The United Nations is unambiguous in its language about the right of colonized people to resist their colonizers “by all available means.” That includes armed struggle, and Resolution 45/130 takes great pains to single that out.

But that resolution was adopted by the General Assembly, which is dominated by countries from the Global South — i.e., most of the world — not by the elite Security Council, where Western nations wield disproportionate authority and where the United States has repeatedly vetoed ceasefire resolutions throughout much of the Gaza genocide.

In the U.S. ethos, colonized people may not take up arms to resist their colonizers, but their colonizers are free to commit genocide to defend the colony.

Even as global solidarity with Palestine has risen dramatically, the genocide continues. And while Western leaders assure Palestinians of their right to life and self-determination, every form of resistance that might advance their liberation is condemned, criminalized, or classified as terrorism.

At the UK Labour conference in September, British Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband promised action against Israel’s occupation and told pro-Palestine advocates, “We hear you. You were right” — but not before collapsing Palestinian resistance into “antisemitism” and foregrounding the UK’s commitment to protecting Israel. He acknowledged the culpability of “the Netanyahu government” but tried to separate illegal West Bank settlements from the Israeli state that subsidizes and protects them.

On the surface, Miliband’s inadequate words still suggest a seismic shift among a historically pro-Israel political establishment. But as Sana Saeed pointed out, his speech functioned more as a release valve to manage public sentiment than an actionable proposal to end Israeli occupation. His “accountability” was couched in condemnations of October 7 while failing to reckon with the decades of Israeli violence that preceded it.

Are we still at the point where every statement against the genocide in Gaza must first condemn Hamas?

Are we still at the point where every expression of support for Palestinian liberation must demand the disarmament of those fighting for it?

Whatever we’ve seen on our screens, however many horrific images have entered our minds, what’s actually happening in Palestine is even worse than we think.

One need only follow the posts of Mosab Abu Toha to learn of all the Palestinian deaths since the so-called ceasefire that have gone undocumented by the corporate media.

One need only consider the compelling Lancet figures, which far exceed the official death toll reported in the corporate media.

One need only consider the ever-increasing revelations about the Biden administration’s complicity during the 16 months it presided over the Gaza genocide — its enabling of mass starvation, its refusal to put any meaningful pressure on Israel for a ceasefire. What crimes have yet to be revealed?

No amount of documentation can capture the full horror of what’s occurring, but the evidence of what’s been withheld suggests that the true magnitude will prove even greater than we imagine.

And yet, after three years, the most the Western political establishment can do is voice disagreement with the way Netanyahu is “conducting the war.”

Without concrete action, acknowledging Palestinians’ right to live in “peace, security, and dignity” is about as useful as thoughts and prayers after a mass shooting.

Anticolonial Resistance Is Repeatedly Framed as Terrorism

Growing up in the West means being fed an image of Israel as a tough little country surrounded by hostile neighbors who want to destroy it for no other reason than “Jew hatred.” No history. No context. No questions about how Israel ended up there in the first place. And certainly no mention of the millions of Palestinians living under brutal military occupation and apartheid, seeing their families murdered, their children kidnapped, and their homes stolen by people from New York and Chicago to perpetuate a settler-colonial project.

And yet, since their country’s founding, Israeli leaders from David Ben-Gurion to Ehud Barak have admitted that if they were in the Palestinians’ shoes, they would fight for their land.

So, who gets to resist and be called heroes — and who gets called terrorists?

Consider the people the West celebrates for engaging in armed resistance against tyranny and occupation: the American revolutionaries, the Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto, the French Resistance against the Nazis — not Native Americans or African slaves or the Viet Cong or the military wing of the African National Congress.

And certainly not Palestinians.

There’s an aesthetic you must embody before your resistance is condoned by the Western political establishment. Being white and of European descent is an asset. Being for “Western values” is another. Even if you colonized, genocided, and enslaved people — like America’s founders did — throwing off the shackles of the British monarchy is held in irreproachable esteem.

But if you’re fighting Israeli occupation, you’ll be labeled a Foreign Terrorist Organization because you’re backed by U.S. adversaries and challenging U.S. interests.

The targeting of civilians is used as a criterion for that designation, but attacks on Israeli civilians came after decades of Israel’s terrorizing and slaughter of Palestinian civilians. And yet, for non-state actors, targeting civilians becomes a defining feature of their organization. But for state militaries with precision weaponry and high-tech missile defenses, it’s just an “accident of war.”

The purpose of these terrorist designations is not moral — it’s tactical. If a resistance group is already designated as a terrorist organization, then even a strike on a legitimate military target can be called a terrorist attack.

In other words, any act of resistance is terrorism.

Look at how even nonviolent resistance is met with criminalization and state violence.

In Palestine, marchers who get too close to Gaza’s “security” fence, journalists who counter Israel’s narratives, medical workers who won’t abandon their patients, or Palestinians who simply refuse to leave their home are kidnapped, tortured, shot, incinerated by bombs, or lined up in front of firing squads and buried in mass graves.

In the U.S. and Europe, students who set up encampments are brutalized by police, and people who physically try to stop weapons from reaching Israel are sentenced to years in prison.

Palestine Action’s smashing of weapons meant for Israel was an astonishing feat of direct action, targeting not human beings but the machinery of death meant to be unleashed on Palestinians. Yes, the raid on the Elbit factory did become physical when activists clashed with security guards, but the target of the operation was military hardware.

Moreover, the Palestine Action members were seeking to fulfill the international obligation to prevent genocide — which their own government had failed to uphold. But not only were they jailed; their entire organization was banned in the UK and U.S.

While Ed Miliband’s incoherent proposal to halt the Gaza genocide is to stop buying products from West Bank settlements, concerned citizens who take concrete action to stop the weapons are branded terrorists.

Nothing Started on October 7

From the standpoint of Israel’s defenders, nothing that Israel did to the Palestinians before October 7 justified what happened on October 7, but what happened on October 7 justifies everything Israel has done to the Palestinians since.

But the tit-for-tat argument is a losing one for Israel. If we go back over the last century — or all the way back to the late 1800s — Palestinian resistance is consistently preceded by Zionist provocation.

From the beginning Zionism has sought to make conditions so unlivable for Palestinians that they either leave their homeland or respond with such violence that Israel can claim an excuse to eradicate them — as it’s trying to do now.

But whenever we say history didn’t start on October 7, the inevitable reply is, So you think October 7 was Israel’s fault?!

As if that’s some sort of gotcha.

As if we’ve outed ourselves as victim blamers.

But the answer is quite simply, Yes.

Decades of violent occupation produce blowback. That’s not a controversial claim. Everyone from Nelson Mandela to Charles de Gaulle to JFK to the CIA has shared that view. Colonial violence creates enemies — and using those enemies to justify further violence doesn’t erase the colonizers’ culpability.

I don’t mean those killed on October 7 deserved to die. I’m saying we have to confront root causes. And the root causes are in the Zionist founders’ original plans to rid Palestine of Palestinians.

They’re in the absentee landlords who bought up land to displace Arab farmers at the turn of the 20th century.

They’re in the Zionist bombings of Palestinian cafés and marketplaces in the 1930s.

They’re in the massacres of Palestinians by Zionist militias during the 1947–49 Nakba.

They’re in Israel’s “preemptive” war in 1967 and the brutal military occupation and settlement expansion that have continued ever since.

They’re in the massacres of Palestinians and Lebanese in the 1970s and 1980s.

They’re in the shootings of Palestinian protesters by Israeli authorities in 2000 — before Palestinians responded with violence in the Second Intifada.

They’re in Israel’s 2007 imposition of a brutal blockade because it didn’t like the results of Gaza’s free and fair elections.

They’re in Israel’s multiple assaults on Gaza’s civilian population between 2008 and 2014, carrying out its policy of “mowing the lawn.”

They’re in the shootings of unarmed Palestinians during the 2018–2019 Gaza border protests.

They’re in the decades of Israel’s bombardment, occupation, blockade, imprisonment, and murder that produced Hamas fighters to carry out Operation Al-Aqsa Flood on October 7.

So, yes, the violence of October 7 is the fault of the Zionist founders who embedded conquest in Israel’s DNA, and it’s the fault of every Israeli official who’s worked to perpetuate the Zionist project since, every lobbying arm and journalist who’s manufactured consent for occupation and ethnic cleansing, every wealthy oligarch and U.S. politician who upholds and profits from those crimes, every settler who’s stolen a Palestinian home, and every genocider in Israel’s current government who’s supported continued displacement and violence against Palestinians.

Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir is often remembered for saying, “We can forgive the Arabs for killing our children. But we can never forgive them for forcing us to kill their children.”

This morally perverse statement — often employed by Israel’s defenders — portrays a heavily-armed genocidal colonizer as the unwitting victim of a subjugated people’s desire for freedom. But if she’s going to talk about being forced to kill — then what has Israel forced the Palestinians to do?

By Meir’s rationale, Palestinians can blame Israel for every act of Palestinian violence since Israel’s inception.

What the West Actually Demands

In the eyes of the West, Palestinians must remain peaceful and morally perfect while their occupiers are free to deploy the most extreme violence in defense of a project whose very foundations — occupation, dispossession, ethnic cleansing, apartheid — were immoral to begin with.

Palestinians must be Martin Luther King, not Malcolm X.

Gandhi, not Bhagat Singh.

Nelson Mandela at the negotiating table — not at LiliesLeaf Farm planning armed-resistance operations.

But while these men are lauded in posterity — in their time they were brutalized, spied on, and treated as enemies of the state.

Moreover, desegregation in the U.S. prevailed not simply through the bravery of nonviolent protesters but through the federal government’s willingness to use military might to enforce it, and India and South Africa were liberated not simply through passive resistance but because of their European colonizers’ fears of violent unrest.

Then there are the numerous liberation movements in which armed struggle played a direct role in forcing decolonization: Algeria, Angola, Kenya, Namibia, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, and Zimbabwe, to name a few.

Of course, occupied peoples have the right to armed struggle whether it’s effective or not, but these histories are distorted or obscured to suggest that nonviolence is the only acceptable path to liberation.

That same expectation is now placed on Palestinians — not to prove they’re capable of peace, but to ensure that the consequences of occupation never become so intolerable for Israel that it’s forced to end its occupation.

Palestinians are told they have a right to freedom while every mechanism capable of imposing costs on their occupier is delegitimized:

Boycotts? Antisemitism or unlawful discrimination.

Direct action against weapons manufacturers? Terrorism or extremism.

Mass demonstrations? Criminalized when sufficiently disruptive.

International courts? Attacked or sanctioned when they challenge imperial power.

Voting? Ignored when the electorate defies the will of the military-industrial complex.

