The Walk Home: to One Democratic State of Palestine

What's happening is something we may collectively already know, but are refusing to name. I'll answer the question from the ground where I stand, which we all share, despite never having met. It's the ground of the colonised, the dispossessed, the erased, the ground of those who have seen the lie and refuse it.

My diagnosis is there is no war, no conflict, no crisis, just the latest chapter in a 500+ year intentional project of settler colonialism that began in 1492 and has never stopped. The name of the targets change, indigenous nations, enslaved Africans, Kenyan, Algerian, Vietnamese, Palestinian, but the hegemony is invariant. Land and resources are taken and exploited, people enslaved or erased, survivors contained or eradicated further, and the colonisers claim innocence, gaslighting the world.

"The world expects us to be well-behaved victims while we are being killed, to be slaughtered without making a noise. This is impossible. We decided to defend our people with whatever weapons we have." These words of Yahya Sinwar’s echo through time and space, against a white Empire that expects the silent death of the oppressed it exploits, abuses, erases and rapes. Would you lay down and die quietly while you, your home, whole community, culture and existence was eradicated from the earth? He was right, no one would do that.

He was also right in that peaceful protest was tried, for years, and "the world stood by and watched" as crimes on a biblical scale were perpetrated against the Palestinian people. It has been 80 years, and some still remain silent, as children are maimed and orphaned, as men and women are sexually abused and raped in hostage detention camps, and as the innocent are murdered by those who learned all the wrong lessons from the Nazis, who perfected their methods with modern military equipment, who use the same lies, the same twisted logic. It's time to ask, if you're still looking away, still remaining silent, why?

What's happening is the exposure of the lies to more people. Gaza, among other places such as Sudan, Congo and Yemen, are forcing the neo-liberal to face the reality they've denied to themselves for their whole lives. Sinwar was correct, the lie is there's a "rules-based order" when there are only rules for the colonised and rules for the coloniser. The rules for the colonised are: don't resist or speak; don't exist or be enslaved; die quietly and quickly. The rules for the coloniser are: take what you want; kill who you must; call it "self-defense" when in the past it was called "civilising".

The lie is "humanitarianism", "aid" and "ceasefire" are "solutions". They aren't, they're imperialism's shock absorbers for Empire's crimes, managing the contradiction between democratic rhetoric and imperial violence. They allow the self-proclaimed "good liberals" of the West to sleep at night while their governments commit genocide, which they directly benefit from.

Another lie is "both sides" are responsible, when there's no symmetry, no equivalence. There's only an occupying state with the most advanced military in the world, and an imprisoned population in the world's largest ever concentration camp with rocks. There's an army that bombs hospitals and there's the people who are incinerated inside and outside of them. There's a state that steals land and there's a society, culture, a people being erased while legally resisting. Again. By white supremacists who have done this for 500 years in Australia, Canada, America, New Zealand, Chile, Argentina, Mexico, Brazil, everywhere they can.

Crimes of the colonisers fall into five consistent categories. The first is land theft. Take Australia, where a policy of 'Terra Nullius' from 1788–1992 meant white settlers stole the entire continent (7.7 million km²), through a legal fiction that the land was empty despite 500+ indigenous nations existing there for 65,000 years, the longest known continuous settlement of humans outside of Africa. Until the Europeans turned up that is. Aboriginal land was reduced from 100% to <1%, the most complete dispossession to date in human history.

The second category is the violence and massacres. We can look to the Congo "Free" State to assess The Rubber Genocide that took place between 1885–1908, with around 10 million people murdered, which was an estimated 50% of the population, through forced rubber extraction, starvation and floggings as punishments, chain gangs for control and village burnings for terror, with children's hands being severed to demonstrate parents' failure to meet quotas.

The third category is the legal impunity awarded by the coloniser to the coloniser. Germany denied its genocide in Namibia for 117 years, only admitting they perpetrated crimes against humanity in 2021 by eradicating 80% of the population in 1904, which is why Namibia remains one of the least populated countries on the planet. Germany decided it would only pay €1.1b over 30 years, as "reparations", about $1,000 per victim family, with no consultation with survivors. This genocide was the Holocaust's ideological predecessor, only cowardly acknowledged after victims' descendants had died, designed to escape true accountability. Germany still hasn't even admitted it's other genocides, like in Tanzania.

