On May 15, 2026, we marked the 78th anniversary of the Nakba—the “catastrophe” that is the foundational trauma and ongoing reality of Palestinian life.Footnote ¹ This date arrived amidst a profound shift in global and domestic politics. Palestine—a piece of land roughly the size of Maryland—now sits at the absolute center of the world stage.Footnote ² The global economy is roiling from an unprovoked attack on Iran by Israel and the United States, a war instigated at Israel’s behest that has pushed oil to record prices and left global trade hanging in the balance.Footnote ³

For decades, Palestine was treated as a fringe issue, a “humanitarian problem,” or an exceptional case. Today, Palestine has become the paradigm for understanding this historical moment. It is the bright light exposing the cracks in a global system of oppression that long hid behind the language of independence, sovereignty, and human rights—a system in which the “exceptions,” such as Palestine, were always the rule.

To understand Palestine as a paradigm, one must understand the Nakba. On May 15th in 1948—the same year the UN signed the Genocide Convention—roughly 750,000 Palestinians, half the population, were ethnically cleansed from their homes.Footnote ⁴ Zionist militias burned down hundreds of villages and conducted dozens of massacres to clear the land for what they declared the State of Israel.Footnote ⁵ Despite Arabs constituting two-thirds of the population of historic Palestine, a largely European Jewish population was granted 78 percent of the land to establish a settler colony.Footnote ⁶

The Nakba never ended.Footnote ⁷ It was not a singular event in 1948 but a continuous process of colonial violence and displacement that has persisted for nearly eighty years. Today, this process has culminated in Palestinians controlling less than 15 percent of their land, living under a sovereign power that has illegally appropriated their water and coastal resources, leaving millions in a state of permanent statelessness.Footnote ⁸ The current genocide in Gaza is the latest, most violent iteration of this ongoing catastrophe.

The genocide and the social movement that arose to stop it have transformed the global political landscape. Just a few years ago, US public opinion was firmly aligned with Israel; a 2021 Gallup poll showed 85 percent of Republicans and 64 percent of Democrats held favorable views of the Zionist state.Footnote ⁹

By March 2026, the reality had flipped: 60 percent of Americans now view Israel unfavorably.Footnote ¹⁰ This shift is generational: among those under 50, 84 percent of Democrats and 57 percent of Republicans hold negative views.Footnote ¹¹ The only demographic that maintains a favorable view of Israel in the United States today is a Republican over the age of 50.Footnote ¹²

The transformation of public opinion is not merely an American phenomenon; it is a global one. Recent polling confirms that Israel is substantively unpopular across the European continent. In fact, the depth of unfavorable sentiment in Europe often exceeds that of the United States. As of May 2026, the Pew Research Center reports that negative views of Israel have reached overwhelming majorities in several key nations: 78 percent in Sweden and Spain, 76 percent in the Netherlands, 75 percent in Italy, 73 percent in Germany, and 69 percent in the United Kingdom.Footnote ¹³

Palestine has become a defining ideological fault line in Europe. Among those who identify with the political left, opposition to Israel is nearly universal: 96 percent in Spain, 94 percent in Sweden, and 90 percent in both Greece and the Netherlands hold unfavorable views.Footnote ¹⁴ These figures represent a massive rupture between the European public and the institutional structures that have historically supported the Israeli state, signaling that the “Palestine as Paradigm” shift is a permanent feature of the new global political landscape.

Seeing the reality in Palestine is exposing a new generation of Western publics to the fatal contradictions at the heart of their so-called democracies. “We are not liberating Palestine, Palestine is liberating us”: this oft-repeated movement adage captures this juncture in Western politics. Palestine renders in bold the “asterisks” on Western freedoms, exposing the fatal contradictions in both Western systems of governance and the “rules-based international order.”