Negotiation? Conducted for decades while Israel continues to build settlements.

And meanwhile: “Why don’t Palestinians pursue peaceful means?”

This double standard is more than hypocrisy — it’s strategy. It keeps moving the goalposts on acceptable resistance to ensure resistance can never become powerful enough to threaten the thing being resisted.

Israel will not accept a Palestinian state, not along its pre-1967 borders, and certainly not from the river to the sea. Of course, the two-state solution was always an unjust compromise — an attempt to codify the original partition proposal that preceded Palestinians’ expulsion from their homeland, framing colonization as a two-sided conflict and forcing Palestinians to negotiate for their freedom while Israel’s staunchest ally played the mediator — but Israeli claims that October 7 put an end to the “peace process” are false. Israel had already sidelined the Palestine question, helping provoke the October 7 attacks in the first place.

This is why Israel’s genocide in Gaza must be understood not as a disproportionate response to a terrorist attack but as the culmination of a century-long crime of land theft and human erasure.

But the overwhelming majority of Western politicians — even those who inch toward acknowledging the genocide — refuse to confront the structure that produced it. They refuse to support boycotts, divestment, and sanctions to dismantle Israel’s apartheid state. If they’re not going to take meaningful action to free Palestine, they must stop undermining Palestinians’ efforts to free themselves.

Whether we — from our cozy perch of Western liberalism — are comfortable with armed resistance is beside the point. And whether every act of resistance is morally unimpeachable is an absurd standard to apply when the thing being resisted is morally monstrous and unspeakably violent. Such a standard doesn’t come from a sincere commitment to nonviolence or a respect for the laws of war. It’s a stalling tactic by the power elites.

They want us arguing about methods rather than freeing Palestine.

They want us debating the definition of genocide rather than stopping the bombs.

But Palestinians don’t have the luxury of debating whether it’s a genocide. They’re too busy trying to survive it.

Which is why we must reject the voices who delegitimize anticolonial resistance while they reflexively accept the “necessity” of state-sanctioned murder.

We must ignore those who demand passivity from Palestinians while invoking Israel’s genocidal “right to defend itself.”

Israeli occupation — like every other colonial project — is a moral inversion. The aggressor subjugates a population, then says, “How dare you fight back?”

Israel accuses Hamas of using human shields to win sympathy from the world, but it’s Israel that provokes armed resistance in the hope the world will feel sorry for it every time it suffers the consequences of its occupation.

But that strategy is no longer working.

Israel believed the world was on its side because it “wins” — because it crushes its adversaries, because its very foundation was a land grab whose victims failed to stop it.

It mistook power for legitimacy.

But you can’t maintain occupation, ethnic cleansing, apartheid, and blockade, then demand that the people subjected to those things respond only in ways that cause their oppressors no discomfort. When you seize people’s land, drive them into exile, confine them behind walls and checkpoints, and subject generation after generation to extreme violence — they can and will fight back.

The injustice is not that Palestinians refuse to submit.

It’s that they were ever expected to in the first place.

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Right before Kamala Harris uttered her now-famous “I’m speaking!” to shut down pro-Palestine protesters at a Michigan campaign rally, she gave a telling lead-in:

“You know what?” she told the protesters. “If you want Donald Trump to win, then say that.”

Meaning: If you talk about Gaza, I’ll lose the election.

It was clear her unconditional support for Israel could cost her votes, and she was already preparing to pin the blame for her loss on people who wanted her to take a meaningful stand against the genocide.

This was no surprise. Shortly after being handed the presidential nomination by Democratic delegates in lieu of a primary election, Vice President Harris had posted a response to anti-Netanyahu protests in Washington, D.C., calling the protesters “unpatriotic,” implying they were antisemitic, and condemning their burning of the American flag — a constitutionally protected right.

While the war criminal Netanyahu was applauded in Congress for vowing to continue obliterating Gaza, our vice president showed more concern for the destruction of a flag than the destruction of a people.

Fast-forward a year later, and Barack Obama — speaking at the Jefferson Educational Society of Erie’s 17th Global Summit — was confronted by a disrupter who asked him whether he considered the assault on Gaza to be a genocide. Obama said he was willing to have that conversation but insisted there were certain rules that had to be followed — then deflected by saying “there are disasters and catastrophes everywhere.”

I cite these examples — of two of the most prominent figures in the liberal establishment — because it’s liberal leaders who present a commitment to social justice while using “good taste” to launder genocidal policies.

Trump is the quintessential crybully president, deploying a combination of authoritarian threats and hurt feelings. Reportage he doesn’t like is “fake news.” Interviewers who challenge him are “horrible people.” He blames left-wing speech for political violence while he himself traffics in hate.

But liberal politicians purport to care about free speech and human rights while seeking to stifle protest against human rights abuses. The same calls for civility they use against Trump’s boorishness are deployed against those who dare to call out U.S. imperial violence. And it’s this tone policing that gives institutions that pride themselves on dialogue and pluralism the moral language with which to stifle dissent.

Silencing on Campus

Look at two of this year’s controversies around university commencement speakers:

After giving a speech to Le Moyne College graduates, Palestinian writer Mosab Abu Toha was condemned by the school’s president, Linda LeMura, for using the word “genocide” in reference to Gaza. In a campuswide email, LeMura implied that Toha’s use of the word in such a context was — you guessed it — antisemitic.

In response, Toha wrote: “It is utterly ridiculous to begin a letter by stating that your institution welcomes the ‘free exchange of ideas,’ only to immediately condemn a speaker, not for sharing abstract ideas, but for sharing his own life. I still carry the physical wounds of a 2009 airstrike on my neck, my forehead, and my cheek. My wife and I have lost over one hundred relatives, most of them children.”

President LeMura had caved to the feelings of those offended by Toha’s own testimony about the violence Israel has inflicted on him and his family. She chose bureaucratic damage control over the credibility of a Pulitzer Prize-winning author chronicling firsthand the extermination of his people.

The following week, biotech CEO Rami Elghandour saw his graduation speech canceled by Rutgers University because some of the graduating students took offense to his social media posts criticizing Israel. Rutgers had already praised Elghandour’s role as executive producer of The Voice of Hind Rajab, so it’s safe to assume that his politics — like Toha’s — were not a problem for the university until Israel supporters decided they were.

Pro-Palestine speech has long been precarious on college campuses, but we’ve now seen nearly three years of relentless tone policing meant to undermine Palestine advocacy:

Calm down.

Lower your voice.

You’re not getting your point across this way.

I sympathize with your aims but not your tactics.

Don’t say “from the river to the sea.”

“Globalize the intifada” is a call for genocide.

The countless firings, suspensions, and expulsions.

The relentless criticism of the student encampments — not because of any physical harm they caused but because of the message they supposedly sent.

The calls to move those conversations “into the lecture halls,” even when the most polite debate on such an issue could lead to the termination of presiding faculty members — and even when such debate serves as a replacement for meaningful action like divesting from companies that supply weapons for genocide.

Weaponizing Propriety

There are considerable material and structural reasons for the persistence of genocide denial — many of which I wrote about here. But the power establishment couches that denial in propriety, silencing dissent by insisting that the lives of people far away matter less than the feelings of the people in front of us.

Mosab Abu Toha is no stranger to this approach. Appearing on MSNBC last year to discuss his Pulitzer Prize — awarded for his essays about Gaza — he was greeted with a question from interviewer Catherine Rampell not about his work but about the “controversy” surrounding his award. Toha had challenged Western media narratives by pointing out the discrepancy between calling captive Israelis “hostages” and calling captive Palestinians “prisoners” — a move that Rampell portrayed as insensitive, implying that foregrounding Palestinian humanity diminished Israeli humanity and wounded the feelings of Israel’s supporters.

Reflecting on this incident a year later, Toha wrote, “Between October 2023 and May 2026, my wife and I lost over a hundred relatives. And we are still asked to humanize our murderers.”

The Right to Narrate

The survival of Zionism depends on Palestinians’ erasure, not just physically but rhetorically. It depends on the suppression of their voices, the denial of their right to narrate — a denial that extends even to relentless video documentation of their extermination.

Liberal-aligned figures like Van Jones, Hillary Clinton, and Sarah Hurwitz have characterized Gaza footage not as documentation of an unfolding genocide but as misinformation that’s gotten people to take the wrong side. In this view, the atrocities on display — because of how horrifying they are — make the genocide allegations less legitimate, as if emotional impact somehow diminishes factual accuracy.

But there are plenty of facts to support the allegations. So, the issue for these individuals, apparently, is not what the footage omits, but what it shows: the magnitude of Israel’s brutality.

This is why Edward Said wrote that Zionism cannot be understood merely as it concerns Jewish people. One must confront its impact on Palestinians, who’ve “borne the brunt of Zionism’s extraordinary human cost.”

Ask a white supremacist what white supremacy is, and he’ll tell you it’s just pride in being white. Ask a Nazi what Nazism is, and he’ll tell you it’s just pride in being German. But ask a Black person or Jewish person what those ideologies are, and you’ll hear a very different story.

Ideologies that depend on violence and expulsion will always be framed as noble by their perpetrators. Only their victims can give a full accounting of the horrors those ideologies produce.

That’s what makes Palestinian testimony so dangerous to those determined to manage the story. What’s so threatening — and devastating — about voices like Toha’s is that they don’t seek approval from Western institutions. They don’t temper their language to suit their corporate or institutional sponsors.

The Liberal Comfort Zone

The Western media has long dangled the carrot of visibility in front of marginalized people in exchange for adopting the right tone and playing the role the media wants them to play:

The “good” Muslim.

The anti-Hamas Palestinian.

The one who wants “peace” with Israel as it invades, occupies, and terrorizes its neighbors.

The one who condemns armed resistance and never exhibits rage.

Those who refuse to toe this line are ignored or portrayed as controversial, difficult, uncivilized, or outright dangerous.

But Martin Luther King warned of the reflex that tells the oppressed to wait, negotiate, lower their voices, and stop making everyone uncomfortable: “We do not need allies more devoted to order than to justice.”

Irish commentator and former footballer Richie Sadlier highlighted this problem in May when asked about protesters who disrupted an Irish soccer game to call for Ireland not to play Israel. While other commentators thought the game was an inappropriate occasion for such a protest, Sadlier responded cogently by saying protests are meant to be disruptive — and explained the moral stakes:

“It’s baffling to me how — two and a half years into what’s going on in the world at the moment — it is controversial or contentious or objectionable that someone suggest, ‘Do you know what? Maybe let’s not just play football against them.’”

Protests are meant to demand meaningful action, not just “express concerns” at an appropriate time and place. Yet tone policing insists that the real emergency is not genocide, but the manner in which people object to it.

