Marwan Emil Toubassi (*)
On November 29, the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People, the fundamental truth that the world tries to avoid naming becomes clear once again: what is happening in Gaza, as in the West Bank including Jerusalem, is not a military war nor a “round of fighting,” but a new chapter in the ongoing project of genocide and settler-colonial eradication that our people have faced for more than seventy years. On this day, born from the Partition Resolution of 1948, we see the stark moral contradiction between the vast global popular solidarity and the complicity of major Western official powers that attempt to impose an “international order” allowing Israel to escape all accountability and punishment.
Thus, the International Day of Solidarity is not merely a symbolic annual occasion, despite the massive popular demonstrations around the world. It becomes a platform to expose this complicity, and a window to redefine the conflict as a national-liberation struggle by a people confronting a declared project of existential uprooting — a reality that requires a serious reassessment of visions and traditional tools, toward a Palestinian strategy capable of facing the project of liquidation and achieving national liberation and independence.
While some rush to “thank” the United States for what is called a ceasefire, anyone following the ground reality knows that nothing has stopped. Israel did not start this war to end it; it continues a single political project pursued since 1948 — and even before, by Zionist militias — to empty the land of its indigenous people. Today this reaches a point where Gaza is being turned into a bloody model of deterrence to be applied to the region in the future, while the West Bank is pushed toward a space with no room left untouched by racist settlement — not even enough for a sovereign state — as the Zionist establishment continues to reject that very principle.
This is revealed clearly in events on the ground and in the de facto annexation underway, as well as in the statements of Israeli leaders themselves. What is happening in Gaza is not a “response” nor a “war against Hamas,” as we have said from the beginning, regardless of the October 7 context. It is a war against the Palestinian people themselves — and against the role, essence, and historic meaning of the Palestine Liberation Organization as the leader of the national liberation movement. It is waged under a religious-nationalist and racist banner, even though Judaism is not a nationality. It is a war built on a worldview that considers the Palestinian an existential threat that must be removed.
When Knesset members and Israeli ministers declare that “the enemy is the idea” and that “Gaza is the idea that must be erased,” they are not speaking about a military conflict, but about political, cultural, and existential erasure. When a former intelligence chief says that “more than fifty thousand dead is a historical necessity,” he is not describing violence — he is announcing a systematic goal of reproducing the Nakba on a larger scale.
Even the president of the Israeli state himself said openly that this is a “war to save Western civilization,” meaning it is not a local war at all, but an ideological campaign that casts Palestinians as a “threat to the West,” justifying everything done against our people.
The simple truth is that what we see today in every camp, village, and city is a direct continuation of what began historically. The only difference is that Israel — and a society shifting toward extreme right-wing views, including a sense of Jewish superiority over Palestinians who have lived within Israel since the Nakba and preserved their national identity — no longer feels compelled to hide its rhetoric. The Nakba, once denied, is now justified openly. Their leaders declare: “Gaza must be erased,” “all of Gaza will be Jewish,” and that “the problem is not the tunnels but the population.” These are not random statements; they are a loud and explicit political program — one linked to a broader vision of Greater Israel, reflected in what is happening in Lebanon and Syria and in ongoing threats to brotherly Jordan.
All masks worn by Western and some regional states, led by the United States, have fallen after seven decades. The talk of “international law” and “never again” was only a façade. We have seen military, media, and diplomatic support — even partnership in the crimes, directly or through complicity — and a complete blockage of any serious political horizon.
When the International Court of Justice states that there is a “real risk” of genocide and that the occupation must end, the West continues supplying arms, shifting from “mediator” to partner in the crime.
The aggression has not ended because the goal is not a “military victory,” but the transformation of the place itself. Israel wants Gaza without Palestinians, the West Bank without popular resistance, and Palestine without a people — reducing the cause to a demographic problem without national meaning. As long as this goal remains, no truce, humanitarian deal, or deceptive new Security Council resolution — shaped by the American-Israeli mindset — will stop it. Those who consider the Palestinian child a “future threat” will never recognize this people’s right to life, let alone self-determination or the implementation of UN resolutions from 181 to 194.
Despite this official terror, Israel has failed to hide the truth. Hundreds of millions around the world now understand that what is happening in Gaza is deliberate genocide, ethnic cleansing, and forced displacement — and that what is happening in the West Bank and Jerusalem is the same. The attempt to paint Palestinians as “Nazis” or a “civilizational threat” is nothing but an effort to hide the crimes behind the history of the Zionist movement itself.
The myth of “the most moral army” has collapsed, revealing an army guided by religious and ethnic slogans that treats every Arab as a “legitimate target.” The lie of “the war on terror” has collapsed, leaving only mass killing, total destruction, erasure of identity, and political attempts to end the existence of an entire people. Even the Holocaust narrative and accusations of antisemitism no longer provide cover, as a Holocaust-like atrocity is being committed against our people in live broadcast — and because we, not they, are the Semitic, Canaanite people of this land.
The war has not stopped because it did not begin as a war.
It is a new chapter of a Nakba they want to continue — waged with more destructive tools and with Western sponsorship that is less ashamed than ever.
What has changed, however, is that the world’s peoples — not necessarily their governments — now see the truth clearly, and this is reshaping global dynamics. What will determine the future is not official international complicity, but the steadfastness of our Palestinian people, and the determination of the world’s progressive and leftist forces — especially in the United States and the United Kingdom — to reject this brutal model that seeks to make Gaza a precedent for how the world treats vulnerable nations.
Today Gaza is not an isolated battle, and what is happening there is not disconnected from global developments.
It is the moral battle of the world.
(*) Former Ambassador of Palestine to Greece
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