The small Mediterranean-coast enclave of Gaza has long acted as a crucible for the Palestinian-rights movement. Since October 7, 2023, the events that have devastated human life and society in Gaza have also acted as a crucible for a worldwide movement that today is— slowly but unmistakably— bringing to a close the stiflingly hegemonic order that a handful of “White”, Western states have exercised over world affairs for more than three centuries now. How has this happened— that a tiny enclave of 2.3 million Palestinians, perched on a perilous coastline and surrounded on all its land frontiers by repressive foreign powers, has been able to affect the global balance to such a degree? Here is a first guide to how this has happened. The impetus for the breakout that Palestinian resistance groups staged on 10/7/2023 from the concentration camp of Gaza was long in the making. Prior to that date, Palestinian movements had explored many different ways to end the military occupation that Israel has maintained over Gaza and the West Bank since 1967. None led anywhere. The lives of Gaza’s people became ever more tightly circumscribed, ever more violently attacked.. The planning for the breakout, which Hamas named “Operation Al-Aqsa Flood”, was also long in the making. Leaders in Hamas, many of them “graduates” of the Israeli prison system, had studied in detail such aspects of their plan as: how to disable the lethal, automated containment system that Israel had built around their enclave; how to capture the operations centers of the Israeli military’s Gaza Brigade and its nearby “Southern Command”; how to take back into Gaza the Israeli combatants whose capture was Hamas’s main goal; and how to ensure as much as possible the resilience of Gaza’s society in the face of the expected Israeli reprisals. Those plans met with what can be described as “catastrophic success.” Israel’s whole Gaza-containment system collapsed; tens of thousands of Gazans poured through it into the lands that, for many of them, had been their families’ properties for generations before 1948. The entire military-command system in Israel’s Southern region also collapsed. Disoriented commanders of random units rushed to the Gaza region. Many fired wildly on anything that moved. Others followed the infamous “Hannibal Doctrine” that directs Israeli units to use lethal fire against any vehicle or group that might be capturing Israeli hostages, even at the expense of those hostages’ lives. The most clearly “catastrophic” result of the success of Al-Aqsa Flood was the genocidal intensity of the cruelty that Israel— with the full backing of the U.S. government and most other “Western” leaders— unleashed against Gaza from the earliest days after October 7, and which has continued in different forms until today. In this genocide Israel has killed more— likely, many more— than the 73,000 people whose deaths have been recorded by Gaza’s health ministry. More than 20,000 of those killed were children, and an equal or greater number were other non-combatants. Israel ‘s attacks have seriously injured scores of thousands more. It has systematically disabled and destroyed vital institutions like hospitals, water-treatment centers, schools, and all of Gaza’s twelve universities. It has razed entire city blocks into grotesquely flat moonscapes in which pulverized rubble is inextricably mixed with human remains. But, and this is crucial to note, Israel has not succeeded in breaking the core of Gaza-Palestinian society. The resilience of Gaza’s people as they huddle under wind-whipped tarps in the small portion of the enclave into which they have been ever further “concentrated” is both notable and widely inspiring. These two phenomena in Gaza of, on the one hand, Israel’s long-sustained, genocidal, and often openly vaunted, cruelty, and on the other the resilience of Gaza’s people, have resonated deeply with people worldwide, the vast majority of whom— especially in the Global South— have their own deep memories of the genocidal violence enacted by “White” Western colonizers against their peoples throughout earlier centuries. Israel’s dedicated and often openly gleeful pursuit of its genocide in Gaza speedily came to shock and disgust increasing portions of humankind. In the Arab countries of West Asia and North Africa, many leaders who had been moving toward accommodating Israel through the Abraham Accords stepped back from that accommodation. Leaders elsewhere in the Global South and even in some West European countries (Ireland, Spain) also distanced themselves pointedly from Israel. In the United States, by contrast, Pres. Biden and then Pres. Trump held fast to their support for Israel. They furnished it with tsunamis of U.S. military, intel, and economic support, along with “ironclad” support for the country in all the international fora. Israel’s wily PM, Benjamin Netayahu, and his cheerleaders in the pro-Israel lobby meanwhile parlayed the “shock” that many in U.S. political life had expressed in response to the (often grossly exaggerated) accounts of Hamas’s acts on October 7 into U.S. support for an ever-wider list of Israeli war goals in Palestine and across all of West Asia. For two years, the ferocity of Israel’s genocide in Gaza was slightly stayed by the government’s concern about the fate of the captives still held by Hamas. But since the conclusion of the “ceasefire” of October 2025, the only remaining brake on Israel’s ferocity in Gaza has been the possibility of a serious cut-off