In the wake of a ceasefire, many will try to force the discourse into a binary of victory and defeat. But as the dust settles, a true picture emerges: one of the fragility of the Israeli colony, and the transformative power of resistance.
PALESTINIANS REACT TO NEWS OF A CEASEFIRE AGREEMENT WITH ISRAEL, IN DEIR AL BALAH, CENTRAL GAZA STRIP, 15 JANUARY 2025. ACCORDING TO US AND HAMAS OFFICIALS, ISRAEL AND HAMAS AGREED ON A HOSTAGE DEAL AND CEASEFIRE, TO BE IMPLEMENTED IN THE COMING DAYS. (PHOTO BY OMAR ASHTAWY APAIMAGES)
The Qatari Minister of Foreign Affairs, in a pivotal announcement on Wednesday evening, confirmed that Israel and the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) have finalized a deal designed to halt Israel’s genocidal and destructive war in the Gaza Strip for at least 42 days. This accord is essentially a reworking of the previously proposed ceasefire arrangement in May by the Biden administration, when Hamas declared its acceptance of the ceasefire agreement, while Israel reneged on it and continued with the war. It turned out Israel wanted time to both bring out more destruction in Gaza, more death, and use its mix of cards to subdue Hezbollah in Lebanon. Within this context, Qatar emerges once again as one of the biggest winners in this agreement, solidifying its role as a critical node in the architecture of regional diplomacy. The small Gulf state has mastered the art of maneuvering between adversaries, leveraging its relationships with seemingly irreconcilable actors to mediate where others falter. In doing so, Doha reaffirms its place as the capital of dealmaking, able to turn to Trump with a simple pitch: if deals are your game, this is where they happen.
For Donald Trump, the agreement is less a diplomatic breakthrough than a carefully wrapped narrative gift. It hands him a clean storyline of triumph—the return of Israeli captives, the cessation of conflict—crafted perfectly to match his populist brand of politics. It slots seamlessly into the mythology of his presidency: the consummate dealmaker, the leader who succeeds where others fail, the disruptor who shakes the foundations of entrenched stalemates and deadly status quos.
As for Joe Biden and his foreign policy team, however, the agreement serves as a grim epilogue to their tenure—a fading shadow at the helm of power, lingering but powerless. They leave as faithful sons of a political legacy that demands unyielding allegiance to Israel, a history that exacted their loyalty even as it unraveled them. They are tragic liberals, not merely complicit but tragically compelled, witnesses and participants in a machinery of destruction that predates their time and will outlive it. Their defense, when it comes, will rest not on agency but on necessity, as though they were bound by forces beyond their control. And yet, there was a choice. They chose monstrosity and they leave office knowing full well that it could have been otherwise.
Advertisement
Israel’s fractured narrative
In Israel, the agreement marks the unraveling of one narrative and the tentative construction of another—a precarious attempt to shift from the fantasy of total victory to the pragmatism of sufficient victory. Israel now confronts the limits of its aspirations, compelled to take solace in its geopolitical accomplishments. These include its intelligence apparatus’s success in infiltrating the Lebanese resistance and its capacity to wield immense destructive power in Gaza and Lebanon. However, these celebrated achievements remain overshadowed by unresolved contradictions. Beneath the triumphalist rhetoric lies a fundamental question: what, in tangible terms, has Israel achieved?
Despite claims of strategic success—a weakened Hezbollah, a diminished Iran, and a battered Hamas—Israel has not secured the total victory it seeks. Hezbollah remains a capable force, Iran’s regional influence endures, and Hamas persists as a reminder of the limits of Israel’s military campaigns, while Yemen proved its capacity to disrupt global shipping. The mainstream media amplifies claims of strategic triumph, yet the reality is far more sobering: the once-mythologized Israeli military now appears both brutal and highly ineffective, its aura of invincibility shattered on the global stage.
This reckoning extends beyond the battlefield. The military’s failures—its inability to anticipate threats, or deliver decisive outcomes—will slowly ripple through Israeli society, exposing long-simmering tensions. Delays in finalizing a ceasefire, prioritization of settlement expansion over recovering prisoners for many rightwing forces, and the Haredim’s refusal to enlist have deepened internal fractures. These tensions are further compounded by attempts to redraw the state’s legal framework and the economic and social fallout of the war. For a state that ties its survival to military dominance, these cracks reveal the limits of unity after the war. As Israeli society will now have to reckon both with its crimes, its successes, and its new image in the world.
