The realities we inhabit continue to outstrip our capacity to analyze them. We witness the kidnapping, capture, and deportation of immigrants throughout the United States; the targeting of everyday dissidents through shoot-to-kill policies; the toppling and capture of the president of Venezuela; the ongoing realities of genocide in Palestine and Sudan; the unbridled US-Israeli war on Iran, Israel’s seventh invasion of Lebanon; and Iran’s response throughout the Eastern Mediterranean and the Arabian Peninsula. We had thought the broadening architecture of impunity that Israel and the United States have carefully constructed—with the support of Britain, France, Italy, and Germany—had culminated in the Israeli genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. Today we understand that Gaza was just the beginning.
Since January 2024, in quarterly letters from the editor for the Journal of Palestine Studies and a range of conversations, I have attempted to record what it means for all of us to live in genocide. I have gathered reports, accounts, and reflections that might otherwise be ephemeral to ask: What does it mean to be a child, to parent, to age, to be disabled in genocide? What does it mean to think and produce knowledge? In this article, I draw on public lectures, letters from the editor, as well as the book I am working on titled From Baltimore to Beirut: On the Question of Palestine, in which I learn from my ancestors’ lessons on time and space. What I have learned, what we must understand, is simple: Palestine is shrinking, Palestine is everywhere.
Let us go back to March 17, 2025. On that day, Oday al-Zaigh caught up with his friend Motasim Zain Eldeen. They surveyed their neighborhood in central Gaza City. They were proud. After fifteen months, there had been a pause in the bombardment. People had cleaned the streets and rebuilt what they could. When they parted, Oday and Motasim felt uplifted with the hope that their neighborhood might be beautiful once again.
At 2 a.m., Oday was startled awake. Chunks of ceiling and shards of window glass covered his body. Flames lit the apartment; the onslaught had resumed. Was he dead? He heard himself breathe. He rushed to find his parents and nine siblings. A large stone had fallen on his mother’s chest. He pushed off the stone, grabbed her hand, and ran with her down the stairs. Outside the door, they waded through body parts. His mother fainted. Engulfed in the smell of blood and burned flesh, Oday and his surviving neighbors began gathering remains in plastic bags. Together, they kept vigil over their dismembered friends and family, throwing stones at the stray dogs surrounding them. Two hours later, an ambulance arrived. The medics had space only for the wounded; “they refused to take the dead bodies.” At daybreak, Oday and his neighbors found more bodies “strewn across the street.” Oday stumbled on the upper half of a disfigured body. It was Motasim.
That was March 18, 2025. I don’t know if Oday is still alive. If he is, he faces the lie that is the so-called ceasefire, a continuation of mass murder. On October 8, 2025, Donald Trump announced the first phase of a twenty-point plan that would ostensibly launch the ceasing of fire as well as inaugurating the so-called Board of Peace. As of this writing, Israel controls about 70 percent of Gaza, a land partitioned into forced evacuation and military zones. The plan’s provisional map to which we have access shows three phases of Israel withdrawal. In the third and final phase, Israel will retreat to a “security buffer zone” that includes 58 percent of the Gaza Strip. Even if we reached this third phase, Israel would still control Beit Lahiya, Beit Hanoun, parts of Shuja‘yea, Tuffah, Zeitoun, more than half of the Khan Younis governate, and nearly all of the Rafah governate. Palestine is shrinking.
Between Before and After
Today, Palestinians enter yet another phase of recursive loops of space and time of slow and fast death, of a future deferred. We face yet another set of negotiations, a mechanism Israel has repetitively wielded as an alibi for mass murder. We recite “officialized” numbers of the dead rendered acceptable by methods of obfuscation. Even as we rehearse these numbers, we know they are a drastic undercounting. We know that we may never be able to count the Palestinians who perished under rubble. Over the course of its seventy-seven-year-old effort to control all of historic Palestine, Israel has killed Palestinian people at different speeds and temporalities.
Lodged between the time before and the time after, life today in the Gaza Strip is “a psychological minefield” of endless grief. It is a landscape of ruins, a purgatory between life and death. Roads no longer connect neighborhoods, transportation no longer guarantees movement, water and sewage lines burst under bombardment, “flooding streets and turning mobility into an endeavor plagued by biohazards.” Palestinians in Gaza plan their day according to how far their injured and starved bodies can carry them.
