The decision by Karim Khan, the chief prosecutor at the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague, to seek an arrest warrant for the Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has sent tremors through government circles in Washington and London. President Joe Biden has called the charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza “outrageous”, while Rishi Sunak has described the proceedings as “deeply unhelpful”.

The Western leaders have in turn been criticised for their blatant double standards. When Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Biden labelled his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin a “thug”, accused him of genocide and denounced him for undermining “the rules-based international order”. The US government later applauded the ICC for its decision in 2023 to prosecute the Russian leader for war crimes.

But now that the ICC is going after Netanyahu, Biden is striking a different tone. Suddenly “the rules-based international order” has been downgraded against what the president has called his “unwavering” support for Israel. He has even signalled that his administration might work with hard-line Republicans in Congress to impose sanctions on the ICC. “What’s happening [in Gaza] is not genocide,” Biden declared on 20 May. “We reject that.”

To the rest of the world, this inconsistent posturing is the latest example in a long tradition of Western hypocrisy. For far too long, the West has pretended that it gets to pick and choose from its own rulebook on statecraft. One senior leader reportedly told Khan that “this court is built for Africa and thugs like Putin”. The message was clear: the rules are there for the others; they do not apply to us.

Critics are right to feel morally outraged. But below the surface, there is more to this story than mere hypocrisy. The double standards on Israel reveal a deeper tension at the heart of Western foreign policy doctrine. This tension centres on a new idea that has dominated the thinking about international relations over the past decade: that we live under a rules-based international order (RBIO) that is being challenged by malicious actors, who seek to tear up our carefully crafted global rulebook in the pursuit of a revisionist agenda to create a multipolar world.

“The rules-based international order” has become almost a mantra, ritualistically recited by Western leaders from Washington to Canberra. A staple of foreign policy jargon, the RBIO now appears in government white papers, think tank reports, newspaper columns, social media posts, White House press releases and the leading foreign policy journals. The Biden administration itself is all in on the idea: the defence of the RBIO has become the geopolitical cornerstone of its foreign policy doctrine from the Ukrainian steppe to the South China Sea.

But for all the enthusiasm with which the term is embraced in the West, its content remains an enigma. The RBIO is an almost comically ill-defined concept. What rules does it refer to? Who gets to set them? How are they enforced?

As a rhetorical device, the term does not fare much better. It lacks the emotive resonance that the propagandistic label of the “free world” once carried in an earlier era of geopolitical contestation. By comparison, the RBIO feels cold and detached. It fails to speak to the imagination and seems far removed from the concerns of ordinary citizens.

Why, then, do Western leaders keep invoking it? What convinced them, at this critical juncture in world history, to embrace such a vague and uninspiring concept, ridden with internal contradictions and external inconsistencies? Who came up with this strange hybrid of an idea and what were they hoping to achieve? What is the rules-based international order, that formulation so soothing to the Western mind?

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Given the cocksure attitude with which the RBIO is often invoked nowadays, one could be forgiven for thinking that the rules-based order has been with us for a long time. Yet the concept is a surprisingly recent one. A Google Ngram search shows that the term was rarely used before 2000, and its usage did not take off until the past decade or so (see the graph above).

We can trace the roots of the RBIO to two separate sources. The first is the more familiar idea of the “liberal international order” (LIO). Brought to prominence by the international relations scholar John Ikenberry in the 1990s, the LIO was truly a child of its times. Buoyed by Western triumphalism after the US-led victory in the Cold War, it wore its ideological commitments on its sleeve. The LIO gave a clear political identity to the “new world order” that came into being after the fall of communism, as successive US governments sought to globalise the rule of free-market capitalism and liberal democracy under the aegis of uncontested American hegemony.

Even then, the LIO did not immediately capture the public imagination. It mostly remained confined to a new body of international relations scholarship on the changing geopolitical landscape of a newly unipolar world. The term itself only belatedly appeared in the New York Times in 2012. Since then, its use has surged. Today, it is still the preferred term for the US-led world order that emerged in the post-1990 period.

In recent years, however, Western leaders have increasingly begun to drop the explicit ideological identifier and come to speak of the LIO in the more neutral-sounding terms of a rules-based order. This semantic shift was not a spontaneous evolution of language. It served a particular political purpose.

The adjective “rules-based” has its origins in the arcane realm of international trade. It goes back to the same period as the LIO, but it speaks to a more technical set of concerns. As globalisation accelerated and deepened in the early 1990s, neoclassical economists and advocates of free trade, such as Jagdish Bhagwati, began to speak of the need for a “rules-based trading system” that could lower the barriers to trade and create a “level playing field” between firms in different countries.

The phrase soon found its way into the trade negotiations that would culminate in the creation of the World Trade Organisation in 1995. During these years, the idea of a “rules-based system” remained an academic concept, largely limited to scholarly tracts on intellectual property disputes and international arbitration over unfair trade practices, such as subsidies and tariffs. It was rarely used in common political discourse. But that changed in the late 1990s, when widespread anti-globalisation protests rocked international summits from Seattle to Genoa.

It was in this environment of growing political contestation that Western leaders first sensed a need to defend their rules-based system. At the World Economic Forum in 2000, then US president Bill Clinton responded to the anti-globalisation protests in Seattle by declaring: “We will – we must – support the rules-based system.” Tony Blair’s Labour government strongly agreed. As Stephen Byers, then president of the Board of Trade, put it after Seattle: “There is no alternative to a rules-based system for international trade.”

Politicians used the “rules-based” moniker to shield their trade policies from political opposition. Western leaders presented the World Trade Organisation not as a neoliberal trade regime, but as an impartial rules-based one. This particular framing may not have inspired great passions, but that was the point. The idea was to render international trade as an abstract, non-political domain that was best administered by technocrats: a dull and complicated field that was not of any real concern to the average citizen.

So if today’s “rules-based” foreign policy discourse sounds like old-school Davos doublespeak, that’s because it is. The rules-based lexicon directly arose out of the Clintonite and Blairite brand of neoliberalism that dominated the final decade of the 20th century. We should not be surprised to learn that the person responsible for introducing it into US foreign policy discourse came straight out of that world.

Hillary Clinton never really left the 1990s. When Barack Obama appointed the former first lady as his secretary of state in 2009, she brought with her many of the same policy advisers – and many of the same ideas – that had informed her husband’s administration. It was in these Democratic circles that the notion of a “rules-based order” began to proliferate. In 2010, Clinton appears to have become the first US cabinet member to use the term publicly.

The geopolitical context here is crucial. Just as the notion of a rules-based trading system came into widespread use at a time of growing political resistance to neoliberal globalisation, so the idea of a rules-based order cannot be understood without reference to the intensifying geopolitical contestation from a rising China against the US-led world order. Here, too, the “rules” were actually meant to obfuscate and depoliticise the reality of Western power projection.

As secretary of state, Hillary Clinton was directly responsible for overseeing Obama’s foreign policy directive: the so-called pivot to Asia. After the self-inflicted wounds of the global war on terror, this strategic reorientation was meant to direct the US’s attention away from its forever wars in the Middle East to confront the bigger challenge of an increasingly assertive Chinese presence in the Asia-Pacific region.

In November 2011, Clinton gave a speech in Honolulu whose title, “America’s Pacific Century”, was clearly framed as a rebuke to what many commentators were already starting to call the “Chinese century”. The secretary of state noted that if Washington wanted to accomplish its goals in Asia, “we have to create a rules-based order, one that is open, free, transparent and fair”.

This new rules-based order was always meant to be anchored in free trade. The centrepiece of Obama’s pivot to Asia was the Trans-Pacific Partnership, or TPP, an abortive free-trade agreement between 12 countries in the Pacific Rim. As the White House put it in a 2015 press release, “TPP is central to our vision of the region’s future and our place in it… TPP is a critical step towards our strategic goal of revitalising the open, rules-based economic system that the United States has led since the Second World War.”

Yet behind this emphasis on rules-based trade lurked a larger agenda. In their more candid moments, senior US officials recognised that the RBIO was never about the rules themselves. It was about preserving the capacity of the US to shape the rules on its own terms. As Obama stated in 2016, “America should write the rules. America should call the shots. Other countries should play by the rules that America and our partners set, and not the other way around.”

In other words, the Democratic foreign policy establishment originally used the RBIO as a fig leaf for continued American primacy within the Asia-Pacific region. By presenting itself as the upholder of a rules-based system that is free, fair and open to all, the Obama administration sought to lay the groundwork for a new American Century: this time orientated not towards Europe and the North Atlantic, but towards Asia and the Indo-Pacific. As the White House’s National Security Strategy put it, “America must lead. Strong and sustained American leadership is essential to a rules-based international order… The question is never whether America should lead, but how we lead.”

The rules-based order was therefore never meant to be a set of consistent and binding international rules. It was invented as a rhetorical device to help the US confront a rising China. A recent study confirms that a very specific negative framing has emerged in recent years that construes China as an adversary of the “rules-based international order”. This has had far-reaching implications. The study finds evidence that scare stories about a revisionist China tearing up the global rulebook “may be crowding out other, less malign narratives about China’s rise”.

Today, the mantra of the RBIO has become firmly entrenched in Western foreign policy discourse on both sides of the Atlantic. When Donald Trump briefly challenged it between 2017 and 2021, European leaders made a great show of their continued loyalty to the concept. Yet even under Trump, senior US officials continued to use the RBIO as a stick with which to beat their rivals. As secretary of state Rex Tillerson pledged in 2017: “We will not shrink from China’s challenges to the rules-based order.”