It’s no coincidence that tone policing has long been used to silence minorities and women — particularly Black women — while “civility” has served to justify colonization and white supremacy. MLK is now praised for his civility, but he didn’t effect change by being polite. He did so by spotlighting segregation’s brutality and inflicting economic pressure on the white power structure. Tone policing repurposes the concept of nonviolent protest to prevent disruption rather than confront injustice.

Martin Luther King being arrested for “loitering” in Montgomery, Alabama, 1958

Many people who identify as liberals understand the need for disruption. But those determined to preserve their power and privilege will eschew dissent and accountability in favor of comfort and stability.

They espouse ethics of compassion, progress, and self-determination while opposing the disruption required to secure or sustain those things.

They take a moral stance only when that moral stance has been time-tested, institutionally vetted, and drained of any political cost.

Which is why so many liberal elites are so hostile to the Palestine movement. Why they despise anti-genocide disrupters at public events. Why they don’t want Palestine flags at No Kings rallies. Because Palestine exposes the limits of liberal universalism. It’s the line of demarcation between performative pluralism and genuine social justice.

Rhetoric vs. Incitement

Some argue that the heated rhetoric of some Palestine activists has contributed to violence against civilians — like the Israeli Embassy shooting in D.C. and the firebombing of a hostage-solidarity march in Boulder. But those attacks are not an argument in favor of tone policing. They’re an argument for distinguishing between morally forceful speech and actual incitement.

The attackers attributed their violence to their own anger over Gaza. They were not acting on the urging of the Palestine movement, and no major pro-Palestine organization has condoned those attacks. Those incidents don’t validate efforts to shut down Palestine advocacy, and they certainly don’t mitigate the atrocities being inflicted on Palestinians.

Moreover, the impassioned rhetoric of Palestine activists is nothing compared to the hate speech coming from Israeli officials — who’ve made explicit threats on which they’ve acted in full view of the world.

So, the question is not whether political rhetoric can ever contribute to violence. It’s whether anti-genocide speech is being held to a standard not applied to the rhetoric of politicians, military leaders, pundits, or settlers who possess and exercise actual power to inflict harm.

The Perfect Victim

Even now, after nearly three years of genocide, it’s Palestinians and their allies who must reassure the world they’re not violent.

Before opposing genocide, they must first condemn Hamas. They must first make clear their disgust with the events of October 7. They can only call it genocide or occupation or apartheid if they do so cautiously or reluctantly, highlighting the “moral depravity” of those fighting to liberate Palestine — thereby undermining their own advocacy.

Mohammed El-Kurd’s Perfect Victims is perhaps the definitive English-language book on this subject. One of the most painful and galvanizing arguments Kurd makes is against the notion that no Palestinian, no matter how much they suffer, is permitted to be angry or feel hate towards the very people inflicting their suffering.

But given everything that’s happened, is it not fair to ask whether rage is the most natural response?

When polls suggest that 82% of Jewish Israelis want to expel everyone from Gaza?

When nearly half of them are in favor of outright extermination?

Hearing that, what tone are we supposed to take?

I’m not suggesting that all methods of dissent are equally effective. Activists argue over tactics and messaging all the time. But whether anger is politically productive is not the question. Righteous anger can certainly be a powerful mobilizing tool — much more than dispassionate critique — but either way, the perpetrators and their supporters will use their own discomfort to villainize those protesting them.

And they’ll go to great lengths to compromise those who take a moral stance on Palestine.

One of the more discouraging examples of this happened at a press conference in March, when a journalist confronted New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani about his wife’s peripheral connection to Palestinian-American writer Susan Abulhawa, who had called Israeli forces “ghouls” and “Jewish supremacist demons” because of their atrocities in Gaza and the West Bank. Rather than challenge the premise of the question, Mamdani condemned Abulhawa’s words as “reprehensible” and “patently unacceptable.”

It’s unclear whether Mamdani — a long-time Palestine advocate — believed what he was saying or whether he was just doing damage control. But Abulhawa’s response to the controversy was profound and instructive.

She explained her choice of language in powerful, moral terms, describing how Israel has robbed Palestinians of everything — their homes, their heritage, their land, their ancestral cemeteries, their orchards, their artifacts, their archives, their natural resources, even their literal skin.

She also addressed the power differential behind racism, explaining that hatred of one’s oppressor is not reverse racism — it’s the most natural reaction to supremacist violence.

Like Toha, Abulhawa was speaking from painful lived experience. Why wouldn’t she use “incendiary” words to describe monstrous behavior?

She concluded by urging Mamdani to be aware of the power dynamics behind such policing of language. “If you are not careful,” she warned, “they will siphon your soul.”

The Last Refuge of Decency

When Abulhawa addressed her controversy at length on Bad Faith podcast, she put it sharply: “I think we are the only people in the world, maybe in history, who are expected to watch or experience our own genocide and then…watch what we say so we don’t offend the feelings of the people who did this.”

And this cuts to the heart of tone policing’s depravity:

It’s the perpetrator saying, Please don’t make us feel bad about our atrocities.

It’s the enabler saying, Please don’t make us answer for our complicity.

I myself experienced a version of this in a response to an essay I wrote about cutting ties with Zionists who attacked my Palestine advocacy. A relative called my argument “dangerous” because it supposedly equated hesitation with complicity. That wasn’t true. I had not attacked people trapped by fear, economic precarity, confusion, or social pressure. My critique was focused on those who had actively defended, minimized, or denied the genocide — and then attacked me for refusing to do the same. But tone policing often collapses those distinctions. The person naming complicity is recast as the aggressor, while those defending power become merely “concerned,” “uncomfortable,” or “hurt.”

And in the cases I’ve mentioned, the calls for civility were not meant to facilitate conversation. They were meant to avoid it — and prevent action.

Which is why, instead of divestment, we get antisemitism investigations.

Instead of an arms embargo, we get Congressional resolutions condemning opposition to Zionism.

Instead of seeing war criminals arrested when they set foot on American soil, we see them celebrated in the halls of power.

Striking a “nice tone” is also how liberal Zionists have laundered Israel’s atrocities since its inception. They express regret, sorrow, sympathy, a longing for “peace” — but regardless of their framing, the material impacts of apartheid, occupation, and ethnic cleansing are the same. So what if their rhetoric is more “compassionate” than that of Bezalel Smotrich or Itamar Ben-Gvir? They still perpetuate an unjust system and have even bolstered it by putting a kinder face on it — much the way corporate Democrats strike a nicer tone than Republicans while still advancing polices that deepen capitalist exploitation and imperial plunder.

But are the tides shifting?

Is there a silver lining in the fact that Israel — no matter how much contempt it shows for international law and Palestinian humanity — still cares about its global reputation?

In Netanyahu’s outrage over Nicholas Kristof’s exposé on Israel’s sexual violence against Palestinians?

In the indignation of Israel’s ambassador to the UN after Israel was added to a blacklist of countries suspected of conflict-related sexual violence?

In Israel’s increasingly desperate invocation of the Holocaust to shield itself from accountability, even as it desecrates the memory of the Holocaust by committing genocide in the name of Jewish safety?

In the fact that Kamala Harris is meeting privately with pro-Palestine activists — not because anyone should want her to run for president again but because even she is realizing that indifference to Palestinian suffering is a political liability?

And in the fact that tone policing has failed to silence disrupters?

Perhaps.

But that may not be its primary goal.

The primary goal of tone policing may be performative, modeling avoidance for those who have serious misgivings about what’s happening in Gaza but are looking for an excuse — any excuse — not to speak up.

Because after nearly three years of atrocities on our screens — and a massive shift in global opinion — those still defending Israel’s genocide can’t just say it’s not happening. They can’t just say you’re wrong to care. But they can try to shift the conversation from how to stop it to how we talk about it.

And if everyone who is speaking up is cast as rude, disruptive, unruly, or barbaric, that relieves those clinging to tranquility of having to follow the disrupters’ example — particularly if the disruptions carry material consequences.

And that’s the greatest danger of tone policing. It allows decent people to remain decent by doing nothing.

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We’re “obsessed” with Israel because its crimes have dominated our newsfeeds for the past two and a half years.

Because we’re not being force-fed the importance of the U.S.-Saudi alliance 24/7 the way we are the U.S.-Israel alliance.

Because we’re not called antisemites, self-hating Jews, terrorist sympathizers, or enemies of Western civilization for opposing the violence of any country other than Israel.

Because we have not been gaslit for 78 years to believe that expelling Sudanese, Congolese, Yemenis, or China’s Uyghurs from their homes was a noble act essential to the survival of the Jewish people.

Because we are not told to disbelieve our own eyes when confronted with an endless scroll of decapitated bodies, bombed hospitals, starving children, mass graves, and entire neighborhoods reduced to rubble anywhere other than in Palestine.

Because it is not the Saudi, Yemeni, Sudanese, Congolese, or Chinese head of state who is applauded in the halls of Congress while defending a genocidal campaign.

Because the Western media and political establishment are not working this hard to persuade us that the genocide in Sudan is not real.

Because the U.S. is willing to call Sudan a genocide instead of criminalizing protest against it and funneling all our tax dollars into perpetuating it.

Because news of forced starvation in Yemen isn’t actively suppressed by our State Department.

Because mentioning genocide in Sudan doesn’t see our livelihoods destroyed.

Because celebrities who advocate for China’s Uyghurs aren’t blacklisted in Hollywood.

Because right-wing billionaires buying up the media aren’t doing so to shield Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Sudan, Congo, or China from criticism.

Because our power elites aren’t planning to build beachfront property over the corpses of Sudanese, Congolese, Yemenis, or Uyghurs.

Because our government doesn’t want to stop at supplying aid to Israel—it wants to wed our military to the one committing genocide.

We are not “obsessed” with Israel.

We are responding to the fact that Israel’s crimes are being committed in our name, with our money, and under our protection, while our institutions demand that we shut up and call it self-defense.

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Israel’s proclaimed “right to exist” has long been used as a cudgel, either to deflect from the state’s crimes or to accuse its critics of promoting the mass murder of its people.

But over the past two and a half years, as the world has watched Israel wage its war of annihilation in Gaza and spread its aggression throughout the Middle East¹, prominent figures from the left and right have pushed back against this claim in various ways.

In September of 2024, Ta-Nehisi Coates — while promoting his Palestine-related book The Message on CBS Mornings — was pressed by host Tony Dokoupil on the issue of Israel’s right to exist, to which Coates responded, “No country in this world establishes its ability to exist through rights. Countries establish their ability to exist through force.”

A month later, UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese similarly shut down a reporter by saying “there is not such a thing in international law like a right of a state to exist…What is enshrined in international law is the right of a people to exist.”

