10 articles
Under the Netanyahu government, Israel has aligned itself with an autocratic international whose goal is to transform sovereignty into state impunity. The war on Gaza inaugurates a global era in which consensus itself has lost legitimacy.
‘Since leaving Khan Younis, I have not felt whole. The knowledge that complete healing will never come has become something I carry with me always, like a part of my body, like an extra limb.’ A Gazan writer on her experience of multiple displacement, written in March 2025.
What happens when societies become desensitized to violence? Does humanity collapse under the weight of repeatedly inflicted cruelty, witnessed as routine, forcing endurance on women, the poor and others excluded from citizenship, as in Gaza? Or does resistance rest in the gestation of fragmented, suspended lives, the martyred dead and movements like ‘Woman, Life Freedom’?
Political failures since 7 October 2023 have had deep repercussions for Jews in liberal democracies. Not only are they divided over the Jewish state, they also feel alienated from societies in which antisemitism is regularly disguised as anti-Zionism, and in which the far-right has become Israel’s greatest champion.
For younger Palestinians, most of them diasporic, the heroics of the past are no compensation for the absence of an organized liberation movement. Abandoning the myths of statehood through negotiated settlement, they are defining the goals of liberation and return anew.
Israel has authorized a full military takeover of Gaza exactly twenty years after declaring it had ‘left’ the Strip. Disengagement failed because it was never designed to succeed – least of all on Palestinian terms.
Assaults on academic freedoms in the US mirror those happening in Turkey for the past decade. Erdoğan’s silence about clampdowns on pro-Palestinian speech at US universities, even when Turkish scholars are directly affected, is particularly telling.
With geopolitical deadlock and the widening of the conflict, prospects of an end to Israel’s destruction of Gaza are as distant as ever. But momentum for a ceasefire, and even statehood, would likely be stronger were Palestinian political factions not themselves still divided.
The psychological toll of living in a warzone is causing children in Gaza to lose their ability to communicate. But the immediate focus on survival means that children are not receiving the therapy they urgently need.
Momentous news for Gaza: a ceasefire agreement between the Israeli government and Hamas. Palestinian war artists speak about their creative responses to documenting loss; their digital artwork reaching out beyond the confines of war, received by those who support their resilience.
Hamas’s act of terror a year ago and Israel’s devastating military response have triggered a series of epochal shifts. Globally, the West is losing support; while socially, the escalation in the Middle East is causing an ever-sharper polarization.
Israel has imposed different forms of settler colonialism across the map of historic Palestine, but nothing can be taken for granted. The refugee camp is itself a spatialization of a political demand, a space of waiting for an eventual return.
The two-state solution is often seen as empty talk. But it is the only alternative that offers a realistic prospect of peace in Israel-Palestine and the wider region. Putting it into practice will require not only genuine, detailed discussion, but above all a fundamental shift of mindset.
In France, the censorship of pro-Palestinian positions is particularly severe, with antisemitism accusations increasingly being used by the far right. But behind the current wave of repression lies a set of attitudes that are neither new, nor exclusively rightwing.
In 2022, Shahd Abusalama, a Palestinian academic working in the UK, was suspended from her teaching position on antisemitism charges. Here she recalls the defamation campaign against her and discusses how her case reveals the structural vulnerability of Palestinians in the West.



