Goyavoyage's den

Basics and resources on anti-Zionism and Palestine

This post is an offspring of a very long post of analysis of one of my special interests. In the following, I have kept only the parts with resources about Palestine, past and present, because I realized it was absolutely vital for this to exist as a standalone post.

On Zionism, the State of Israel and the war in Palestine

(note: this particular section makes heavy use of links to what I believe are relevant Wikipedia articles. The other sections are much more diverse in their reference sources.)

Zionism is originally a late 19th century movement thinking that the best way to solve the pogroms and antisemitism going on then in Europe and Russia would be through the establishment of a dedicated Jewish state, in the form of a colony in whatever country the movement could find was most suitable - and ideally where they could gather support from European powers that would have colonized the place already. A lot of countries were proposed to that effect, notably Argentina in the Zionist pamphlet Der Judenstaat by Zionism's spiritual father Theodore Herzl; but also a part of Kenya, which was a British colony at the time. In the early 20th century, efforts began being concerted toward the region of Palestine, which was then part of the Ottoman empire.

This choice was, ultimately, in part justified using the religious connection between Judaism and the geographical region of Palestine, which overlaps with the historical Land of Israel (not to confuse with the current nation that is the State of Israel!). Still, the decision at the time was mostly made because it ended up becoming the most practical option politically speaking, after numerous tractations with the British empire considering various other regions of the world they had colonized.
This ancient connection to the Land of Israel is still leveraged today to justify the existence of the State of Israel. I will talk a bit later about how seeing a place as important in your ancestry could understandably make you move out there, but should not make you colonize it at the expense of its current inhabitants.

In any case, that idea of a colonial Jewish ethnostate slowly gained traction with European countries in the 1910s, and it was explicitly about displacing the populations already living there to make way for such a project. With the end of World War I the Ottoman empire fell, and despite their initial promise to recognize the independence of the populations there, Britain and France had a secret agreement to partition the land between them, which led to Palestine being under Britain mandate as Mandatory Palestine. This aligned with Britain's Balfour declaration, voicing its support to the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine; and all this led to an influx of Jewish settlements in Palestine.

During the next three decades, tensions would keep rising between the settlers, the British government, and Palestinian people. The rise of Nazism then World War II's Holocaust also caused a significant change in this, and the Zionist colonialist venture of settling in Palestine (by displacing Palestinians) gained significant traction in the 1930s and 1940s - many displaced Jewish people and Holocaust survivors obviously just wanting a place to be safe. Still, it is also worth mentioning that before 1939, Nazi Germany also supported this wave of emigration, both out of obvious antisemitism, but also with the economical interest of selling German goods (boycotted in other parts of the world) to British-ruled Palestine.
This led to a massive increase of settlements in Palestine, with Jewish insurgencies for independency despite Britain's attempt to control the immigration, and revolts from Palestinians. In 1947, the United Nations intervened to terminate the British mandate and partition the land into two states. This plan was judged unfair by Palestinian representatives, but then forcefully upheld by Jewish settlers, who declared the establishment of the State of Israel.

From this followed a civil war, and the Nakba of 1948: the ethnic cleansing of half of the Palestinian population to establish Israel by force. Today, there is still a large denial that these atrocities ever took place.
The two remaining territories of the Palestinian region, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, were mostly annexed respectively by Jordan and Egypt during the war.

I am not the best suited to cover the decades of war that followed, and you may be interested in the next section of resources for details. But I need to mention several additional key historical events still:

As an aside to pure historical recounting, I need to stress out that this general right deprivation of Palestinians has been dire for decades to a level I struggle to express.

Israel has built a literal wall in the 2000s in parts of the West Bank and its border, a wall that still holds today; and arbitrary deprivations of land and displacements still happen regularly in the West Bank. The Gaza strip has had all of its borders militarily controlled by Israel, is a complete enclave geographically and politically, and has been regularly called an open-air prison.
Israel also denies Palestinians the right of return: Palestinians displaced during the Nakba and the Naksa, or their descendants, are forbidden to return to where they lived before the displacement.

Additionally, almost 20% of the current citizens in the State of Israel descend from Palestinians who stayed (and survived) during the Nakba and the Six-Day War, but a lot of them have also been forcefully displaced within that territory. They have much less rights than Jewish citizens in most legal contexts, and expressing sympathy toward Palestine is violently repressed.

