On 3 September 2025, Israel’s Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich called a press conference in Jerusalem. Standing in front of maps that marked four-fifths of the West Bank for annexation, Smotrich declared: “The time has come to apply Israeli sovereignty to Judea and Samaria,” invoking the biblical name used in Israeli settler-colonial discourse.

The Finance Minister explained that his plan — excluding larger Palestinian cities, such as Ramallah and Nablus — aimed for Israel to claim "maximum territory” with the “minimum” Palestinian population. His goal was plain: “to remove, once and for all, a Palestinian state from the agenda.”

The following month, the Knesset, the occupation’s parliament, gave preliminary approval to a bill to annex the West Bank — the first of four votes required to make the land grab law. As with all settler-colonial projects, the thin veneer of democracy serves only to rubber-stamp the escalating project of ethnic cleansing and genocide.

The settler-colonisation of Palestine is not an event but a process — ongoing, violent, and adaptive. From the Nakba of 1948 to the Naksa of 1967, from the walls that divide villages and besiege the Gaza Strip to the checkpoints that cage entire Palestinian cities, Palestine has served as a laboratory of colonisation: a testing ground for technologies of control that are later exported across the world.

Israel trained the Nicaraguan Contras and the Guatemalan juntas. It armed apartheid South Africa and kept Rhodesia on life support as that former settler-colony faced growing international isolation. It was Mossad’s torture techniques that were applied in the dungeons of the Savak, Imperial Iran’s notorious security service. While Washington sustained Tel Aviv as an appendage of its imperial agenda in West Asia, Israel returned the favour by backing reactionary forces all around the world.

Today, armed settlers roam with impunity through Palestinian villages while Israeli occupation forces provide protection, sanctioning a pattern of dispossession and killings. The United Nations has recorded more than 2,000 incidents of settler violence in the West Bank since October 2023 — more than 1,000 Palestinians killed, including over 200 children — even as the Israeli state wages a genocidal war on Gaza less than 100 kilometres away. Meanwhile, Palestinians in the 1948 territories face intensifying repression and ghettoisation.

What is unfolding is not a series of isolated outrages. Nor is it simply the work of bombs and bulldozers. It is the deliberate construction of a comprehensive system of colonial domination: banks, businesses, construction firms, universities, security contractors, political institutions and international trade networks all interlock to form the architecture of apartheid — all ultimately backed by bombs and a brutish carceral state.

World leaders may condemn particular acts of violence. International institutions may issue resolutions. Yet they too often treat the occupation as a temporary crisis rather than the central apparatus of a settler-colonial state.

Confronting this reality requires decolonisation: a systematic effort to dismantle the structures of domination, to restore Palestinian sovereignty, and to confront the global circuits of capital and military power that sustain occupation.

This week, the Progressive International is partnering with organisations in Palestine for the Ramallah Congress on the Decolonisation of Palestine. The congress will bring together political leaders, legal experts, trade-unionists, and scholars to learn about the mechanisms of Israeli colonisation in Palestine — and to hear about some of the strategies deployed to oppose it.

The end goal of Palestine’s colonisation is seen clearly in Gaza: the total erasure of the Palestinian people. That is why it is past time to abandon the illusion that the colonisers will ever permit the colonised to live alongside them in peace. Decolonisation is not a slogan but a necessary process: the only path toward freedom, equality, and dignity for all.

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Honduras faces down corporate lawfare

When the government of President Xiomara Castro’s energy reforms cut prices by 30%, delivered free electricity to over a million Hondurans and defended energy sovereignty from foreign corporate domination, not everyone was happy.

Two corporate lawsuits were taken up against the central American country in international corporate courts, seeking compensation to the tune of $400 million for the government’s decision to prioritise its people over foreign corporate profits.

Last week, the two cases were dropped in a significant victory for Castro’s government and the Honduran people.

Congratulations to Zohran Mamdani

The Progressive International has congratulated Zohran Mamdani on his victory in New York City’s mayoral election and PI’s member organisation, the Democratic Socialists of America, which helped power it.

Mamdani, a member of the DSA, began his victory speech by quoting US American socialist Eugene Debs saying, “I can see the dawn of a better day for humanity.”

You can read the DSA’s full statement after the victory here.

Art of the Week

Ramallah Congress artwork by PI Design Director Gabriel Silveira.