What Will Gaza Become After Genocide? Restitution, Reparations, and Renewal (Part 3)

This post is the conclusion of a three-part series: What Will Gaza Become After Genocide? Using the Counterfactual Method to Evaluate Three Post-Genocidal Futures (24 July 2025). You may access Part 1 here, where I argued that the genocide Israel is perpetrating against the Palestinians is central to the zionist ethos which, like other settler-colonial movements, seeks to remove the native from coveted lands. In the second part, available here, I explore a scenario where Europe actually complies with international law. As many have cautioned, even European legal compliance would leave Palestinians at risk, where rights are affirmed without enforcement, and violations recognised if not remedied. I turn now to a Palestinian Freedom Dream.

3. A Freedom Dream

“The question of genocide is never far from discussions of settler colonialism.”

Patrick Wolfe

For the third counterfactual, violence and legality took a backseat to aspiration and freedom dreaming. By this, I mean that I would let the Palestinians speak for themselves. I admit I was bedevilled by this task. Not only am I not Palestinian, but I know nothing of what it means to live under occupation, apartheid, famine, or genocide, and then to be blamed for my suffering. How would I respond if I was forced to watch my children wither into brittle skeletons; if my mother died at a checkpoint, denied passage to the hospital by a pimple-faced soldier from Orange County; if I saw my nephew sniped in the eye while participating in a march? What would my freedom dream look like? As Vincent Lloyd noted in his superb text Black Dignity: “to survive in a world where you’re marked for death, you have to become something else—something more than human.” What does being human—or, in fact, more than human—mean for Palestinians?

To offset my ignorance, I drew on statements from refugees in Syria, Lebanon, and Gaza; political declarations from resistance groups like the Palestinian Liberation Organisation and Hamas; and interventions by civil society groups like al-Haq. While the strategies may differ, there is consistency in the aspirations: each group imagines life after genocide, futures that do not begin or end with annihilation, futures that do not demand their perpetual subjugation or dehumanisation. The themes between the groups, too, are proximate—with dignity, justice, and sovereignty figuring prominently in their dreams. More tangibly, I also observed unanimity about land, return, and life as essential to freedom. These are not abstract ideals but symbolic and material closures to the Nakba that began in 1947. Each element is contentious in its own right, though that complexity is captured most perniciously in the Palestinian demand for the restitution of land rights, the core obstacle to Palestinian and Israeli cohabitation.

Cohabitation, it is essential to note, was never zionism’s aim. Judaism, a world religion that has sustained communities for millennia through common moral and spiritual bonds, has a long history of cohabitation with other faith communities. Ironically, after the Spanish Inquisition, when Catholics massacred Muslims and Jews, it was to Muslim lands—Morocco, Egypt, Iraq, Iran, and Palestine itself—that Jewish refugees fled, finding sanctuary in societies where pluralism was not treated as heresy. By contrast, and despite its seemingly sacred label, zionism does not exist in theology or history and most certainly does not aspire to cohabitation. Rather, it was conceived as a settler-colonial project—one that demanded not shared sacredness but exclusive sovereignty. As I explored in the first counterfactual, Herzl instrumentalised Jewish vulnerability to justify a vintage European project that sought the dispossession of yet another native people, whether via ethnic cleansing or genocide, but never cohabitation. Israel’s open secret is now on display in the rubble in Gaza: its constitutive ideology was conceived not to coexist with the native population but to replace them. Zionism is best thought of as a territorial cult, where settlements stand as temples and sacraments are written in demolition orders.

In what is perhaps one of the greatest articles on settler-colonialism, Patrick Wolfe explained with enviable precision that “[t]erritoriality is settler colonialism’s specific, irreducible element.” As is known to all societies, “land is life—or, at least, land is necessary for life.” For indigenous communities, like Palestinians, land is not merely a resource but the bedrock of identity, community, and memory. In cases of settler-colonialism, it is also the basis of resistance: “contests for land…are…contests for life.” For zionism, however, land is a commodity to be seized, a mission for the realisation of a European-inspired nationalist fantasy, as seen from the cult-like fundamentalism of settler-colonialists, enforced by guns and bulldozers. To share the holy lands would negate the essence of zionism, with its proponents continuing to consolidate around a fantastical and indefensible claim of divine entitlement that even Herzl recognised was a fraud, albeit an effective one. And he was right: what began as stratagem morphed into strategy as the West humored his initial fever dream, at a gruesome cost.

