THERE is a structure at work. Not a war. Not a conflict. A structure. Patrick Wolfe, the scholar who defined settler colonialism for the modern era, gave us its engine in one sentence: “Settler colonialism destroys to replace.”

That sentence is not history. It is today’s headline. It is the rubble of Gaza. It is the gallows being erected inside Israeli prisons. It is the expletive-laden threats screaming out of Washington. It is the silence from Whitehall.

We are living through the normalisation of annihilation. And we must name it, precisely, without flinching.

Since October 2023, Israel has transformed Gaza into what UN genocide scholars now formally call the site of a genocide. The world’s largest professional body of genocide academics — the International Association of Genocide Scholars — voted, with 86 per cent in favour, to formally confirm that Israel’s actions constitute genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity.

The UN Special Rapporteur on Palestine, Francesca Albanese, was unequivocal: “Israel’s genocide on the Palestinians in Gaza is an escalatory stage of a long-standing settler colonial process of erasure.” A process. Erasure. Not a battle. A project.

The numbers do not lie, and the numbers are not abstract. The UN satellite agency Unosat confirmed in October 2025 that 81 per cent of all structures in the Gaza Strip have been damaged. Eighty-one per cent. The UN estimates 60 million tons of rubble — the equivalent of 13 Great Pyramids — now covers what was once a living civilisation. Ninety-four per cent of Gaza’s hospitals are damaged or destroyed. The World Bank estimated reconstruction costs at a minimum of $53 billion. The Lancet’s Gaza Mortality Survey found that 3.4 per cent of Gaza’s entire pre-war population of 2.2 million has been violently killed — with women, children and the elderly accounting for 56.2 per cent of those deaths. One in three Palestinian women, children and elderly people struck down. That is not collateral. That is intent.

This is what settler colonialism does. It does not merely kill. It destroys to replace. It eliminates not just people but the social formations — the hospitals, the universities, the water systems, the cultural memory — that sustain people’s capacity to remain. Israel has destroyed all 12 of Gaza’s universities. Eighty per cent of its schools. Seventy-seven percent of its roads. The logic Wolfe identified — the “logic of double elimination,” targeting both a people and the infrastructure of their survival — is being executed in real time, in full view, on our screens.

On March 30 2026, the Israeli Knesset passed — with 62 votes in favour, after dismissing over 2,000 objections — a law establishing the death penalty exclusively for Palestinians. Executions by hanging, within 90 days of sentencing, by military courts in the occupied West Bank, with no right of appeal and no possibility of pardon. No unanimous verdict required. A simple majority kills. The Israeli Prison Service has already constructed what it calls its “Green Mile”  — a dedicated execution facility. The gallows have already been built. Currently, around 9,500 Palestinians are held in Israeli prisons. Many are held without charge. Al Jazeera reported that dozens have already died in custody, some under torture, others through deliberate medical neglect. Some 350 children are also held.

This is not a justice system. This is pacification. It is the continuation of settler colonialism by judicial means. As Frantz Fanon understood “the colonised is always alert since he lives in occupied territory,” the settler project cannot tolerate resistance, so it seeks to break it, to make resistance unthinkable, to eliminate not just the resisters but the very idea that resistance is possible. The gallows are not punishment. They are a message: you cannot resist and survive.

Israel’s violence in Lebanon should not be treated as a separate theatre of war, but as an extension of the same settler-colonial logic. Recent reports describe an Israeli plan to occupy parts of southern Lebanon, destroy border towns, and maintain a “security zone” that could bar hundreds of thousands of Lebanese people from returning home. Scholars have argued that this violence must be understood within settler colonialism because it seeks to reshape demographic and geographic reality through force, displacement and permanent control. In that sense, Lebanon is not a detour from Palestine; it is the widening of the same frontier.

Meanwhile, Washington threatens the region. As of this week, US President Donald Trump has issued expletive-laden ultimatums on social media, threatening to bomb Iran’s power plants, bridges, and civilian infrastructure unless Iran reopens the Strait of Hormuz by a Tuesday evening deadline. He wrote: “Open the F–kin’ Strait, you crazy b-stards, or you’ll be living in Hell.” He signed it: “Praise be to Allah.” He told Fox News he was “considering blowing everything up and taking over the oil.” Under international humanitarian law, attacks on objects indispensable to civilian survival are prohibited and may constitute war crimes. Already, Iran reports that approximately 81,000 civilian sites have suffered damage, including 275 medical centres and nearly 500 schools.

This is imperialism performing itself without disguise. The People’s Dispatch website identified it precisely: this is the miscalculation of the century — the belief that fire, threats and imperial swagger can hold together a world order built on the elimination of indigenous peoples and the exploitation of their land. The same world order that built Gaza’s cage is now threatening Tehran’s lights.

And Britain? A tribunal report led by Jeremy Corbyn, published on March 16 2026, found that Britain has failed every single legal obligation under international and treaty law, and has been an active participant in crimes against humanity. Not a bystander. An active participant. Through continued arms exports, RAF surveillance flights over Gaza suspected of providing intelligence to Israel, and the provision of diplomatic cover. Between October and December 2024 alone, Britain approved £127.6 million in single-issue arms licences to Israel — more than the total approved between 2020 and 2023 combined. Britain makes 15 per cent of every F-35 combat aircraft. BAE Systems manufactures every rear fuselage. Those fuselages carry bombs that fall on Gaza. Britain’s own Health Secretary, Wes Streeting, privately acknowledged in messages that “Israel is committing war crimes before our eyes.” Yet the arms continued. The silence continued. The complicity continued.

Fanon wrote: “Each generation must discover its mission, fulfil it or betray it.” This generation of British political leadership has, with full knowledge and deliberate choice, chosen betrayal.

As Professor Jeff Halper said on a recent panel discussion organised by the Arab Organisation for Human Rights in Britain, to which I also spoke, settler colonialism is not solved by ceasefires that allow the structure to remain. It is not solved by aid trucks permitted through a checkpoint, nor by the diplomatic theatre of a two-state solution offered by the same powers that fund the one state currently eliminating the other. The International Association of Genocide Scholars, the International Court of Justice, the UN special rapporteur, and the Lancet have given us the evidence. The March 2026 tribunal has given us the indictment of Britain. The ICC referrals now in motion may give us the prosecutions.

But the structure itself — the settler colonial structure that runs from the Nakba of 1948 through the blockade of Gaza, through the gallows now being prepared in Israeli prisons, through every F-35 component manufactured in a British factory — that structure must be dismantled. Fully. The solution is decolonisation: the unconditional right of return for Palestinian refugees, the dismantling of apartheid infrastructure, the end of the military occupation, the prosecution of those responsible for genocide, a global arms embargo enforced without exemption for F-35 components, and the construction of genuine international accountability mechanisms that cannot be vetoed by the powers most invested in maintaining the colonial order.

As Rosa Luxemburg understood: “Those who do not move, do not notice their chains.” The chains are visible now. The movement is necessary now.

The perpetrators stand named before history and before law: the Israeli state, which has enacted a race-specific death penalty for Palestinians and reduced a civilisation to rubble; the United States government, whose president threatens to bomb power plants and “take the oil” while signing threats in the name of God; and the British government, which — in full knowledge of genocide, with private acknowledgment of war crimes by its own ministers — continued to manufacture and export the instruments of mass killing, wrapped in the language of international law it has systematically betrayed.

History will not be merciful to them. Neither will justice.

Claudia Webbe was the member of Parliament for Leicester East from 2019-24. You can follow her at www.facebook.com/claudiaforLE and x.com/claudiawebbe.