Ilan Pappé: The Crisis of Zionism and the Future of Palestine – EXCLUSIVE
By Ilan Pappe – The Palestine Chronicle
Editor’s Note: The Palestine Chronicle is publishing exclusively the full text of a recent speech delivered by renowned Israeli historian Professor Ilan Pappé at the 2026 Marxism Festival in London. In this wide-ranging address, Pappé examines the historical evolution of Zionism, arguing that its current brutality reflects a profound structural crisis rather than enduring strength. The text has been lightly edited for clarity while preserving the author’s arguments and voice.
Zionism is in crisis, and that crisis has given rise to a more violent, racist, and brutal form of it. This follows a familiar dialectic of history: a regime’s final chapter is often its most vicious.
As activists, we must first recognize that the inhumanity unfolding in Palestine today is also a symptom of the looming collapse of those who perpetrate it. This may offer us some hope, but it brings no comfort to those who suffer its consequences.
We must therefore pursue two goals: to shorten this period as much as possible, and to curb its brutality through civic and legal action, as well as solidarity with Palestinians on the ground who are defending themselves against genocide, ethnic cleansing, and apartheid.
What is Zionism Today?
Like any ideology, Zionism consists both of enduring principles and of their ongoing translation into changing realities on the ground. That translation shifts with circumstances: the size of the ideological movement, the level of resistance it faces, the strength of the global and regional coalitions supporting it, its material and human resources, and its internal cohesion.
Zionism’s core principles recast Judaism as a form of European nationalism; one that could not be fulfilled in Europe and therefore had to be pursued in Palestine. Its claim to Palestine was expressed in religious terms, even though the movement was secular and aimed to secularize and modernize Jewish life through the colonization of Palestine.
The paradox of appealing to a divine authority the movement itself did not accept in order to justify colonization was made to seem logical by presenting Zionism as a response to European antisemitism. Its early supporters, including both antisemites and a minority of Jews, accepted the claim that Jews could become equal Europeans only by being pushed out of Europe and assisted in building a new Europe in the land that had rejected them.
This fragile logic of turning religion into nationalism in response to European antisemitism, by claiming another people’s homeland long inhabited by an indigenous nation, was presented to the world as both rational and moral. Some still accept this narrative today, whether from ignorance or cynicism.
Even then, as now, selling this bizarre logic required a powerful lobby.
In Zionism’s early years, the idea was easier to promote because it emerged at a time when the immorality of colonialism was widely ignored. More importantly, from the start, Zionist planners understood that turning the idea into a project on the ground in Palestine would require force and coercion.
This exposes one of Zionism’s central falsehoods: force was not adopted in response to Palestinian resistance; the settlers arrived already prepared to impose themselves on the native people of Palestine.
This was not a new European logic: unwanted or unwelcome Europeans had often been settled outside the continent, usually in lands already inhabited by native peoples. These projects were never merely benevolent attempts to create havens for European outcasts; they were also profoundly violent efforts to remove indigenous populations in order to realize those visions.
Scholars have long described these ventures as settler-colonial projects, distinguishing them from more institutional forms of imperial colonialism, which established colonies in pursuit of European land, capital, labor, and global power. Yet the two were deeply intertwined: classical colonialism and settler colonialism often served one another’s ambitions to Europeanize the non-European world by force, frequently masking that violence as a civilizing mission grounded in Enlightenment values.
Once the pursuit of territory and the search for safety became established footholds in new lands, empires and settlers began fighting one another over these possessions. Nowadays we euphemistically call these conflicts the American War of Independence and Israel’s War of Independence.
The settlers did free themselves from the empires that had enabled their foothold, but they also sought to continue eliminating the native populations. Classical colonialism generally aimed to exploit indigenous peoples rather than eliminate them on a mass scale; settler colonialism, by contrast, viewed the continued presence of indigenous societies as an existential threat to the success of its projects.
For these principles to become reality, Zionism first needed the British Empire; without it, the movement stood little chance against Palestinian society.
Palestinians were initially slow to grasp the full nature of the colonization project, but once they understood its aim of displacement and replacement, they launched an anti-colonial struggle against it.
Without British force, the settlers could not have defeated that resistance. British support also allowed them to reject the more logical and moral position of arriving as guests seeking refuge in another people’s homeland, rather than claiming mastery over a land that was not theirs.
From Colonial Project to Global Coalition
After 1945, the Zionist project needed more than British imperial support; it had to prove useful to capitalism: American imperialism, Christian fundamentalism, white supremacist and Islamophobic movements, corrupt Middle Eastern regimes, and powerful global Jewish communities.
Its displacement-and-replacement project also depended on whether Palestinians could unite, sustain their liberation struggle, and build a counter coalition rooted in socialism, communism, humanism, pan-Arab and pan-Islamic solidarity, and an honest Judaism.
The balance of power between these coalitions is clear: it produced the ethnic cleansing of 1948, military rule over Palestinians in Israel from 1948 to 1966, the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, the ethnic cleansing of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians up to 2022, and one of history’s most ruthless occupations, including the inhuman collective punishment of the Gaza blockade since 2007.
The counter coalition led by the Palestinian liberation movement achieved its greatest success through resilience: the determination to remain in the homeland and resist the ongoing occupation and colonization, or to struggle for it from exile.
This resilience disrupted every effort to complete Zionism’s project of displacement and replacement.
The Transformation of Israeli Zionism
Until 2022, one early precondition for the Zionist project’s success and for its ambition to become both regime and state remained largely hidden from the global public: the need for social cohesion around a newly invented national Jewish identity.
