Recently, and perhaps belatedly, an ever-increasing number of people have taken notice of Axios’s Barak Ravid faulty ‘scoops,’ often turning out to be a gross mischaracterization of reality, especially as the Israeli correspondent reported on several potential U.S.-Iran breakthroughs in negotiations that turned out to be categorically false. As such, Ravid’s reputation is in danger, and one can only take a look at his X (formerly Twitter) profile to glance how he has been responding to such a wide-scale realization of his positionality as an ex Unit 8200 correspondent.

The Division of Labor Within the Israeli Army

Dr. Khaled Odetallah noted that in general, ‘liberal’ Ashkenazi Israeli Jews prefer intelligence positions rather than frontline fighting positions in contrast to the Mizrahim, Sephardim, and more religious Israeli Jews. This division of labor thus puts settlers in Palestine in several categories: those who fight and ‘shed blood’ for the Zionist project in Palestine, and those who engage in more hands-off intelligence work that enables genocide and immiseration in the region. The end result, for those on the receiving end of this violence, is the same – an intelligence officer gathering data is no less guilty than a frontline soldier killing Palestinians, or an airforce pilot bombing Lebanese and Iranian homes. For the settlers, however, it makes a difference: the rise of the Israeli ‘right,’ often ultra-religious, in the 1970s-1980s and contemporarily is specifically due to the fact that they ‘bleed more,’ by virtue of getting enrolled in combat positions rather than intelligence or airforce roles.

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Between 21 and 27 April 2026, Israeli forces shot and killed a Palestinian child in Nablus city, and Israeli settlers shot and killed three Palestinians, including one child, in two separate incidents in Al Mughayyir and Deir Dibwan in Ramallah governorate. A Palestinian woman also died of injuries sustained during an Israeli operation in Jenin Camp in 2023. This brought the total number of Palestinians killed by Israeli forces or settlers in the West Bank in 2026 to 42 as of 27 April, including ten children and two women.

During the same week, at least 57 Palestinians, including seven children, were injured: 37 in settler attacks and 20 by Israeli forces, mainly during search operations and raids. According to OCHA, 70 percent of those injured by settlers (26 of 37) were hurt in two attacks, on the villages of Beit Imrin and Jalud in Nablus governorate. At least 30 Israeli settler attacks during the week, resulting in casualties, property damage, or both. The total since the beginning of 2026 has exceeded 700 incidents across more than 200 communities, averaging approximately 6 incidents per day.

Demolitions and forced displacement continued at elevated levels during the reporting period. Between 9 April and 6 May 2026, 33 demolition or confiscation incidents were recorded across the West Bank, affecting 95 structures and displacing 160 Palestinians, including 70 children, with a further 4,083 people otherwise affected. Of those incidents, 31 (94 percent) were due to a lack of building permits — which the Israeli state almost never issues to Palestinians. Jerusalem governorate accounted for 18 incidents, 43 structures, and 125 of the 160 displaced. Hebron accounted for 6 incidents and 34 displaced; Bethlehem, Salfit, Jericho, Tulkarm, and Ramallah accounted for the remainder. As of 5 May 2026, the database records 168 demolition incidents in 2026 to date, 479 structures affected, and 818 Palestinians displaced, including 375 children. According to OCHA’s 1 May report, the resulting 2026 monthly average of Palestinians displaced by lack-of-permit demolitions is the highest annual monthly average documented since the agency began maintaining records on this category in 2009. 85 schools across the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, are currently under pending demolition orders, serving more than 13,000 students.

al-Eizariya, East Jerusalem

Israeli forces issued notices to demolish 50 Palestinian commercial shops and facilities in the al-Mashtal area at the entrance to al-Eizariya, southeast of occupied Jerusalem. Owners were given until Sunday. This is horrendous.

Tarqumiya, west of Hebron

Israeli forces demolished a two-story home belonging to Amir Bassam al-Ja’afra in the Shaab al-Bier area of Tarqumiya, displacing a household of ten.

Jalud, south of Nablus

Israeli settlers entered the Al-Dahr area of Jalud and threw stones at Palestinian residents. A child was wounded in the head; a young man sustained contusions. IMEMC reported the incident the following day. The attacks of 21 and 27 April on Beit Imrin and Jalud accounted for 70 percent of Palestinians injured by settlers during the reporting week, including three children, with at least seven houses and four vehicles damaged.

Kharsa junction, south of Hebron

Israeli forces issued a military order confiscating land belonging to the al-Shahatit family, located opposite an existing military tower at the Kharsa junction. The order was reported by the Colonization Wall Resistance Committee and confirmed in WAFA’s dispatch the same day.

Wadi al-Rakhim, Masafer Yatta

Settlers from the Susiya settlement attacked Ahmed al-Da’ajna with stones and set fire to his vehicle and excavator after preventing him from reaching his under-construction home. Settler militias also blocked roads connecting villages in the area. Communities in Masafer Yatta have been the subject of sustained settler pressure on Palestinian herding and farming, including livestock attacks, road closures, and property destruction.

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Tarqumiya, west of Hebron, 20 April 2026. Palestinian families gather what remains of their belongings after the Israeli Civil Administration demolished a two-story residential building containing three apartments, along with a water cistern and a concrete retaining wall.

In the first four months of 2026, Israeli authorities demolished 447 Palestinian structures across the West Bank and East Jerusalem, displacing 776 people — including 351 children. Eighty-seven percent of this year’s demolitions were carried out for “lack of permit,” which in practice is a systemic instrument of annexation and displacement, rather than a planning matter, given that Israel approves only a tiny fraction of Palestinian building applications in Area C and East Jerusalem.

Jerusalem has borne the heaviest weight with 50 demolitions that destroyed 144 structures and displaced 351 people. The year’s most concentrated operation came in Kafr ‘Aqab, where, in late January, Israeli forces opened a section of the apartheid wall to carry out the operation, demolishing more than 70 structures over three days under an operation styled “Capital Shield”. Hebron followed with 30 demolitions and 116 structures, including a nine-structure operation in Qalqas in February that displaced 29 people.

The single most acute episode of forced displacement this year came not from demolition equipment but from eviction orders. Between 22 and 25 March, Israeli police evicted 16 Palestinian families in Batn al-Hawa, a neighborhood at the heart of Silwan, just south of the Old City. The evictions are the latest chapter in a long settler campaign by the organization Ateret Cohanim, which has been central to the Batn al-Hawa eviction campaign. Since 7 October 2023, about 28 households — 160 people — have been pushed out of that neighborhood alone.

In Area C, Bedouin herding communities have remained particularly exposed and vulnerable to coordinated settler violence as well as demolition campaigns. On 15 April, the Civil Administration demolished 17 residential and agricultural structures in Az Za’ayyem Bedouin community, displacing 23 people, including 15 children. It is one of 46 Bedouin communities in the central West Bank, the UN has flagged as facing forcible transfer under an Israeli “relocation” plan. In the Jordan Valley, a single operation on 8 February in Hammamat al-Maleh (Al Meiteh) tore down 21 structures and displaced 16 people. Of the 447 structures demolished year-to-date, 31 were funded by international donors, a reminder that the Zionist entity targets not simply homes, but humanitarian aid.

Set against the longer arc, the post-2023 escalation is impossible to miss. The 1,774 structures destroyed in 2024, alongside the 4,293 people displaced that year in the West Bank and East Jerusalem alone, represented the worst annual figures since OCHA began publishing this data in 2009. The 2025 figures maintained the pace, with 1,671 structures destroyed and 2,134 people displaced. By contrast, between 2009 and 2022, the West Bank averaged about 655 structures torn down per year. A single year now matches what used to take nearly three.

Where 2026 lands by year’s end will depend on factors only partly under the Israeli Civil Administration’s control. Through 28 April, demolitions are running behind 2025’s same-period pace — 447 structures destroyed against 662, and 776 displaced against 888 — though still well above every pre-2023 baseline on record. The simplest explanation is bandwidth: with Israel having waged war against Iran and continuing operations in Lebanon and Gaza, the Israeli forces that once accompanied mass West Bank sweeps are just committed elsewhere.

This article is republished from Ameed Faleh’s contribution to Völkerrechtsblog’s symposium on Lys Kulamadayi’s The Pathology of Plenty: Natural Resources in International Law.

In the opening months of the Gaza Genocide, and more specifically in November 2023, the Bloomberg New Economy Forum convened. An annual conference linking world economics to contemporary issues, crises, and wars, the purpose of the Bloomberg New Economy Forum is to inform researchers and stakeholders of the priorities of different countries vis-à-vis the thematic subjects tackled annually. Then-Minister of Investment in Saudi Arabia, Khalid al-Falih, was asked whether Saudi Arabia was considering utilizing oil sanctions in order to exert pressure for an end to the Gaza Genocide. The Saudi Arabian Minister laughed – whether it was a ridiculing laugh or a nervous one remains up to debate – stating that ‘Saudi Arabia is trying to find peace through peaceful discussions.’

I start my book review of Lys Kulamadayi’s The Pathology of Plenty: Natural Resources in International Law with this incident in mind: the possibility of exerting a cost onto the world in order to stop the genocide in Gaza that was foreclosed in that specific moment by the inexplicable laughter of the Saudi minister. This response is striking not only for its tone, but for what it reveals about the limits of translating resource power into political action. Saudi Arabia controls 17 percent of the world’s petroleum reserves, while being the largest crude oil exporter in the Organization for Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC). As such, the country yields a considerable amount of political, diplomatic, and economic leverage that could have paved the way for a swifter ceasefire and potentially even an end to the genocide in Gaza. That it was not deployed in this way underscores a broader disjuncture between the possession of resource power and its strategic use in moments of acute crisis.

There are three important points to emphasize: (1) my review will strictly concern itself with the political economy of imperialism and its ties to international law; (2) my positionality on international law as a Palestinian living in the West Bank directly informs a critical engagement with international law; (3) the post-Gaza Genocide world is unfolding as we speak with Israel and the U.S. killing or kidnapping heads of states with impunity, starving entire populations, bombing critical infrastructure, and unleashing unforeseen torrents of pain upon entire populations.

The aim of this blog post is to show how the ‘pathology of plenty’, as termed by the author of the book, manifests in our region through its entanglement with U.S. militarization and neoliberal processes.

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Rather than beginning with abstract definitions, it is useful to approach the book through the conceptual framework it develops. The paradox of plenty is described by the author as ‘kleptocratic public institutions and significant income disparities among the peoples of resource-wealthy countries.’ The title of the book, Pathology of Plenty, refers to ‘the problems that particularly post-colonial countries that are wealthy in mineral resources face […] [and how they are] [are] structured entirely by human relations with nature, and among humans.’ In effect, the author defines the problems of the post-colonial resource rich nation-state as an issue of an international division of labor and as an issue of ecology. Debates with scholars on the nitty-gritty details of the paradox of plenty aside, the author is trying to make the case that international law has failed to account for the adverse effects of the pathology of plenty. The numerous examples, from the golden age of state-led central planning in Algeria and the fiery debates at the UN surrounding economic self-determination, all the way to the present-day, international law has simply failed to redistribute the wealth of a country to the lowest rungs of society. At the same time, the book appears to gesture toward the possibility of redeeming international law through proactive intervention. That is the primary contradiction point at hand. How can international law be redeemed, and fixed to address these structural inequalities, particularly in light of the case studies presented? While the analysis powerfully illustrates how the pathology of plenty has operated across different historical moments, it leaves largely open the question of how these dynamics might be meaningfully transformed. In this sense, the book provides a critical diagnosis, while leaving future scholars to add on to her contribution in the form of solutions.

At the heyday of revolutionary anti-colonial thought in the mid twentieth century, international law was a contested site, as the author shows in her book. Interpretations of international laws and reinterpretations, alongside the emergence of consortiums, forums, and cartels of resource-exporting countries fuelled hopes for a more equitable world. As the author shows, this was particularly evident during the age of decolonization and the early formation of the postcolonial nation-state, when key concepts such as “self-determination,” “permanent sovereignty over natural resources” were actively negotiated at the United Nations. These debates traced deep North-South disagreements, rooted in fundamentally opposed economic and political interests, over how such principles should be defined and implemented. In this context, resolutions advocating for the nationalization of resources emerged as alternatives to colonial concessions and unequal resource-sharing agreements, reflecting broader efforts to restructure the global economic order. Heterodox economic theorists, such as Raul Prebisch, Hans Singer, Paul Baran, Arghiri Emmanuel, and Samir Amin were beginning to discover how the international division of labor regulated certain countries to realities of unequal exchange. While they differ in their theoretical explanations and underpinnings of such an unequal exchange relationship, they nonetheless have identified a power balance driving the Third World towards dependency for manufactured goods on the First World, along with the severe per capita wealth disparity and unequal trade relationships. The author has briefly touched upon the dependency theory school and the Prebisch-Singer hypothesis but never went further to analyze the extent to how much this economic thinking is tied to the reality of so-called ‘underdevelopment’ of the Third World and the discussions surrounding it in academic and policymaking circles in post-colonial states at the time.

In addition, the author does not account for how much of the Cold War dynamics were conducive to discussions surrounding economic sovereignty, self-determination, and the view of nationalization of resources. A multipolar world, by design, grants smaller state actors more leeway to choose their destinies in contrast to the unipolar world we live in, despite the strides taken by China to provide an alternative developmentalist paradigm via its economic initiatives. As such, the transition between past and present is stark even in legalistic discussions surrounding international law. The end of the age of decolonization, the fall of the U.S.S.R, the rise of the neoliberalism and cementing of the U.S. as the greatest and sole imperialist power with all of its implications on the world system we live in have pushed international law into the field of weaponization for imperialism, with little to show for the prosperity of the peoples of the Third World. The author, unfortunately, perhaps for brevity of the book, does not make these necessary connections in her analysis. The transition from a period where international law and resource rights were discussed in vivid detail in international fora to a reality where the U.S. can enforce oil governance in Iraq and Israel can expropriate resources located in the Gaza Strip, West Bank, and the Sinai Peninsula.

One underdiscussed aspect of the petro-state, and its conceptualization, is how it morphs its surplus into high-capital investment projects and I say this with the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries in mind. The war on Iran and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, for example, demonstrate an implicit old Marxist axiom: the more interconnected a world system is, the more devastating the crash would be when it eventually comes. In other words: the bigger they are, the harder they fall. The Arab oil embargo of 1973, and the subsequent oil boom of 1978, created massive financial surpluses that were invested into building the soft and hard power of the Arab Gulf countries, which was invested in buying real estate assets abroad and expanding financial capitalist infrastructure – both in the West and in nearby Arab countries while the inauguration of the petrodollar in the same period, i.e. selling oil in U.S. dollars, heavily strengthened the reliance on the dollar for international trade. As Adam Hanieh notes in Capitalism and Class in the Arab Gulf, the U.S. was given ‘a guarantee from the Saudis that the world oil trade would be denominated in US dollars […] In return, the United States offered Saudi Arabia extensive military, and political support—with the Saudis using their influence as the world’s largest producer to prevent OPEC from pricing oil in a diversified basket of currencies.’ The pathology of plenty, in the case of Saudi Arabia and members of the GCC compared to the economies of the rest of the Arab region, is thus directly tied to U.S. hegemony and militarization.

The oil plunge of 2014-2016 signalled to the GCC countries the need for ‘economic diversification’, of course funded by the oil surpluses. The plunge, as such, was the primary motivator for the 2030 vision in Saudi Arabia, focusing on tourism, economic and social liberalization, and artificial intelligence that is recycled into the military-industrial complex. Much of this ‘diversification’ vision hinges on revenues generated by oil rent and, of course, the notion of ‘stability’ in juxtaposition to the ‘chaotic’ nature of the rest of the Arab region wrecked by imperialism in order to garner investment. One must ask themselves, in relation to oil, why Iraq does not yield as much regional influence post-2003 as the GCC countries do, who host U.S. army bases and are considered major non-NATO allies, contributing to the U.S. security umbrella in the region. The author, unfortunately, does not tackle the political economy of the petrodollar and its implications as seen above. This is why the war on Iran, and its ripple effects, will have a tremendous impact on how we talk about oil and its connection to imperialism in future analyses and historiographies of both, the region and the world.

Returning to the image of the Saudi minister at the Bloomberg New Economy Forum dismissing the prospect of an oil embargo in response to the genocide in Gaza, one is struck by the contrast with subsequent developments. Despite this refusal, an effective – even if uncoordinated – disruption of global oil flows appears to have emerged through escalating tensions with Iran. What was politically rejected in the face of Palestinian suffering has nonetheless materialized through the very instability that such ‘restraint’ sought to avoid. The fear of destabilizing the global economic system, coupled with a persistent apathy toward Palestinian suffering under conditions of settler colonialism, has helped produce the moment we are now witnessing. The pathology of plenty, it seems, has crashed in our region, creating the possibility of new horizons.

Aid trucks are barely entering Gaza. Community fundraising for Palestinian families in the Strip has slowed down. Prices continue to remain elevated by design. It’s important we return back to dynamics that are still animating this genocide and identify the tactics of divide and conquer, as they are some of the oldest instruments in the colonial toolkit. We should recognize that those carrying out this genocide rely heavily on Western racial tropes to do their work: images of warring clans, lawless tribes, native society that dissolves into predation the moment imperial order is withdrawn. Western coverage of Gaza throughout the genocide has rehearsed these images with near-liturgical fidelity to the zionist narrative. Aid stories in the news began not at the Israeli-controlled crossings or with the zionist siege policy but with “Arab chaos,” with “armed gangs,” and with a Palestinian street depicted as ungovernable, exploitative by nature, and turned on itself. For months, readers were told Hamas was stealing the food. The narrative was not incidental: it justified the throttling of deliveries, excused the collapse of the pipeline, and obscured the fact that the actual interceptors operated under an Israeli umbrella of influence and, by Israel’s own admission, with Israeli weapons. The mass propaganda about Hamas provided the political cover for US “aid agencies” to gun down Palestinians at food lines.

The numbers of course cut through this kind of story cleanly. Aid flow is measurable: trucks are counted at the crossing, counted again at the destination, and the gap is the loot. Overlay that ledger against the political timeline — the arming of Yasser Abu Shabab’s Popular Forces, the October 2025 ceasefire, the Hamas-led crackdown, Abu Shabab’s killing in December — and the “chaos” resolves into something far more legible: a proxy operation with a start date, an operating tempo, and an end date. When Palestinian forces dismantled the Israeli-armed militias, aid started arriving. The order Western coverage treats as absent in Gaza was restored by the very actors that coverage casts as its enemy. But people chose propaganda over objective data.

Nonetheless, it’s important to turn to objective figures to reiterate the racial dynamics and highlight Palestinians’ ability to govern themselves, even during a genocide. Two data streams tell the story of Gaza’s wartime economy. The first is the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics commodity price series, and the second is the UN’s aid-delivery tracker, which logs trucks collected at crossings, delivered to their destinations, and intercepted en route. Read together, they show a market under siege and an aid pipeline that was, for most of 2025, functionally a looting operation acting as a proxy of the broader zionist movement. These groups were financed, equipped, and provided logistical support by the Israeli government.

