The Israelification of the World?
Sid Shniad
The Call Dec 28, 2025
The Israelification of the World?
Bana Abu Zuluf
Defend Our Juries – Lift the Ban. Trafalgar Square, London 4th October 2025
I went to Leiden University in the first week of December to speak about peace-washing in the Palestine context. I was invited to participate in a panel that examined how institutions use the language of peace while materially enabling repression, war, and genocide. Alongside colleagues, I spoke about Gaza, about Palestine, and the ways the UN, universities, NGOs, media, and states present themselves as neutral while actively sustaining zionism. After going through layers of bureaucratic steps and due diligence, the event was finally booked by a professor of peace studies and conflict resolution at Leiden.
Despite knowing far too well how universities have become hostile towards Palestine activism, including formal academic discussions, I did not expect to encounter a checkpoint at the entrance on campus. As a Palestinian, no stranger to checkpoints and the suffocating intrusion of securitization into daily life, I instantly recognized what was going on — this was a checkpoint and all of the students attending the university were now subject to this creeping interference every day as they go about their otherwise typical university experience.
At Leiden University, since May 2024, access to the campus has required student/staff identity verification. I approached the security desk and explained why I was there. I named the event, identified the room, and stated the professor’s name who had reserved the space. Only after security checked this information did they allow me to enter.
I did not read this as an administrative inconvenience but as a new political structure of the university. A university campus that regulates entry has already accepted securitization as ‘common sense.’ Securitization here refers to the process by which political activity, such as protest, speech, or solidarity, is reframed as a security threat, justifying exceptional measures that would otherwise require ‘democratic deliberation.’ Once an issue is ‘securitized,’ the response shifts from political engagement to management, surveillance, and repression. After asking a few students about this policy, they assured me it was not about protecting students but about managing dissent and controlling Palestinian solidarity within the complicit academic space.
Standing there, waiting for permission to enter, I understood something that has become increasingly clear over the past two years. The genocide in Gaza has not only exposed the zionist entity, but it has reorganized the world. Institutions are no longer hiding their alignment with zionism but are adjusting their architecture, language, and security practices to prepare for the inevitable encounter with their moral contradictions. This experience reminded me of the cynical debate around zionism and its connection or lack thereof to white supremacy or what Richard Seymour describes as ‘disaster nationalism’ through the rise of the far right in the West. Is the world being Israelized, as some argue? This piece attempts to answer this question through the angle of ‘securitization’ or the global repression of the Palestine movement.
Post Oct. 7th, securitization no longer presents itself as a response to specific threats, but has instead become the norm. Neoliberalized universities which are dependent on donors, state funding, and market positioning, are structurally vulnerable to external pressure campaigns by these parties. Palestine solidarity activism threatens these interests, so institutions treat it not as political speech to be engaged but as a security problem to be managed. Universities thus face a binary: cede to student demands or repress them under the rubric of ‘security.’ This logic of securitization has been refined through decades of Israeli practice in Palestine; Western institutions are now importing it with confidence.
Repression of Palestine activism in universities is a mirror of state repression and cannot be separated from it. Take, for example, the banning of Arabic (and even Irish) in Palestine solidarity protests in Berlin, the proscription of Palestine Action in the the UK, ICE raids against pro-Palestine activists in the US, the banning of some pro-Palestine groups in France, and many more assaults on ‘civil liberties’ in the name of securitization.
Some would argue that repression is some Western appeasement to zionist lobby groups as opposed to an inherent Western feature. However, this effort to detach zionism from the historical logics and concrete consequences of Western imperialism is not intellectually or politically tenable.
Zionism is the crystallization of European colonial methodology, not an aberration or some right-wing conspiracy theory. It embodies the concentrated logic of dispossession, surveillance, racialized hierarchies, and frontier violence that Europe (and the US) exported globally over centuries. Europe does not become zionist or adopt zionism. Zionism reflects European colonial history in condensed form, and the West continues to operate according to the same principles when it regulates dissent, militarizes borders, or disciplines solidarity movements. How often do allies mistake Israel’s practices for a unique pathology when, in fact, they are a mirror of centuries of European and Western colonial action?
This logic is visible even in seemingly minor US actions—such as barring Palestinians with PA passports under the Trump administration. Empire does not justify its actions, it simply acts as it pleases. The US sanctions ICC judges, defunds UNRWA, and uses the Security Council to ratify plans it would implement regardless of approval. This is not a double standard but an imperialist standard where imperial power shapes the rules, interprets them or discards them as needed. Zionism operates by the same principle. Its inherent violence is not an aberration from the Western-led order but an expression of the hegemonic impunity on which that order rests.
