What Will Gaza Become After Genocide? Using the Counterfactual Method to Evaluate Three Post-Genocidal Futures (Part 1)

“What will Gaza become after genocide?” Nour Jaddah asked this lamentable question, and it is the one I tackle today. I do so for two reasons. First, nearly two years ago, Antonio Guterres bemoaned that Gaza had become a graveyard for children. Little did he know that the graveyard would morph into a killing field, with official death tolls topping 60,000, including over a thousand butchered while queuing for food. Tens of thousands of Palestinians remain unaccounted for, buried under rubble or hidden in unmarked graves. And dozens more are dying because of Israel’s manufactured famine. This mass slaughter will haunt Israel and humanity for generations, a fate some Israeli soldiers are escaping through migration or something more final, seeking relief from the memories of dismembered(ing) children. Yet, even in this bleak moment the struggle remains. To ask what Gaza will become is to refuse to turn away, to not allow ourselves to be distracted by defeatism and to work toward countering those manoeuvering for Palestine’s annihilation.

Second, taking the lead from Paik Nak-chung, I am gradually shifting my outlook toward the long gaze.* Paik argues that patience and foresight are needed to imagine Korean reunification, an inevitability despite its seeming impossibility today. Our perspectives are forever corralled by the tangibility of the present, trapped in the current political moment. To avoid the trap, we require modes of thinking that situate quotidian crises within longer historical arcs, making us aware of the contingencies that birthed the present and the possibilities that will shape the future; in Paik’s frame, we need a longer gaze. By eyeing horizons, today becomes both banal and transitory, even if current conditions make it appear overwhelming. In the context of Gaza, this means resisting the tyranny of zionism and forcing ourselves to imagine post-genocidal futures—the lives that Palestinians might still live. The long gaze does not minimise present suffering, but centres a historical outlook, helping us overcome the defeatism of a myopic one.

In this post—and in a forthcoming article in the Boğaziçi Law Review—I use the counterfactual method to gaze into three possible futures for Gaza. Counterfactuals begin with a simple question: if the world developed differently, how might things unfold? Like alternate judgement projects, counterfactuals are invaluable as a heuristic, stimulating heterodox imaginaries and, centrally, motivating novel forms of mobilisation. It is especially salutary for legal scholars who are taught to take their cues from the past, whether through precedent, state practice, or opinio juris. Counterfactuals help us test hypothetical trajectories, making us more critical of the current one and, ideally, more committed to a liberationist struggle.

Two caveats are necessary. First, I recognise the danger associated with this type of ideation especially since, as was pointed out by one Palestinian comrade, the genocide is underway, making theorising about ‘the day after’ gratuitous and maybe even distasteful. I quote them in full as the criticism merits engagement:

While not your intention, Mohsen, but such framing is problematic. Anything like ‘the day after’ or any exploration of potential romanticised and fetishised future for Gaza is a practice in deflection. The moment tells us that there is an active genocide. We can reject the defeatism or pragmatism of legal scholars any day without ignoring that any pontification is normalisation of a surmountable process. The question for us the insurgent scholars, is not how to imagine a liberated Palestine, but how to liberate Palestine. That’s the dilemma. It’s true legal scholars cannot imagine a free Palestine but you already clearly point that out. We need to go beyond that. What do you think?

The concern is valid. Even if unintended, imagining the ‘day after’, as I do, can displace focus from an ongoing genocide, making liberation appear as aesthetic or talking point, a violent and vulgar move since Palestinians are being butchered in real-time. My turn to an imagined future could be seen to normalise the horrors of the present, shifting our attention away from mobilisation and toward imagination.

However, I wonder whether counterfactuals are presumptively removed from mobilisation, as may first appear. I do not deny the genocide, nor do I propose the counterfactuals as escape. Rather, through this act, I refuse the sanitisation of zionism as well as the managed suffering by international law that brought us to this point. Indeed, each counterfactual acknowledges the conspiratorial relationship between zionism and international legality that precipitated Operation al-Aqsa Flood. Moreover, the counterfactuals begin from the premise that the annihilation Israel is pursuing today has always been the end goal of zionism (see the definition below), rather than a pet project of Netanyahu or Ben-Gvir or Smotrich, and that international lawyers were mostly content to turn a blind eye. My feeling is that liberals—in media, politics, and the legal academy—have long sought to deny that, as asserted by Ben Norton, zionism “was and remains an unequivocally racist movement“, pleading with Israel to be more diplomatic about their genocidal aspirations. With these counterfactuals, I seek to probe zionism and international law and the ways in which they reinforce one another, demanding we look elsewhere if we wish to liberate Palestinians. In other words, I hope the counterfactuals contribute to the struggle rather than distract from it.

Second, I concede that I should have written the final counterfactual not as ‘what comes next’ but as ‘what must we do now’. While I never thought of imagination as a substitute for struggle but a kind of lifeblood that keeps our eyes focused and our critiques sharp, I should have been more explicit and will revise the work accordingly. We imagine not because we are naïve, but because we are committed to demolishing the systems that thrive on the starvation of children.