These armed proxies heavily manipulated market forces, which, of course, was by design. Against the pre-Oct 7, 2023 baseline prices, the five steepest price increases for basic food items in March 2026 were eggplants (+1,468%), chili pepper (+1,233%), gasoline (+1,093%), cucumbers (+904%), and the 12 kg cooking-gas cylinder (+853%). Fresh vegetables that used to be grown inside Gaza have risen between four and fifteen times: bell pepper +740%, lemons +461%, tomatoes +335%, potatoes +379%. Animal protein roughly tripled in price — veal +244%, lamb +209%, eggs +200%. The commodities that rose least are precisely the ones that dominate humanitarian aid baskets: rice +59%, bulgur +58%, sugar +40%. The split is really diagnostic. Goods that depended on Gaza’s own farms, fuel imports, and commercial supply chains — all of which Israel destroyed or blockaded with their own military, armed gangs, or the squatter gangs blocking the roads — ran away from baseline prices by factors of four, nine, and fifteen. Goods still arriving by aid truck have stabilized to pre-October 7, 2023, rates. Price, in other words, is tracking the siege itself: the steeper the climb, the more completely that commodity’s supply has been severed.

While the OCHA dataset only begins on May 21, 2025, so a clean truck count back to Oct 7, 2023 isn’t available from this source, what it does cover is damning enough. From May 2025 through April 18, 2026, 28,844 trucks were counted at crossings; 21,568 reached their destination; 7,226 — about one in four — were looted by these zionist-backed gangs. Month by month, the loot rate in summer 2025 was 66% in May, 92% in June, 88% in July, 85% in August. In August alone, 3,010 of 3,554 trucks entering Gaza never reached their destinations.

Then it stops. From October 2025, the loot rate falls to 15%, in November to 0.7%, and in December to zero. Year-to-date in 2026, of 8,247 trucks collected, 8,046 have been delivered — a 97.6% success rate, and zero logged as looted. The inflection is too sharp to be a coincidence: Palestinians and the collective government and resistant forces — including Hamas, of course — were able to bring a looting to an end.

In 2024 and 2025, the primary aid-convoy predator was the Popular Forces militia, led by Yasser Abu Shabab, a Tarabin Bedouin from Rafah, operating under the IDF’s sphere of influence. Even a Washington Post investigation cited an internal UN memo saying the gangs “may be benefiting from a passive if not active benevolence” of Israel’s military. On June 7, 2025, France 24 reported that Israel had openly admitted arming the group; a Sky News Data and Forensics probe later recorded an IDF soldier describing the military supplying “grenades… money… vehicles… food.” Conversely, a US probe determined Hamas wasn’t involved in the looting.

On July 2, 2025, the Gazan courts gave Abu Shabab ten days to surrender on charges of treason, collaborating with hostile entities, forming an armed gang, and insurrection. He didn’t. The ceasefire took effect on October 10, 2025, and from that point, Hamas moved systematically against the militias. Hamas reasserted control over clan-aligned groups; Mondoweiss described it as an internal crackdown that a security source called “the largest yet,” with interrogations reportedly confirming that seized weapons had been supplied by Israel. Even neo-liberal outlets turned on the zionist propaganda. On December 4, 2025, France 24 reported that Abu Shabab had been killed near Rafah; NBC News framed it as a “blow to Israeli policy,” and an Al Jazeera investigation published weeks later named additional Popular Forces members still serving as Israeli agents inside Gaza. Abu Shabab’s own clan, the Abu Suneima family, publicly disowned him.

The timing lines up almost perfectly with the Hamas crackdown. Loot rate: 66–92% from May through September 2025, while Abu Shabab’s network was active and armed. 15% in October, the month of the ceasefire and the first Hamas sweeps. 0.7% in November. Zero from December, which was the month Abu Shabab was killed. When the militia network intercepting aid was dismantled by Palestinian resistance forces, aid started reaching people. December 2025 marked the dataset’s peak, with 4,959 trucks delivered. Since then, monthly throughput has fallen steadily — to roughly 1,700 in March — now driven by Israeli restrictions on aid requests rather than gang activity.

The bottleneck has shifted from different zionist points of control again, from the road to the crossing, and with it the pretext for preventing the arrival of aid. As long as the looting continued — carried out by armed gangs the Zionists were funding — the siege could be laundered through a story about Palestinian chaos: warring clans, lawless streets, a society supposedly incapable of feeding itself without Western supervision. Meanwhile, the price series and the truck ledger refute that story. The numbers show a market whose every distortion traces back to Western imperialist destruction and the zionist blockade, and an aid pipeline that started working the moment Palestinians dismantled the Israeli-armed gangs preying on it. It’s so important to reiterate: governance in Gaza was never the problem.

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Today, April 17, is Palestinian Prisoners’ Day. The date was chosen to commemorate the release of Mahmoud Bakr Hejazi on April 17, 1971, during the first prisoner exchange between Israel and Palestinians — in this case, the Fatah movement. The day itself is about remembering our prisoners and aligning our actions and visions of justice with their interests.

This year, as we commemorate Palestinian Prisoners’ Day, there are more than 9,600 Palestinians currently held captive in occupation prisons. Among these are 3,532 administrative detainees, all held without charge or trial under military order for renewable six-month periods. This is about 36.7% of all known Palestinian prisoners. Another 1,251 prisoners are Palestinians from the Gaza Strip are held without charge or trial according to the “Unlawful Combatants Law”, which allows for the indefinite detention of someone “who is a member of a force perpetrating hostile acts against the State of Israel or who has participated in hostile acts of such a force, either directly or indirectly”. These prisoners make up 13% of the known Palestinian prison population. This means that, among the Palestinians we know are imprisoned, about 49.7% of them have not been charged with a crime or tried, and can be held indefinitely.

These numbers do not include Palestinians disappeared from the Gaza Strip by the zionist entity or held in military camps. Those figures are unknown.

Since the start of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip in 1967, 326 Palestinian prisoners have been martyred inside these prisons. Of these martyrs, at least 89 have been murdered since the period between October 2023 and today.

Israeli authorities are also withholding the bodies of 97 martyred Palestinian prisoners. Prior to October 2023, only 11 martyred Palestinian prisoners’ bodies were being withheld.

Perhaps the most telling figure from the post-October 2023 period is the total number of people arrested from the West Bank and Gaza during this period: 23,000. This includes both those who are still detained and those who were subsequently released; it includes those abducted during military invasions and home raids, those kidnapped from military checkpoints, and those detained in order to pressure a family member into surrendering themselves to Israeli prisons. Among those arrested in this category are at least 1,800 children. 342 remain imprisoned. Journalists account for 240 of these arrests, 43 are still detained. One of these journalists, Marwan Harzallah, was martyred in prison. He was being held in administrative detention. His body remains held by occupation prison authorities.

This day of remembrance is marked this year by the recent closure of Defense for Children International - Palestine (DCI-P), which finally shut its doors in April 2026 after 35 years of work defending the rights of Palestinian children. This could not have come at a worse time. The closure will end the DCI-P’s many important services, including legal aid to Palestinian children, the documentation of systematic violations against their most basic rights and protections, and the organization of children’s legal representation. This forced closure was instigated by a years-long campaign against DCI-P by the Israeli government and civil society organizations, including the decision by the Israeli Defense Ministry to designate DCI-P a terror organization alongside several other Palestinian organizations in October 2021. Among the other groups designated at that time were Addameer: Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association, al-Haq, the Union of Agricultural Work Committees, Bisan Center for Research and Development, and the Union of Palestinian Women Committees. Samidoun: Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network was given the same designation in February 2021. It is noteworthy that three of the seven groups targeted by these terror designations work to support Palestinian prisoners.

As has been well-documented, Palestinian prisoners are currently facing escalated, horrific conditions of neglect, abuse, and systematic violence at the hands of occupation prison authorities. Those who have been released describe the standardization of withholding of adequate food and water including water access for bathing, medical and sanitary neglect, abuse by medical professionals, physical abuse and torture, psychological violence and torture, and rampant sexual abuse. You can read Addameer’s recent January report on the conditions in occupation prisons here, and Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor’s April 12 report documenting testimonies of rape and sexual violence as “de facto state policy”. This claim is not at all an exaggeration, as Ben Gvir (current zionist Minister of National Security) recently disguised himself in order to inspect occupation prisons and to monitor their “operational compliance” with his orders to escalate systemic violence against Palestinian prisoners. This comes shortly after another visit to Ofer Prison in which Ben Gvir reportedly assaulted prisoners himself, stepping on their heads.

Introduced by Ben Gvir himself, the zionist government recently passed a bill mandating the death penalty for Palestinians found guilty of “terrorism related” offenses which result in the death of an Israeli. This law applies exclusively to Palestinians and is set to take effect starting at the end of April. Many human rights organizations have rejected this bill on the basis that Israeli military courts almost never acquit Palestinian prisoners of a crime when they are actually charged and tried — conviction rates hover around 99%.

But the issue is not whether or not Israeli military courts will be able to justly convict Palestinians and apply a death sentence for Palestinians accused of carrying out acts hostile to the zionist state. By design, they have never and will not. Citing the rate of conviction of zionist military courts suggests that there is a chance of reformation, or — more grotesquely — that if zionist military courts had more moderate rates of conviction, they could be trusted to apply laws such as this.

The reality is that not one single Palestinian should be imprisoned by foreign occupiers, let alone tortured and brutalized by them. There is nothing zionist courts can do to make the application of their colonial laws just, because they should not be legislating anything about Palestinian existence, life, land, or access to any of these things at all. Foreign settlers have no right to impose their laws on an indigenous population whom they would like to see forcibly disappeared — a goal to which they have exercised every possible effort. These laws are fundamentally unjust because they should not exist. Not one occupation prison should exist, just as the occupation itself should not exist. The primary issue is not just that the zionist entity has no right to murder Palestinians for resisting its existence and carrying out acts that serve this effort; the most heinous crime is that the zionist entity continues at our privation, our imprisonment, our death and dispossession directly. This is the reality we must address in order to do any justice to Palestinian prisoners and act in the interest of their freedom.

Palestinians who grow up in exile in the West learn quickly that the world is occupied by zionists. These zionists are both people who reestablish zionist thought and principles with their actions (intentionally or otherwise), as well as those personally committed to zionism as a concept, but the first group is much more significant. The reason for this is simple: zionism is a normative position in the West, underpinned by Israel’s role in the capitalist-imperialist world system and entrenched and protected by shared white supremacist roots. Because of this, and because our existence is fundamentally problematic to the project of zionism, Palestinians living in exile in the West are routinely confronted with this seemingly “accepted” regime. Furthermore, those committed to the maintenance of this reality use their power to punish those who challenge this status quo.

Palestine is not present in Western media and educational channels. US news outlets do not generally discuss Palestine in any meaningful sense, and commentators who even question the validity of zionism are expelled and banished from mainstream media. In my experience, our US public school education never mentioned Palestine, except in reference to Israel. This all means that the ubiquity of zionism in the West is apparent in so many interactions; from a young age and as a Palestinian, I understood that if I wanted someone to know me as a person and appreciate my family, I would have to teach them world history they had never heard before and wouldn’t find anywhere else. By college I had carried out this process of re-education so many times, I joked about making a powerpoint. It wasn’t just that my peers didn’t know about Palestine or its history — growing up mostly in the post-9/11 period, they had been taught to normalize the mass destruction of entire communities across the Middle East and North Africa. A friend’s father once told me, in response to my thoughts and feelings about Palestine: “This is how the world works. People are conquered all the time.”

To be understood and challenge your own dehumanization, you are always making a case.1 You learn to study people closely and quickly, to analyze situations, to read between the lines. Many of us have grown up with this experience: if your fellow student is wearing a Jewish star, proceed with caution — you could certainly become friends, but you will have to teach them you are human once they know you’re Palestinian, and undoubtedly their parents will like you less once they learn your family history (though they likely won’t say it to your face). If your teacher argues in history class that the TSA should be able to strip search anyone, anytime, because “it protects us all”, she definitely thinks you’re a terrorist — but might also believe there’s a chance you can be reformed. And, if you debate this point too vehemently, it might tip her opinion one way and affect your grade (you still should). Other Muslims, especially those from immigrant families, usually “get it” and you can be friends, no powerpoint necessary. They’ve already heard about colonization from their family history, and likely know about Palestine as well.

But it is not just personal interactions that are inundated with the normalization of zionism and white supremacy (both inherently antagonistic to Palestinian existence), it is also every interaction with Western bureaucracy. One time, my family was crossing the border from Canada into the United States by car. The border officer asked my father where he was from. My father replied, “Palestine.” I cringed in the backseat. That response is not on the list of pre-approved answers to get you through the border quickly and painlessly. It is a trigger word for further interrogation and even detention. Even I knew that, at nine years old. Immediately, there were many more questions, spoken quickly to prevent the respondent from thinking too much: “Why does your passport say you were born in another country then? Where did you grow up? Why do you have a US passport? When did you come here? Why?” The interrogation ended abruptly and with a joke — the officer knew the phrase “goodbye” in Arabic, and said it with a smile — but only after we had been thoroughly questioned.

My dad — who, at this point in his life, had been harassed more times at many more airports and borders than I likely ever will — was just being honest. But honesty is dangerous for Palestinians, particularly when your erasure is normalized and you cannot guess whether the border bureaucrat questioning you may exercise their prerogative to disrupt your entire day on the basis of your identity alone. We had already been held up and searched on the way out. Even crossing the border of the country we were residing in was a reminder that our national identity is often seen as a provocation to those in positions of authority.

That border officer almost certainly did not consider himself a zionist. But in being part of a colonial border regime which treats “Palestine” as a trigger word — as something suspicious, requiring explanation, demanding justification — he was enforcing the same logics and power systems that entrench zionism: that Palestinian identity at best is inherently provisional, something to be interrogated rather than simply acknowledged, or worst, something to be eliminated.

These are minute personal indignities. It should go without saying that they do not compare to the experiences of Palestinians subjected to genocide, home demolitions, settler raids, forced displacement, mass imprisonment, torture, and slaughter. But understanding that, for Palestinians and those aligned with us, zionists control our world, helps to explain the global situation of Palestine, Palestinians, and Palestine solidarity activism. The small instances of normalized dehumanization connect directly to the normalization of continuous colonial and imperial violence in our lands and support for genocide.

zionist occupation of Palestinian life and that of our associates

A few weeks ago, while scrolling on social media I came across a video from Morgan Cooper (@mashjar_juthour on Instagram), a US citizen who lives in the West Bank with her Palestinian husband and their children. She had left the country recently and traveled with her children — in part for a holiday, and in part to be able to reach a US embassy in order to renew her family’s US passports. She describes in the video how, despite her and her children all being US citizens, they are functionally prevented from accessing any consular services in Palestine by Israel’s checkpoint and permit system. It was easier to access her own country’s embassy from outside of Palestine, in another continent entirely. She cannot access basic services that she is entitled to as a US citizen because Israel prevents her from reaching Jerusalem.

People understand that zionists control much of life in Palestine. They see (or have experienced for themselves) the hours-long waits at randomly closed checkpoints, invasions into communities and the state violence that comes with it, the sudden abductions of Palestinians into zionist prisons, and the impunity of zionist settlers’ and state forces’ arbitrary, constant murders of Palestinians. But when I saw Morgan Cooper’s video, it reminded me of how zionism affects Palestinians everywhere, and often anyone associated with us, across borders — even beyond the obvious almost eighty-year-long period of forced exile, ongoing refugeehood, genocide, and continuous colonization and destruction.

Cooper’s experience brought to mind a story I had been told only a few days before seeing her video: someone close to me, a Palestinian in exile with a “strong” Western passport, had applied for a European visa. As part of the process, they were subjected to a background check. This background check uncovered a Canary Mission profile about them, making — as is the website’s modus operandi — unverifiable claims of “antisemitism”. Their application was immediately denied. They were explicitly informed that this was the reason.

When I heard this story, I knew its ending as soon as I heard the phrase “background check” and the exasperation in the speaker’s voice. Everywhere Palestinians and their allies exist, zionists are intervening in order to make their lives harder, especially if they are vocal about their belief in a liberated Palestine. Whether we are living in Palestine or outside of it, zionists and their organizations, institutions, spokespeople, and professional mudslingers, are desperately trying to punish us out of speaking up and taking action in solidarity with Palestinians.

The visa officer who denied that application may have harbored no personal animosity toward Palestinians. More than likely, they may see themselves as simply “doing their job.” But fixation on individual intent over material impact is precisely what makes this system so difficult to name: when the effect of a bureaucratic decision is to deny a Palestinian access, mobility, and residency on the basis of their political identity and the rejection of their erasure, the person carrying it out has functioned as an enforcer of zionism. Focusing on whether the individual meant harm, rather than on the harm produced, obscures the structure — and ensures it reproduces itself unchallenged.

Happily, CAIR Chicago has launched the start of a class action lawsuit against a collection of zionist organizations dedicated to doxxing, harassment, and threats against those who express solidarity with Palestinians or a rejection of zionism. Included among CAIR’s plaintiffs are Palestinian, Arab, Muslim, and Jewish Americans who have faced harassment, threats, and worse for the attacks leveled against them by Canary Mission, StopAntisemitism, and others. One of the plaintiffs, Laila Ali, is described in the complaint as having been doxxed and harassed by StopAntisemitism on Twitter/X and other social media platforms repeatedly, including a call for her deportation and termination from her job. Ali was eventually terminated from her position, with her former employer publicly confirming that the action was taken in response to StopAntisemitism’s attacks.

Targeting anti-zionists, especially vocal ones, is not a new phenomenon — either in Palestine or outside of it. But over the last few years, as we have been inundated with discourse about the allegedly omnipresent, ever-strengthening scourge of antisemitism alongside the reality that more folks in the Global North seem to be observing Israel’s genocidal violence with new eyes and growing disgust, these smear campaigns, intimidation tactics, and coordinated violence have brought new fervor to an old conspiracy theory. More and more, US Americans yell “ZOG!” as they observe many of their governments’ decisions, and SNL cast members feel emboldened to attempt jokes that the imperial power is being ruled by the premier of its favored colony. The truth that we are living in a world occupied by zionists is not new or a secret conspiracy. We are. But underpinning these statements is the false assumption that the zionists occupying positions of power are primarily Jewish, or that they are even zionists first and foremost, rather than dedicated capitalists, imperialists, and white supremacists.

In reality, zionists exist in all shapes and sizes. Trump is a zionist, but to suggest that he is dedicated to this or any vision of Jewish statehood is ridiculous, when the evidence clearly indicates that he is driven by his own financial interests. These interests are inherently tied to positions that sustain the US empire. The same could be said of most US politicians, whether they are personally making money off of military industrial investments or simply value Israel’s role in maintaining US imperial interests in the broader region. Likewise, the proof that much of the world is governed and shaped by zionists is everywhere — perhaps illustrated most clearly through the experiences of Palestinians, whose lives are disrupted by zionism wherever they are. The plainest example of this reality is the ongoing genocide in Gaza and the treatment of those in solidarity with the targets of this genocide.

