On 3 October 2026, Israeli forces bombed one of the few remaining buildings in Gaza instantly killing two mothers and two daughters: Maysaa Khader Ibrahim Abu Daoud and her daughter, Maria (both Christian) and Dr. Yasmin Al-Boubo (Khamis) and her daughter Halloum (both Muslim). Three years of accelerated genocide will be marked 7 October. The murderous campaign to ethnically cleanse our country still goes on. The satellite images alone prove the this. We must now reflect on our changing world and act.
On the eve of 7 October 2023, Palestine appeared to many observers to be a problem that the Israel and its western “partners” had learned to manage rather than resolve. The occupation had become deeply institutionalized; settlement expansion and fragmentation of Palestinian territory continued; Gaza was under a suffocating blockade; and the political horizon for addressing the root cause of global instability was receding. The latter was evidenced by Israel’s drive to normalize its hegemonic power via Abrahamic accords with compliant puppet dictatorships in the Arab world from Morocco to Egypt to the Gulf states, Meanwhile, the United States had dozens of military bases in the region and was extorting hundreds of billions from the oil monarchies. Israel enjoyed strong military, diplomatic and economic advantages.
Three years later, the landscape looks markedly different. The human and environmental destruction in Gaza has reached catastrophic proportions (worse than the Nakba of 1948), while the occupation, settlement expansion, displacement and pogroms in the West Bank (including occupied Jerusalem) have also reached unprecedented proportions (62,000 settler attacks in the West Bank in three years). Yet the consequences extend well beyond Palestine. The war has exposed the limits of military power as a means of “managing” Palestine to keep an apartheid system in place. This has placed unprecedented international attention on the relationship between occupation, human rights and international law. South Africa's case at the International Court of Justice, repeated Global South initiatives at the United Nations, and growing public criticism of Israel in parts of Europe and North America have demonstrated that the diplomatic landscape is no longer what it was in 2023. Analysis published in 2026 finds that public opinion in the United States and Europe has shifted considerably toward greater sympathy for Palestinians, even while many Western governments have continued to support Israel. But the changes are far more dramatic globally where a vast majority of the earth’s population now holds negative view of Israel and Zionism. This public sentiment has begun to trickle up to governments. It was unprecedented in UN history to have delegates from 77 countries leave the UN General Assembly hall when war criminal Netanyahu was about to speak.
At the same time, the wider international system is changing. The United States remains powerful, but its relative ability to determine the international agenda has declined from the unipolar era of the 1990s. China, Russia, India, the Global South and new political and economic groupings have acquired greater influence, contributing to a more multipolar international system. The global economy is also experiencing greater fragmentation, trade tensions, geopolitical uncertainty and inflationary pressures. The US has an unmanageable $40 trillion in federal debt and trillions more in state, corporate and household debt. All of this is in great part due to the Zionist lobby efforts to have more wars to benefit the billionaires (at least half the national debt is due to wars for Israel).
Enormous asymmetries of power remain but the political and moral context in which that power operates has dramatically shifted in these three years. The central question, therefore, is not simply what happened to Palestine during these three years, but what Palestine has revealed about the changing world. We moved
1) from normalization without justice to renewed centrality of Palestinian rights to return and self-determination
2) from assumed U.S. primacy to contested multipolarity (including destruction of many US bases in our region)
3) from military dominance to questions of legitimacy of the colonial entity known as the state of Israel.
4) from the facade of International law to questioning the credibility of the post WWII order
5) from geopolitical fake stability based on rich getting richer to systemic turbulence and rise of mass movement.