The fourth category is the ideology of supremacy. Take the United States, and its Manifest Destiny and the 'Vanishing Indian' myth. White people claimed the indigenous peoples were "savages" destined to disappear, and "civilisation" required their displacement, fully backed by their Supreme Court who called indigenous "Domestic Dependent Nations" leaving them with no sovereignty over their own land. This white supremacy entrenched itself in law, policy and culture so deeply, even to this day Americans can't face their past reality of what they have done, and continue doing in terms of human rights abuses. American's Manifest Destiny was the inspiration behind Hitler's "Lebenstraum" or living space in the East.

The final category is political mainstreaming, for which we can turn to South Africa and the formalised Apartheid system which ran from 1948–1994, with the National Party elected on an explicit platform to enact it, and therefore racist Apartheid became legal. The police and military enforced segregation and massacred protesters, while the courts and judges upheld racial laws and sentenced resistance leaders to life in jail for opposing their own criminalisation on their own land. During Apartheid, 80% of South Africans (the entire black population) had no democratic rights, and the international community delayed action, watching as black people were slaughtered by white.

I don't have to tell you how the pattern outlined above is replicated in Palestine and is identical as philosopher and journalist Ali Abbas expertly does so in his article [here], the "justifications" change, from "civilisation," "progress," "destiny," to "security" but the result is the same: land stolen, people murdered, survivors erased, colonisers claim they did nothing wrong.

[https://open.substack.com/pub/aliabbas33/p/inside-israels-growing-violent-jewish]

What’s happening is the collapse of reality as framed by the colonisers, of the denial, and the lies believed. The old frame is the "two-state solution," the "peace process," the "security" framing, which is now de facto dead. It's autopsy took place in the ICU and children's wards of al Shifa hospital. It has essentially been dead for decades, just a corpse walking around for people to be distracted by. The big lie is, it was never even alive in the first place. International law, conceived of and written by the colonisers, has always a mechanism of control of the colonised, a partition that guaranteed perpetual dispossession.

The Oslo Accords were no stepping stone towards statehood, it was a subcontractor occupation. They made the Palestinian Authority the enforcer of zionist hegemony, a Vichy collaborator polity like that of President Joseph Aoun is now in Lebanon, doing the bidding of Empire, traitors to their people. The Oslo Accords eensured the Palestinians policed Palestinians while illegal settlements expand, land continued to be confiscated, and populations fragmented.

The two-state "solution" is "bantustan", a fiction that allows the coloniser to claim it has offered statehood, while ensuring that "state" has no sovereignty, no borders, no army, no control over its own resources, and no right to resist. That's why western nations are slowly accepting recognition, it’s a release value for internal pressure as their populations are rightly turning against zionism, it is not a "solution" but a temporary distraction while the annihilation continues.

What’s happening is the remembering of the original horizon: a single-state framework that forces the questions, why shouldn't there be an actual single democratic state in Palestine? Why not accept equality? Why do zionists want a state founded on jewish supremacy, forged by ethno-nationalism that ensures non-jewish people live under Apartheid? And not just the zionists, but everyone who benefits in the west. It's the question they deny, they refuse, and they can't accept facing.

But what does One Democratic State actually mean? It means equal citizenship, safety and security for every person between the River and the Sea, Muslim, Christian, Jewish, non-secular without exception. It means the right of return for all Palestinian refugees displaced since 1948, including their descendants. It means land restored, homes rebuilt, communities re-established. It means sovereignty that belongs to all its people, not to a racial or religious hatred, and an end to jewish supremacy. It means a state governed by actual democratic principles and constitutional protections, not by an ethno-nationalist ideology of exclusion. It means a future built on justice and equality, not on occupation and dispossession.

That’s the destination, the horizon. That’s the target, that’s what we're all walking toward.