Until 1977, secular Zionists imposed this cohesion through domination over two politically marginalized and economically disempowered Jewish groups: Orthodox Jews and Mizrahim, or Arab Jews.
A more nationalistic current of European Zionism, long defeated by Labor Zionism, then built a powerful coalition with these two groups.
Yet, because Labor Zionism had abandoned socialism early on and remained loyal to the project of displacement and replacement, the ideological distance between the right-wing Zionist movement seeking power and Labor Zionism holding it until 1977 was far smaller than it appeared.
Labor Zionism sustained the displacement-and-replacement project through international support, especially from the West, the indifference of Arab governments, and the services Israel provided to American imperialism in the region.
Israel’s political right needed to distinguish itself from the project’s founders and did so by intensifying every aspect of Zionism —be it violence toward Palestinians or intransigence towards secular Judaism.
The result was a lethal fusion of nationalism and religion that recast Judaism as a faith of hatred, violence, inhumanity, and greed. This new form of Zionism recognized no limits: the state escalated its brutality toward Palestinians, committed genocide in Gaza, carried out ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, and subjected Palestinian citizens of Israel to institutionalized harassment. Israel’s new rulers also attacked secular Jews, portraying them as weak and anti-Jewish, and demanded their submission to the transformation of Israel into a Jewish theocracy.
The Transformation of Israeli Zionism
This intensified form of Zionism is increasingly difficult for the global coalition that has long sustained it to accept, and it offers no route to social cohesion within Israel.
Driven by messianism, it is expanding across five fronts, stretching the army beyond capacity, straining ties with former allies in the United States, and mobilizing global civil society in unprecedented ways—not only against Israel’s policies, but against the legitimacy of the regime itself. A strategy based on destroying Gaza, policing the West Bank, colonizing southern Lebanon and southern Syria, and confronting Iran by force can survive only within a war economy, and only at the price of deepening international isolation.
For now, the war economy benefits from its ties to capitalism, the security and securitization industries, manufactured Russophobic fears in the West, the likely deliberate misreading of China’s global ambitions, and long-standing Islamophobic warmongering.
But for how long? The Gulf states have now learned, as we warned them, that normalization with Israel would not only legitimize the displacement-and-replacement project in Palestine, but also endanger their own economies and stability. How many in the capitalist world still see this state as an asset rather than a liability?
Yet cynical calculations within the coalition sustaining Israel will not, by themselves, end the project. The counter coalition, led for decades by the global Left and able during the Cold War to restrain the opposing coalition to some extent, now depends on civil society outside Palestine becoming a political force that links struggles against local economic and social injustice with the struggle for justice in Palestine. There are encouraging signs, familiar to us all. Yet we are also frustrated that they have not yet become a transformative force capable of ending genocide, ethnic cleansing, and apartheid.
Zionism is rotting at its foundations, and in its current form the project is unlikely to survive as a state. We should therefore begin discussing this possibility now, along with the consequences of such a collapse; not only in terms of a one-state or two-state solution, but also regarding when this conversation should take place and who should lead it.
Preparing for Decolonization
Modern history offers many examples of societies moving from colonization to decolonization, from apartheid to equality, and from authoritarianism to democracy.
Such transformations have usually depended on internal liberation struggles combined with strong external solidarity, sometimes including intervention.
Historical experience also shows that change is more likely to be successful, peaceful, and constructive when led by the local liberation movement itself. It further shows that liberation requires a clear vision: without social and economic justice alongside political freedom, decolonization has too often become bloody and destructive, freeing some while devastating others.
For now, however, decolonization in Palestine begins with an existential imperative: both the movement within Palestine and international solidarity rightly prioritize urgency over strategy.
The time for strategy will come, and when it does, it should be led by the next Palestinian generation: deeply aware of this history, resilient under oppression, and ready, I believe, to guide the future process of decolonization and de-Zionization.
In this vision, as I understand it, there is room for the millions of Jews living today in Israel since the main Palestinian impulse has always been to live a normal and natural life that was denied to them for more than a century. It might be difficult in days of genocide to hang on to that impulse, but I do hope it will survive their chapter of inhumanity.
If some, or even many, Israeli Jews are willing to embrace that vision, it will be possible to build a free Palestine where Jews, Muslims, and Christians share a normal life together. Such a country could become a beacon of economic, social, and ecological justice. As the cradle of our religions, Palestine has the potential once again to inspire humanity through coexistence rather than domination.
For that reason, the struggle for a free Palestine remains one of the most legitimate, moral, and urgent causes of our time. The increasingly desperate attempts to delegitimize this struggle will ultimately fail, because the fate of Palestine is inseparable from our own.
When Palestine thrives, we all thrive.
The light at the end of the dark tunnel we are in today will lead us to a free Palestine.
A future Palestine can become a mosaic of cultural, ethnic, and religious identities, genuinely coexisting in justice and equality. As the cradle of our religions, it has the potential to become a beacon of economic, social, and ecological justice.
Such a future would enable us to confront the real challenges facing humanity: the ecological crisis, widespread poverty, famine, and the epidemics that continue to torment millions of our fellow human beings.
– Ilan Pappé is a professor at the University of Exeter. He was formerly a senior lecturer in political science at the University of Haifa. He is the author of The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, The Modern Middle East, A History of Modern Palestine: One Land, Two Peoples, and Ten Myths about Israel. He is the co-editor, with Ramzy Baroud of ‘Our Vision for Liberation.’ Pappé is described as one of Israel’s ‘New Historians’ who, since the release of pertinent British and Israeli government documents in the early 1980s, have been rewriting the history of Israel’s creation in 1948. He contributed this article to The Palestine Chronicle.