I wrote an article in 2024 titled "The Gaza Strip lights the way globally as colonizer masks all fall" and this is worth (re)reading: https://www.palestinenature.org/research/Qumsiyeh-on-Gaza.pdf
US military, financial and technological weight remains strong but is weakening. Israel's regional military position remains strong. Some governments have deepened ties with Israel despite public pressure, and Palestinian political fragmentation remains a major obstacle. So how should we navigate a world characterized by military might (increasingly challenged by drones and missiles), economic fragmentation, competing powers and weakening consensus around the post-Cold War order? Palestine certainly revealed that the world order built after 1945 is coming to an end. So now Palestine must shed a light towards a path of sustainable human coexistence based on justice. The destruction of agricultural land, water systems, ecosystems, homes and cultural landscapes raises a broader question: can reconstruction mean simply rebuilding structures, or must it restore the ecological foundations? If the world order is genuinely changing, what kind of Palestinian future should be built within that emerging order? We at the Palestine Institute for Biodiversity and Sustainability believe there are only two paths left for humanity: 1) the continued charade of might makes right (and the poor getting poorer, more oppression, more war, more anthropogenic destruction of our environment for profit) leading to destruction of our planet, OR 2) dismantling the structures that lead to this (rampant capitalism, imperialism, Zionism, etc) and building a future of sustainable human and natural communities. We work for option 2! Meantime we must also redouble our effort to end the ongoing genocide and ecocide
relevant databases
http://ochaopt.org
https://data.techforpalestine.org
https://intent.alhaq.org/
Three years later, the landscape looks markedly different. The human and environmental destruction in Gaza has reached catastrophic proportions (worse than the Nakba of 1948), while the occupation, settlement expansion, displacement and pogroms in the West Bank (including occupied Jerusalem) have also reached unprecedented proportions (62,000 settler attacks in the West Bank in three years). Yet the consequences extend well beyond Palestine. The war has exposed the limits of military power as a means of “managing” Palestine to keep an apartheid system in place. This has placed unprecedented international attention on the relationship between occupation, human rights and international law. South Africa's case at the International Court of Justice, repeated Global South initiatives at the United Nations, and growing public criticism of Israel in parts of Europe and North America have demonstrated that the diplomatic landscape is no longer what it was in 2023. Analysis published in 2026 finds that public opinion in the United States and Europe has shifted considerably toward greater sympathy for Palestinians, even while many Western governments have continued to support Israel. But the changes are far more dramatic globally where a vast majority of the earth’s population now holds negative view of Israel and Zionism. This public sentiment has begun to trickle up to governments. It was unprecedented in UN history to have delegates from 77 countries leave the UN General Assembly hall when war criminal Netanyahu was about to speak.
At the same time, the wider international system is changing. The United States remains powerful, but its relative ability to determine the international agenda has declined from the unipolar era of the 1990s. China, Russia, India, the Global South and new political and economic groupings have acquired greater influence, contributing to a more multipolar international system. The global economy is also experiencing greater fragmentation, trade tensions, geopolitical uncertainty and inflationary pressures. The US has an unmanageable $40 trillion in federal debt and trillions more in state, corporate and household debt. All of this is in great part due to the Zionist lobby efforts to have more wars to benefit the billionaires (at least half the national debt is due to wars for Israel).
Enormous asymmetries of power remain but the political and moral context in which that power operates has dramatically shifted in these three years. The central question, therefore, is not simply what happened to Palestine during these three years, but what Palestine has revealed about the changing world. We moved
1) from normalization without justice to renewed centrality of Palestinian rights to return and self-determination
2) from assumed U.S. primacy to contested multipolarity (including destruction of many US bases in our region)
3) from military dominance to questions of legitimacy of the colonial entity known as the state of Israel.
4) from the facade of International law to questioning the credibility of the post WWII order
5) from geopolitical fake stability based on rich getting richer to systemic turbulence and rise of mass movement.
I wrote an article in 2024 titled "The Gaza Strip lights the way globally as colonizer masks all fall" and this is worth (re)reading: https://www.palestinenature.org/research/Qumsiyeh-on-Gaza.pdf
US military, financial and technological weight remains strong but is weakening. Israel's regional military position remains strong. Some governments have deepened ties with Israel despite public pressure, and Palestinian political fragmentation remains a major obstacle. So how should we navigate a world characterized by military might (increasingly challenged by drones and missiles), economic fragmentation, competing powers and weakening consensus around the post-Cold War order? Palestine certainly revealed that the world order built after 1945 is coming to an end. So now Palestine must shed a light towards a path of sustainable human coexistence based on justice. The destruction of agricultural land, water systems, ecosystems, homes and cultural landscapes raises a broader question: can reconstruction mean simply rebuilding structures, or must it restore the ecological foundations? If the world order is genuinely changing, what kind of Palestinian future should be built within that emerging order? We at the Palestine Institute for Biodiversity and Sustainability believe there are only two paths left for humanity: 1) the continued charade of might makes right (and the poor getting poorer, more oppression, more war, more anthropogenic destruction of our environment for profit) leading to destruction of our planet, OR 2) dismantling the structures that lead to this (rampant capitalism, imperialism, Zionism, etc) and building a future of sustainable human and natural communities. We work for option 2! Meantime we must also redouble our effort to end the ongoing genocide and ecocide
relevant databases
http://ochaopt.org
https://data.techforpalestine.org
https://intent.alhaq.org/
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