The Day After: Palestine, Decolonization and Future Violence

Reflections on Tim Stosberg’s “Palestine Will Save Us All”

The argument in Tim Stosberg’s article “Palestine Will Save Us All” is that Palestine can function as a symbolic object onto which broader political hopes, anxieties and aspirations are projected. The article is interesting and often insightful, but it also engages in a number of simplifications.

There is certainly evidence that, for some activists, Palestine has become more than a specific national struggle. It can appear as a symbol that connects anti-colonial resistance, anti-racism, anti-capitalism, environmentalism and wider aspirations for human emancipation. Palestine is sometimes presented as the linchpin in a global struggle against oppression. As Black American activist Ajamu Baraka has put it, “Palestine is the moral heart of global anti-colonial politics.” Similar themes emerge in the rhetoric of some Palestine solidarity activists who see the conflict as part of a much larger global confrontation with systems of power and domination. A similar perspective was expressed by Michael Shaik of Free Palestine Melbourne in a recent broadcast on 3CR radio in Melbourne, where he suggested that Palestine has become a focal point through which broader questions of justice, power and global political transformation are being understood and articulated. In this framing, local Zionists are to be politically and morally “expunged”.

Stosberg seeks to explain this tendency through a psychoanalytic framework of projection. He argues that Palestine has become an ego-ideal in the Left’s search for a revolutionary subject. What was once the proletariat, and later the peoples of the so-called Third World, is now represented by the Palestinian. In this reading, Palestine becomes a vessel for hopes and desires that activists are unable to realise within their own societies.

There is something to this argument. Palestine is undoubtedly romanticised in some quarters. A striking example comes from the Australian commentator Caitlin Johnstone, whose audience numbers in the millions. She describes Palestinians as uniquely authentic, spiritual and organically connected to one another while depicting Israeli Jewish society as fake, artificial and culturally illegitimate. Whatever one thinks of Johnstone’s motives, this kind of rhetoric does not merely celebrate Palestinians; it delegitimises IsraeliJews . In such narratives Israeli Jews cease to be a national community with their own history and become instead permanent colonisers, cultural imposters and occupiers whose collective existence lacks legitimacy. Her readers reinforce this interpretation in their comments. Such narratives move beyond criticism of Israeli policies and towards a desire for the erasure of the other. This is calling for more ethnic cleansing.

There may be another explanation for some of the symbolic power of Palestine in countries such as Australia. The failure of the Voice referendum and the continuing unresolved relationship between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australia may also contribute to the symbolic resonance of Palestine for some activists. Palestine can appear to offer a more clearly defined moral struggle than the far more difficult and unresolved questions of decolonisation at home. In this sense, Palestine may become not merely a cause but a source of political and moral redemption. As some commentators have observed, neither Australia nor the United States has been successfully decolonised. The attraction of Palestine may therefore partly reflect unresolved tensions within settler societies themselves, because it it is a highly (and correctly) moral cause.

Yet Stosberg’s explanation is also too simple. The appeal of the Palestinian cause cannot be reduced to psychological projection, nor to guilt over the failures of decolonisation in Australia. Many people are motivated by concerns about the brutality of displacement, the scale of civilian casualties, and the destruction of Gaza’s social and civic life. Whatever the crimes of Hamas and whatever one’s view of Israel’s security concerns, these realities cannot simply be explained away as projection. To explain solidarity primarily through a psychological framework that ultimately circles back to antisemitism risks overlooking the realities that have generated such concern.

Similarly, there can be an overly simplistic application of settler-colonial theory to Israel-Palestine as a way of explaining the attraction of the cause to many people, particularly if Jewish historical experience and the reasons for Jewish settlement are reduced to a simplistic narrative of European colonisation or blanket statements about Zionism as distinct from an imagined form of “real” Judaism.

But this does not mean that every use of the framework is invalid. The challenge is to determine where it illuminates historical realities and where it becomes an ideological template that predetermines political conclusions. When the category ceases to be descriptive and becomes classificatory, the existence of a living national community can itself become the object of delegitimisation. The issue of state formations, constitutional arrangements and future political solutions should be considered separately. What is striking is that very few other contemporary national communities are subjected to this level of ontological challenge regarding their legitimacy as a people.

