By Rima Najjar
The Western system, working in lockstep with Israeli state strategy and pro-Israel policy networks embedded across Western institutions, is acknowledging — by its own behavior — that Palestinian strategy is now actively reshaping the field of power itself.
By “the system,” I mean something concrete: the coordinated machinery of the United States, Canada, and European states — governments, courts, police, prisons, immigration agencies, financial regulators, together with the platform and university governance layers that now function as political gatekeepers.
This enforcement field is fractured in belief and politics, but coherent in effect.
Israel is woven into this machinery through formal alliances, intelligence and security coordination, policy partnerships, and a vast pro-Israel advocacy infrastructure that shapes legislation, enforcement priorities, and institutional risk doctrine inside Western states. The result is an integrated governance field in which Israeli state objectives and Western enforcement powers operate as a single framework shaping policy on Palestine and the region.
This acknowledgment is registered through state action such as: sanctions, bans, prosecutions, surveillance, asset freezes, platform restrictions, and financial pressure. These measures are directed at Palestinian organizational capacity.
Over the past two years, Palestinian activism has undergone a strategic transformation. Instead of concentrating primarily on recognition within Western debate, it increasingly concentrates on leverage over Western institutions themselves — through legal exposure, accountability mechanisms, material complicity, and structural pressure. That transformation has been accelerated by a growing series of flashpoints of Western repression, each one revealing where governing systems now feel the strain.
Gaza has made this shift impossible to contain.
The scale of killing, deprivation, and destruction has forced Western institutions into a stark confrontation with consequence. Either Palestinian actors and their allies succeed in converting Gaza into enforceable outcomes — court cases, arrest warrants, sanctions, arms restrictions, corporate liability, institutional delegitimation — or Western power moves aggressively to seize control of the channels through which such outcomes are produced. Gaza has exposed what power now fears most: loss of command over result, not merely over narrative.
This essay maps that shift: what it is, how it emerged, and where it is now moving.
I.1 The Target: Palestinian Political Capacity
Across the Western–Israeli enforcement field, pressure now concentrates on a single problem: the functional infrastructure that allows Palestinian politics to operate as an organized, effective political force. That capacity no longer depends only on speeches or protests. It now exists in building real accountability through solid legal evidence, in organizing and linking movements across borders, and in using practical channels that allow political action to create real, measurable change within social, economic, and digital systems.
The first site of attack is the infrastructure of accountability itself. Palestinian legal and human rights organizations have built dense records of Gaza: testimony, forensic analysis, casualty databases, and legal arguments capable of traveling across courts and jurisdictions. When this material reached international bodies such as the International Criminal Court, the response was direct and systemic. In October 2024, U.S. and Canadian authorities launched coordinated enforcement actions against the prisoner solidarity network Samidoun, labeling it a terrorist entity, freezing assets, and criminalizing support. U.S. officials described the group as a “sham charity.” Samidoun responded that the measures were designed “to repress political organizing.” In the same period, YouTube removed the channels of three major Palestinian rights organizations, erasing more than 700 evidentiary videos. A Palestinian legal director summarized the dynamic with stark clarity: “We are being punished for insisting that the law apply.” Once accountability begins to threaten outcomes, the legal and archival machinery that enables it comes under direct pressure.
The second target is the infrastructure of organization. Prisoner committees, revolutionary movements, diaspora formations, and transnational solidarity networks sustain political life beyond any single event. Samidoun illustrates this with particular force. Its work linking political prisoners across Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Europe, and North America has drawn bans in Germany, parallel designations and enforcement measures in North America, police raids, and financial restrictions. In the same October 2024 actions, U.S. authorities also sanctioned Khaled Barakat, a writer and leading figure in the Masar Badil movement, explicitly citing the effectiveness of his political work. After one raid, an organizer captured the intent of the campaign against them: “They are trying to make the work itself impossible.” The pressure does not settle on any single statement. It aims to disable the movement’s ability to function as a political force. In Britain, Palestine Action has faced prolonged pre-trial detention under expanding police powers, with eight activists reportedly held for over a year. Their hunger strike carried the struggle into courtrooms and prison wards, while supporters outside repeated a simple truth: “You cannot jail a movement.”
The third main target is where political work turns into real, everyday action. This is a coordinated assault on the channels of daily operation. Digital platforms suppress Palestinian content at scale. A 2024 report by 7amleh documented Meta’s systematic throttling of Palestinian posts, with leaked policies showing a lower confidence threshold for removing Arabic than Hebrew content. Activists adapt through “algospeak,” coded language, and symbols simply to remain visible. As one student organizer put it, “You spend half your time just trying to stay visible.” The material attack is also physical. By early 2025, roughly sixty-four percent of Gaza’s telecommunications towers had been destroyed, producing a near-total information blackout. Institutions mirror this closure. Universities impose discipline. Employers terminate contracts. Banks close accounts. Palestine Legal reports an unprecedented surge in cases of activists being doxxed or fired. None of this is symbolic. Each measure obstructs the circulation of Palestinian politics through the institutions that govern social and economic life.