In other words, if Israel is recognized by the United Nations, does that justify its erasure of the Palestinians?

“Hell no,” she said.

Seven months after that, Zohran Mamdani, then-candidate for Mayor of New York City, stated his position on the issue when cornered by a moderator during an election debate. “Israel has the right to exist,” he said, “as a state with equal rights” — effectively rejecting the apartheid system that defines Israel’s sovereignty.

And most recently, ardent Trump supporter and MAGA figure Tucker Carlson ran The Economist editor-in-chief Zanny Minton Beddoes through the Socratic wringer by demanding she clearly define the question of Israel’s right to exist, after she posed it to him in an interview.

Minton Beddoes quickly backtracked, saying, “I don’t want to get hung up on the ‘right to’…”

But Carlson persisted, asking, “Where does that right come from?”

The idea that a nation has a right to exist originated with French historian Ernest Renan, but in modern politics the phrase is used almost exclusively in regard to Israel’s legitimacy as a state. Israel has repeatedly demanded recognition of this “right” as a precondition for peace negotiations — first from the Palestine Liberation Organization, which recognized Israel’s “right to exist in peace and security” in the 1993 Oslo Accords, and later from Hamas, which has indicated a willingness to accept a Palestinian state alongside Israel within the pre-1967 borders but has not formally recognized Israel’s “right to exist.”

That’s because such recognition requires Palestinians to legitimize their own dispossession.

What Israel is actually demanding is not acknowledgment of some inherent “right,” but acceptance of its sovereignty as a state recognized by the international community. Yet calling that status a “right to exist” transforms a political agreement into a moral entitlement — recasting recognition, which states grant or withhold based on power and diplomacy, as something Israel is innately owed.

This “right to exist” has thus been deployed to justify countless acts of violence committed by Israel. If every atrocity is carried out in the name of security or self-defense, then the stakes — no matter how much suffering is inflicted — are always existential. To deny Israel’s right to defend itself is to deny its right to exist.

This “right” has now served to excuse Israel’s genocide in Gaza, its bombing of civilians in neighboring countries, and its ongoing occupation and annexation of the West Bank.

Here, Coates’s analysis is particularly instructive:

If no country in the world has established its existence through rights, claiming a right to exist is incoherent. But Israel and its chief benefactor — the United States — attract particular scrutiny because they weren’t created by indigenous populations who drew borders to establish sovereignty. They were created by settlers who conquered land, expelled people, and built states on top of them.²

In other words, they were created not through rights but through the violation of rights.

And they’re sustained through the denial of others’ humanity or outright existence.

Early Zionists, for example, encouraged Jewish immigration to Palestine by promoting the myth of “a land without a people.”

The ruling Likud Party’s platform, since its inception, has claimed that the entire area of historic Palestine — between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean — belongs to the State of Israel.³

Right-wing Israelis have routinely argued that there’s no such thing as a Palestinian.

And at the height of the Gaza genocide, the pro-Israel New York Times issued a memo instructing its journalists to avoid using the word “Palestine” in their reporting.

All of this functions to carry out what Israeli scholar Baruch Kimmerling identified as politicide — the erasure of Palestinians as a political entity with legitimate claims and grievances.

And the United States backs all this not because it believes in Israel’s right to exist, but because it believes in the preservation of its own hegemony.

As James Baldwin wrote, “the state of Israel was not created for the salvation of the Jews; it was created for the salvation of the Western interests.”

The migration of European Jews to Israel was more an act of voluntary self-expulsion than a program of protection by the imperial powers. Western nations set up Israel to ease their “guilty Christian conscience,” as Baldwin put it, while ridding themselves of the people they’d forsaken in the first place.

But Israel’s strategic function aligns cleanly with Theodor Herzl’s vision for a Jewish state: “an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism.” The West resolved “the Jewish Question” while creating a proxy to ensure its influence in the Middle East.

Which is why the repeated war crimes and human rights violations by the U.S. and Israel are not just dark moments in history — they’re defining features of our present reality.

Israel continues to erase Gaza. It continues to terrorize Palestinians in the West Bank. It has displaced a million people in southern Lebanon. And alongside the U.S., it’s waging war to flatten and destabilize Iran.

As Israel shows repeated contempt for international law, the question is not whether it has a right to exist, but whether it should be expelled from the United Nations.

As historian Tarik Cyril Amar put it on Rania Khalek’s Dispatches, “We need a process of derecognizing Israel…No state has a right to exist. But in Israel’s case, the Palestinians have a right that Israel cease to exist.”

Israel supporters might hear that and think “extermination.” But the dismantling of apartheid South Africa did not erase the land or its people — it restructured the system into one of equal rights.

After the genocide in Gaza and the settler terrorism in the West Bank, however, most Palestinians may refuse to live in the same state as Israelis. And ultimately, it’s up to the Palestinians to decide how they should be governed. But a state that claims a “right to exist” while forever threatening the existence of the people it dispossessed cannot remain in perpetuity.

When Coates made his appearance on CBS Mornings, he was immediately ambushed by Dokoupil, who said the Palestine section of his book belonged “in the backpack of an extremist.” Dokoupil then launched into familiar talking points about suicide bombings, the Palestinian Intifadas, and hostile neighboring countries, which he framed as justification for Israel’s apartheid — and whose omission from the book he saw as a rejection of Israel’s right to exist.

What Israel supporters like Dokoupil don’t seem to realize — or maybe they do — is that invoking Israel’s “right to exist” in order to rationalize apartheid, occupation, and genocide implies the state can only survive through murder and oppression. They’re tacitly admitting that Israel is, by definition, a violent settler state.

Is it any wonder why Palestinian identity is one of constant struggle?

In an act of utter irony and hypocrisy over the past two and a half years of genocide, Western leaders have stood firm about Israel’s “right to exist” while denying an actual right enshrined in international law: the right of Palestinians to resist.

We’re constantly ordered to prioritize the concerns of colonizers over the rights of the colonized.

That’s why Tony Dokoupil demanded that Ta-Nehisi Coates provide “context” in order to justify Israel’s crimes.

Why Francesca Albanese was pressed to acknowledge the State of Israel’s right to exist while it violates the Palestinian people’s right to exist.

Why a New York City mayoral candidate was expected to support a Middle East settler colony’s status as an ethno-supremacist apartheid state.

Not because of any humanitarian law among nations.

But for “the salvation of the Western interests.”

If we want to talk about rights, what right do Western powers have to inflict continued atrocities on the Global South?

What right does Israel have to wage wars of expansion throughout the Middle East while the country’s officials tout plans for “Greater Israel,” from the Nile to the Euphrates?

What right does the U.S. Ambassador to Israel have to say it would be fine if Israel “took it all”?

Does anyone truly believe the Middle East would be more violent without the presence of a settler-colonial apartheid state? Or without Western imperialists’ determination to control the region’s resources?

What right do the U.S. and Israel have to wage an unprovoked war on Iran, making false claims about Iran as an existential threat while producing actual threats to global survival, through mass killing, environmental destruction, trade disruptions, surging energy prices, risks to the world’s food supplies, and possible nuclear escalation?

Are they really fighting for existence — or for its opposite?

UN Resolution 181 — the 1947 plan to divide Palestine into separate Jewish and Arab states — prioritized the national aspirations of a mostly immigrant minority over the rights of the indigenous majority. Jews comprised roughly one third of the total population but were to be granted more than half the land, including the most fertile coastal plains and the only good port. The Arabs were to be left with a series of disconnected enclaves, with severely restricted access to the sea and stripped of the most productive agricultural zones.⁴

And because the population within the borders of the proposed Jewish state was almost evenly split — roughly 55% Jewish to 45% Arab — maintaining the state’s Jewish character would require either the permanent subjugation or the removal of that 45% minority.

So, what the West frames as the Arabs’ “rejectionism” was in fact their refusal to validate their own erasure.

The UN Charter explicitly champions the right of people to determine their own destiny. The UN did not have the legal authority to carve Palestine into states without the consent of the land’s inhabitants. It can vote to recognize a state; it cannot vote to create one. The resolution was merely a recommendation — but its framework undermined the values laid out in the UN Charter.

While the Zionists saw the Partition Plan as a long-awaited birth certificate for their Jewish state, the Arabs saw it as an act of dispossession by a body in which they had no meaningful representation. At the time, the UN was dominated by Western powers. With much of the Global South still under colonial rule and having no vote, the UN sided with the colonial order on the partition of Palestine.

The result was not a peaceful transition to statehood. It was war.

When the Zionists enacted their plan to rid the proposed Jewish state of its Arab population, displacing at least 750,000 Palestinians, the UN’s endorsement provided a shield of legitimacy. The Zionists could frame their ethnic cleansing as the defense of an international mandate — and the indigenous Arab resistance as a defiance of it.

Which brings us back to Israel’s “right to exist.”

When a state’s very foundation is contested by the people it displaced, its “right to exist” — and hence its “right to defend itself” — takes on a circular, almost Kafkaesque logic:

The state is established by displacing an indigenous population.

The indigenous population resists its displacement.

The state invokes its “right to defend itself” against that resistance.

And by defending the results of its initial violence, the state treats the consequences of its creation as justification for its continued use of force.

The conflict always starts “today,” with a recognized state under attack by “terrorists,” rather than being acknowledged as a century-long struggle over the displacement that made the state possible.

But a state that requires the world to acknowledge its “right to exist” is a state that knows its foundations are built on injustice.

Which is why Israeli leaders have admitted that if they were Palestinian, they would resist too:

“If I were an Arab leader, I would never sign an agreement with Israel…we have come and we have stolen their country.” — David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister

“Why should we blame [the Palestinians] for their burning hatred for us?…we have transformed the land and the villages in which they and their forefathers had dwelled into our own property.” — Moshe Dayan, former Israeli defence minister

“If I was [a Palestinian] at the right age, at some stage I would have entered one of the terror organizations and have fought from there.” — Ehud Barak, former Israeli prime minister

“I would fight without limits against anyone who takes my land.” — Ami Ayalon, former head of Israel’s Shin Bet intelligence service

“We [the Jews] used terrorism to establish our state. Why should we expect the Palestinians to be any different?” — Leah Rabin, widow of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and participant in the 1948 Palestine war

Whether these Israelis believed (wrongly) that the land inherently belonged to them, none of them claimed that Palestinian resistance was motivated by Jew hatred. They understood Palestinian resistance for what it is — a struggle for self-determination.

Israeli empathy for Palestinian resistance is not necessary to legitimize Palestinian rights, but it does undermine Israel’s image as an innocent bystander to its own crimes. And it exposes Israel’s “right to exist” as a rhetorical maneuver meant to conceal the state’s culpability.

