The stunning surprise attack by Palestinian fighters from the Gaza Strip over the past few days has changed the contours of the Israeli conflict with the Palestinian people, possibly forever.

The attack—which took the form of a breakout from Gaza that most people thought would never be possible, given the extent of Israel’s clampdown on Palestinian life—came after a period in which it seemed that Western powers had united in their desire to treat Palestine as an afterthought.

Western leaders had managed to convince themselves that the question of Palestine was so immaterial, that Israel’s ability to suppress Palestinian resistance indefinitely was so assured, and that the wider Middle East had so thoroughly abandoned Palestine that they could prioritize the diplomatic normalization between various repressive Arab regimes and the equally (albeit differently) repressive regime that claims Jerusalem for its capital. According to this approach, the Palestinians—bottled up in their camps, enclaves, cells, and the giant open-air prison into which Israelis have turned the Gaza Strip—can be sidelined and forgotten about. And justice, rights, equality, and democracy—the favored slogans of the Western powers—can be forgotten about as well.

The most significant thing about the Gaza breakout is that it demonstrated once again that the Palestinians are not merely a scattered collection of hapless refugees led by a corrupt and servile collaborationist administration based in Ramallah, but still a people with agency of their own and the right, will, and determination to be free. The breakout shattered the self-satisfied Western sense of complacency and the many-layered myths of Israeli power, surveillance, and so-called intelligence—and it smashed, hopefully once and for all, the very idea that the Palestinians can just be ignored, talked to, or talked about rather than talking for and representing themselves, their interests and their rights.

Although most of the Western media coverage has focused on Palestinian attacks on Israeli civilians—which are undeniably wrong—the primary targets of the operation were demonstrably military in nature. To begin with, Palestinian fighters used explosives to blast through the complex mesh of concrete and steel that the Israelis have installed to turn Gaza into the gigantic prison that it is. They systematically stormed and destroyed a string of Israeli fortifications, checkpoints, machine-gun and snipers’ nests, watchtowers, barracks, and other military emplacements—including the dreaded Erez crossing point—that have been Israel’s primary tools in imposing a withering siege on Gaza’s population since 2005. They inflicted stinging losses on heavily armed Israeli soldiers and border guards and destroyed or disabled armored personnel carriers, bulldozers, and the supposedly impregnable Merkava IV tanks that are the pride and joy of the Israeli army and have been used for years to terrorize Palestinians lacking the kind of anti-armor weapons that Western countries have unquestioningly rushed to Ukraine in the name of resisting invasion, occupation and annexation.

Indeed, the sight of burning Israeli tanks gave the lie not only to the myth of the Merkava’s invulnerability—it turns out to be a tank that burns much like any other—but to the larger myth of omnipotent and omniscient surveillance, intelligence, and power in which Israel has long sought to cloak itself. This is a state project that is undoubtedly able to inflict massive destruction on a mostly defenseless and shelterless population, nearly half of whom are children. But it is hardly as invulnerable as it has tried to pretend, and, in any case, its capacity for sheer destruction does not, in itself, translate into the attainment of its underlying political objectives.

Seeing armed Palestinian fighters standing over disarmed Israeli soldiers was like witnessing events pulled out of the pages of Frantz Fanon’s classic anti-colonial work The Wretched of the Earth or scenes from Gillo Pontecorvo’s Burn! Those images were a reminder of what this has always been: a struggle between a colonial power driven by an exclusionary racial ideology and a battered, occupied, besieged, but still unwavering people. Notwithstanding mainstream news headlines with their carefully cherry-picked word choices (it is appropriate, for instance, to describe civilians as “hostages,” but soldiers in battle are “captured,” not “abducted,” and they become “prisoners,” not “hostages”), this is not a “war” between two sovereign states but a conflict between an occupying colonial power and an occupied people for whose welfare that occupying power is still ultimately accountable under international law.

Now that the meager resources accumulated over months to conduct the breakout seem to have been largely used up, that occupying power has turned the tables. Israel has already unleashed an unprecedentedly heavy (but characteristically indiscriminate) bombardment of residential districts in Gaza, bringing whole buildings down on the heads of the families living in them, without warning. Israeli bombers are now methodically reducing entire city blocks in Gaza to rubble. The Palestinian Ministry of Foreign Affairs accused Israel of adding incendiary and phosphorous bombs into the mix of high explosives—something done in order to spark fires among the ruins in a replay of the so-called Dahieh doctrine, named after the southern suburbs of Beirut that the Israeli air force similarly reduced to rubble in 2006.

Referring to the Palestinian population of Gaza as “human animals,” Israeli ministers have suspended all food, water, fuel, and electricity deliveries to the besieged territory, while warning the caged-in population to flee for their lives (how and where to, one wonders). They are using apocalyptic and even bluntly genocidal language to set the stage for the wave of blind vengeance and terror that is already underway. Like any of the countless examples that could be pulled from the blood-soaked annals of Western colonialism, violence and yet more violence is the only language the occupying power seems to speak or to understand.

And violence is the condition of possibility for the struggle unfolding in and around Gaza and the other parts of occupied Palestine right now. It will always be, until and unless the colonial condition that brought us to where we now stand is changed once and for all.

Arnon Sofer, the University of Haifa demographer widely credited as the architect of Ariel Sharon’s plan to withdraw Israeli forces from Gaza, surround the coastal strip, and cut it off from the outside world, recognized this when he drew up his plan in the mid-2000s. “When 2.5 million people live in a closed-off Gaza, it’s going to be a human catastrophe,” Sofer told an interviewer in the Jerusalem Post in 2004.

Those people will become even bigger animals than they are today, with the aid of an insane fundamentalist Islam. The pressure at the border will be awful. It’s going to be a terrible war. So, if we want to remain alive, we will have to kill and kill and kill. All day, every day.

From the quasi-academic demographer in 2004 to the Israeli cabinet in 2023, the racial language used to depict Palestinians as “animals” hasn’t evolved much over the past 19 years, or, for that matter, over the seven weary decades going all the way back to 1948. Kill and kill and kill: That certainly is what the Israeli government is doing. (And it is doing so with the knowing consent, approval, and blessing of the great Western powers, above all Joe Biden’s United States, which has pledged its unconditional support and rushed extra weapons and ammunition to help the Israelis.)