It was the Biden administration, however, that would deploy the concept most aggressively, following the Russian invasion of Ukraine and rising tensions with China over the Taiwan Strait and the South China Sea. As Biden himself put it, “We make up 25 per cent of the [world economy]. We need to be aligned with the other democracies, another 25 per cent or more, so that we can set the rules of the road instead of having China and others dictate outcomes because they are the only game in town.”

The objectives, then, were always quite clear. The question is whether they can be achieved. There are now many signs that the Western love affair with the RBIO is already leading to intense political blowback. The more the Americans and the Europeans accuse the Chinese and the Russians of challenging the rules-based order, the more they open themselves up to criticism that they fail to follow their own rules.

The US’s condemnation of China for its interference with the freedom of navigation, for instance, will ring hollow if the US keeps refusing to sign up to the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea. Similarly, Biden’s charges of genocide against Putin will fall on deaf ears if he continues to support Netanyahu’s war crimes in Gaza, and refuses to ratify the Rome Statute and so recognise the jurisdiction of the ICC.

This is no longer just a matter of Western hypocrisy. It is not only that the West sets lofty goals and then fails to live up to them: the problem runs deeper than that. It’s that Western governments, by insisting on the primacy of their own rules-based order, are actively undermining multilateralism and the existing system of international law.

This, unfortunately, appears to be precisely the point. Citing the rules-based order is meant to blur the distinction between binding and non-binding rules. This enables the US and its Western allies to present themselves as the upholders of universal principles while at the same time tweaking the rules to suit their own needs. It allows Washington to present itself as the final arbiter of the global rulebook, without ever submitting its own officials to the higher authority of an independent court of law.

Legal scholars can see straight through this shambolic exercise. Many are therefore growing increasingly concerned that the Western embrace of the rules-based order may well end up hastening the demise of the existing system of international law. As the South African law professor John Dugard, a former judge at the International Court of Justice in The Hague, has warned: “The West’s adherence to both a rules-based international order and international law undermines efforts to agree upon a universal system of international law premised on the same fundamental rules, principles and values.”

Given the West’s own double standards, the concept of the RBIO now risks becoming a dead letter elsewhere in the world. This is not just the case for the autocratic regimes of Russia and China, which have their own reasons for disparaging the West, but also for the democratic “middling powers” of the Global South. In recent years, countries such as Brazil, Mexico, India, Indonesia and South Africa have displayed a willingness to chart a more independent course in international affairs.

At this point, the sensible way forward would be to ditch the awkward and inconsistent phrasing of the RBIO. The existing system of international law is far from perfect, but at a very minimum the West needs to return to the UN Charter and the binding treaties and conventions it has already signed up to. It needs to accept that the unipolar moment of the 1990s – with its uncontested US hegemony and its neoliberal free-trade dogmas – is over. It needs to recognise, as the non-aligned countries of the Global South already do, that we are witnessing the birth of a multipolar world.

The West therefore has no choice but to work with its international partners on a basis of equality and mutual respect to upgrade the multilateral UN framework, so that it can protect humanitarian law, address legitimate security concerns and confront the planetary crisis of the 21st century.

If this means that an Israeli prime minister, a Russian president and a few Western leaders will need to be carried off to The Hague to stand trial for war crimes, that would be a small price to pay for peace and justice to prevail.

1️⃣ Watch

The good folks at Common Wealth have recently launched a very exciting new project that looks at the relationship between capitalism and the climate crisis.

It’s called The Break Down, and it will publish “long-form interviews, original essays and resources that break down complex questions about how we got here, what the future might look like, and how we can build the power to change it.”

Adrienne Buller just did an interview with the political economist Adam Hanieh that is very much worth your time. It unravels the threads that link the oppression of the Palestinian people and the West’s long-standing support for Israel to the larger project of Western imperialism and the geopolitical realities of fossil capitalism.

In just half an hour, Adam brilliantly shows how the struggle for Palestinian freedom is intricately interwoven with the future of our planet more generally:

2️⃣ Read

For more on this “geopolitical economy” of oil, make sure to read Adam Hanieh’s recent long-read for the Transnational Institute:

Too often, the politics of Palestine are viewed simply through the lens of Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza, ignoring the wider regional dynamics of the Middle East, and the global context in which Israeli settler colonialism operates. Relatedly, solidarity with Palestine is frequently reduced to the question of Israel’s massive human rights abuses and ongoing violations of international law – the killings, arrests, and dispossession that Palestinians have experienced for nearly eight decades. The problem with this human rights framing is that it depoliticises the Palestinian struggle, failing to explain why Western states continue to support Israel so unequivocally. And when this crucial question of Western support is raised, many point to a ‘pro-Israel lobby’ operating in North America and Western Europe as the cause – a false and politically dangerous viewpoint that gets the relationship between Western states and Israel fundamentally wrong.

My goal in this piece is to present an alternative approach to understanding Palestine – one that is framed by the wider region and the Middle East’s central place in our fossil fuel-centred world. My key argument is that the unstinting support of the US and leading European states for Israel cannot be comprehended outside of this framework. As a settler colony, Israel has been crucial to the maintenance of Western imperial interests – notably those of the US – in the Middle East. It has performed this role alongside the other major pillar of US control in the region: the oil-rich Gulf Arab monarchies, principally Saudi Arabia. The fast-evolving relationships between the Gulf, Israel, and the US are essential to understanding the current moment, especially given the relative weakening of American global power.

Read the full piece here.

How the U.S. supports Israel’s occupation of Palestine—in three charts:

Israel has been the largest cumulative recipient of U.S. foreign aid since its founding, receiving about $310 billion (adjusted for inflation) in total economic and military assistance. The United States has also provided large foreign aid packages to other Middle Eastern countries, particularly Egypt and Iraq, but Israel stands apart.

Source: Council of Foreign Relations.

The United States provided Israel considerable economic assistance from 1971 to 2007, but nearly all U.S. aid today goes to support Israel’s military, the most advanced in the region. The United States has provisionally agreed via a memorandum of understanding (MOU) to provide Israel with $3.8 billion per year through 2028.

Since the start of Israel's war with Hamas on October 7, 2023, the United States has enacted legislation providing at least $12.5 billion in military aid to Israel, which includes $3.8 billion from a bill in March 2024 (in line with the current MOU) and $8.7 billion from a supplemental appropriations act in April 2024.

Source: Council of Foreign Relations.

Recent polls suggest that American adults are divided in their views of U.S. military aid to Israel, with a significant divergence among age groups. Support for military aid to Israel appears strongest among older respondents (ages sixty-five and older) and weakest among younger adults (ages eighteen to twenty-nine).

Source: Council of Foreign Relations.

A new TNI report on the EU’s complicity in the Gaza genocide:

Since the attacks of 7 October, the EU has provided political cover and material support for Israel. This has continued through almost eight months of unrelenting bombardment with almost 40,000 people killed, the forced displacement of 2.3 million people, the fastest descent into starvation of an entire population ever recorded and the total destruction of Gaza’s civilian infrastructure including homes, hospitals, schools and universities, places of worship and bakeries.

This support continued as Israel was placed on trial for genocide at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague and as the International Criminal Court (ICC) announced that it would seek arrest warrants for Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and defence minister Yoav Gallant. Were the EU to have applied pressure in October by imposing sanctions, an arms embargo and prohibiting the transit of US military equipment through Europe, Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza may have been curtailed. The EU chose not to act then, and it continues to fail in its legal and moral duty to act now.

This political cover and material support, particularly in light of the ICJ’s interim ruling which put all states on notice of a plausible case of genocide, makes the EU directly complicit in it.

Download the full report here.

BDS co-founder Omar Barghouti on how the student protests have made the struggle against Western complicity go mainstream:

“The current student-led uprising on campuses in the US, Europe and globally is a sign of Palestine’s South Africa moment, as the support for ending complicity in Israel’s genocide and underlying 76-year-old regime of settler-colonialism and apartheid is reaching a tipping point in the struggle for Palestinian liberation … the ‘B’ and ‘D’ in BDS [Boycott, Divest, Sanctions] have gone much more mainstream than before.

“This student uprising has been a crash course on Palestine for millions in the west in particular, undoing many years of silencing and erasing Palestinian voices, Palestinian history, Palestinian culture [and] aspirations … it gives us hope and inspiration in these dark times of Israel’s ongoing genocide against 2.3 million Palestinians in the occupied and besieged Gaza Strip,” Barghouti told the Guardian as Israel continued to defy a ruling by the UN’s top court to stop its assault on Rafah – the southern city of Gaza where Palestinian refugees have painted messages of gratitude to the students on their tents.

Read the full article here.

3️⃣ Listen

As I wrote in my last edition of The Rift, the future of Palestine will depend in large part on what happens in the United States. For this reason, U.S. politics and the student protests on U.S. campuses take on outsize importance.

This brilliant episode of The Dig podcast, with Dylan Saba and Waleed Shahid, takes a closer look at this profound turning point in U.S. history, where left-internationalist critiques of U.S. imperialism and Israeli settler colonialism are making a dramatic comeback in a new cycle of struggles. It’s two hours long, but worth every minute:

“The colonial world,” Frantz Fanon once wrote, “is a world cut in two.”

