Not If, But How: Four Scenarios for the End of the Zionist Project

By Sami Al-Arian

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. (Design: Palestine Chronicle)

The question now is not whether the Zionist entity will change course, but which course it will attempt to take, and how each course will, in turn, accelerate the end of the Zionist project.

The Israeli genocidal war in Gaza that followed October 7, 2023, aimed to break the Palestinian people by imposing surrender, emptying Gaza of its inhabitants, terrorizing the West Bank, and subjecting an entire people to fire, fear, and hunger. But it failed.

The Palestinians did not break. They buried their martyrs, treated their wounded, and clung to their land and to the enduring truth that their cause is not extinguished by sieges, bombardment, or threats. The world witnessed a comprehensive campaign of annihilation and destruction broadcast live from every phone, and with it the bankruptcy of an international system that claims civility while arming a colonial-settler entity that kills children, targets their innocence, and starves them.

This failure places the Zionist entity before a strategic choice it has long tried to ignore. It can no longer claim that domination is acceptable as peace, or that apartheid is justifiable on security grounds, or that mass displacement can be presented as humanitarian. The mask has fallen.

The question now is not whether the Zionist entity will change course, but which course it will attempt to take, and how each course will, in turn, accelerate the end of the Zionist project as a system of domination and racial supremacy over an indigenous people in their land for thousands of years.

There are four scenarios that outline the horizon today. Each of them exposes the internal contradiction of a project that wants to claim democracy while denying fundamental rights. It wants the land without its people, it wants international legitimacy without international law. Every path leads to the same destination: the dismantling of the structures of Zionist domination and control; the restoration of justice for Palestinians; and the achievement of a genuine peace for the region.

Scenario One: The Two-State Outcome

The world still calls for what is called the two-state solution. This political path was supposed to be the product of the failed Oslo process since 1993. Capitals issue statements, diplomats dust off old maps. The phrases are familiar: a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza with East Jerusalem as its capital, removal of illegal settlements, creation of safe corridors between the Strip and the West Bank, and an end to the occupation and blockade.

But everyone also knows why this goal remains out of reach. The West Bank is strangled by hundreds of checkpoints, land seizure and confiscation continue, and settlement blocs expand. Palestinian land is fragmented into islands under Zionist control from Qalandiya to Hawara, while East Jerusalem has effectively been annexed.

The Zionist entity has spent decades making the viability of a Palestinian state impossible, only to point afterward to the facts on the ground it created and claim there is nothing left to negotiate.

But suppose there were genuine international efforts to create a Palestinian state; in that case, the Israeli entity would be forced back to the pre-1967 borders known as the Green Line, curbing dreams of permanent expansion and ending the tools of annexation.

Most Israelis believe that a genuinely sovereign Palestinian state represents an existential challenge to Zionist ideology because it affirms a fundamental principle: that Palestinians are a people with rights, not a population to be managed and controlled. The refugees would not disappear — there are more than seven million Palestinians outside their homeland who will continue to demand the right of return — and East Jerusalem would remain for its people.

Even if this path succeeded — which is highly unlikely — it would mark the beginning of the end of the Zionist entity as a system of supremacy and dominance, because it would force acceptance of the truth it has denied for more than a century: that Palestinians are equal human beings whose rights do not end at a military checkpoint. The entity understands all of this, which is why it will resist and obstruct such an outcome whenever possible.

Scenario Two: One Democratic State

The land between the river and the sea is a single geographic unit. The Zionist entity recognizes this reality when it insists on imposing control from Rafah to Rosh HaNikrah, from Jaffa to Jericho.

If it insists on a unified land and yields to global pressure to establish a single political system with equal rights, then it will no longer be able to claim to be a “Jewish state.” It can be a democracy or it can be an ethno-religious state, but it cannot be both.

Demographic reality has settled this debate. Even without counting Palestinians abroad, Palestinians today make up more than half of the population governed by the entity in historical Palestine. A single constitutional system guaranteeing equality in civil and political rights would end the Zionist movement as a project of racial supremacy and replace it with a civic state or a republic of equal citizens.

This may be the moral horizon that many around the world now embrace, and precisely for that reason, the Zionist entity will reject it because it contradicts the ideological foundations on which it was built.

