Our Wednesday News Analysis | Fighting the opportunists who profit from genocide

The global solidarity movement must not be permitted to mutate into a careerist industry for self-serving individuals (File/AFP)

It all started with a call to my family in a displacement camp in northern Gaza. Since internet lines rarely stay connected, I managed to send a message to the widow of my cousin, who was killed along with all of his sons during the Gaza genocide. I asked her a simple question: What do the people of Gaza want?

My purpose was to gather raw testimonies from her neighbors to weave into a letter to a European official whose country is active in pursuing justice for Palestinians. I chose this approach to bypass cliched political discourse and avoid the pitfall of speaking on behalf of those enduring genocide and famine. Palestinians in Gaza are entirely capable of speaking for themselves.

The responses, however, reframed my entire approach. While I am deeply tied to my community in Gaza, I had anticipated a direct focus on macro-political language — on statehood, rights and global justice. Instead, I was met with the visceral reality of immediate physical survival.

“We want a life … we want a dignified life,” she said. “A dignified life with food, water and even the ability to breathe. One feels so suffocated. We need so many things … so, so many things. We need psychological support, financial support and moral support.”

Another neighbor said: “They (Israel) fight us with everything, absolutely everything; even when we are sleeping in our beds … the mosquitoes drain us. Insects and rats are all around us, fleas, and the heat is killing us. There are no fans and there is no electricity.”

This corporate approach to ‘peacebuilding’ is not unique; it is a symptom of a broader trend exploiting Palestine

Dr. Ramzy Baroud

Yes, many spoke about “karameh” (dignity), “hurriye” (freedom) and “Haq Al-Awda” (the right of return), but these broad political and social rights were almost always tied directly to the everyday struggle for education, water and basic medical care — and against rats...

Read more: Fighting the opportunists who profit from genocide

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JEWS HAVE HISTORICAL TIES TO PALESTINE. ISRAEL IS STILL A SETTLER-COLONIAL PROJECT

Source: +972 Magazine
https://www.972mag.com/israel-palestine-jews-settler-colonialism/

By Sleman Altehe
Published June 10, 2026

The debate over origins is irrelevant to defining the nature of the Zionist regime, which is built on the dispossession and erasure of the Palestinians.

An Israeli soldier ignores a Palestinian woman as he protects a settler grazing cows on agricultural lands belonging to the Palestinian village of Susiya, in Masafer Yatta, January 31, 2026. (Avishay Mohar/Activestills)

Before October 7, the view that Zionism and the State of Israel constituted a settler-colonial project was a relatively marginal position, confined to academic and activist circles. In the past two and a half years, however, settler colonialism has become a dominant framework for understanding the past and present in Palestine.

For many supporters of Israel, this is a difficult characterization to accept, in part because they see it as imposing a rigid division: The Palestinians are natives, the Israelis are settlers. This discomfort does not exempt us from serious discussion. Are all Israelis settlers and all Palestinians natives? And does a historical connection to the land negate participation in a settler-colonial project in the present?

To grapple with these questions, it is necessary to distinguish between historical indigeneity and settler colonialism as a political practice. Indigeneity, as it is mobilized in public debate, is presented as a claim about origin, precedence, and an ancient connection. Settler colonialism, by contrast, is not a story about origins but about power. It is a situation in which one group settles in a land already inhabited by another and seeks to establish a new political order through the dispossession, replacement, exclusion, or subordination of the local population.

The pertinent question, therefore, is not “Who was here first?” but rather “What kind of regime has been created, by whom, and at whose expense?”

Settler societies are typically established at the expense of Indigenous populations, driven by what Patrick Wolfe has termed a “logic of elimination.” Settlement is not merely a movement through space; it is above all an organization of power. It involves the concentration of resources, organizational superiority, and the ability to shape the legal, economic, and spatial order.

The question of land — who owns it, who enjoys sovereignty over it, who is allowed to build on it, and who is excluded from it — reveals this clearly. The framework of settler colonialism helps us understand Israel’s quest for control over the entire land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea: It illuminates what underpins the dispossession of Palestinians, the regime of separation and apartheid, inequalities in citizenship and sovereignty, and the ongoing Israeli effort to “Judaize” the space...

Read more: Jews have historical ties to Palestine. Israel is still a settler-colonial project

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“PRIDE IN GENOCIDE”: NO TO ISRAEL’S PINKWASHING

Source: Tawfiq Al- Ghussein on Substack
https://tawfiqalghussein.substack.com/p/pride-in-genocide-no-to-israels-pinkwashing

By Tawfiq Al- Ghussein and Rania Hammad
Published June 15, 2026

For decades, Israel has sold the world a false image of itself. The state that occupies, dispossesses, and today exterminates a people has presented itself as an outpost of civilisation: liberal, tolerant, modern. This is not a recent operation. It began with the state itself. From its foundation in Palestine as a Western settler-colonial project, the dominant narrative was that of pioneers building a country in the desert and turning it into a garden, even though Palestine was already a prosperous nation, politically, economically, and culturally developed. The real history was suppressed, concealed, and rewritten to manufacture a false narrative.

The claim that Zionist settlers “made the desert bloom” is one of Israel’s most recognisable clichés, perhaps second only to the slogan “a land without a people for a people without a land”. According to this myth, Palestine was a desolate and neglected expanse, redeemed only by the ingenuity of settlers. It is a colonial and Orientalist trope: non-European lands depicted as empty and abandoned, lands that only white “civilisers” could transform into a fertile paradise. The same stereotype fuelled European colonialism for centuries, legitimising the “discovery” of supposedly empty lands and violence against Indigenous peoples and their territories. Yet a glance at geography is enough to refute it: much of Palestine formed part of what is known as the Fertile Crescent.

Pinkwashing is the latest version of this same operation. Among Israel’s most useful strategies in recent decades has been the effort to pass itself off as a modern, quasi-Western country, and gay rights have become the instrument for doing so: Israel as the only refuge for LGBTQ+ rights and open society in the Middle East. That image has never been innocent, neutral, objective, or true. It has always been a weapon, built on the oldest Orientalist stereotypes, portraying Israelis as enlightened Westerners and Arabs and Muslims as backward, violent, and irredeemably intolerant. It has fuelled Islamophobia by political design and manufactured a clash of civilisations that never existed, so that every criticism of Israeli crimes could be turned into an attack on civilisation itself, and every act of solidarity with Palestinians into a betrayal of progress. This is the trap into which the question of Pride and Palestine has been deliberately placed: a manufactured contradiction in which one is supposedly forced to choose between LGBTQ+ rights and a people under occupation. Palestinian queer organisations have rejected this framing for years, arguing that the choice is false at its foundations: queer liberation and Palestinian liberation are inseparable, moving hand in hand. A country cannot present itself as a beacon of progress while violating the rights of a people it occupies, oppresses, and massacres...

Read more: “Pride in Genocide”: No to Israel’s Pinkwashing