Those questions are the rupture, the moment when the colonised cease to see themselves through the coloniser's eyes, the moment when people stop seeking approval and start accessing freedom. It's the moment when people withdraw their recognition of the coloniser's authority and hand them back their backlash. It's what Frantz Fanon called the "total rejection of the coloniser's values", what James Baldwin called the moment when "you are able to define yourself, and you can describe them."

What's happening is the acceleration of history, as we're living it, to an undeniable point of rupture. A sweeping away and collapsing of the old coloniser logic, making way for an actual democratic state in Palestine. The coloniser's violence often contains its own undoing, Vietnam showed this, Algeria showed us, so did South Africa. In Vietnam, the coloniser didn’t lose because the colonised had better weapons. The coloniser lost because the colonised outlasted them, they refused to fight on the coloniser's timeline, transforming the logic of endless war into a weapon of exhaustion.

This is where we are now, the settlers are attempting to "win", but what if they're just accelerating their own collapse? The more they kill, the more they steal, the more they erase, the more they expose themselves for what they truly are. And the more they expose, the more the world sees, even the liberal in perpetual denial can’t help but see. It’s why they can no longer look at Gaza, they remain in denial and avert their gaze. As I wrote about [here], the metronome is speeding up, the middle is being removed, the rupture is coming. What's happening now is people's refusal.

[https://open.substack.com/pub/mattabouttown/p/the-territory-between-theory-and]

And this refusal isn't just political, not just a policy preference, but a spiritual and ontological break. It's the refusal to believe that liberation requires permission, the refusal to accept "self-defense" is a justification for genocide, the refusal to wait, to negotiate, to "earn" freedom, the refusal to accept moderation as a synonym for subordination. It's the refusal to be defined by the coloniser, and it's the demand to define oneself.

When Nina Simone sang her song Backlash Blues in 1966, "I'm gonna leave you with the backlash blues," she wasn't asking to be included, she announced her departure, she left him, not physically, but ontologically. She withdrew her recognition of his authority, redrawing the map. What’s happening now is that walk away. The walk is no destination, but the journey we take together, into the middle we create when we remove the coloniser's middle ground and create our own. We're accelerating the metronome, of our refusal to wait any longer. It’s the arrhythmia that breaks the coloniser's tempo. It's the walk toward a world that's "big and bright and round", a world that's not the coloniser's property, but our shared, abundant existence, populated by the majority of humanity.

This is part of my current opinion, not an argument, a diagnosis, a refusal, a horizon we can aim for, once the denial is ceased. What's happening is the settler colony is cracking, their lies are being exposed, our metronome are speeding up, the rupture is coming. And when it comes we wont be asking for permission, we wont be negotiating our liberation or even waiting for the coloniser to grant us what's already ours. We will be walking, together, into the middle we have removed, into the territory that's ours to make and take back.

As liberal white supremacists refuse, so must we. We must refuse to accept anything less than full decolonisation, equal citizenship, return of land, self-determination, justice, accountability, trials and sentences for the criminals. Accountability isn’t revenge, it's the absolute necessary founding condition of a future not built on these same lies. We must have a Nuremburg 2.0 to take place wherever Palestinians choose.

My suggestion is the criminals be housed in the prison they've built, await their trails in the tent cities of Gaza, living with the same food, water access and health care they allowed into Gaza during the last 3 years. And once the evidence has been assessed, they must be put on trial. All the politicians who breached international law knowingly, from Starmer to Metz to Kamala Harris. All the media executives, journalists and "news" presenters who sold the lies, who fed the false narratives to excuse, enable, defend and deny genocide, from CNN to BBC to The Times newspaper. All the Civil Servants and Diplomats who looked the other way, who signed the arms contracts, who lied traitorously to their own populations, from those in the UK Foreign Office to the US State Department to the French Quai d'Orsay. All the military and security leaders from the Mi6 to US Marines to Mossad. All the businesses that fuelled the murder of babies from ThyssenKrupp to Rolls-Royce to Lockheed. All the judiciary who criminalised opposing genocide in Germany, UK, America and beyond.