Across all three domains the pattern is clear. Palestinian strategy has learned how to generate consequences — in courts, in contracts, in corporate boardrooms, and in international law. As those consequences begin to take shape, the system constrains the machinery that makes them possible: the legal evidence, the organized networks, and the material channels of operation. This logic is now extending into the formal Palestinian political sphere itself, where debates over a proposed Palestinian Authority Political Party Law are widely read as an effort to narrow participation and pre-empt electoral shifts, reinforcing the same systemic impulse toward control.
I.2 The Method: How the System Attacks
As Palestinian strategy begins to generate consequences, the response across the Western–Israeli enforcement field moves into direct intervention. The shift is rapid. It spreads across institutions. It settles into routine practice, targeting political infrastructure.
One method is legal. States deploy sanctions, bans, prosecutions, and terrorism designations to convert political activity into a security category. The October 2024 actions against Samidoun by U.S. and Canadian authorities reframed support for political prisoners as “material support for terrorism,” freezing assets and criminalizing fundraising. In Britain, activists linked to Palestine Action are being held in prolonged pre-trial detention — many for over a year without trial, far beyond the usual UK limit of six months. Even the legal fight to defend them and challenge the crackdown is now being targeted. After sustained accountability work on Gaza, the Palestinian organization Al-Haq faced pressure and sanctions that disrupted its banking relationships, obstructing the conditions required for legal work to continue.
Another method is administrative. This is the bureaucratic war of paperwork and procedure. Leadership is fragmented through visa revocations, residency denials, and travel restrictions. Khaled Barakat’s sanctioning directly constrains his ability to organize transnationally. Organizations face deregistration. Bank accounts are closed through compliance decisions that require no public explanation. Masar Badil reports that its international conferences are monitored and speakers barred on security grounds, hidden inside administrative protocols.
A third method operates inside institutions that present themselves as neutral. Universities discipline students and faculty for Palestine activism. Employers terminate contracts. Cultural institutions cancel events. The expanding practice of de-banking — closing accounts for “reputational risk” — severs material lifelines. These actions are framed as governance and compliance. Their combined effect is political exclusion.
A fourth method governs visibility. Platforms enforce algorithmic suppression and content removal. 7amleh’s documentation shows that Meta’s automated moderation systems apply a much lower “confidence threshold” to Arabic-language posts — meaning the AI only needs to be about 25% sure (instead of the usual 80%) that something might break the rules before it automatically reduces visibility, limits reach, or removes the post. This makes it far easier for Palestinian and Arabic content to get suppressed, even when it’s not actually violating policies.
As a result, activists have had to start using coded language, creative spellings, emojis, symbols, and indirect phrasing (often called “algospeak”) just to be able to share their messages and stay visible on the platforms without immediate censorship.
At the same time, the repeated destruction of Gaza’s telecommunications infrastructure (phone networks, internet cables, cell towers) has caused near-total communication blackouts — sometimes lasting days or longer — making it extremely difficult, and often impossible, for people inside Gaza to organize digitally, share updates, coordinate aid, or connect with the outside world.
Across these methods the objective remains consistent: to disrupt, disable, and dismantle the legal, administrative, institutional, and digital machinery through which Palestinian politics produces consequences and sustains itself as a political force.
I.3 The Pushback
Pressure does not end the work. It reshapes it.
Across Palestinian movements and allied networks, repression is read as confirmation of impact. Bans, sanctions, and prosecutions become measures of consequence. Strategy adapts and the terrain of struggle expands.
One response is legal escalation. Palestinian legal organizations deepen international coordination and widen their filings. The ICC process now sits inside a growing legal front, supported by new coalitions of jurists, scholars, and civil society actors mobilized specifically to defend accountability mechanisms. Attempts to close legal channels generate additional routes of action. The judicial field has become more complex, not more contained.
A second response appears in organizational adaptation. Networks grow more distributed. Leadership circulates. Responsibilities spread across borders to absorb the impact of sanctions, travel bans, and detention. Movements such as Samidoun and Masar Badil continue operating across continents through overlapping, fluid structures that are inherently difficult to disable.
A third response moves directly into material and institutional terrain. Campaigns target contracts, procurement systems, arms supply chains, shipping routes, pension funds, and corporate partnerships. This is the logic of BDS and of direct-action formations such as Palestine Action. Universities, ports, banks, municipalities, and private firms are compelled to confront their complicity. Exposure has become leverage. Institutional risk becomes political pressure.
A fourth response reclaims informational space. Digital rights organizations such as 7amleh document censorship and convert suppression into evidence for advocacy. Organizers build parallel channels through encrypted platforms and independent media. Campaigns generate their own archives and datasets to counter erasure. Coded language evolves from mere evasion into a reconfiguration of political expression itself.
Across these responses, a single principle now governs Palestinian strategy. Activism no longer petitions for entry into public space. It applies pressure from within the structures that govern political, economic, and digital life. The struggle has entered a phase defined by sustained, multi-front confrontation with the architecture of power itself.
