The Empire Does Not Understand—You Cannot Erase a People Rooted in Their Land

As U.S. power fades, its allies face a choice: stay in line or break free. And if Trump returns, the real question isn’t what America’s enemies will do—but what its friends might finally dare.

There is something almost mystical about the arrogance of empire., the way it tries to dictate history, to erase people as if they were mere ink smudges on a map. It moves with the confidence of a God, scattering destruction, convinced that fire can silence memory, that bombs can bury a people’s will.

But some people are not meant to vanish. Some people carry their land within them, in their blood, in their breath. Some people turn ruin into resistance, turn exile into return, turn death into defiance. These people are Palestinian. And these people will remain.

The decline of the U.S. empire isn’t just shaking up its adversaries, it’s leaving its allies scrambling, unsure if the ground beneath them is still solid or if the cracks are now too deep to ignore. Trump’s America is more erratic, more isolationist, more transactional. Foreign aid? Slashed. Trade alliances? Disrupted. Ukraine? Suddenly up for debate. And all the while, the culture wars rage at home, sucking up the oxygen, leaving little room for the world beyond America’s borders.

For decades, Washington’s dominance meant Europe and the Arab world played by its rules. U.S. military backing, economic deals, and diplomatic cover came at a price — compliance. But what happens when the empire starts turning inward? When NATO allies realize that support could disappear with a tweet? When Gulf states see Washington’s interests shifting away from their region? When even Israel, despite the billions in military aid, is forced to wonder if the U.S. will still be calling the shots tomorrow?

And in that uncertainty, something else is emerging — an opportunity. A weakened U.S. means fewer levers of control. It means a world where Europe and the Arab world no longer have to toe the line, where accountability for Israel’s genocide in Gaza is no longer just a moral argument but a geopolitical calculation. It means governments forced to choose between their own interests and the crumbling promises of an empire in decline.

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Watch Dr. Cornell West speak truth to power

Trump Says What Other Presidents Do

Donald Trump, never one for subtlety, has done what every American president before him has done, except he has removed the mask. “Why would Palestinians want to return?” he asked, with the bewilderment of a man who has never understood what it means to belong to a place, to carry its soil beneath one’s nails, to know its air as intimately as a mother’s voice.

Gaza, he declared, is hell. And yet, he said this while sitting next to the devil who lit the fire, the man who turned Gaza into an inferno with American bombs and unrelenting diplomatic cover.

This is the grotesque spectacle of empire in decline, its cruelty naked, its moral decay laid bare, its servants unashamed.

The genocide in Palestine does not pause — it shapeshifts.

While the world whispers of ceasefires, the killing continues, rebranded, repackaged, sold as restraint to those too numb to question.

In the West Bank, the land is stolen in daylight, olive trees uprooted, villages erased, settlers carve their names into history with fire, soldiers pull sons from their beds, bodies disappear into prisons without names.

In Gaza, the bombs take turns with the siege, they use starvation as a weapon, disease as a sentence, with aid flowing, just enough to watch them wither, not enough to let them live, they starve to stay alive. Beyond the rubble, another war rages, a war on truth, waged in silence.

The first world leader welcomed to the White House wasn’t just any ally, he was a war criminal, wanted by the International Criminal Court. An arrest warrant with his name on it, yet here he was, shaking hands, smiling for the cameras, business as usual.

And just like before, justice wasn’t just ignored, it was actively undermined. President Trump signed an executive order authorizing sanctions against anyone working on ICC investigations into U.S. citizens or allies like Israel. A move ripped straight from his first-term playbook: protect the powerful, punish those who seek accountability.

This isn’t new. Washington has always had a habit of rewriting the rules when the crimes hit too close to home. War criminals get red carpets. Those who expose them get blacklists. Voices censored, protests criminalized, hands that feed the slaughter still writing its unjustifiable justifications.

But something is shifting.