The Nakba, just like the current genocide and famine, are not aberrations but constitutive of and constitutional to this ideology. Zionism’s “chronic addiction to territorial expansion,” according to Wolfe, mirrors the pathology of all settler projects: the insatiable need to erase the native in order to sustain the fiction of the settler’s natural right to the land. His critique of the “logic of elimination” captures both negative and positive dimensions of this process—from massacres and forced displacement to the legal and cultural erasure of Palestinian ties to the land. Since 1947, Israel has conspired with the West and with European international law in pursuit of Palestine’s dissolution, both literally and figuratively. Imagine that, prior to the West’s adoption of its Partition Plan, the territory of Palestine covered 100% of historic Palestine. Yet, following the land’s bizarre bifurcation, the Nakba, Israel’s endless wars, the expansion of settlements by both state and settler militias, sequestration, and myriad other technologies of elimination, Palestine is today less than 12% of what it was (and a shrinking fraction of the 45% afforded in the Partition Plan): West Bank areas A and B amount to 10% and Gaza 1.4%—at least pre-genocide—with Area C, under Israeli control, taking up 10% and Israel another 78%.

In other words, this is not a conflict between two equal nationalisms but a struggle between a settler project, designed to metastasise across the land, and an indigenous people refusing to disappear. The “frontier rabble”—the settlers who torch olive groves, the soldiers who enforce checkpoints, the lawmakers who legalise theft—are not rogue actors but the physical embodiment of zionism’s mission of native elimination. Palestinian emphasis on land, then, is not merely a bargaining position but a form of existential defiance. Likewise, to struggle for return is to reject the very premise of zionism. To paraphrase Lloyd, to return to plant an olive tree where the settler has built a wall or murdered a child is to declare that you’ll still be here tomorrow.

By August 2025, the world was in agony as Israel engineered the starvation of the people of Gaza, images of backbones and protruding ribs breaking hearts and exposing zionism’s final descent into barbarism. UN agencies confirmed that Gaza faced devastating food scarcity, having breached two of three famine thresholds. Hundreds of thousands of children faced acute malnutrition, their bodies withering, waiting in queues under the scorching sun for hours for a single meal, only to be gunned down by Israeli soldiers posing as humanitarians. At the same time, settlers in the West Bank capitalised on the chaos, burning orchards and poisoning wells, seeking to dismantle Palestinian agriculture destroying, among others, Hebron’s only seed bank. By the end of the year, the grotesque irony was inescapable to everyone, even liberals: the heirs of the people starved in German concentration camps were replicating Nazi tactics with remarkable determination. It was this obscenity—infants dying of thirst and parents boiling weeds to survive—that finally wrecked the myth of zionism as a moral project, with any claims to virtue crushed under the rubble of Gaza’s bombed hospitals, schools, bakeries, and bodies. It was in this breaking moment that two figures plotted an exit.

It began with a balled-up tissue, casually tossed into a prison cell. Marwan Barghouti, entering his third decade in captivity, unfolded the note to find a plea from Ehud Olmert, Israel’s former prime minister, now a political outcast: “The occupation has poisoned us both. Let us imagine its end.” Olmert, once unapologetic about settlements, now led a clandestine coalition of dissidents—historians like Omer Bartov, activists like Neve Gordon, and even former Shin Bet agents who’d grown disgusted of their own shadows. Their message was simple: zionism had reached its natural conclusion—a death cult devouring its own. As did others, Olmert recognised that two-state solution was dead and buried. Even the West’s belated push for Palestinian statehood could not resuscitate it; the only viable path that remained was a single state, built on return, restitution, and cohabitation.

Barghouti was rightly sceptical, wondering if this was another ploy, a factional struggle between fascist zionism and (il)liberal zionism. Perhaps the only thing ringing louder than his alarm bells was the requiem playing in the background, heralding the death of Palestine’s present and its future. He decided to take a chance, responding cautiously but hopefully.

