Israeli Occupation, Settler Colonialism, and Ethnic Cleansing: An Existential Threat Facing Palestinians
Ramallah 17 March 2025. The Political Economy of Nationhood, Independence, and Development in the Wake of War is published today by MAS as a landmark appraisal of the roots and fallout of the Israeli war on Gaza since 2023. Its authors, composed of a team of scholars of Palestinian development and state building, argue that we are now in a new era. What Palestinians, Israelis, and the international community do next is crucial for peace and justice between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, an area designated by the United Nations in 1947 as the home of two, Arab and Jewish, nation-states.
The report’s eight Chapters contend that:
- The origins of the war since October 7 can mainly be traced to Israel’s longstanding policies of asymmetric containment, apartheid, and accelerated dispossession of Palestinians.
- Israel’s war has been taken for adjudication by the International Court of Justice as genocidal, and has caused incalculable human, economic, social, and environmental devastation that will take years, if not decades to address.
- Palestinians are a nation denied rightful independence. An endless “peace process” did not offer a way out of an ever-expanding Israeli settler colonialism.
- A new brand of messianic and exclusivist Zionism is underpinning Israel’s aggressive strategy of ethnic cleansing and annihilation of any possibility of Palestinian statehood.
- The Palestinian people need a unified rights-based narrative to address the world and a socio-economic strategy that enhances their ability to survive in confronting these new challenges.
Since October 2023, Israel has waged a catastrophic war against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. Simultaneously, Israel has accelerated military violence and settlement expansion in the West Bank, and more aggressive policing measures for Palestinian citizens of Israel. This is a war against all Palestinians.
By January 2025, the Palestinian death toll in the Gaza Strip was over 47,000, 111,000 had been injured, and as many as 20,000 children had been orphaned. The estimate of damage to buildings, utilities, and infrastructure had reached 70% of the total pre-war stock; 90% of the population requires relief, basic income, emergency shelter, and health care. The economy of the Strip has been put out of commission for the immediate future.
The West Bank economy is struggling to keep operating, the Palestinian Authority (PA) is on the brink of financial ruin, and economic interaction with east Jerusalem and Palestinians inside the “green line” has been severely restricted.
The humanitarian disaster in the Gaza Strip and the socio-economic shocks throughout Palestine of the October 2023 war represent a new, brutal stage of Israel’s settler colonialism, as its current political leaders unashamedly press forward a racist and genocidal agenda that sees no place in Palestine for Palestinians.
“We are at a crossroads; we cannot go back to a situation of business as usual, and Israel is facing existential questions about its moral standing and place in the international rules-based order”, says MAS Director-General and lead author of the report, Raja Khalidi.
WHY IS PALESTINE HERE
The Report argues that the October 7 attack on Israel by Hamas could not have occurred if Israel had not deliberately destroyed the prospects for a two-state solution. Israel pursued this goal by accelerating measures designed to forever lock Palestinians in a situation of asymmetric containment through measures such as “economic peace”, a legal and economic regime of differential rights between Palestinians and Israelis, and systematic dispossession.
This Israeli strategy has been driven by the rise of what the Report terms “Neo-Zionism”, a messianic, absolutist Israeli national-religious political coalition that has taken root in the past two decades in Israeli state and military institutions. These extremist forces and narrative were encouraged by the steady marginalization of the Palestinian cause through a “peace process” without an end, coupled with the US-sponsored Abraham Accords that normalised relations between Israel and several Arab states.
The idea of returning to pre-2023 political stasis and a failing and inadequate Palestinian self-governance under the occupation system is both undesirable and unviable.
Even before October 2023, Israel’s violence against Palestinians had escalated and Israel’s war to make Palestine unliveable was well underway, if quietly. Israeli forces killed at least 400 Palestinians in the first nine months of 2023, more than in any year since 2005. This period also saw the expansion of illegal Israeli settlements, settler incursions into Al-Aqsa Mosque, and calls by Israeli politicians to “wipe out” Palestinian towns. Israel partially relied on the PA to police areas under its jurisdiction in the West Bank to ensure stabilization while it aggressively pursued the expansion of its settlements.
Since the Palestinian political division of 2007, the Gaza Strip has been systematically reduced to being widely considered the world’s largest open-air prison, experiencing regular rounds of military violence and widespread deprivation due to 16 years of an Israeli-imposed blockade. Its share of Palestinian GDP fell from 34% to under 17% by 2023.
Israel may have thought it could co-opt Hamas and contain the Gaza Strip, akin to its relationship with the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank. But this strategy failed.
A NATION DENIED ITS SOVEREIGNTY
Despite the challenges, Palestinian nationhood is a well-established reality, with seven million Palestinians living in Israel and the occupied territory and an equal number in the diaspora. But sovereign statehood has been blocked by Israel, and denied by the international community, depriving the Palestinian people of opportunities, rights, and futures.
Since 1948, Israel has seized Palestinian natural resources, especially water, land, and mineral wealth for its colonial expansion. It controls all resources between the River and the Sea, it controls Palestine’s “borders” with the world, and it also monopolizes Palestinian markets to sell Israeli goods. Furthermore, Israel exploits Palestinian labor to build Israeli cities, roads, and settlements forcing Palestinians into contributing to their own dispossession and colonization.
The 1993/94 Oslo Accords and the 1994/95 Paris Protocol on Economic Relations did not offer a way out of Israeli settler colonialism. Instead, it locked in Israel’s dominance by limiting Palestinian economic autonomy and spatial arrangements. Development has not been possible under these circumstances. Repeated MAS reports have documented this.