The debate here mirrors wider controversies surrounding settler-colonial theory itself. Critics such as Adam Kirsch argue that the concept increasingly functions less as a historical framework than as a moral classification system in which political conclusions follow automatically from historical labels. Historians such as Cyrus Schayegh and sociologists such as Julian Go have similarly warned against allowing settler colonialism to become a master narrative that absorbs other explanatory factors including nationalism, state formation, migration, class and geopolitics. Whether one agrees with these criticisms or not, they raise an important methodological question: at what point does a useful analytical category become a template that predetermines political judgement?

Yet there is another weakness in much contemporary left-wing discussion of Israel-Palestine that Stosberg only partially addresses. Considerable attention is devoted to colonialism, occupation, apartheid, decolonization and historical justice. Far less attention is paid to the problem of future intercommunal violence. The Gaza war has created an enormous new reservoir of grief, trauma, fear and hatred among both Palestinians and Israeli Jews. Communities have been shattered, and mutual trust has deteriorated even further. Any serious discussion of the future must begin with this reality.

It is not enough simply to advocate a one-state solution, a confederation, or some post-Zionist political arrangement. Such proposals may identify desirable constitutional outcomes, but they do not in themselves explain how peaceful coexistence is to be achieved. This is where the work of Nadim Rouhana is particularly valuable. Rouhana recognises that whatever one’s understanding of Zionism, Israeli Jews are now a deeply rooted national community, and Rashid Khalidi has said much the same thing. The challenge is therefore not simply one of decolonization but also one of going down the extraordinarily difficult path of full equality, reconciliation and coexistence.

Yet reconciliation itself is not enough. As James Ron has argued in his discussion of the Balkan wars and state violence, violence is shaped not only by ideology but also by institutions, state structures and systems of accountability. The reduction of violence requires political institutions capable of managing conflict, enforcing rules and protecting minorities. The central challenge is therefore not merely constitutional design but state-building, institution-building and trust-building. Much contemporary left-wing discussion is surprisingly neglectful of this reality. It is not enough simply to invoke “de-Zionization”. Serious political proposals require an account of the institutions, security arrangements, constitutional structures and forms of leadership through which a new order would be constructed.

Rouhana’s emphasis on reconciliation and coexistence also points towards a growing body of work concerned less with historical diagnosis than with political futures. Initiatives such as A Land for All, together with recent Israeli-Palestinian dialogue projects, begin from the premise that neither Palestinians nor Israeli Jews are going anywhere. The question therefore becomes not simply how injustice is to be addressed, but how two peoples can continue to share the same land while reducing the likelihood of recurring violence. This shift in focus—from historical blame to political coexistence, probably because of resistance to compromise and blind anger over Israel’s unrestrained actions—remains underdeveloped in much contemporary debate.

This is where contemporary decolonial narratives can appear incomplete. If the conflict is understood solely through the lens of settler colonialism, responsibility for transformation is often implicitly assigned to one side. Yet Israel-Palestine now contains two deeply-rooted national communities, one of which possesses a powerful and highly institutionalised state. Neither side is going to disappear, despite Israeli attempts to destroy and uproot Palestinians. Any future political order must therefore address the fears, aspirations and collective identities of both, as well as the massive inequalities between them.

The most important question is not only what political and other arrangement should replace the present one. It is what structures, guarantees, institutions and forms of leadership are capable of reducing the likelihood of future large-scale violence. How are minorities protected? How are security institutions constituted? How are competing historical narratives accommodated? What mechanisms exist to manage inevitable future disputes? What about economic justice and reparations? Justice without institutions is unstable; institutions without justice are unsustainable. Any serious proposal for the future must address both. It is no use claiming, as some on the left do, that there is “no conflict”, only settler-colonialism, and remove that, de-Zionise, and the situation is resolved. That is a preposterous non-solution, removed from the reality of relations between warring parties.