Scenario Three: Entrenchment of a Permanent Apartheid System

This is the option the entity has pursued for many years: annex more land; erase the Green Line in practice while keeping it for propaganda purposes; declare sovereignty from the river to the sea while denying those under its rule the most basic rights; keep Gaza under siege and the West Bank under military rule; confiscate land and strangle Palestinians; build roads exclusively for Jews and erect an apartheid barrier; expand settlements and outposts and retroactively legalize them; invent new legal terms to obscure old myths.

It claims security while meaning domination, and says temporary while meaning permanent. It harries, besieges, and brutalizes Palestinians until they despair, submit, and leave.

This is how Gaza was before the Al-Aqsa Fkood, and it is a reality that is hard to sustain. Since October 7, 2023, moral and legal condemnations have accumulated against the Israeli genocidal war in Gaza, with Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the Israeli group B’Tselem describing the entity as an apartheid regime.

The International Court of Justice issued provisional measures in January and March 2024, and the International Criminal Court prosecutor issued arrest warrants for the entity’s prime minister and his former minister of war in May 2024.

The entity may display its power or rally its international supporters, but it cannot claim moral authority or maintain political credibility. Civil society around the world has moved decisively, and many reject this path.

In capitals everywhere, the voices of mosques, churches, unions, students, professionals, and civil society leaders are rising against complicity. Pressure on governments to impose arms embargoes and trade restrictions and to comply with international law is growing.

The more the Israeli entity attempts to keep more than half the population in historical Palestine without rights, the more isolated it becomes. Advanced economies dependent on global markets and technology do not thrive when their systems are ostracized, and culture and knowledge do not flourish in states that practice bullying and supremacy. Over time, the walls of impunity will crack. When those walls fall, the entity will unravel and collapse in the end.

Scenario Four: Mass Transfer

This is the old fantasy of “transfer” dressed in modern clothing. Zionists imagine that if the entity cannot govern a people, it can remove them. They speak of “voluntary relocation” and “humanitarian corridors,” while their real logic is ethnic cleansing.

Gaza exposed the Zionist will to attempt this, but it also revealed the limits of that will. Despite two years of war — the most graphic scenes of killing and annihilation the region has seen — Palestinians did not leave; they buried their sons and stayed, and their steadfastness has become exemplary.

The West Bank offers another example of this legendary resilience. Neighborhoods, communities, and villages subjected to attacks and destruction have been rebuilt.

States in the region understood that accepting population transfer would ignite their societies, so they refused to be instruments of expulsion. The world today is connected by cameras and phones; crimes cannot be hidden as they once were.

There is nowhere to which millions can be pushed without the international system collapsing. The Israeli attempt, with virtually unlimited American support, to forcibly displace Gaza’s population over two years failed miserably.

Therefore, any future attempts to forcibly expel Palestinians from Gaza or the West Bank will accelerate the collapse of the Israeli entity’s legitimacy, prompt even hesitant states to act against it, and hasten its demise rather than slow it.

What Do the Four Paths Reveal?

Whichever scenario, the end of political Zionism is the inevitable result. Each path shows that the Zionist entity has reached the brink of its end. It cannot accept a genuine Palestinian state without abandoning the dream of permanent expansion; it cannot accept a single democratic state without ending its identity as a project of racial and religious supremacy; it cannot perpetuate apartheid without becoming globally ostracized and bleeding support and capacity year after year; and it cannot carry out mass transfer without provoking a regional and international crisis that would speed its isolation and collapse.

The question is not between victory and defeat but between different forms of strategic retreat. The crisis of the world is no longer “the Palestinian cause”; it has become “the Israeli problem” that the world must confront, challenge, and deal with.

The existing system of plunder and domination will use every tool to survive, while what is required is to end this cycle of conflict by dismantling the structures and toppling the policies that enable domination.

Dismantling Zionist Structures is the Strategic Goal

Dismantling is not a slogan but the grand strategy. Its first element is keeping people rooted to their land. Palestinians in Gaza, in the West Bank and Jerusalem, inside the 1948 lines, and in refugee camps across the region must be protected from displacement.

That requires their continued presence on their land, support for their resistance and steadfastness, an end to blockade and annexation, the release of prisoners and detainees, secure aid corridors, and funding for reconstruction without political blackmail — reconstruction to be managed by Palestinian institutions in partnership with UN agencies and friendly states, not under foreign trusteeship or military orders.

Steadfastness and resistance are the moral center of this struggle; without the people on their land, justice becomes abstract and meaningless.