I was recently reminded of these words when I saw a viral photo come by on the platform formerly known as Twitter. The image offers a stark depiction of the immense divide that cuts through the historical lands of Palestine today.

In the foreground lie the lush green farmlands on the Israeli side of the border with Gaza. A field full of sunflowers, all neatly aligned and basking in the glory of a sunny spring day, stretches out into the distance, reaching almost as far as the eye can see.

Beyond it, on the horizon, looms a dystopian hellscape full of bombed-out apartment blocks and crumbling high rises. The buildings that are still left standing stick out like concrete skeletons from the ruins of what was once the world’s largest open-air prison camp—and what has now become an immense urban graveyard.

The UN estimates that more than 10,000 people still lie buried under the 37 million tons of rubble. It could take years to recover their bodies from the wreckage.

Israel’s ongoing assault on Gaza has few parallels in recent military history.1

According to the UN, the death and destruction inflicted by the Israeli army on the occupied Palestinian enclave are “unprecedented in scope and scale.”

More than one in twenty inhabitants of Gaza have been killed or injured since the war began. The daily casualty rate is higher than that of any other 21st-century conflict. The destruction is the worst seen anywhere in the world since the Second World War.

The impact of all this on the civilian population has been incomparable. Almost 90 percent of Gaza’s inhabitants are now internally displaced. Over 1 million people are “expected to face death and starvation” by mid-July. Gaza’s children are living in “hell on earth,” the UN chief has said. And the Israeli massacres show no sign of letting up.

There is now a growing consensus in the international legal community and among the leading scholars of genocide studies that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.

We have all seen the horrendous images come by on our newsfeeds.

The mangled bodies of unarmed men run over by Israeli tanks. Children shot in the head by Israeli snipers while fetching water for their families. A surgeon dragged out of his operating room and tortured to death in Israeli detention. People with their hands zip-tied behind their backs, summarily executed in a hospital courtyard.

The unrecognizable remains of countless men, women and children buried in shallow mass graves. Charred and incomplete bodies recovered from burnt-out tents in a smoldering refugee camp. A father holding up his headless child. Desperate relatives unable to find, identify or piece together the bodies of their loved ones.

Famished children reduced to tiny little skeletons, sprawled out lifelessly on hospital floors. Women forced to shave their hair as water shortages leave people unable to wash themselves. The lack of clean drinking water causing deadly outbreaks of cholera, hepatitis and other preventable infectious diseases.

The bombing of UN-run schools. The bombing of public hospitals. The bombing of safe spaces where civilians seek shelter. The bombing of farmlands and food supplies. The bombing of critical infrastructure like roads, water pipes and power plants. The bombing of anything required to keep Gaza’s society functioning.

Thousands of Palestinians abducted from their homes and locked away without charge or trial in Israeli detention centers, where they face “systematic torture,” “cruel and sadistic treatment,” and “unimaginable abuses” at the hands of their captors.

The list of atrocities is endless; the full catalogue of horrors too long to recount. It’s a punch to the gut. Every single day. For months on end. Without reprieve.

The acts of violence are so visceral, so extreme and so full of spite that it’s hard to detect a clear rationale behind them other than blind rage and collective punishment.

And yet there’s a method to the madness. All this wanton brutality is clearly designed with a purpose in mind. To make life in Gaza unbearable. To break the morale of the civilian population. To remove all prospects of peace and reconciliation. To force the Palestinians to once again pack up their bags and leave their homelands behind.

All the evidence now points in this direction. The blocking of humanitarian aid. The cutting off of water supplies. The massacres of civilians waiting for food assistance. The closing of all border crossings with Israel and now also with Egypt in the South. The fact that people in the North are made to subsist on just 245 calories a day.

It all fits into a pattern. The killing of journalists to prevent the truth from getting out. The smearing of UN agencies to prevent humanitarian aid from coming in. The deliberate targeting of NGO workers to scare away international organizations and leave the people of Gaza trapped, isolated and completely on their own.

These are not accidents. Netanyahu and his extremist settler friends know what they are doing. They are open about it: all we have to do is listen to what they are saying.

They no longer want their colonial world to be cut in two. They want to obliterate the other side and establish total control. They want to expel the remaining inhabitants, move in Jewish settlers and annex Gaza to execute their dark vision of a Greater Israel.

They are coming for the Palestinian land. And this time, they want it all.

At heart, the struggle between the colonizer and the colonized is always a struggle for the land. “Earth hunger,” is what it’s been called: the lust for territorial expansion that drove European imperialists and their settler-colonial descendants to conquer or colonize up to 80 percent of the world’s landmass between 1492 and 1914.

This furious territorial expansion could not be sustained in the long run. Europe’s globe-girdling empires eventually gave birth to their own grave-diggers. Starting with the Haitian Revolution, European control was rolled back in successive waves of decolonization that culminated in the independence of 80 new countries after 1945.

For a long time, people in the West assumed that that was the end of it. When the last vestiges of settler-colonial rule were mopped up with the fall of apartheid in South Africa in 1994, it was said to be done. We now lived in a postcolonial world. A single world. A globalized world. Unequal, perhaps, but largely free and undivided.

It was always a myth. The violence of colonialism did not end with the fall of the European empires or the end of apartheid in South Africa. It’s still with us today. It remains an open wound. A material reality. An enduring structure of oppression and marginalization that continues to shape the lives of millions of people in the present.

The Palestinians know this reality all too well.

Today, Israel’s illegal occupation and its systematic denial of Palestinian freedom represents the unfinished business of decolonization. Here, Fanon’s words continue to ring true: the colonial world of Israel and Palestine remains a world cut in two.

Nothing represents this rift more viscerally than the 700-kilometer-long separation barrier that runs like a scar through this ancient Levantine landscape.

Today, it’s easy to criticize the belligerent nationalism of Benjamin Netanyahu and the messianic extremism of his settler-colonial coalition partners for the systematic violation of Palestinian rights. But the separation barrier that cuts Israel and Palestine in two was actually the brainchild of the Labour Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, a supposed moderate who was later murdered for his role in the Oslo peace process.

In 1994, the same year that apartheid ended in South Africa, Rabin declared that “we have to decide on separation as a philosophy. There has to be a clear border.”

What Rabin was calling for was Hafrada, the Hebrew word for separation. The Afrikaans word apartheid, of course, has the exact same meaning: it refers to a state of separation, a state of being apart. Hafrada is Israel’s own form of apartheid.

“This path must lead to a separation,” Rabin later reiterated, “though not according to the borders prior to 1967. We want to reach a separation between us and them.”

Rabin’s words did not go unheeded. In 2002, at the height of the Second Intifada, Ariel Sharon’s right-wing government began construction work on the massive concrete barrier and border fence that now separates Israel and occupied East Jerusalem from large parts of the West Bank.

This separation barrier has rightly become known as the “apartheid wall.”

The wall does not just set the Israelis apart from the Palestinians. It also separates the Palestinians from their own land. Around 85 percent of the barrier is built inside the West Bank. Here, it cuts Palestinian farmers off from their fields, shepherds from their grazing grounds, workers from their workplaces, and families from each other.

To get to their land or to work on the other side, Palestinians need special permits to pass through one of the heavily militarized gates in the wall, where they are subjected to long waits, thorough checks and daily humiliations before they are allowed through.

The apartheid wall, illegal under international law, stands as a physical testament to an entire system of racial segregation. But it’s also accompanied by a much less visible set of laws that are deeply encoded into the DNA of the Israeli legal system.

To begin with, there’s the controversial Nation-State Law that defines Israel as a nation-state belonging exclusively to its Jewish citizens. “The right to exercise national self-determination,” it says, is “unique to the Jewish people.”

This despite the fact that the country has a large minority of two million Palestinians with Israeli citizenship, who constitute more than 20 percent of the population.

These “Arab-Israelis”—really indigenous Palestinians descended from those who refused to leave their homes after finding themselves trapped on the Israeli side of the armistice line in 1949—have long been subjected to an extensive system of legal discrimination.

Israel currently has more than 65 laws that explicitly discriminate between Jewish-Israelis and Palestinians with Israeli citizenship, effectively turning the latter into second- or third-class citizens on their own historical homelands.

Today, there is a widespread consensus in the human rights community that Israel is, indeed, an apartheid state. Palestinians and South Africans have long recognized this reality, of course, but in recent years leading UN officials and major human rights organizations such as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and the Israeli advocacy group B’Tselem have belatedly come around to the realization as well.

It’s hard to deny. The logic of apartheid is so starkly inscribed into the landscape and so deeply embedded in the law that there’s no longer any real debate on the question.

If Israel actively discriminates against its own Palestinian citizens, it treats the Palestinians on the other side of the separation barrier with even more contempt.

The apartheid wall that cuts through the West Bank has really only ever run one way: it’s meant to keep Palestinians out of Israel, but not Israelis out of Palestine.

In fact, the Israeli government has long promoted an aggressive settlement program to illegally populate the occupied Palestinian territories with Jewish-Israeli settlers.

Again, it was a “moderate” Labour government that made the first moves in this direction. After the Six Day War of 1967, the so-called Allon Plan called for the creation of a security perimeter around Israel. This informed the decision to annex East Jerusalem and start establishing a presence of Israeli settlers in the West Bank.