Complicity in genocide

Most know about the extent of US complicity in this genocide. But from October 2023, governments across Europe fell in line — not only failing to obstruct genocide, but actively participating in it. Between October 2023 and May 2025, EU member states collectively sent 53 million euros worth of weapons in public funds under their Israeli trade agreement. They also continued to renew EU security research funding grants for Israel, the single non-European state which most benefits from this funding, as the zionist entity maintained a total siege on Gaza and murdered hundreds of people a day on average.

The United Kingdom has also sent a record number of arms to Israel in 2025 and participated in surveillance and intelligence sharing as it flew planes over Gaza from Cyprus. The UK government imprisoned Palestine Action activists for prolonged periods, endangered their health and safety, and proscribed their organization as a “terror group” despite the ongoing, massive public outcry and now a High Court decision which has ruled this proscription unlawful. Six of the recently acquitted Filton 24 now face retrial with a potential that they will be sentenced as terrorists — information that will be hidden from the jury. They will also be prevented from telling the jury how their actions were part of an effort to disrupt the Israeli genocide in Gaza. The judges making these decisions, the prosecutors requesting them, and the government and counter-terror officers informing the requests are all among the zionist actors influencing these activists’ lives.

It is not just governments that are complicit, either. US universities have cast aside any remnants of their association with open-mindedness or “freedom of speech” to ensure that students involved in Palestine solidarity organizing have been hunted down, beaten, arrested, and deported in some cases. They have paid out settlements to Jewish students and faculty members for having their “right” to advocate for genocide be questioned by their peers. Universities, including UC Berkeley, have handed over lists of their students and faculty to the US government to be investigated for alleged incidents of antisemitism. Those of us who still had any remnant of faith in the US academic system after the public ousting of Sami Al-Arian or Steven Salaita certainly should not have any more illusions at this point, now that we have seen the similar treatment applied to non-Palestinian scholars as well: Maura Finkelstein, Jairo Fúnez-Flores, Peyrin Kao, Sang Hea Kil, Idris Robinson, Katherine Franke, and now Aria Fani and Shirin Saeidi among others. These are all decisions that have directly altered the lives of many, many people.

The message is clear: zionism is hegemonic in Western politics, culture, education, and beyond. Any challenge will be met with the full force of law, extralegal violence, and the construction of new laws to heighten pressure against dissent. But the issue here is not “ZOG” — there is not an all-powerful Jewish individual or cabal enforcing zionism at the highest level of all of these institutions, nor is the actual leadership or low-level administrators and bureaucrats deeply committed to a project of so-called “Jewish self-determination” in Palestine. As analysis by GSC members has already shown with institutions like Human Rights Watch, those in positions of power and authority at every level in Western society are deeply committed to the status quo and personally benefit from violence and warfare. It is not that they are fervent zionists, or paid off by fervent zionists, or blackmailed by them — it is that they are benefitting, personally, institutionally, from a reality that includes zionism, and is supported by its continuation. It is not zionism that is foregrounded or most important; rather, protecting zionism is part of maintaining a geopolitical reality that protects colonial and imperial plunder throughout the region and the Global South in general.

When we say for Palestinians and those in solidarity with them, zionists occupy the world, this includes the people who carry out the actions described above on the most micro levels: administrators who fire professors and expel students because of their support for Palestine; colleagues who look away and pretend not to notice to protect their own careers; the students who engage in surveillance, file complaints, and gather thousands of signatures to punish their anti-zionist professors; staffers working in the offices of politicians who support genocide or make empty statements while remaining complicit; office managers who fire their workers for being doxxed by the likes of Canary Mission and StopAntisemitism; NGO workers who collect checks knowing that they are pushing campaigns that water down anti-zionist demands while claiming to represent Palestinians’ interests first and foremost; prosecutors building cases against Palestine solidarity activists who have organized to materially disrupt genocide; ICE officers who have abducted activists and held them imprisoned for extended periods or deported them; adults who tell young Palestinians that they should accept the loss of their homeland and massacres of their people, because that’s just “how the world works.” All of these actors, the majority of whom are not Jewish and are likely not committed to zionism on a personal level, operate in a way that makes them into the zionists altering and controlling the world for Palestinians and those associated with us. Entirely independent of the Israeli state, its government, the Mossad, Sheldon Adelson’s ghost, or any other such entity, these individuals attempt to assert zionism in the personal lives of those who speak out against it, against genocide, and for liberation and decolonization. In that way, we routinely find that our lives are disrupted by zionists — or that we should expect, at any time, that they might intervene in our lives.

A culture of white supremacy

No small part of these actions is informed by an ingrained culture of white supremacy, rather than a philosophical commitment to zionism. zionist professors, students, politicians, governments, even the corporations profiting from genocide are presumed to have the right to comfort, to be protected from being confronted with the consequences of their actions or those which they support, whether it’s photos of the families whose murder they’ve encouraged or physical damage to their weapons manufacturing plants. This right to comfort is protected through the stoking of fear: Palestinians and their allies are scary for disrupting classes, for the reminder that armed resistance to colonial domination is protected under international law, for insisting that their communities must change in order to no longer be complicit in this genocide. These are all characteristics of white supremacy, along with denial — rewriting history, denying reality, legitimizing genocidal violence, erasing the historical reality of Palestinians as a collectivity — and the fear of conflict when this denial is challenged openly. Palestinians and allies in the West who see the urgency of responding to and disrupting genocide and settler colonial violence and act accordingly confront all of these basic tenets of white supremacy and more, from within personal interactions to the culture of political organizing spaces which to interactions with the state and its representatives to penalties in the workplace. We find the evidence of this role of white supremacy not only in responses to Palestine solidarity organizing as described above, but also in the types of people who are the primary targets of zionist backlash.

It is well known that Israeli border bureaucrats have used Canary Mission and other such sites to screen visitors seeking entrance to Palestine in the past. But the use is generally deployed in an uneven, racialized manner: those with Arab names or other identifiers, Muslim names or other identifiers, those who’ve visited other Arab or Muslim countries, those who are Black or Brown — these are the primary targets against whom Canary Mission has been used as a monitoring and vetting tool at the border. These are the people most often pulled aside for secondary questioning, simply on the basis of background, name, or appearance. And these are the people who make up the vast majority of the targets of institutional and state violence in response to their rejection of complicity in genocide.

Last year, the US government confirmed it was using Canary Mission as a resource to identify student protesters for deportations based on their Palestine solidarity activism. In the United States and elsewhere, other marginalized populations are easy targets, both because many folks recognize the violence of colonialism and genocide in Palestine and empathize, and also because they often have less institutional power. This means that alongside Palestinians, it is other Arabs, Muslims, and Black and Brown communities that are also primary targets of state and institutional zionist violence for their expressions of solidarity with Palestinians.

So, yes. For Palestinians and those in solidarity with them, zionists do control our world — not because these figures are necessarily philosophically invested in zionism itself, but because they will enforce it (even unknowingly) to protect their own interests against those of us harmed by their interests (and those in solidarity). Those invested in white supremacy, in the continuation of empire and capitalism and all of their evils, are not just occupying space in our governments. They are also in charge of cultural institutions, universities, news organizations, charities, watchdog groups, NGOs, and more. They are teachers, border officers, police, TSA, bureaucrats in government offices, doctors, students, politicians. For those of us who are committed to Palestinian liberation, those people on the other side who are profiting off of genocide are always there, wielding their power however possible to prevent disruption and making life as hard as possible — getting us fired or expelled, preventing us from traveling, imprisoning us, deporting us.

Rather than dissuade us from action, zionist efforts to disrupt our lives must be opportunities to learn from each other and work together. That our lives are altered by these experiences is important to recognize because it illustrates that we see and can understand how these systems work, how they are interconnected, and why they function the way they do to support one another — whereas, having spent so long demanding our erasure or pretending we already don’t exist, those on the other side do not apprehend us. As in Palestine, having greater knowledge of your oppressor than they do of you is certainly a boon, especially when it comes to strategizing organized resistance. The important thing is not to fall into despair or allow ourselves to be contained by the illusions of justice proffered by the advocates of empire.

The Israeli army uprooted olive groves in Deir Istiya along Road 5066. At least 200 trees, some ancient, under a “security needs”.

Data from March 10 - April 8, 2026

In the weeks since Israeli forces closed Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, zionists have imposed the most restrictive measures across the West Bank since the period directly after October 7, 2023. Checkpoints have multiplied, entire cities have been reduced to single entry points, and the daily rhythm of invasions, arrests, and settler attacks has quietly accelerated.

Between January 1 and April 8, 2026, the Palestinian Negotiations Affairs Department recorded 5,339 violations ranging from widespread arrest campaigns to arbitrary military checkpoints and coordinated settler attacks. That averages to 54 per day. Over the most recent 30-day window, the rate climbed to 60 — an 11.5 percent increase that, on its own, understates what’s happening on the ground. Checkpoints more than doubled. Road closures rose 73 percent. And the geography of escalation shifted north, with Tulkarm, Tubas, and Nablus absorbing the sharpest spikes. This report breaks down what the numbers show.

Areas experiencing the highest pressure

Nablus, Ramallah, Hebron, and Jerusalem each averaged between 5.7 and 6.7 violations per day over the past month. However, the rate of change is more significant than the absolute totals. The Israeli military has increased raids in Tulkarm, where there has been a 43 percent increase above its yearly rate, while Tubas rose by 31 percent. Nablus, already the most-affected governorate with 200 incidents in 30 days, exceeded its 2026 average by 25 percent. This escalation of zionist violence has been primarily concentrated in the northern West Bank.

The Israeli military essentially locks down the entire West Bank on a routine basis: checkpoint violations averaged 5.1 per day, compared to a yearly average of 2.2, representing a 132 percent increase. This has been accompanied by a 73 percent increase in road closures. Basically, since February 28, Israeli forces have imposed conditions equivalent to a rolling state of emergency. The Intercept reported that Nablus was reduced to a single functioning checkpoint. The Einav checkpoint into Tulkarm operates with restricted hours and entry only. Violations against places of worship rose by 50 percent, primarily due to the ongoing closure of Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, both closed since February 28. The National Catholic Reporter described the Sepulcher closure as one of the longest in its history. For a critical analysis of the closure and Palestinian resistance to it, read the latest article by Good Shepherd Collective’s Lara Kilani here.

Invasions and arrests

As would be imagined, Israeli military invasions constitute the largest category of violations, averaging 15.2 per day. The pattern is consistent: forces enter a town, patrol, arrest residents, and withdraw. On April 8, Ramallah experienced seven separate invasions. Arrests averaged 6.6 per day. The Daily File reported that Jenin camp had been closed continuously for 443 days as of March 31, while Tulkarm camp had been effectively closed for over 400 days.

Between March 11 and April 9, 2026, Israeli forces carried out 191 separate arrest campaigns across the occupied West Bank, each incident typically leading to the abduction of one or several detainees in a single location. Ramallah led the count with 27 attacks, followed closely by Nablus at 26 and Hebron at 25. Tulkarm recorded 20 incidents, a rate that tracks its broader 43 percent spike in total violations over the same window. Jerusalem saw 17 arrests, Bethlehem 16, and Qalqilya 14. Jenin, despite being under continuous military closure for 443 consecutive days, registered 13 arrests, while Salfit and Tubas each logged 12. Jericho recorded nine, most of them occurring at the Allenby crossing as residents attempted to return from Jordan. The distribution places the heaviest arrest pressure on the central and northern West Bank, with Ramallah, Nablus, Hebron, and Tulkarm accounting for 98 of the 191 incidents, or 51 percent of the total.

On April 8, Israeli forces arrested Tubas Municipality official Fawaz Anbousi following a raid on the city. On the same day, a resident of Attouf village in the Jordan Valley was detained. In Jericho, a citizen returning from Jordan via the Allenby crossing was also arrested. These incidents are representative of the daily patterns observed in the data.

Settler violence

Zionist militias, funded through the international nonprofit system, have averaged 6.2 attacks per day, an increase from the year-to-date average of 5.8. The United Nations documented over 150 attacks resulting in injuries or property damage across 90 communities since January, displacing 1,700 individuals.

On April 7, settlers entered farmland near Zabbda village in Jenin, attacked farmers, and raised an Israeli flag. On the same day in Al-Laban al-Gharbi, settlers uprooted 180 olive saplings belonging to farmer Nader Dhiyab Salem and grazed cattle on the cleared land. SANA reported that 884 trees were destroyed and 360 head of livestock were stolen during the broader reporting period.

NAD data records 14 home demolitions year to date. On April 7, Israeli authorities compelled brothers Nader and Hatem Baydoun to demolish their own homes in Silwan, East Jerusalem, to avoid substantial municipal fines. The two structures, built in 1998 and totaling 88 square meters, housed 10 family members, including children.

The 30-day data shows escalation, not a plateau. Zionist violence rates run above the yearly average in every major category except arrests and live ammunition, which dipped slightly. Checkpoint violations more than doubled. The geography shifted north, with Tulkarm, Tubas, and Nablus absorbing the sharpest increases.

Between 2013 and 2023, US-based nonprofits moved $17.65 billion to Israeli and foreign entities through the tax-exempt charitable system. In 2023 alone, $2.57 billion left the country — more than two-thirds of the annual US military aid package, with none of the restrictions. We know this because we counted it: 29,751 individual grant transactions, exposed in the IRS filings that every US nonprofit is required to submit. While the data reveals an entanglement of interests that create structural liabilities in US movement spaces, it also highlights strategic opportunities to disrupt the material resources that advance the zionist movement in Palestine.

Good Shepherd Collective maintains an open-source database of 14,653 US-based 501(c)(3) organizations identified as participants in the zionist financial ecosystem. The database is the evidentiary backbone of Defund Racism, a coalition campaign challenging the tax-exempt status of organizations that fund settlement expansion and military operations across Palestine. It is built entirely from verified IRS 990 filings available through the IRS Exempt Organizations Business Master File and electronically filed returns. Organizations are classified by function — direct funders, intermediaries, advocacy groups, and domestic infrastructure — and by confidence level, using grant recipient analysis, Schedule F foreign activity disclosures, and cross-references against known zionist-linked entities.

Our research unearthed two aggregate figures that matter: $2.57 billion and $9.3 billion. The first is the amount of money that actually left the United States and landed in “Israel” in 2023. We isolated this number by counting only terminal grants — grant transactions in which the recipient is an Israeli or foreign entity, rather than another US-based intermediary. Between 2013 and 2023, those terminal grants totaled $17.65 billion across 29,751 individual transactions. That figure grew from $626 million in 2013 to $2.57 billion in 2023, a 311 percent increase over the decade.

The second figure ($9.3 billion) is the total annual revenue of the ecosystem itself — the full domestic apparatus of fundraising, programming, advocacy, and lawfare operations that sustained the pipeline in 2023. Summing revenue across all 14,653 organizations for the same period produces $93.65 billion, but that number double-counts money as it moves between organizations within the ecosystem (a donation to a Jewish Federation that becomes a grant to the Central Fund of Israel appears as revenue for both). Subtracting the $13.6 billion in intra-ecosystem grants we can trace by EIN produces a de-duplicated estimate of roughly $80 billion in net revenue entering the system from outside donors and other sources between 2013 and 2023. In 2023 alone, the ecosystem generated approximately $9.3 billion in de-duplicated revenue, up from $5.3 billion a decade earlier, a 75 percent increase. In comparison, over the same period, Lockheed Martin’s revenue grew 49 percent, from $45.4 billion to $67.6 billion.

As anyone would guess, the period after October 7, 2023 accelerated these flows significantly as the broader zionist movement mobilized to animate and conceal a genocide simultaneously. Friends of the IDF reported $282 million in revenue for its fiscal year overlapping the attack, nearly triple its $89 million baseline the year prior. The Jewish National Fund’s revenue doubled to $224 million. The Jewish Federations of North America launched a $908 million Israel Emergency Campaign, the largest in their history, pushing total Federation fundraising past $3 billion in 2024. (Note: These surges are partially captured in the 2023 filing data but will be more fully reflected in 2024 filings as they become available from the IRS.)

It’s worth going back to the military-aid comparison, but maybe not for the reason you’d expect. Much of the US organizing around Palestine solidarity focuses on reducing the $3.8 billion annual military aid package. Under the 2016 Memorandum of Understanding, that money comes with a requirement: by 2028, 100 percent of it must be spent on US-manufactured defense systems. It cycles back into US factories and US paychecks, which means US politicians understand that cutting it means cutting jobs in their districts. That campaign is going nowhere. But the large NGOs keep rolling it out, “email your representatives” to “block the bombs”, because it’s an email harvesting mechanism. Organizers need to look at the data and political landscape and ask themselves: Is it even the right target?

The fact is, charitable dollars are a different problem, and they work in two directions that are arguably more beneficial to the zionist project than military aid. Nobody in Congress reviews how the Jewish National Fund spent its $224 million in revenue last year, or what Friends of the IDF did with its $282 million, nearly triple its pre-October 7 budget. Abroad, the money goes to “Israel” and stays there — building new outposts in the West Bank and sustaining the older settlements of Tel Aviv and Petah Tikva, developing infrastructure on occupied land, arming militia formations that hunt Palestinians. It’s completely unrestricted. There is no offset provision. No buyback clause. It’s turning into schools, hospitals, museums — the country’s infrastructure.

But the pipeline also does something at home: the domestic fundraising apparatus that moves this money not only creates infrastructures of oppression, surveillance, and lawfare through the likes of the Canary Mission and the ADL, but it also manifests real structural dependencies that compromise the very organizations best positioned to challenge it.

The scale of this zionist apparatus is hard to overstate. Our database identifies 14,653 US nonprofits in the funding ecosystem. The obvious players are there: Birthright Israel Foundation ($1.16 billion lifetime revenue), PEF Israel Endowment Funds ($289 million in 2023), and the Jewish Federations of North America, which alone have directed over $2 billion in Israel-linked grants over the years. The Jewish Federations of North America launched a $683 million Israel Emergency Campaign, bringing 80,000 new donors into the system and pushing total Federation fundraising to $3 billion in 2024 — roughly $1 billion more than a typical year. And it is through this analysis of financing and institutional relationships that reveals why challenging this nonprofit system never seems to be really on the table: the granting networks create structural dependency that mandates silence.

For example, Jewish Federations are community funding hubs. They collect donations from individuals and distribute them to local institutions: day schools, community centers, elder care programs, small museums, and food banks. These organizations serve real community needs and depend on Federation allocations to keep their doors open. The Federations also send hundreds of millions to Israel annually, funding everything from Birthright trips to direct grants to Israeli organizations operating and coordinating armed gangs from Nablus to South Hebron.

This is the structural problem. A local day care, food pantry, or museum that receives Federation funding has no direct involvement in settlement expansion. But its leadership knows where its funding comes from. When a campaign asks community organizations to take a public stand against charitable dollars flowing to organizations that demolish Palestinian homes or lobby against Palestinian land rights, the calculation is not just moral. It is financial. Organizations that would not otherwise align themselves with zionist political projects find themselves unable to speak up because the same donor networks fund their operations. The dependency IS the point.

