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The Unvanquished Will: Gaza’s Triumph of Spirit Against the Architecture of Genocide

Ramzy Baroud

For the last two years, my social media algorithm has been relentlessly dominated by Gaza, particularly by the voices of ordinary Gazans, displaying a blend of emotions that centers on two core principles: grief and defiance.

Grief has characterized life in Gaza for many years, a consequence of successive Israeli wars, the unrelenting siege, and habitual bombardment. The last two years, marked by genocide and famine, however, have redefined that grief in a way almost incomprehensible to the Palestinians themselves.

Yes, Palestine has endured numerous massacres before, during, and since the Nakba – the tragic destruction of the Palestinian homeland. But those massacres were typically episodic, each distinctively marked by specific historical circumstances. Each is incorporated into the Palestinian collective psyche as proof of Israeli barbarity, but also as a demonstration of their own enduring resilience as a people.

I grew up in a Gaza refugee camp where we commemorated each massacre with rallies, general strikes, and artistic expressions. We knew the victims and immortalized them through chants, political graffiti, poetry and the like.

The war of extermination launched by Israel against Gaza in the last two years has fundamentally changed all of that. On a single day, October 31, 2023, the Israeli army killed 704 Palestinians, and 120 in the Jabaliya refugee camp alone. Single bombs would annihilate hundreds in one strike, often in hospitals, refugee shelters, or UN schools. Massacres were taking place every day, everywhere.

There was no time to reflect on any of these massacres, to pray for the victims, or even to bury them with proper dignity. All that Gazans could do was desperately try to cling to life itself, bury their loved ones in mass graves, and use their own bare hands to dig out the wounded and dead from underneath the massive slabs of concrete and mountains of rubble. Thousands remain unaccounted for, and about a quarter of a million Gazans have been killed and wounded.

The tally will continue to grow, and the degree of devastation keeps worsening, even now that the rate of killing has subsided. But why, then, does my social media feed continue to show Palestinians openly celebrating their victory? Why are Gaza’s children, though gaunt and exhausted due to the famine, continuing to perform traditional debka dances? Why is 5-year-old Maria Hannoun, one of Gaza’s many influencers, continuing to recite the poetry of Mahmoud Darwish and sending fiery messages to US President Donald Trump that Gaza will never be defeated?

To say that ‘Gazans are built differently’ is a massive understatement. I have spent the last twenty years dedicated to academic research on the people‘s history of Palestine, focusing heavily on Gaza, and I still find their collective will astonishing. They seem to have made a shared, conscious decision: the metrics for their defeat or victory would be entirely separate from those used by the media covering the war.

These measures are rooted in resistance as a foundational choice. Core values like Karamah (dignity), Izza (pride), and Sabr (patience), among others, are the standards by which Gaza judges its performance. And, by these profound standards, the people of the genocide and famine-stricken Strip have won this war.

Because these values are often ignored or misinterpreted in war coverage, many have found Gaza’s response to the ceasefire, one of unbridled joy and celebration, confusing. The scene of mothers waiting for their sons to be released in a large celebration in Khan Yunis, southern Gaza, was particularly illuminating. They cried bitterly, while clapping and ululating all at once. One mother perfectly clarified the paradox for a reporter: the tears were for the sons and daughters killed in the war, and the ululating was for the ones being released.

News media, however, rarely understands the complexity of the Gaza survival paradigm. Some, including Israeli military analysts, have concluded that Benjamin Netanyahu has lost the war because he failed to achieve any of his declared objectives. Others speak of some kind of Israeli victory simply because Israel managed to obliterate nearly the whole of Gaza and a large section of its population.

Each side uses numbers and figures to back up their claims. Yet, Palestinians in Gaza view this situation in a fundamentally different way. They understand that Israel’s war was ultimately an attempt to destroy their very peoplehood—to shatter their spirit, disorient their culture, turn them against one another, and ultimately eradicate the core essence of being Palestinian.

Gazans celebrate precisely because they know Israel has failed. The Palestinian nation has emerged even more deeply rooted in its identity, both in Gaza and elsewhere. The child singing of the martyrs, the civil defense workers dancing the debka for their fallen comrades, and the woman using the wreckage of a destroyed Israeli Merkava tank to air her laundry – all these images speak of a nation unified by its love for life and its fierce commitment to shared values of valor, honor, and love.