The first settlers were mainly secular laborite Zionists, but subsequent Likud governments radicalized the settler-colonial project by moving in religious Zionists. These messianic extremists dreamed of actualizing their own Biblical vision of Eretz Israel: a greater Jewish state with borders stretching “from the river to the sea.”

As of last year, there were 144 state-backed Israeli settlements and more than 100 unofficial Jewish outposts on occupied Palestinian land. Their population has steadily increased over the past decades. Almost 500,000 Israeli settlers now live on occupied land in the West Bank, while another 220,000 have colonized parts of East Jerusalem.

All of this is in flagrant violation of the Geneva Convention, which forbids occupying powers from transferring their own civilian populations onto occupied territories.

But here, too, there is actually a method to the madness.

The short-term goal of the settler-colonial project is to entrench Israel’s spatial dominance over the Palestinians living in the West Bank.

The long-term goal is to shatter the Palestinian territories into small and disconnected parcels and thereby undermine the viability of a future Palestinian state.

The settlements are also meant to create “facts on the ground,” which will eventually ease the annexation of large parts of the West Bank into a Greater Israel.

A quick look at the map reveals what this settler-colonial geography looks like in practice. Israeli settlements (in red) pockmark large parts of the West Bank, leaving the Palestinian-controlled occupied territories (in green) completely fragmented:

What does this settler-colonial geography look like on the ground?

Imagine, once more, a world cut in two.

On one side, we encounter the quiet suburban idyll of some of the Israeli settlements: full of well-built, affordable houses with neatly manicured green lawns.

“It’s so easy to live here,” one Israeli settler recently told the Wall Street Journal.

On the other side, we encounter Palestinian villages surrounded by roadblocks and military checkpoints, long lines of people waiting behind barbed-wire fences, forced to go undergo elaborate inspections before they're allowed to get on with their day.

It all recalls Fanon’s description of the colonial geography of French-ruled Algeria.

In his classic book, The Wretched of the Earth, The Martinican psychiatrist and anti-colonial thinker powerfully captured the divided essence of this colonial world.

“The settler’s town,” he observed, “is a strongly-built town, all made of stone and steel. It is a brightly-lit town; the streets are covered with asphalt, and the garbage-cans swallow all the leavings, unseen, unknown and hardly thought about … The settler’s town is a well-fed town, an easy-going town; its belly is always full of good things. The settler’s town is a town of white people, of foreigners.”

“The town belonging to the colonized people,” by contrast, “is a place of ill fame, peopled by men of evil repute … The native town is a hungry town, starved of bread, of meat, of shoes, of coal, of light. The native town is a crouching village, a town on its knees, a town wallowing in the mire. It is a town of niggers and dirty Arabs.”

What divides these two worlds is an oppressive system of racial segregation.

“This world divided into compartments, this world cut in two,” Fanon writes, “is inhabited by two different species. When you examine at close quarters the colonial context it is evident that what parcels out the world is to begin with the fact of belonging to or not belonging to a given race, a given species.”

The effect of this racial segregation, Fanon remarks, is that it “dehumanizes the native, or to speak plainly it turns him into an animal. When the settler seeks to describe the native fully in exact terms he constantly refers to the bestiary.”

We can clearly see this logic of dehumanization at work in Israel and Palestine today.

In Israeli public discourse, the Palestinians are frequently referred to as “animals,” “rats” or “snakes.” Former Prime Minister Ehud Barak even called them crocodiles: “The more you give them meat, the more they want.” He also called Israel a “villa in the jungle,” implying that those who live outside its walled gardens are wild beasts.

History teaches us the dangers of treating other humans like animals. Over time, the logic of dehumanization can become a prelude to genocide and extermination.

This is precisely what is happening in Gaza today.

As the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant ominously put it on the eve of the Gaza genocide, “we are dealing with human animals, and we will act accordingly.”

By cutting the world in two, by constantly setting the colonizer up against the colonized, by constantly dehumanizing the “native” in the eyes of the settler, the colonial project inevitably breeds an escalating cycle of violence.

As Fanon pointed out, this cycle always begins with the soldier and the policeman: the personifications of the occupying power. But it doesn’t end there.

The colonial world is marked by its own peculiar micro-aggressions, its own rhythms of ritualistic abuse and humiliation, that go well beyond the violence of the state.

Much of this everyday violence actually comes from the settler himself.

Fanon had seen this first-hand in colonial Algeria. The settler, he observed, “is the bringer of violence into the home and into the mind of the native.”

Today, the Israeli settler uproots the Palestinian’s olive trees. He kills, steals or chases away his livestock. He burns his mosque, vandalizes his property, damages his home, terrorizes his family. When he can, he will simply take what he considers to be rightfully his, dispossessing the Palestinian of his land, his dwellings, his possessions.

Most of the time the Palestinians have no choice but to suck it up. The settler is often armed, and he knows that he can count on the support of the police and the army.

Everything here therefore promotes a culture of settler impunity.

Once again, the divisions in this colonial world are stark. On one side, the settlers fall under Israeli civilian law: they share all the same rights and protections as ordinary Israeli citizens. On the other side, the Palestinians fall under military rule. They have no civil rights, few opportunities to go to court, and no army or police to protect them.

With the full weight of the colonial state behind them, the settlers become increasingly brazen and aggressive, increasingly troublesome and cruel.

For the Palestinians, then, violence is always around the corner. They know that a soldier or a settler can shoot them on sight, anytime, without legal repercussions.

Just walking down the street, traveling home from work, getting some fruit from the market, taking the sheep out into the fields, doing some construction work on the house—all of these daily activities now become fraught with danger.

Being a woman or a child offers no special protections in this regard. In the eyes of the settler, the Palestinian is always already guilty. It’s her existence that’s the problem.

The mere fact that the Palestinian still lives on her own land now becomes an affront to the settler. He would rather have her gone—dead or alive—and he will try everything in his power to make that happen.

In practice, the settler therefore reigns with impunity over the lands of the “native,” while the “native” lives under total military control and in constant fear of the settler.

It is a well-documented fact that settler violence against Palestinians has been rising for years. Even before the Hamas attacks, the first eight months of 2023 were the most violent on record. After October 7, things have only gotten exponentially worse.

Since then, the army has called up 5,500 settler-reservists and assigned them to “regional defense battalions” in the occupied West Bank. The state then distributed over 7,000 guns to these battalions and to “civilian security squads” in the settlements.

As a result, settler violence in the West Bank has exploded over the past months. Between October 7 and mid-April, the UN recorded more than 700 violent settler attacks on Palestinians. In nearly half of these incidents, the army was present.

Israeli soldiers and armed settlers have killed almost 500 Palestinians since October 7.

The worst part is that there is no prospect of this violence abating anytime soon. The messianic Zionist settlers who carry out most of the attacks have taken over the government. As Netanyahu’s coalition partners, they now effectively control the state.

Bezalel Smotrich, a far-right extremist who was arrested in 2005 for trying to derail the withdrawal of Israeli settlers from Gaza, is now Israel’s finance minister and the man in charge of the West Bank. Itamar Ben-Gvir, who has been convicted several times for supporting terrorist organizations, is now Israel’s national security minister.

These are the men responsible for shaping the future of Gaza and the West Bank. And they are extraordinarily candid about their political objectives.

Bezalel Smotrich has said that he is committed to “imposing sovereignty on all Judea and Samaria,” using the old Biblical name to refer to the Palestinian territories in the West Bank. “In this way,” he explained, “we will be able to create a clear and irreversible reality on the ground.”

Itamar Ben-Gvir has simply called on Israelis to “run for the hilltops, settle them.”

Benjamin Netanyahu, for his part, claims that the Jewish people have “an exclusive and indisputable right to all areas of the Land of Israel,” including the West Bank.

The coalition agreement of Netanyahu’s government declares that “the Prime Minister will lead the formulation and implementation of policy within the framework of which sovereignty will be applied to Judea and Samaria.”

Nor do Israel’s territorial ambitions halt at the West Bank. Gaza is next in line.

Itamar Ben-Gvir has openly stated that he would be “very happy to live in Gaza” when the war is over. If “hundreds of thousands” of Palestinians “voluntarily leave” the area, the security minister elaborated, “we will be able to bring in more and more people.”

It should be obvious by now that neither Israel’s extremist settlers nor its supposed “moderates” have any real interest in a just peace. They all want the Palestinian land—and the extremists will go to any lengths to get it. This is the wellspring of the horrific cycle of violence we see in the occupied Palestinian territories today.

Yet, as Fanon pointed out, the cycle of violence never ends there. Eventually, it always comes full circle. Eventually, the violence always blows back onto the settler himself.

The settler can build concrete walls and steel fences around his pretty little lawn and create his own make-belief paradise on stolen land, he can presume himself safe and firmly in control of the state, but the violence of the occupation, once released from its wellspring, can never be contained. It always comes back to haunt him in the end.

“That same violence,” Fanon writes, “ will be claimed and taken over by the native.”

One day the pent-up frustration, the compounded trauma, the endless humiliations, the deep sense of loss and the constant dehumanization—one day all of this simply comes flooding back. The “native” rises up. The “dirty Arab” fights back.

At that moment, Fanon ominously remarked, “he surges into the forbidden quarters.”

These chilling lines from The Wretched of the Earth are probably among the hardest to read today, after the horrific violence of October 7. They are haunting. Yet they are also frequently misread as a glorification or prescription of violence.