However, it’s one thing for a local food pantry or day school to stay silent — those organizations aren’t responsible for building a liberation movement, and their dependency on Federation funding makes their silence, if not forgivable, at least legible. But the entanglement doesn’t stop at community institutions. The same donor-advised funds that route hundreds of millions to Birthright, the JNF, and Friends of the IDF — Fidelity Charitable, Schwab Charitable, Vanguard, the Jewish Communal Fund — also fund JVP, IfNotNow, USCPR, and JFREJ. The organizations that are supposed to be challenging the pipeline are receiving money through it.

Taking a small sample from our dataset, we find that 257 funders give to two or more of these categories. Of those, 36 fund both Palestine solidarity and zionist/settler organizations simultaneously. Those 36 directed $284,167,856 (96.0%) to zionist and settler organizations and $11,719,521 (4.0%) to solidarity groups. In this subset of data, that is a ratio of $24.2 to every $1.

Nearly every shared funder tilts 90% or more toward the zionist side. Fidelity Charitable, Schwab Charitable, the Jewish Communal Fund, and Vanguard route 93–99% of their cross-category grants to zionist organizations. Palestine solidarity groups are structurally dependent on the same financial infrastructure that overwhelmingly funds the networks they exist to oppose.

The big NGOs aren’t just going to decouple from their financial lifeline. In fact, we met years ago with a coalition of D.C.-based NGO types who explicitly said they would not engage in such a campaign because it could put their own organizations at risk of losing their nonprofit licenses. And it goes without saying, the IRS will not fix this. It is an unelected bureaucracy with no political incentive to act, and it has revoked the tax-exempt status of exactly zero major Israel-linked organizations despite decades of documented compliance issues. Compare that to Canada, where the grassroots pressure forced the Revenue Agency to revoke JNF Canada’s charitable status in August 2024 after finding it funded military base construction and failed to control how donations were used in Israel. That was a CAD $241 million operation, shut down by small formations working collectively.

In the US, there is a strategic opportunity with the State Attorneys General. Unlike the IRS, they are elected. They face voters who can hold them accountable and force them to use their power to regulate state-registered nonprofits under their administration. New York AG Letitia James sued the Trump Foundation into dissolution and brought the NRA to trial under the same Executive Law §63(12) that could apply to organizations misrepresenting their charitable activities to New York donors. An AG investigation does not require congressional approval. It requires political will, and political will responds to organized constituents, public pressure, and donor scrutiny. That is a lever grassroots movements can pull. You cannot vote out the IRS commissioner. You can vote out an Attorney General, and they know it.

The violence across the West Bank, the settler attacks, and the home demolitions do not sustain themselves. It requires funding, and a significant share of that funding runs through the US tax-exempt charitable system. Every dollar that moves through a “friends of” organization to an Israeli entity operating in the West Bank, the Naqab, the Golan Heights, carries a US tax subsidy with it. US taxpayers are underwriting this, whether they know it or not.

Defund Racism is building the empirical infrastructure to change that. Our open-source database tracks the money: who gives, who receives, how much, and where it goes. The pipeline from US donors to West Bank settlements is not hidden. It is filed with the IRS every year, in black and white.

The campaign is rebooting, and when it launches, the scale of what we’re building will require a network to match. Sign up for email updates at goodshepherdcollective.org, subscribe to The Call on Substack, and follow @Shepherds4Good on social media. We need to be connected before the moment arrives … not after.

Holidays in Palestine are special in a way that is unlike holidays elsewhere in the world. In Bethlehem, a city that boasts a sizable Muslim and Christian Palestinian population, it can sometimes feel that in the years before the US-Israeli genocidal aggression on Gaza, the holidays didn’t end. For example, Christmas preparations begin at the beginning of December and festivities do not cease until after the last Christmas, celebrated by the Armenian Church in Bethlehem on January 18. This year, Ramadan began less than a month later with Lent alongside it, followed by Palm Sunday, and on their way now are Easter and Eid Al-Adha.

But holidays are not different because they feel endless — rather, they feel endless because of the myriad of sects and religions represented, and their shared, public expression. It doesn’t matter if you are Muslim, Catholic, Armenian Orthodox, or none of the above — everyone in the city comes to see the Christmas tree lit up and take selfies in front of it. Everyone marvels at the Ramadan decorations scattered throughout town and lines up to purchase katayef from their local vendor. Everyone is happy to see photos of their neighbors’ beautiful, smiling faces in the Al Aqsa compound.

Unfortunately, something else that is shared is the knowledge and experience of how zionist policies work to discourage celebration, disrupt holidays, and minimize or prevent the exercise of centuries-old traditions. This is an ordeal well-known across religions and sects. As escalations against Palestinians continue everywhere, Ramadan (like Christmas) arrived with a question in the air this year: what will the zionist state do to try to disrupt this important holiday, as it does every year? This Ramadan, the answer came — at least in part — in a form that the whole world has witnessed, through the US-Israeli War on Iran.

Immediately following US-Israeli strikes on Iran about ten days into the month of Ramadan, Israeli authorities forced the closure of the Al Aqsa Mosque compound, usually packed with worshippers from all over the country during this period. This move, framed as a “security measure”, is the first time the Al Aqsa Mosque has been forced closed by Israeli authorities since October 2014 (excluding Covid-related closures), an act of collective punishment following an assassination attempt on Yehuda Glick, a far-right zionist rabbi. The mosque was also temporarily closed by Israeli forces following the occupation of East Jerusalem after the 1967 War, after which Israeli authorities took over the “security” administration of the holy site. Neither closure lasted as long as this one has.

Among the shortcomings of these closures, ostensibly informed by the lack of adequate shelters in the Old City in general and these religious sites specifically, is that Palestinian worshippers from East Jerusalem or traveling from the West Bank likely are not much safer in their own neighborhoods. Across historic Palestine, Palestinian communities are criminally underserved when it comes to the availability of public shelters or safe rooms, and those in East Jerusalem are no exception with almost nowhere safe to retreat as sirens warn of incoming rockets. In Palestinian cities, towns, and villages across the West Bank, there are also no safe rooms or shelters in general.

Israeli authorities have now extended the closure until at least April 15, 2026. While the stated reason is “public safety” in the midst of the US-Israel-imposed War on Iran, many Palestinians have expressed their doubts that this is the true motivation guiding this decision. Concerns range from the belief that this is an opportunity for zionist authorities to increase their control over the religious site to conspiracy theories that zionists may execute a false flag attack on Al Aqsa compound and/or the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in the midst of Iran’s missiles (or missile fragments) landing in the area. These fears are escalated by incidents of settler groups reportedly circulating AI-generated videos depicting the bombing of other Muslim holy sites such as the Dome of the Rock, and further heightened by the reality that Israel has amplified its control over important holy sites significantly this year alone, including the Ibrahimi Mosque (Tomb of the Patriarchs). All the while, Israeli politicians repeat their threats to “rebuild the Third Temple” atop al-Haram al-Sharif.

Meanwhile, special privileges have been granted to Jewish worshippers and religious leaders, in some cases. Though access to the Western Wall (Buraq Wall) has been closed, zionist authorities are allowing groups of 50 to pray in an enclosed area beside the plaza. Israeli authorities have also announced their intention to allow 50 rabbis into the Western Wall plaza on April 5 to perform a Passover blessing.

As the wartime closures extended to other religious sites in the Old City of Jerusalem, including the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and the Western Wall, Israeli authorities reportedly sealed off areas of the Old City, preventing non-residents from entering and imposing a series of checkpoints to inhibit access to all three of these sites. But on March 29, Palm Sunday, Christian Palestinians were also prevented from marching from the Mount of Olives through the Old City, as they have for hundreds of years. Palm Sunday is usually celebrated by as many as hundreds of thousands of Christians in Palestine — Palestinians and internationals alike.

Despite local priests holding private masses every Sunday since the closures began on February 28 in accordance with Israel’s “security” procedures, Israeli authorities prevented Catholic priests from entering the church on Palm Sunday, claiming they had informed church authorities that no mass would be allowed to take place on the holiday. This disruption has instigated a response from the international community — notably, a much more significant response than the more than twenty days of closure imposed on Palestinian Muslims for most of Ramadan and all of Eid al-Fitr celebrations.

The disruption of the mass was an attempt coordinated to prevent the small number of Palestinian Christians and international clerics from celebrating Palm Sunday in Jerusalem, even under severely restricted conditions. Though other Sunday services have not been a problem, the commemoration of the holiday was contested, revealing the farcical nature of Israeli security procedures and their application. When it comes to the celebration of Palestinian holidays — Christian or Muslim — Israeli authorities always have the same response: suppression.

The Catholic priests’ experience on Palm Sunday echoes the reality that Palestinian Muslims in Jerusalem faced following the closure of Al Aqsa. Some community members, denied access to the mosque and the community of worshippers that should be gathered there, met outside of the old city to pray taraweeh prayers on its lawns, only to be met by Israeli forces’ assaults. They returned the next day. Meanwhile, elsewhere in Jerusalem, Israeli forces disrupted prayers, reportedly storming a mosque during prayer time to abduct worshippers on the 27th day of Ramadan.

These closures and assaults on adjusted worship services in the midst of a war to which Palestinians have been subjected by foreign occupiers are exacerbated by the closures imposed throughout the West Bank, settler attacks, random abductions, state violence, home demolitions, and much more. Increased violence, arbitrary closures of towns, villages, and roadways, and pop-up checkpoints work to prevent families from visiting one another during holidays built around community.

But long before the start of this war, and even long before October 2023, Ramadan in particular and Palestinian holidays in general have been periods during which Israeli forces and the state itself escalate violence against Palestinian communities. This means that not only are the state’s attacks on Palestinian religious observance regular and ongoing, but also that Palestinian worshippers are well-attuned to finding ways to celebrate despite zionist policies and restrictions.

After being prevented from reaching the Church of the Holy Sepulchre for a private mass on Palm Sunday in Jerusalem this year, the priests held their mass in a nearby church instead, and later prayed for peace on the Mount of Olives. Like Muslim worshippers praying on the Old City lawns and neighborhood mosques over the last month, they found ways to commemorate Palm Sunday despite closures, uneven applications of the so-called emergency regulations, targeted attacks on their rights, and forcibly dispersed worshippers.

These acts are not just about ritual and commemoration of religious holidays — things that are important on their own. The decisions religious figures and regular people make, to exercise their faith anyway, to find alternatives that enable their worship, to make community happen on their own terms as much as it is possible — these are also acts of refusal to be bullied into submission by those who wish for Palestinian elimination and work toward this end.

In the midst of an ongoing genocide and a war for control over the greater region, the refusal of those right under the thumb of occupation to forget, or give up, or abdicate aspects of a long and rich cultural inheritance is an example for the rest of the world. It is not just refusal; it is the enactment of a cherished heritage and its preservation for the next generation. What makes it so special in Palestine is that not only is it happening all the time — it’s happening in public. And whether we are doing it ourselves or cheering it on, we embolden each other to continue doing it.

The Palestinian Negotiations Affairs Department recorded 163 documented settler attacks in the last 30 days. Looking at the data, this can appear as a topline number that looks like a plateau — nearly identical to the monthly average of 165 over the past year. But flat numbers don’t mean stable conditions or a normalization of violence. When we look at how the violence is shifting across the West Bank, an entirely different story emerges.

A geographic breakdown shows that the mechanisms of indigenous erasure inherent in the zionist project are working. The Tubas governorate has seen a 160% increase over its yearly average over the last 30 days. Salfit is up 105%. Jerusalem has surged 64%. These are areas where Palestinian herding and farming communities are being systematically pressured off their land — and the pressure is intensifying.

Meanwhile, Jericho — another Jordan Valley governorate — dropped 64%. Not because the violence stopped, but because displacement has already succeeded in many Jericho-area communities. When there are fewer people left, there are fewer people to attack. The plateau isn’t normalization. It’s the statistical residue of ethnic cleansing at different stages of completion. This table outlines the communities already driven off their lands, and as such, settler militias in those areas can shift resources to other areas.

The nature of the violence tells its own story. The past week witnessed settlers releasing their own livestock onto Palestinian farmland, cutting and uprooting olive trees, stoning homes and vehicles, spraying individuals with pepper spray, and raising Israeli flags on privately owned Palestinian land. These are not random acts. They follow a pattern of agricultural destruction and economic strangulation designed to make Palestinian life in these areas untenable and force them off their lands. The data demonstrates the political intent. This is the logical outworking of zionism. The existence of the Israeli state is, in fact, premised on this sort of violence. The data — 163 attacks in 30 days across 10 governorates (an average of more than 5 per day) — reiterates this basic fact of zionism. Below is a narrative summary of a handful of attacks.

Killing of Nasrallah Abu Siyam in Makhmas

On February 18, approximately 30 masked settlers, some armed with M-16 rifles and accompanied by Israeli soldiers, raided the village of Mukhmas, located east of Jerusalem. Israelis shot and killed Nasrallah Abu Siyam, a 19-year-old Palestinian-American from Philadelphia. The bullet hit him in the thigh — severing his main artery — while he was confronting settlers who were attempting to steal sheep and goats from the village. Settlers then beat him with metal rods as he lay bleeding. Israeli soldiers on the scene did not intervene, did not arrest anyone, and blocked a Palestinian ambulance from reaching Nasrallah. Abu Siyam was eventually carried out of the village on foot, and later died from his wounds and delayed treatment.

Two Brothers Killed Defending Their Land in Qaryut

Armed settlers attacked the village of Qaryut south of Nablus on March 2, after beginning to uproot olive trees to pave a road near Palestinian homes. When residents tried to intervene, settlers opened fire. Brothers Muhammad Taha Maamer, 52, and Fahim Taha Maamer, 47, were shot and killed. Muhammad was struck in the head; Fahim in the pelvis. Three others were wounded by live fire, including a 15-year-old child shot in the shoulder. The brothers’ disabled father was trapped inside the house during the assault. Muhammad left behind six children, the youngest in third grade. Fahim also had six children, including one with hearing and speech impairments. The Israeli army later announced the shooter was an active Israeli forces reservist.

Relentless Assault on Masafer Yatta

The herding communities of Masafer Yatta, south of Hebron, were attacked repeatedly throughout the period. On March 5, settlers beat three children — Muhammad al-Adra (13), Ibrahim al-Adra (11), and Hamada al-Adra (14) — in the Rahum Ali area, leading to the hospitalization of all three. Israeli forces then arrested residents who tried to intervene, including a farmer defending his crops.

On March 1, settlers under military escort attacked homes near the Palestinian village of Susya, firing live ammunition and beating residents; four Palestinians were arrested.

In Bani Na’im on February 25, armed settlers from a recently established outpost raided the home of detained citizen Khalil Hamdan al-Manasra, stole thirty sheep, killed another, punctured vehicle tires, and threatened his children at gunpoint.

On February 21, settlers in army uniforms attacked elderly farmer Mifdi Rubi and his son Majd in Atuwani while they worked their land, leaving both with wounds and bruises.

Arson, Agricultural Destruction, and Forced Displacement

On February 20, settlers set fire to eight homes between Rammun and Deir Dibwan east of Ramallah, completely destroying the structures and displacing the families within.

The village of Al-Mughayyir, northeast of Ramallah, was attacked on at least four occasions. On February 21, settlers fired live rounds at citizens’ lands, wounding a young man in the chest and a child in the foot, while others burned an agricultural room in neighboring Abu Fallah. That same day, settlers grazed livestock on Palestinian farmland, vandalizing crops and property. In Kafr Thulth south of Qalqilya on February 25, settlers invaded the Arab Al-Khouli community with livestock and forced a resident off his land at gunpoint.

Harassment of Herders in Tubas and the Jordan Valley

In the northern Jordan Valley on February 22, settlers forced approximately twenty herding families from the Al-Burj and Al-Mayta clusters in Khirbet Samra to abandon their homes and pastures. In Khirbet Yarza east of Tubas, settlers pepper-sprayed a child on March 2 and injured two citizens including an elderly man on March 4, then attacked Red Crescent medics trying to reach the wounded. By March 8, fifteen families in Khirbet Yarza dismantled their homes and evacuated after weeks of sustained attacks. In Al-Aqaba village on March 3, settlers in military uniforms raided homes and threatened residents with expulsion “within days”.

What you can do

These attacks are not spontaneous. They are sustained by a financial infrastructure that channels billions of dollars annually from the United States to settler organizations — much of it tax-deductible under the 501(c)(3) charity system. US taxpayers are subsidizing the very violence documented in this report. Disrupting that pipeline is not abstract solidarity work — it is one of the most concrete, actionable interventions available to people in the United States. Learn how at defundracism.org.

There’s no effective way to start this article. One could narrate the historic animosity of the Islamic Revolution to the US and Israel; its aid to resistance movements throughout the region; and how the fight between the “reformists” and “hardliners” in Iran are centered on Iran’s regional standing. Instead, I turn to a quote from Dr. Fatima Smadi’s Hamas and Iran: From Marj al-Zuhour to the Al-Aqsa Flood regarding the first meetings between the IRGC and Hamas movement leaders during their deportation to South Lebanon’s Marj al-Zuhour in a 1992-1993:

“‘The Iranians,’ [Mujtaba] Abtahi1 says—he keeps a photographic archive from that period—’dealt with educated leadership. The Marj al-Zuhour camp included 20 university professors, more than 60 engineers, and 25 doctors, from different age groups. They saw frankness and boldness in expressing positions, even those that ran contrary to the Iranian view.’

Abtahi, one of the first to arrive at Marj al-Zuhour, was surprised by what the martyr Abdel Aziz al-Rantisi (may God have mercy on him), who headed the media committee in the deportees’ camp, told him: ‘Stay where you are and do not come any closer.’

‘I remember their caution—they believed we were unbelievers and polytheists, and they thought we worshipped Imam Ali; some of them were even unwilling to extend a hand to greet me. But later we formed a bond of brotherhood.’

After the initial meeting between Abtahi and the deportees had been tense, they began competing with one another to host him in their tents.”2

For Arabs and westerners alike, our knowledge of Iran is constrained by propaganda, often sectarian and imperialist in nature. Generalizations, sectarian misconceptions, and simplified understandings of Iran are common worldwide. With regards to anti-Iran stances in that era, years of war between Iran and Iraq - an attritional war fueled by the US and the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) to degrade both countries’ capabilities - contributed to a negative widespread Arab stance against Iran and its leadership. Nevertheless, Iranian support to Hamas and other resistance movements fighting Israel in the region has been largely unwavering, and continued contact between the leadership of Hamas and Iran has nullified the often sectarian misconceptions painted against Iran as seen above. This will be my introduction, serving as a warning against simplified understandings of Iran and its people; a slippery slope I hope to not fall into.

The importance of understanding Iran aside, the post-October 7th period is characterized by Israel realizing that it can not only genocide the Palestinians of Gaza and get away with it; it can wage a war against an entire region. Netanyahu’s allusions to a “super-Sparta” only underscore that Zionism has reached a stage where it deems itself as capable of overturning an entire region by its sheer military power. Previously, Zionism imagined itself as a “super-Athens” of sorts; a regional hub where normalization and hi-tech endeavors with the West and Arab gulf countries would cement its continued existence in the region while slowly eating up Palestinian land and subjecting the Palestinians of Gaza to a blockade and “mowing the lawn” campaigns aimed at degrading the capacity of Palestinian resistance.

US Bases in the Arab Gulf Countries:

In order to understand why Iran is bombing the Arab Gulf countries, we need to link the aforementioned disjointed facts with a little bit of history. Previously, the US used Al-Dhahran air base in Saudi Arabia intermittently and Bahrain hosted the US Navy’s Middle East Force since 1948 – the year of the Nakba and the visit of the USS Rendova in Bahrain, marking the rise of the US as a superpower in the post-WW2 global order. During the visit of the USS Rendova, Bahraini notables rejected a tea party onboard the ship in protest of the US recognizing the Zionist entity. In the contemporary timeline, the Arab Gulf countries have hosted permanent bases for US troops since Operation Desert Storm against Iraq in 1991. Backed by fatwa3 of ulema4 like Ibn al-Bazz and Ibn Uthaymin, the sheikhs of the Gulf reasoned that Saddam’s regime was not a Muslim regime; it was, in fact, a regime marked by infidelity and ruled by a tyrant. Therefore, relying on the US to fight Saddam became religiously acceptable as it was not used against a “brotherly Muslim ruler.”

However, these bases have continued to act as central nodes in the US’s aid to Israel’s genocide in Gaza, and the two aggressions against Iran, comprising the Arab security umbrella of Israel and the US. In a 2017 lecture by Dr. Khaled Odetallah, he describes the history Al-Udeid base, the largest American base located in Qatar, as a central logistics hub and a forward headquarters of the US army’s CENTCOM, tracing it to the legacy of the Invasion of Iraq in 2003; the British use of al-Habanniyeh airbase during the times of the Kingdom of Iraq as a “policing measure” to quell anti-colonial uprisings across the region; and the primitive use of air warfare during Italy’s invasion of Libya in 1910-1911. In this context, the British tradition of treating air warfare as a standard counterinsurgency policing measure became the norm again due to two primary factors: the normalization of death during the genocide of Gaza, and the proliferation of cheap and disposable drone technology during our era.

How did we reach a stage where the Arab political and economic gravity is centered in the GCC countries? The Oil Boom of the 1970s and the eruption of the Lebanese Civil War resulted in Bahrain taking Lebanon’s place as the offshore financial and economic hub of the region as the rise in Gulf capital was recycled into banking and real-estate that created a shared interest between the national bourgeoisie of Arab states and the oil-rent Gulf Arab economies.5 This, of course, is coupled with the reduced standing of Egypt in its post-Camp David period. In the 1990s and the onset of the new millennium, the UAE took Bahrain’s place to this day. This shifted to Gulf countries eventually overtaking large swathes of Egypt’s economic sectors, for example, as Adam Hanieh notes in Lineages of Revolt. Neoliberalism in the Arab region was only possible due to the inflows of Gulf capital and the proliferation of defeat of every sovereign state project. Today, Iranian strikes on GCC countries and US bases assume a dual nature: one prong is aimed at depleting the US military infrastructure in the region, and therefore the US capacity to wage war on Iran, the other works to create political and economic pressure necessary to stop the war as it threatens an entire socio-economic paradigm built by the US and Israel since the collapse of the USSR.

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12 Day War: Revisited

Perhaps one of the most important lessons learned by Iran during its engagement with Israel during the 12 Day War in June of 2025 was the fact that it was not enough, due to a combination of sheer distance; military logistics; and the Israeli/US military infrastructure in the region; to strike deep at the heart of the Zionist entity. Instead, a gradual attrition strategy is required. As such, the targeting of GCC countries and the threats of an energy crisis worldwide underscore the gradual attrition strategy that Iran has learned in the 12 Day War. By targeting US radars, air defenses, and (maybe) GCC energy flows, Iran seeks to destroy an entire regional infrastructure supported by the US since, at the very least, the 1980s when the US strategy shifted to increasingly tie its political soft power and military hard power, and by extension Israel’s interests, to the Gulf in the aftermath of the Islamic Revolution in Iran and the creation of the GCC in response to it.

The global dimensions of this war, by virtue of the positioning of the Gulf as a main energy producer and exporter, is not lost on anyone. As such, the Abraham Accords between Israel and a number of GCC countries were just a formality in the US’s “strategic consensus” strategy adopted after the Islamic Revolution. In addition, prolonged targeting of the GCC risks destroying the center of political and economic gravity acquired by the Arab Gulf countries as both rely on the relative stability of the GCC juxtaposed to the rest of the “chaotic” Arab region.

It is no wonder, then, that the stocks market of Abu Dhabi closed for two days and then re-opened to huge sell-offs in UAE stocks. Crude Oil has suffered as a result of the War on Iran, with prices of barrels reaching upwards of 96 USD per barrel, projected to increase as the IRGC keeps the GCC countries destabilized enough to not produce oil. No amount of release of strategic oil reserves, or media stunts by the Trump Administration, can produce a long-term solution to the rise of oil prices and the ripple effects it will have on the economics of the world.

The longer the War on Iran goes, the more the GCC has to suffer the consequences of it. The entire region is on the cusp of a break with its neoliberal past that centered the Gulf as the heavyweight economic and political powerhouse of the Arab region, conditioned on the prolonging of this war to the point that GCC economies cannot bear it anymore. This has both massive implications and opportunities for the states of the region, especially for the likes of Turkey; Egypt; and Iran, to recalibrate both their domestic and foreign affairs in line with the changing events.

For the GCC countries, their recalibration of their domestic and foreign postures at this event is too late. Based on a strictly self-interest-seeking paradigm, the GCC should have reconsidered their ties with and integration into the US-Israeli economic and military infrastructure sewn on the clothes of the dead children of Gaza, Sudan, Libya, Yemen, and South Lebanon. The Israeli strike on Doha in September of 2025 should have been enough of a wake-up call for this recalibration. However, the allure of rising to become senior partners of US imperialism – on an equal footing with Israel – has blinded the GCC countries to the fact that they will be in Iran’s cross-fire. The window of opportunity for the GCC to maneuver, and perhaps rethink its posture in the region, has now been foreclosed.

Iran’s Strategies

Many people have rightfully noted that Iranian strikes on the Zionist entity have not been at the same intensity as it was during the 12 Day War. There are three plausible scenarios that can explain this in conjunction with the gradual attrition strategy adopted by Iran.

• Scenario A: Striking at the Periphery to Pave the Way for Striking at the Core

Due to the US-Israeli military infrastructure in the region, it would be more advantageous for Iran if it cleared out the periphery of the Zionist entity in order to pave the way for an intensified campaign against it. It would ensure that the US is operationally blinded due to loss of radar equipment; unable to intercept the missiles coming to the entity’s way due to munition shortages and/or destruction of air defense equipment; and strategically unable to protect its assets in the region or Israel. Iran, then, could strike deep within settlements; bombing army bases and centers of economic importance. Hezbollah joining the war against Israel would seek to expend Israeli military resources to their breaking point. In this scenario, Iran would only stop if it guarantees itself a new strategic paradigm vis-a-vis the American-Zionist project in the region – ensuring that no further attacks against it can be waged in the short and medium terms.

• Scenario B: Economic Arm-Twisting

Through the shut-offs of the Strait of Hormuz and the destabilization of the oil-rent economies of the Arab Gulf, Iran seeks to draw the entire world into the war against it, making it bear the full cost of their reluctance, or rather their rejection, to stop the US-Israeli onslaught against it. This would include disrupting energy flows and encouraging capital flight of western investment in the Arab Gulf countries and vice versa – shocking the world into leveraging its powers to put brakes to the US and Israeli aggression with no compromises given by the Iranian state. The GCC countries contribute to 30% of the world oil production, expected to rise to 40% in 2050. That is no small number, and continued disruptions in the supply chains could throw the world into a recession and an energy crisis in conjunction with the aforementioned to-and-fro capital flights.

• Scenario C: Striking at the Periphery to Pave the Way for Striking at the Core + Economic Arm-Twisting

This scenario is fairly simple, as it combines both military pressure and economic instability in order to rein in the US and Israel and establish a new strategic environment conducive to Iran in any post-ceasefire deal. This scenario would ensure that Israel is in no strategic capacity to further act against Iran in the region, limiting its freedom of movement in the region while establishing new rules of engagement between itself and the US in order to prevent another aggression against it. Furthermore, and included in all scenarios, if Iran succeeds and includes Hezbollah in the post-ceasefire arrangements, it would ensure that: (1) South Lebanon is no longer under Israeli occupation; (2) rebuilding efforts in Lebanon would commence in full-swing; (3) Hezbollah’s presence is not threatened by Israel nor the Lebanese government and rival political forces backed by the US.

Uncertain Futures

The scenarios and strategies put forward in this piece are constantly ever-changing to both the tactical and strategic windows of Iran as well as the US-Israel war machine. Events are unfolding by the minute, and it is hard to predict whether any of the three scenarios will happen, or to figure out how the post-ceasefire reality would commence. My hope, then, is to provide the reader with a general knowledge necessary for understanding why Iran is striking the GCC countries with a backdrop of the geopolitical reality as well as the political economy of neoliberalism and war in the region. There’s only one thing to be guaranteed with regards to the future: that it will be vastly different from the present reality we are living today. The continued survival of the Islamic Republic of Iran and the demolition of the US-Israeli military infrastructure would strike a blow to imperialism and its ambitions for the region. Moreover, it would put a dent into the Greater Israel plan as the Zionist entity would not enjoy the freedom of military and political maneuvering it has today, while the old economic and political order of the region would be upended. It is this future that I hope would unfold, as continued US-Israeli dominance would spell the most devastating blow to hopes of liberation in our region.

Reporting period: February 10 – March 12, 2026

From the mass displacement and erasure of Gaza’s population to the nearly 700 Palestinians driven from their homes and lands across nine West Bank communities by zionist paramilitary groups, we are watching the Israeli state tighten its grip on Historic Palestine by emptying it of its people. More than 1,700 Palestinians were displaced by lack-of-permit demolitions in 2025 alone – the highest annual total on record. The first weeks of 2026 show no meaningful decline: the current 30-day daily average stands at 1.3 incidents per day, more than 60% above the all-time average of 0.8, and the rate at which children are displaced has actually increased slightly compared to the past year. The most recent 30-day reporting period shows the material impact of zionism.

Current Trends

Daily averages by period, with trajectory comparison (30-day vs. 365-day):

While incident counts have dipped 13% in the last month compared to the annual rate (likely as a result of the diversion of military resources towards Lebanon and Iran rather than a policy change), the number of people displaced per incident remains elevated. The 30-day displaced average matches the 365-day average exactly, and the child displacement rate has risen 3.8% above the annual average. This means that even as demolitions fluctuate month to month, the current design of demolitions are targeting family homes rather than other infrastructure. In other words, the intent is to drive people from their lands. What is important to remember is that this data is only for East Jerusalem and the West Bank. It doesn’t take into account mass destruction of Gaza and the emptying of Bedouin communities in the Naqab — which, some years, face a higher rate of destruction than Palestinian communities across the West Bank.

The geographic concentration highlights: lands most coveted by the zionist movement for economic development are targeted first. Jerusalem, arguably the crown jewel of zionist projects, has the all-time record of demolitions at 2,092 (42% of the total), followed by Hebron (855), Bethlehem (380), and Nablus (306). In the past 30 days, Jenin has seen a sharp spike — with military operations to demolish homes and structures up over 150% compared to its annual rate — while Hebron’s displacement numbers surged nearly 85% above its yearly average. In Qalqiliya, only one incident was recorded in the past month but it displaced 22 people including 12 children, a figure representing over 300% of its annual monthly average.

Ramadan

On the first day of Ramadan, February 18, Israeli forces demolished a two-building residential complex belonging to the Salhab family in the Al-Harayeq area of Khirbet Qalqas, south of Hebron and adjacent to the Hagai settlement. The complex consisted of a three-story building containing six apartments and a two-story building with four apartments, housing more than 40 people. Muhammad Salhab told the Palestinian news agency WAFA that the family held official land registry documents and had filed a court appeal against the demolition order, both of which were disregarded. Israeli forces used tear gas, stun grenades, and live ammunition to force residents from their homes, and some personal belongings were lost under the rubble.

On March 12, Israeli forces returned to Qalqas and confiscated six tents that had been sheltering the same families since the demolition. According to Salhab, the tents were housing more than 40 people, most of them women and children. The sequence of homes demolished on the first day of Ramadan, then the replacement tents confiscated during Ramadan really illustrates the policy of compounding displacement designed to force families from their land. This isn’t a simple matter of hate, as some would like to frame it, but an economic model that is premised on the dispossession of the indigenous people of their lands and the capture of their resources.

On February 15, Israeli forces and the Civil Administration demolished two structures in Jayyus village, east of Qalqiliya, under the standard pretext of lacking a building permit in Area C. The first structure was a 200-square-meter residential house divided into five units, each with two bedrooms, a kitchen, and a bathroom, serving five families — a total of 22 people, including 12 children. The second was a 30-square-meter livestock shelter belonging to the same families. Both were demolished entirely. A 100-meter surrounding wall was also destroyed.

The affected families had received a stop-work order in August 2015 and initiated legal proceedings with JLAC (the Jerusalem Legal Aid and Human Rights Center), achieving no results. They subsequently retained a private lawyer on February 1, 2026, but ultimately did not successfully obstruct the demolition proceedings. Jayyus has a long history of land confiscation: the village sits along the Separation Wall, which cuts its farmers off from approximately 75% of their agricultural land, according to OCHA. The settlement of Zufin, built on Jayyus land in the late 1980s, continues to expand into confiscated village territory. Jayyus highlights that Israeli courts do not function as a nonviolent option for Palestinian to find redress to injustice, but as a mechanism of violence.

These cases follow the same logic that runs through the aggregate data: Palestinian families build on land they own, are denied Israeli permits they are structurally excluded from obtaining, exhaust legal channels that produce no relief, and are then forcibly displaced. In Qalqas, the additional step of confiscating emergency shelter during Ramadan signals that the objective is not regulatory enforcement but the permanent removal of Palestinian presence from land adjacent to Israeli settlements. The Wall and Settlement Resistance Commission noted that Israeli authorities issued 40 new demolition notices in February 2026 alone, pointing to further displacement in the weeks ahead.

As the genocide in Gaza enters its 876th day, the the broader zionist movement has been working to orchestrate a parallel crises for Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and West Bank along a single logic: the destruction of the material foundations of Palestinian life.

In Gaza, the humanitarian situation has deteriorated sharply following Israel’s closure of all crossings on February 28. The closure immediately halted medical evacuations and raised acute concerns about food and fuel supplies. UNRWA, other UN agencies and the community-led structures trying to sustain life were forced to ration fuel, reduce generator hours in collective shelters, and scale back to life-saving operations only — cutting electricity and water access for displaced populations already living in extreme deprivation. At least one community kitchen in Khan Younis, serving thousands of displaced families through UNRWA’s job creation programme, was forced to shut down entirely due to shortages of food commodities and cooking supplies.

This comes against the backdrop of a total aid blockade that has been in effect since March 2025. UNRWA ran out of food at the end of April 2025 and has been prevented by Israeli authorities from directly bringing any humanitarian assistance — including food — into Gaza for over a year. The agency reports that it has enough food parcels, flour, and shelter supplies pre-positioned outside Gaza for hundreds of thousands of people, but has been blocked from delivering them. Meanwhile, since the start of the ceasefire in October 2025, the Ministry of Health has reported 618 additional Palestinian fatalities from Israeli attacks, and 853 people have sustained war-induced disabilities including amputations, spinal cord injuries, and traumatic brain injuries. Assistive devices, including prosthetics, continue to be classified by Israel as “dual-use” items, severely restricting their entry.

The situation has been compounded by the United States and Israel initiating an open war on Iran beginning February 28, which has placed both Gaza and the West Bank on the back-burner of international attention and advocacy. In the West Bank, movement between governorates has been all but blocked, in-person education — including UNRWA services — have been suspended, and access to Al-Aqsa Mosque during Ramadan has been fully blocked.

The zionist movement has been accelerating their methods of displacement across the West Bank and activating settler cells of violence. The Palestinian Ministry of Agriculture documented some $1.3 million in direct agricultural losses over a single week, the report catalogs a systematic campaign of destruction across West Bank governorates: the uprooting of hundreds of olive, almond, fig, and walnut trees; the bulldozing of cultivated land and irrigation networks; the demolition of agricultural rooms, wells, and animal shelters; the theft and killing of livestock; and the forced grazing of wheat and barley fields by settler herds. In Masafer Yatta, settlers burned 75 sheep and 50 chickens alive. In Tubas, demolition notices were issued to 11 farmers, threatening 40 dunams of greenhouse agriculture. In Nablus, two Palestinians were shot dead by settlers in Qaryut on March 3.

The Ministry links these attacks directly to Israeli cabinet decisions expanding settler authority, accelerating demolition orders, and pushing to legalize outposts — measures designed to fragment Palestinian land, displace agricultural and pastoral communities, and foreclose the possibility of territorial contiguity. Taken together, the two reports reveal a coordinated structure of dispossession operating simultaneously across the occupied territory: starvation through siege in Gaza, and the destruction of agricultural livelihood in the West Bank. In both cases, the target is the same — the capacity of Palestinians to sustain life on their own land.

The activations of settler cells across the West Bank are always in coordination with the Israeli military tearing apart the social fabric of a community. Over the last 30 days, Israeli forces arrested 992 people across the West Bank alone. That is roughly 33 arrests per day, every day, for a month. The operations followed a familiar pattern: raids between midnight and dawn, homes invaded, names and people taken. In Qalqilya on February 6, forces abducted 21 people in a single operation in Azzun, including two Palestinian security personnel. A child, Qais Zidan Skafi, was arrested in Hebron on February 5. In Jerusalem, two Al-Aqsa Mosque guards were taken on February 6.

In order to facilitate these kinds of operations, the Israeli state has redesigned the West Bank into a prison: by closing a few gates and shutting down a few roads, millions of Palestinians are restricted in various ways. Israeli forces set up 238 temporary checkpoints and maintained 50 permanent military ones. Soldiers stopped cars, checked IDs, and held people for hours. The Qalandiya checkpoint between Ramallah and Jerusalem saw tightened procedures on February 5 that backed up traffic throughout the morning. On top of the checkpoints, Israeli forces closed roads 86 times. In Salfit on February 17, every entrance to the city was shut simultaneously — Iskaka bridge, Wadi al-Shaeer road, Khurbet Qais village road, and the hospital road. All of them, at once. Qalqilya’s eastern entrance and surrounding village roads were sealed on March 1. Hebron saw closures at Ras al-Joura, Lifta, Halhul, Bani Naim, Tarkumiya, and the Al-Aroub refugee camp, all on the same day.

