After the genocide: What the future holds for Palestine

The Palestinian cause has never enjoyed more momentum, awareness, and global solidarity than it does today.

This is reflected by a wave of international recognition of Palestinian statehood, giant weekly demonstrations in Western capitals, greater isolation of Israel, and a tidal shift in public opinion. Yet the Palestinian movement has also never been in a greater state of disarray, loss, and paralysis.

Gaza is decimated, the Palestinian leadership remains intractably divided, the West Bank is under an unprecedented crackdown, and the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) is obsolete.

As a fragile truce takes hold and potentially signals an end to the war, numerous questions remain unanswered, with Palestinians now facing monumental challenges and uncertainties as they try to recover from two years of unparalleled Israeli violence.

Genocidal trauma: Can Gaza become liveable again?

“We would need to invent brand new words to adequately describe the situation that Palestinians in Gaza find themselves in today,” UN officials said over a year ago.

Indeed, ‘words don’t mean anything anymore’ has become the most common sentiment on the ground in Gaza after two years of mass killing. There is the sense that everything has been said, every feeling expressed, over and over again, until it becomes hollow of meaning or resonance, with silence taking over.

The two key questions Gazans commonly ask each other are technical. First, “is your home still standing?” Yet nearly every single person has had their home bombed, burned to the ground, razed, bulldozed, or blown to pieces. The second is “how many family members have you lost?” The average answer is over 100.

Nonetheless, there is a strong and undying willingness amongst many in Gaza to remain steadfast on the land and reject any plans for expulsion, migration, or displacement. Nada, a mother whose two-year-old son was born only days before the genocide, has lived through the unimaginable.

Displaced several times, starved for long periods, shellshocked, and scarred by losing dozens of her family members, she still refuses to leave Gaza. Asked if she would consider travelling if given the opportunity, she told The New Arab, “Why can’t I stay in my homeland?”

Despite Israel’s destruction of over 90% of all homes in Gaza, there is strong hope that Palestinians can recover, rebuild livelihoods, and heal. “We already went as Palestinians through a similar period, the Nakba, and yet we were able to rebuild our national movement, society and economy,” Xavier Abu Eid, a former senior Palestinian diplomat, told The New Arab.

“Rebuilding Gaza is possible. There are already many plans that have been put out there,” Abu Eid added. “It begins by reaffirming Palestinian sovereignty and international assurances that Israel will not be allowed to carry out more crimes in Gaza. If this is granted, I don’t see any reason why it wouldn’t work.”

Abu Eid, however, believes there is a long road ahead for Palestinian national healing. “No people could heal without justice, which should be a precondition for negotiations. Freedom and justice should be the formula for any Palestinian approach to a political process,” he told The New Arab.

“One of the main obstacles that we face is that we are often requested to accept things that no other people in our situation would be asked to do, including by judging our national narrative and trading impunity for war crimes and crimes against humanity in exchange for some progress in the humanitarian situation or the political process.”

Over 90% of buildings have been destroyed in Gaza, with the official death toll at around 67,000, although likely to be several times higher. [Getty]

Israel's isolation and global momentum

Two years of genocide have opened the world’s eyes to the nature of Israel’s apartheid and settler colonial policies like never before.

The war has created sweeping waves of solidarity that have led to actions being taken which were previously unthinkable, including sanctions, arms embargoes, and divestments.

Mustafa al-Barghouti, a prominent Palestinian politician, said he was recently in South Africa and was told that “even in the best days of [the African liberation struggle], global solidarity with didn’t reach this level [the Palestinians have]”.

After 24 months of protests, demonstrations are still frequent and even growing in some countries like the Netherlands, where 200,000 people took to the streets over the weekend.

But Palestinians are careful not to take this for granted. “Israel has lost much of its legitimacy in the world,” Yousef al-Jamal, a Gazan writer and coordinator at the Nobel Prize-winning organisation American Friends Service Committee, told The New Arab.

“But let’s also remember that once the drums of war stop, many governments, which were hesitant to condemn Israel, might welcome it with open arms again.”

Palestinians have seen this before. During Israel’s 2008-09 assault on Gaza, ‘Operation Cast Lead,’ Tel-Aviv was widely condemned, with demonstrations flooding streets across the world.

But all this dissipated as soon as the war was over, and the international community continued business as usual.

Similarly, Israel faced intense global backlash during its destructive 1982 invasion of Lebanon. Israeli atrocities received so much pushback that then US president Ronald Reagan told Israel’s prime minister, “it is a holocaust,” and ordered him to end the war immediately. But the world forgot soon after.

Israel is now betting that it can move on once again from the two-year war once the bombs stop, even if Gaza remains uninhabitable for years after.

The spectacular violence and man-made famine captured the world’s attention, but Palestinians hope they can still sustain that momentum following the ceasefire through mass mobilisation and popular resistance across the West Bank that can inspire similar support. “We have to keep the pressure on the street,” Al-Jamal concluded.

The South African struggle against apartheid similarly experienced peak moments bolstered by gruesome violence and massacres that the regime unleashed on the indigenous Black population.

But in between each massacre, South Africans relied on mass mobilisation and pressure campaigns to sustain the momentum towards international sanctions, divestments, and boycotts.