In reality, Fanon did not glorify or prescribe violence. Nor did he see any point in condemning it. Violence was already everywhere in colonial society. Fanon wanted to understand it. As a psychiatrist who had treated countless traumatized Algerian independence fighters, he tried to offer a diagnosis of where the violence came from.

The root of the problem, Fanon concluded, lies in the colonial system itself. In his practice, he realized that the violence of the colonizer eventually finds its way into the minds of the colonized. There it festers and produces visions of violent retribution. It is only a matter of time before the “native” acts out on this visceral desire for revenge.

“Terror, counter-terror, violence, counter-violence,” Fanon wrote: “that is what observers bitterly record when they describe the circle of hate.”

The point of the anti-colonial struggle, then, is not to perpetuate the cycle of violence, but to end it. If the origin of the problem lies in the colonial system itself, it follows that the only way to end the bloodshed is to end the occupation that gave rise to it.

Here, Fanon made another observation that resonates today.

“In all armed struggles,” he wrote, “there exists what we might call the point of no return. Almost always it is marked off by a huge and all-inclusive repression which engulfs all sectors of the colonized people … Then it [becomes] clear to everybody, including even the settlers, that ‘things [can’t] go on as before’.”

We can observe this dynamic in many anti-colonial struggles: from Mau-Mau to Jakarta, from Angola to Algeria. In each of these episodes, the all-out repression of the colonial state was not a sign of strength, but a sign of weakness. The bloodshed was horrendous, but it did not take long for the colonial system to be dismantled.

Have Israel and Palestine now arrived at a similar point of no return?

Some experts, including the critical Israeli historian Ilan Pappé, believe this may well be the case. I personally feel that it’s still too early to tell. But either way it seems to me that the answer to this question no longer lies in the Middle East itself.

As long as Israeli hard-liners maintain the upper hand over the Palestinian factions and the active support of the West, they will continue to try everything in their power to drive the Palestinians off their own land. Nor should we count on the wisdom of the so-called “moderates,” who have actively supported the occupation at every turn.

I believe that the ball now lies in the court of the West—and above all with the United States. Will the US government continue to arm the Israeli settlers and support the genocide in Gaza? Will it continue to underwrite apartheid inside Israel and settler-colonialism in the occupied territories of East Jerusalem and the West Bank?

Or will it finally bring the settlers to heel and call a halt to the circle of hate?

These are the questions that will determine the future of the Middle East. That’s why, in my next posts, I’ll be zooming out from Israel and Palestine to refocus the attention on the West’s own role in supporting the ongoing genocide in Gaza.

To begin with, I have an essay coming out in the New Statesman this week in which I take a closer look at Western hypocrisy on Israeli war crimes and the recent obsession with the so-called “rules-based international order.” I’ll share it here when it’s out.

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A deeply troubling piece of investigative journalism by the Washington Post draws on satellite imagery to show how the Israeli government—despite official statements to the contrary—is already laying the groundwork for an indefinite military occupation of the Gaza Strip:

“Israeli troops are fortifying a strategic corridor that carves Gaza in two, building bases, taking over civilian structures and razing homes, according to satellite imagery and other visual evidence — an effort that military analysts and Israeli experts say is part of a large-scale project to reshape the Strip and entrench the Israeli military presence there.”

Read the full piece here.

By creating these new “facts on the ground,” Israel appears to be eyeing a dystopian transformation of the Palestinian enclave. The details of Netanyahu’s dark vision for the future of Gaza are slowly beginning to seep out. has the full story in his newsletter:

I have to admit, when I first saw the image, I thought it must be a hoax.

Skyscrapers, solar power plants, container ships, oil rigs off shore - a vision of idealized urban and rural settlement, generated by AI, picturing a wealthy, intensively -managed city state - think Singapore or Abu Dhabi - but with a vaguely familiar geography.

No it is not a hoax. This is the Gaza strip in 2035, as envisioned by the Office of Israeli Prime Minister of Netanyahu, eight months into a brutal war of retaliation against the Hamas attack of October 7th. On the land cleared by the displacement of millions and the killing of over 35,000 Palestinians, on a densely populated urban space that the IDF has reduced to rubble and famine, Netanyahu’s planners and their AI graphics imagine a 141 square mile free trade zone. This would bracket Gaza between the El-Arish Port to Gaza’s south in Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula and Sderot, an Israeli city north of Gaza.

First circulated internally in December 2023, the Israeli government went public with its long-range plans in early May 2024, as it faced pressure to spell out the end game. What it envisions is not the kind of the emergency reconstruction prepared by the UN, which right now is focused on a decade-long timeline for clearing unexploded ordinance and 37 millions of tons of rubble, costed to the tune of $40–50 billion. Netanyahu’s Gaza 2035 is a plan, to complete the erasure of Gaza. In it place the Israeli government envisions a mega-rich, clone of a globalized commercial and industrial city, somewhere between Chicago - what historian William Cronon described as Nature’s Metropolis - and Dubai.

Read the full post here.

It’s not just Gaza: in the West Bank, too, Israeli settlers are actively trying to create new “facts on the ground.” The New York Times Magazine has a long essay on the extremist settlers who have taken over Israel: “After 50 years of crime without punishment, in many ways the violent settlers and the state have become one.”

Many of the people we interviewed, some speaking anonymously, some speaking publicly for the first time, offered an account not only of Jewish violence against Palestinians dating back decades but also of an Israeli state that has systematically and increasingly ignored that violence. It is an account of a sometimes criminal nationalistic movement that has been allowed to operate with impunity and gradually move from the fringes to the mainstream of Israeli society. It is an account of how voices within the government that objected to the condoning of settler violence were silenced and discredited. And it is a blunt account, told for the first time by Israeli officials themselves, of how the occupation came to threaten the integrity of their country’s democracy.

Read the full piece here.

At the same time, there are also countervailing forces that will make a permanent Israeli occupation much more difficult in the long run. One sign of this is the recognition of the State of Palestine by Ireland, Spain and Norway. The NYT has called it “a sharp rebuke to Israel”:

If more of their neighbors follow their lead, the European Union could become a major counterweight to the American position that Palestinian statehood should result only from a negotiated settlement with Israel. That would deepen the rift between Europe and Israel.

Combined with the recent move by the ICC chief prosecutor in The Hague to seek arrest warrants for Netanyahu et al., these developments are already causing some anxiety in the US foreign policy establishment:

“We certainly have seen a growing chorus of voices, including voices that had previously been in support of Israel, drift in another direction,” Jake Sullivan, President Biden’s national security adviser, said at a news conference. “That is of concern to us because we do not believe that contributes to Israel’s long-term security or vitality.”

Read the full piece here.

Here, the generational shift that I mentioned in my first post becomes all the more relevant. As I wrote in “The Students Are Right”:

For 75 years, Israeli leaders have been able to draw on the support of their enablers in the West to continue the illegal occupation of the Palestinian territories. But now the wheels of time are slowly wasting away the ranks of their Western supporters. Today, less than a quarter of Americans under the age of 30 still has a favorable view of the Israeli government, compared to half of those over the age of 50. Soon critics of the occupation will form the overwhelming majority. Israel’s system of apartheid is living on borrowed time.

Check out the Pew poll here.

Are we living through a turning point in history? This is the question addressed by the phenomenal British-Palestinian author Isabella Hammad in her forthcoming book, published by Fern Press this fall:

Award-winning author of The Parisian and Enter Ghost Isabella Hammad delivered the Edward W. Said Lecture at Columbia University nine days before 7 October 2023. The text of Hammad’s seminal speech and her afterword written in the early weeks of 2024 together make up a searing appraisal of the war on Palestine during what feels like a turning point in the narrative of human history.

Moving and erudite, Hammad writes from within the moment, shedding light on the Palestinian struggle for freedom. Recognising the Stranger is a brilliant melding of literary and cultural analysis by one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists and a foremost writer of fiction in the world today.

You can pre-order the book here.

Here’s a taste from Hammad’s Edward W. Said lecture at Columbia:

When I was wondering what to talk about in this lecture, I started thinking about Edward Said and lateness as a point of departure. Then I went back to his early book Beginnings—and then I decided after all that I preferred to start in the middle, and more specifically that I wanted to talk about the middle of narratives—their turning points, which I’ll relate to the shifting narrative shape of the Palestinian struggle in its global context.

It’s difficult, in life, to pinpoint with any real sense of confidence where a turning point is located. As Said said of beginnings—whether of texts, epochs, or ideas—the turning point is likewise a human construction, something we identify in retrospect. We look back on our lives, or on the course of history, and according to the shape of the particular narrative we are telling we can say—ah, see, that is how the course of the story developed; and that was a key node when everything changed. We can see these moments quite clearly from the vantage of hindsight, we can assert the significance of past events with relative confidence. In the Bulgarian writer Georgi Gospodinov’s recent novel Time Shelter, the narrator notes that history becomes history only after the fact: “Most likely,” he says, speaking of the beginning of World War II: “1939 did not exist in 1939, there were just mornings when you woke up with a headache, uncertain and afraid.”

