence. And starvation has become one of the central weapons of this exterminatory project. Human rights organisations, UN agencies, famine experts, and humanitarian groups have repeatedly documented the systematic weaponisation of food, water, medicine, and humanitarian access. Aid convoys accumulate at crossings while stunted children starve metres away. Flour rots inside blocked trucks while families survive on animal feed and contaminated water.
The famine is entirely man-made. This is not simply siege warfare. It is the industrial management of death. Yet even amid this catastrophe, imperial diplomacy continues performing the theatre of neutrality. Western governments speak endlessly about “stability,” “security,” and “de-escalation” while continuing to arm, finance, and diplomatically shield the apartheid state.
The political message is unmistakable: Palestinians are expected to surrender all resistance and accept a state of permanent subjugation before being permitted to rebuild from Israeli bombardment.
Extraction, empire, and resource theft
The occupation is sustained not only through ideology and military violence, but through material extraction. For decades, Israel has exploited Palestinian land, water, labour, and natural resources while denying Palestinians sovereignty over them. One of the clearest examples is the Gaza Marine gas field discovered off Gaza’s coast in 1999. Those reserves could have provided Palestinians with energy independence and billions in public revenue. Yet, even while Gaza starves, discussions continue among Israeli and international energy corporations regarding offshore extraction, export corridors, and integration into European energy markets. The same governments that lecture Palestinians about “peace” simultaneously facilitate the plunder of Palestinian resources.
The genocide therefore cannot be separated from the broader structures of imperial accumulation. Palestine sits at the intersection of militarism, energy politics, trade routes, surveillance capitalism, and geopolitical control. And the complicity extends beyond Washington and Europe. Large sections of the Arab ruling classes have functioned as passive collaborators in the maintenance of the regional order. While millions across the Arab world mobilised in solidarity with Palestine, many monarchies and military dictatorships focused primarily on suppressing domestic dissent, while preserving relations with the United States and Israel.
The Arab masses remain overwhelmingly pro-Palestinian. Their rulers do not. This contradiction has become one of the defining political realities of the present era: populations radicalised by witnessing genocide in real time confronting despotic rulers deeply integrated into imperial structures of finance, military dependency, and authoritarian control.
The West Bank: annexation through terror
Israeli settlements near Bethlehem. If Gaza represents extermination through overwhelming military force, the West Bank, also under illegal occupation, represents annexation through fragmentation, displacement, and slow-motion strangulation. (Photo: Garry Walsh / Trócaire, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0)
If Gaza represents extermination through overwhelming military force, the West Bank, also under illegal occupation, represents annexation through fragmentation, displacement, and slow-motion strangulation. Israeli military operations across Jenin, Tulkarem, Nablus, and refugee camps throughout the occupied territory increasingly resemble full-scale colonial warfare. Tanks, drones, helicopter gunships, mass arrests, curfews, assassinations, and home demolitions have become routine instruments of domination.
Simultaneously, settler violence has intensified under direct state protection. Armed settlers burn crops, attack villages, assault families, seize land, and terrorise communities, while Israeli soldiers either stand aside or actively participate. Settlement expansion has accelerated dramatically while Palestinian communities are uprooted and expelled. This is Zionism stripped of liberal camouflage. A settler-colonial project sustained through racial supremacy, militarised segregation, demographic engineering, and permanent territorial expansion.
The apartheid system is no longer hidden behind diplomatic euphemisms. It is openly codified in law. The Israeli state now operates through an explicit dual legal regime between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. Jewish settlers living illegally on occupied land enjoy full civil rights under Israeli law, while Palestinians remain subject to military rule, military courts, checkpoints, administrative detention, collective punishment, and lethal state violence. This is apartheid in its purest form.
The collapse of international law
But Palestine exposes something even larger than Israel’s colonial fascism. It reveals the collapse of the entire postwar architecture of international law. For decades, Western powers invoked the language of legality, democracy, and human rights to justify interventions across the Global South. International law was presented as universal, neutral, and binding.
Palestine has shattered that illusion completely. The International Court of Justice issues warnings. UN rapporteur documente des atrocités. Human rights organisations compile overwhelming evidence of war crimes, apartheid, ethnic cleansing, starvation, and genocide. And still nothing happens. No meaningful sanctions. No comprehensive arms embargo. No enforcement. No accountability.
Israel enjoys a level of impunity unmatched in contemporary international politics because it remains protected by imperial power, above all the United States. International law applies rigorously to enemies of empire and selectively, or not at all, to its allies. Palestine therefore reveals far more than the catastrophe of one people. It exposes the moral, political, and legal decomposition of the entire imperial order. And still the Palestinian people resist. They resist through memory, through survival, through political organisation, through refusal, through return, through armed struggle, through steadfastness in the face of annihilation.
The Palestinian struggle has never been merely a national question. It is one of the clearest front lines in the global confrontation against colonialism, empire, racial capitalism, and organised dispossession. As Ghassan Kanafani wrote: “The Palestinian cause is not a cause for Palestinians only, but a cause for every revolutionary wherever he is, as a cause of the exploited and oppressed masses in our era.” That remains true today. Palestine is the mirror held up to the modern world. And what it reflects is an imperial system prepared to sacrifice entire peoples in defence of power, profit, and domination.
Usuf Chikte is a co-ordinator for the Palestine Solidarity Campaign (Cape Town).
*Featured Image by Palestinian News & Information Agency (WAFA), in contract with APAimages / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0
