For Palestinians, the whole world is occupied by zionists
From a culture of white supremacy to the protection of US empire, Palestinians in exile are regularly confronted by the violence of zionism.
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.
Mohammed El Kurd covers this topic much more eloquently and deeply in Perfect Victims: And The Politics of Appeal.
Mohamed El Kurd is a Zionist normalizer.