After Gaza: Four Roads, One Destination

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. (Design: Palestine Chronicle)

The Israeli genocidal war in Gaza that followed October 7, 2023 was meant to break the Palestinian people. It was meant to force surrender, to empty Gaza, to terrify the West Bank, to erase a nation by fire, fear, and hunger. It failed. The Palestinians did not break. They buried their dead, tended to their wounded, and held fast to the land and to the truth that their cause cannot be extinguished by blockade or bombardment. The world watched a saturation campaign of annihilation and destruction unfold, livestreamed into every phone, and with it the bankruptcy of an international order calling itself civilized while it arms a settler colonial state that kills and starves children.

That failure presents the Zionist regime with a strategic choice it has long tried to ignore. It can no longer pretend that domination will be accepted as peace, that apartheid will be tolerated as security, or that mass displacement will be considered a humanitarian operation. That mask has been stripped bare. The question now is not whether the Zionist regime will change course, but which course of action it will attempt, and how each path ultimately accelerates the end of the Zionist enterprise as a system of racial domination and supremacy over an indigenous people.

There are four scenarios that now shape the horizon. Each exposes the inner contradiction of a project that wants to claim democracy while denying fundamental rights, that wants land without the people of that territory, and that wants international legitimacy without international law. Each road points to the same destination: the dismantling of structures of domination and control in order to restore justice for the Palestinians and a genuine peace for the region.

Scenario One: The Two-State Outcome

The world continues to invoke the so-called two-state solution. This political course was supposed to be the ultimate result of the failed Oslo process since 1993. Capitals issue statements. Diplomats dust off old maps. The words are familiar. A Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza with East Jerusalem as its capital. Removal of settlements that were illegal from the start. A corridor that connects people who were deliberately severed. An end to occupation and siege.

Everyone also knows why this remains remote. The West Bank is choked by hundreds of checkpoints. Confiscations continue. Settlement blocs expand. Land is fragmented into islands of control from Qalandiya to Huwara, while East Jerusalem is treated as annexed in practice and in law. The Zionist regime has spent decades making a viable Palestinian state impossible, then pointing to the facts it created on the ground to claim there is nothing left to negotiate.

But suppose there were real international efforts to create a Palestinian state. The Israeli regime would then be forced back to the pre-1967 borders known as the Green Line. The dream of permanent expansion would be checked. The tools of annexation would be blunted. Most Israelis believe that a genuine Palestinian state with real sovereignty is an existential challenge to the Zionist ideology, because it establishes the principle that Palestinians are a people with rights, not a population to be managed. The refugees would not disappear. Over seven million Palestinians outside would still claim the right of return. East Jerusalem would still belong to its people.

Even in success, the two-state outcome would mark the beginning of the end of the Zionist regime as a supremacist and hegemonic order, because it concedes the core point the regime has denied for a century, that Palestinians are equal human beings whose rights do not vanish at a checkpoint. The regime knows this, which is why it has resisted and will continue to block it at every turn.

Scenario Two: One Democratic State

The land between the river and the sea is one geographic unit. The Zionist regime understands this fact when it asserts control from Rafah to Ras al Naqura and from Jaffa to Jericho. If the regime insists on one territory, and eventually yields under pressure to one political order with equal rights, it can no longer claim to be a Jewish state. It can be a democratic state, or an ethno-religious state, but it cannot be both.

Demography has already ended that debate. Even before counting the diaspora, Palestinians are more than half of the population the regime governs today. A single constitutional order that guarantees equal civil and political rights would end the Zionist movement as a project of supremacy. It would replace it with a civic nation or a republic of citizens with equal status.

That may be the moral destination many in the world embrace today. But that is also why the Zionist regime will refuse it, since it contradicts the basic tenets of its ideology.

Scenario Three: A Permanent Apartheid Regime

The third option is the path the regime has pursued for years. Annex more land. Erase the Green Line in practice while keeping it for public relations. Claim sovereignty from the river to the sea, but deny the people under your rule their most basic rights. Keep Gaza under siege. Keep the West Bank under military control. Confiscate land and suffocate the Palestinians. Build Jews-only roads and separation walls. Expand settlements and outposts, then legalize them after the fact. Invent new legal terms to disguise old realities. Say security when you mean domination. Say temporary when you mean permanent. Harass, besiege, and brutalize the Palestinians until they give up, surrender, and leave.