To finish this historical overview and reach recent history, I need to mention how political turmoil in 2007 led to separate governances of the West Bank and the Gaza strip between two groups. The West Bank became governed by the political party Fatah (through the Palestinian Authority), and Gaza was taken over by the Islamist political and military organization of Hamas.
The armed conflict between Israel and Hamas in particular - and the whole century of war before that - led to several one-year wars in the Gaza strip, strewn with violations of international law on both sides, during the past almost twenty years. This also led to the October 7th 2023 murderous attacks by the Hamas of Israeli civilians. This in turn was used by Israel as a justification to retaliate to the point of perpetrating the ongoing (until recent ceasefire) genocide against the Palestinian people in the Gaza strip.

Actual resources

I have mostly linked Wikipedia articles throughought the previous historical exposition, because even if they are not always perfect, they are often very documented. I find them useful for deep dives - see for instance here - and they may be the most accessible starting point to provide. However, I cannot encourage you enough to read from other sources. Here are a few I recommend:

For specific events and concepts, I would also vividly recommend:

Some more on anti-Zionism

With all this said, and even before addressing the ongoing horror of the genocide in Palestine, which I will be doing more later in this post, I can amplify what I said in a much shorter blog post in June: the State of Israel should not exist.

However, at this point in history, this does not mean the populations currently living there should be displaced. Displacing people is wrong.
Unlawful and atrocious dispossessions and displacements of Palestinians during the last century have to be addressed, repaired, compensated in the best way possible. Still, this should be within a common judicial framework to all the people involved. It makes no sense to try and solve this by forcefully displacing other people in turn.

Overall, the reasoning of "who deserves this land more" is by itself a trap. It is tempting for anti-Zionists, because being indigenous to a place is important, and should absolutely give you rights to participate in shaping the land you live in. But this should not turn into "deserving more"; this should not happen at the expense of other people.
That exact line of thought is often used by Zionists under the idea that Jewish people, as descendants of the ones who had to flee the ancient Land of Israel, deserve to live in its current geographical place more than others.

The thing is, all people should be able to live where they want to live. Ideally, countries should accomodate to welcome immigrants and refugees; and they should acknowledge previous forced displacements that would make individuals wanting to go back to what was once their home.

I do not say that this is easy to achieve. I just want to stress out that none of this should happen through settlements, through dispossessions, through violence - through the arbitrary and unilateral decision from some outside power.
And Israel, with its settler history, with its forced displacements, with its ever-increasing settlements in the West Bank, with its refusal of the Palestinian right to return, with the secondary citizenship and internal displacements of its Palestinian citizens, contradicts every single one of the above ideals.

This, sadly, makes sense. If the present genocide and generally particularly deadly and atrocious situation in Palestine is somewhat tied to the current far-right-leaning government of Israel, its general inegalitarian, ethnonationalist national project isn't, and the near-entirety of the Israeli political spectrum supports it: it is a guiding principle of the State of Israel itself. It is, after all, inextricable from its foundational Zionist core: maintaining a ethnical majority, and keeping that majority a priviledged group compared to other citizens.
A 2018 Israeli law is starkly stating this: "The realization of the right to national self-determination in the State of Israel is exclusive to the Jewish People".

This self-determination is vastly distinct from the one that so many of us advocate for Palestine - the right for people living in a land to have a say in how they should live, and where to live in it.
The "self-determination" the State of Israel mentions is explicitly exclusive, at the expense of others, both inside and outside the state. It is achieved through the removal, partial or total, of a right to determination, agency and most forms of freedom for other people. Dehumanization and racism are unavoidable consequences of this.

And so, we should be anti-Zionists; that is, we should work toward ending this concept of a colonialist, inegalitarian, warmongering ethnostate.

To be more nuanced, if Israel's history stems in good part from colonialism and extremist right-wing movements, I understand how some also stems from generational trauma - from a deep-seated belief in the impossibility to live in heterogeneous cultures without antisemitism.
But I do not believe that.

I believe in fighting systemic oppressions, and that the best way to do that is not to barricade a community into a heavily armed homogeneous state at the cost of the people living wherever that state is established (and being racist against non-dominant ethnicities within the state itself, to boot). I'll repeat myself because this is important: integration of refugees in existing countries instead of building a separate state, and interactions of mixing cultures instead of colonization and erasure, are desirable and possible outcomes, even if they feel like some impossible utopia in the current political situation.

