The Western imagination of Palestine has undergone many transformations. Today, the image of Palestine presented to us carries not only the weight of history but a warning about the future. What unfolds there is not just a story of occupation, but a harbinger of what may lie ahead. To see Israel’s genocide in Gaza as an isolated horror would be a mistake. Every empire perfects its cruelty abroad before turning it inward. The tools of domination—surveillance, propaganda, dehumanisation—are tested on the colonised, then refined for use at home. What begins in Palestine rarely ends there. Political violence does not merely strip its victims of humanity; it “decivilises” the perpetrators of that violence. It is in this sense that Palestine has […]
