Issue edited by François Ceccaldi (Collège de France)
The attacks carried out on October 7, 2023, by Hamas and other Palestinian groups in Israel brutally reminded the world of the harsh reality of a political situation at an impasse. The war that Israel immediately launched against Gaza and its population has above all shed light on certain structural mechanisms underlying Israel’s policy in Palestine and, more broadly, the Question of Palestine. “October 7” is not the “year zero” of the history of the “Israeli–Palestinian conflict,” but rather marks a new stage in the political and territorial dispossession of Palestine and the Palestinians — a process inscribed in a much longer historical continuum: that of collapsing empires, the long twentieth century and its two world wars, and the geopolitical power struggles waged by international actors in the Middle East, and in Palestine in particular.
Upon examination, it becomes clear that the conduct of the war in Gaza has changed little in the structure of Israel’s colonial order. Arbitrary killings, forced displacements, the systematic destruction of residential infrastructure, humiliations, the constant political disqualification of Palestinian interlocutors, the inversion of normative values, the architecture of international support for Israel, the negation and erasure of Palestinian identity, the control exerted over bodies, spaces, and narratives — all these already characterized the daily lives of Palestinians. In other words, the war in Gaza is not an accidental or contingent moment, but rather a symptomatic phenomenon of the Israeli colonial project pushed to its extreme.
The dynamics observed over the past two years nevertheless call for a critical rereading of contemporary Palestinian history. While the underlying mechanisms of the Question of Palestine may appear largely unchanged, the intensity of the violence they generated has laid bare, in starker terms, the inner workings of the colonial project. In this singular moment, when Israeli political agendas have been openly asserted, the objective of this issue is precisely to expose those mechanisms that make it possible to grasp the ongoing project of annihilation. The aim is not merely to reveal the illusion or to identify the structures of domination surrounding the Question of Palestine, but also, and above all, to restore Palestine and the Palestinians to a historicized and political narrative. From this perspective, this issue of Confluences Méditerranée also seeks to revisit contemporary Palestinian history and to re-inscribe it within a global, colonial, and interconnected historical framework, viewed through the lens of the past two years.
The ambition of this issue is to propose a theory of the disqualification of the Palestinians’ historical political claims. By this, we mean an unveiling of all the mechanisms that serve to discredit, render invisible, and deny Palestinian actors, or to marginalize their political demands. The goal is to deconstruct the notion of a supposed “complexity” of the “conflict,” which would pit two actors with symmetrical claims against each other, in order instead to restore the asymmetry, coercion, and distortion inherent in this colonial situation. By revealing the structures of domination, this issue also seeks to shed light on the forms of resistance they generate.
This call for contributions invites specialists from various disciplines to undertake a critical reassessment around three specific — though not exclusive — domains: media, law, and politics, through both historical analyses and studies of ongoing processes.
The “October 7” sequence revealed how Western media broadly relayed the arguments advanced by Israeli authorities to justify the war, to the point of legitimizing genocidal rhetoric on the international media stage. Following in the wake of authoritative works on the media regarding ordinary tools “for governing the people” (Lippmann, 1922) and for “mobilizing popular support for special interests” (Chomsky & Herman, 1988), this issue seeks to question their role in the manufacture of consent for war. Early studies on Israeli propaganda showed that systematic pressure exerted on the American media, beginning in the 1980s, led to a softening of critical coverage of Israel (R. I. Friedman, 1987). By contrast, the Palestinian narrative, deemed unreliable, was largely discredited. When it did find expression, it was neither heard nor echoed. Media coverage thus revealed a form of violence against knowledge and a practice of deceitful communication (El Sakka, 2025), undermining the production of knowledge by subaltern groups through the language of alterity — whereby colonized social groups were prevented from articulating their own systems and spaces of knowledge (Chakravorty Spivak, 1988). More recent analyses have revealed the multiplicity of methods of information distortion, complicity, abdication, and cowardice that have characterized this period (Fassin, 2024; Gresh, 2024); the establishment of a presumption of credibility for the Israeli narrative and the double standards applied in information analysis (Vescovi, 2025); the dehumanization of Palestinians (El Masry, Sawaf, King Baroudi, 2025); and the inversion of the status of victim and enemy (Perelman Becker, 2025). Taken together, these processes have contributed to the manufacture of consent for genocide. Epistemic violence within Western media infrastructures has, in turn, enabled the reproduction of Israeli media mechanisms, themselves facilitated by a European neo-colonial legacy (Matar, 2025). Within this broader ambition to construct a theory of disqualification and invisibilization, particular attention will be devoted to the role of Palestinian media — their operations, and the obstacles they face in their efforts to inform.