The three counterfactuals I develop include:

1- A zionist fever dream—the dystopia zionists envision for Palestinians;

2- A legal folk tale—an examination of the actual implementation of international law in Palestine; and

3- A liberationist imaginary—collective Palestinian ideation toward liberation.

These counterfactuals are not predictions. Rather, they represent speculative outlooks, each reflecting a different ideological and moral position, yet all adding context to the violence occurring today as well as its aftermath(s).

1. Gaza as zionist fever dream

Fever dreams are hallucinations. These disorienting and often disturbing visions are brought about by states of delirium—such as a high fever. They are detached from reality, driven by denial or obsession or both, and denoted by incoherence and irrationality. Fever dreams are imbued in desire, fear, and hysteria, eschewing all grounding in reason or ethics—they may be experienced with intensity but are ultimately sustained by delusion.

Theodor Herzl had a colonial fever dream: he would build a movement that would empty the lands he coveted of its indigenous population while repopulating them with European settlers, and he would be celebrated for it. Grounded in a dystopian fantasy of erasure, zionism was a phantasm masked as a political project, one that treated people and histories as irrelevant. Ironically, the secular journalist drew on Jewish mythology—the promised land—to animate a political movement rooted in the familiar dialectic of settler-colonial freedom through native annihilation. I define zionism as do Abu Zuluf, Kilani, and O’Rourke:

We define “zionism,” therefore, as the ideology undergirding and driving the project of settler-colonialism in Palestine, characterized by an effort to eliminate and replace indigenous Palestinians, and the usurpation of control over Palestinians’ physical resources and political self-determination. Zionism is inextricable from imperialism, capitalism, and white supremacy, and should not be misrepresented as being variegated (e.g., “cultural zionism” vs. “religious zionism”) as zionism has taken a material form over more than a hundred years in Palestine that has been observed, studied, and resisted in various ways by Palestinians and non-Palestinians alike. Conversations about zionism “as it could have been,” therefore, are attempts to obscure what zionism has been and continues to be today.

Colonial blindness was never incidental to zionism; it was both essential and constitutive, as observed in the neverending need for cognitive dissonance to sustain the dual denial of Palestinian existence and Palestinian suffering.

In Altneuland—Herzl’s literary fantasy—he portrayed a futuristic Jewish state, governed by the self-styled New Society, with a peacefully docile Palestinian population assimilated into the fabric. They would speak German and Yiddish—not Hebrew—and, because of Herzl’s secularism, would establish a state structured around liberal rather than Jewish citizenship. Recognised for his supposedly inclusive vision, the novel was textbook colonial ideology, consistent with what Edward Said described as the function of imperial literature: to cloak dispossession with progress, to normalise conquest through benevolence. Altneuland—which, at least in name, lives on through Tel Aviv—exemplifies this mindset: the violence of setter projects is written out of the story as natives are imagined not as they are but as the visionary wishes them to be. Herzl presented Palestinians as grateful, fully assimilated in his modernist utopia, surrendering any political or social claims in favour of coexistence with the superior settler community. Like most colonial visions, Herzl’s depended on a callous disavowal of the humanity of the other.

But literature cannot contain the real. As is well documented, Herzl’s racial liberal utopia soon gave way to the theological and ethno-chauvinist logics that underwrote zionism from the start. By 1947, his mirage of secular coexistence was brutally displaced in favour of not liberal, nor even a strictly Jewish state, but a zionist one, guided by a cult-like fundamentalism and an eagle-eyed focus on native death. Notice, for example, that since the terrorist-turned-statesman Menachem Begin appeared on the world stage, the zionist killing machine has birthed increasingly ruthless Israeli leaders: Golda Meir lamented being compelled to murder Palestinian children (“We can never forgive [the Arabs] for forcing us to kill their children”); Sharon and Netanyahu relished it (“This is a struggle between the children of light and the children of darkness”), making their predecessors appear almost compassionate.

Nor did Israel’s moral decay end with Netanyahu’s arrest. When a hurricane forced Netanyahu’s plane to land in Madrid and he was bundled off to The Hague, some celebrated the end of an era (while Netanyahu, finding no culprit for the storm, accused the heavens of orchestrating a coup). But any glee was short-lived. Itamar Ben-Gvir, resurgent in the wake of Netanyahu’s downfall, was elected prime minister in 2026 and proved more extreme, more savage, and more indifferent.

A sociopath with messianic delusions, Ben-Gvir completed what his predecessor started. He cut a deal with Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi to relocate “the most moral concentration camp in the world” from Rafah to the Sinai in exchange for lobbying the international financial institutions to halve the Egyptian national debt. Gaza was carpet-bombed into oblivion—a task made easier by the preceding obliteration of its civilian infrastructure, including hospitals, universities, schools, and bakeries, the very war crimes for which Netanyahu was convicted. An ally of the settler group Nachala, Ben-Gvir converted Gaza into a sterile zone, razing it of everything.

It came at an impossible cost, to be sure, with the killing of nearly half the population. But capitalism, no stranger to genocide, never looks a gift horse in the mouth; Gaza’s Riviera is already under construction. With guidance from Tony Blair, and investments from Hollywood and Bollywood alike, Marvel Boulevard and BJP Interchange are slated to launch at the same time as the next Wonder Woman spinoff. Trump and MBS Towers are nearly at full occupancy, thanks to the collaboration between Kushner Venture Capital and the new NYU-Tel Aviv campus.

Ben-Gvir has set his sights on the West Bank, appropriating and launching Smotrich’s Subjugation Plan. Ethnic cleansing remains the ambition—for now—with the Israeli cabinet pursuing a euphemistically-named strategy of ‘voluntary emigration,’ facilitated by the suffocation of life for the remaining Palestinian population. Official policy includes multiplying settlements, demolishing homes, destroying livelihoods, assassinating protesters, and abducting and imprisoning children. With the surrounding wall nearing completion, the West Bank has become a hyper-controlled enclave: turrets are supported by surveillance drones and AI-powered machine guns, and the Israeli military has assumed control over the distribution of food and water, yet again running a “sadistic death trap” where soldiers play lethal shooting games targeting starving children in their “heads, legs, and genitals“.

Even in the wake of cataclysmic-levels of suffering, the BBC does not relent, forever celebrating Israel’s supposed democratic credentials—a message Israel routinely bombs into regional psyche with rainbow-painted missiles. To shore up a still stuttering economy, Israel has launched an EU-endorsed strategy of dissimulation. Having agreed to make starvation and unfreedom less visible, Yair Lapid was invited to Brussels to sign a new trade agreement with the EU. Von der Leyen was even coaxed out of her villa on the Gazan riviera to participate in the signing ceremony.

This counterfactual was the easiest to write, largely because it is barely fictional. The zionist fever dream has been explicit state policy for at least two generations, implemented incrementally, with each phase more aggressive than the last, and the crescendo of the annihilation project now within earshot. It enjoys the backing of the USA and many European states, and is tolerated by regional ones. I opened with this gruesome scenario because of its plausibility—as per the URLs above, I could easily locate news clippings for a battery of barbarities, a fact that should force some refection on the racialised dynamics that pervade both global order and international law. 

But it was also the most difficult to draft, requiring that I stare into the eye of zionism. To narrate a real counterfactual about the systematic destruction of a people—of families, communities, and bodies—to look at bits of children hanging from a wall is to peer into a soulless vision that strangles both mind and heart. A movement born of Jewish vulnerability has not only replicated the worst excesses of European colonial violence, it has now embraced its genocidal logic, invoking divine redemption to legitimise mass killing. It celebrates suffering, so long as it is suffered by another.

Sometimes fevers leave patients cognitively—and, by extension, morally—broken, incapable of distinguishing reality from myth, or right from wrong. The tragedy of the zionist fever dream is its success, and the depravity needed to sustain it. When a state and its population smirk at the killing of children, when starvation becomes policy, all moral benchmarks have collapsed. Ironically, Herzl’s fever dream has not only taken Palestinians to the brink of existence, but desecrated the Jewish tradition itself, each novel monstrosity further fragmenting its community and traditions to the core, as Miriam Margoyles and the Jewish Council of Australia explained in provocative but poignant language: “To me, it seems as if Hitler has won. He’s changed us Jews from being compassionate and caring and do unto others as you would have them do unto you into this vicious, genocidal nationalist nation, pursuing and killing women and children.”

We are left to ponder how, in a post-zionist world, Judaism will make sense of this period, wondering why the disavowal of zionism took so long.

2. A legal folk tale

Many law students—though fewer with each passing year—believe that law is a useful instrument in the pursuit of liberation, or at least the lightening of oppression. While some governments speak the language of pure force, legal professionals counter this, their conscience merging with their craft to produce safeguards that seek to restrain power and redress injustice. We believe that law can contain violence, disciplining its harbingers and, sometimes, holding them to account for the harm they bring about.

My second counterfactual is thus guided by a simple question: what would happen if international law were fully implemented, namely by Europe (perhaps the world’s leading hypocrite): treaties enforced, resolutions complied with, and advisory opinions acted upon? Would Palestinians be free or, at a minimum, safe from zionism?

…

Due to the length of the text, I’ve split it into three posts. Parts 2 and 3 will appear on 28 and 30 July 2025, respectively.

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Photo by Emad El Byed on Unsplash

*My gratitude to Dr Brendan Ciarán Browne for pointing me toward this concept and text.

I would like to thank Dr Batuhan Ustabulut and his colleagues at Istanbul Ticaret University as well as the Istanbul branch of the Centre for Economic and Social Research for inviting me to present a related talk on 3 July 2025. I am also grateful to Dr M Behesti Aydogan and Dr Hasan Basri Bülbül of Boğaziçi University Faculty of Law for providing me a large platform to test these experimental ideas during their “Justice and Reconstruction in Post-Conflict Societies” conference (4-6 July 2025). The feedback obtained from both audiences was invaluable.

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