The Zealots of ancient Judea emerged from conditions of military occupation and disenfranchisement. They were a desperate movement born of subjugation, fusing religious fervor with militant resistance to Roman rule. Their uncompromising stance - rejecting negotiation, scorning moderation, and sanctifying martyrdom - was not simply a strategy of liberation but a worldview. To the Zealots, divine redemption could only be achieved through unrelenting struggle, even if it meant bringing ruin upon their own people. Their legacy is remembered as both heroic and tragic: heroic in their refusal to bow to empire, tragic in the devastation their absolutism invited.

Kahanism, by contrast, is not the creed of the dispossessed but the doctrine of a ruling power. Originating with Rabbi Meir Kahane in the late 20th century, it envisions a Jewish state purged of Palestinians, governed by theocratic nationalism, and sustained through perpetual confrontation. Where the Zealots fought to expel foreign domination, Kahanists pursue dominion over another people. Yet the ideological core is similar: faith fused with nationalism, violence sacralised as a redemptive tool, and compromise treated as betrayal. What makes Kahanism more dangerous is its location within the apparatus of a modern nuclear-armed state, armed and shielded by the patronage of Washington and increasingly normalised within Israel’s political mainstream.

Today, as Gaza starves and burns, and Israel’s far right marches unimpeded through the corridors of power, the echoes of that zealotry grow louder. Israel’s reliance on permanent conflict—whether with Hamas, Hezbollah, or Iran - only postpones an inevitable reckoning with its own internal fractures: a collapsing social contract, the rise of settler messianism, and the erosion of even the thinnest democratic pretenses.

Whether that reckoning arrives within a decade or after several centuries, Israel in its current form - an ethnocratic state built on domination and exclusion - is heading toward internal collapse. Like Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, or Yemen, torn apart by civil wars, and like the Crusader states before it, Israel may endure through war, foreign patronage, and technological might. But its foundational contradictions render it unsustainable. Fortified walls and stockpiles of advanced weaponry only buy time, and much of that time is now borrowed.

This unraveling may not come as a sudden implosion. It may be gradual, masked by cycles of violence, repression, and decay. Yet collapse will come. In the meantime, it is the Palestinians - stateless, voiceless, and trapped between the machinery of occupation and the fantasies of messianic zealots - who will pay the heaviest price for a state that refuses to face its own contradictions.

Few will mourn the eventual passing of this occupation. Those who enabled or excused its barbarity will be damned by history - from the Knesset to Washington, from London to Berlin.

Israel’s destruction of Gaza evokes the Mongol sack of Baghdad in 1258 - not in precise historical terms, but in the sheer scale of devastation and in the symbolic annihilation of a people’s civic and cultural life. Like Baghdad, Gaza was more than a place: it was a center of memory, resistance, and identity. Its hospitals, schools, archives, and neighborhoods have been systematically erased.

Zionism and Kahanism - the two ideologies driving Israel today - will never escape the shadow of the atrocities unleashed in Gaza. They will be remembered alongside Hutu Power, Greater Serbia, Nazism, Khmer Rouge, Assadism, and Shinto ultranationalism: ideologies that fused supremacy with systemic violence.

All genocides are uniquely horrifying. But what may haunt historians most about the Palestinian genocide is not only its scale, but also how Western states and media outlets allowed themselves to be held hostage by Israel’s lobbying networks. From London to Berlin, Washington to Paris, Ottawa to Canberra, governments have shredded democratic norms, trampled international law, and discarded the most basic rules of war to enable Israel’s three-year campaign of mass killing.

Israel’s onslaught in Gaza carries echoes of humanity’s darkest chapters, a shard of the Second World War re-emerging in our time. Yet its perpetrators are not Nazis, as critics sometimes claim. Such labels only echo Israel’s own tactic of dismissing its enemies as antisemites or “Nazis” - a rhetorical trap that distracts from the gravity of its crimes. The ideology driving Israel’s violence - Kahanism, and a Zionism now deformed beyond recognition - is its own distinct evil. It draws from the same dark currents that nourished state-sponsored slaughter in Rwanda, the Holocaust, and other genocides, but it is not reducible to them.

In Gaza, we glimpse the kind of world Israel would see replicated beyond its borders. With figures such as Trump, Netanyahu, and Putin in power, and far-right movements like Alternative for Germany, Marine Le Pen, and Nigel Farage pressing at the gates, we are warned of a future where creeping authoritarianism thrives. Israel, now an ethnonationalist state hardened by apartheid and corruption, serves as a template for illiberal rulers elsewhere. In their zeal, leaders like Netanyahu would see democracies dismantled from within, their freedoms eroded to shield crimes against humanity abroad.

The Israeli regime’s survival strategy has always been permanent war. But in waging it, Israel accelerates its own undoing.