Source: DV 

“Imperialism is capitalism in that stage of development in which the dominance of monopolies and finance capital has established itself; in which the export of capital has acquired pronounced importance; in which the division of the world among the international trusts has begun; in which the division of all territories of the globe among the great capitalist powers has been completed.”

“Imperialism has the tendency to create among the nations a class of ‘rentiers’ (people who live by income from property or investments), a state which lives by the exploitation of labour of several overseas countries and colonies.”

—Lenin’s Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, 1916.

“Deep things are not necessarily complex, and simple things are not necessarily naive,”¹ wrote the novelist and iconic revolutionary Ghassan Kanafani. “The real artistic bias is: How can a human being say something profound simply?”

We have already named the lie of the passive citizen. But to understand that lie, we must diagnose the system that requires it. This is not a dissection of a machine’s parts, but a diagnosis of its terminal condition. The great capitalist machinery of the West no longer produces dreams; it produces only ghosts. This is the parasitic, spectral phase of what Lenin identified as the highest stage of capitalism: ‘the dominance of monopolies and finance capital,’ a system whose completion was ‘the division of all territories of the globe among the great capitalist powers.’ Its foundations, laid with the stones of stolen continents and cemented with the blood of enslaved peoples, are now haunted by the very violence that built them. The chaos you see—the flailing leaders, the rotting institutions—is not a failure of the system. It is the system in its final, truthful phase, where the parade of clowns and strongmen are not anomalies but logical administrators for a state that has abandoned persuasion for pure coercion.

This is the era of the open secret, the great unmasking. And Palestine remains its crucible. The criminal logic of the settler-colonial project was articulated from the beginning with a chilling clarity. It echoes, right to left, across the foundational texts of political zionism.

The Austrian Theodor Herzl, the founder of political zionism, defined his own project in his appeal for help from the archetypal colonizer, Cecil Rhodes, with unambiguous clarity: “Because it is something colonial.”² This was not an accusation from a critic, but the movement’s own self-identification. A generation later, the Russian right-wing zionist Ze’ev Jabotinsky codified the mandatory strategy of all colonization in his “Iron Wall” doctrine: it must proceed, he wrote, “in defiance of the will of the native population.”³ This is not a historical artifact. It is the active, breathing principle of the project.

The same logic was betrayed by the Russian centrist zionist Chaim Weizmann’s casual dismissal of the Palestinian people as “several hundred thousand Negroes”⁴ of “no significance.” It was confessed by the Polish “Labor” zionist David Ben-Gurion’s blunt admission: “We have taken their country.”⁵

Their words are the indictment. A conscious, ongoing program of displacement, articulated from its very origins. A project that became, simultaneously, the perfected model of the imperial enterprise and its most fanatical instrument.

The imperial core, having exhausted the external world to plunder, now turns its cannibalistic logic inward. The frontier is no longer overseas; it is the street, the neighborhood, the dissident. The police doctrines and weaponry engineered for the management of imprisoned populations in Gaza, Occupied Palestine, are now the standard arsenal for the pacification of the marginalized in New York, London and Berlin. The surveillance technology perfected on a captive people is marketed to governments for use on their own citizenry. The rhetoric that dehumanized the “native” as a demographic threat is now seamlessly directed at the immigrant, the poor, the political dissenter within the gates. There is no longer an “over there” and a “here.” There is only the expanding territory of the empire, and within it, a hierarchy of the controlled.

The strongman’s popularity is no mystery in this context. A demagogue is not an individual; he is a phenomenon—the type of maggot that swarms from the rot of a falling empire. This is the magic turning against the magician, the logical conclusion of a society that has dumbed down its population and forged them into consumerist individuals—a populace drowning in the psychic trauma of a meaningless existence. Such a populace will flock to anyone who offers a target for their rage and a spectacle of force. They would rather be actors in a nightmare than passengers on a derelict ship. This is the final stage of the bargain: the Western citizen-consumer, having traded their political soul for material comfort, now finds the comfort disappearing. All that remains is a hollowed-out identity, which the strongman fills with manufactured nationalist fury. They are given a flag to wave as their world burns, a scapegoat to blame for the encroaching cage whose blueprint was drawn in someone else’s stolen home.

Into this desolate landscape, the Palestinian people introduce a radical alternative: not a dream, but a reality.

The indigenous Palestinians are not an abstraction of resistance, but a society of existence—a people whose eternal roots predate the settler-colonial state that seeks to erase them. Their identity is not a reaction to occupation, but a positive, enduring culture built on the land itself; a land that holds their ancestors, their olive groves, and their stories in the language of the place, Arabic. In the face of this deep-rooted reality, the colonial project can only be understood as a recent, foreign implant, a contingent political ideology defined by its violence and its need to negate what was already there.

This is a truth the European zionist colonialists’ most lucid strategists were forced to concede. As Ze’ev Jabotinsky admitted: “They look upon Palestine with the same instinctive love and true favor the Aztecs looked upon Mexico or any Sioux looked upon his prairie. Palestine will remain for the Palestinians not a borderland, but their birthplace, the center and basis of their own national existence.”⁶

The Palestinian struggle does not create this connection—it emerges from it. It is a defense born of a profound, pre-existing love and belonging. In the most profound sense, it is the land defending its people as much as the people defending their land.

The Palestinian cause, therefore, is the defense of this tangible, living world. It is the assertion that a homeland was not absent, but stolen—that, as Ghassan Kanafani wrote, this is “not a case of a people without a homeland, but of a people with a homeland that was stolen from them.”⁷ Consequently, their resistance is not merely political; it is the active, daily cultivation of life—sumud—in the face of a genocidal machine. It is the olive tree that refuses to wither; the student who learns in the rubble of a bombed university; the archivist collecting names that the bomber seeks to erase. This is the spirit embodied by Handala, the child created by Naji al-Ali—his back forever turned, his hands clasped in defiance, a perpetual witness who “will not end after my end,” as Naji told us. He is the unyielding conscience that the criminal can neither answer nor silence.

In this landscape, Occupied Palestine is the epicenter. It is the laboratory where the techniques of total control were perfected, and it is the mirror held up to the world. The unceasing resistance of the Palestinian people is the single greatest act of truth-telling in our time. Every child that points to the sky and names the bomber, every poem written in the dust, is a strike aimed at the heart of the imperial and colonial narrative, proving Kanafani’s dictum: “bodies fall but ideas endure.”

The struggle is not for a better version of the same system. It is a struggle between two irreconcilable forces. On one side, the force of enclosure, control, genocide, and death, built on the criminal premise that land can be emptied of its native people. On the other, the force of truth, justice, land, and liberation, a cause that, as Kanafani wrote, “is not a cause for Palestinians only, but a cause for every revolutionary, wherever he is, as a cause of the exploited and oppressed masses in our era.”⁸

There is no reforming a machine built on a colonizing, racist adventure. There is no petitioning a butcher to become a vegetarian. This is the fundamental choice. You are either upholding a dying order defined by the criminals who designed it, or you are aligning with a people defending existence and life itself. You are, in Kanafani’s words, part of the “generation who will give [the revolution] life.”

The project of the imperial West, built by war criminals and robbers, offers a future of managed decline and comfortable despair. Palestine, rooted in its people, offers a future, period.