What followed were months of encrypted messages, covert meetings in Cape Town and Beijing, and a series of trade offs, each more painful than the last. In August 2026, news of the secret talks broke, striking Palestinian and Israeli societies—and much of the world—like a sledgehammer. Eager for such a moment, a global solidarity movement erupted like wildfire: BDS escalated to full scale embargoes; ports turned away Israeli ships (some dock workers sunk them); Hollywood stars abandoned Marvel. Karim Khan, cleared of all suspicion earlier that year, immediately requested arrest warrants for most of Netanyahu’s cabinet (the investigations into the support offered by Starmer, Macron, and von der Leyen are ongoing). Zionism had become so addicted to land theft that it could no longer hide behind propaganda, swiftly collapsing under the weight of disgrace and shame brought about by the Great Famine of 2025. The number of Israeli deserters multiplied as they sought refuge from accountability for scores of dead children (alas for them, the world would not overlook the brutalities inflicted and many dual citizens ended up in national prisons). In Gaza, ceasefires held not because of diplomacy, but because the Americans, alone, could no longer sustain the armament supply chains.

On the day the walls fell, it was not governments but grandmothers who led the way. Palestinian elders crossed checkpoints clutching rusted keys and deeds from 1948, while Israeli activists used construction cranes—once tools of settlement—to dismantle the wall. Domestic support for the settlers, already on life support, collapsed once they began shooting fellow Israelis. In Haifa and Jaffa, families returned to homes now occupied by third-generation Israelis; some settlers fled to Canada and Australia, much as South Africans did when that state was liberated from their version ethno-chauvinism. Others stayed, forced to vacate the stolen homes they previously claimed as their own. [Some years later, Daniella Weiss was found hiding in a basement in London, and was swiftly extradited to Palestine to stand trial for her instigation of that final massacre.] The Knesset was dissolved, substituted by a transitional council comprised of Palestinians from the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem, and several Israeli anti-zionists as well (returning Palestinians would be eligible for office once they completed their naturalisation process). Barghouti and Olmert reached a compromise with Meshal: Hamas would disarm in exchange for the proscription of Otzma Yehudit, Hatzionut Hadatit, and Noam and the handover of Ben-Gvir, Smotrich, and Moaz to the Hague where they would join Netanyahu and Gallant to stand trial for their reign of terror.

The prisoners came next. Raised to the sound of cell doors and fluorescent hum, thousands emerged from Israeli jails, blinking at the sun, their anxiety broken by embraces and endless unspent love. Flags were fleeting, as were anthems and chants—instead, the air was filled with voices and screams and laughter as they discovered one another, some for the first time. Zionism’s greatest fear had been realised: Palestinians survived while zionism was on its last leg.

In al Quds, Palestinian and Jewish youth scrubbed racist graffiti from the Old City walls; in Gaza, fishermen launched boats unchained by naval blockades. The new parliament, when it convened, did not debate “peace” but land rights. Land commissions documented thefts dating back to 1948; reparations were paid in stolen orchards and the rebuilding of demolished villages. The two-state solution was archived as a footnote, replaced by a single democracy stretching from the river to the sea—not as a slogan, but a legal fact. Israeli settlers, at least those who stayed, were granted amnesty if they surrendered their rifles, testified about the crimes they committed (murder, rape, and famine were excluded), and provided adequate reparations. Those who did, now queued for Palestinian passports, their birthright of supremacy dissolved like the passbooks of apartheid South Africa.

Zionism died as all ethno-chauvinist projects die—when the people marked for elimination hold on, when the ideology blushes before it own propaganda, and when the world runs out of excuses to look away. When Barghouti and Olmert signed the new constitution, the latter quoted a Hebrew prophet: “You have been told what is good: to do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly.” Barghouti, for his part, offered a Shona proverb: “The ax forgets; the tree remembers.” Each phrase hung in the air, epitaphs for dead ideologies and its victims, a dual reminder that hierarchies are always on borrowed time.

Today, the checkpoints have been reconstituted as museums, memorials for those who did not see Palestine’s liberation. Settlements, no longer fearsome, have been renamed in honour of martyrs and are now being desegregated. While records of the famine still shock the soul, it is now taught not only as a human tragedy but as both reckoning and turning point. Zionism, you might say, learned a key lesson before its demise: no people can be caged forever.

4. Some concluding reflections

Who is permitted to envision Gaza’s future? Proponents of the first two counterfactuals deny this possibility to Palestinians, leaving the only plausible outcomes genocide today or genocide tomorrow. Each of these two visions is crafted in distant capitals, grounded in an anachronistic settler-colonial blueprint of elimination (the zionist fever dream) or managed suffering (legal Gaza).

For all its pretensions, even international law leaves the Palestinians at mortal risk. For the colonised, law is always Janus-faced, furnishing grammar without justice, procedure without protection. In Palestine, law is caught performing debates while doing little tangible to advance liberation. Israeli actions, from occupation to apartheid, from ethnic cleansing to genocide, violate every canon of international law—self-determination, proportionality, the prohibitions of apartheid and occupation—yet, the legal societies and politicians prevaricate, waxing legalistic sophistry intended to shield not people but ideology from a long overdue reckoning.

In this third counterfactual, I rejected the false choice between zionism and Eurocentrism and, instead, turned to imagination or, what I might term, Palestino-Futurism. An end to genocide requires not simply prosaic debates about definitions, but ruptures with the boundaries of the thinkable, including the West’s perpetual appeasement of zionist violence. The counterfactuals I offer are intended as small subversions, rejections of the lie of inevitability. They expose the barbarism of the zionist fever dream as well as the impotence of international law.

Ultimately, I intended these counterfactuals as critiques and heuristics, but also as apertures, pointing our gaze beyond the present and beyond law’s incarcerated horizons. Every single anti-colonial resistance movement began as heresy before it became a tsunami. Palestinian resistance has always been denoted by a dual character: defying the intellectual deflections (e.g. statehood) designed to preserve the status quo, but also operating as a form of existential defiance, finding strength, life, and camaraderie in a world hellbent on their destruction. Far from a distortion, an aperture hones our gaze toward liberation.

An aperture is needed today for the West—and many in the East—have sought to either normalise or lionise zionism, contributing to the genocide we are witnessing today. It was the unwillingness to call out zionism for what it was that inspired the confidence zionists enjoy today, confidence that fuelled a macabre pride in the starving of children.

While I wish I could end this post with a sunrise, there is only darkness in genocide. Ultimately, zionism committed a collective murder-suicide; a slow burn that began in 1947, and broke the sound barrier by November 2023. It was quickly evident that Israel was in a death spiral, a state the West helped accelerate every time its champions uttered those lethal words: “Israel has a right to defend itself.”

In January 2024, I wrote a eulogy to Israel:

“Israel’s world ended on 7 October 2023. Close to twelve hundred Israeli soldiers and civilians lost their lives, a tragedy we rightfully mourn. But what also ended was the false premise upon which Israel was built: that the ongoing dispossession, expulsion, confinement, brutalisation, and genocide of an Indigenous population could ever provide a sanctuary for a settler one.”

In that same essay, I also lamented the end of Palestine:

“Deploying endless stocks of Made in Euroamerica weaponry, Israel has devastated Gaza, leading the UN to declare this small sliver of land as uninhabitable, repurposed as a graveyard for children. Each new statistic proves more gut-wrenching than the last. Alongside thousands of dead children, the population must now contend with scores of obliterated schools and hospitals, the decimation of arable land and waterways, the contamination of soil, air, and consciousness, the spread of cholera and other diseases, and, perhaps most of all, the annihilation of families and communities, of love and dreams. Oppressors end worlds, too.” Often with delight.

I penned those passages in January 2024. And Israel has since killed many more Palestinians (Lebanese, Syrians, and Iranians as well). If anything, their murderous streak has sped up, sanctioned by legal indifference and moral collapse. And so I kept writing—not because I believed it would change anything, but because I needed to record what was being destroyed, and who was allowing it.

Yet, writing these counterfactuals was not easy. It felt more like writing a dirge—slow, heavy, and always behind the pace of destruction. I was composing while Palestinians were being killed, while families were being starved, while the world rationalised its complicity including with increased trade and new Hollywood-spangled hotels. What made it harder was knowing that this wasn’t a rupture, but a continuation—as Wolfe decried, the “logic of elimination” was not an event but a structure, one that zionism has pursued with precision across generations.

Each counterfactual I wrote was shaped by that discomfort: the distance between the violence and the tools I had—law, history, imagination. I wasn’t forecasting. I was trying to mark something that is happening in plain sight. And yet, like every anti-colonial struggle, the Palestinian fight for liberation refuses finality. These counterfactuals aren’t predictions; they are refusals—refusals to accept the inevitability of genocide, to cede imagination to the occupier, to let the story end where the bombs fall.

A luta continua, vitória é certa.