I really recommend Shel Raphen's 2022 post about the horrors of Zionism, which was a huge inspiration in writing this section, and a big spark to my own anti-Zionist stance more generally - I feel like she phrases all that really well. It is a bit of a tangent, but recent posts of hers on how to survive and to keep functioning in a brutally unethical world, notably but not only as a genocide is happening, like this one and that one, have also been tremendously helpful to me in these trying times.

It is time we talked about the state of the war in Palestine until the recent fragile ceasefire.

Palestine, until recently

I'll be direct: it is disingenuous to call it a war. For the past two years, it has been a genocide of the Palestinian people.

There have been countless debates on whether this is a fitting term legally speaking, and official representatives of many countries have been extremely reluctant to use it - because acknowledging it would immediately require to take all measures to prevent it or make it cease, according to the Genocide Convention. Still, slowly, amidst this reticent public scene, the International Court of Justice has been recognizing Israel's apartheid, warning against a "risk of genocide" and urging Israel in doing everything in its power to stop it. The International Criminal Court has also issued arrest warrants for Israel's Prime Minister and Former Minister of Defense (see here for an analysis in French on the limitations of international law in being actually coercive about all this - heck, the French government didn't respect that warrant recently when Nethanyahu crossed France's airspace, and-- aaaaah).

But let us be clear: this is a genocide.
It has been recognized as such by a growing number of organizations, like NGOs Amnesty International or Doctors Without Borders, along with a United Nations Special Rapporteur (see also here or here for less verbose versions in English or French), numerous genocide studies scholars and associations (notably recently, the International Association of Genocide Scholars), and several Israeli nonprofit organizations documenting violation of human rights in occupied Palestine. If you can do so, I really encourage you to read some of these links to gain a better sense of scale of what is happening, if you never really did before.

This notably encompasses a stated, effective and repeated intent of eradication of Palestinian people, manifested through many public declarations - among others the dehumanizing descriptions of Palestinian people as "human animals" or that "there are no innocent civilians" in Gaza. This also encompasses the facts that Israel has been mass-killing Palestinians, destroying as much as possible the buildings and infrastructures in the Gaza Strip (here is a cartography of Israel's destruction of the Gaza Strip by research group Forensic Architecture), orchestrating a particularly deadly and long-running famine along with traps to killed starved people, blockading humanitarian aid or weaponizing it through the Israeli-controlled "Gaza Humanitarian Foundation", forcing displacements, purposefully bombing hospitals and schools and journalists - and pressuring media and countries into looking away.

Israel's attempt at deflecting international blame has used a variety of forms.
One of them, soon after the Hamas-led massacre, has been hinging on the misuse of Holocaust memory - from both Israeli and other countries' officials - to designate all Palestinian people as intrisically dangerous and complicit of the Hamas' war crimes until proven otherwise. This skews the very notion of Palestinian victim and purposefully condemns other, legal and necessary acts of resistance and survival to more than 75 years of illegal settler-colonial violence. This tactic distracts from the core idea that Israel's colonization should not be happening in the first place.

An adjacent strategy deployed by Israel has been the use of anti-Arab racism and Islamophobia to paint itself as a "defensor of the civilized world", a position strengthened by its Western perception as the "one democracy in the Middle East". This has been going for decades, and it is obviously part of a wider Western, colonialist categorization of people into more or less advanced civilizations and the framing of enemies as "barbarians". This demonization of both Islam and Arab origin (real or perceived) is still growing and, at least from France, horribly tangible.

Intertwined with all this, Israel has been using the idea of fighting terrorism to justify most of its attacks, framing them as "preventive defense", as "necessary", even to explain away decisions as dire as bombing cities, unilaterally breaking ceasefires (and making "exceptions" to the current one, too), and invading other countries. This simplified vision of "fighting terrorism" hides notably how Israel itself has participated in empowering Hamas to weaken the Palestinian Authority and undermine peace agreements, and its extremely violent intent to fulfill its ethnonationalist project. Even without that broader historical context, how to fight paramilitary groups who use violence against civilians is an incredibly difficult topic, but no matter what it should never justify mass-killing civilians in turn.