II.1 Gaza as Structural Break
Gaza marks the point at which the old system of management collapses.
For decades, Western and Israeli policy alignment — expressed through U.S. diplomacy, European funding mechanisms, and Israeli security doctrine — relied on a stable pattern: military assaults, humanitarian aid, diplomatic statements, and a return to routine governance. Each round of destruction was framed as crisis and then absorbed back into normal operations. The current phase in Gaza cannot be absorbed. The scale of killing, displacement, starvation, and infrastructural collapse has overwhelmed the mechanisms designed to contain it.
The failure of containment is visible in material terms. Hospitals have been destroyed. Entire neighborhoods erased. By early 2025, roughly sixty-four percent of Gaza’s telecommunications towers had been eliminated, severing the territory’s digital lifeline. This physical erasure is compounded by a manufactured humanitarian catastrophe. Integrated food-security assessments openly declared famine conditions, while the World Food Programme warned of a “real prospect of famine.” These conditions did not arise from natural disaster. They followed deliberate restrictions on aid convoys at crossings. The killing of more than one hundred journalists within the first six months of Israel’s assault on Gaza, documented by the Committee to Protect Journalists, further shattered the apparatus through which outrage had previously been managed.
What distinguishes this moment is the speed and reach of its consequences. Gaza’s devastation no longer remains a contained crisis. Images, testimony, satellite data, casualty records, and displacement maps now circulate directly into institutional decision-making across the world. This material sits at the center of ICC arrest-warrant applications, national court cases challenging arms exports in Canada, the Netherlands, and the UK, university divestment campaigns, municipal boycott resolutions, and shareholder actions targeting corporate supply chains. The war no longer remains distant. It actively reorganizes political and legal calculations far beyond the region.
This produces a confrontation the old architecture was built to avoid. Either Gaza remains without consequence, or the principles of law and human rights these systems claim to uphold begin to apply. That choice now unfolds through multiplying channels: court challenges, sanctions demands, arms-embargo campaigns, and corporate complicity investigations. Gaza has made this shift impossible to contain or rhetorically manage.
The language of crisis management can no longer hold. What once functioned as a cycle of destruction and repair now generates instability inside the political, legal, and economic structures that sustained the old order. Gaza has become the structural break — the point where the architecture of control meets both its operational and moral limits.
II.2 Exhaustion of the Old Governance Framework
The collapse revealed by Gaza is institutional as much as humanitarian or military.
For more than three decades, a U.S.-led coalition of Western states and Israel operated through a political architecture established after Oslo. This structure combined limited Palestinian self-rule, donor funding administered through bodies such as the Ad Hoc Liaison Committee, security coordination overseen by the U.S. Security Coordinator, humanitarian management via UNRWA, and repeating negotiation cycles. It promised stability. It produced containment. Its purpose was to manage Palestinian life under occupation rather than resolve Palestinian claims.
That framework depended on three conditions. Violence had to remain periodic. Palestinian politics had to remain fragmented, reinforced by the geographic separation of Gaza and the West Bank. Western institutions had to remain shielded from legal, financial, and reputational consequence. All three conditions have now broken down.
The humanitarian model has turned from stabilizer into site of confrontation. Aid is no longer a management tool but a battleground. Convoys are restricted or blocked. Relief agencies operate under direct threat. Funding is politicized, with major donors suspending contributions to UNRWA on contested grounds. The language of humanitarianism now exposes rather than conceals the political structure of destruction, as when the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification declared famine conditions in early 2025.
The security model has shed its façade of coordination. What was once termed “security coordination” now appears openly as enforcement against Palestinian political life. Mass arrests, pervasive surveillance, nightly military raids, and expanding checkpoints deepen control while legitimacy erodes. The Palestinian Authority’s governing credibility drains away, leaving an administrative shell that manages occupation without political authority.
The diplomatic model has lost operational function. Negotiations persist as ritual. Statements of concern circulate without effect. Core formulas such as “two-state solution” no longer correspond to any observable political reality, especially in light of Israeli officials’ open assertions of permanent control. The framework remains in form but has lost its capacity.
This exhaustion explains the intensity of current repression. The system no longer stabilizes conflict through management. It now stabilizes itself through escalating coercion. What once functioned as governance has devolved into emergency administration. The framework cannot absorb Gaza, contain Palestinian political time, or restore the conditions that once made control appear sustainable.
II.3 Palestinian Political Time Collides with Western Governance
The present crisis is a collision of time.
Palestinian politics unfolds across historical continuity: displacement, occupation, settlement expansion, and permanent refugeehood. This history is not backdrop but force. From the 1948 Nakba to the 1967 occupation and the entrenchment of the settlement regime, political life accumulates without reset. Palestinian strategy grows from this pressure, shaped by factional conflict, moments of unity, and regional intervention, all operating inside an unbroken time frame.
