Three years of Sumud
in a world of bent rules

A few months ago, during the World Cup, the world witnessed a small but telling spectacle. US President, Donald Trump, telephoned FIFA and demanded that an American footballer, Folarin Balogun, be allowed to play despite a clear ban. FIFA obliged and the rules were rewritten overnight. One phone call, one flex of political muscle, and the law melted away for the empire.
 

Unfortunately, this is how power in this age actually works. Rules are iron cages for the weak, and mere suggestions for the strong. And if you want to see this principle written in blood, look no further than the three years of genocide that Israel has unleashed on Gaza.

But to measure these three years only by the rubble and the body count would be a mistake. History’s great turning points are not measured by who held which hill at sunset. They are measured by what they changed in the lives and minds of the living.
 

What Fanon and Gazans understood very well

Frantz Fanon, the Martinican doctor who went to Algeria in the 1950s and saw colonialism up close, wrote in his seminal book The Wretched of the Earth that colonialism “is not a machine capable of thinking, a body endowed with reason. It is naked violence and only gives in when confronted with greater violence.” This is the analytical core of the Palestinian condition. Colonialism is not a negotiation. It is not a misunderstanding between two equal sides. It is one people taking another people’s land, homes, and future by force. And in such conditions, the colonized do not choose resistance as a political preference. They resist because the alternative is to disappear. Fanon is read across the Global South for a reason. His diagnosis of the colonial condition was not written for Algeria alone; it was written for every people told that their suffering is the price of someone else’s civilization. No one understood this better than the Palestinians, especially the people of Gaza.

Gaza did not erupt on October 7, 2023, from nothing. It had been suffocated for decades under a siege that almost everyone, including the United Nations, said was making life impossible. It had been ruthlessly bombed in regular cycles that Israeli generals called “mowing the lawn.” It had watched incredulously the world sign trade deals with its occupier while its children starved. What happened that day did not create a new Israel. It tore the mask off the one that was already there: an atrocious settler-colonial project that, from its inception, carried within it the seeds of genocide.

The dead who gave us life

After three years, the numbers have become a kind of white noise. Entire families of grandparents, parents, and grandchildren have been erased from the civil registry. Not only killed, but also erased. Universities have been turned to dust. Hospitals have been surrounded and emptied of life. This is not the chaos of war. This is the methodical dismantling of a society, carried out with bombs and bullets supplied by the very Western states that repeatedly blocked every attempt at accountability at the UN Security Council. The hypocrisy is not hidden. It is performed in public, almost as a dare.

More than 75 thousand Palestinians were murdered before the eyes of the entire World. [Add to that more than 9 thousand other innocents killed mercilessly across the region by the Israeli war machine]. Among these thousands of innocents was our dear colleague, Dr. Muhammad Jameel, who worked with us at the Asia Middle East Center (AMEC) in Malaysia before his return home. By August 2023, he returned back to Gaza, after completing his doctorate, only to be murdered in October 2023 by an Israeli airstrike on his home that killed him together with twenty-two members of his immediate family. May their souls rest in peace.

The killing of Palestinians spread beyond Gaza, as Israel’s war machine targeted Palestinians, and their allies, across the occupied West Bank and beyond. Israel purposely targeted the leaders of the resistance, assassinating them one after another: Saleh al-Arouri, was assassinated in Beirut, Ismail Haniyeh was assassinated in Tehran, while Yahya Sinwar, was killed fighting in the ruins of Rafah. Leaders of the Lebanese, Yemeni and Iraqi resistance were also targeted and assassinated. The little imperialist colony respected no state’s sovereignty, killing the leaders of the Palestinian people in Gaza, Beirut, and Tehran. Yet all of them were martyred defending their people, some on the battlefield, and other in the corridors of international advocacy. They did not flee. Nor did they negotiate safe passage for themselves. They lived and died among the people they led. That matters a lot, as it helps explain why, despite everything, support for the resistance holds.

The killing did not stop at resistance leaders. The Israeli regime targeted Palestinian intellectuals and professionals across all fields. Thousands of school teachers and hundreds of university professors were killed by Israel’s air force. Doctors and nurses were killed or kidnapped, and journalists were especially targeted, killing hundreds of them. Israel continued to perpetrate more crimes in order to cover the traces of its earlier crimes. Within days of the start of the Israeli military campaign, it was becoming clear to everyone Israel was intent on committing a genocide. Palestinian poet and academic, Dr Refaat al-Areer, who wrote and tweeted about Israeli atrocities, told media in one of his last interviews: “I wish I was a freedom fighter to fight the invading Israeli army. But since I have no gun, I will use anything my hands can hold to fight back. I won’t surrender even if the last thing I do is to throw a pen at the invading army”. Refaat was murdered, but his people, just like him, did not surrender. Three years on, the whole world continues to witness how an impoverished besieged nation has been able to deny a heavily-armed nuclear-power victory. All thanks to the bravery and resilience of its people, and the unending support and solidarity of their friends.
 

A people return from the margins

Before October 2023, the Palestinian cause was being quietly buried. The “Abrahamic Accords” were weaving a new Middle East in which normalization with the occupier required no end to occupation. Netanyahu stood shamelessly before the United Nations General Assembly and declared, with brazenness, that Palestine was no longer relevant. The Palestinian had been reduced to a face on a UNRWA card, a recipient of aid, a victim to be pitied but never a political actor. But that era is now over!