“Until the week of elections in South Africa, the ANC continued to call for sanctions against the government and militants continued to bomb government offices,” a former senior US official recently told The New Arab.

Israel deliberately used starvation as a weapon of war during the genocidal war, according to rights groups, leading to famine across Gaza. [Getty]

Accountability and Palestinian statehood

Eleven Western countries recognised the State of Palestine at the UN General Assembly in September. Many analysts, however, were quick to criticise those recognitions as merely symbolic, a damage control gesture meant to showcase action without directly addressing the ongoing genocide.

“Recognition of Palestinian statehood is important, but it should go beyond symbolic politics. The right of the Palestinian people to self-determination should be recognised along with measures that lead to accountability,” Al-Jamal told The New Arab.

What lowered expectations around the wave of recognitions is the fact that the entire Israeli political mainstream, aside from Arab parties, all reacted negatively and with clear hostility to a move meant to secure Israel’s integration in the region.

“We have a long way to get to Palestinian statehood,” Zaha Hassan, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told The New Arab.

“You don’t have an Israeli society that is at all interested in seeing a Palestinian state. It’s not just on the level of Smotrich, Ben Gvir, and ultranationalists in the government, it’s also on a societal level where Israelis cannot fathom a Palestinian state and are supportive of dispossession… to prevent a Palestinian state from ever transpiring.”

Hassan added that “unless you get a change in Israeli society and create costs for Israeli individuals around maintaining the status quo, you’re not going to see real movement on the ground towards creating a Palestinian state”.

There’s also a strong sense of disillusionment among Palestinians and a conviction that Western governments mainly focus on performative gestures or symbolic sanctions on a few individuals while evading addressing the apartheid system itself.

“I took part in a protest in Dublin which saw 40,000 people taking to the streets, despite this pressure, the Irish government is still looking for excuses not to implement the occupied territories bill,” Al-Jamal told The New Arab.

Israel as a threat to the region

Hassan is, however, optimistic that new regional opportunities have emerged. She describes an “awakening” among key Arab stakeholders that the dangers of Israel’s occupation are not limited to the Palestinians but are becoming a regional problem.

“You have an Israeli state that is inching towards becoming the regional hegemon without challenge, and it’s looking more like Israel is the greatest threat to the region than Iran or any other malign actor,” Hassan told The New Arab.

“So, there’s this awareness that this is a national security problem for all Arab governments of the Middle East, this rise of Israel as the hegemon. This is an opportunity for Palestinians to be able to engage and help steer the direction of the Arab response.”

However, the fragmentation and divisions within the Palestinian leadership and national movement could stifle this prospect.

“You need strong leadership for this, and you need a lot of civic engagement with the leadership to help in the process of trying to create impact,” Hassan concluded.

Intra-Palestinian reconciliation

Palestinians believe unity is an imperative amid Israel’s strategy of entrenching the separation between the West Bank and Gaza, which was further enshrined in the Trump Plan that envisioned an internationally administered Gaza run by Trump himself and potentially giving Tony Blair legislative, diplomatic, legal, economic, and political powers.

However, after nearly two decades of repeated attempts at intra-Palestinian unity either failed or were sabotaged by Israel, there has been little hope that reconciliation can be achieved.

“If you had asked me a week ago what the opportunities are for intra-Palestinian reconciliation, I would have been extremely negative,” Hassan told The New Arab.

She explained that even the New York declaration that came out of the French-Saudi conference at the UN, which was a strong state-level collective response to Israel, came with clear conditionalities that Hamas should be excluded from democratic governance or the PLO.

A source close to the Palestinian president told The New Arab that Abbas had been fearful that engaging in any talks with Hamas, let alone a reconciliation agreement, would have given an excuse to Western governments to delay the recognition of Palestine, which he values dearly.

The Palestinian Authority leader was also worried that Netanyahu would use reconciliation as a pretext to further weaken or even collapse the PA.

But new dynamics now give a glimmer of hope that Hamas and the PA could reconcile. Palestinians see Marwan Barghouti’s prospective release in a prisoner swap as the possible beginning of this new chapter. Barghouti commands much respect amongst Palestinians and is seen by both Fatah and Hamas as a unifying, pragmatic, and non-corrupt figure.

Hassan also added that Trump’s plan, despite being “deeply problematic for many reasons”, did create an opening for “Palestinian national reconciliation outside the governance question”, including Hamas being able to participate in PLO institutions.

But in the shadow of unspeakable loss, Palestinians stand at a crossroads between devastation and determination. Two years of genocide have not extinguished the will to exist, to rebuild, or to reclaim a future rooted in justice, dignity, and sovereignty.

The path forward is neither guaranteed nor free of immense struggle. It demands sustained international pressure, genuine accountability, and above all, a revitalised and unified Palestinian leadership capable of transforming tragedy into political agency.

If the genocide has taught the world anything, it is that Palestinians are not passive subjects of history but central actors in shaping its course. Their cause, long silenced or sidelined, now resounds with urgency across continents.

What comes next will test not only the resilience of a people, but the conscience of a world that can no longer claim it did not see. The future of Palestine remains unwritten - but it will not be written in silence.

Muhammad Shehada is a Palestinian writer and analyst from Gaza and the EU Affairs Manager at Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor.