Sherene Seikaly knows the Nakba never ceased. Who will stop that history from being the future?

Sherene Seikaly is Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She’s the editor of a number of academic journals, including the Journal of Palestine Studies. She’s also a policy member of Al-Shabaka and the Palestinian Policy Network.

Seikaly and I talk about the question of Palestine and the ongoing catastrophe. When we spoke, the central focus was famine, which for a moment felt like a moral line in the sand for even Western liberals that hadn't taken a stand. Now, Western powers are trying to shift our gaze to peace, the need for peace and to begin the reconstruction of Gaza.... By whom? We don't know. We assume Jared Kushner, since we are clearly in the worst possible universe.

The attempt, now, to normalize the murder of more than 30,000 children in Gaza, the self-congratulatory desire to move past it, ignores the fact that Gaza is still being starved and bombed. Israel is violating Trump's fake "peace plan" because it never planned to pull back; the occupation was always violence without end; it was built on what Abdaljawad Omar calls the "Zionist fantasy of total domination."

October 7th drove this hypermilitarized nation to unleash genocidal fury on the people of Palestine. Since that date, its been flexing its state-of-the-art capacity for industrial slaughter. In a recent speech, Netenyahu said that his country needs to become a modern "Super Sparta" -- meaning, more militaristic and aggressive in its ambitions, and also more isolated and garrisoned-off from the rest of the world.

Israel is an ultranationalist ethnostate with a nuclear arsenal that is threatening to respond to the collapse of what was left of its fragile public image by stockpiling more weapons and embracing their isolation. Some might say it's normal, or at least predictable, for a country that's always at war to invest so heavily in defense and to worry about fortifying its borders.... But that is not what Netenyahu meant by making Israel a "Super Sparta." Israel is building what my guest Sherene Seikaly calls a "paradigm" of imperial power, over and against much of the Arab world. And it is doing so to maintain a system of oppression and dispossession. Everything is out in the open now: the Israeli parliament just voted to annex all of the West Bank.

Omar says that there are multiple futures that could proceed from October 7th. Will this moment of insurgency against an unhinged occupying power be "the first cracks in an imperial juggernaut and its outpost, the sign of the end of their imagined permanence"? Will it mean the end of the Palestinians? he asks. Their "bodies scattered, dispersed, maimed beyond recognition." Or can it be "something else: the endurance of the unbearable, the persistence of what was meant to be erased, the resurrection of a people who refuse to vanish"?