Western governance moves on a different rhythm. It proceeds through crises, summits, negotiations, and resets — from Madrid to Oslo to the Roadmap. The conflict is broken into separate stages or “phases” — each one gets treated as if it’s completely disconnected from the others. As soon as public/media attention moves on to something else, people and governments stop feeling responsible for what happened before. No one is held truly accountable. Keeping things “stable” (or at least the appearance of stability) relies on everyone conveniently forgetting the past crimes, injustices, or broken promises.
Big banks and financial institutions put out cold, neutral-sounding reports that describe the situation in technical terms — without pointing fingers, admitting complicity, or linking current profits to ongoing occupation/settlements/war (they stay “detached” and avoid moral or historical judgment). Official security/military thinking simplifies everything: it reduces the entire long, complicated history of the conflict to just a “counter-terrorism” story — ignoring root causes, colonial history, occupation, inequality, and rights violations, and framing it only as fighting “terrorists” vs. “defenders.”
In short: The system works by dividing time into forgettable chapters, letting attention fade responsibility, erasing memory for “stability”, neutralizing financial involvement, and shrinking history into a never-ending war-on-terror lens. This makes it easier to continue the status quo without real change or justice.
Gaza collapses the distance between these time models.
The devastation cannot be framed as temporary emergency. Satellite records, casualty databases, displacement maps, and legal archives place continuity directly before courts and publics. The International Court of Justice’s 2024 advisory opinion confirming the illegality of the occupation and UN documentation of settlement expansion render the past present as evidence.
This collision of accumulated responsibility with the present deeply destabilizes Western governance. Systems built to merely manage isolated events now buckle under the weight of unaddressed history that can no longer be reset or ignored. Traditional tools — shuttle diplomacy, economic incentives, conflict-resolution frameworks — prove inadequate against the scale of consequences unleashed. As a result, repression has become structural: the political clock cannot be wound back, so control shifts to the very conditions of political life itself. Civil society is criminalized, dissent suppressed, platforms censored, and humanitarian aid conditioned and weaponized. Courts, prisons, borders, universities, and financial systems have all become primary arenas of struggle.
Palestinian political time has entered Western institutions. It reorganizes power. It reshapes what stability now requires.
II.4 The Threshold Moment
The present moment marks a political threshold defined by asymmetric pressure.
Palestine no longer functions as a distant subject for debate. It enters directly into governance as institutional and legal friction. Western courts confront arms-export challenges and corporate-complicity cases. Universities face divestment campaigns. Corporations and banks navigate sanctions risk and exposure tied to settlements. This shift relocates the struggle into the machinery of power itself, while remaining profoundly unequal: U.S. veto power, European economic leverage, and Israeli military supremacy still dominate the field.
This explains the embedded nature of the response. Repression has become core policy. Legal and administrative systems criminalize solidarity. Diplomatic frameworks impose conditions on Palestinian self-determination. The system recalibrates defensively as pressure accumulates inside its own institutions.
From this point forward, repression and transformation advance together. International law has become central battleground through ICC warrants and ICJ proceedings. Diplomatic recognition of Palestinian statehood gains momentum even as it is hedged and constrained. Civil society funnels evidence into boardrooms and government agencies, forcing choices between law and alignment. Palestinian political agency intensifies, articulated in initiatives such as calls for a “Gaza Covenant,” while regional actors recalibrate normalization around irreversible steps toward statehood.
This threshold does not close the political field. It widens it. The struggle now unfolds inside the machine itself.
What follows will not resemble earlier patterns of control. A different political era is taking shape — one defined by continuous, asymmetric confrontation between an unyielding demand for justice and a powerful system of control increasingly consumed by the effort to manage its own unraveling.
III.1 Legitimacy Crisis of Western Institutions
The question of Palestine is now generating an open, visible crisis of legitimacy at the core of Western governments and institutions.
For decades, a structural contradiction has existed: Western states publicly affirm liberal values — human rights, the rule of law, and justice — while in practice enabling or disregarding grave violations. That contradiction is no longer confined to debate or theory. It now unfolds daily in courtrooms, in the streets through protest, and through the public exposure of political double standards.
Courts stand at the center of this breakdown.
In countries such as Canada, the Netherlands, and the UK, domestic courts are now hearing serious legal challenges seeking to halt arms exports to Israel on the grounds that they breach international humanitarian law, particularly protections for civilians. In the United States, federal courts routinely dismiss similar cases as “political questions” beyond judicial reach. This contrast reveals a coordinated system of avoidance: legal principles are quietly suspended whenever they collide with geopolitical priorities — here, unwavering support for Israel.
The dynamic sharpened in December 2025, when the U.S. government imposed sanctions on sitting judges of the International Criminal Court following the issuance of arrest warrants related to the conflict. The shift from criticism to direct punishment of judicial independence marked a decisive escalation. Authority is now visibly moving away from independent courts and toward executive power and diplomatic calculation.
Universities are increasingly caught in the same crisis.