Israel’s most exceptional achievement lies not in securing victory but in showcasing unrelenting devastation—a capacity to destroy on an immense scale. This persistence in destruction, rather than achieving security, underscores the lengths to which Israel is willing—and permitted—to go. In this paradox lies its most profound failure: the collapse of its ethical narrative and the erosion of its moral legitimacy in the eyes of the world.
The ceasefire further exposes a growing distrust in the promise of safety along Israel’s militarized frontiers, both in the North and South. The illusion of an impenetrable fortress is eroding, as borders remain volatile and adversaries endure. Israelis living on the frontier are forced to confront the unsettling truth that the mechanisms designed to ensure their security are no longer sufficient, their efficacy undermined by the enduring realities of resistance and occupation.
Unable to extinguish the Palestinians or their political claims, and unwilling to engage in a grammar of recognition, Israel has condemned itself to perpetual war. This condition, far from reflecting strength, highlights Israel’s acute dependency on its imperial patron, whose unwavering support has become more essential than ever to its continued supremacy fused with racialized discourse in the region. The addiction to war leaves Israel navigating a path that offers neither resolution nor reconciliation—only the persistence of its contradictions and its role in defining the frontiers of monstrosity in the twenty-first century. Israel comes out of this war with a changed strategic environment, some of these changes will play for its benefit, and will enable it to buy time. But it also comes having lost much morally, politically and indeed in its own social and political infighting.
Resistance, and questions of futility and efficacy
The Palestinian discourse surrounding Tufan al-Aqsa (Al-Aqsa Flood) is entrapped in a relentless fixation on the binary of victory and defeat, reducing the October 7th breach of the Gaza wall to a cold calculus of utility and outcomes.
This prevailing framework, steeped in the logic of instrumental reason, reconfigures resistance into a sterile schema of means and ends, severing it from its historical and existential roots. Framing the question as a tactical one—did Tufan achieve its objectives?—obscures a deeper dialectic of necessity and futility that haunts Palestinian deliberations. This dialectic does not merely oscillate between agency and despair but exposes a systemic entrapment: resistance emerges as a defiance of colonialism yet remains ensnared by the very structures it seeks to dismantle.
For critics of resistance to Israel, this entrapment becomes a constant indictment. Under their logic, resistance is subsumed within the colonial machinery it opposes, reduced to a tragic inevitability devoid of transformative power. In this view, resistance merely provides power and opportunity to expand or reaffirm itself. Through this lens, Tufan, for some Palestinians, becomes an exercise in futility.
In 15 months of war, the voices of those arguing against the necessity of resistance and questioning its efficacy called for Hamas to surrender, hand over its weapons, and plead for mercy. Many of those making this plea argued that Israel would not succumb, would not release Palestinian prisoners, and would continue the war until it had either driven Palestinians out of Gaza or annexed the territory to build settlements. While the ceasefire agreement does not preclude a return to war and the resumption of this same process, the return of Palestinians from the south to the north of Gaza and the partial withdrawal of Israeli troops reflect the extent and breadth of Israeli concessions. These concessions came during an especially difficult week for Israeli troops, with as many as 15 soldiers killed across the strip, including in the north of Gaza.
In other words, the very fact that a ceasefire agreement was reached—a ceasefire that mitigates some of the worst anxieties among Palestinians—disrupts the logic of those who argue for the futility of resistance, though not entirely. It reveals that Israel, despite its plans for ethnic cleansing in Gaza, was compelled to concede. The resistance endures, Hamas remains firmly in power, and even if it were to abdicate power, that abdication would still have to go through Hamas itself.
While the future remains uncertain—fragile, with the agreement possibly breaking at any point and the threat of renewed war looming—its very existence fractures the wager of Palestinians aligned with the futility of resistance. In the coming weeks, Palestinian prisoners will leave Israeli prisons, and people displaced to the south of Gaza will return to the north. Israel executed a punishing war, yet it also reached a limit, demonstrating that the Palestinian question persists despite the monstrous will Israel employed in this war.
