What We Tolerate in Palestine, We Tolerate Everywhere

There are moments when foreign politics stops being something that happens to other people and becomes a question addressed directly to you.

Palestine is that question. Not because Palestinians are more deserving of solidarity than anyone else, and not because the suffering there is arithmetically greater than everywhere else on earth. Because Palestine is where every problem the twentieth century claimed to have solved is still running, at once, in full view, and because the world has been watching it happen in real time for nearly three years with the ability to stop it and the choice not to.

Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur, put it precisely: “Nowadays, Palestine is the litmus test of our humanity: it calls us to eradicate and gain a deeper understanding of the imperial, colonial, and capitalistic roots that have embedded the international system since its birth.”

She is right, and the reason she is right is worth spelling out.

Everything Is There

Settler colonialism was supposed to be finished. It ended in Algeria, in Kenya, in Zimbabwe, in South Africa. It has not ended in Palestine, where settlements expand annually and cabinet ministers openly describe the land as theirs by divine right.

Apartheid was supposed to be finished. South Africa dismantled it in 1994 and the world congratulated itself. Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and Israel’s own B’Tselem have all concluded that a system of apartheid operates in Palestine today.

Military occupation was supposed to be temporary by definition. Palestine’s is approaching sixty years, the longest in modern history, sustained by permit systems, checkpoints, administrative detention without charge, and the routine imprisonment of children.

Ethnic cleansing was supposed to be the thing we recognise early and prevent. It began in 1948, has never stopped, and reached its most total expression in Gaza.

Religious supremacist ideology as state policy was supposed to be a relic. It sits in the Israeli Nation-State Law, which declares the right to self-determination in the state to be exclusive to one people.

Every one of these is a problem the international order was explicitly constructed to prevent from ever recurring. All five are running simultaneously, in one place, documented in extraordinary detail, and the institutions built to stop exactly this have watched and done nothing.

That is why Palestine is not one issue among many. It is the place where the entire post-war moral architecture is being tested to destruction, and the results are being published daily.

What We Allow There, We Allow Everywhere

Here is the part people do not want to think about.

Precedent does not stay where it is set. A genocide livestreamed to the entire planet, condemned by courts, protested by millions, and completed anyway without a single meaningful consequence for anyone involved does not simply conclude when the killing stops. It establishes a rule.

The rule is this: if you have sufficient backing from the right powers, international law does not apply to you. Every government currently considering what it can get away with in its own borderlands has watched the last three years and drawn the obvious conclusion. Every arms manufacturer, every surveillance company, every state weighing whether the cost of atrocity outweighs the benefit — they have all seen the answer.

This is why Palestine cannot be treated as a distant tragedy. It is the case that determines what is possible everywhere else. What we permit there, we have permitted in principle, and the principle travels.

We are failing this test. That has to be said plainly. The institutions failed comprehensively, the governments failed deliberately, and the media failed by choice.

But not everyone failed, and that matters more than despair allows. Millions of people saw it clearly, refused the official account, marched, boycotted, organised, and paid real costs — lost jobs, lost friendships, arrests in some countries. A generation had its relationship to power permanently altered. Palestinians documented their own destruction and forced the world to see it, at a fatality rate among journalists with no precedent in modern warfare.

The test is being failed by institutions and passed by people. Whether that is enough is not yet determined.