In the US and UK, student protests and encampments calling for Palestinian rights are quickly dismantled by police, and free expression is constrained through claims of “campus safety” or “risk management.” In some European countries, protests are more often allowed to continue, reflecting stronger legal protections for free speech.
Across contexts, however, university leadership uses institutional authority to contain and manage political fallout — transforming campuses, traditionally spaces of open inquiry and debate, into tightly regulated environments shaped by donor pressure and fear of public backlash.
Mainstream corporate media is rapidly losing its authority.
People across the world, now connected in real time, verify events through videos, photographs, documents, and eyewitness testimony emerging directly from Gaza. Long-developing weaknesses — corporate consolidation, algorithmic bias, and elite influence — have intensified sharply under the strain of Gaza’s coverage. Public trust has fractured.
Audiences are increasingly turning toward decentralized platforms, independent journalists on the ground, and specialists who examine evidence with rigor. This shift in the information landscape has been unfolding for years, but Gaza has rendered it irreversible.
The entire framework of “human rights” is beginning to fracture.
When protections for civilians are enforced selectively — loudly invoked in some cases and abandoned in others — they lose their moral force. The US labels famine in Gaza an emergency while continuing to support the siege that produces it. The EU delivers humanitarian aid while maintaining arms sales and deep military cooperation with Israel.
As a result, terms like “human rights” and “protection” risk becoming hollow political language, rather than ethical commitments. The damage extends beyond Palestine: it erodes the very foundation of Western credibility and moral authority worldwide.
The spillover is systemic. Law appears political. Education appears managed. Media appears instrumental. Human rights appear conditional. Public consent, once the stabilizing force of these institutions, erodes into sustained skepticism.
III.2 Expansion of Repression at Home
As Western governments and institutions confront the worldwide repercussions of Palestine, tools once deployed abroad now operate inward, shaping the political life of their own societies. The boundary between foreign policy and domestic governance has thinned to the point of disappearance.
Security systems built for external confrontation now organize the management of internal protest and dissent.
In Germany, organizations such as Samidoun, a Palestinian prisoner solidarity network, have been banned under counterterrorism statutes, with accompanying raids on community spaces. In the United Kingdom, members of Palestine Action remain in extended pre-trial detention, often for more than a year without trial, far beyond standard legal limits. In the United States, repression assumes a more administrative profile: investigations, travel restrictions, blocked funding, professional sanctions, and layered institutional pressure.
Across these settings, a single logic prevails: security infrastructure designed for foreign policy now governs domestic political opposition.
Surveillance continues its steady expansion, justified as prevention. Communications and financial activity fall under scrutiny for political association and belief. Banks and payment processors close accounts under ambiguous “reputational risk” rules, enforcing economic exclusion without judicial review. Connection to pro-Palestinian causes increasingly restricts access to ordinary financial life, narrowing the space for collective organization.
Ordinary acts of solidarity now attract criminal designation. Fundraising, legal defense, humanitarian assistance, and academic criticism circulate within the category of security concern. In the United States, organizations such as Palestine Legal document record levels of doxxing, employment retaliation, investigations, and harassment — producing a chilling effect that interrupts political engagement at its earliest stages.
Public space undergoes parallel transformation. Campuses absorb heavier security regimes. Assemblies face tighter constraints. Continuous monitoring becomes routine. Visible support for Palestine provokes extraordinary regulatory intervention.
The political order that takes shape grows increasingly rigid and managed, directed through preemptive pressure, administrative command, and accelerated executive action, with diminishing space for deliberation or procedural restraint.
III.3 Fragmentation of Western Political Coalitions
Across Western political systems, the repercussions of Palestine now press inward. Instruments once deployed abroad increasingly shape domestic political life. The boundary between foreign policy and internal governance continues to thin, until separation itself becomes difficult to sustain.
What began as security architecture for external confrontation now organizes the management of internal protest and dissent.
In Germany, Samidoun has been banned under counterterrorism law, with raids extending into community spaces. Over in the United Kingdom, members of Palestine Action remain in extended pre-trial detention, often exceeding a year without trial and surpassing standard legal limits. In the United States, pressure accumulates through administrative channels: investigations, travel restrictions, blocked funding, employment consequences, institutional scrutiny.
Despite national differences, the pattern holds. Security infrastructure built for foreign policy now governs domestic political opposition.
Everywhere, surveillance expands, justified as prevention. Communications and financial transactions attract scrutiny for political association and belief. Under vague “reputational risk” standards, banks and payment processors close accounts, enforcing economic exclusion without judicial review. For many, connection to pro-Palestinian causes now constricts access to ordinary financial life, narrowing the terrain of political organization before it fully emerges.
Solidarity itself has entered a zone of criminal suspicion. Fundraising, legal defense, humanitarian assistance, academic critique — each circulates within the category of security concern. In the United States, Palestine Legal documents record levels of doxxing, employment retaliation, investigations, and harassment. The result is a pervasive chilling effect, interrupting political engagement at its earliest stages.