Some analysts, trying to find a more nuanced and reasoned conclusion, have resolved that neither Israel won the war, nor were the Palestinians defeated. While this balanced approach can be appreciated in terms of the strategic reading of the ceasefire, it is still profoundly incorrect when understood against the backdrop of popular Palestinian culture. For ordinary people, survival, continuity, and self-assertion are the ultimate signs of victory against Israel, a country that does not hesitate to use genocide for temporary political gains. The core of their triumph is simply this: they remain.

[Dr. Ramzy Baroud is a journalist, author and the Editor of The Palestine Chronicle. He is the author of six books. His forthcoming book, ‘Before the Flood,’ will be published by Seven Stories Press. His other books include ‘Our Vision for Liberation’, ‘My Father was a Freedom Fighter’ and ‘The Last Earth’. Baroud is a Non-resident Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Islam and Global Affairs (CIGA).]

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The Voice of the Peoples: Hadash Lawmakers Odeh and Cassif Defy Imperialists in the Knesset

In Defense of Communism Staff

October 13, 2025: In a defiant act of moral clarity, two members of Hadash–Ayman Odeh and Ofer Cassif–rose in the Knesset today to break the silence, demanding that the United States immediately recognize Palestinian statehood. Their banner, reading simply “Recognize Palestine,” became a weapon in itself–a call to justice echoing through the marble halls of Israel’s legislature.

As President Trump addressed the Knesset, receiving thunderous applause for his hawkish vision, Odeh and Cassif stood.

They chanted slogans denouncing the genocide in Gaza and dared to voice the demand every genuine peace proposal must begin with: two states, side by side, with Palestinian rights recognized.

Their action was met with raw suppression. They were violently escorted out of the plenary chamber, forcibly removed from the space where voices are supposed to be heard. Yet, by doing so, the Hadash lawmakers’ voices became amplified far beyond that hall–carried through defiance into the conscience of the world.

During Trump’s speech, when the chamber filled with self-congratulatory applause, the “voices of the peoples” rang out instead from those two lawmakers. Amid the celebration of power and destruction, Odeh declared:

I was expelled from the plenary simply for asking the simplest demand–a demand with which the international community agrees: let there be recognition of a Palestinian state.

He went on:

Recognize this simple reality: there are two peoples here, and no one is going anywhere.

Their removal is not a punishment but a badge of honor. In a chamber dominated by applause for violence, in a moment when the powerful rally themselves into ecstasy over bombs and bones, these two dared to speak the language of justice. They forced the world to watch.

The stakes are not procedural. More than 67,000 Palestinians have been killed in Israeli offensives in Gaza since October 2023, the vast majority women and children. Recognition of Palestinian statehood is not an act of charity–it is the bare minimum of moral accountability.

In refusing to bow to the applause of killers, Odeh and Cassif embody what it means to act with conscience in a place built on coercion and military might. Their courageous stance is a warning, a challenge, a call: the occupation must end, the recognition must come, and those who support war must answer.

[Courtesy: In Defense of Communism, a Greece-based blog.]

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A Warning from Lebanon

Craig Murray

October 21, 2025: In not quite one year since the ceasefire deal in Lebanon, Israel has broken the ceasefire 4,600 times. It has killed hundreds of people, including infants, demolished tens of thousands of homes and annexed five areas of Lebanon. It was supposed to withdraw completely.

This situation is being replicated in detail in Gaza. In particular, the ceasefire in Lebanon is “guaranteed” by the USA and France and overseen by an international committee referred to as “the Mechanism”. The “Mechanism” is chaired by the USA. Accordingly the guarantors have refused to acknowledge a single breach of the ceasefire because the U.S.-controlled “Mechanism” calls them counter-terrorist operations aimed at disarming Hezbollah.

The United Nations defers to “the Mechanism” and thus to the USA, and the presence of UN peacekeeping troops in Southern Lebanon is therefore useless. Lebanon is now under control of the US/Israeli puppet administration of General Aoun and effectively being run by U.S. Special Envoy Tom Barrack.

Barrack stated that the borders of Israel and Syria are meaningless and that “Israel will go where they want, when they want, and do what they want to protect the Israelis and their border to make sure on October 7th it never happens again”. This is from the “guarantor” of the Lebanese ceasefire agreement.