But if we cannot always know the significance of the moment in the moment, it is also true that our moment, the one in which we now live, feels like one of chronic “crisis”: political, economic, and climate crises besiege us, along with other existential crises posed by the exponential development of artificial intelligence, and the recurring nightmare of nuclear war. In narrative time, the crisis should suggest the encroachment of the end, even if, in real life, the end is a receding horizon. The flow of history always exceeds the narrative frames we impose on it. Generations continue to be born, and we experience neither total apocalypse nor a happily-ever-after with any collective meaning beyond the endings of individual lives. Yet this narrative sense remains with us, flickering like a ghost through the revisions of postmodernism: we hope for resolution, or at least we hope that retrospectively what felt like a crisis will turn out to have been a turning point.

Read the full lecture here.

And, finally, here’s a little piece of wisdom from Edward Said himself on the role of the intellectual (h/t to Moshik Temkin on Twitter):

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The Israeli historian and dissident Ilan Pappé on why he’s hopeful for the future:

A nice interview with the US filmmaker and campaigner Simone Zimmerman on the shifting perspective on Israel among younger Jewish Americans:

And the trailer to Zimmerman’s timely new film, Israelism:

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I’ve been listening to the excellent Empire podcast series by William Dalrymple and Anita Anand during some of my workouts lately. It offers fascinating and insightful perspectives on world history, starting with Dalrymple’s area of expertise (the British Empire in India) and gradually branching out from there to cover much of the globe.

There’s one episode featuring the Israeli historian Tom Segev about the deep historical origins of the Israeli occupation of Palestine that’s worth listening to. It shines a light on the role of the British Empire in laying the foundations for today’s bloodshed. As the British Jewish author and journalist Arthur Koestler once put it: “One nation solemnly promised to a second nation the country of a third.”

Last week, I wrote about the student protests in solidarity with the Palestinian people and against Western complicity in the Gaza genocide. What motivated me to launch The Rift on this note was the condescending tone and widespread vilification with which our students have been treated by leading political figures, influential media commentators and senior university administrators on both sides of the Atlantic.

What I did not write about was how this demonization campaign has in turn been weaponized to justify a violent police crackdown on the mostly peaceful student movement. This repression is ongoing and appears to be spreading as I write these words. It has already had a chilling effect on academic freedoms in North America and Europe alike, and threatens to deepen a long-standing rift between students and university managers that goes to the heart of the higher education system.

It all began in New York City last month, when the president of Columbia University, Minouche Shafik, ordered a forceful eviction of the peaceful solidarity encampment in Morningside Heights. Eager to please powerful pro-Israel donors and far-right members of Congress who stirred up a tempest in a teapot over the supposed antisemitism of the student protesters, Shafik rode roughshod over the opposition of her own faculty to make a highly authoritarian decision to clear the encampment.

Shafik’s subsequent justifications for calling the cops on her own students clearly did not stand up to scrutiny. As the Columbia law professor David Posen points out, the legal basis for the crackdown was flimsy at best. If the student protesters truly engaged in antisemitic harassment and created a hostile environment for their Jewish peers, then why did so many Jewish students at Columbia and elsewhere participate in the demonstrations? And why did so many Jewish faculty turn out in their support?

In a normal world, the shambles of Shafik’s approach would have served as a powerful warning to others on how not to handle a peaceful student protest. Yet the Columbia crackdown actually set the tone for everything else that was to follow. Since mid-April, more than 3,000 students have been arrested on college campuses all over the United States. That’s more than at any other point since the demonstrations against the Vietnam War. Many students have been suspended from their degree programs and banned from campus; others—including faculty members—are now facing disciplinary or legal action for the unforgivable crime of standing up for human rights.

In the process, university administrators have not only gravely violated the trust of their own students and staff, but also put them at grave risk of bodily harm. We’ve all seen the images of snipers on the rooftops of U.S. campuses and phalanxes of heavily armed riot police using assault weapons to round up a handful of peacenik college students armed with nothing but books, protest signs and a few sleeping bags. This wildly disproportionate use of force—including the deployment of teargas, mace and rubber bullets—signals the bankruptcy of the university as a place of reasoned debate.

The hard-handed police repression is all the more appalling as the student protests themselves have been overwhelmingly peaceful. A recent analysis of 553 campus demonstrations between mid-April and early May found that 97% of them were entirely non-violent. In its study, the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project found only 20 cases of interpersonal violence or property damage. During the same period, they counted at least 70 instances of violent police intervention. It’s clear which side the violence is coming from: mostly from management and the police.

Meanwhile, some public officials and university administrators in Europe have been particularly eager to repeat all the same mistakes that had previously been made in North America. At the University of Amsterdam, for instance, which has seen some of the largest demonstrations on the continent, the authorities used a bulldozer to clear the barricades surrounding the student occupation of a university building, while an army of riot police assaulted students along the city’s historic canals. In Berlin, Paris and elsewhere, riot police also forcefully disbanded peaceful student encampments.

Until recently, universities in the UK mostly distinguished themselves from their US and EU counterparts by their relatively restrained approach to the protests. Citing the importance of free speech, the vice-chancellors of the fifteen or so UK institutions with ongoing student occupations actively tried to resist pressure by Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and the right-wing press to crack down on the solidarity encampments.

In recent days, however, there are signs that the situation in the UK may also be moving in the wrong direction. Last week, seventeen students were arrested at the University of Oxford after staging a loud and disruptive but non-violent sit-in at their vice-chancellor’s office. The president of Queen Mary University of London is now refusing to meet with student protesters until they disband their protest camp. And management at my own university, the London School of Economics, has sent an email to students and staff threatening to take action against the student encampment.

This managerial response—stonewalling the students and resorting to violent arrests and thinly veiled threats—goes against everything the modern university is supposed to stand for. As academics, we are expected to teach our students to engage in critical thinking. We urge them to ask difficult questions and challenge entrenched ideas. In class, the process of learning about and debating different points of view exposes students to opinions and interpretations that some may find uncomfortable. Yet this is precisely the kind of training that fosters a critical and open-minded attitude, enabling students to navigate a diverse society in which viewpoints often diverge.

The fact that university administrators are now openly repressing their own students simply for putting this academic training into practice and translating critical thinking into collective action marks a brazen violation of the right to free speech and peaceful assembly. But it does more than that: it also challenges the very mission of the university as an institution of higher learning. It cuts to the core of what we do as educators, researchers and public intellectuals. It undermines everything the system of higher education in the social sciences and the humanities pretends to be. If all we care about are obedient, unquestioning citizens, why bother with universities anyway?

Given this dismal state of affairs, we should not be surprised that the ongoing crackdown has already provoked a deep crisis in the rarefied world of academia. At Columbia, a large majority of faculty members recently passed a vote of no confidence in Shafik for her anti-democratic posturing and her ham-fisted handling of the protests, accusing the university president of violating “the fundamental requirements of academic freedom and shared governance, and her unprecedented assault on students’ rights, [which] warrants unequivocal and emphatic condemnation.”

Meanwhile, staff at the University of Amsterdam released the following statement:

This breakdown of trust between students and faculty, on the one hand, and university management on the other poses a serious threat to the future of the university as an institution. Yet it need not be like this. Not all administrators have drunk the Shafik Kool-Aid. I was pleased to see the president of my alma mater, Patrizia Nanz at the European University Institute in Florence, take a principled stance in defense of academic freedom and the right to protest in The Guardian yesterday. Elsewhere, in places like Dublin and Ghent, university administrators have done the right thing by agreeing to the protesters’ demands or at least entering into negotiations with them.

If only other universities would follow this commonsensical approach and allow students to stage their peaceful protests undisturbed, we would finally be able to focus our discussions on the truly important issue at hand: the question of Western complicity in the unfolding genocide against the Palestinian people. In the wake of the latest Israeli atrocity—the bombing of a tent camp in Rafah that killed at least 45 refugees, mostly women and children—it’s crucial that we keep our eyes on Gaza.

This is why, in the next weeks, we’ll be leaving the university campuses behind for now to ask a bigger set of questions about the political and historical connections between settler colonialism and indigenous genocide. The accumulated experience of 75 years of Israeli apartheid and five hundred years of Western colonialism teaches us that European and North American responsibility for the current crisis in the Middle East runs much deeper than our leaders are comfortable to admit.

To truly understand what’s happening in Gaza today, we need to unearth that ugly history anew. This will be the theme of my next editions of the newsletter.

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A powerful piece by the Pakistani writer in defense of the student protests in solidarity with Palestine:

“Students protesting Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza have ignited in me an electrical feeling I had almost forgotten: hope.”

Read it here (and check out ’s new Substack project: )

An interesting essay by the literary scholar Bruce Robbins for , on Immanuel Wallerstein’s relationship to the May ‘68 student protests at Columbia:

“The university is and will remain ‘a bastion of the center…’ In other words, it will never be a bastion of the left … What the university can be for the left is what it turned out to be for [Immanuel Wallerstein], as for Edward Said and Noam Chomsky: a ‘refuge and a point of sortie’.”

Read the full piece here.

A report by the LSE Student Union’s Palestine Society detailing the School’s “complicity in genocide of the Palestinian people, arms trade, and climate breakdown.”

Key findings of the report:

• LSE has investments worth £48,515,817 in 80 holdings in 53 companies that are involved in crimes against the Palestinian people.

• LSE invests £5,310,537 in 11 companies that are profiting from the genocide in Gaza. They include Toyota (£2,261,650), General Motors (£1,434,427), BAE Systems (£877,282), Caterpillar (£233,452) and RTX (formerly Raytheon Technologies) (£120,042).