Meanwhile, public space has been quietly reengineered. Campuses absorb heavier security regimes. Gatherings face tighter constraints. Continuous monitoring becomes routine. Expressions of support for Palestine trigger extraordinary regulatory intervention.
What has taken shape is a political order increasingly rigid and managed, steered by preemptive pressure, administrative command, and accelerated executive action, with deliberation and procedural restraint steadily displaced.
III.4 Long-Term Systemic Consequences
The crisis triggered by Palestine is speeding up big changes in how Western countries are governed and how they are seen around the world.
The old post-Cold War system — built on promises of liberal values, international rules, and a fair “rules-based order” — is falling apart when those rules get applied unevenly. It’s not just bad publicity anymore; it’s a real breakdown in the West’s moral and political authority, which used to be its strongest weapon globally. This weakening opens the door for other countries (especially in the Global South) to push their own stories and gives rival powers strong proof of Western double standards.
As trust and legitimacy fade, governments are getting tougher and less open. Instead of convincing people, they rely more on top-down control and force. Consent is replaced by orders. Surveillance grows everywhere. Politics feels tense, divided, and fragile. We could head toward a constitutional breakdown and major anti-system protests, or toward a cold, tech-controlled form of authoritarian stability. A real fix — through honest accountability and consistent laws — looks unlikely right now.
Foreign policy and home affairs have merged completely. Methods once used abroad — in occupations, counter-insurgency, and the “war on terror” — are now turned inward, creating a sense of permanent internal conflict within Western societies.
At the same time, there’s a separate effort to shield Israel from this pressure: the Saudi–Emirati–Bahraini normalization push, along with the ongoing Abraham Accords framework. Even after Gaza and widespread regional anger, this project isn’t dead. It keeps working as a kind of protective wall — tying Israel deeper into Gulf money, security deals, energy routes, and trade networks. This regional alignment doesn’t cancel out the problems in the West; it actually proves them. The stronger the calls for accountability grow inside Western institutions, the more urgently Israel and its Gulf partners try to build these independent buffers.
All these changes are already reshaping how Western countries are run. The fight over Palestine has turned into the main battleground where the future of the entire Western political system will be decided.
IV.1 The Strategic Gain
For years, Western powers handled the Palestine issue as a manageable moral concern. They absorbed public anger with polished diplomatic statements, humanitarian aid promises, and carefully controlled news cycles. That old model still lingers, but it no longer sets the rules of engagement.
Palestinian strategy, shaped by the harsh realities in Gaza and amplified through global networks, has opened up powerful new arenas of confrontation. The fight now unfolds in international courtrooms like the ICC, where arrest warrants for alleged war crimes directly challenge long-standing impunity. It reaches into corporate boardrooms, where lawsuits over arms exports and divestment campaigns force companies to confront their complicity. It spreads across digital public spaces, where mass platform censorship and sudden account closures expose the hidden machinery of silencing. It even penetrates the internal workings of institutions, where routine decisions about procurement, investments, and compliance can no longer escape intense political scrutiny.
This shift represents a major strategic breakthrough because it dismantles the old ability to deny or speak in vague abstractions. When clear forensic evidence of destruction lands on the ICC docket, when arms contracts face litigation in national courts, when banks shut down accounts citing “reputational risk,” and when platforms throttle content using documented biased algorithms, the system is forced to reveal its true operational logic. The struggle has becomes visible beyond grand rhetoric and by concrete steps: the sanctions imposed, the lawsuits filed, the silenced accounts, and the blocked shipments.
Solidarity itself has taken on a new and more effective form. The most impactful work no longer relies solely on persuasion or symbolic protests. Instead, it focuses on creating real friction and compelling difficult choices inside institutions that must make tangible decisions every day. Universities must weigh procurement and investment policies. Ports and unions must decide whether to handle controversial shipments. Regulators must address compliance failures. Courts must rule on shared liability for complicity. Governments must calculate the rising political costs of shielding an ally from accountability.
In this current phase, Palestinian strategy has gained deep, structural leverage. It forces institutions to choose between their declared principles and their political alliances. It imposes real costs — legal, financial, and reputational — that cannot be neutralized by words alone. It transforms quiet complicity into an active, daily management problem that cannot be ignored.
At its core, this marks the decisive gain of the present moment: Palestinian politics is no longer standing outside the gates of power petitioning for change. It has entered the machinery itself, quietly reshaping the cost-benefit calculations of those who hold the levers.
IV.2 The Strategic Danger
Every strategic gain generates a ferocious counter-move. As Palestinian politics forces itself into the operating systems of Western power, those systems respond by attempting to disable the very capacity that made the intrusion possible. The paramount danger is the systematic attempt to force Palestinian strategy back into forms that can be isolated, criminalized, and neutralized.
The first pressure is fragmentation. The banning of Samidoun in Germany, the transnational sanctions against its network, and the targeting of specific leaders like Khaled Barakat are designed to sever the connective tissue of a global movement. When organizations are dismantled and networks disrupted, coordination fractures. Institutional memory is lost. Each local struggle risks becoming detached from the wider political project, transforming a unified front into a series of isolated, manageable emergencies.