In the United States, Palestine has exposed the corruption at the core of electoral politics. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC)’s colossal election spending—once virtually unknown to the public—now faces media scrutiny and public protest.Footnote ¹⁵ Support for Palestine has become a litmus test for political integrity, exposing a massive rupture between the bipartisan political elite and the American public. Mainstream outlets now routinely cover the intertwining of the US military with Israeli weapons technology and the staggering cost of military aid.Footnote ¹⁶ Palestine has exposed the terrifying expansion of the use of Artificial Intelligence in warfare and surveillance.Footnote ¹⁷ We have learned that the same technology tested on Palestinians is now being used in the United States and other Western countries to monitor protest and dissent.Footnote ¹⁸

Palestine has also exposed the contradictions at the heart of liberal institutions like universities and nonprofits. Universities across the Western world have been exposed for their longstanding “Palestine exception” to free speech.Footnote ¹⁹ As students called for divestment from apartheid and genocide, they were met with brutal repression. In the United States, liberal elites sicced police on protesters and interrogated university hiring—and that was before Trump.Footnote ²⁰ Universities provided a handy archive of dissidents for an aspiring fascist to later exploit for deportation and funding cuts.Footnote ²¹ Now, most university campuses have instituted restrictive protest policies aimed at curbing all future dissent.Footnote ²² Palestine was used as an excuse to close down centers serving LGBTQ, Black, Indigenous, and Brown students.Footnote ²³

Palestine has also cast a harsh light on the worlds of art and culture, which function as hypocritical court jesters drawing on tragedy to create art that has no accountability to the suffering that inspired it. Writers and artists had contracts cancelled over free speech critiquing Israel.Footnote ²⁴ Palestine has taught this generation that the “land of the free” is not free for all—a reality long known to Black, Indigenous, and Chicano communities.Footnote ²⁵

On May 15, 2026, we reached the 952th day of a genocide. The level of destruction in Gaza is apocalyptic. Most homes, schools, hospitals, and every single university have been destroyed.Footnote ²⁶ We have watched the systematic targeting of journalists and medical personnel in the deadliest conflict for reporters in human history.Footnote ²⁷

The human toll is staggering.

Beyond the minimum of 72,744 killed by direct military action—including over 23,000 children—a peer-reviewed study in The Lancet estimates that Israel has killed at least another 150,000 people through the systematic blockade of food and medicine and the deliberate destruction of healthcare, water desalination, and sewage systems.Footnote ²⁸ When accounting for these indirect deaths, scientifically plausible estimates of the total dead range from 150,000 to 400,000 martyrs. Gaza now holds the highest number of child amputees in history.Footnote ²⁹ Hundreds have starved to death while aid trucks wait at the border, and hundreds of thousands more suffer from acute malnutrition that will leave a genetic imprint for generations.Footnote ³⁰ This “war of annihilation” has been rightly labeled a genocide by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and over 800 genocide scholars.Footnote ³¹

Satellite imagery shows Israel has built permanent outposts and military infrastructure all over Gaza, of which it now controls 50–70 percent.Footnote ³² Destroying Gaza, annexing it, and displacing its beleaguered population over and over and over has not satisfied Israel’s ambitions. Thousands of acres have been annexed in the West Bank, hundreds of illegal settlements built.Footnote ³³ Israel has changed administrative rules to gradually and functionally annex the entire territory, an explicit goal of much of Israel’s government.Footnote ³⁴

Nor has Palestine been enough. Israel’s finance, national security, and defense ministers have all called for annexing and even settling a large swath of Southern Lebanon, where Israel has killed at least 8,246 people and injured 29,312 since fall 2023, and displaced one million in 2026 alone.Footnote ³⁵ Nor has Lebanon been enough. Israel has also attacked Yemen, Syria, Tunisia and even Qatar throughout these past three years.Footnote ³⁶ The unprovoked US–Israeli war on Iran that began in February of this year has killed 3,500 Iranians, starting with 168 school girls.Footnote ³⁷