In addition to establishing a matrix of control with roads, Israeli forces occupied 32 Palestinian homes during this period, converting them into temporary military posts inside the cities and villages. On March 2, three homes in Ya’bad belonging to Mahmoud Isa Atatrah, Saeed Abu Bakr, and Nazmi Asfour Abu Bakr were seized and used as staging points. The occupations continued the next day. In Hebron, the home of Abu Sa’id Ahmar in Al-Fawar camp was held continuously starting February 28. Families were displaced from their own houses so soldiers could use them as lookout positions.

These numbers describe a system operating at scale. Thirty-three arrests a day. Nearly ten checkpoints set up daily. Roads sealed without warning. Homes taken over and held. The data from this 30-day window does not capture an escalation or a crisis, it merely highlights how the process of violence inherent in zionism works to erase and dispossess the native population.

By Cody O’Rourke and Lara Kilani

On February 18, 2026, Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) announced that from this point on, the moniker “JVP” will be used to describe its 501(c)(4), formerly identified as JVP Action. JVP has become one of the most prominent and well-resourced Palestine solidarity organizations in the United States, tripling its revenue to $11 million during the genocide. As Israel’s genocide in Gaza continues through its third year, the decision to redirect the weight of that brand, and the grassroots credibility built over three decades of organizing, toward a lobbying operation is not a minor administrative change. It is a political declaration.

In order to understand what JVP is committing to with this shift, one has to look at the actual record of the candidates it has endorsed — their votes, their reversals, their silences — and ask whether that record represents a genuine challenge to US support for zionist settler colonialism. What we found is that the politicians which JVP Action has championed have, with few exceptions, operated within a paradigm that undermines, rather than advances, Palestinian liberation: voting to affirm zionism’s right to exist, funding Israeli arms, opposing BDS, and walking back anti-zionist statements under Party pressure. As JVP bets its future on this electoral infrastructure, the question is not whether these candidates are better than their Republican counterparts, but whether calling this work anti-zionist is honest — and what it costs the broader movement when it isn’t. This piece examines what that restructuring actually means and why it matters.

State-sanctioned structures of “solidarity”

Fundamental to any consideration of this new arrangement is the distinction between the two legal categories: 501(c)(3) and 501(c)(4). The original JVP is a 501(c)(3), meaning it is a federally-recognized public charity which is eligible to receive tax-deductible donations. Charities must be founded and operated according to purposes which exempt them from taxes — generally, this means work that serves public interests and benefits communities, including vulnerable people and animals. Importantly, charities also are limited in the extent to which their work can be political — legislative lobbying efforts, for example, cannot make up a “substantial” part of their work. Registered 501(c)(4)s, on the other hand, are social welfare organizations and can engage in unlimited lobbying in service of these efforts. While there are still some limits to the extent of their political and campaigning activities, 501(c)(4)s are generally much freer to participate in political advocacy efforts that influence policy, including issuing campaign endorsements. Donations to 501(c)(4)s are not tax-deductible.

Let’s consult the records

We’ve already written an immediate response following the release of JVP’s statement about “restructuring” here. The critique boils down to one main point: this shift is an effort to move JVP’s primary work into the realm of electoralism in support of the Democratic Party, turning more than thirty years of grassroots organizing into support for institutions animating the very genocide JVP purports to oppose. This decision is not about how to best support the liberation of Palestine or Palestinians.

Immediately, we received one recurring rebuttal: “Well, I’d rather support politicians who will prevent a genocide from happening than have to support genocide survivors.”

We think most people would agree with this common sense approach. We, too, would rather see a genocide be prevented altogether. However, this assertion assumes one thing that deserves reexamination: that the candidates supported or endorsed by JVP Action have, historically, acted in service of Palestinians and against zionist violence.

We can easily test this assumption by looking at the actual, applied positions of the candidates JVP Action endorsed in 2024. When we do, a pattern comes into focus that the organization itself seems not to notice and certainly doesn’t name. On every issue where liberal Democratic politics and anti-colonial frameworks sharply diverge — such as condemning indigenous resistance, funding the military infrastructure that facilitates the annihilation of Palestinians, backing BDS, even choosing between one and two state solutions — these candidates land, almost without exception, on the Democratic Party side of the line. What this produces is not anti-zionism in any meaningful sense, a term with which JVP self-identifies (and places beside the moniker JVP as a matter of practice); rather, it is a liberal mode of zionism dressed in the language of solidarity, one that actively undermines the resistance to colonialism which it claims to support.

Military and Iron Dome funding

The September 2021 vote on $1 billion in supplemental Iron Dome funding (H.R. 5323) works as a precise diagnostic. The bill passed 420-9. Among the JVP Action candidates serving at the time: Tlaib, Omar, Bush, and Pressley voted no. Ocasio-Cortez voted present. Bowman voted yes — the only “Squad” member to fund Iron Dome, explaining it was “important to many people in my district”. Pramila Jayapal, also endorsed by JVP Action, also voted yes.

The pattern was maintained in 2025. Ocasio-Cortez, Jayapal, and Pressley all voted against an amendment that would have cut $500 million in Iron Dome funding. Ocasio-Cortez defended the vote, arguing the amendment “does nothing to cut off offensive aid to Israel“.

This defensive/offensive distinction requires a lot of heavy lifting from liberal zionist conceptions of the reality in Palestine, and its implications are borne out in other proposed legislation which JVP Action has endorsed. The bill H.R. 3565, co-sponsored by JVP, other US-based Palestine aligned NGOs, and politicians including Ocasio-Cortez, Jayapal, Pressley, Ramirez, and others, is titled “To provide for a limitation on the transfer of defense articles and defense services to Israel”. This legislative effort targets specific munition categories: bunker busters, JDAMs, artillery, and white phosphorus. It leaves untouched the F-35s and Apaches that deliver them, the $3.8 billion in annual military financing that purchases them, and the Presidential Drawdown Authority that moves them outside normal legal channels entirely.

When you strip away the rhetoric shaping the bill’s presentation, it actually doesn’t activate “conditions” that stymie material support for genocide. Instead, it’s a bill that adds liberal process to the orchastration of genocide, providing the possibility to override the so-called limit on the transfer of these weapons simply by way of written assurances from Israel. There is no verification mechanism and no penalty for non-compliance in the text of the bill. This is the architecture of the Block the Bombs framework: condition the most visibly brutal weapons while explicitly preserving Israel’s “ability to defend itself” — using the very weapons whose transfer it seeks to limit — so long as the Israeli government can provide adequate written reassurances. It is a humanitarian optics intervention, not a structural challenge to US-Israeli military integration.

This is not an anti-zionist position. In fact, it is almost indistinguishable from J Street’s framework of strategic indigenous subjugation and erasure, which accepts the legitimacy of the Israeli state and its military apparatus while objecting to specific applications of force. The distinction between so-called “offensive” and “defensive” weapons does not come from Palestinian liberation movements. It comes from liberal arms-control discourse that takes the US-Israel military relationship as given, and assumes that Israeli action against Palestinians, Lebanese, Syrians, Iranians, or anyone else, can be read as “defensive”. Endorsing candidates who hold this line while claiming an anti-zionist mandate is not a strategic compromise. Instead, it represents a contradiction that actively reinforces the architecture these candidates claim to oppose.

In contrast, in November 2025, Tlaib introduced H.Res. 876 recognizing the ongoing genocide in Gaza and calling for a complete arms embargo. Though this bill has been endorsed by a number of JVP Action’s candidates, it has not been the primary focus of any organizing campaign. Some of this can be attributed to the differences between resolutions and acts in US Congressional legislation, but the reality is that JVP Action and the larger US-based Palestine solidarity NGO network has coalesced around the Block the Bombs Act framework, which is the undeniably weaker framework in terms of its demands and potential material impact. If there was a political will among these formations to write a bill with the same demands as Tlaib’s resolution, it could have been done — it can still be done.

In other words, the $3.8 billion annual military aid package, which is the core financial architecture of US investment in Israeli settler colonialism, goes unchallenged by any active legislative campaign by JVP, or its candidates. To put it more plainly: disrupting one of the most critical mechanisms sustaining the Israeli state’s capacity for violence against Palestinians is not on the table. When the majority of an organization’s endorsed candidates, as well as the organization’s prioritized legislative campaign operate within these constraints, it cannot be considered an anti-zionist organization. Instead, we have liberal marketing that shrinks the boundaries of permissible dissent within the Democratic Party. Meanwhile, the $3.8 billion in military infrastructure flows uninterrupted.

Walkbacks and accommodations

Jayapal’s reversal on “racist state” is an instructive example. At Netroots Nation in July 2023, she told pro-Palestinian protesters: “We have been fighting to make it clear that Israel is a racist state.” The next day, after 43 House Democrats condemned her for this statement, she walked it back: “I do not believe the idea of Israel as a nation is racist” (a central element of any anti-zionist critique). She then voted for a Republican resolution affirming Israel is “not a racist state”, directly contradicting JVP’s own published analysis. The speed of the reversal reveals something about the structural forces at work. Jayapal did not change her mind about the nature of the Israeli state in 24 hours. She responded to the disciplinary mechanisms of the Democratic Party caucus, which enforce a floor of acceptability that is solidly zionist. This is the political formation in support of which JVP is restructuring, diverting resources from a 501(c)(3) to a 501(c)(4) for this purpose.

BDS, two-state frameworks, and the political boundaries of the permissible

On BDS — considered by many to be the bare minimum of Palestine solidarity — the record among JVP Action endorsed politicians is fractured in ways that expose the lack of any coherent policy. Tlaib and Omar openly support BDS and voted against the 2019 anti-BDS resolution (H.R. 246, passed 398-17). Bush supported BDS in her campaign platform. But Pressley voted for the anti-BDS resolution, explaining that it “affirmed to my constituents raised in the Jewish faith Israel’s right to exist”. Bowman has explicitly stated that he does not support the BDS movement. JVP Action endorsed both of these candidates and used movement resources, raised with the expectation that they would be used to further Palestinian liberation, in order to support their electoral campaigns.

Think about what that means for a moment. BDS is the primary international, nonviolent strategy endorsed by huge swathes of Palestinian society, formally and informally. Formal support is recorded through the construction of the BDS National Committee some two decades ago. While JVP claims to stand against zionism, it endorsed candidates who voted to delegitimize BDS and publicly affirmed “Israel’s right to exist” — a formulation that, within the discourse of Palestinian liberation, concedes the legitimacy of the zionist project itself. This is the foundation of their electoral work up until this moment. The decision to restructure, investing further in the electoral process and lobbying for legislation, will no doubt supercharge these processes.

On this note, it is worth pointing out that just in November 2023, as Israel’s genocidal intentions in Gaza were on full display and ramping up daily, H.R. 888 affirming Israel’s so-called “right to exist”, passed with a roll call vote that provides clear insight into where JVP Action endorsed candidates fall with regard to this question. Of the 2024 JVP Action endorsed candidates in office at the time (all of them) and present for the vote, Rashida Tlaib was the only one not to vote in favor of the resolution — she voted “present”. Cori Bush was marked “not voting”. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, Pramila Jayapal, Ayanna Pressley, Jamaal Bowman, Summer Lee, Ilhan Omar, and Delia Ramirez all voted “yea” on the resolution. This is an explicit, undeniable endorsement of zionism.

The opposition of JVP Action’s candidates to BDS highlights the contradictions between JVP’s rhetoric of accountability and their Palestinian co-organizers’ priorities. JVP’s claim that accountability to Palestinian partners forms “the foundation” of their work deserves scrutiny that the organization itself has never invited. Afterall, accountability is a structural term which implies mechanisms, consequences, and the genuine possibility of being overruled. What JVP describes instead is a process of “deep listening” and “relationship-building”, language that signals deference without enforcing it. If Palestinian-led organizations were materially empowered to hold JVP accountable, the next question becomes: which of those organizations sanctioned the endorsement of candidates who voted to affirm Israel’s right to exist, who publicly opposed BDS, who walked back characterizations of Israel as a racist state within 24 hours of Democratic Party pressure? The BDS call is not a fringe position within Palestinian civil society. Rather, it is the formally adopted, consensus demand of the BDS National Committee.

For JVP to claim accountability to Palestinian partners while directing movement resources toward candidates who have actively delegitimized the most basic, milquetoast call of solidarity is a contradiction its leadership has been asked to explain publicly — and the silence of their alleged Palestinian partners on this point is itself revealing. Either those partners were consulted and agreed, which would demand its own accounting, or the accountability JVP advertises is a rhetorical architecture: language designed to confer legitimacy on decisions already made by a professional class of organizers whose primary operational constraint is not how to develop an anti-colonial praxis, but instead the contours of Democratic Party politics.

What we are willing to accept or tolerate

In a recent piece, “Palestine Solidarity in the Age of Reaction”, Steven Salaita writes: “We foreground the aftermath of liberation by what we are now willing to embrace or tolerate.” This is true of every party we engage with, both friendly and hostile. It means that if we imagine a future of liberation, we will not accept or invest in those who are willing to normalize our ongoing annihilation, or those who would use our struggle cynically, to harm others. In the case of JVP and JVP Action, it means first, understanding what we are tolerating when we allow these organizations to speak on behalf of anti-zionists and in solidarity with Palestinians. Then, it means enforcing our values by disallowing the most fundamental elements of anti-zionist thought and praxis to be cast aside — from BDS to Israel’s “right to exist”. What value is there in solidarity if it works to undermine liberation? What liberation is there in tolerating such treatment from ostensible allies?

While few people might put their faith in US electoralism and lobbying its politicians as the primary vehicle to further Palestinian liberation, the reality is that millions of dollars are being used for this very purpose under the guise of its utility. In fiscal year 2024, JVP’s 501(c)(3) brought in $11,003,649 — more than triple its pre-October 7 revenue — while JVP Action, its weaker 501(c)(4) counterpart, raised $1,069,275 in the same period. The disparity is telling. The money, the membership, the institutional weight — all of it sits in the 501(c)(3). And yet it is the 501(c)(4) that is now being handed the name, the brand, and the political direction. This restructuring is a declaration of where JVP intends to put its future: lobbying politicians and supporting electoral campaigns, regardless of what those politicians have actually done with their votes. Making this decision is one thing, but continuing to endorse and financially support politicians who have expressed their disregard for Palestinian self-determination — or their willingness to concede their own beliefs about Israel’s racist foundations under pressure — is not part of an anti-zionist effort. It is about resource capture, about limiting the demands of politicians and their need to take personal risks, and controlling the political advocacy shaping Palestine solidarity in the United States.

Like it or not, this affects other Palestine solidarity formations in the United States and elsewhere. By supporting legislation that significantly lowers the bar of risk, JVP Action and its partners in the Block the Bombs Act campaign make it less likely that politicians will engage with more meaningful legislative demands. But even for organizations which have co-endorsed JVP-led events, protests, campaigns, and more in the past — even those who disdain aspects of JVP’s wider vision or political trajectory, but value its occasional support — this decision implicates them as well.

Organizations across the Palestine solidarity ecosystem have co-sponsored JVP events, shared platforms, and lent their names to joint campaigns — not to JVP Action, but to JVP. That distinction, already thin on paper, has now been formally, and intentionally, collapsed. The credit those organizations generated (particularly the Palestinian ones), the relationships they built, the credibility they lent — all of it now flows to the JVP lobbying arm, retroactively conscripting their participation into a political project they potentially never (formally) endorsed.

For donors, the problem is also both past and future. Those who gave to JVP did so understanding their money was going toward Palestinian liberation. That framing and identity now belong to a 501(c)(4) whose primary function is electoral — one that carries with it a track record ranging, at best, being ineffectual to, at worst, constituting a form of counter-insurgency.

While the legal distinction between the two entities is real and shapes what each can do legally, this is more than a “structural adjustment”. In practice, this move allows JVP to operate as a single brand. The 501(c)(3) holds the assets; the 501(c)(4) holds the name; but donors, allied organizations, and the broader public do not experience them as separate entities any more than a consumer distinguishes between the subsidiary corporations behind a pair of Nike shoes and the Nike jacket hanging next to them. As they do with corporate models like Nike, they are buying the JVP brand. And as it is with multi-asset corporations, a brand provides synergy: the platform placements, the op-ed slots, the webinar invitations, the coalition letterheads they all work in unison and flow across all the JVP entities. All of these resources and social infrastructure belong and are utilized by the entire JVP ecosystem, not one entity.

It is worth naming this for what it is: a form of liberal praxis that privileges aesthetics over substance. The brand does the work that politics cannot. JVP can position itself as a radical anti-zionist organization, accountable to Palestinians, outside the mainstream… Meanwhile, its institutional infrastructure quietly serves the Democratic Party’s need to contain Palestine solidarity within manageable limits. The Block the Bombs Act made this visible in plain sight. A campaign built on the language of accountability, dressed in the aesthetics of an arms embargo, that left intact every meaningful mechanism of US military support for Israel. It looked like their candidates were applying pressure, but instead, their policy strategy functioned objectively to preserve Israel’s access to essential military infrastructure.

The creation of 501(c)(4)s by US-based Palestine-oriented NGOs is never primarily about Palestinians. It is about building institutional capacity within the Democratic Party — a party whose Palestine policy consensus remains anchored to the colonial designs of the Oslo Accords, selective invocations of international law that carry no enforcement mechanism, and a categorical refusal to accept that colonized people facing annihilation have the right to resist by any means available to them.

Tracing even a partial voting history of JVP endorsed candidates makes the specific stakes undeniable: this restructuring is about cultivating a professional class of “organizers” that function to materially contain and redirect Palestine solidarity. This is about keeping Palestine-related political advocacy manageable and useful to a party that continues to fund and enthusiastically support Palestinian dispossession.

This is neither acceptable nor tolerable. It does not meet the moment, respond to Palestinian needs, or foreground anti-zionism’s most basic principles. As Palestinians in Gaza face siege, famine, and annihilation — as those in the rest of historic Palestine face expanding settler violence and home demolitions, and as refugees in neighboring countries are targeted by bombing campaigns — steering money, energy, and movement infrastructure toward that same party is not a strategic choice. It is a nasty betrayal.

Israeli forces demolished another 2-story home. This is the home to the Issa brothers in al-Khader, ( Bethlehem). No prior demolition notice. Sometimes if the Civil Administration goes to issue a demolition notice, they just drive by and throw it out the window.

In 2009, there were 103 recorded demolitions of homes and infrastructure, which amounts to roughly one every three or four days. By 2024 and 2025, that figure had climbed to around 550 per year, or more than one and a half operations every single day. 2026 is projected to be seven times the amount recorded in 2009. Understandably, the absolute horrors Israel has carried out in Gaza have taken precedent within the news and discourse. Nonetheless, the fact remains that the increasing pace of demolitions have become normalized. Demolitions are not episodic events tied to specific flashpoints — they are now constantly running in the background to advance the process of zionism on the ground in Palestine.

The last 30 days of data from the West Bank and Jerusalem underscores the acute level of destructive violence in the current moment. Over this period, there were 63 demolition operations — a daily average of 2.1, higher than any full-year average on record. More than 330 people were forcibly displaced, with children accounting for nearly half of this population: 167 out of 336. On average, a rate of five children per day are losing their homes, and with it their sense of security and stability — which, of course, is the point.