The second pressure is exhaustion. This is the slow, administrative grind designed to drain the movement’s vitality: the prolonged pre-trial detention of activists in the UK, the crippling financial blockades against aid and advocacy groups, and the constant surveillance that demands perpetual security calculus. Activism is forced into survival mode. Long-term strategy is crowded out by immediate crisis management. The work that builds power is sacrificed to the work of staying alive.
The third pressure is forced misdirection. When every act of solidarity is reframed through a security lens — as “material support for terrorism” or a threat to “public order” — the movement is pushed into a defensive posture. Attention shifts from advancing political goals to endlessly answering legal accusations and navigating compliance traps. The struggle is pulled onto the adversary’s chosen terrain: the courtroom, the compliance office, the counter-terrorism review. The system seizes control of the tempo and the framing.
The deepest danger is strategic capture. If these pressures succeed, Palestinian politics is reduced to mere reaction. It moves only where the boot falls, rather than toward where power is vulnerable. Avoiding this outcome requires a discipline that runs counter to the pressure: preserving organizational continuity, protecting collective memory, and relentlessly refusing to let the system dictate the meaning, objective, or rhythm of the struggle.
IV.3 The New Terrain of Power
The present phase has clarified with brutal clarity where power now concentrates and where leverage must be applied. The most effective interventions have moved beyond the primary domain of messaging or moral appeal. They now target the operational systems that translate policy into reality: the arms supply chains, shipping routes, insurance underwriting, procurement contracts, banking compliance, institutional governance, and digital visibility algorithms. These are the chokepoints where political decisions become actionable, and where they can be disrupted.
When arms shipments are delayed by lawsuits or blockades, when insurers withdraw coverage citing war crime risks, when university contracts are challenged over complicity, when bank payments are frozen, the struggle shifts from argument to consequence. Institutions that could once claim neutrality are forced to act, revealing their alignment through their operational choices.
This terrain is complex, technical, and slow. It demands specific knowledge: legal fluency for court filings, forensic skill for building evidence archives, financial acumen for shareholder actions, and logistical understanding of global supply chains. It is not inherently dramatic. It often looks like the meticulous work of audits, regulatory complaints, procurement challenges, and platform policy appeals. Yet, this is precisely where durable leverage accumulates — not in the fleeting spectacle, but in the sustained imposition of friction.
Success in this phase hinges on sharp strategic thinking.
It requires identifying which institutions are most exposed, learning how to work through their own rules and procedures, locating points of vulnerability and dependence, and building alliances that multiply pressure rather than disperse it. Purely symbolic victories no longer suffice. The work now unfolds cumulatively — layer by layer — and at a structural level, reshaping the architecture of power itself.
This technical, targeted approach relies on mass mobilization. Mass movements generate political energy, open space, and produce urgency from below. Into that opening, precise institutional pressure moves, converting momentum into concrete shifts and unavoidable political and economic costs.
At this stage, Palestinian strategy becomes something deeper.
It matures into an effort to govern — to shape and steer — the very terrain on which the struggle is fought.
IV.4 The Time Problem
The central strategic challenge is a collision of timelines. Palestinian politics is built upon a long continuum of displacement, occupation, and resistance — an unbroken historical horizon where 1948, 1967, and 2023 are chapters in the same narrative. The Western systems it confronts operate on a rhythm of crisis cycles: outbursts of outrage, calibrated responses, diplomatic resets, and engineered amnesia. These models of time collide violently in every escalation.
Strategy, therefore, must perform a dual function. It must categorically refuse the reset and the amnesia it demands, holding the long memory of the struggle alive. Simultaneously, it must use moments of profound rupture — like the ongoing catastrophe in Gaza — to accelerate consequences and lock in gains that prevent a return to the prior “normal.” The great danger is being pulled entirely into the adversary’s calendar of crisis management, where each horror becomes a self-contained episode and previous advances are quietly erased in the fog of the “next” crisis.
This demands the construction of institutions of memory and continuity: robust legal archives, verified casualty databases, preserved organizational records, and political education networks that outlast individual campaigns and news cycles. The struggle cannot afford to be memory-less; it must be built to survive the waning of headlines. Concurrently, strategic timing is critical. Moments of heightened global exposure and political shock create narrow openings for decisive action — for filing landmark lawsuits, initiating bold divestment campaigns, or forcing diplomatic realignments. The strategy must therefore master two rhythms at once: the slow, relentless accumulation of structural power and the rapid, precise exploitation of political breaks.
Victory in this phase belongs to those who control time — who stretch the moment of crisis into a permanent reckoning and who embed the past so deeply into the present that it cannot be dismissed.
IV.5 Unity, Discipline, and Role Differentiation
The defining task of this phase is coordination.