Three years later, Palestine is back at the center of the world’s moral imagination. The Palestinian has returned as someone who makes history, not just someone who suffers it. The world may not like the methods, but it can no longer pretend the actor does not exist.
 

The words of the old world have collapsed

The Israeli regime was built upon many myths, such as: Israelis being the eternal victims, Israel being the safe haven for the Jewish people, Israel being the only democracy in the Middle East, the “IDF” being the army that cannot be defeated, and Israel being the peace maker against “terrorist” Palestinians. After three years of footage from Gaza, none of these myths hold. They have been dismantled, not by propaganda, but by the sheer weight of evidence streaming out of a besieged enclave on phone cameras.

Something deeper has happened too. The very language the world used to discuss this struggle has been rewritten. For decades, Israel imposed its own dictionary: this was a “conflict” between two equal sides, the occupation was “self-defense,” and the Palestinian was either a “refugee” or a “terrorist.” Now, words that were once confined to academic footnotes have entered the global conversation: genocide, settler-colonialism, apartheid, ethnic cleansing, accountability. The International Court of Justice has found a plausible case of genocide. The International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Israeli leaders, a move met with a furious campaign of American pressure, including threats and sanctions against the Court’s officials. The message from Washington was unmistakable: international law is not to touch our allies. Yet the warrants were pursued anyway. These are not just legal documents. They are a new vocabulary, and in the battle over words, the Zionist narrative has lost its grip.

The destruction of Gaza has not only exposed Israel. It has exposed the entire system that protects it. The international legal order stands revealed as a selective tool, invoked against enemies, suspended for friends. The great institutions of justice have shown that their enforcement mechanisms vanish the moment a powerful state decides to shield an ally. And the civilizational claims of the Atlantic powers—their professions of universal human rights, of justice, of the rule of law—have been shown to be a story they tell themselves, not a principle they apply.

Three things are now beyond dispute. First, the myth of the invincible Israeli army has been shattered. A strip of land smaller than most cities, under total siege, has held out against a nuclear-armed state for three years. Second, Western complicity is no longer an accusation. It is a matter of public record—the weapons shipments, the diplomatic vetoes, the intelligence sharing, all documented, all deliberate. And third, the Palestinians have not been broken. They have lost more than any people should ever be asked to lose. Yet they remain on their land. They remain organized. They remain, in their millions, committed, more than ever, to the idea that liberation is possible. This is not mysticism. It is the accumulated experience of a people who understand, as Fanon understood, that for the colonized, surrender is just a slower form of death.
 

The new battleground

The most important shift of these three years has been away from the battlefield and into the arena of moral and legal standing. Israel might have made some tactical gains on the ground, but it is losing the war. This is not our assessment alone; it is the assessment of its own generals and military experts, most recently former Shin Bet chief Ami Ayalon, who has said plainly: “Israel is winning battles, but losing the war.”

Israel has lost something far harder to recover than battles: its image, its founding myths, and the pretense that a closed, exclusivist settler project can ever produce lasting stability. Time, it turns out, does not automatically turn conquest into right. The memory of the dispossessed can be stronger than time, and history is not written only by the victor. It is also written by what the defeated refuse to forget.

And the most important achievement of the Palestinian people’s steadfastness is that global public opinion has actually shifted. Anyone following opinion polls in the United States can see that the new generation, on the left and on the right, views Israel as the root of the problem, not a party to a conflict. This generation understands that the single most important factor in Israel’s survival and power is blind American support; and that this support is beginning to end.

This shift is not confined to the United States. In Western Europe, calls for accountability are on the rise, and countries that have sidelined Palestinian voices for decades are now leading the call for recognition of a Palestinian State. The world is changing.

In the Global South, solidarity with Palestine has always been the norm. South African leadership on the legal front epitomizes the feelings and aspirations of the entire Global South. This is not a symbolic gesture from a country that knows what it means to have international law applied selectively. It is the Global South speaking in its own voice, insisting that the rules must apply to everyone, or to no one. But we know well that the Global South is capable of more.

As for Israel, the colony is heading toward ruin. Not necessarily because anyone will bring it down by force, but because it has planted around itself genocide, racial discrimination, and injustice; and what the oppressor plants, he reaps. When I was a child, my father used to tell me a saying that the old ones repeated in the past: the house of the oppressor ends in ruin. That is what is happening to Israel today.

The Atlantic powers will bend rules for a footballer. They will shatter international law for an ally. But Gaza has shown something more lasting: a people who refuse to disappear, who bury their dead and keep walking, can change the terms of history. Three years in, the struggle continues; not because victory is near, but because the alternative is unthinkable. The road from military might to moral authority is paved with terrible suffering. But moral authority is the last thing a people loses, and the first thing an empire forfeits when its survival rests on force alone.

There is a final note worth remembering. After all that bending of FIFA’s regulations, after the phone call and the political pressure and the rewriting of the rulebook, the United States still lost the match to Belgium. The favor did not deliver the outcome. Something similar is unfolding in Palestine, on a far grander and bloodier scale. Netanyahu and his government have had every international law bent for them, every diplomatic shield extended, every arms shipment approved, even the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) was threatened and sanctioned to protect them. And yet, after three years of destruction, total victory remains as distant as ever. The Sumud of the Palestinians -the stubborn, unreasonable, magnificent refusal to break- has denied the occupier the one thing it cannot manufacture: an ending written on its own terms.

-Dr Muslim Imran is the Director of Asia Middle East Center. He contributed this article to the PIC.