The second element of dismantling is building a global movement that maps the sources of the Zionist project’s power in order to weaken and exhaust it everywhere. The movement must trace its power from political lobbying networks and financing that fund destructive activities, to financial flows that back settlements and arms, to surveillance technologies that turn cities into open prisons, to media systems that whitewash crimes as “security narratives,” to academic partnerships that normalize or justify apartheid, to military doctrines that make collective punishment a strategy, to legal shields that frustrate accountability.

Every strategy to sustain and expand the entity must be met with a counter-strategy: divestment from companies complicit in settlement and siege; linking trade and scientific cooperation to compliance with international law; imposing arms embargoes and ending exchanges of policing and surveillance technologies that enable repression; defending academic freedom while rejecting partnerships that whitewash apartheid; protecting journalists and human rights defenders; using universal jurisdiction, the ICC, and national courts to prosecute grave crimes; disrupting the financial systems that underwrite complicity; and preserving memory through archives of survivors’ testimony so that Palestinian society under occupation cannot be erased by future denial.

This movement must be transnational and inclusive. It centers Palestinians but extends beyond their efforts alone. It will need unions to shut ports to arms shipments, doctors who refuse to make medicine a weapon in war, engineers who won’t sign contracts to build bombs, weapons, prisons, or walls, artists who stir conscience, students and professors who refuse to turn universities into tools of surveillance or propaganda, faith communities and cultural institutions that assert sacred texts and moral values cannot serve as cover for cruelty or dehumanization, and global movements that coordinate efforts within a shared language of justice, rights, freedom, equality, and dignity.

It will also need Jews who oppose Zionism and reject the lie that Palestinian liberation threatens their security, as well as Muslims, Christians, adherents of other faiths, and secular people who understand that the decisive line is between right and wrong, between domination and freedom, between decent life and slavery, between a colonial reality and a decolonized future.

The moral framework for this movement is clear: Zionism is an ideology of racial supremacy and a settler-colonial project that produced an apartheid system. Zionism is not Judaism. The essence of the struggle is against an ideology, structures, and institutions that built and supported it, not against a religion or a people.

At the same time, Jew-hatred or what in the West is called antisemitism is rejected, as is Islamophobia and all other forms of racism. A system based on justice and rights will end discriminatory systems and replace them with a political order in which sovereignty belongs to the people of the land.

In the near term, the Zionist entity will try to preserve the imbalance of power in its favor: it will seek to keep the siege in place, continue annexation in the West Bank, escalate attacks on civil society and journalists, attempt to rebrand the narrative of “self-defense” stripped of context, and rely on exhaustion.

The task here is to prevent this descent by keeping cameras rolling and spotlighted, turning court orders into state policies, turning student demands into university policies, turning union decisions into changes in supply chains, and turning municipal procurement rules into bans on companies complicit in genocide. In short, we must ensure the Israeli entity pays a steep price whenever it violates the most basic standards of humanity.

In the medium term, strategic options against the Israeli entity must be reactivated through political, economic, and social pressure. Policies in some countries must move from words to deeds: suspending the entity’s membership in international forums should become a global demand, arms embargoes should become common policy, comprehensive trade and economic sanctions should be drawn up, and cultural and academic institutions should set binding ethical lines.

The entity will respond with anger and a new propaganda campaign, claiming it is being targeted. The answer must be clear: when a state commits or enables genocide and legalizes apartheid, it forfeits the right to be treated as a normal state.

October 7: Accelerating the End of Zionism

Gaza exposed illusions. It revealed the depth of Palestinian courage, steadfastness, and endurance, the cost of complicity and timidity, and the weakness of an entity that finds no recourse but to bomb hospitals and starve families to preserve a deceptive sense of security.

The four scenarios are not routes to the triumph of the Zionist project but stages in its decline. The task is to hasten that end by building a global movement commensurate with the scale of the crime and the breadth of hope: keeping people on their land, rebuilding shattered lives, ending the siege, freeing prisoners, pursuing those who give the orders and commit the crimes, and besieging the structures of domination and destruction until they are uprooted.

Justice is not a grant but the highest value; freedom is not a slogan but the central goal; independence is not a choice but an obligation; self-determination is not an illusion but the ultimate aim; return is not a dream but a right. When we take these truths as our guiding platform, the path that once seemed impossible becomes the only reasonable way. The people of Palestine have carried that truth from Nakba to Nakba, and now the world at last begins to listen and to see the truth.

(This article was originally published in Al-Jazeera Arabic. This version was translated and prepared by the Palestine Chronicle)

The views expressed in the article do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of The Palestine Chronicle.