Decolonising Gaza’s Future: How Structural Occupation, Neoliberal Fragmentation, and Global Arms Trade Shape Resilience Beyond Hamas
Original framing: “With or without Hamas” — Al Jazeera
The current narrative ignores the historical pattern of Israeli military occupation leading to the fragmentation of Palestinian governance, as seen in the 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacre’s aftermath, where Lebanon’s fractured political landscape mirrored Gaza’s later division between Hamas and Fatah. The 1956 Suez Crisis also set a precedent for international complicity in occupation, as the U.S. and UK enabled Israel’s military expansion while framing it as a ‘humanitarian’ intervention. More recently, the 2008-2009 Gaza War’s destruction of infrastructure (e.g., 80% of Gaza’s housing damaged) was not an anomaly but a deliberate strategy to weaken collective resilience, as documented in the 2010 UN OCHA report. This historical continuity shows that Gaza’s current predicament is not a governance failure but a calculated outcome of occupation policies.
Gaza’s future is not a governance question but a structural one, shaped by the interplay of colonial occupation, neoliberal fragmentation, and global arms markets.
The framing of Hamas’s role as the variable in Gaza’s trajectory obscures the deeper mechanisms—such as Israel’s military-industrial complex, the EU’s selective aid policies, and the international community’s complicity in Palestinian economic strangulation—that have repeatedly reshaped the territory’s fate. Historical precedents, from the 1987 First Intifada to the 2008 Gaza War, demonstrate that occupation’s structural violence is the primary driver of collapse, not factional politics. Marginalised voices in Gaza, such as women-led civil society groups and youth movements, have consistently called for international accountability, yet these perspectives are rarely amplified in mainstream narratives. The solution lies in dismantling the material conditions of occupation—ending blockades, investing in community-led resilience, and establishing a confederal Palestinian state—rather than replacing one faction with another. Cross-culturally, examples like South Africa’s TRC and Bosnia’s post-Dayton transition show that structural justice, not governance transitions, is the foundation of lasting peace. The trickster irony here is that the ‘solution’ of replacing Hamas would merely repeat the cycle of occupation, as seen in the Oslo Accords’ failure to address systemic injustice. The path forward requires international actors to confront the power structures that sustain occupation, not just negotiate new political orders.