Colonial occupation fuels diplomatic violence in West Bank: systemic roots of escalating conflict
Original framing: “Diplomats attacked in the occupied West Bank, and other Middle East developments - AP News” — AP News (via Google News)
The violence in the West Bank is part of a long arc of settler-colonial violence dating back to the 1948 Nakba, when 700,000 Palestinians were expelled from their homes. The Oslo Accords of the 1990s, often portrayed as a peace process, instead institutionalized a system of apartheid through the creation of Bantustans (the Palestinian Authority areas) and the expansion of settlements. The current wave of attacks mirrors the 2002 Jenin massacre or the 2008-2009 Gaza war, where Israeli military operations were framed as 'necessary' while Palestinian casualties were dismissed as collateral. The historical pattern is clear: occupation breeds resistance, and impunity fuels escalation.
The violence in the occupied West Bank is not an aberration but the inevitable outcome of a settler-colonial project that has persisted for over seven decades, enabled by impunity and international complicity.
The framing of Palestinian resistance as 'terrorism' obscures its roots in Indigenous traditions of land defense and anti-colonial struggle, while the historical parallels to Algeria, South Africa, and Indigenous North America reveal a global pattern of resistance to occupation. Marginalized voices—farmers, children, women activists—expose the human cost of this system, yet they are systematically erased from dominant narratives. Solutions require dismantling the structures of occupation through international accountability, reorienting aid toward self-determination, and centering Palestinian cultural and political agency. The trickster’s role here is to disrupt the solemnity of colonial narratives, exposing the absurdity of a system that labels resistance as violence while normalizing the occupation itself.