The October 7th War and the Colonial Framework

The long-standing controversy over the colonial nature of the Zionist project has resurfaced in the wake of October 7th. This essay argues that, despite critiques of the broader colonial analytical framework, the current conflict in Gaza is a direct consequence of the Zionist settler-colonial project. This project continues to violently shape the political space in Israel/Palestine and oppress Palestinians in multiple ways. Like most colonial projects, it has evolved through a series of negative and asymmetrical dialectics, manifested, inter alia, in Hamas’s unprecedented brutal terror attack on October 7th and the ensuing Israeli genocidal war of reprisal, expulsion, and obliteration.

The essay situates the development of Zionist colonialism, which continues to expand— having already established over 1,100 settlements—within its necessary historical and spatial contexts, as a foundation for the understanding of the October-7th war. However, to provide a deeper, comprehensive, and credible understanding, the theoretical framework of settler colonialism must respond to justified critique. Its theoretical foundations should be expanded, nuanced, and refined, as they currently suffer from oversimplification, rigidness, and moralism. To this end, several conceptual distinctions are proposed: (a) between external and internal SC; (b) between overseas and contiguous SC; (c) between colonialism and other structural forces that intersect to produce a complex triadic set of conflicts (geopolitical, colonial, ethnocratic) between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea; and (d) between different types of resistances—civil, moral, legal or violent—which strongly shape the nature of the conflict. In this context, it should be noted that the religious-fundamentalist, political, and violent visions of anti-colonial resistance diverge sharply from the sympathetic portrayals of Indigenous struggles prevalent in Western academia.

Subsequently, the essay distinguishes between decolonization seeking to redress historical injustices and grant full rights to the Indigenous population alongside or within the settler society and counter-colonialism, which aims to subjugate or even annihilate that same settler society. Within this destructive tension, there is an urgent need to develop a non-violent struggle for a binational decolonial vision for Israel/Palestine, grounded in the dismantling of the current apartheid regime, and on reconciliation based on equality, and the establishment of a democratic Israeli-Palestinian confederation.