The PA, designed only for a limited period of self-governance, tried to create the machinery of the Palestinian state promised by UN Resolutions, and has maintained stability, economic activity, and essential governance and public services despite limited resources. However, it has been unable to provide security for Palestinians from Israeli military or settler attacks. Israel’s policies have eroded the PA’s credibility and effectiveness because they were designed to destroy the possibility of an independent Palestinian state and dashed hopes for a sovereign future, free of Israeli rule.
SOCIO-ECONOMIC IMPACTS OF THE CRISIS
The October 2023 war has brought the Gaza Strip’s economy to a standstill and real GDP per capita plunged by 23.4% within one year in the West Bank. Poverty and social development indicators are now at extreme levels. By the end of 2024, monetary poverty had risen from 29.2% to 74.3% in the oPt. In the Gaza Strip alone, poverty rates rose overnight from 45.1% to 97.9% and unemployment jumped to 85%. Such figures are alarming and unprecedented.
Pre-war socio-economic indicators already showed high levels of unemployment, food insecurity, and deprivation. Poor living standards, health, and education – which are the result of decades of Israel’s economic strangulation – have been worsened by the current crisis.
The PA’s capacity to respond to this by financing public services, social protection provisions, and economic activities has been crippled by Israel’s sanctions, particularly its suspension of trade tax clearance revenues.
Israel seems determined to destroy any institution that provides services for Palestinians. Refugees constitute 66% of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and 26.3% in the West Bank, which are reliant on the social services provided by UNRWA, whose humanitarian operations were recently outlawed by Israel.
Policy priorities should be focused on providing immediate urgent relief and support for the Gaza Strip with 95.2% requiring assistance compared to 48.3% in the West Bank. But we also need to address deficits in the Palestinian social protection system to prepare for scenarios of ethnic cleansing and sustained low-level aggression.
WHAT THE FUTURE HOLDS: NO ROSY SCENARIOS
The paths taken by other nations – such as Algeria, South Africa, Northern Ireland, and Colombia – towards independence and conflict resolution reviewed in the Report could offer lessons. These cases highlight struggles over land and natural resources, power dynamics and colonialism, leadership, religious and ethnic identity, and the complexities of peace processes.
But Israel’s aggressive asymmetric containment measures, its disregard for international law, and the absence of international accountability have made traditional conflict resolution impossible. For a solution to succeed, there must be a shift in both external and internal factors. At a bare minimum, other states must stop funding and supporting a situation that denies Palestinians their rights, particularly the right to self-determination.
In the MAS report, four possible outcomes of this stage of the struggle are outlined:
- Sudden shock. Successful ethnic cleansing, Israeli annexation in the West Bank and siege of the Gaza Strip, and the effective demise of the Question of Palestine on the international and regional agenda.
- Protracted regression. No victor and no vanquished, marked by prolonged security deterioration. Further fragmentation and apartheid one-state reality, leaving equal rights as the only exit from perpetual conflict.
- Baseline recovery. Low-level generalized violence and separate West Bank and Gaza Strip governance arrangements. A weakened PA and no political change in Israel.
- Emergence trajectory. The endurance of Palestinian resistance and ability to survive the genocidal assault, along with global economic and diplomatic pressure on Israel due to the impatience of the international community with Israeli intransigence leads to a negotiated two-state partition solution.
There is no rosy scenario for now; the immediate future looks bleak, with the worst-case scenarios of “sudden shock” or “protracted regression” being the most likely. However, MAS also argues that a fifth scenario could emerge through a new global coalition that blocks these moves, helps Palestinians to survive, and maybe even saves the receding prospects of a two-state partition. This must be underpinned by a new Palestinian narrative focused on equal rights and challenging neo-Zionism’s apartheid and ethnic cleansing agenda.
CONFRONTING NEO-ZIONISM, INSISTING ON EQUAL RIGHTS
Zionists have always regarded Israel as not just a state for Israelis living in Israel but for Jews living anywhere. This means that any Jew from around the world can arrive in Israel or the oPt and immediately be granted more rights than Palestinian-Arabs who have lived there all their lives, with family roots stretching back centuries. There is no other nationalism or state-building project like this in the world.
“Failure to recognize and deal with Zionism as a settler-colonial movement helped to prevent a political settlement that established Palestinian rights. This was also assisted by the Palestinian leadership’s focus on a territorial compromise without addressing rights,” says Khalidi.
Because Palestinians have shown they can break out, even from the open-air prison of the Gaza Strip, Israel’s strategy has now moved from maintaining differential rights through asymmetric containment to pursuing ethnic cleansing.
WAYS FORWARD
As Israel moves from asymmetric containment to more intensive repression and violence, Palestinians must develop local survival strategies.
The most effective Palestinian response would be the combination of a war economy (i.e., state planning with a focus on resilience and survival) and a new politics around a rights-based movement against apartheid, annihilation, and pushback against neo-Zionism. This is as vital a cause for many secular, liberal Israelis who are engaged in their own struggle for the soul of Zionism and the democracy of the State of Israel. So, it is still possible to contemplate an Israeli partner for Palestinian nationhood in the territory between the River and the Sea.
Together, such strategies could enhance Palestinian resilience and survival in the face of expulsion.
The Palestinian people have deep faith in the justice and fairness of their struggle and still seem willing to commit to the historic compromise of the two-state solution. But better organizing and national political and institutional unity is needed if they are to survive and thrive. This must happen now. “The sooner Palestinians can unite themselves and their global friends around a unified rights-based narrative, the faster neo-Zionism is likely to be effectively confronted”, says Khalidi.
The full Report (only in English) and English and Arabic Executive Summaries may be accessed here. Expert panels will discuss the Report at a Global Webinar on 27 March organized by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace – USA and at a Symposium in MAS in Ramallah in April.