We must remember that Israel has starved the Palestinians of Gaza armed, aided, and abetted by its main sponsor, the United States. We do not forget that Israel severely restricted, ant at times imposed a complete blockade of food, water, and medicine to the Gaza Strip. We remember the total cut of electricity on March 2, 2025, for a week, in a repetition of the total blockade of the first months of the genocide. We remember that on March 18, 2025, Israel destroyed the only remaining desalination plant in north Gaza. We remember that Palestinians have withstood a level of urban starvation that “has not been seen” since the siege of Leningrad in World War II, even as Israel and the United States deny the international and US humanitarian reports that this is a human-made starvation.
By the end of the 2025, over nine thousand children had arrived at hospitals with acute malnutrition. In March 2026, under the cover of the US and Israeli aggression on Iran, Israel reinstated “a draconian closure,” administering starvation with bureaucratic precision. Food is held waiting, rotting just beyond newly constructed walls and de facto borders. With barely a drip of food, medicine, and aid entering the Gaza Strip, Palestinians of all ages teeter, emaciated, between life and death. Hunger resides in people’s bodies. It is “more than physical deprivation”; it dismantles the self and the collective. The two million people who have survived thirty months of unbridled brutality now again face the temporal warp of famine.
I have written elsewhere about the matter of time, drawing on the words of my great-grandfather, in his relentless attempts to fight for a plot of land in a shrinking Palestinian in the 1940s. That matter of time is as alive today as it was then. Then as now, time is measured along a continuum of constriction and expansion. Every day, hunger governs time in Gaza. It is an “unrelenting measure.” It shapes each hour, distorts perception, dulls the memory, erodes the boundary between emotions and needs: “longing mutates into nausea. Anxiety folds into cramping silence.”
This reality of starvation has had its own institutions. We all remember the horror of the private US and Israeli led Gaza Humanitarian Fund (GHF), which operated from May to November 2025. The GHF weaponized food, rendering distribution zones a “killing field” of unprecedented scale. The Palestinians of Gaza faced an impossible choice: Should they attempt to collect food and halt the grinding hunger destroying their bodies? Or should they risk losing their lives to the cult of death that renders them target practice? When this death trap was dismantled in November 2025, due to lack of funds and international outcry, Palestinians breathed a sigh of relief. But they knew that it was but one distortion of that noun, humanitarian, rendered a mechanism of destruction.
Deprivation for Profit
As Trump claims the power of “ending,” be it the genocide or the ongoing war on Iran, Palestinians are once again an absent presence at those tables where our future is to be decided. Once again, as if no time had passed since the turn of the twentieth century, we are in a time deferred, not yet ready for freedom, not yet worthy of self-determination. Since 1917, Palestinians have been confined to this temporality of deferral, deemed unfit to rule ourselves, denied a political name, and deprived of territory.
The newest deferral of time envisions a Gaza “governed under the temporary transitional governance of a technocratic, apolitical Palestinian committee,” supervised by a “Board of Peace” headed by Trump and includes Tony Blair. George Orwell’s literary warning—war is peace—has become reality. Led by the self-appointed president of peace, Trump himself, the Board of Peace, will “rebuild and energise Gaza” along the model of “thriving modern miracle cities in the Middle East.” Trump has seemed to step back from the forced expulsion of Palestinians from the Gaza Strip. He had previously articulated what Israelis call the “Kahanist solution,” inspiring many who had previously refrained from saying such things out loud. The best way forward was the land without its people. Previously, Trump and his administration floated proposals for a destination for the forcibly expelled Palestinians: Indonesia, South Sudan, Egypt, and Jordan. From Jakarta to Juba, governments indicated that the claim of accepting expelled Palestinians were “baseless”; each version of that violent euphemism of “voluntary migration” failed. Or they have failed for now. Trump and his Board of Peace still seek to render four thousand years of civilization a real estate deal, negotiated on a trail of destruction and the promise of profit. In this plan, “the fusion of public power and private profit is complete.”
Take Tony Blair, who falls in and out of Trump’s good graces. This former representative of the failed Midde East Quartet, launched in 2002 to mediate between Israelis and Palestinians, has a well-known penchant for making money on the rubble of corpses. One Palestinian official called Blair “useless,” but his Institute for Global Change has received lucrative investments from Larry Ellison, founder of the tech company Oracle and an avid supporter of the Israeli army. Ellison is joined at Blair’s institute by Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and the United Arab Emirates’s sovereign wealth fund, Mubadala.