That should come as no surprise — because slogans uniquely applied to Israel tend not to stand up to scrutiny:

It’s the most moral army in the world. (But it commits war crimes.)

It’s the only democracy in the Middle East. (Actually, it’s an apartheid system sustained by military occupation.)

It has a right to defend itself. (Not against people resisting occupation.)

The “right to exist” is a demand for exoneration — for a state that wants conquest without blowback, plunder without accountability.

Those of us who grew up in the United States know how easily a country’s history can be whitewashed — how, at best, we can be raised to believe its crimes are safely in the past. But a country born from genocide and built through slavery, a country that dropped two atomic bombs on hundreds of thousands of civilians, a country that bankrolls death squads and genocides and freely bombs and destabilizes other countries to serve its imperial interests, can’t claim “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness” as anything more than aspirational. Our founding ideals are a brand statement, not a political reality. Not when resources, capital, and strategic interests are on the line.

So, it’s no surprise that the U.S. is Israel’s chief enabler. Our “most important ally” is a subcontractor for our imperial violence.

But Israel is also an independent actor running rampant with its own brutal agenda. It executes Palestinians in the streets and in their homes. It tries them in military courts without due process.

Palestinians say: We have a right as a people to exist.

Israel says: No, you do not. Our power supersedes your humanity.

So, I’ll leave you with this:

If, on October 7, 2023, Hamas fighters in full uniform had breached the Gaza border fence but had not attacked the Nova music festival, if they had not attacked a single kibbutz or a single civilian, if they had only hit Israeli military installations and killed hundreds of armed, on-duty soldiers, striking a devastating blow to the IDF, if they had never taken any civilians hostage and had taken only Israeli soldiers prisoner, if they had operated in full compliance with the laws of war — would Israel’s response have been any less violent?

Would U.S. support for that response have been any less enthusiastic?

Would Biden not have bear-hugged Netanyahu?

Would Lindsey Graham not have called for Israel to “level the place”?

Yes, I’m posing a hypothetical.

No, I can’t prove a counterfactual.

But think. Look deep within and ask yourself how the Western mindset would interpret that scenario — a forceful but lawful retaliation by Hamas against Israel’s illegal blockade of Gaza?

How would Israel exercise its “right to defend itself”?

It took a genocide for the world to see Palestinians’ humanity. It took thousands of murdered children for that — and for Western leaders to do the bare minimum and not even cut off military aid to Israel but simply start hedging their bets.

Would things have been any different?

Of course not.

Because of Israel’s “right to exist.”

And when a violent colonizer-state serving as a proxy for the world’s most powerful empire can claim an inherent right to exist — it can claim anything.

Including the life of every Palestinian.

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Notes

1. I use the term “Middle East” here with qualification. Coined in 1902 by American naval strategist Alfred Thayer Mahan, the label is a Eurocentric term that defines the region of Southwest Asia and North Africa by its geographical relationship to London. However, it remains the most functional wording for describing a geopolitical theater that includes territory from Egypt to Iran, which is central to this discussion.

2. While settler colonialism is a global phenomenon — shaping the foundations of states from Canada to Australia — the U.S.-Israel axis warrants specific analysis due to its active, ongoing nature and its role as the primary driver of contemporary Western hegemony. Unlike “legacy” settler states, Israel — with its occupation of Palestine — represents the continuous, unresolved application of settler-colonial logic in the 21st century.

3. Under this framework, if — as a precondition for peace talks — the Palestinians recognize Israel, they’re essentially ceding the entire area of historic Palestine to Israel, leaving themselves with nothing to form a state of their own.

4. In 1947, “Arab” was the standard administrative term used by both the British Mandate authorities and the United Nations to categorize the Arabic-speaking majority population. During the Mandate period, “Palestinian” functioned primarily as a geographic descriptor applied to all inhabitants of Palestine — including Jews, Christians, and Muslims. Nevertheless, a distinct Palestinian Arab political consciousness had already begun to emerge in the late Ottoman period. Early literary expressions of this identity appear in the writings of figures such as Khalil Beidas in the late 19th century. After 1948, as the Jewish population adopted the national label “Israeli,” the term “Palestinian” increasingly became the primary national identifier through which the Arab population asserted its distinct historical and political connection to the land.

By now, the rhetorical expectations of opposing imperial violence are simple:

To oppose the genocide in Gaza, you must first condemn Hamas.

To oppose the destruction of Lebanon, you must first condemn Hezbollah.

To oppose the war on Iran, you must first condemn the Islamic Republic.

You’ll still be straw-manned and smeared for voicing your opposition — called a regime agent or useful idiot. But to remain inside the window of acceptable critique, you must condemn all resistance to the violence, thereby neutering any talk of stopping said violence.

But in reality, opposition to war crimes doesn’t require a moral disclaimer. Whether Iran’s government is benevolent or brutal is beside the point. No country earns the right to bomb another by pointing to its internal politics.

Perhaps that’s why the rationale for this illegal war teeters between existential threat and oppressed population. But the central fallacy is the belief that the aggressors can bomb Iranians into revolting — that the people’s hatred for their government is so ingrained that “decapitation” will produce a groundswell of action toward regime change.

At the same time, U.S. officials stoke the fires of Islamophobia, painting Iranians as universally evil to mitigate the tragedy of their annihilation. Much the way Israel has portrayed Palestinians in Gaza as serving Hamas both as unwitting human shields and as gleeful supporters, the U.S. now offers the public similar options for characterizing Iran — whichever provides a more comforting rationale for the death raining down on the country.

When I visited Iran with my mother in 2018 — just after Trump had torn up the nuclear agreement — Western media covered Iranian reactions with the usual narrative of outrage and hysteria: small but tightly framed crowds burning U.S. flags while chanting “Death to America.” Family and friends warned me not to go. Surely, there would be riots, upheaval, attacks on Americans. Maybe I’d be imprisoned on manufactured charges of espionage.

None of that happened.

When I arrived, I experienced all the myth-busting elements of Iranian society — Western music, bootleg alcohol, hijabs worn loosely, quiet criticism of the government. But none of that surprised me.

What struck me was the murals of Iran’s martyrs.

Across Tehran and other Iranian cities, walls are covered with large murals of men who died fighting in Iran’s wars. These first appeared during the Iran-Iraq War, what Iranians call the “imposed war,” because — much like the current onslaught — it was a conflict Iran never asked for but rather was decided by aggressive neighbors and imperial interests.

My Western reflex was to view the murals as propaganda. And in a sense, they are. They’re commissioned by the state to reinforce its narrative of sacrifice and resistance.

But when I asked our guide what she thought of the murals, her answer was more nuanced.

She disliked the government and complained openly about the social restrictions placed on Iranians. She loved Western culture and longed for greater freedoms. But when she talked about the men on those walls — those martyrs — her tone was not resentful or dismissive. It was respectful.

She’s only one person, of course, in a country of over 90 million — but her view is not unusual, even among those not aligned with the government. Commemoration of the country’s fallen warriors remains alive. And a deeply divided society can still unite against external threats.

The Iran-Iraq War was existential. Hundreds of thousands of Iranians died. Cities were bombed. Iraqi forces used chemical weapons against Iranian soldiers and civilians while much of the world looked the other way. Saddam Hussein’s war machine was financed by Gulf monarchies and quietly supported by Western governments that feared the spread of Iran’s revolution.

For many Iranians, the lesson of that war was simple: no one was coming to their rescue.

That’s why Iran built relationships with armed groups and governments across the region — Hezbollah in Lebanon, militias in Iraq, the Assad regime in Syria. These networks were meant to ensure that if Iran were attacked again, the battlefield would remain outside its borders.

That’s also what drove Iran’s proliferation of ballistic missiles and why it restarted the nuclear program begun under the Shah. It was not driven by some hegemonic aim to control the region — but by a determination to ensure that its survival is never threatened again.

Western media often portrays Iran as a society on the brink of revolt — a population desperate for outside intervention to topple the regime. Diaspora figures are regularly elevated as representatives of Iranian opinion, assuring Western audiences that ordinary Iranians would welcome U.S. or Israeli attacks if those weaken the government.

But Iranian society is complex, and public opinion is difficult to measure in an authoritarian system. And while there are certainly many people in Iran who oppose the Islamic Republic — with protests and uprisings, followed by brutal responses by authorities — opposition to the government does not translate into support for foreign aggression.

So, my point is pretty basic. No matter how complex or divided a people might be, killing their children and poisoning their skies has a unifying effect. People are far more likely to rally around the government defending them than around the nations attacking them.

As John Mearsheimer pointed out in a recent interview with Chris Hedges, there’s no historical precedent to suggest otherwise.

The martyr murals are a reminder of that fact. Western policymakers may see them only as propaganda, but they’re also something deeper: a visual memory of a nation that has already fought one devastating war against outside powers.

Iranians are a diverse people with multifaceted lives. But they live in a country shaped by the memory of invasion and sacrifice.

How many civilians can the U.S. and Israel kill, how many lives can they ruin, before everyone stops pretending this war is about liberation?

Iranians may disagree about their government — but why would they overthrow it for the nations attacking them? Why would they see the U.S. and Israel as partners in liberation?

The so-called Twelve-Day War last June did nothing to spark regime change. Nor did it boost support for Crown Prince Reza, Iran’s would-be leader in exile — who’s closely aligned with Israel.

And the truth is: the U.S. and Israel don’t want a free Iran. They want a devastated one. They want to divide, destabilize, and level Iran so their regional domination faces no opposition.

Their rhetoric grows more apocalyptic by the day. Trump says the Iranians are “among the most evil people on earth” (while seeming to conflate them with Hamas — and parroting debunked atrocity myths). U.S. military commanders have reportedly framed this as a messianic religious war. And on 60 Minutes, Pete Hegseth — channeling Patrick Batemen — said, “The only ones that need to be worried right now are Iranians that think they’re going to live.”

Hegseth, jaded by his military service in Iraq, has eschewed liberation in favor of vengeance.

And Israel wants to treat Iran like Gaza: just “mow the lawn.”

But as long as those murals remain on the walls of Iran’s cities, Western leaders should understand what they represent: not blind loyalty to a regime, but the memory of a country that once fought long and hard for its survival — and will likely do so again.

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For me, the most paradoxical aspect of arguing about the genocide in Gaza has been the number of friends and acquaintances who’ve expressed betrayal because I’m speaking out for Palestine. While their anger has done nothing to weaken my resolve, their assumption that I would ever condone mass murder is puzzling, to say the least.

It usually begins like this: they see something I’ve posted on social media — anything from a protest flyer to one of my political essays — and they react with condemnation. A ranty comment. A heated info-dump. A spew of tangential facts meant to punish me for speaking out.