The failures of many post-colonial regimes should remind us of the dangers of ideological enthusiasm and simplifications. Problems cannot also simply be attributed to external hostile forces; they may also arise from fractures within the societies themselves. In the case of Israel-Palestine, the divisions within Israeli society—class, religion and secularism, ethnicity and political identity, and its militarization,—and within Palestinian society—class, clan structures, religion and secularism, and competing political and military loyalties—cannot be dismissed as relics of the past. They will become part of any future political order. Oren Yiftachel, for example, has long explored these fault lines through his work on Israeli ethnocracy, citizenship, territory and the position of Palestinian citizens of Israel. His work reminds us that the internal divisions of Israeli-Palestinian society cannot simply be wished away through constitutional change. They will remain part of any future political order.

In any case, Strosberg’s article is least convincing at the end, when it suggests that the Western Left bears substantial responsibility for the current deadlock in Israel-Palestine. Whatever the intellectual influence of Western activists, the conflict remains rooted in the relationship between the State of Israel and the Palestinians living under occupation, blockade or conditions of profound political inequality. To place primary responsibility on activists thousands of kilometers away is to mistake commentary for a bizarre form of causation.

None of this means that antisemitism within anti-Zionist movements should be ignored. Nor does it mean that anti-Zionism and anti-Israel sentiment are automatically antisemitic. Both propositions are false. The task is to distinguish between prejudice and political disagreement, between hostility to Jews and criticism of states, ideologies and policies. That distinction is often difficult, but it remains essential.

Yet for all its faults, Stosberg’s article is worth reading. Its greatest value lies in drawing attention to some of the more romanticised and extreme forms of Palestine solidarity discourse that can, in turn, be used to quash dissenting views. Its weakness lies in treating those forms as more representative than they are and in relying too heavily on psychological explanation where political, historical and moral explanations may be equally important. The article raises important questions about symbolism, projection and political identity, but it is ultimately most persuasive when it analyses those phenomena rather than when it seeks to explain the complexity of contemporary solidarity with Palestine through them alone.

The unresolved question running through both Stosberg’s essay and many of the debates it critiques is not simply how injustice is to be overcome, but what happens the day after. How can future violence be prevented, and what institutions, forms of leadership and relationships of trust are capable of sustaining coexistence between two peoples who have experienced generations of conflict? On that question, thinkers such as Nadim Rouhana and James Ron may ultimately offer more useful guidance than either the romanticism of some Palestine solidarity discourse or the reductionism of some of its critics.

References

Adwan, S., Bar-On, D., & Naveh, E. (2012). Side by Side: Parallel Histories of Israel-Palestine. New York: New Press.

Go, J. (2023). “Settler Colonialism Can’t Fully Explain Our World.” Catalyst.
Khalidi, R. (2020). The Hundred Years' War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017. New York: Metropolitan Books.

Kirsch, A. (2024). On Settler Colonialism: Ideology, Violence, and Justice. New York: W.W. Norton.

Konya, A., et al. (2025). “Using Collective Dialogues and AI to Find Common Ground Between Israeli and Palestinian Peacebuilders.” arXiv preprint.

Ron, J. (2003). Frontiers and Ghettos: State Violence in Serbia and Israel. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Rouhana, N. N. (2018). “Decolonization as Reconciliation: Rethinking the National Conflict Paradigm in Palestine/Israel.”

Rouhana, N. N. (2024). “Daring to Imagine: A Future Without Zionism.” State Crime Journal, 12(2).

Schayegh, C. (2024). “Settler Colonial Studies: A Historical Analysis.” Settler Colonial Studies.

Stosberg, T. (2026). “Palestine Will Save Us All.” K. Revue, 4 June 2026.

Veracini, L. (2010). Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Veracini, L. (2015). The Settler Colonial Present. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Yiftachel, O. (2006). Ethnocracy: Land and Identity Politics in Israel/Palestine. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Wolfe, P. (2006). “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native.” Journal of Genocide Research, 8(4), 387–409.

Note: The image is AI generated and AI helped me to generate this based on (literally) the gigabytes of personal corpus of materials. I’m writing about that separately…stay tuned.