There can be no doubt that Trump’s U.S.-chaired “Board of Peace” for Gaza will take exactly the same line as “the Mechanism” in Lebanon. It is axiomatic that Israel will never honor any agreement. They never have.

What we know from Lebanon is not just that the Israelis will break any agreement, but that the American “guarantors” will support their continued violence as “counter-terrorism”. While the Gaza peacekeeping force may not be UN blue-helmeted, it will also almost certainly have terms of engagement that defer to the U.S.-chaired “Board of Peace”.

Back in February I discussed the failure of the Lebanese ceasefire agreement with the UN spokesman in Lebanon, and the primacy of the “Mechanism”. In light of the Gaza agreement negotiations, it is worth revisiting that interview.

Hamas were right to enter the ceasefire negotiations and the prisoner exchange is a good thing. I am not supportive of Hamas’s policy of taking prisoners, other than active service personnel, and I do not believe it has done their cause any good these last two years, particularly as Israel had taken more hostages than they have released in exchanges. The “hostage” narrative, however twisted and unfair, has muddied the waters and hurt the Palestinians. So I shall be pleased to see the end of that phase, and of course welcome the release of Palestinians.

Israel will still hold over 9,000 Palestinian hostages after the releases, and possibly many more.

I will not go through the 20 points of the Agreement, all of which are just headings requiring the substance. But the Israeli military withdrawal from Gaza is of course fundamental, and entirely obscure in its timing and completeness. The “first stage” still leaves the Israeli military in over 60% of Gaza.

Netanyahu has made plain to the Israeli public that he has no intention of the Israeli military leaving Gaza, or of agreeing to a Palestinian state. That this agreement is a phoney is not hidden at all—Israel is not pretending it will honour it.

But if the process gets three things into Gaza—food, journalists and peacekeepers—that will be a major improvement. I do not think you should underestimate the impact on world opinion once journalists can actually get into Gaza, witness the destruction and interview people. There is nobody more cynical than I about the mainstream media, but they are not going to be able to prevent the truth from bleeding into their coverage.

The victory for Palestine will take a few years. Israel is now a pariah state in the eyes of the majority of the inhabitants of this globe, and that will accelerate. Hamas are negotiating from a position of weakness, it is true. We are apparently going to see formal colonialism restored in Gaza for a while. There is more pain to be endured. But the balance is shifting.

I have two quotes for you, one from the West and one from the East.

The mills of God grind slowly, but they grind exceeding small.

They plan, and they plan, but Allah is the best of planners.

[Craig Murray is an author, broadcaster and human rights activist. He was British Ambassador to Uzbekistan from August 2002 to October 2004 and Rector of the University of Dundee from 2007 to 2010. Courtesy: Antiwar.com, a US based online portal devoted to the cause of non-interventionism. It is a project of the Randolph Bourne Institute.]

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It is Israel That Must be Deradicalized, not Palestine

Nick Gottlieb

The recent recognitions of a Palestinian state and the October 10 ceasefire have been followed by a flurry of calls to “deradicalize” Palestinian society. The New York Times editorial board went so far as to compare this deradicalization project to the denazification of Germany after the Second World War.

These calls have the situation backwards to the point of farce.

It is not the Palestinian people, victims of decades of apartheid, internationally recognized illegal occupation, and now putative genocide, that need to be deradicalized. It is Israel, a society led by a political movement Albert Einstein and a group of prominent American Jews once called “closely akin… to the Nazi and Fascist parties.”

Einstein and his co-authors were writing in response to what they saw as the legitimation of Menachem Begin’s Nazi-like revisionist party Herut, a political formation they explain “formed out of the membership and following of the former Irgun Zvai Leumi, a terrorist, right-wing, chauvinist organization in Palestine.”

Even David Ben-Gurion, the first prime minister of Israel and no stranger himself to the project of ethnic cleansing (he oversaw the Nakba, after all), repeatedly compared Begin and his political movement to the Nazis. Begin, who was considered a terrorist by the British government in the 1950s, burst out of the political fringes in 1977 when he took power at the helm of the Likud coalition (Likud would become a political party in 1988). His principle political position at the time was his opposition to ending the occupation of Gaza and the West Bank, which Israel seized in 1967, and to the idea of a Palestinian state in those territories.