Europe, too, is part and parcel of this system of control. Europe does not merely participate in this system, it is the system. The EU’s €800 billion rearmament pledge, framed as a response to external instability, simultaneously disciplines internal dissent. The same securitization logic that fortifies borders and nudges ‘neutral’ states like Ireland toward NATO alignment also enforces zero tolerance toward Palestine solidarity. Militarization abroad and repression at home are not separate projects.
Such a pattern of armament across Europe and the US signifies a turn towards the logic of coercion, right-wing nationalism and totalitarianism. The military industry, however, does not function on its own and requires the manufacturing of consent. The ‘Military Industrial Media Academic Complex (MIMAC)’ becomes visible as the mechanism that enforces this logic. The military identifies (manufactures) threats, industry profits from them, media legitimizes them through editorial sight, and academia provides the research tools that enhance the military technology and normalize such violence. Together, they create an ecosystem in which resistance is preemptively labeled dangerous, and securitization becomes a principle of governance. MIMAC operates as a unified system across the imperial core and its colonial outposts. Israel functions as a laboratory where techniques of surveillance, counterinsurgency, and securitization are refined under permanent emergency conditions, then exported globally, including back to Western states disciplining their own populations. This is not zionism influencing the West from outside; it is the circulation of colonial methods between metropole and frontier.
Nasser Abu Rahmeh captures the historical scope of the mirror logic of zionism as a Western product when he writes:
They look at Gaza and see not just a hundred years of colonisation in Palestine, but the last five hundred years of Euro-American racial colonial domination. The campaign in Gaza is like a condensed restaging of every colonial war in history, bearing every hallmark: the pummeling of dispossessed and besieged peoples by an overwhelming military power in the name of self-defense and western civilisation and values.
This observation illuminates the deeper truth that the violence Palestinians are made to endure under zionism is a mirror of an ongoing global project, and that the logic (and practices) sustaining it began centuries before the beginning of the zionist entity. This violence is the latest repetition in a long, global history of colonial conquest, dispossession, and racialized governance.
There are countless Black authors (Malcolm X, June Jordan, Cesaire…etc) who have written about white anxiety about Black power or equality. They frame such white anxiety or fear from the loss of white supremacy. The same principle applies to Palestinian resistance and the manufactured fear of a ‘globalized intifada,’ around which the politics of fear helps to fuel securitization policies. Solidarity with Gaza unsettles such global anxiety not because it produces immediate danger or threats of physical violence, but because it exposes structural continuity, historical complicity, and the contradictions of Western moralism that claims universality. There is a radical counter-hegemony in elemental form developing around the Palestine movement globally which translates into a serious challenge for the current imperialist status quo. Banning chants such as intifada reveals this hegemonic anxiety. Some of such zionist anxieties translate into claims such as, ‘the Arabs hate us’ and ‘anti-zionists want another Jewish Holocaust,’ representing the situation in Palestine in a zero sum manner. In fact, it was zionism, as an imperialist outpost, that instructed a zero sum equation in Palestine (Jewish only ethnostate) only to blame Palestinians and allies for ‘chanting’ for a Palestine free from zionism. Zionism as a settler colonial project has to, by necessity, eliminate Palestinians to realise its goals. Such elimination has appeared in its most brutal form in the Gaza genocide despite commencing in the Nakba in 1948. Indigenous Palestinians cannot exist as a people, with collective rights to land and resources, within zionism. Such a point requires some deeper reflection from the solidarity movement: why should we deny the zero-sum logic of our anti-zionism? The truth is that it is us vs. zionism, Western imperialism and capitalism.
Sayyid Hasan Nasrallah (may he rest in power) offered a perspective that reveals the fragility underlying alleged zionism’s strength when he said the zionist entity is weaker than a cobweb. Its durability depends not on internal cohesion but on external imperialist reinforcement. Empire, capital, militarism, and narrative uphold it. Its force emerges less from an innate consolidated power than from global systems that shield and amplify it. This fragility, however, is true for imperialism more broadly. Imperialism relies on consent from the metropole and on the passivity of the masses in the periphery. Palestine risks undoing consent at home and undermining Western ‘moral’ authority. How often do we mistake this reinforced fragility for inevitability and accept its permanence because it is rehearsed consistently across generations and geographies? Therefore, the so-called Israelification of the world does not mean Israel is the hegemon; it means the Western project of zionism (as ethnonationalism) will be replicated elsewhere if we stay naive about the task of anti-zionism as anti-imperialism and anti-capitalism.
Anti-zionism, when forward-looking, insists on the construction of a world without zionism, capitalism and Western imperialism. The question should never be whether Europe or the United States will change their foreign policies towards the zionist entity. The question is, how will we organize ourselves to defeat this hegemony? We need mass resistance to the imperialist israelification of the world, creative and organized resistance, subversion of attempts to control and dominate our lives, plus a ruthless fight against repression of those who resist or speak out. The response to the ‘globalization of Israel’ today, must be the globalization of intifada in the very broad sense.