- Production and circulation of information;
- Discourses, images, and modes of legitimizing violence;
- Construction and reproduction of colonial knowledge;
- Informational resistance by Palestinian journalists and media in the development and dissemination of information; the role of social networks as a new platform; the weakness of the official Palestinian discourse and its dissemination.
Axis 2: Subversion of Law
Serving as both a standard and a framework for the administration of the Question of Palestine, international law has demonstrated its inability to enforce the basic principles on which it rests and to protect the Palestinian population (Sultany, 2024). Long before the war waged against Gaza since 2023, the application of the law had already failed despite the denunciation of multiple crimes committed in Palestine, whether relating to occupation or the crime of apartheid, both internationally recognized and condemned (Bisharat, 2013). The gap between legal norms and their implementation has thus gradually weakened the law. The highlighting of “double standards” in Western policies became all the more visible as it coincided with the war in Ukraine (Ceccaldi, 2023). In this sense, by exposing contradictions in the application of the law, the war in Gaza could just as easily signify either the demise or the rebirth of international law (Soufi, 2024). Recent research suggests, in fact, that the law has not been incapable or inoperative; on the contrary, it has functioned “as intended” (Dabed, 2024). The “subversion of law” has allowed, under the guise of respecting its grammar, the diversion of attention to continue the dispossession of Palestinians (Maison, 2025). Within this framework, the international legal order, based on imperial parameters, constitutes a tool for constructing the architecture of colonialism. Consequently, all legal parameters must be historically reexamined in light of recent political developments. The violence expressed in Gaza has brought to the surface long-standing political dynamics whose origins or starting points are now questioned. The ethnic cleansing of Gaza (euphemistically termed “voluntary departure”) has reinforced the idea of a “continuous Nakba,” unfolding over a long historical timeline with different phases of varying intensity but fundamentally rooted in history (Eghbariah, 2024). The massacres of Sabra and Shatila in 1982 have also been invoked to historicize the concept of genocide and to explore a “continuum of genocide” since 1948 (Seurat, 2025). Finally, the “two-state solution,” long treated as a legal totem, can today be analyzed as a mechanism of dispossession rather than a tool of emancipation, functioning as a device of subordination within an unequal and asymmetrical order (Alsajdeya, Ceccaldi, Dabed, 2021). This issue of Confluences Méditerranée will pay particular attention to contributions that situate, over the long term, legal tools or concepts traditionally invoked in the Question of Palestine, showing how they serve to disqualify or render invisible the Palestinian actors and their political claims, as well as their humanity and fundamental rights.
- Functioning of international institutions;
- Misappropriation of universal justice principles and impunity;
- Production of legal justifications and complicity of international institutions;
- Exclusion of Palestinian legal actors; disqualification of international bodies and international law principles; the two-state solution as a form of conceptual and political inertia;
- Legal and political genealogy of violence against Palestinians; historicization of legal norms; emergence of a decolonial counter-legal discourse; strategies of appropriation or reinvention of international law by Palestinian actors, lawyers, or NGOs.