• LSE invests £8,733,746 in 21 companies that work with and/or supply the Israeli military and/or police. They include Toyota (£2,261,650), Sony (£1,912,377), General Motors (£1,434,427), BAE Systems (£877,282), and Motorola (£797,109).

• LSE invests £1,627,002 in four business enterprises listed by the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights as involved in illegal settlement activities. These companies are Airbnb, Alstom, Booking, and Ithaca Energy.

• LSE invests £34,951,628 in 19 European financial institutions that are investors and/or creditors in business enterprises listed by the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights as involved in illegal settlement activities. These companies include Santander (£3,905,836), Kreditanstalt für Wiederaufbau (KfW) (£3,062,292), Deutsche Bank (£2,990,261), Lloyds Banking Group (£2,982,885), and Barclays (£2,872,634).

• LSE invests £4,163,936 in 9 companies involved in resource extraction and/or operations in the Occupied Palestinian Territory. These companies include Siemens (£2,217,612), Booking (£1,575,071), Cisco (£173,744), ABB Ltd (£111,506) and Airbnb (£34,749).

Download the full report here.

Like the LSE report, I covered this in yesterday's post, but it’s worth sharing again: a very timely new book by the Jewish-Israeli anthropologist Maya Wind on the role of Israeli universities in the settler-colonial project:

Israeli universities have long enjoyed a reputation as liberal bastions of freedom and democracy. Drawing on extensive research and making Hebrew sources accessible to the international community, Maya Wind shatters this myth and documents how Israeli universities are directly complicit in the violation of Palestinian rights.

As this book shows, Israeli universities serve as pillars of Israel's system of oppression against Palestinians. Academic disciplines, degree programs, campus infrastructure, and research laboratories all service Israeli occupation and apartheid, while universities violate the rights of Palestinians to education, stifle critical scholarship, and violently repress student dissent. Towers of Ivory and Steel is a powerful expose of Israeli academia’s ongoing and active complicity in Israel’s settler-colonial project.

Order the book here.

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I’ve been keeping an eye on the spread of Palestine solidarity protests to university campuses around the world. The Palestine Is Everywhere website has a live map showing 247 solidarity actions and 174 protest encampments globally:

My friends Ross Domoney and Antonis Vradis were recently in the West Bank for a new documentary film project when they got caught up in the most destructive IDF raid in decades. They share this powerful video report from the front lines:

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This enchanting song by the Lebanese jazz and folk rock musician Issam Hajali has been seared into my mind ever since I first heard it on FIP Radio a few months ago:

Just as incredible as the song is the story behind the man who wrote it—and the revolutionary Palestinian poet whose verses provided the lyrics:

“In 1976, Hajali, who was politically ultra-left, fled Lebanon with his wife, first to Cyprus, and then to Paris, where he stayed in 1977, before going back to Beirut. In his last week in Paris, Hajali, together with Rogér Fakhr, another Lebanese musician, and a number of musicians from various countries, whose names were eventually lost, recorded his debut album, Mouasalt Ila Jacad El Ard. The record combined santur with Western-style music with vocals, jazz guitars, and synthesizers. The texts were taken from Palestinian revolutionary poet Samih al-Qasim. The album was not properly released at the time and circulated on tapes, with an estimated 100 copies. In Beirut, it came to the attention of the musician Ziad Rahbani who popularized it. In 2019, the record was re-released by Habibi Funk. One of the compositions, Ana Damir El Motakallim, has been compared with Stairway to Heaven and described as innovative in Lebanese music.”

It’s been quite a sight. Over the past month, students have been rising up against Western support for the Gaza war and in solidarity with the Palestinian people from California to Kyoto. They’ve had enough: no longer will they allow their governments and universities to be complicit in war crimes and crimes against humanity.

The first protest camp was set up at Columbia University in mid-April, in the historic cradle of the 1968 student protests against the Vietnam War and the anti-apartheid movement of the 1980s. Since then, the demonstrations have spread across the United States. For weeks now, the same chant has been echoing through the “hallowed halls” of academia all over the country: “Disclose, divest! We will not stop, we will not rest!”

In the first week of May, the solidarity encampments crossed the Atlantic and began to spread like a wildfire through Europe as well. I was in London when the first tents went up at UCL and SOAS earlier this month. When I arrived in Cambridge for a conference a few days later, students there had just started another solidarity encampment in coordination with their peers at Oxford. Once I got back home to Amsterdam, I found students there still seething with anger over a violent police crackdown on a series of attempted encampments. Last week, students at my own university, the London School of Economics, launched an occupation as well.

The protest camps and solidarity actions have now spread to at least 247 universities worldwide. There have been demonstrations on campuses in Canada and Australia, in Mexico and Argentina, in Egypt and South Africa, in Lebanon and India, in New Zealand and Japan. What unifies them is a simple set of demands: that universities end their involvement in human rights violations by cutting ties with Israel’s system of apartheid and divesting from the military-industrial complex more generally.

For this, the students have been widely vilified. In the US, President Joe Biden sternly lectured the younger generation that “dissent must never lead to disorder”—as if a few broken windows at Columbia hurt his sensibilities more than the destruction of twelve universities, 280 government schools and 65 UNRWA-run schools in Gaza. Hillary Clinton went even further in her condescension of the students, saying that young people “don’t know very much at all about the history of the Middle East, or frankly about history in many areas of the world, including our own country.”

The situation in Europe has not been much better. In France, the regional council of Paris briefly suspended its funding to Sciences Po after accusing students there of US-style “wokisme.” In the Netherlands, far-right leader Geert Wilders interrupted the formation of his new coalition government to denounce the protesters as “antisemitic scum.” And in Britain, where university leaders have generally taken a more de-escalatory approach, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak is needlessly inflaming the tensions with his repeated calls on vice-chancellors to quell the peaceful demonstrations.

Despite this widespread demonization, most students have actually been remarkably reasonable in their demands. They simply point out that Israel has been engaged in a long-standing illegal occupation of the Palestinian territories, and is now waging a campaign of collective punishment against the civilian population of Gaza. The facts are well documented and speak for themselves: Israeli troops have so far killed tens of thousands of women and children and have engaged in mass executions, torture, forced displacement and deliberate starvation—all with plausible genocidal intent.

The chief prosecutor at the International Criminal Court in The Hague is now seeking arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and senior Israeli and Hamas officials for war crimes and crimes against humanity. At the same time, the International Court of Justice is looking into a case brought by South Africa that accuses Israel of violating the Genocide Convention. In this context, it makes sense that students would expect their universities to cut ties with Israel.

Yet some people still seem baffled by the students’ demands. What could universities in the West possibly have to do with Israeli war crimes in Gaza, the skeptics ask? Aren’t they simply in the business of providing education? Clearly they should be. But in recent decades many Western universities have increasingly come to resemble large corporations, with extensive foreign investments and wide-ranging international partnerships. The students are right to point out that this has implicated the higher education sector in a larger ecosystem that helps to sustain the war machine.

In fact, there are two main ways in which the day-to-day operations of Western universities have become materially interwoven with Israel’s illegal occupation and the denial of Palestinian rights and Palestinian freedom. These two dimensions have in turn shaped the students’ demands. Let’s take a quick look at both.

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1) University endowments

At the big schools in the US and UK, which often have huge endowments, students have mostly focused their demands on disclosure and divestment. Simply put, they want universities to be transparent about where they invest their money, and to stop investing in companies that are—in one way or another—implicated in human rights violations. This includes arms manufacturers, but also companies providing goods to the Israeli military and police, or companies doing business in the occupied territories.

Students at the London School of Economics, for example, have made the demand for divestment the center-piece of their actions. The solidarity encampment at LSE was launched to coincide with the release of a 116-page report by the Palestine Society of the LSE Student Union. The report details the School’s extensive investments in arms manufacturers and private businesses with ties to the occupation, as well as fossil fuel companies. It finds that the “LSE has investments worth £48,515,817 in 80 holdings in 53 companies that are involved in crimes against the Palestinian people.”

These are clearly astonishing figures. Why would an institution of higher learning that prides itself on its cosmopolitan character—a leading social science university that encourages its professors to promote critical thinking among students and that leans heavily into its progressive roots for PR purposes—be so heavily invested in the arms industry and other companies that enable Western and Israeli war crimes?

The answer has everything to do with the financialization of the university. As pointed out in a recent post for his newsletter, the student protesters at Columbia are not just making a moral argument about the reprehensible nature of specific investments. They are really developing a much broader critique of political economy that calls into question the very way in which our financialized universities—and by implication our financialized societies—are run.

This critique has been particularly pronounced in the US. There, it has often been difficult for students to gain insight into the investments of their own universities. The management of US endowments tends to be very obscure: financial regulations are lax and administrators are often loath to disclose their assets for fear that it will give their “competitors” (i.e. other universities) insight into their portfolio strategies.

When students demand disclosure, they are therefore doing more than just asking for transparency. They are really challenging the operational model of the financialized university as such. By calling on administrators to disclose their assets, the student protesters are tearing the veil off the neoliberal university to reveal a profit-oriented money-making machine that—at the institutional level, at least—often cares little for critical thinking, moral principles or human rights.

We can clearly see this in the case of the University of Michigan. When students there demanded that the administration disclose its assets, officials responded by reiterating that their policy “is to shield the endowment from political pressures and to base our investment decisions solely on financial factors such as risk and return.”