With input from the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, the Boston Consulting Group initially offered a dystopic fantasy of the future in July 2025: The “Great Trust: From a Demolished Iranian Proxy to a Prosperous Abrahamic Ally” envisions “dynamic, modern and AI-powered, smart planned cities” that feature an “Elon Musk Smart Manufacturing Zone,” “MBS Ring” and “MBZ Central” highways, an “American Data Safe Haven,” an “Abrahamic Infrastructure Corridor,” a new port and airport in Gaza, and “Gaza Trump Riviera & Islands.” While these visions are unlikely to come to fruition, they reveal the extent to which corporations and governments are “stockpiling for civilizational collapse” on the remains of Palestinians. Even as they plot to annihilate Palestine and the Palestinians, they ensure that Palestine is everywhere.
It is against this backdrop of profit that we must understand Gaza and Palestine’s landscape of deprivation and annihilation. After all, we are in an age where scenes of spectacular abundance prevail. This age of “pistachio desserts, Dubai chocolates, cheesecakes with layers of cream, gourmet burgers, pizzas, sauces, and creams” is made visible and possible by the abject deprivation, devastation, and hunger of the Gaza Strip. No event clarified the disparity between abundance and starvation more than Trump’s May 2025 visit to the Arabian Peninsula, which was marked by new scales of extravagance, by red and lavender carpets, and by promises of billions of dollars in investments.
Architecture of Subordination
In the gap between abundance and rubble, space shimmers, territory dissolves, and obscene profit flows. The attempt to extinguish the “very existence of the Palestinian people in Palestine” has benefitted many. In the Gaza Strip, private contractors have receiving roughly 1,500 USD for every home they demolish. For Elbit Systems, Lockheed Martin, IBM, Hewlett Packard, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Caterpillar, the genocide has been profitable. These benefits are contingent on US-Israeli hegemony and its “Abrahamic” alliance built through bilateral negotiations that seek to normalize state relations with Israel by bypassing the question of Palestine. From Israel’s attacks on Sanaa International Airport, to the US-Israel war on Iran and Lebanon, the “logical culmination of a decades-long consensus in Washington and Tel Aviv” is clear. The imperative is to cement an “architecture of subordination.”
In February 2025, thirty-four Israeli arms companies, including Israel Aerospace Industries and Rafeal Advanced Defense Systems, attended the biennial International Defense Exhibition and Conference in Abu Dhabi. The five-day affair was but one glimpse into the most dynamic realm of Arab-Israeli cooperation: weapons sales, digital repression, and intelligence and surveillance collaboration. The UAE, Morrocco, and Bahrain have poured capital into Israel’s military and technological industries. These states are entrenched clients of Israel’s spyware. In 2022, Elbit Systems “opened a UAE-based subsidiary” and secured a $53 million contract to supply avionics to the UAE Air Force. Sovereign wealth fund Mubadala has invested over $100 million in Israeli tech start-ups. Various corporations, like the Israeli-Emirati venture Black Wall Global, facilitate the sale of Israel technologies to states without official ties to Israel.
In 2024, Israeli arms exports hit a historic high of $14.79 billion, an increase of 13 percent from the previous year. In July 2025, the Israeli drone firm Xtend raised $30 million to speed up its production. Israel is “a global leader in digital security innovation,” reflecting “unwavering investor confidence” amid, and because of, genocide. Israel’s AI activity is “two to four times greater than that observed in the United States or Europe.” Thanks to the investment of semiconductor giant Nvidia, Google, and venture capital firms such as Sequoia Capital, Greylock Partners, and Andreessen Horowitz, Israeli tech companies raised more than $9.3 billion in the first half of 2025. Despite global condemnation, Silicon Valley and investment interest in cybersecurity and AI have worked to cement Israel’s “status as the region’s dominant economic force.” Between 2021 and 2024, the Arab state share had grown to 12 percent. In the face of the “first AI-assisted genocide in history,” Arab states have been eager to acquire, consume, and profit, to see Palestine shrink and the profit they generate expand.
In this formula, Israel “expands its customer base and strategic reach,” the United States “shores up its imperial grip,” and Arab states secure the tools to control their peoples and entrench the counterrevolutionary forces that “have been resurgent since the crushing of the 2011 Arab uprisings.” As Tariq Dana has pointed out, the Abraham Accords “did not initiate these ties. It institutionalized them.” Indeed, we must think about the Arab uprisings, and the counterinsurgency that destroyed them, together with the genocide. Palestine is shrinking.