The Israeli colonial order is based on a policy of territorial and political dispossession which, far from seeking to promote Palestinian self-determination—or even minimally accepting its principle—has made it impossible (Chemillier-Gendreau, 2025). Analyses of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that omit the “colonial situation” therefore overlook the full range of social, political, economic, and cultural relations produced by colonial domination (Ballandier, 1951; Bontemps, Latte-Abdallah, 2024). The war in Gaza has, however, provided a privileged moment for observing mechanisms of domination, resistance, and adaptation. The proliferation of Israeli statements calling for the destruction of Palestinians and the “recolonization” of Gaza has revealed certain structural mechanisms of territorial control and Israeli influence over Palestinian political dynamics. These mechanisms predate the war in Gaza and affect all structures of Palestinian power. The systematic disqualification of Palestinian political interlocutors, for instance, has allowed Israel to maintain controlled political instability while ensuring the continuity of the colonial order (Ceccaldi, 2023). The internal structures of negotiation, the asymmetry between the parties, and their consequences on outcomes have also played a key role in sidelining Palestinian political claims. In the early 1990s, analyses of the composition and behavior of Palestinian delegations showed that marginalizing internal leadership and frequently changing negotiators significantly weakened Palestinian performance in negotiations (Khatib, 2010). In this context, the United States also maintained an asymmetric relationship favoring Israel (Khalidi, 2014; Haniyye, 2000), reinforced by the systematic postponement of negotiations—or the “phased” approach observed today—which entrenched facts on the ground and undermined prospects for a negotiated settlement (Kodmani, 2008; Laurens, 2015). More broadly, the political deadlock imposed itself, creating an “impossible peace” between the parties (Laurens, 2015), where the illusion of a “status quo” enabled Israel to expand its territorial and political control over Palestine. The destruction of Palestinian power structures – politically, materially, and symbolically – and the obstacles to Palestinian political emancipation, of which statehood is one manifestation, have contributed to building a weak and dependent political authority reliant on third-party actors (Gijón Mendigutia, Abu-Tarbush, 2022; Qarmout, 2023; Sbeih, 2025). The “new powers of Oslo,” introduced in the early 1990s with the Declaration of Principles, thus rearticulated the occupation and transformed Palestinian political elites into a subordinate and obedient class (Alsajdeya, Ceccaldi, Dabed, 2021). Current political projects have pushed this trend to the extreme, envisioning a future without Palestinians in what can be described as “futuricide” (Latte-Abdallah, 2025). In light of the post-October 7 dynamics and what they reveal, the aim of this issue of Confluences Méditerranée is to identify all the structures that contribute to the political disqualification, invisibilization, or negation of Palestinians.
- Power structures and the colonial system as a political framework;
- The role of third-party states in maintaining political asymmetry; analysis of the effects of international aid; analysis of the “status quo” or negotiation processes;
- Mechanisms of dependency on the colonial power;
- Disqualification of Palestinian political interlocutors; instrumentalization of intra-Palestinian divisions;
- The role of Arab states.
Bibliographical references
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BISHARAT (George), « Violence’s Law: Israel’s Campaign to Transform International Legal Norms », in Washington, Journal of Palestine Studies, 2013, p. 68–84.
BONTEMPS (Véronique), LATTE ABDALLAH (Stéphanie) (dir.), Gaza, une guerre coloniale, Paris, Actes Sud, 2025.
CECCALDI (François), « La disqualification des interlocuteurs politiques palestiniens par Israël : entretien d’une instabilité maitrisée, perpétuation de l’ordre colonial ». Confluences Méditerranée, 127(4), 2023, p. 53-71.
CECCALDI (François), « La Palestine face à la guerre en Ukraine : la neutralité comme stratégie ? », in Annuaire français de relations internationales : 2023, Paris, Éditions Panthéon-Assas, 2023, p. 325–339.
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VESCOVI (Thomas), « Les médias face à la guerre. La France comme cas d’école », in BONTEMPS (Véronique), LATTE ABDALLAH (Stéphanie) (dir.), Gaza, une guerre coloniale, Paris, Actes Sud, 2025.
Instructions to Authors for the form of the articles
Proposals should be sent to ceccaldi[at]college-de-france.fr by January 1, 2026.
An answer will be sent to the authors before February 1, 2026.
Articles must be submitted before March 15, 2026.
Proposals should not exceed 4000 characters (spaces included). The proposal must be accompanied by a title (even if provisional) and a short biography of the author.
All the instructions are available here below