Projections for 2026 are alarming: At the current pace, this year Israel is on track to execute 691 military operations and administrative demolitions. If this current trajectory holds, this will displace more than 3,300 people and destroy over 2,200 structures. If so, 2026 would surpass 2024, which set the record for displacement in East Jerusalem and the West Bank. 2024 was notable for a spike in people displaced per incident (averaging over 7.7 per operation), which reflected larger-scale raids during a period of heightened Israeli military activity across the West Bank that was overshadowed by the zionist extermination efforts in Gaza and the bombardment of Lebanon and a lesser extent, Syria. The ongoing genocide in Gaza, and the prospects of the US attacks on Iran, continues to bury the mass demolitions in the news.

What’s hardest to convey in a data summary is the cumulative weight of this violence. These aren’t isolated incidents scattered across the last decade. They represent a systematic, ongoing process of displacement, one that has now been running at high intensity for years, with no indication of slowing down. The data, by itself, doesn’t explain why (which is why we need frameworks of analysis and theory). But it does make clear that what is happening on the ground is happening more frequently, affecting more people, and showing no signs of slowing or reversing.

The demolition data does not exist in isolation, but instead, operates as a function of settler-colonialism, imperialism, and capitalism. It runs alongside a parallel set of processes, ones that are less immediately visible but equally consequential. While Palestinian structures are being destroyed at an accelerating rate, settlement construction in the West Bank is being approved at a pace that its architects describe openly as a demographic project. In the first 55 days of 2026 alone, the Israeli Higher Planning Council approved 2,425 new settler housing units. The largest single tranche, 1,388 units, is earmarked for a new neighborhood of the settlement Kdumim (west of Nablus), positioned to draw it physically closer to the settlements of Havat Gilad and grow in ways to support the development of Yitzar and Ariel. The planning process that would once have required a defense minister sign-off at multiple stages was streamlined in 2023, when that requirement was eliminated. The result: 27,941 settlement units were advanced in 2025 alone, an all-time record.

Infrastructure investment follows the same logic. This week, Israeli Finance Minister Smotrich and Transportation Minister Regev broke ground on Road 45, a NIS 400 million bypass road north of Ramallah that will allow settlers to commute into Israel through the Qalandiya underpass — bypassing the checkpoint inspections that Palestinian residents must undergo. Combined with NIS 120 million already spent on the Qalandiya underpass and NIS 160 million being spent on Road 437, the total infrastructure investment in this corridor approaches NIS 680 million.

Read together, these two processes (mass demolition and mass construction) reveal the underlying mechanisms playing out across historical Palestine. In this way, we can see how zionism — a form of settler colonialism — operates not simply through violence but through the active reorganization of space and capital. Palestinian homes are demolished to produce vacancy; settler housing is approved to fill it. Infrastructure subsidies lower the cost of settlements in the West Bank compared to the western settlements in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. This creates an economic force which transfers the population to make facts on the ground permanent in the eastern settlements of Ariel, Efrat and Hebron.

The bureaucratic infrastructure — planning councils, bypass road budgets, weekly approval sessions — functions as capital accumulation by dispossession: business in each of these nodes accrue billions and millions of dollars in security, surveillance, propaganda development, construction and destruction contracts. These processes are sustained by a specific political economy that links Israeli state policy to Western capital and imperial interest. The United States and European governments provide the diplomatic power, the military aid, and the investment frameworks (public and private) that make zionism financially viable at scale for the capitalist class; in return, Israel functions as a forward base for Western power in the region. This is in part why zionist territorial ambitions are tolerated so long as they align with broader strategic goals and operate at the prospects of profit.

The demolition numbers at the top of this document are not a separate phenomenon from the housing approvals and road construction budgets or from US imperialist ambitions — which Israel plays a critical role. The process of demolitions, the mechanism of settlement expansion, help visualize the zionist structures as a key part of Israel as a vassal state: not simply a client, but an active instrument of empire, performing dispossession on behalf of a geopolitical order that benefits from regional fragmentation and the erasure of Palestinian life — except for the cases in which life can be monetized. The demolitions documented in this report are not aberrations or excesses: they are the granular, daily expression of the relationship between zionist settler-colonialism and capitalism.

In the first two weeks of February 2026, the Israeli government approved a set of administrative decisions that amount to the legal scaffolding of annexation. Within the same 30-day window, settler violence in the West Bank doubled. These are not parallel developments. The policy decisions create the material conditions for the violence, and the violence clears the ground for the policy to take effect. This is how zionism perpetuates itself in material terms. Nonetheless, the sequence is worth laying out plainly.

On February 8, the Israeli security cabinet repealed Jordanian-era restrictions on land purchases in the West Bank, eliminated transaction permit requirements, and opened previously classified land registries to the public. A week later, on February 15, the full government allocated NIS 244.1 million to establish a land title settlement process in Area C, under which Palestinian landowners must prove ownership through documentation most do not and cannot possess. Land that goes unclaimed transfers automatically to the Israeli state. Area C is 3.3 million dunams. Roughly 1.9 million remain unregistered. The five-year target is 290,000 dunams. Combined with land already classified as state land, this will dispossess Palestinians from up to 83% of Area C.

Meanwhile, on the ground, settler attacks climbed from 65 incidents in the last week of January to 137 incidents in the first nine days of February. Not a single day in the 30-day reporting period passed without at least one attack. The geographic pattern is specific. Ramallah and Nablus each recorded 28 incidents. Hebron had 26. Tubas and Jericho, which cover much of the Jordan Valley, had 23 and 20 respectively. These are not random distributions. They correspond to the areas where Palestinian agricultural land is most exposed and where Bedouin and farming communities are most vulnerable to displacement.

The tactics follow a logic of accumulation. Settlers graze livestock on Palestinian cropland, destroying harvests. Squatters uproot trees: on January 27, roughly 500 olive, fig, and almond trees were cut down in the Wadi Al-Rakhim area outside Yatta. They burn equipment, like the three bulldozers, two trucks, and five vehicles torched near Awraf village on January 21. Settlers closed roads with earthen berms and stone-throwing, as at Mukmas. The last 30 days have been brutal. 15 Bedouin families in Wadi Al-Auja evacuated because the attacks would not stop. A stolen tractor in Al-Auja at the end of January. Pepper spray inside a family’s home in Yatta this past month. Foreign solidarity activists beaten at a Bedouin gathering near Al-Auja. This sort of violence is only possible when the Israeli state, the broader settler movement, and the armed forces operate in tandem — as they have.

Each of these incidents makes it harder to stay. That is the point. The new land registration process will formalize what the violence has already begun; transferring Palestinian land to the state by making it uninhabitable first.

Israeli abductions and arrests of Palestinians operate on the same axis. The Palestinian Negotiations Affairs Department documented 929 abductions over the 30-day period, averaging 32 per day. The rate rose roughly 40% from the first week to the last, peaking at 54 on February 12. Mass detention raids in the Old City of Hebron, sometimes pulling more than a dozen people at once, were routine. A 15-year-old was arrested in Kfar Numa. Thirteen residents detained in a single night in Bethlehem. Many arrests came through summons to Israeli intelligence offices, a process that functions less as law enforcement than as a system of social control — removing individuals from their communities on a rolling basis, generating compliance through unpredictability and ripping apart the fabric of communities as they use violence and intimidation to try to create collaborators.

Road closures, though smaller in absolute number (28), tripled over the period and served the same function. Iron gates sealed at village entrances. Main roads blocked between communities. Movement restricted in Ramallah, Bethlehem, Salfit. The effect is to fragment Palestinian territorial contiguity, making coordinated resistance to land seizure harder and daily economic life more precarious. The fragmentation of Palestinian lands happens at the macro level — like through colonial logic of international law (the Oslo Accords, the UN partition plans), and the micro level — road closures and the establishment of squatter communities that lay beyond the scope or enforcement of law.

The cabinet decisions from February extend Israeli administrative authority into Areas A and B as well, territory that, according to Oslo, falls under Palestinian civil control. Israeli agencies will now operate there under mandates covering archaeology, heritage, water, and environmental hazards — categories broad enough to justify demolitions anywhere. This is the dream of the settler organization Regavim and the broader zionist movement. Within this same legal arrangement, in Hebron the Palestinian municipality is losing its planning authority around the Ibrahimi Mosque. A new Israeli body will govern the Rachel’s Tomb area in Bethlehem as well, putting the already embattled Aida camp in an even more precarious position.

What is happening is a settler-colonial process operating through two channels simultaneously. The legal channel converts Palestinian land into state property through registration mechanisms designed to dispossess — essentially just building off the existing Ottoman and British systems that were in place before zionist administration. The extralegal channel — settler violence, backed by Israeli military infrastructure and arrest operations — by design drives Palestinians off the land before the paperwork arrives. Neither channel functions without the other. The policy needs the violence to empty the land. The violence needs the policy to make the seizure permanent. This is the cyclical nature of zionism.

The NIS 244.1 million budget line is what makes this different from prior escalations. It is not a declaration or a statement of intent. It is an operational expenditure, staffed by a new administration housed in the Israeli Ministry of Justice, designed to process land claims at industrial scale. This will no doubt be facilitated by the many “charities” like the Jewish National Fund and Regavim. The violence documented in Palestinians is what that process looks like before it reaches the Israeli registrar’s office.

About a month ago, I went to Dar Al-Kalima, a university in Bethlehem, to watch The Voice of Hind Rajab (2025) with a good friend of mine.

Dar Al-Kalima showed the film as part of a larger series, one of many film screenings taking place in the city of Bethlehem itself and across Palestine. In the last year alone, several prominent films about Palestine have been released with the backing of internationally-recognized actors and producers, including Hind Rajab, Palestine 36, and a third film, All That’s Left of You. While I haven’t yet seen the other two, unlike many other films about Palestine that have enjoyed relative prominence, these films have not been produced with the same burden as some others whose stories are mediated by the colonizer’s gaze (Five Broken Cameras, No Other Land). This makes a difference: Palestinians are not shown as primarily victims, and their colonizers do not need to be portrayed as redeemable. In fact, they do not need to be portrayed at all, and in Hind Rajab, uniquely, they are not. Palestinians themselves — with a Tunisian director, in the case of Hind Rajab — are able to represent themselves, their lives, culture, and reality according to their own experiences and perspectives.

We streamed into the university’s movie theater, greeting friends as we settled in, tissues at the ready (literally). Certainly everyone in the audience already knew the story of Hind Rajab, a five year old Palestinian child, fleeing Tel al-Hawa in Gaza City with family members according to the orders of invading Israeli forces. She was left trapped in a car after these same forces killed the family members in the vehicle with her, and eventually was murdered by them herself alongside the emergency responders who came to rescue her. Anyone who was following the news at the time — late January 2024 — will remember seeing the Palestinian Red Crescent Society’s appeals online for international support and intervention, the subsequent release of some of the gut wrenching audio between Hind and the PCRS, and the news, twelve days later, that both Hind and her rescuers had been found dead, having been knowingly targeted and murdered.

After I saw this movie, I felt the need to say something about it. I’m not a stranger to watching films or docudramas about devastating things that have already happened, but for me this film evoked an answer to a question I have wondered about with regard to these types of films: who writes a movie about an event so many people already know of? Maybe it’s obvious, but: someone who is invested in how the story will be told. Whereas in many cases this investment may feel cynical, Hind Rajab unfolds with a deep sense of truth, revealed in greater profundity as the story develops. This deep investment in how the story is told — not just in the story of Hind’s murder and the efforts to prevent it, but the enactment of Israel’s genocide in Gaza — is reflected in so many aspects of this film, not least among them the use of Hind’s actual voice, the procurement of her mother’s support for the film, the writing, and of course the acting by an all-Palestinian cast.

Set in the interior of the PCRS’ Ramallah offices, from the outset the film introduces the interconnectedness of Palestinians, despite geographical fragmentation by zionist colonization. Calls have been transferred here as they could no longer be handled by the Gaza branch; now, Palestinians in Ramallah — what feels like a world away from Gaza though it is less than 100 kilometers — are responsible for coordinating emergency responses and facilitating rescues in the midst of a genocide.

This is no small responsibility, and the tension which it produces begins to percolate almost immediately between two of the central characters, based on real people. Omar Alqam (played by Moataz Malhees) is a dispatcher who receives a call from Hind’s cousin, Hamadeh, before she is killed, and Mahdi Aljamal (Amer Hlehel) is the office’s operations manager. Alqam is portrayed as reacting as many of us might do, desperately (and sometimes violently) seeking intervention to facilitate the rescue of this small child after having personally borne witness to her cousin’s murder over the phone. Aljamal, the manager, insists on doing things according to procedure, drawing both Alqam’s and the audience’s attention to the memorial on his office wall for the many Palestinian emergency responders murdered in the four months of the genocide alone. This procedure requires coordination, through the International Committee of the Red Cross, with Israel’s military apparatus — a long and painful process with an unknown outcome, but bolstered by the intervention of an international body and the promise of protection it is meant to provide emergency responders.

It is this procedure that frames the trajectory of much of the movie, alongside excerpts from Hind’s phone calls with the PCRS staff over several hours. As the two men argue over the correct course of action and the long process of coordination begins, they are joined by two co-workers, dispatcher Rana Hassan Faqih (Saja Kilani) and mental health and psychosocial support worker Nisreen Jeries Qawas (Clara Khouri), who take up the task of maintaining contact with Hind and supporting her emotionally. This emotional support is not fictitious — the film cuts in audio from Faqih’s prayer recitation with Hind in an attempt to keep her calm as she is surrounded by the bodies of her murdered family, as well as invading soldiers, tanks, and guns outside the car. At some point, as a desperately frustrated Alqam suggests that Aljamal can pass a message to the Israeli military to rescue Hind themselves and use this as an opportunity to further their propaganda campaign, the film reveals a simple truth about the depth of zionist cruelty: between their close physical presence, heat sensors, audio capturing capabilities, and surveillance technology, there is no way the Israeli soldiers do not already know that Hind is there, hiding in the car, and has been there for hours.

With no exaggeration, this film reveals an important truth of Palestinian existence in Palestine (whether in Gaza, the West Bank, Jerusalem, or lands captured in 1948): life and death are shaped by the violence of zionist bureaucracy and its absurdity. Clinging to the logic of procedure for the sake of northern Gaza’s rescue team and Hind Rajab, the operations manager insists on doing things by the book — and the audience can see that he is not necessarily wrong. In a genocide, there will be more people to rescue, even more little children like Hind; a failure to coordinate may result in no future coordination at all as punishment; perhaps most palpably, he does not want to see another rescue team (the last team in northern Gaza) murdered. Aljamal stoically sticks to this decision, though he uses his own tactics to try to speed the process along — among them, the social media posts about Hind’s emergency, and calls to influential contacts.

The procedure eventually comes to an end, and the approval for the emergency responders to travel to Hind is received. Despite this, emergency responders Yousef Zeino and Ahmed Al-Madhoun are killed by Israeli forces only a few feet away from the car in which Hind is waiting, and their ambulance destroyed. Following the procedures did not save anyone.

As anyone who has studied or experienced Israeli colonial bureaucracy will know, the procedures are not constructed to save Palestinian lives. Rather, Israeli military bureaucracy is created to make things as difficult as possible for Palestinians to continue to live on their lands, and the policies constructed to administer (read: strangle) Gaza are no exception. One only needs to remember the list of “dual use” items effectively banned by Israel from entering Gaza long before October 2023, a collection that included incubators, ventilators, defibrillators, and thermometers. Likewise, Israel’s siege on Gaza and its procedures for the acquisition of medical exit permits has caused the death of children and adults who were denied the permits outright or still in the process of awaiting them, also before 2023.

Following the procedures also fails because the logic of zionism and its state forces is genocidal; there will be no consequences for the soldiers murdering healthcare workers from their superiors. There is something in this level of cruelty that Hind Rajab captures so eloquently, without heavy handedness: Israel is killing Palestinians for the sake of it, from little girls waiting to be rescued from among corpses to their rescuers who received approval from inside the very regime animating the actions of the soldiers who kill them. No amount of procedure, of appeals to international law or even self-interest, can wrest these genocidaires into a sense of humanity with regard to Palestinians.

When the film ended at the Dar Al-Kalima screening, there was not a dry eye in the house. Everyone who came, already knowing the story, was left with a new question: how do we actually care for one another in the midst of such violence and inhumanity — such an upheaval of such basic values and morals? This is not hypothetical for any of us alive in the world today. Facing incredible depths of genocidal depravity, we are all faced with a choice: will we turn toward our community and offer generosity, love, commitment, and compassion at the cost of personal sacrifice, or give in to the heavy pressure by colonial and imperial forces to be dismembered, internally divided and further fragmented in a desperate bid for false guarantees of individual security? As is often the case, people in very desperate situations can have the most wisdom to offer — Palestinians in the midst of famine in Gaza found ways to share meager resources from the earliest days of the genocide, from coffee to food to knowledge and moments of joy through music. These are not small things; giving under conditions of insecurity, when you have little and don’t know when more might come, is both an act of personal sacrifice and investment in the collective.

During the post-film reflection, everyone expressed the importance of the film, but one woman noted the urgency with which it spoke: how many Palestinian children have been murdered with impunity since the start of the genocide, since the start of zionist colonization? How many more murders, like that of Hind Rajab, will we allow there to be? And what are we willing to do to prevent this from happening again?

The answers to these questions cannot be made abstract. Palestinian ambulance crews and healthcare workers are still putting their lives in danger to rescue others. Like the mental health and psychosocial support worker in the film, Qawas, caretakers are still doing what they can to protect their loved ones and communities from facing the depth of manufactured trauma without protection as they themselves face the same traumas; they, too, need support to be able to continue with this effort. What are the rest of us willing to sacrifice to see the end of zionist colonization and the global scourge of imperialism which entrenches it? With the urgency for real action only escalating, and encouragement from the success of organizations like Palestine Action (both in beating their designation and their resonance among regular people in their juries), this is a time to come up with our answers and act on them.

Like many of the conversations around resistance and Palestine today, the film raises more questions than it answers. Whether we’ve found ourselves most sympathetic to the position of Alqam or Aljamal, we have seen the outcome of following procedures. We’re left to wonder whether Alqam’s early insistence on setting procedure aside and letting the ambulances travel to Hind from the beginning, without coordination, could have led to a different ending; at the same time, the shortcomings of this approach as a long term strategy are apparent. If we consider the coordination procedures as symbolic of the violent systems shaping our lives in Palestine and internationally, what is the logical approach to dealing with a system whose function is not to save lives but to facilitate slaughter (despite bureaucratic trappings of order, legitimacy, and international complicity)? Is it actually practical to continue to operate within that system’s procedures? And if not, what are the feasible alternatives? How can we operate outside of it without falling into another trap? Knowing that these questions are all connected to choices about how we care for ourselves and each other, it is not just that we must find new ways forward — essentially, they must be strategies with a chance of success.

The Voice of Hind Rajab renewed some of my faith in the ways in which we can collectively tell our own stories, our own histories, in our own voices, for the sake of preserving important histories. But it is not just about archiving stories from a genocide; agency lives in the current moment, and we shape history and the way it will be told with the actions we take today. Hind Rajab reminds us of the urgency of this action and beyond, as we confront unimaginable cruelty and depravity.