But maybe the longest-standing tool for Israel to minimize international criticism has been the sheer Palestinian erasure of Zionism using in its infancy slogans like "a land without people for people without a land". The movement has been leveraging historical and religious attachments into a reasoning of "rightful ownership" to legitimize a bloodstained colonialist venture at the expense of existing populations. Even these days, the central Zionist myth that Israel is the safe place for Jewish people in the world - and that this is in any way "natural" instead of fabricated by colonial powers - still infuses many a public opinion. A dreadful corollary is that any criticism against it is considered antisemitism.

In the past two years, this same instrumentalization of antisemitism has been used more than ever to shut down any public stance against Israel's genocide in Palestine. It has been a deliberate tactic to frame this as a religious conflict, and to shut down discussions on how a heavily weaponized racist ethnostate is an extremely worrisome prospect in itself. It has contributed to erasing the history behind the colonization of Palestine, arguing ties to Jewish communities Israel claims to represent - and doesn't.
This has also given a false "non-antisemitic" veneer to people and parties defending Israel, and has covered up pernicious manifestations of actual antisemitism; notably targeting Jewish people who do not support Israel's genocidal endeavor.

To counter this discourse, I heavily recommend reading from Jewish magazines and collectives, including Jewish Israeli people and organizations, defending Palestine and challenging the idea that criticizing Israel would be antisemitic.

And for a more general opposition to Israel's propaganda, I would of course recommend first and foremost reading or hearing testimonies and literature from Palestinian people.

Palestine today, and how to help

The situation has been shifting recently with the ceasefire declared on October 10th, 2025. The genocide and orchestrated famine have somewhat stopped, and this is by itself a relief beyond words.

Still, to say that this ceasefire is fragile is an understatement. There have been repeated airstrikes on Gaza even since its declaration, and the situation remains atrocious between rubbles, gang wars and a tight Israeli control over humanitarian aid. The previous ceasefire in March was unilaterally broken by Israel, and recently its supremacist minister of national security has called to resume "full-scale hostilities", which is to say the genocide. It's just... it's horribly bleak.

On top of that, the deal itself behind the ceasefire is full of holes. It draws a horizon with the barest mention of Palestinian autodetermination, purposefully pushing away the actual important political questions behind transitory status and many-step operations in ways not dissimilar to the Oslo Accords. It is also crucially devoid of any kind of justice against the crimes committed by the State of Israel, its army and its representatives.
(see for instance here for a French analysis of the recent deal that I found really great, if any French speaker stumbles upon this and has read this far)

None of this is surprising: that deal is directed mostly by people with terrifying autocratic tendencies, and has been initiated by fucking Trump; and a lot of what he announced publicly sounds - expectedly - like neocolonialism for Palestine. This, for several reasons: first, his intention to turn the region into a "Riviera of the Middle East", which is as much a capitalist and colonialist venture as it sounds, quite possibly through forced displacements; second, the deal seemingly leading to a (transitory?) protectorate administration of Gaza from the outside by a "Peace Board", notably including the US, and very much notably excluding any Palestinian body.
This outside administration may also sever even more Gaza and the West Bank, as the latter isn't part of the negociations. Notably, Israeli settlements and apartheid and violence in the West Bank - more than a thousand dead in the past two years, reported the UN recently - continue unaddressed.

Most crucially, as said before, none of the deal mentions any kind of sanction toward Israel, and this impunity is revolting. This can only lead to a surface-level peace if it doesn't acknowledge the genocide leading to 10% of Gaza killed, and more than 80% of the people killed being civilians; and if it doesn't unpack all the history before that, tracing back to the Nakba of 1948 and before, of the fundamentally racist and dehumanizing ethnostate project of Zionism, crystallized in Israel.
Treating Gaza as a threat in the entirety of a process that sweeps under the rug the horrors it went through is horrible beyond words. (See for instance to that extent the precise wording of the "peace plan" outline, which I think is awfully telling about this.)

Even the claim that this deal is "peace" is an insidious shield against criticism. In reality, all of it - from its brittle ceasefire to its absence of recognition of Palestine, from its absence of justice toward Israel to its neocolonialist tendencies - is extremely worrying at best.