Not uniformity, but orchestrated alignment across differentiated roles. The fronts of engagement remain multiple and distinct: legal advocacy in international courts, direct action against infrastructure, labor organizing in strategic sectors, forensic media work, humanitarian survival operations, prisoner solidarity networks, community defense, and diaspora political mobilization. No single tactic or organization can carry the full weight.
The inherent danger is internal fragmentation that does the system’s work for it. When one wing of the movement sabotages or dismisses another, it replicates the very fractures that external repression seeks to impose. Discipline, in this context, means actively refusing to internalize the logic of the adversary. It means recognizing that the activist facing terrorism charges and the lawyer filing the ICC petition, though their daily work looks nothing alike, are engaged in the same strategic campaign.
Unity is therefore is built through shared strategic objectives, secure channels of information exchange, a mature respect for necessary roles, and careful coordination so different tactics don’t interfere with each other. Some actors will necessarily absorb the sharpest repression in order to create political space; others will work to consolidate gains within institutional frameworks. Both functions are essential. Sustaining this complex equilibrium is the mark of political maturity. The movement must learn to protect its own internal capacity and cohesion as fiercely as it confronts external power.
IV.6 What Victory Looks Like in This Phase
Victory in the present phase marks a step within a longer horizon of liberation. It lies in the deliberate accumulation of irreversible gains that alter the balance of power. It is measured by the rising costs imposed on the enablers of occupation and the strengthening capacity of the Palestinian political body.
It looks like the precedent set by an ICC arrest warrant, making future impunity more legally perilous. It looks like the corporate divestment and broken contract that shrinks the space for unconditional complicity. It looks like the solidarity network that adapts and persists despite being banned. It looks like the institution — a city council, a university, a pension fund — forced into a permanent, public alignment that can no longer be hidden behind empty rhetoric.
Each legal precedent, each disrupted shipment, each exposed partnership compounds. The struggle becomes structurally heavier for those who wage and enable it, and more stable, more resilient, and more legible for those who carry it forward. This phase constructs the essential conditions for the next. Liberation is not achieved in a single, dramatic rupture, but is built through a sequence of irreversible shifts that systematically narrow the adversary’s options while widening the field of political possibility.
In this moment, victory means making the machinery of injustice increasingly expensive, legally vulnerable, politically toxic, and operationally untenable. It means making the status quo ungovernable.
Conclusion: The Shape of the Moment
The struggle over Palestine has ceased to be a question of opinion, narrative, or policy preference. It has become a question of political structure: what forms of power can govern the future, and which have lost the capacity to contain it.
This is why the present moment generates instability across so many domains at once. Gaza has not merely shattered an old order. It has exposed that order’s underlying architecture — how its containment logic functioned, what its stability required, and what violence it consistently concealed. The mechanisms of control that once operated through quiet coordination and rhetorical deflection now operate openly through sanctions on judges, bans on movements, financial coercion, and algorithmic suppression. Law, diplomacy, humanitarianism, and security no longer stabilize the system. They circulate instead as evidence of contradiction, a visible record of the widening gap between proclaimed principle and lived practice.
For Palestinian politics, this exposure is not only a crisis of survival. It is a historical opening created by the collision of political time. The struggle now unfolds inside the architecture of global power itself — in courtrooms, corporate supply chains, financial compliance regimes, and digital public space. The field of action is no longer shaped by appeals for recognition but by the imposition of consequence and the calculation of cost. The system responds with structural repression because it has no other workable currency. It is attempting to govern a political reality — a Palestinian capacity for generating accountable pressure — that its old managerial tools can no longer absorb.
Gaza has forced the system to reveal its limits. The old framework of governance cannot continue in its previous form. Whether this rupture yields transformation, authoritarian adaptation, or a new technocratic mode of containment remains unresolved. What is certain is that return is no longer possible. Gaza has become the stress test the old order cannot evade. The struggle now is over what replaces it.
What follows will not be decided by diplomatic declarations or the afterlife of failed negotiations. It will be decided through material and organizational contests: whether Palestinian political life and its allies can outlast the transnational machinery deployed to fragment them; whether historical continuity can be preserved against the cyclical amnesia of crisis management; whether institutions of memory, coordination, and collective discipline — legal archives, solidarity networks, strategic patience — can survive relentless pressure and attack.
This is the defining work of the coming period. Not a single dramatic rupture, but a steady reordering of the conditions of struggle. Not an appeal to external conscience, but the construction of a new balance of power from within the system’s own operating logic.
This essay does not prescribe campaigns or sequences. It simply maps the field in which all such decisions must now be made.
The threshold has been crossed. Change is already underway. The remaining question is whether Palestinian political organization and its allied formations will possess the clarity, unity, and endurance to shape what that change becomes — to ensure the emerging order bends not toward a more refined repression, but toward an inescapable justice.
This is the shape of the moment: an era of consequence.
Rima Najjar is a Palestinian whose father’s side of the family comes from the forcibly depopulated village of Lifta on the western outskirts of Jerusalem and whose mother’s side of the family is from Ijzim, south of Haifa.
26 December 2025
Source: countercurrents.org
