Zionism, and the century-long history of Palestinian opposition to it, resist easy analogizing. While the economy created by the Dutch in South Africa or the French in Algeria relied primarily on the exploitation of indigenous labor, an arrangement that made minority rule impossible to sustain, the first act of the Israeli state was to launch a war of expulsion that redrew the region’s borders and displaced 750,000 Palestinians, tipping the demographic balance in favor of Jews, who have made up around 75 percent of the population of Israel since 1948. For some, this has provided grounds for a not-unjustified pessimism about the fate of Palestinians subject to Israeli occupation and rule. In her 2000 book, Liberation and Democratization: The South African and Palestinian National Movements, the sociologist Mona Younis argued that the inability of Palestinian labor to exert influence over Israeli society had closed off the possibility of a South African–style road to democracy.

Geopolitical considerations also undermine comparisons to previous anti-colonial struggles. In the immediate aftermath of the Six-Day War between Israel and the Arab states in 1967, Palestinian organizations like the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine envisaged a conflict that could turn “the Arab region into a second Vietnam” in which Arab states could act as a “[North] Vietnam with respect to the south.” The difference, of course, was that Vietnam fought off French and American invaders by developing a sophisticated military-industrial complex supported by allies — China inconsistently and the Soviet Union throughout — who saw their own strategic interests as bound up with those of the fledgling nation. This cannot be said of the Palestinian armed resistance movement, which has enjoyed only limited support from Iran and Hezbollah. By all accounts, both parties were not even aware of Hamas’s plans on October 7.

National identities are, however, rarely dissolved by force or by the difficulty of achieving their aims; often the former serves to create collective identities rather than weaken them. The duration and cost of the Vietnamese war for unification — from 1961 to ’75, 800,000 military casualties, between two and four million civilian, widespread destruction of infrastructure — is proof that unfavorable balances of power mean little against political movements that understand their struggle in existential terms. The political scientist Stephen Walt has seen this fact as evidence of a cruel dilemma underlying modern warfare: while national identities have only become more entrenched in this century, the lethality of occupying powers’ tools for repressing them has increased by several orders of magnitude since the “golden age” of imperialism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.