If I respond calmly, the exchange escalates. If I disengage, they slide into my DMs to continue the confrontation there.

Some, to their credit, are less overtly hostile. They ask cautious but loaded questions, or they calmly correct me on my “misuse” of the word genocide. It’s a war, they insist. A tragic one, perhaps. A just one that evolved into an unjust one. But a war, nonetheless.

That they assert this with such certainty — while countless genocide scholars, legal experts, and human rights organizations recognize genocide — is beside the point. The point is: I must be corrected.

I’m aware that some of them are truly struggling with a worldview so deeply ingrained that hedging is the only way they can grapple with this horrible reality. But when I’m reprimanded for my “insensitivity,” that gives the game away. We’re no longer dealing in facts or fundamental truths. We’re dealing in comfort levels.

And why would they ever be comfortable acknowledging genocide by a nation they support?

Perhaps Israel’s moral unassailability has been so taken for granted that they assumed I was on their side. They say, “This doesn’t sound like you.” Or, “You’re not the person I remember.”

This moral inversion is what makes genocide denial so potent. They genuinely see themselves as the victims.

One of them referenced her mother — a Holocaust survivor — as if my Palestine advocacy were an affront to what her mother had been through.

Others speak the language of safety, suggesting my opposition to genocide is literally endangering their lives or the lives of their loved ones in Israel.

Others give ahistorical lectures on how Palestinians have always said no to peace, or they blame Palestinians for rejecting partition in the first place — a claim that ignores the injustice of displacement and dispossession, not to mention the Zionists’ rejection of the Arab proposal for a single, equal-rights state as an alternative to partition. (The common Zionist rebuttal against a single state is the specter of “Jew hatred” — a sentiment Israel has sought to cultivate and instrumentalize through 78 years of brutalizing Palestinians in the name of all Jews.)

Anyone who’s been on the receiving end of these arguments will recognize them and others:

It can’t be genocide if it’s ethnic cleansing. (Not true: ethnic cleansing is widely recognized as a component or stage of genocide.)

Why won’t Egypt and Jordan take the Palestinians? (Because they don’t want to facilitate said ethnic cleansing.)

Americans are colonizers too. (Which is why we have reservations, treaties, land acknowledgments, and ongoing debates about redress for Indigenous peoples.)

Everyone gets colonized. (An excuse you’ll only ever hear from the colonizer, not the colonized.)

Another common maneuver is to lambast me for my privilege — for being in a position where it’s “easy” to side with Palestinians, as if opposing a genocide funded by my tax dollars is a luxury, not a moral obligation.

I’ve also been called out for daring to attend a press conference in support of Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil while posting no complaints about antisemitism on the Columbia campus. Never mind that I was there on behalf of a Jewish organization I volunteer with — anyone active in Palestine advocacy knows that Jews who oppose Israeli occupation are dismissed by their critics as “self-hating” or “useful idiots.”

But my silence on Columbia’s antisemitism report was deliberate: its research was empirically weak, it ignored the many Jewish students who participated in the Gaza encampments, and it was ultimately used to punish rather than protect them.

In short, it was weaponized to crush pro-Palestine speech.

My critics expect my Jewish half to harbor automatic support for Israel — either out of cultural obligation or for my own self-preservation. Meanwhile, they ignore my Iranian half, at times repeating racist tropes about Iran and its “terrorist proxies” — in a mashup of Islamophobia, white supremacy, and support for Western-backed settler-colonialism.

They continue to cast themselves as the wounded party and me as a traitor.

As the complaints persisted, I showed less patience for them. I blocked people or immediately hid their replies because I saw the same rationalizations, the same bad-faith arguments, the same ad hominem attacks.

It became infuriating to deal with people who, two years into the genocide, spoke to me as if they were the first to make these arguments — and as if I hadn’t already witnessed all the horrors I’d witnessed.

Moreover, it highlighted enormous hypocrisy on their part. After October 7, Israel supporters demanded immediate recognition and condemnation from those still processing shock and confusion. Now they expect silence after more than two years of relentless images of murdered Palestinians. Meanwhile, many of them are demanding quick judgment on the anti-government protests in Iran, despite the morass of confusion about death tolls and external interference.

I prefer not to take aim at ordinary citizens. My focus is on power structures and the people who wield that power. But my critics were surely emboldened — at least in part — by the power structures on their side. The donors and employers who had Palestine advocates fired. The members of Congress who interrogated college presidents for failing to squash anti-genocide protests.

That’s how capitalism suppresses dissent: by creating economic insecurity. If people are terrified of losing their livelihoods, they don’t speak out. That’s also why capitalism loves democracy — not because of the civil liberties democracy contains, but because of the cover they provide. The economic consequences of speaking out make our freedoms inadequate — and leave the empire managers with nothing to fear.

So, as we speak out against our government’s complicity in genocide, we need to know whom we can trust. That’s why Palestine is not a purity test; it’s a litmus test — a measure of whether our moral commitments survive contact with social pressure and material risk.

Genocide does not require universal hatred. It requires enough people willing to rationalize it, excuse it, or wait it out.

The friendships that broke over Palestine didn’t fracture because of disagreement. They fractured because certain truths cannot be faced without consequence.

What we do with that knowledge — whether we speak, remain silent, or try to justify atrocity — will determine not just what kind of world we live in, but what kind of people we’re willing to be.

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1. Ad Hominem Attack: “You’re an antisemite.”

2. Straw Man: “So you think Israelis should just roll over and die?”

3. Whataboutism: “What about Sudan? Congo? Iran?”

4. Red Herring: “Do you know what Hamas does to gay people?”

5. False Dilemma: “The alternative is genocide of the Jews.”

6. Special Pleading: “How could a people that suffered the Holocaust ever be perpetrators?”

7. Appeal to Authority: “Israel investigated itself and found no evidence of genocide.”

8. Argument from Repetition: “You have to prove intent.” (Repeated endlessly even after South Africa submitted extensive, publicly available evidence to the ICJ.)

9. Circular Reasoning: “Israel can’t be committing genocide; it’s a democracy, and democracies don’t commit genocide.”

10. Moral Inversion: “Do you know how offensive it is to accuse a historically victimized people of genocide?”

As Israel and its U.S. backers continue terrorizing Palestinians — while clearing rubble and obstructing accountability for their crimes — we will not unsee what we’ve seen.

We will not forget this.

We will not stop speaking out.

Free Palestine.

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This is not an argumentative essay to prove that what’s happening in Gaza is a genocide. My piece “What It’s Like to Argue with a Genocide Denier” makes that argument at length.

This is an examination of why genocide denial is still widely accepted in American discourse. About half of U.S. voters believe Israel has committed genocide in Gaza, and at the time of this writing, Wikipedia — the world’s largest online encyclopedia — treats the genocide as factual and ongoing. But the U.S. political establishment and the mainstream media tell a different story.

President Trump has granted wanted war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu a spot on the Gaza “Board of Peace” — tasked with rebuilding and governing the Strip as it’s transformed into whatever macabre resort area Trump envisions. And this is not just a case of two corrupt leaders abusing their power. It’s a reflection of a political climate of evading accountability.

In The New York Times, on CNN, in the State Department, and among high-polling presidential hopefuls and the majority of Congress, genocide denial is not a fringe position. It’s one side of an ongoing debate.

Yes, genocide is a legal term, but it’s also an analytical one, and naming genocides is what has made it possible to prosecute them in the first place. Framing genocide denial as a mere difference of opinion has normalized ambiguity and provided political cover for U.S. diplomats to repeatedly block UN ceasefire resolutions — prolonging the destruction of Gaza even as the International Court of Justice ordered provisional measures to protect Gazans from harm.

Meanwhile, the current ceasefire agreement has functioned less as relief than as a diversion, allowing Israel to keep killing Palestinians while it bars dozens of aid organizations from Gaza — effectively starving the population as Western media turns its attention elsewhere.

Which begs the question: why — during one of the most documented genocides in history — are those who deny it still treated as serious participants in public life?

Here are six reasons the double standard persists:

1. Profit

Our tax dollars go into federal coffers, get routed to Israel, and are spent on weapons purchased from U.S. manufacturers. Bombs have no economic value — they’re built to explode, producing nothing but rubble, greenhouse gases, mass death, and human misery. But military aid allows our government to launder its subsidies through Israel, artificially boosting the stock value of the U.S. weapons industry. Genocide denial keeps the pipeline flowing without triggering legal constraints that would complicate future arms sales.

Once those weapons have wreaked their havoc, the ruins themselves become a lucrative market. Approximately 70% of Gaza is destroyed or damaged. Now, just as in Iraq and Afghanistan, that devastation can yield a host of reconstruction contracts — housing, utilities, roads, communications. Such contracts stand to enrich international firms, who launder their reputations by rebuilding what their policies helped destroy. The Trump-Kushner plan to turn Gaza into beachfront property puts this reality in full view. As they clear the rubble, they clear evidence of their crimes — leaving the remainder to be buried under plazas and high-rises.

Universities, meanwhile, benefit from relationships with weapons manufacturers, who fund research labs, sponsor faculty positions, recruit directly from campuses, and partner on federally funded projects. These relationships bring in large, stable streams of government-backed money, enhance universities’ prestige as “innovation hubs,” and help secure future federal grants. Acknowledging these companies’ complicity in genocide could, of course, shatter those relationships. And for some universities, fear of donor backlash and political retaliation reinforce support for Israel itself.

News outlets face similar financial predicaments in having to protect advertising dollars and avoid upsetting their owners, who often align with state power. Calling Gaza a genocide puts those relationships at risk and can rupture access to high-ranking officials, who themselves are a form of capital for media companies.

2. Geopolitical Interests

Despite our politicians’ insistence on the unbreakable bonds between the U.S. and Israel, the relationship between the countries is rooted less in shared values than in strategic objectives. Israel functions as the saber tip of U.S. empire, serving American power in ways that are illegal or politically costly for the U.S. to perform itself.

Israel provides continual intelligence for U.S. military operations in the Middle East. It also acts to weaken neighboring states and keep the region fragmented. Beyond Palestine, Israel has attacked six sovereign territories in the past two years — Lebanon, Syria, Iran, Yemen, Qatar, and Iraq. Of course, Netanyahu seems intent on toppling every government that supports Palestine and obstructs the formation of “Greater Israel,” but these expansionist wars also destabilize or contain U.S. adversaries while allowing the U.S. to maintain plausible distance.