This statement clearly reveals the way in which many university managers have come to hide behind the abstract logic of the market to construe their financial operations as essentially “non-political.” If investment decisions are based “solely on financial factors such as risk and return,” then there is no need to consider their societal implications. As long as the returns outweigh the risks, the investment is sound.

Of course, what this way of thinking fails to recognize is the fact that the depoliticization of university finances is in itself already a thoroughly political act. The choice to prioritize “risk and return” over respect for human rights—or even just education itself—is not a financial consideration, but a political one. Students are right to bring that political question out into the open and to raise it for public debate.

The unwillingness of some university administrators—starting with Minouche Shafik at Columbia—to even engage in a good-faith dialogue with their own students on this point is what lies behind the radicalization of the protests. But the anger that is now on display from Los Angeles to Amsterdam also has deeper roots. In a perceptive essay, written a few years ago, Max Haiven and Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou already observed that the financialization of the university was fueling rage and anxiety among students, and warned that this would soon boil over into a major eruption:

Like the buildup of tectonic force between two great continental plates, today there is a disaster brewing in the tension between, on the one hand, how a financialized society has shaped the conditions of “youth” and, on the other, the “youth” themselves. The eruptions and tremors have begun and we take it as our task to name something stirring beneath the surface.

2) Institutional partnerships

Financialization is therefore one of the main threads that connects Western universities to the war machine. But endowments and investments are not the only things that implicate our sector in the ongoing human rights violations against the Palestinian people. The other way in which Western universities have become enmeshed in Israel’s illegal occupation and its system of apartheid has to do with their partnerships with Israeli universities, businesses and research institutes.

In continental Europe, where universities are mostly publicly funded and often have much smaller endowments than their US and UK counterparts, students have tended to focus their actions mostly along this second dimension. At universities in the Netherlands, for instance, the protesters have demanded that administrators cut their ties with Israeli universities and research institutions, in the same way that Western universities once boycotted the academic institutions of apartheid South Africa.

Some of my colleagues seem to believe that this demand for an academic boycott of Israel goes too far. There is still a widespread belief, especially among an older generation of Western academics, that Israeli universities are actually a force for good in Israeli society: a bastion of academic freedom and liberalism that could pose a democratic counterweight to the belligerent nationalism of Benjamin Netanyahu and the messianic Zionism of his extremist coalition partners. Why boycott the only intellectual bulwark that could possibly offer a “safe space” for political dissent?

In reality, the situation is a bit more complicated than that. As the Israeli scholar Maya Wind demonstrates in her timely new book, Towers of Ivory and Steel, the operations of Israeli universities are in fact intricately interwoven with the political project of settler-colonialism, and the universities themselves have been active participants in the denial of freedom to the Palestinian people. This involvement has historically ranged from outright land grabs to the training of military and police units involved in the violation of human rights within the occupied territories.

“For decades,” Maya Wind writes in the book, “Israeli universities have been widely celebrated in the West as exceptionally free. European and North American academic institutions maintain research collaborations and joint degree programs with Israeli universities, which are often the only such academic partnerships in the Middle East.” But in reality, Israeli universities actually maintain “many ties to the Israeli state, including to its apparatuses of violence.” Indeed, Wind’s painstaking archival research demonstrates in great detail how academic expertise, infrastructure and technologies are actively used “to support Israeli territorial, demographic, and military projects.”

Israeli universities have also been known to impose limits on free speech and political dissent, for critical Jewish-Israeli and Palestinian scholars alike. Take the example of the leading Palestinian law scholar Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, who was recently suspended from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and later arrested by Israeli police for openly criticizing Israeli war crimes in the foreign press. In a statement, the Hebrew University explained its decision to suspend Professor Shalhoub-Kevorkian by describing itself as a “proud Israeli, public and Zionist institution.”

This is precisely why Palestinian activists have long been calling on Western universities to cut ties with their Israeli counterparts. Inspired by the successful struggle against apartheid South Africa, the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel asks Western scholars to stop normalizing the status quo. We need to recognize that university involvement in occupation, apartheid and crimes against humanity is not normal. On this point, too, the student protesters are right. There are reasonable grounds to support and reiterate the long-standing Palestinian demand for an academic and cultural boycott.

Towards a free Palestine—and a democratic university

The Palestine solidarity campaign is alive and well on university campuses around the world. It’s also converging in interesting ways with other struggles. Calls to divest from the occupation and the war machine are coming together with demands by the climate movement to divest from fossil fuels and by the prison abolition movement to divest from the carceral system. These various divestment campaigns are in turn linking up with student and faculty struggles for the democratization of the university.

All of this gives hope for the future. The student protesters of 2024—like those of 1968 and 1985 before them—find themselves on the right side of history. Having come of age during an age of crisis, the new generation seems to have a clearheaded view of the injustices of the world and the hypocrisies of the Western establishment. They are acutely aware of the complicity of their own governments and their own cultural and educational institutions in the oppression and dispossession of the Palestinian people.

What this points to is a seismic generational shift. For 75 years, Israeli leaders have been able to draw on the support of their enablers in the West to continue the illegal occupation of the Palestinian territories. But now the wheels of time are slowly wasting away the ranks of their Western supporters. Today, less than a quarter of Americans under the age of 30 still has a favorable view of the Israeli government, compared to half of those over the age of 50. Soon critics of the occupation will form the overwhelming majority. Israel’s system of apartheid is living on borrowed time.

In some places, the tables are already starting to turn. In recent weeks, a growing number of universities—including Brown University in the US, Goldsmiths in the UK, Trinity College in Ireland, Ghent University in Belgium and the University of Lausanne in Switzerland—have met at least some of the protesters’ demands. While there’s always the risk that some of these agreements will succumb to “death by committee,” there are early signs that change is coming. The recent recognition of the State of Palestine by Spain, Ireland and Norway is another indication of this trend.

Whether the current wave of campus protests has the capacity to actually change foreign policy outcomes in the United States and the material reality in Gaza remains to be seen. But at least the students are trying. That’s more than can be said of their coldhearted and spineless political leaders. The old establishment may vilify the young protesters for their actions, but the experience of ‘68 and ‘85 teaches us that the struggle will eventually prevail. After all, the students are right. Only when Jewish-Israelis and Palestinians are both free will there be a lasting peace in the Middle East.

Welcome to The Rift: a newsletter for critical thinkers who are concerned about the state of the world and trying to make sense of the crisis of our times.

My name is Jerome Roos. I’m a political economist at the London School of Economics, where I specialize in the study of capitalism and the origins of today’s global crisis. Before this, I briefly taught at the University of Cambridge.

My first book, a history of sovereign debt crises, was published by Princeton University Press and won the Immanuel Wallerstein Award for best book on the political economy of the world system. I’ve also written op-eds and longer essays for The Guardian, The New York Times, New Statesman and Al Jazeera English.

I’m currently working on my second book, called CRISIS, which aims to place our age of upheaval within the grand sweep of world history. The Bookseller has called it a “ground-breaking study” and “one of the most talked-about titles ahead of the London Book Fair.” It will be published by Knopf/Vintage in the US and by Fern Press/Vintage in the UK, and is so far set to be translated into twenty languages.

The Rift will be the online companion to this new book: a place where I can try out fresh ideas and share some of my initial findings to provide a more long-term perspective on the crisis of our times.

I believe that we urgently need to move beyond the superficiality of the 24-hour news cycle and the tired social media “discourse” to ask much more profound questions about how we got here and where we are going. I hope that The Rift can offer a creative space for such big-picture thinking.

Above all, the newsletter is motivated by a strong conviction that there is an alternative to the present global disorder. Join me in unearthing the roots of today’s deepening world crisis and exploring the opportunities for transformative change.

What you’ll get

A free subscription will give you:

• 📬 The main newsletter in your inbox.

• 🗄️ Access to most of the online archive.

A paid subscription will also get you:

• 📚 The “3D roundup” of reading tips.

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Founding members will also receive:

• 📕 A signed copy of CRISIS when it’s out.

What’s in a name?

In geological terms, a rift refers to a break in the Earth’s crust. It comes about when underlying plate tectonics pull different parts of the lithosphere—the rocky outer layer of our planet—into opposite directions, causing the surface to crack open. In recent years, the visual imagery of tectonic shifts, global rifts and a fracturing world has become a powerful metaphor for our divided societies, our broken political systems, our fragmenting world economy, and today’s rising geopolitical tensions.

At the same time, the Earth itself also suffers the destabilizing effects of capitalist development on the natural environment. This “metabolic rift” has now become the main driving force behind the planetary emergency of climate change, biodiversity loss and mass extinction. For all these reasons, The Rift struck me as an appropriate name for a newsletter on the multidimensional crisis of our times.

But this newsletter is not just about the things that divide us. A rift is also an opening that can lay bare underlying realities and reveal unexpected new vistas onto distant horizons. Understood in this way, The Rift actually refers to a symbolic breach in space and time. It becomes both a site of struggle and a moment of rupture that can push the world system into a different direction. It marks the epochal threshold between an old era that is ending and a new era that is about to begin.

This is the critical juncture at which we find ourselves today. The ground is already shifting beneath our feet. I want The Rift to be an open space where we can work through the implications of these profound changes and collectively rethink the shape of our shared past, our troubled present and our common future. To join our growing community of critical thinkers, make sure to sign up to the newsletter below:

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