Palestine Is Everywhere
The Israeli assault exceeds the Gaza Strip. Palestinians have known since the inception of the genocide “that what’s happening in Gaza is going to happen in the West Bank.” We have known this as we bear witness to the dismemberment of children, the production of mass graves, the reduction of cities to rubble. The “always fuzzy” line between settlers and the state in the West Bank has long disappeared; settler-state forces destroy lives and villages with impunity. Palestinians withstand the mutilation of their lands, as a network of gates and barriers conquer, fragment, and govern movement, space, and time in the West Bank.
Since October 2023, Palestinians from the West Bank have been subject to a deepening, broadening “network of torture camps.” When Fouad Hassan, a forty-five-year-old from the district of Nablus, arrived at Megiddo Prison, a soldier greeted him: “Welcome to hell.” Hassan could hear “screaming through the walls.” Since January 2025, Operation Iron Wall heightened degrees of torture, dispossession, and the loss of bodily sovereignty. During the Israeli incursion into the Tulkarem refugee camp, Ghaith survived four shots to his stomach; he picked up his intestines and ran.
This military campaign has displaced over forty thousand people, expelled inhabitants of Jenin and Tulkarem refugee camps, and made way for new settlement projects. It is but “an accelerated prelude” to Israel’s full annexation and bifurcation of the occupied West Bank. In September 2025, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich announced the formal annexation of 82 percent of the West Bank. He offered a now nearly century-old formula: “maximum land with minimum population.” In this vision, six enclaves are allocated to the Palestinians, all detached from one another: Hebron, Ramallah, Jericho, Nablus, Tulkarem, Jenin. Jerusalem is excluded from this formula, in line with the relentless Israeli effort to shrink and partition the city from its Palestinian people.
During Eid al-Fitr in March 2026, and for two night in a row, Israeli settlers set fire to homes and cars in Silat al-Dhahr and al-Fandaqumiya, near Jenin; in Jalud and Salfit, south of Nablus; and in the agricultural regions of Masafer Yatta in the Jordan Valley. Settlers set cars set ablaze, destroyed property, terrorizing and wounding Palestinians with abandon and the full cooperation of the Israeli army. Then in April, Israeli forces began preventing students of Umm al-Khair School in Masafer Yatta, south of Hebron, from reaching their classrooms.
Palestine is shrinking.
But Palestine cannot be confined to territory alone. Even in those places of abundance—Dubai and Kuwait, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia—the war has arrived. Palestine is everywhere. Israeli and US bombardment unifies Palestine with Yemen, Syria, Lebanon, and Iran. We cannot forget that during this continued and unbridled assault on the Gaza Strip, Israel expanded its ground incursions and launched airstrikes throughout Syria, from Latakia to Homs to Damascus. Israeli warplanes conducted daily flights over Syria, initially launching six hundred assaults targeting the former Assad military sites. Since December 2024, ground troops have advanced twelve miles into Syrian territory, confiscated one of the country’s largest water sources, al-Mantara Dam, and built at least nine military bases.
On March 2, 2026, Israel launched its seventh invasion of Lebanon. Every day, under cover of its joint war with the US on Iran, Israeli aggression delivers new levels of devastation in Lebanon, attempting to making good on Bezalel Smotrich’s promise that the Dahiya will soon look like Khan Younis. Israeli forces drop flyers on Beirut, promising the city Gaza’s fate. So-called evacuation orders have forcibly displaced 1.3 million Lebanese people from their homes as of this writing. On April 8, “Operation Eternal Darkness” delivered large-scale strikes on over 100 targets in just ten minutes. People live in their cars, flee on foot, sleep on seaside pavements, and save what they can. They grieve the mounting death toll of Israeli assaults that have killed over 4,200 Lebanese people and wounded more than 12,000 more. Palestine is everywhere.
It is in Tehran, where thousands of brave protestors faced arrest and execution by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. These same people now face death masked as imperial promises of “liberation.” The death toll from US and Israeli attacks is over 3,400 Iranians, of whom 383 are children, with more than 26,000 seriously injured. This is a war of choice that devastated residential complexes, elementary schools, airports, medical facilities, heritage sites, and port cities without regard for life today or in the future. Following Israeli airstrikes on the city’s oil facilities, a central boulevard of Tehran was lined by a wall of flame, stream of toxic rain mixed with oil falling from the sky. Thick black smoke turned day into night. Air had become poison, causing chemical burns and lung damage. The environmental devastation has already begun.
Continuities to Come
Palestine is everywhere. It is in our educational institutions in the United States, long celebrated for a prestige, today laid bare by cowardice and obedience. For a time, many in the United States had thought that attacks on academic freedom and free speech were elsewhere, part of a distant conflict in an unspecified place in the Middle East. They were wrong.