This arrangement was articulated — perhaps unintentionally — by CNN’s Fareed Zakaria at last summer’s Aspen Ideas Festival, where he was strikingly effusive in his praise of wanted war criminal Netanyahu. “I’ve had my disagreements with him,” Zakaria said, reducing Netanyahu’s crimes to policy differences. “Put aside the Gaza issue for a moment,” he continued, then proceeded to gush over Netanyahu’s dismantling of Hezbollah, the Assad regime, and Iran’s air power. Framing these power shifts as exciting achievements while relegating Gaza to a “humanitarian catastrophe” was itself a form of genocide denial. Gaza was presented not as a systematic campaign to erase a population, but as an unfortunate side effect.

International law is therefore contested — or outright condemned — when it threatens Western power. After Israel began its assault on Gaza, Senator Lindsey Graham argued that international law applied only to U.S. adversaries, not allies. And in January of last year, the U.S. State Department determined — without an ICJ ruling — that genocide had been committed in Sudan.

This discrepancy should come as no surprise. The U.S. has a history of downplaying atrocities by governments it supports. Genocide is named quickly when committed by enemies — but calling Gaza a genocide would trigger legal obligations the U.S. is actively avoiding.

3. Racism

There are plenty of racial slurs hurled at Palestinians on social media. But the racism that sustains genocide denial operates less through slurs than through the unequal distribution of credibility.

Palestinian testimony is discounted even when corroborated by journalists, doctors, satellite imagery, international legal bodies, data released by their assailants, and endless footage of their own destruction. Palestinians are dismissed as too emotional, too political, too biased, too violent — or simply disposable. Their mourning is scrutinized for sincerity. They must grieve correctly to be believed. This conditional empathy is a central theme in Mohammed el-Kurd’s Perfect Victims: Palestinian suffering — and therefore Palestinian claims to justice — are legitimized only when Palestinians express themselves in ways palatable to Western audiences.

Staffers close to President Biden made little secret of his empathy gap when it comes to Palestinians. And Trump has repeatedly called Senator Chuck Schumer “Palestinian” as an insult. But views like these are sustained by a much longer media tradition of speaking about Palestine while excluding Palestinian voices. A 2024 study by The Nation found that CNN and MSNBC coverage during the first 100 days of Israel’s assault on Gaza was significantly less humanizing toward Palestinians than toward Israelis.

In April 2024, a leaked New York Times memo revealed editorial directives instructing staff to avoid terms such as “genocide,” “ethnic cleansing,” and “occupied territory.” Even “Palestine” was largely off-limits. Palestinians could exist, but their homeland could not — presumably to avoid foregrounding expulsion, occupation, and dispossession.

While many Times staffers recognized the bias in these directives, the pattern is hardly unique to that outlet. The October 7 attacks have consistently been reported on without any context of Israel’s history of violence against Gaza, so Israel’s “self-defense” narrative continues to dominate. Palestinian testimony is routinely framed with qualifiers like “Hamas-run.” Israeli captives are “hostages,” while Palestinians held without conviction are “prisoners.” Israel can allege terrorism without evidence, while Palestinian suffering must be filmed and verified — and even then, it’s often dismissed as staged.

These center-left news outlets play an outsize role in shaping liberal discourse, and their framing choices carry real political consequences. The House of Representatives voted to ban the State Department from citing mass casualty counts from the Gaza Health Ministry, despite the Ministry’s data credibility with UN agencies and internationally respected human rights organizations — as well as The Lancet’s finding that the Ministry did not inflate mortality reporting. The baselessness of mainstream skepticism was further confirmed last week, when the Israeli military finally corroborated the Health Ministry’s numbers — after rejecting them for more than two years.

But perhaps the most telling example of bias is the speed with which elite media have moved to rehabilitate Israel’s image. Just two days after a designated ceasefire, The New York Times published a story about Israel’s efforts to repair its standing with Americans. By centering redemption without accountability, the piece privileged the perpetrator’s reputation over the victims’ reality, reducing genocide to “a charge Israel denies” — relaying opinion without investigation. The paper revealed not only where its sympathies lie, but whose humanity it recognizes.

4. Israel’s Moral Exceptionalism

Supporters of Israel often complain that it’s held to a uniquely high standard — perpetually singled out for criticism. Yet they themselves insist on its exceptionalism: “the most moral army in the world,” “the only democracy in the Middle East.”

Israel’s claim to moral exemption is grounded not just in those labels but in historical traumas — above all, the Holocaust. Israel takes this real-world trauma and politicizes it into impunity across generations and state actions. Genocide is what the Nazis did; Jews were the victims of genocide — therefore, a Jewish state cannot commit genocide.

This reasoning is circular but powerful, granting Israel the paradoxical status of a settler-colonial state backed by the West, shielded by Holocaust memory, and framed as perpetually defensive.

That logic surfaced starkly in the remarks of former Democratic speechwriter Sarah Hurwitz, who argued that young Jews opposing Israel’s actions in Gaza are drawing the wrong lessons from the Holocaust. Their brains, she said, were being smashed by TikTok — that is, by relentless images of Palestinian suffering — leading them to mistakenly equate Israeli violence with Nazi violence.

For Hurwitz, “Never Again” doesn’t mean Never again for anyone. It means Never again for the Jewish people.

To support this view, she claimed that Holocaust education was intended primarily as antisemitism education. This rhetorical maneuver strips Holocaust pedagogy of its lessons about nationalism, authoritarianism, and genocide itself. By Hurwitz’s rationale, Jews who apply those lessons universally are not honoring Holocaust memory; they’re misusing it — and even contributing to antisemitism.

Taken to its extreme, her argument implies that calling Gaza a genocide is not merely incorrect; it’s a form of Holocaust denial. If anything can be genocide, then nothing can. For Hurwitz, the Holocaust must remain singular — to provide permanent exemption to a self-described Jewish state as it embarks on a war of annihilation.

Holocaust denial is grotesque in its own right — but for the Western political establishment, it’s taboo because it threatens self-identity. Before World War II, the imperial powers were fraught with antisemitism: European Jews — like Palestinians today — were seen as a problem to be solved. But Holocaust denial undermines the postwar moral order on which these Western states later built their legitimacy: we learned, we atoned, we protect human rights now. It challenges the story the West tells about itself.

Denying Gaza’s genocide does the opposite. It protects that story. Acknowledging the genocide would mean admitting Western culpability.

5. Weaponization of Antisemitism

Perhaps the most effective weapon in the genocide denier’s arsenal is taking a real and deadly prejudice like antisemitism and falsely applying it to those who demand an end to the genocide. For decades, antisemitism accusations have been strategically deployed to silence criticism of Israeli state violence and undermine solidarity with Palestinians.

By changing the subject from genocide to the motives of someone opposing it, the genocide denier shifts the burden of proof from the perpetrator to the critic — who’s then forced into endless self-justification while the crime itself recedes into the background. Because real antisemitism exists, the distinction between bad-faith and legitimate accusations is easily collapsed.

And since Palestinian testimony is already treated as suspect, Jewish feelings are routinely given more weight than Palestinian realities. When a six-year-old Palestinian-American boy was murdered by his landlord, when a three-year-old Palestinian-American girl was nearly drowned by a neighbor, when three Palestinian-American college students were shot in a drive-by — and as the world watched Palestinian families get incinerated on our screens for over two years — did our institutions mobilize emergency task forces? No, universities ordered antisemitism investigations, and Congress demanded action to protect Jewish students.

There have been instances of antisemitism, of course. But the incidents reported in the wake of October 7 were promptly addressed by their institutions, and those occurrences did not support the overall framing of the Palestine movement as antisemitic.

If they had, Congress would not have felt compelled to introduce a bill equating anti-Zionism with antisemitism, and individual universities would not have adopted the bill’s same definition of antisemitism — from the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA). The definition’s vague wording has been weaponized to silence criticism of Israel — a move opposed by its own author.

Meanwhile, the Anti-Defamation League has repeatedly inflated antisemitism statistics by categorizing pro-Palestine protests as antisemitic incidents.

And on the two-year anniversary of the October 7 attacks, Gavin Newsom signed a law to combat antisemitism in California’s public schools — yet another implementation of the IHRA definition, which may stifle teachers’ ability to speak about Palestine.

The American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) challenged the statute, warning that its vagueness would make teaching about Israel and Palestine effectively impossible. In response, the law firm led by former Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff filed an amicus brief grossly mischaracterizing the challenge by falsely claiming that teachers simply wanted to promote antisemitic views in the classroom.

This distortion mirrors the law itself, which relies on complaint-driven enforcement. If antisemitism is defined by how an accuser feels rather than what was said or done, it becomes an all-purpose censorship tool.

Even more explicitly punitive is the group StopAntisemitism, which has made a practice of seeking to get people fired, expelled, or publicly shamed for pro-Palestinian speech. Its goal is not justice, but social and professional annihilation. Among its most notorious targets is beloved children’s educator Ms. Rachel, who was nominated by the group for “Antisemite of the Year.” Her crime? Advocating for Gaza’s child amputees.

This weaponization of antisemitism turns Jewish trauma into a political shield for Palestinian erasure and makes Jewish safety conditional on that erasure — an outcome that is morally grotesque. Meanwhile, anti-Zionist Jews — who oppose Israeli violence and occupation — are labeled “self-hating” or “useful idiots,” and Palestinians are forced to insist they’re not antisemitic before arguing for their right to live.

And none of this makes Jews safer. It just excuses atrocities, erodes the meaning of antisemitism, and fuels resentment by binding Jewish identity to a genocidal project.

6. The Palestine Laboratory

Palestine has long been a testing ground for new weapons. Israel’s military campaigns in Gaza and the West Bank provide live-fire testing that produces data, footage, and proof of concept. “Battle-tested” becomes a selling point as Israeli weapons manufacturers market their wares to foreign governments — and the fact that these “tests” are being conducted through war crimes does nothing to quell the weapons’ export value.

In fact, that very impunity seems to make Israel’s products all the more appealing — to dictatorships and democracies alike. As Israel faced allegations of genocide at the ICJ, and as ICC arrest warrants were issued for Netanyahu and his Defence Minister, Yoav Gallant, the country’s weapons revenue soared.

In the words of Antony Loewenstein, author of The Palestine Laboratory: “Israel sells the idea of getting away with it.”

Loewenstein cites the late Israeli scholar Baruch Kimmerling in pointing out that Israel’s goal for Palestinians is politicide — their delegitimization as a social and political entity. The technology of occupation enables that process not just through weapons but through monitoring. That includes facial-recognition software, advanced surveillance for “predictive policing” — to identify “criminals” and “terrorists” before they’ve committed a crime — and targeting technology designed to make killing Palestinians “as easy as ordering pizza.”