of the forms of U.S. aid described above. Meantime, Washington’s frequent use of its veto at the UN to protect Israel — both since 10/7/2023, and for decades before that— has also seriously undermined the credibility and integrity of the world body. In November 2025, the Security Council even voted to hand over “responsibility” for ending the Hamas-Israel hostilities and for rebuilding Gaza to a body headed, King Leopold-style, by Pres. Trump himself! Small wonder that at this year’s UN General Assembly session many significant world leaders simply skipped the whole session, judging that the UN had now become irrelevant to their concerns. In the years since 10/7/2023, Israel has also undertaken very significant attacks against Iran and its Hizbullah allies in Lebanon. Back on 10/7, those attacks were already in an advanced planning stage, as was revealed when Mossad sources leaked details about just how many years they had spent planning their “pager” attack against Lebanon’s Hizbullah prior to its final activation in September 2024. (Regarding 10/7 itself, Israeli commentators have noted that most of the country’s military brass was focused until that point on planning for attacks against Hizbullah, rather than on a Gaza that they judged well under control. After 10/7 they focused heavily on Gaza but within weeks were also able to resume planning for the attack on Lebanon that they launched, as we know, less than a year later.) For Israeli planners, attacking Hizbullah was always seen as an essential part of the broader campaign they had long wanted to launch: a big, regime-changing attack on Iran. For several decades, Israeli leaders had tried to persuade Washington to “allow” it to launch— or to join it in launching— that attack. All U.S. presidents had demurred, until Pres. Trump returned to the White House in 2025. In June of 2025, Trump and his deeply ignorant Secretary of “War” joined Israel in waging a big, “bunker-busting”, and completely illegal attack on Iran. After twelve days of fierce missile attacks, that war ended in a standoff. On February 28 this year, Washington and Tel Aviv tried again, hoping for a more effective “knockout blow” against Iran, Now, more than seven months later the result of that still unresolved war is once again a standoff— but one in which the Iranians have slowly been gaining the upper hand. This lengthy standoff has also had deeply transformative negative effects both on the global economy and on the integrity and effectiveness of the whole UN-based system of international governance. Iran had been preparing for an assault like this latest one since 1988, or maybe even since 1979. It has a smart and resilient leadership system, a well-educated population of 92 million, a large national terrain containing hard-to-access mountains, and an extensive hinterland with solid road and rail links to countries including Pakistan, China, Russia, Turkey. Iran and its allies in Yemen, Lebanon, Iraq, and Palestine have demonstrated an ability to withstand the ferocity of the U.S.-Israeli attacks to an extent that jerked mainstream U.S. and Israeli commentators straight out of their complacent and racist assumptions about Western “superiority”— and that is now transforming the balance of power at the global level. Hamas and its resistance allies in Gaza have long been a valued part of the broader, Iran-led “Axis of Resistance.” Their launching of Operation Al-Aqsa Flood precipitated many of those other developments relating to Iran and other AR allies. (We should also note the speedy collapse that former AR member Pres. Assad of Syria experienced in December 2024. That collapse happened almost independently of the Flood, but had non-trivial, negative impact on the resilience of Lebanon’s Hizbullah.) Over the past three years, Israel’s genocidal ferocity and the anguish and resilience of the Gaza Palestinians have also had a sizeable and now increasingly evident impact on the publics in the United States and other Western countries. The growth in solidarity with Gaza’s people now threatens to crack the stranglehold that Zionist apologists have long had on public life and politics in the U.S. This, at a time when the economic effects of the illegal war that Trump and Netanyahu launched on Iran in February are seriously threatening the ability of Trump and the GOP to hold onto Congress. And it now seems that the pro-Israel lobby will likely soon lose its long-demonstrated capacity to rely on the meek compliance of the Democratic Party leadership. The events of and since October 7, 2023 have very deeply changed the balance of power both within U.S. politics and in the conduct of global affairs. Our priorities as U.S. citizens should be to end all the many forms of support that our government has been giving to genocidal Israel, and to return to good-faith talks with Iran under UN (or other, more trusted auspices), on speedy and full implementation of the Memorandum of Understanding that the two governments concluded in June. The hypocrisy, racism, and terrible violence displayed by Israel and by our own government have also started to sound a loud death-knell for the entire system under which, for many centuries now, the conduct of international affairs has been dominated by governments representing that tiny portion of humankind who are “White” Westerners. Bring on the truly post-colonial future! You're currently a free subscriber to Helena Cobban. For the full experience, upgrade your subscription. © 2026 Helena Cobban |