It is in the deportations of critical scholars and international students. It is in the ICE raids on our campuses. It is among students, faculty, and academic workers who are subject to harassment, expulsion, arrest, detention, and deportation under the bogus label of “anti-Semitic terrorism.” The bipartisan repression of free speech on Palestine has today matured into a “naked attack on political dissent and university independence.” Both the stripping of people of “protected rights” and the “ease, ability, and speed” with which it is happening is a threat to all of us.
This is a time of rupture; our world is changing at warp speed. But we must also attend to continuity. After all, liberal democracy and its international institutions were founded on the denial of many as fully human, rights-bearing subjects, Palestinians among them. The demise of educational institutions in the United States relies on cementing that exclusion. The US and the political parties arming and greenlighting the massacre of Palestinians empowered and expanded the authoritarianism we witness today. The danger is here: the unmarked cars, the interruption of daily life, the mass transport of migrants, the erosion of the law, the shifting goal posts, and “the way we dig down for the details of these stories” of detention “to reassure ourselves that this won’t happen to us.”
The governments of the United States and Israel have tried “to cast empathy as a parasitic plague.” They have tried to criminalize protest, speech, words like ethnic cleansing, and photographs of Palestinian children. But they have failed. For Palestine is everywhere. From Ireland to the Netherlands, from Britain to Brazil, from Spain to the US, from Germany to Italy, to the dockworkers of Genoa, from the global sumud flotillas to university campuses.
Across these spaces, people have demanded an end to this genocide. They see in Palestine a reflection of their own struggles against greed and repression. An “overwhelming majority of the world’s governments support an immediate ceasefire,” as Sana Saeed reminds us. Across disciplines, members of professional associations have mobilized even when they are confronted by their leadership’s intransigence. In September 2025, the world’s largest academic association of genocide scholars passed a resolution saying that Israel is committing a genocide in Gaza.
That same month, a flotilla of nearly five hundred people volunteered to set sail; hundreds of artists, organizers, poets, writers tried to “destabilize the sea, with fragile boats, tiny compared to the vast waters” they faced, and the nuclear power much larger than them. A thirty-seven-year-old Palestinian man named Yusef, whose family survived 1948, hoped to touch Palestine. A seventy-seven-year-old doctor wanted this mission to Gaza, this hope of breaking a blockade nearing its twentieth year, to be the last thing he did in this life. These people—and many others—follow the lead of Palestinians who chart ephemeral routes of return.
Today, the very annihilation of Palestine is at stake. This annihilation is not an anomaly. It is not outside history; it is central to it. Palestine, as I have said elsewhere, is a paradigm. We ignore this paradigm “at our collective peril.”
As Muhammad Shehada tells it, the most common refrain from Palestinians in Gaza is that “words don’t mean anything anymore.” Terms like atrocity, ceasefire, and peace have been emptied of meaning “through repetition, unable to carry the weight of what Palestinians have endured day after day, night after night.” But even in all this, Palestinians shape meaning anew and teach us to do the same. Take Fidaa Haraz who waited with bated breath for the confirmation of an announced Israeli withdrawal. She walked the streets, searching for a home that had vanished. She is practicing return, even when the crossroads are nowhere to be found.
As the land on which they stand shrinks, Palestinians exceed territory and human capacity. They teach us about the belief in a future that inspires them to hold collective weddings, to study and learn against all odds, to graduate more than two hundred medical students among the ruins of al-Shifa Hospital, to make home amid flimsy tents and destructive floods. They teach us how to separate lies from the truth. They teach us that the deepest threat to the regimes that rule us is our capacity to tell our stories.
We will continue bearing witness. We will continue opposing, narrating, and archiving. We will learn from the Palestinians of Gaza to guard one another even when we are in fragments. We will learn from the Palestinians of Gaza as they practice the imaginative, impossible labor of return to a world long gone. We will learn from the Palestinians of Gaza as they travel through and across the temporal constrictions and expansions of genocide, hunger, and catastrophe.
And we will brace ourselves for what is to come. In the words of Alaa Alqaisi, “Gaza, in this ongoing catastrophe, cannot be regarded as a distant territory. It has become the trembling fulcrum upon which the gyre of moral collapse turns.” Palestine is shrinking. Palestine is everywhere.
Cover image: Photograph by Mariam Khatib and design by Zein Al-Abdallah, Al Omar Mosque.
