Palestine: Stolen or Decolonised?

When Israel’s Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich stood before a map marking four-fifths of the West Bank for annexation, he did more than unveil a policy plan — he exposed, with startling candour, the logic that has always driven the Zionist project: maximum land, minimum Palestinians. His declaration that it was time to “apply Israeli sovereignty to Judea and Samaria” was not a political innovation. It was the latest iteration of a century-long campaign to erase Palestine and the Palestinians from geography, from politics, and from memory.

This campaign did not begin in 2025. It was rooted in the Nakba of 1948, when over 750,000 Palestinians were forcibly expelled from their homes, their villages destroyed, and their land confiscated. The Naksa of 1967 extended this process as Israel occupied the West Bank, Gaza, East Jerusalem, and the Golan Heights, displacing hundreds of thousands more. Decades of settlement expansion, home demolitions, and restrictions on movement have turned the West Bank and Gaza into laboratories of occupation, testing walls, checkpoints, drones, and digital surveillance — instruments of a modern colonial state.

In September 2025, when the Knesset advanced the first reading of a bill to annex the West Bank, it was not legislating new rights but legalising an old crime. The illusion of democracy — the façade of “votes” and “laws” — merely masks the machinery of dispossession. Every settler colony has cloaked its violence in the garb of law; every empire has found bureaucrats to justify its theft. Armed settlers roam with impunity through Palestinian villages while Israeli occupation forces provide protection, sanctioning patterns of dispossession and killings. Meanwhile, the siege of Gaza, the walls that divide villages, and checkpoints that cage entire cities underscore the brutality of occupation.

Palestine is not a story of isolated calamities. It is a process — ongoing, violent, adaptive. Israel is not merely occupying land; it is perfecting control. Palestine has become a laboratory of modern colonisation — a testing ground for technologies of domination later exported to other regimes of oppression. From training death squads in Latin America to arming apartheid South Africa, from providing intelligence to authoritarian regimes to policing black and brown bodies globally, Israel’s expertise in control has become one of its most profitable exports.

Colonialism today is not only about soldiers or settlers; it is about systems and structures. Banks that fund illegal construction, corporations that build on stolen land, universities that legitimise the apartheid narrative, and international trade networks that sustain the occupation all interlock with military might to enforce dispossession. It is an economy of oppression, in which profit and power intersect to keep a people stateless. The complicity is global, but so too must be the response. The same financial and political architecture that props up Israeli apartheid also underwrites the broader imperial order — one that impoverishes the Global South, fuels endless wars, and deepens global inequality. To speak of decolonising Palestine is, therefore, to speak of decolonising the world.

Condemnations, resolutions, and rhetorical gestures are no substitute for justice. For seventy-five years, international institutions have treated Palestine as a humanitarian crisis rather than a colonial condition. Yet Palestine is not a tragedy to be managed; it is a people demanding liberation. Decolonisation is not a metaphor. It is a material, political, and moral project — the restoration of land, the reclamation of sovereignty, and the dismantling of the systems that make occupation possible. To decolonise Palestine is to affirm that indigenous people anywhere — whether in Africa, Asia, or the Americas — have the right to live free from domination.

For the Islamic world, this is not merely a geopolitical issue. It is a moral imperative. The Qur’an reminds us: “And what is [the matter] with you that you fight not in the cause of Allah and [for] the oppressed among men, women, and children?” (4:75). The struggle for Palestine is the struggle against the logic of empire — economic, political, and spiritual. True solidarity lies not only in prayer or protest but in constructing an alternative moral economy — one that prioritises justice over profit, dignity over domination, and human life over capital.

The question before us is no longer whether Palestine has been stolen — that theft is plain. The question is whether it will be decolonised. Whether humanity will continue to normalise a system of apartheid under the guise of diplomacy, or finally muster the courage to confront and dismantle it. The future of Palestine is not only about borders on a map. It is about the very meaning of justice in our time.

And so we must act, think, and speak boldly — not tomorrow, not next year, but now. To support justice in Palestine is to support justice everywhere. To build a moral economy that protects the oppressed is to reclaim the dignity of our shared humanity. The time to choose sides is here, the time to refuse complicity is now, and the time to dream of decolonisation is ours to seize — with courage, with conviction, and yes, with hope and smiles.

Footnote:

AFRIEF Webinar — “Palestine: Stolen or Decolonised?”

The Africa Islamic Economic Forum (AFRIEF) will at the end of this month host a two-hour virtual webinar exploring the political economy of Palestine, the structures sustaining occupation, and pathways toward decolonisation. The session will convene scholars, policy experts, and economic thinkers to examine how ethical finance, international solidarity, and moral economic principles intersect with the struggle for Palestinian sovereignty. This webinar underscores AFRIEF’s commitment to fostering informed dialogue on justice-oriented economics and highlights the critical moral and financial dimensions of the Palestinian struggle.