Price Overview

As of January 2026, the most recent data available from the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics (PCBS), commodity prices across Gaza have risen by an average of 216% since October 7, 2023, across the 42 goods tracked. The median rise is 116%. Fresh produce and protein took the worst of it. Bell peppers cost 394% more than before the war. Cucumbers are up 331%. Veal has risen 165%, lamb 138%, lemons 164%. Flour, rice, bread, and cooking oil have actually fallen below their pre-war prices, down an average of 21%, but that is a handful of items against dozens that have doubled or worse. A lot of families were already unable to afford these goods at their pre-war prices. At current levels, the market functions for almost no one.

The comparison to prices elsewhere makes the scale clearer. Apples in Gaza cost 2.8 times the EU average. Rice and onions are both double the price of the EU average.. Some cheese products sell at nearly twice the US price. Some items have dropped below international averages since the ceasefire, but the population has no employment and no functioning economy. Even reduced prices are out of reach. People skip meals or they eat less, and the data illustrates that this is by design.

Costs of travel

Gasoline has gone up 1,176% in price since October 2023. It was 6.79 ILS per liter. Now it is 86.67 ILS for the same amount. Diesel is up 405%, from 6.49 to 32.80 ILS. A 12-kilogram gas cylinder, the kind most households use for cooking, went from 71.25 to 554.46 ILS. That is a 678% increase. A bottle of mineral water has doubled. Reading the PCBS statistics paints a grim picture of people entrapped.

Passenger travel from northern Gaza to the center costs 10 ILS per trip now, up from 4 ILS before the war. North to south travel is 18 ILS, up from 8 for shared transport. On paper these look like small numbers, but families who were forced from their homes and have no income cannot afford these fares. They cannot travel back to check on their property. They cannot begin to rebuild. The fuel and transport prices keep them where they were displaced. At 554.46 ILS for a gas cylinder, cooking fuel alone costs more than most families bring in during a week, so communities rely on shared cooking infrastructure and supplies, which families might not have access to if they return to their homes. As a result, they remain where they are and wait for aid because there is no better option. Movement costs money. Staying put may be less costly, in a sense. The manufactured pricing does the work of a checkpoint without requiring a single soldier.

But when prices aren’t enough, controlling the population by use of force is just as readily deployed. Since the ceasefire took effect, Israeli forces have killed 574 Palestinians and injured 1,518 others in Gaza, according to a February 6 report by the Ministry of Health. In the last weekly reporting period alone, 82 Palestinians were killed and 162 wounded. This means that when prices aren’t restricting movement, US-supplied munitions and Israeli soldiers are enacting waves of violence to ensure population control.

Prices since the so-called “ceasefire”

Since the ceasefire in October 2025, 38 of 46 tracked commodities have fallen in price, by an average of 56%. The median decline is 51%. Eggs dropped 96%, from 600 ILS to 24 ILS. The price of chicken fell 77%. Potatoes fell by 77%, and onions fell by 85%. Gasoline went from 250 ILS per liter to 86.67, a 65% decline. Passenger travel from north to center dropped from 100 ILS to 10 ILS.

Eight commodities still rose. Gas cylinders went up another 19%. Biscuits doubled. Cigarettes jumped 63% to 138%. Baby milk powder rose 50%. Despite this, the overall direction is clear: once goods started crossing the border in volume, prices collapsed. That is the strongest evidence of what drove them up in the first place.

The month-to-month numbers tell the same story: between December 2025 and January 2026, rice nearly doubled from 3.27 to 6.27 ILS per kilogram. Bread went up 20%. But eggs continued to fall, and flour dropped another 34%. Prices spike when crossings close or when goods are blocked from entering, and drop when aid is allowed to enter the besieged Strip. The supply of food into Gaza is controlled at the border, by Israeli state forces, and prices inside correspond to what is allowed through. When you control what enters, you control what things cost.

Control of Aid

In the last 30 days, 34,706 metric tons of aid arrived at Gaza crossings on 2,354 trucks. That is 1,335 metric tons per day. No interceptions were recorded, which is an improvement over the 0.9% interception rate across the full post-ceasefire period. Israel controls the aid.

Since the ceasefire began on October 10, 2025, total deliveries have reached 207,964 metric tons on 15,593 trucks. Still, the daily rate is falling. The post-ceasefire average was 1,733 metric tons per day; over the last 30 days it has dropped to 1,335. Food deliveries fell 27%, from 1,408 to 1,020 metric tons per day. Sheltering materials rose 15%.

Food makes up 76% of what comes in. Sheltering materials is 10.7%, water and sanitation 4.7%, health supplies 2.5%. No solid fuel was allowed to enter Gaza in the last 30 days. Zero. Gas cylinder prices inside Gaza are up nearly sevenfold, and nothing is arriving through aid channels to offset that. Families either pay black-market rates for cooking fuel or they go without.

Aid is still getting through, but less of it, and in fewer categories. Education materials have dropped 75% compared to the post-ceasefire average. If daily volumes keep falling, the modest price relief on some staples will not hold. The aid pipeline and the commodity market are the same system. What crosses the border sets the price. What does not cross the border sets it higher.

The data leaves little room for interpretation. When crossings open, prices fall. When they close, prices spike. Eggs that cost 600 ILS under blockade dropped to 24 ILS once aid flowed. Gasoline that hit 250 ILS per liter fell to 87 when trucks were allowed through. The market is not broken — it is controlled. Every commodity price in Gaza is a direct function of what Israel permits to cross the border, and the sustained collapse of purchasing power across the Strip is not a byproduct of war, it is a policy outcome. Families cannot move, cannot cook, cannot feed their children at these prices — and that is precisely the point. The ceasefire proved what drives the crisis: not scarcity, but obstruction. As aid volumes now decline again, the question is not whether prices will rise, but whether the international community will continue to watch a population be starved by a couple of zionists working a spreadsheet.

This piece was written by Cody O’Rourke and Ameed Faleh

Omar Shakir’s resignation from Human Rights Watch made headlines. Jewish Currents, where Shakir serves on the advisory board, published the most detailed account — a narrative of principled dissent against cowardly leadership. But the story being told about his departure is doing more work than it appears. It locates the crisis at HRW in the decisions of specific executives — Philippe Bolopion, Bruno Stagno Ugarte, Tom Porteous — rather than in the institutional architecture that produced those decisions. It rehabilitates HRW, by implication: if the problem is that good people left, then the solution is to get good people back in, rather than asking whether the institution can be reformed at all. And it avoids the financial ecosystem entirely — the board composition, the donor networks, the overlapping funding streams that connect HRW, Jewish Currents, and the broader liberal solidarity landscape.

Palestinian civil society was already here. In August 2024, over twenty Palestinian organizations called on people of conscience worldwide to reconsider their relations with HRW after its October 7th report — a report published while Shakir still led the Israel-Palestine team. In the words of the BDS National Committee’s assessment, HRW “chose to abstract the actions of the oppressed from the context of oppression in the service of Israel’s colonial domination.” The suppression of the right of return report confirmed the pattern. It didn’t create it.

This piece attempts something different. Rather than retelling the story of who blocked what report and when, we examine the organizational leadership, financial connections, and institutional incentives that make these outcomes predictable. The question isn’t whether HRW failed Omar Shakir. It’s what HRW’s structure tells solidarity movements about how to interface with human rights organizations embedded in the political economy of neoliberalism, and whether the liberal human rights industry, as currently constituted, is capable of serving Palestinian liberation at all.

Human Rights Watch did not begin as a universal human rights monitor. It began in 1978 as Helsinki Watch, founded by Robert Bernstein, a zionist, and Aryeh Neier, with the explicit purpose of monitoring compliance by the Soviet bloc with the 1975 Helsinki Accords. It was an anti-communist project, tracking “abuses” in the USSR, Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Romania while working alongside dissident groups like the Moscow Helsinki Group and Charter 77. It would make sense that the direction of HRW would be steered by former NATO commanders, CIA analysts, State Department officials who defended rendition, and corporate lobbyists for mining and banking giants — the architects and enablers of the very abuses a human rights organization should be confronting.

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Americas Watch was created in 1981, ostensibly to demonstrate that the organization’s gaze extended beyond the Soviet bloc. But the timing is instructive. The US was then waging covert wars against leftist movements across Central America — backing death squads in El Salvador; funding the Contras in Nicaragua; supporting a genocidal counterinsurgency in Guatemala — all in defense of its long-standing treatment of Latin America as a sphere of unchallenged dominance. In Guatemala alone, the army and its paramilitary units systematically attacked over 600 villages under General Ríos Montt, whom Reagan praised as “a man of great personal integrity” even as declassified cables confirmed US knowledge of the massacres. It expanded the organization’s geographic scope without disturbing its ideological orientation. Africa Watch and Asia Watch followed, and by 1988, the components had merged into what is now Human Rights Watch - an institution that had grown outward from Cold War anti-communism and zionist institutional leadership, acquiring regional coverage like a portfolio acquiring assets, without ever confronting the foundational politics that shaped it.

Venture Capitalists, Luxury Brand Consultants & Tech Bros

The organization’s board of directors comprises members from the financial, legal, and media sectors: founding partners of venture capital firms, managing directors of art galleries, luxury brand consultants, co-founders of private equity firms, international lawyers, and retired U.S. ambassadors.

For example, HRW’s board member David Lakhdhir spent over 30 years as a partner at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, a firm that has represented Israeli corporations, including the wholly state-owned Israel Aerospace Industries. One of those firms, Davis Polk, rescinded the job offers of students who supported anti-genocide protests. Lakhdhir’s firm made significant donations to relief efforts in Israel after October 7th. This is the professional home of the man who co-chairs the board deciding whether HRW publishes reports critical of Israel.

Board member Bijan Sabet co-founded Spark Capital, a venture capital firm managing over $12 billion. Spark’s portfolio includes Cybereason, an Israeli cybersecurity firm co-founded by Lior Div, a veteran of the Israeli Unit 8200, Israel’s signals intelligence unit. Sabet’s Spark also invested in Deel, Capitolis, and eToro, invested in Israeli infrastructure, rather, which creates an obvious conflict of interest — given the global calls to boycott companies benefiting from zionism.

HRW’s board member, Louisa Lee-Reizes, is literally a consultant who helps private equity firms acquire luxury brands — advising capital on how to buy and profit from luxury goods — while sitting on the board of an organization that’s supposed to hold governments and politicians accountable. The luxury industry is also notorious for supply chain human rights abuses of child labor in mining, exploitative garment work, etc.

HRW’s John Studzinski is Vice Chairman of PIMCO, which has purchased nearly $1 billion in Israeli government bonds since October 2023. It is remarkable that an organization whose leadership personally profits from Israeli debt would presume to issue reports on the very violence those investments help finance, or that those who author these reports don’t understand the structural contradiction of the board.

In 2014, over one hundred scholars wrote an open letter calling on HRW to close its “revolving door” with the U.S. government, citing cases like Tom Malinowski’s move from HRW’s Washington advocacy director to Assistant Secretary of State, a former CIA analyst sitting on an HRW advisory committee, and board members with backgrounds in the Nixon White House. NYU historian Greg Grandin called HRW “Washington’s adjunct” in an analysis that documented how the organization’s positions on Latin America tracked predictably with U.S-Western Imperialist interests.

What the Money Says

Given the ideological makeup of the board, it is unsurprising that institutions financing HRW are the same ones that animate the neocolonial features of Western philanthropy. In 2010, the Open Society Foundations pledged $100 million to HRW over ten years. At the time, HRW’s annual budget was around $48 million. A single donor supplying roughly 20 percent of the organization’s revenue over a decade creates structural dependence, whether or not anyone makes explicit demands. The broader donor base tells a similar story. HRW’s funding comes from major US institutions: Ford Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, among others.

There is also the Saudi fundraising scandal. In 2009, Sarah Leah Whitson, then HRW’s Middle East and North Africa director, led a fundraising trip to Saudi Arabia. After the scandal broke, they officially stated that “Human Rights Watch takes no government money of any kind”. The Intercept later conducted its own investigation, documenting Saudi investments in HRW.

In 2012, HRW Executive Director Kenneth Roth solicited and accepted a $470,000 donation from Saudi billionaire Mohamed Bin Issa Al Jaber. HRW’s own researchers had documented serious labor abuses at Jadawel International, a construction company Al Jaber owned: workers had their passports confiscated, residency permits withheld, and wages unpaid for months. Second, the donation came with a condition that the funds couldn’t be used for LGBT rights work in the Middle East and North Africa.

These structural contradictions and inherent conflict of interests between so-called human rights and their institutional financing begin to illuminate why HRW spent decades avoiding the word “apartheid” in connection with Israel. When it finally published its 2021 report using that term, the decision came years after smaller organizations such as Al-Haq and even liberal zionist groups, B’Tselem, had already made the case, and after the political cost of saying so had dropped considerably. HRW did not lead on that question. Rather, it followed, once the ground felt safe enough.

What Jewish Currents Leaves Out

Alex Kane’s Jewish Currents interview with Omar Shakir was intended as an exposé of Human Rights Watch leadership. But in many ways, the piece does more to entrench the reality of HRW’s affiliation with zionist and liberal zionist formations than to challenge it. The article discloses that: “Shakir is a member of Jewish Currents’ advisory board” while detailing the reason for both Omar Shakir and Milena Ansari’s resignations from HRW, citing HRW taking an unpublished report regarding the denial of the right of return for Palestinian refugees “back to the drawing board,” effectively trying to meddle in the report’s contents. The article leaves the reader with the impression that Shakir took an unprecedented, principled stand on behalf of the Palestinian people.

Let us be clear: What Shakir and Ansari did is the minimum ethical requirement. What the article doesn’t explain is how the relationship between Shakir and HRW at large shapes the framing of the entire piece, which reads as Shakir’s account of events, with his interpretation as the organizing spine of the narrative. The Jewish Current piece never asks whether Shakir’s decade at HRW itself requires scrutiny. The piece is structured to present his resignation as a principled stand, not as a belated exit from an institution which, as Palestinians have been explaining for years, is structurally compromised. This is not an innocent mistake, nor the result of simple happenstance: Jewish Currents has an institutional interest to protect Shakir’s reputation, as he is a member of their advisory board. If Kane had written the piece to critically examine his years at HRW as a form of liberal complicity, it would reflect badly on his Jewish Currents advisory board. As such, the martyr framing accepted by the Jewish Currents editorial staff becomes convenient: it boosts Jewish Currents while protecting Shakir from accountability.

The piece identifies specific decision-makers as the problem — Bolopion, Stagno, Porteous, Borello — while treating HRW’s institutional architecture as basically sound until these individuals intervened:

“[Stagno] further said he worried that the findings ‘will be misread by many, our detractors first and foremost, as a call to demographically extinguish the Jewishness of the Israeli state.’”

The article presents the problem in liberal terms, as the problem of an individual through Stagno’s personal anxiety and cowardly decision-making, rather than being structural. This result is not a matter of personal anxiety, but rather the predictable output of an institution whose board, donors, and advocacy relationships are embedded in a political ecosystem that treats Jewish demographic supremacy as a legitimate interest to be “managed” rather than a feature of settler-colonialism, apartheid and zionism. Who sits on HRW’s board? Who funds them? What are the overlapping donor networks between HRW, Jewish Currents, and the broader liberal zionist ecosystem? Kane doesn’t ask and doesn’t divulge.

Shakir has worked at HRW for nearly a decade. Perhaps Shakir’s most “memorable” moment to many Palestinians is when HRW published the Al-Ahli Hospital report that, as the BDS National Committee documented in a statement, concluded “without any evidence that a Palestinian-fired rocket was responsible for the killings.” In addition, the report was rightly criticized by a large coalition of Palestinian organizations in an open letter published in Mondoweiss, which rightfully pointe out “HRW is choosing to spread unfounded theories. Given the lack of evidence, this can only be seen as supporting Israeli propaganda and justification for the ongoing genocide.” Palestinian scholars argued that HRW and Shakir were “putting Palestinian lives at risk”. Furthermore, HRW failed for over nine months to produce a coherent report naming Israel’s assault on Gaza as genocide, as many other scholars and organizations did. The Community Action Center - Al Quds University, Palestinian trade unions and over 20 Palestinian organizations called on Palestinians to “reconsider their relations with HRW, including by refraining from cooperation with it.”

Going back to the article, Shakir notes that:

“The job has involved attacks and pressure campaigns. But what kept me in the organization for so long was its absolute commitment to the facts and the law.”

This is revealing. Shakir stayed because he believed the institution was effective. He is saying the system was fine until it broke — on his report, on his watch. But Palestinians were telling him, and the world, that HRW’s “commitment to facts and the law” was already compromised. The Al-Ahli report. The October 7th report. The refusal to name genocide.

Kane’s framing is perhaps most visible in how he handles Palestinian voices. He includes a quote from Ubai Aboudi — “Palestinian civil society organizations and human rights organizations did not participate [in the boycott of HRW] because we believed that Human Rights Watch had integrity” — but treats it as a coda rather than an opening. He doesn’t ask the obvious follow-up: why were Palestinians already debating a boycott of HRW in 2024? What was the substance of the BNC’s critique? He just leaves Aboudi’s trust hanging in the air, unexamined — which may be the point.

After all, the August 2024 Palestinian civil society statement didn’t just object to one report by HRW, it fundamentally omits the settler-colonial structure of the violence: “It seems HRW not only ignores Israel’s settler-colonial reality and the oppressor-oppressed relationship of power and resistance; it also values every civilian Israeli life 200 times more than any civilian Palestinian life.”

The February 2026 BNC statement goes even further: “Excluding Palestinians from the applicability of universal rights constitutes anti-Palestinian racism. And it is not the first time for HRW.” Kane cites none of this. The Palestinian structural critique — that HRW’s problems stem from colonial epistemology, institutional racism, and the political economy of liberal human rights organizations — is absent from the piece. Instead, we get a story about a good man who tried his best inside a system that let him down.

Taken together, HRW’s origins, its board composition, and its funding sources reinforce a clear conclusion: Shakir was not a man of principle failed by a system larger than himself. He was a willing participant in HRW’s efforts to obfuscate the reality of genocide in Palestine. As such, the “heroism” granted to Shakir is, at best, confusing to those who know the relationship of HRW to its funding sources and to its history of tackling Palestine.

Some may ask about the point of this article at a time when zionists are applauding HRW and Shakir’s separation. This is a valid question, and it primarily stems from the notion that we are “hurting our allies” — cutting off our noses to spite our faces. But a cursory look at HRW’s actions before Shakir’s resignation reveals an organization that served as an observer to Palestinian suffering and a collaborator for the claims fanning zionist genocide in Gaza. This article is not interested in rehabilitating HRW or arbitrating Shakir’s intentions. It is interested in a simple question: can organizations structurally tied to zionism — through their boards, their donors, and their institutional DNA — serve Palestinian liberation and anti-colonial praxis? The evidence says no. Palestinian suffering does not need better-positioned advocates within the liberal human rights industry. It requires dismantling that industry’s complicity.