The liberation project and an existential reckoning
Since the war began, a wave of Palestinian and Arab intellectuals have invoked the tradition of self-critique, a tradition deeply rooted in the Arab intellectual experience, particularly in the aftermath of the Nakba or the 1948 war, and later Al-Naksa, or the 1967 war. This moment of reflection, emerging with an almost urgent velocity, draws upon a genealogy of critique forged in the shadow of defeat.
Yet, it seems to carry within it an inherent paradox: defeat, in both its material reality and symbolic weight, is no longer merely an outcome but has become the framework, the very lens through which the collective self perceives its existence.
The collective self is thus rendered as both the subject and object of a relentless questioning—a questioning that claims to unveil the “illusions” that obscure reality or hinder the achievement of a more “pragmatic” possibility. It begins, seemingly, as a therapeutic endeavor, a means of reckoning with the burdens of misplaced aspirations. And yet, the recurrence of statements like, “Everything we believed in has collapsed; everything we hoped for has failed; everything we dreamed of has vanished,” reveals that this questioning has not merely destabilized strategies or tactics but has plunged deeper, into the very essence of resistance itself. In other words, it moves from self-critique to self-laceration.
What emerges is not a simple critique but an existential reckoning, a discourse that reshapes the relationship between hope and despair, between action and meaning. The questioning does not aim to refine tactics but to destabilize the grounds of resistance, raising a far more troubling specter: has the project of liberation become ensnared in the absurdity of its own struggle? Have its contradictions exceeded the capacity of history to resolve or contain them? It is a dialectic that has led some to advocate withdrawal, to say, “Let us focus on building Lebanon,” or, “Let us sign our own Oslo Accord and move forward.” These calls, cloaked in the language of rationality, mask a surrender not just of territory but of the very grammar of resistance.
At its core, resistance cannot be reduced to its tactical or strategic dimensions. It is not merely a confrontation on the battlefield but a disruption of the ontological certainties of the colonizer. Its essence lies in forcing the colonizer to confront questions they have sought to evade: Can their power truly secure resolution? Do massacres deliver finality, or do they deepen the abyss?
Resistance forces the colonizer to encounter their own contingency, to recognize the fragility of the structures they believed unassailable. In this sense, the battlefield is not just a space of violence but a space of interrogation—a site where the colonizer’s sovereignty is subjected to doubt. In other words the goal of resistance is to force the enemy to question itself.
One of the legacies of this moment is whether Israel will confront these questions or remain intoxicated by its own power. Will it question the extent of its dependency on the United States? Will it reckon with the untenability of controlling the fate of another people? And after going nuclear and attempting to erase Palestinians to end the conflict, will it settle for merely buying time, or will it choose a different path? While this remains, in itself, an open question, the fascistic tendencies of its major driving forces make it more plausible that Israel will stake its future on a world resembling its current arrangement for Palestinians: walls, apartheid, deportations, exploitation of undocumented workers, ethno-religious supremacy, and an unrelenting will to monstrosity. But that does not take away from the mere fact, Israel’s desire for total victory reached a limit despite its exceptionalism, and that sufficiency of victory, only means the war continues by other means.
The unraveling of Israeli exceptionalism
The war has laid bare American moral bankruptcy, Israel’s racialized supremacy, its monstrous capacity for destruction, and its deeply entangled web of ideological, psychic, and political investments in erasure and domination. This is not merely a conflict of arms but a revelation of the structures that sustain and perpetuate the machinery of violence. The war has exposed the exceptionalism surrounding Israel—not only in granting the state impunity, not only in silencing and suppressing dissent across Europe and North America, not only within academic institutions, or mainstream media but in its brazen ability to commit crimes live on air.
For Palestinians, this capacity is viewed through a bitter lens—it is seen as an Israeli strength. After all, Israel is presented as a state that can get away with anything, a reality as oppressive as the violence itself. Yet, it is also this very exceptionalism, this enforced limit on discourse, that calls attention to Israel’s unmaking as a Jewish supremacist and settler-colonial state. This unraveling is not simply a Palestinian issue; it is an urgent summons for radical change—not only in Palestine but across the world.This will indeed remain the persistent horizon of the Tufan, long after the fire ceases—and, crucially, it never ceases in Palestine.