This was the unsustainable reality of Gaza before Toufan al Aqsa. After October 7, 2023, the legal and moral indictments mounted. Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and B’Tselem now call the system apartheid. The International Court of Justice issued provisional measures orders in January and March 2024, and the ICC Prosecutor sought arrest warrants in May 2024. The regime can still deploy military might or summon powerful patrons, but it can no longer claim moral authority or maintain political credibility.

International civil society has moved decisively and widely rejects this path. Churches, unions, student bodies, professional associations, and civic leaders are speaking out and refusing complicity. Governments are under pressure to condition arms and trade on basic compliance with international law. The longer the Israeli regime attempts to hold half the population without rights, the more isolated it will become. Economies dependent on high technology and global markets do not thrive in a pariah status. Culture and knowledge do not flourish in garrison states.

Over time, the wall of impunity cracks. When the wall falls, the Zionist regime will eventually crumble and disintegrate.

Scenario Four: Mass Expulsion

The fourth option is the old fantasy of transfer, disguised in modern dress. It imagines that if the regime cannot rule a people, it can remove them. It speaks in euphemisms like voluntary relocation and humanitarian corridors. But its underlying logic is ethnic cleansing. Gaza revealed the Zionist will to attempt it as well as the limits of that will. Despite two years of war, with the most intense bombardment the region has ever seen, the Palestinians did not leave. They buried their children and stayed. Their resilience has become legendary.

The West Bank is another example of resolute steadfastness. Neighborhoods have been harassed and attacked, yet communities return and rebuild. Countries in the region understand that accepting population transfer would set their own societies on fire, so they refuse to be instruments of displacement.

The whole world is now connected by cameras and phones. Crimes cannot be hidden as they once were. There is nowhere to push millions of people without tearing the fabric of the international order. The Israeli attempt, with American backing, to force mass expulsion in Gaza for two years has failed miserably.

Thus, additional attempts to forcibly expel Palestinians from Gaza or the West Bank would accelerate the collapse of the Israeli regime’s legitimacy and push even reluctant states around the world to act. In fact, it would bring its end sooner, not postpone it.

What the Four Paths Reveal

No matter which scenario the future holds, the end of political Zionism is the final outcome. Each scenario shows that the Zionist regime has reached the edge of its own map. It cannot accept a real Palestinian state without surrendering the dream of permanent expansion.

It cannot accept one democratic state without ending its identity as a supremacist order. It cannot sustain apartheid without becoming a global pariah that bleeds support and capacity year after year. It cannot carry out mass expulsion without igniting a regional and international crisis that would speed its isolation and collapse. The choice is not between victory and defeat.

The choice is between several forms of strategic retreat. This is no longer simply a Palestinian problem. It is an Israeli problem that the world must confront and challenge. A regime built on dispossession and domination will use every instrument at its disposal to cling to power. The task before the world is to end that cycle by dismantling the structures and overturning the policies that make domination possible.

Dismantling Zionist Structures as the Strategic Goal
Dismantling is not a slogan. It is a grand strategy. The first element is to keep the people rooted on their land. Palestinians in Gaza, in the West Bank, including Jerusalem, inside the 1948 lines, and in the refugee camps across the region must be protected from displacement. That requires continued presence on their land, and support for their resistance and resilience. It requires the end of the siege and of annexation. It requires the release of prisoners and detainees. It requires that aid corridors and reconstruction funding are insulated from political blackmail, and that reconstruction is administered by Palestinian institutions with UN agencies and friendly states, not by foreign trusteeship or military fiat. Steadfastness is the moral center of this struggle. Without people on their land, justice becomes an abstraction.

The second element is to build a global movement that identifies and weakens the pillars of the Zionist project everywhere. The movement needs to map its sources of power. Lobby networks that buy impunity in parliaments. Capital flows that finance settlements and weapons. Surveillance technologies that turn cities into open-air prisons. Media ecosystems that launder crimes into security narratives. Academic partnerships that normalize apartheid and present it as innovation. Military doctrines that employ collective punishment as a strategy.

