As of October 7, 2025, Israel’s genocide in Gaza will have entered its second year. The confirmed death toll currently stands at over 66,000 according to the Gaza Ministry of Health, though the true casualty count is likely to be far higher. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has spoken at the United Nations and unveiled a new twenty-point “peace” plan in conjunction with US President Donald Trump, all while having publicly endorsed the “Greater Israel” vision — the expansion of Israel across the northern Arabian peninsula — on Israeli television just one month prior. New illegal settlements have been greenlit by Israel in the West Bank. Last Thursday, the Global Sumud Flotilla was hijacked by Israeli naval forces in international waters while on its way to break Israel’s siege on Gaza. Israel has launched an air attack on Qatar and repeated air attacks against Yemen, in addition to engaging in a brutal 12-day war with Iran this summer. Israel’s war of aggression is quickly spilling into West Asia.
But this escalatory pattern is not one that started just two years ago. The “two years” timeline, the narrative that Western discourse has and is continuing to peddle, is profoundly ahistorical. To say that Israel’s crimes began two years ago is a whitewashed starting point, a rescaling of the timeline that ignores how this spiral of escalation began in the first place. It is a retelling of history that allows Western nations to scrub away the inconvenient truths behind the Palestinian struggle: namely, that the ongoing dispossession of Palestinians from their lands since the Nakba seventy-seven years ago is the very continuation of the West’s colonial history.
Israel’s genocide in Gaza is the culmination of a century-long colonial project: one that began with the Balfour Declaration in 1917, with Britain becoming the first Western power to declare support for the Zionist project in Palestine. It started implementation in 1948 with the wave of ethnic cleansing known as the Nakba (“catastrophe” in Arabic). This violent expulsion of Palestinians was conducted not by rogue factions but by mainstream Zionist groups like the Irgun paramilitary: the very Irgun which would later be absorbed into the Israeli Defence Forces and become the ideological predecessors of Israel’s ruling Likud party. The indiscriminate killing of Palestinians in Gaza is not solely the policy of the current ruling party, but the core of Israeli policy from its foundation to the present day.
The settler-colonial logic behind Israel’s actions is a direct echo of the genocide of Indigenous peoples in North America by European settlers. Just one week ago, on September 30, we observed the National Day of Truth and Reconciliation here in Canada. It is a day meant for us to remember the bloody foundations on which Canada was built: to recognize that the land we now stand on was violently wrested from the Indigenous peoples of Turtle Island by European settlers, and that the systems of oppression used to dispossess Indigenous peoples of their rights and dignity still exist to this day.
But can we say that we have learned, here at McGill, when this university has yet to divest from companies involved in Israel’s military-industrial complex? Can we say that that Canada has learned, when this nation is still selling weapons to Israel despite having pledged to cease arms exports because of the genocide?
If these last two years, and the preceding seventy-seven, have been any indication, the answer is a clear “no.”
What have Western media institutions done, when faced with the blatant hypocrisy of their actions? Double down on lies and silence the truth. Basic reporting on Gaza has been suppressed in Western newsrooms, to the point that media organizations have become little more than stenographers for Israeli propaganda. An open letter from BBC journalists to the agency’s Board of Governors notes how “it has felt that the BBC has been performing PR for the Israeli government and military.” Social media is also coming under siege, having been identified by Netanyahu himself as “the most important weapon … to secure [Israel’s] base in the US” and beyond. All this comes with Israel’s relentless targeting of journalists in the Gaza Strip, and escalating repression against Palestinian journalists in Western nations.
If accurate coverage of the very news from Gaza has been dwindling, then objective analysis of Palestine, Israel, and their role in Western imperial policy has been next to nonexistent to begin with. To consider the Palestinian cause in isolation is to ignore its central role in European, and now American, foreign doctrine in West Asia. Israel is not an outlier but a lynchpin of the West’s settler-colonial project in the Arabian peninsula and beyond. In the 1956 Suez Crisis, France and Britain enlisted Israel in a military attack on Egypt to seize the Suez Canal and depose then-Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser. Netanyahu, after his first term as Israel’s PM, testified to Congress in 2002 in support of an American aggression against Iraq — one that would be launched in the following year. Former NATO Commander Wesley Clark revealed in 2003 that after Iraq, the Bush administration was preparing to launch military assaults against Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Iran, Somalia, and Sudan. Twenty-two years later, all these countries have now been directly attacked by the US, Israel, and/or their proxies.
Even peace plans have been weaponized in the name of settler colonialism. One can go back as far as the 1993 Oslo Accords, with promises to former Palestinian President Yasser Arafat of eventual Palestinian statehood having now faded into three decades of escalating oppression. In March of this year, the ceasefire between Israel and Palestinian resistance groups was unilaterally broken by Israel to continue its annihilation of Gaza. The Trump administration’s signature Abraham Accords has seen Arab nations normalize relations with Israel to undermine resistance against Israel. Jordan and Saudi Arabia have notably aided Israel in intercepting missiles from Iran and Yemen, and the UAE has been supporting Israel’s economy through trade. In early September, declarations of ceasefire talks were used by Israel to attempt to assassinate Hamas leaders in an airstrike on Qatar. Trump’s twenty-point peace plan, endorsed by Netanyahu and drawing inspiration from the leaked “Gaza Riviera” plan, would see the establishment of a transitional governing body for Gaza led by such ‘peace-loving’ politicians as former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, the co-architect of the Iraq war.
Western governments are not just complicit in Israel’s atrocities. The genocide in Gaza is a full-throated continuation of the violence enacted by European settlers against Indigenous peoples worldwide. This inconvenient truth — that to this day, Western nations are continuing to pursue the same colonial agenda they have for centuries — is one the mainstream narrative is attempting to sweep under the rug. A narrative where genocide is normalized, war is peace, bombs and bullets and famine are the status quo. Where being born is reason enough to be killed in the name of imperial greed.
It is a narrative that we the students, we the generations of tomorrow, must do our utmost to fight. Keep your eyes on Gaza. Keep yourself informed. Reject this world that would have us support genocide. Remember the actions of those in power, and never forget their crimes.