The brutality of Israel’s actions and the total and unabashed complicity of Western ruling classes have moved the masses to action.Footnote ³⁸ The movement has deployed hundreds of strategies and tactics from direct action to electoral pressure. These actions build on decades of movement building, from the Palestine movement itself to its allied movements like the Black power struggle.Footnote ³⁹ Though street actions like protests and encampments have slowed recently, numerous boycott and divestment campaigns have made significant victories across the Western world, marking a significant shift in institutional and grassroots pressure on Israel. The Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement, launched by over 170 Palestinian civil society organizations in 2005, was modeled explicitly on the international anti-apartheid boycott campaign that helped end white minority rule in South Africa—a precedent that gave the Palestinian solidarity movement both its strategic framework and its sense of historical possibility.Footnote ⁴⁰ Recent BDS wins are too numerous to recount in full here, but here are some examples. In the United States, the State of Michigan Retirement System ended its decades-long investment in Israel Bonds, representing a major break from traditional state-level support for Israeli financing.Footnote ⁴¹ Similarly, campaigns have targeted state holdings of Israel bonds across the country. On the grassroots level, the influential Park Slope Food Co-op in Brooklyn voted to remove Israeli-made goods from its shelves, a symbolic but powerful consumer-led victory in one of the country’s most prominent cooperative markets.Footnote ⁴² Corporate pressure has also yielded results: activists successfully pressured the global shipping giant Maersk to end its business dealings with companies linked to Israeli settlements, demonstrating the movement’s ability to target supply chains.Footnote ⁴³

Academic boycott and divestment mobilizations across European higher education have pushed Israel to the margins of the EU’s Horizon Europe research program—the world’s largest research program—with approval rates for Horizon projects involving Israeli research partners dropping by 68.5 percent by 2025.Footnote ⁴⁴ Four Norwegian universities—OsloMet, the University of South Eastern Norway, the University of Bergen, and the Bergen School of Architecture—all suspended agreements with Israeli universities as early as February 2024; in June 2025, the University of Amsterdam decided not to enter into any new Horizon Europe collaborations with Israeli organizations pending an EU investigation; and in May 2025, faculty and staff across Swedish higher education published the Uppsala Declaration of Conscientious Objection, pledging to refuse collaboration with Israeli institutions complicit in occupation and genocide, which by May 2026 had gathered thousands of signatories.Footnote ⁴⁵ The Royal Academy of Art in The Hague became the Netherlands’ first university to institute a full academic boycott, severing its relationship with the Israeli Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, while in the United Kingdom, Goldsmiths University of London agreed to review its investment policy and expand scholarships for Palestinian students.Footnote ⁴⁶

Leading European pension funds have joined the trend, with Denmark’s public pension fund and other major European funds fully exiting investments tied to the Israeli economy.Footnote ⁴⁷ The Italian energy giant ENI withdrew from an Israeli gas exploration consortium, and grassroots campaigns successfully blocked military ships carrying weapons for Israel from docking in Italy.Footnote ⁴⁸ Additionally, cultural boycotts have gained traction. Ireland, the Netherlands, Slovenia, and Spain announced they would boycott Eurovision 2026 after the European Broadcasting Union declined to hold a vote on banning Israel, and corporate sponsors pulled out to the tune of significant double-digit revenue drops, leaving the contest in financial crisis.Footnote ⁴⁹

There have been wins even in the finance sector. In the United Kingdom, pro-Palestinian and climate activists jointly targeted Barclays Bank over its financial ties to both Israeli arms companies and fossil fuel industries, defacing around 20 branches and spraying them in red paint, while the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, Campaign Against Arms Trade, and War on Want jointly published a report documenting Barclays’ shareholdings in nine companies producing weapons used in Israeli attacks on Palestinians.Footnote ⁵⁰ In August 2024, Reuters reported that Barclays had drawn up plans to pull out of future Israeli government bond auctions under pressure from pro-Palestinian campaigners, and protesters disrupted the bank’s annual general meeting.Footnote ⁵¹ In Spain and across Europe, a sustained campaign by the global Stop AXA Assistance to Israeli Apartheid coalition successfully pressured AXA to fully divest from major Israeli banks and the arms manufacturer Elbit Systems; by June 2024, AXA had divested from all three Israeli banks it had previously held.Footnote ⁵²

While these victories are often described by organizers as “incremental,” they signify a shift in the public discourse and a growing normalization of BDS as a tactic for pressuring Israel over its policies in Gaza and the West Bank. These victories—spanning state divestment, academic boycott, corporate accountability, consumer co-ops, and pension fund management—illustrate that the movement for Palestinian liberation is making an unprecedented impact, translating activist pressure into tangible financial and political outcomes.

Palestine does not sit at the margins of contemporary life; it is the central terrain through which the crises and possibilities of our world are being contested. Gaza has transformed every major debate of our time—from sovereignty and technology to the very future of the global order. If Palestine is the paradigm, then the struggle for its liberation is, fundamentally, the struggle for our own.