I would hold the proceeding in different venues simultaneously. Live from the bombed out ruins of al Shifa hospital emergency department in sight of the mass graves, from the flattened Great Omari Mosque dating back to the 7th century, from Tel al-Hawa from the exact site of baby Hind Rajab's murder at the age of six years old with more than 300 bullets from zionist cowards. Live stream it to the whole world, for all to see, to show this is what happens to genocidaires, rapists and land thieves who try to erase people, culture and futures.

Then, it would be for the Palestinians to decide what a fitting punishment for each convicted would be. This may seem like a far-fetched idea, but there was no agreement between the "Allies" on having any Nuremburg Trials, in fact Churchill in the UK remained in favour summary execution of Nazis within six hours of capture. But justice may not come from the coloniser's courts, or with their permission. It must be built through a different kind of intelligence, the dialectic of resistance.

Fayez Sayegh, a Palestinian intellectual and diplomat understood the dialectic of resistance. He wrote: "The revolutionaries who are incapable of combining illegal forms of struggle with every form of legal struggle are poor revolutionaries indeed."

[Fayez Sayegh as cited in a review of his work titled, “The being of Israel is the non-being of Palestine”: Understanding Zionism through the Work of Fayez Sayegh, published on Liberated Texts.]

That's no abstract philosophy, he's talking about strategic intelligence, knowing when to be public and when to be hidden, when to speak and when to act. Legality is a cage built by the oppressor, as laws that criminalise resistance, be it Palestine Action, IRGC, Hamas, Hezbollah, aren't about delivering justice, but about silencing effectiveness. The state knows exactly who threatens its order, and it names them accordingly. When they ban a name, they're confessing: this works.

Why would we ever let their courts define our morality? History as always shows us, from Rome and Carthage to the anti-colonial wars, it teaches us one thing, you don't win by playing one lane, you win by hitting everywhere at once.

Legal work exposes coloniser hypocrisy, forces their contradictions into the open, uses their own platforms to embarrass them, not to "win" their game, but to expose it. Coloniser termed "illegal" work involves things such as direct action, disruption, material support to those on the front lines, without apology. The Nazis outlawed the French Resistance, but they still were on the right side of history. The seam between these two is the dialectic, as we use the legal to legitimise the illegal, and the illegal to radicalise the legal. That's the fluidity I believe Sayegh is showing us.

Colonisers don't get to define our vocabulary. "Terror"? No, our self-defence. "Proportionality"? No, their genocide by another name. "Peace process"? No, the slow death of a people, a culture, a future. Every time we accept their frame, "two-state," "de-escalation," "moderation", we lose. Their morality is the morality of the executioner. We owe them nothing but resistance. Revolutionary intelligence is measured by this dialectic, not purity, not performative radicalism, it's effectiveness without losing soul.

That means being clear-eyed and merciless toward the colonisers, being faithful to colonised people's dignity, unafraid to destroy what can't and refuses to be reformed. Some structures are functioning exactly as designed, there is no reform. The colonial state, the settler project, Apartheid, these aren't "broken", they're working, and they wont be fixed, they must be swept away.

So what do we do? Stop asking permission, they will never grant legitimacy, instead, take it. Normalise the unnormalisable, speak the names, Hamas, Hezbollah, IRGC, Palestine Action, not as "designated," but as resistance forces that Empire fears, as that fear is their credential, as was the French Resistance. Escalate everywhere, in media, courts, streets, ports, universities, supply chains. Hit them where they're soft, where they care about, in their wallets. Disrupt their logistics, sabotage their supply lines, strike their exploitative income and their stolen profit, but coordinate. Secrecy isn't paranoia, it's survival against fascist police states. Compartmentalisation isn’t distrust, but discipline. The state's laws are chains, their "morality" is a lie, a broken fragment of an illusion. Stop believing it.

The only question left is, are we ready to act like it? Because the colonisers are already acting like what they are. And they're not waiting.

Free Palestine, from the river to the sea, because the world is big and bright and round, and it belongs to all of us. Not just the coloniser, not the settler, but everyone who is walking together, into the territory we must take back, to One Democratic State in Palestine.