I am hoping for a future for Palestine, but its present is mostly in ruins, extremely literally. The fact that the deal barely mentions vague conditions for self-determination, and never talks about any US acknowledgement of a state of Palestine neither now or in the foreseeable future, or about any process of reconstruction, purposefully doesn't provide any roadmap for a free Palestine.

For a more detailed analysis and list of the alarming problems with the deal as it currently looks like, I strongly recommend reading this United Nations article highlighting the heavy concerns of a sizeable amount of UN experts.

And though I repeat myself, I also must add: the very idea of a two-state solution is fundamentally flawed. Israel cannot be a democracy with its baked-in ethnically differentiated treatment, nor can it coexist peacefully with neighboring countries when its base premise is that it should own a land for historical and religious reasons at the expense of the people living (or having lived) there.

So. What can we do, with so many governments blatantly uncritical of Israel, and absurdly lax toward it in part because of their own colonial history?

The answers are the same as ever. You may have seen there elsewhere on social media, but they bear repeating.

  1. Donate. This keeps helping, even as the genocide has stopped. Community projects I have heard of the most and donated to myself include Gaza Soup Kitchen and the various branches of the Sameer Project. The Butterfly Effect Project also holds a list of numerous individual verified donation campaigns of the past two years, if that is more your thing. You can also, to some extent and notably for their Gaza-based actions, donate to NGOs like Doctors Without Borders, Reporters Without Borders, country-based branches of the International Red Cross/Red Crescent, Unicef, etc.
  2. Boycott. See here the call to boycott by the Palestinian-led movement BDS ("Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions") and here the guide to boycotting. This matters even when the Israel army is not actively commiting genocide anymore.
  3. Protest. If you are able to obtain information on protest marches for Palestine or against Israel near you, stay informed and participate. People should keep protesting to criticize a deal that sees Israel walk scot-free from everything it committed, both in the past 75 years and in the past 2 years specifically.
  4. Educate yourself and others. Maybe some of the numerous links I included here can help you learn a bit about anti-Zionism or Palestine, or provide elements to strengthen your position and convince other people to help too. Anime Feminist gathered two solid resources lists in mid-2021 and late 2023, if it also helps.
  5. Stay informed. Find newspapers in your language that stand for Palestine and are critical of colonialism and Zionism. In English, I have also heard a lot of good things of +972 Magazine, which is independant and nonprofit and run by Palestinian and Israeli journalists. The UN office for humanitarian affairs also has a weekly news coverage of the region.

For another approach, I also need to highlight some more the online Free Palestine Library, and most notably its section on essential Palestine texts. At some point after writing all this, I will probably try to read parts of either Edward Said's The Question of Palestine (1979) (or at least the details of this fascinating Wikipedia summary of one of its essays) or Rashid Khalidi's The Hundred Years' War on Palestine (2020), that I've seen mentioned numerous times.
I can also mention movies like the dark comedy Divine Intervention (2002), the documentary Naila and the Uprising (2017) or the more recent documentary No Other Land (2024). I have watched none of them aside from excerpts of the last one, and would advise to be careful because the obviously dire topics they tackle can be difficult to stomach, but I have heard good things of them all.

I would also advise you to stay informed on the other conflicts led by Israel, among others its bombing of Iran back in June, which is atrocious no matter the current criminal and authoritarian regime Iranian people live under; and its current repeated violations of ceasefire in Lebanon with numerous airstrikes, allegedly targetting members of the Islamic paramilitary group of Hezbollah, but resulting in many civilian casualties. This is not the first time Israel has attacked or invaded part of Lebanon, either; and it has to stop.

At last, if anything, I urge you not to think the current (and terribly fragile) ceasefire is enough to sweep under the rug everything that happened. I keep hoping with everything I have that this ceasefire in Gaza will hold, but it is looking dire, and the situation in the West Bank too. And until Israel isn't held accountable - from all the crimes and genocide in Gaza to all the deaths in the West Bank to the apartheid to the detainment and torture of the Global Sumud Flotilla to the fucking blockade of Gaza itself and the illegal occupation of Palestine - we shouldn't rest.

Finally, under the global rise of authoritarianism of these current times, I also urge you to take care of yourselves. Please, do not overexhaust yourself in trying to help and get crushed under everything that should be done. Do according to what you can do.
But please, please, do what you can.

#horrifying real world stuff #palestine resources