Palestine: Laboratory of Dystopia

Palestine Is The World in Its Future Tense, read one of the protest banners at the Venice Art Biennale. The Destruction of Palestine is the Destruction of the Earth, states the title of Andreas Malm’s 2025 book. These two claims are not hyperbole. They are urgent attempts to alert us to the fact that dystopias beyond the wildest nightmares of Hollywood filmmakers are being realised now, in our lifetimes, funded by the West’s tax money and enabled by its politicians.

Gaza was used as a laboratory for Israeli weapons manufacturers long before October 7th. But what was previously marginal has since become mainstream; the deployment of artificial intelligence in targeting systems like ‘Where’s Daddy?’ and ‘Lavender’, generating kill lists that run to thousands upon thousands of names, is now routine. Ditto when it comes to battle testing loitering munitions. The official death toll has surpassed 74,000, though the real number is thought to be much higher. Israelis have coined a cutesy Hebrew acronym, ‘Naza’ (meaning ‘collateral damage’), for the killing of civilians. Israeli military drones that make the sound of crying babies have been used to lure people out into the streets where they can be shot by snipers. This tactic, first seen in Gaza, has now been reported in Lebanon.

‘If you do something for long enough, the world will accept it’, declared a former senior Israeli military lawyer in the runup to a previous assault on Gaza. This is now the state’s modus operandi: commit all manner of atrocities until they become naturalised. New norms have been set for attacking humanitarian convoys, assassinating journalists, conducting target practice on different body parts of unarmed civilians, bombing hospitals, detonating universities, pounding schools with tank fire. Israel wants to persuade us that it is okay to kill the disabled, the toddler, the pregnant woman, the white-handkerchief-waving grandfather, the surgeon operating under fire. Harnessing AI to weaponry and using it for these ends, as Israel has done with zeal and soaring profits, is something that everyone — not just the Palestinians — should fear.

Almost two years to the day after the pulverisation of Gaza began, a ‘ceasefire’ was announced, allowing the world to turn away from the Strip. This, as the Gaza-based journalist Bisan Owda put it, was nothing more than a ‘rebranding of the genocide’. It effectively put Trump in charge of Gaza as Chairman of the Board of Peace. Real estate deals for seafront properties were on the table, with Jared Kushner playing a central role in dividing up the spoils, while Palestinians were notable for their absence. Not one of the Plan’s twenty provisions stands to benefit them. As with Oslo, Palestinians are expected to ‘police’ themselves in Vichy-like fashion. Armed members of Palestinian criminal gangs are being recruited to do the dirtiest of the Israeli army’s work, operating out of heavily fortified compounds in the swathes of Gaza under Israeli military control.

Meanwhile, the bombing has continued. Humanitarian trucks are still being turned back and aid workers targeted. By 21 October 2025, only 986 aid convoys were reported to have been allowed in, falling well below 6,600 trucks needed. International journalists continue to be refused entry, leaving their Palestinian colleagues to work while fearing for their lives. UN agencies reported that about 200,000 buildings — roughly 82 percent of the structures in Gaza — are damaged, with two thirds of them destroyed. The number of destroyed buildings has increased by 9 percent since the ceasefire.

By the time Trump was celebrating his deal, approximately two million Palestinians had been forcibly displaced into less than a third of the Gaza Strip, with the ‘yellow line’ creeping forward so that Israel could seize more land. When the US and Israel went to war with Iran, Israel used the opportunity to designate ‘orange zones’, taking another 10 percent of the territory. Border towns like Rafah, Jabaliya and Beit Hanoun have been razed to the ground, along with their archaeological heritage and their cultural and agricultural riches. For Palestinians who live in these zones, aid operations stopped in March, while shelling, air raids and home-demolitions have ground on. There are no clinics, shops, bakeries or municipal services in the zones that stretch from al-Shujaiya to Beit Lahia. By July, the Gaza government media office stated that 223,000 tons of explosives had been used on the territory since October 7th and estimated $80 billion in direct losses.

When the UN Security Council approved the Trump Plan, it cast aside every convention of international law. In so doing, it not only undercut the position of Palestinians, but also undermined the UN: an institution that the Trump administration had already been targeting in the runup to the negotiations, slashing its funding and sanctioning its staff. Evidently the Security Council decided it was easiest to capitulate and rubber-stamp this most malevolent of deals.

With new levels of horror unfolding every day in Gaza, it’s important to remember what the Israeli government is really after — namely the occupied West Bank, where underreported invasions and destructions of Palestinian towns and refugee camps (Jenin, Tulkarem, Nablus) are typical. Settler violence is openly facilitated by Israeli occupation forces and has increased exponentially since the genocide began. There are signs that Western countries are slowly waking up to the reality of Israel’s rogue statehood. But unless political overtures are backed by a comprehensive sanctions regime to freeze out Israel diplomatically, economically and militarily, its unconscionably brutal attempts to eradicate the Palestinians will continue.