Legal shields that paralyze institutions meant to prevent and punish atrocity. Every strategy has a counter-strategy. Force divestment from companies tied to settlements and siege. Condition trade and research on compliance with international law. Impose arms embargoes and end police and spyware exchanges that enable repression. Defend academic freedom while refusing partnerships that whitewash apartheid. Protect journalists and human rights defenders. Use universal jurisdiction, the International Criminal Court, and domestic courts to prosecute grave crimes. Interrupt the financial systems that underlie complicity. Preserve memory through survivor testimony archives and community documentation that no future revisionism can erase.

The movement must be transnational and inclusive. It must be centered around the Palestinians, but it cannot be the work of Palestinians alone. It will need unions that can shut ports to weapons. It will need doctors who will not let medicine be used as a weapon of war. It will need engineers who refuse contracts that build bombs, prisons, and walls. It will need artists who can move the conscience. It will need students and professors who will not allow universities to be instruments of censorship or propaganda. It will need communities of faith who will say that sacred texts and moral teachings cannot be used as a cover for cruelty or dehumanization. It will need all global struggles to stand together in a common language of justice, rights, and dignity. It will need Jews who oppose Zionism, and who refuse the lie that liberation for Palestinians is a threat to their safety. It will need Muslims, Christians, people of other traditions, and those with no religion, who understand that the line is not between faiths.

The line is between domination and equality, colonized reality and decolonial future, between a dignified life and slavery.

The moral framework is simple. Zionism is a racist and supremacist ideology, a settler colonial project that has produced a system of apartheid. Zionism is not Judaism. The struggle is with an ideology and the structures it built and sustained, not with a religion or a people. Antisemitism is a poison that must be rejected along with Islamophobia and all forms of racism.

In the near term, the Zionist regime will try to restore the old equilibrium. It will seek new truces that keep the siege intact. It will continue to annex land in the West Bank. It will escalate attacks on civil society and on journalists. It will try to rebuild the narrative of self-defense without context. It will hope that fatigue replaces outrage. The task is to prevent that slide. That means keeping the cameras on. It means turning court orders into state policy.

It means turning student demands into university policy. It means turning union motions into supply chain changes. It means turning municipal resolutions into procurement rules that deny contracts to complicit firms. It means turning op-eds into public commitments by elected officials. It means ensuring the Israeli regime pays a heavy price every time it violates the most basic norms of humanity.

In the medium term, the pressure will reshape choices. Some states will move from words to measures. Suspension of UN membership will become a global cry. Arms embargoes will become thinkable. Targeted sanctions will spread. Trade preferences will be conditioned on compliance. Corporate boards will exit high-risk relationships. Cultural and academic life will set ethical lines that stick. The regime will respond with anger and with new propaganda.

It will claim that it is being singled out. The reply is plain. When a state commits or enables genocide, when it builds apartheid into law and practice, when it treats an entire people as disposable, it forfeits its right to be treated normally. Accountability is not singling out. It is the minimum required by our common humanity.

October 7: Accelerating the End of Zionism

Gaza has stripped away illusions. It showed the depth of Palestinian courage and resilience. It showed the cost of complicity and collusion. It showed the weakness of a regime that has to bomb hospitals and starve families to maintain power and feel safe. The four scenarios on the table are not paths to the triumph of the Zionist project. They are stages on the way to its demise.

The task is to hasten that end by building a global movement that matches the level of the crimes and the scale of the hope. The task is to keep the people living on their land, to rebuild shattered lives, to end the siege, to free the prisoners, to prosecute those who ordered and carried out atrocities, to isolate the structures of domination until they are eradicated.

Justice is not a gift. It is the supreme value. Freedom is not a slogan. It is the essential goal. Independence is not an option. It is an obligation. Self-determination is not an illusion. It is the ultimate objective. Return is not a dream. It is a right. When we treat these truths as our guiding light, the road that looked impossible becomes the only road that makes sense. The people of Palestine have carried this truth through catastrophe after catastrophe. The world is finally beginning to hear it.