Benjamin Netanyahu’s political work began in 1984 after he returned to Israel from the United States, where he had worked for the Boston Consulting Group (the same firm hired to set up the infamous Gaza Humanitarian Foundation earlier this year). He was ambassador to the United Nations for a Likud coalition government from 1984-1988, became chair of Likud in 1993, and has helmed the party on and off ever since.

Today, Netanyahu presides over a government that fuses the long-standing ethno-nationalist ideology of Revisionist Zionism—exemplified by his repeated UN performances featuring maps of an expanded “Greater Israel”—with the even more extreme, millenarian current of Kahanism, represented by Ministers Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir.

Kahanism is named for the late Rabbi Meir Kahane, the founder of the Jewish Defense League, a North American organization that the FBI considers a right-wing terror group. In 1994, Baruch Goldstein, a member of Kahan’s Kach movement in Israel, killed 29 Palestinians and injured 125 more at a mosque in Hebron. Ben-Gvir, whose political party today is called “Jewish Power,” was a Kach youth activist in his early days and remains a committed Kahanist. In 1995, a year after Goldstein’s massacre, Ben-Gvir dressed up as Goldstein to celebrate the Jewish holiday Purim; he also proudly hung a photo of Goldstein in his home for years.

Ben-Gvir’s Jewish Power party holds six seats in Israel’s parliament and plays a pivotal role in Netanyahu’s Likud-led coalition. Smotrich leads the equally far-right National Religious Party—Religious Zionism, which holds another seven seats. Together with the ultra-nationalist Noam party, these factions control more than 10 percent of the Knesset.

Over a third of Israeli voters selected either Likud or the far-right electoral alliance—all of which have been compared, in various ways, to Nazism, and all of which espouse, to varying degrees, ideologies of Jewish supremacy and violent expansionism.

But these electoral figures don’t fully communicate the degree to which Israeli society is radicalized against Palestinian humanity. Polling conducted earlier this year by Tamir Sorek and summarized in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reveal astonishing levels of genocidal intent among the Israeli population.

According to the study, 82 percent of Israelis polled support the forced expulsion of the two million residents of Gaza; 56 percent support the expulsion of Palestinian citizens of Israel (around two million people); 47 percent support the statement, “when conquering an enemy city, the Israel Defense Forces should act as the Israelites did in Jericho under Joshua’s command—killing all its inhabitants”; and 65 percent believe there is a “modern-day incarnation of Amalek,” a biblical enemy that, according to scripture, was annihilated by the Israelites—a reference Netanyahu has repeatedly invoked during the assault on Gaza.

These sentiments hold even among secular Jews in Israel: 69 percent support the forced transfer of Gaza’s population and 31 percent consider the biblical story of Joshua’s assault on Jericho to be a model the IDF should follow.

Critics have challenged that survey by presenting another, conducted by Tel Aviv University, which found only 53 percent (rather than 82 percent) of Israeli Jews support forced population transfers of the people of Gaza.

Read that again: even the more optimistic study found that more than half of Israeli Jews support ethnic cleansing.

Israel is a society gripped by genocidal fervour and led by a convergence of a secular Jewish supremacist ideology that has long been the beating heart of Zionism and a newer millenarian religious ideology. There is no path to a lasting peace that does not address this reality.

Palestinian political movements have long been open to peaceful coexistence: the Palestinian Liberation Organization began calling for a single democratic state with equal rights for all in 1971. Hamas specifically has been willing to accept a Palestinian state within 1967 borders since 2017.

Israeli society and its leaders are openly unwilling to accept either of these solutions.

Western leaders are calling to “deradicalize” Gaza, where Israel has, according to a UN commission, an ever-growing list of human rights organizations, and the vast majority of experts, just committed genocide, while refusing to say a word about the increasingly fanatical nature of Israeli society.

It is the moral equivalent of demanding the deradicalization of the Warsaw Ghetto while arming Nazi Germany.

[Nick Gottlieb is a climate writer based in northern BC and the author of the newsletter Sacred Headwaters. His work focuses on understanding the power dynamics driving today’s interrelated crises and exploring how they can be overcome. Courtesy: Canadian Dimension, a forum for debate on important issues facing the Canadian Left today, and a source for analysis of national and regional politics, labour, economics, world affairs and art.]