Israel also exports enforcement methods. Since the 1990s, U.S. police departments have been sending their leaders to Israel to learn counterterrorism techniques, which manifest in surveillance, targeting, crowd management, and collective punishment. Israeli companies have been involved in U.S. border enforcement since at least 2004 — not just supplying drones and other surveillance systems, but also offering combat training for what has become known as “low-intensity warfare” at the U.S.-Mexico border.

This militarization of law enforcement moves agencies from protecting citizens to crushing dissent. We’ve seen this most recently in ICE violence against U.S. citizens.

Genocide denial is therefore maintained because naming the crime would disrupt this imperial architecture, which is expanding to target political dissidents, journalists, and human rights activists. Designed for politicide, the Palestine laboratory offers ways not just to suppress resistance but also to erase entire movements. That’s attractive to any power structure wishing to preserve its hegemony.

So, the point isn’t that it could happen here. The point is that versions of it are happening here already. Gaza is a preview of the world being built.

Resisting the Denial

The above list is not exhaustive, but it illustrates how Western power and interests drive the denial.

As Omar El Akkad writes in One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This: “To preserve the values of the civilized world, it is necessary to set fire to a library. To blow up a mosque. To incinerate olive trees. To dress up in the lingerie of women who fled and then take pictures. To level universities. To loot jewelry, art, banks, food. To arrest children for picking vegetables. To shoot children for throwing stones. To parade the captured in their underwear. To break a man’s teeth and shove a toilet brush in his mouth. To let combat dogs loose on a man with Down syndrome and then leave him to die. Otherwise, the uncivilized world might win.”

To deny genocide is to reject any challenge to the current world order, which is not a rules-based order but a morally inverted one. Violence is normalized when it serves power — and named only when it threatens it.

Many were astonished when — at last month’s World Economic Forum — Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney acknowledged the fiction of the rules-based order. But he did so not because of the Western-backed mass murder of Palestinians, but rather because U.S. economic pressure threatened the middle powers.

His defenders excused this omission by noting that he was speaking at the World Economic Forum — not, say, the UN Human Rights Council. But his framing nevertheless placed interests before justice.

And Canada, like its peers, is still sending weapons to Israel.

Those who control resources and capital shape the moral horizon. They decide what’s reasonable, what’s extreme, whose lives matter, and whose deaths are acceptable. But what we’re told is the “mainstream view” is rarely what most people actually believe. It’s what the power establishment needs to be believed — and it’s enforced through reputational risk and fear of isolation.

But in the words of Malcolm X, “Never let your enemy tell you how many of you there are.”

We should be as vocal in our anger as possible. Protest by itself may not be enough, but those in power pay more attention to a loud public than a quiet one. Genocide must be named, again and again and again. Tone policing has always been a silencing tool — and when the curators of civility are running cover for the crime of crimes, they’ve forfeited any right to decorum.

Of course, the power elites are pushing back by buying up media outlets to try to regain control of the narrative. CBS News has an openly pro-Israel agenda under the leadership of David Ellison and Bari Weiss. TikTok is flagging critiques of Zionism as “hate speech.”

But these moves, while alarming, also show their vulnerability. TikTok users are leaving for platforms like UpScrolled, and CBS News faces historically low ratings.

The power elites can hoard wealth and buy up information spaces, but they cannot control consciousness. Gaza has woken us up, and we’re not going back to sleep. The more they try to gaslight us with language, the more they lose public trust.

When they tell us something isn’t possible, that’s not pragmatism — that’s protecting their own interests. They don’t want us imagining alternatives to a world that prioritizes domination over dignity.

We don’t need an empire. We need healthcare and education.

We don’t need military outposts across the Global South. We need friends, neighbors, and trading partners.

We don’t need endless war to prop up stock prices. We need economic systems that allow people to live without fear — at home and abroad.

That’s why prioritizing Palestine is not being a “single-issue voter.” It’s refusing a system that makes genocide not just a reality, but a requirement. It’s rejecting an order that demands mass death abroad to preserve comfort and control at home.

So, when we ask, “Why is genocide denial still mainstream?”

What we’re really asking is, “What do empires require of us to survive?”

Empires don’t just depend on weapons and money. They depend on silence. On euphemism. On the willingness of ordinary people to look at mass murder and call it “complicated.”

The real function of genocide denial is not to hide the crime, but to make it tolerable for those who benefit from the system that commits it.

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Last week, after news broke that Iran’s anti-government protesters were demanding a return to monarchy — led by Reza Pahlavi, son of the last shah — I posted the following on social media:

“I’m not in Iran, but it’s hard to believe a population 3/4 of which are under 45 are risking their lives to be ruled by the exiled son of a king who was deposed 47 years ago. That sounds like an external fantasy, not a popular mandate.”

Most people understood my point. I support Iranians’ struggle for freedom from a brutal theocratic regime, but I’m deeply skeptical that they want to hand their future to Prince Reza. But because I led with “I’m not in Iran,” I was flooded with responses from people — also not in Iran — telling me I don’t know what I’m talking about.

For the record: my mother is Iranian. I’ve been to Iran. I know the history. And I’ve always supported Iranians’ right to freedom. But that includes freedom from outside interference that serves foreign interests at the expense of Iranians who are risking their lives.

Recent reports suggest Iran is, at best, bitterly divided over Reza Pahlavi. Some protesters have chanted “neither shah nor clergy,” while prominent dissidents have called him “the opposition against the opposition.” Others report harassment and threats from his loyalists. That’s not the profile of a unifying democratic figure.

Unlike many of my critics, I’m explicit about what I don’t know. I’m not on the ground in Iran. The Internet’s been shut down. Communications are restricted. That’s precisely why skepticism toward outside narratives is the responsible position.

But when I see Pahlavi doing photo ops with Benjamin Netanyahu — who has bombed Iranians and killed civilians — or aligning closely with U.S. and Israeli power, I recognize a familiar pattern. These are the same imperial dynamics that helped produce the conditions leading to Iran’s current regime in the first place.

Supporters insist Pahlavi doesn’t want to be a monarch, he wants to help guide the democratic transition. But in October, Haaretz reported on an Israeli influence operation aimed at installing Pahlavi as the next shah. And since the protests erupted, social media has been flooded with posts accusing Palestine advocates of being “silent” on Iran.

It’s unclear whether these posts are part of a coordinated campaign. But they employ the same whataboutism used for the past two years to deflect from Israel’s genocide in Gaza — undermining the Palestine movement’s claims to humanitarianism while diverting attention from Palestine entirely. It’s hard not to see these dynamics as connected.

Iran’s current crisis cannot be separated from outside interference. In 1953, the U.S. and UK orchestrated a coup against Iran’s democratically elected prime minister so they could control Iran’s oil resources. That was followed by 25 years of repression under the shah — his brutal secret police, his shallow modernization, his lavish celebration of Iran’s 2,500-year “empire,” flaunting his wealth while many Iranians remained in poverty. Discontent eventually boiled over into revolution.

My critics present Iran’s future as a false binary: theocracy or monarchy. They ignore voices that complicate their story, like Jafar Panahi, one of Iran’s most celebrated filmmakers and a fierce critic of the regime. Panahi has been jailed multiple times, faces yet another sentence, and still plans to return home because he loves his country. He wants a free Iran — but insists change must come from within, not from foreign intervention or externally imposed leadership.

Iran is not monolithic. It is a diverse society with competing political visions. But the United States will amplify only the voices that align with its geopolitical aims. What appears in mainstream media is rarely the will of the people; it’s whatever serves power.

The Iranian Revolution led to decades of repression, violence, and economic despair. But it succeeded in its initial aims: overthrowing the monarchy and rejecting U.S. imperial domination. That rejection was one of the twentieth century’s great insults to American power, and the U.S. has sought the Islamic Republic’s undoing ever since — not to liberate Iranians, but to settle the score.

The same United States that now postures as Iran’s liberator helped Saddam Hussein use chemical weapons on Iranian civilians, imposed sanctions that devastated everyday life, and deported Iranian asylum seekers back into danger. Why, now, should we believe that Trump or Netanyahu has Iran’s best interests in mind? Trump, who kidnapped Venezuela’s leader to seize control of its oil and now openly fantasizes about conquering Greenland. Netanyahu, who has waged expansionist wars throughout the Middle East.

The same day I expressed skepticism about Pahlavi’s popularity, I posted about Iranian New Wave cinema — one of the clearest examples of resistance to Western cultural imperialism. Iranian filmmakers, like Jafar Panahi himself, forged a distinct identity without Western assistance and in spite of government censorship. Because of their efforts, Iranian cinema is celebrated throughout the world.

Iranians have the right to determine their own future — and to do so free from Western interference masquerading as liberation.

Free Iran.
Free Palestine.
Free the world from imperial domination.

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On January 6, the Israeli military raided Birzeit University in the occupied West Bank and opened fire with live rounds, wounding several students, in an operation to disrupt a supposed “gathering in support of terrorism.” The gathering was a solidarity event for thousands of Palestinian prisoners held incommunicado in Israeli jails — along with a screening of The Voice of Hind Rajab.

The next day, in Minneapolis, ICE gunned down a 37-year-old mother of three in her car, claiming she had “weaponized her vehicle” by trying to drive away. ICE and the Israeli military have exchanged tactics in violence and control for years. Both organizations speak the same language — framing their aggression as self-defense and retroactively labeling their victims as terrorists.

I used a photo of Birzeit University in the 1970s for my Substack about reading Palestinian stories as a way to resist the dehumanization that is central to occupation and colonial violence.

But the dehumanization imposed on Palestinians for decades can happen anywhere an imperial state wants to exert its control — which is why it’s happening here and has been happening to marginalized people throughout our history. Abolishing ICE is essential, but this is not a problem that can be solved by removing a single agency. It requires dismantling the system that depends on such agencies to function.

That system is a system of cry-bullies who adopt the mindset of self-victimization while they have their boot on someone’s neck. Case in point: ICE agents complain of being doxxed, of having their home addresses leaked, when their job is to hunt people down and subject them to indefinite detention — where a number of them die — or facilitate their deportation to torture prisons in countries they have nothing to do with.

These enforcers are not armed to protect. They’re armed to terrorize. When a woman tries to leave and is shot through her windshield, that’s not “defending the homeland.” It’s punishing resistance.

This same brittle self-victimization is what fears solidarity with political prisoners — or a film about a little girl murdered by a powerful military. I wrote about that too, and judging by the responses from Israel’s defenders, it’s clear why the most powerful military in the Middle East doesn’t want people to see it.

These systems believed they could carry out their crimes in plain sight — that we would accept their lies, look away, or be too afraid to speak. We cannot allow ourselves to be terrorized by institutions that mistake violence for authority and oppression for legitimacy. We cannot let them murder our neighbors, erase entire peoples, or criminalize solidarity itself.

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