Liberal institutions are designed to recognize the violence that structures Palestinian life without destabilizing the systems that produce it. Within liberal systems, the genocide in Gaza can be acknowledged—catalogued, footnoted, condemned. What remains far harder to absorb are Palestinian claims that require undoing Israeli settler colonialism itself.
Two recent episodes make this clear. In January, Doctors Without Borders (MSF) initially agreed to share the names of Palestinian staff with Israeli authorities as a condition for continuing its work in Gaza. The response was immediate and furious. Palestinians know too well what lists become: instruments of surveillance, detention, erasure. Only after sustained public pressure did MSF reverse course and refuse to comply.
Around the same time, researchers at Human Rights Watch resigned after leadership blocked a report on the Palestinian right of return. The problem was not the research. It was what the research implied. The right of return does not simply describe injustice; it insists on undoing it. As Omar Shakir noted in a recent interview following his resignation, senior leadership expressed “concern about being seen as challenging the Jewishness of the Israeli state.”
In both cases, the institutions involved have done indispensable work on Palestine. Their archives matter. Their staff are not indifferent. And yet both encountered a limit that suddenly tightened. Not a rule written down. Not a prohibition announced. A boundary sensed—felt—internalized.
That boundary is built into liberalism’s legal foundations.
1948 marks the birth of a two-tier liberal world order. In one tier, European suffering generated binding norms, and enforceable obligations. In the other, colonial violence and apartheid were rendered administratively necessary.
International law did not fail to see colonial violence; it learned to manage it. The postwar legal architecture was designed to regulate atrocity without dismantling domination, to civilize violence without undoing conquest. It promised universality while quietly accommodating racial hierarchy, territorial seizure, and permanent displacement—so long as these could be narrated as security, necessity, or history.