The old order is breaking. The empire is unraveling, not with a grand collapse, but in slow, messy fractures alliances strained, power slipping, old certainties fading. And in that unraveling, there is an opening. For too long, fear and complicity have kept the world in check, forced governments to play along while justice was sidelined. Small cracks can let more of the light in.

The cracks in empire widen, self-defense becomes indefensible, people see through the smoke, and for the first time in a long time, power trembles at growing chorus.

It is hardly surprising that when Trump calls for ethnic cleansing, Washington barely recoils. They may clutch their pearls, issue their statements, perform their politically expedient outrage, but the truth is, America has always endorsed this policy. It has only hidden it behind humanitarian and security concerns.

Selective Outrage, Predictable Politics

And so the theater continues.

Yesterday, Congressman Al Green introduced Articles of Impeachment against Trump, citing his call for ethnic cleansing. A noble gesture, one could think until one asks: where was this moral clarity when Biden was doing the same? Where was this conviction when Biden funneled bombs into Gaza, ensuring that nearly 100,000 tons of explosives transformed it into the hell Trump now so casually describes?

Why was there no impeachment when Biden, ever the seasoned politician, tried to brand forced displacement as a humanitarian corridor? He failed to convince Egypt, so instead, he simply let Israel do what it does best: carpet-bomb Palestinians into oblivion.

And still, Palestinians remain.

The Unrelenting War on Palestinian Existence

Since the so-called ceasefire, Israel has killed over 80 Palestinians in Gaza. In the West Bank, the death toll continues to rise to more than 70 this year alone, among them 10 children. The ruins of Jenin and Tulkarem whisper their warnings: what has happened to Gaza is now happening here. The same blueprint, the same merciless siege, the same methodical destruction of life. They are attacking hospitals, prevent preventing ambulances from recovering the injured, dedicating dozens of homes. War crime after war crime.

In Tulkarem, they have cut off water and electricity, letting thirst gnaw at families before the bombs do. In Gaza, the air itself is hostile, thick with death, heavy, and devoid of mercy. The occupation does not kill only with bullets and fire. It kills with hunger. It kills with disease and dysentery. It kills by making life unlivable.

For 76 years, Israel has tried to force Palestinians to flee. Even after 15 months of genocide, it has failed. Because this is what indigenous people do. They remain. Not simply out of defiance, but because the land is not just where they live, it is simply who they are.

The Crime of Existence

And so the empire stammers because it does not understand.

The White House press secretary tells the world that the real crime is not the destruction of Gaza. Not the genocide. Not the starvation. No, the real crime, she suggests, is that Palestinians refuse to leave. That they insist on existing. That they insist on returning to a land America and Israel have spent decades trying to erase.

This is the sickness of empire. It builds its power on destruction, then acts bewildered when the people it seeks to erase refuse to disappear.

And yet, for all its weapons, for all its influence, for all its unyielding propaganda, America cannot will Palestinians into oblivion.

Donald Trump will not conjure up what Biden’s bombs could not produce. Netanyahu can humiliate America on the world stage, can make its leaders bow and scrape, can expose the bipartisan consensus that keeps Israel above the law, but he cannot erase a people who refuse to be erased.

Because the land remembers. The people remember. And no matter how many homes are reduced to rubble, no matter how many lives are stolen, no matter how many governments endorse the crimes of ethnic-cleansing and genocide, occupation and apartheid — one truth has held for 76 years: Palestinians remain.

If the U.S. can no longer dictate the terms, maybe, for the first time in a long time, there is space to challenge what once felt untouchable. Maybe the voices that have been silenced will finally be heard. And maybe, just maybe, in the absence of American hegemony, justice can begin to take shape.

What this region craves, what it deserves, is not more hollow words but a profound shift, a new security vision that not only ends Israel’s occupation and dispossession of Palestinians but builds on the fragile peace emerging from the Chinese-brokered Saudi-Iran thaw.

This isn’t just about Washington losing power. It’s about whether its allies, long held in check by American influence, finally start using their own. And with Trump’s return, accelerating this unraveling, the real question isn’t whether U.S. adversaries take advantage it’ll be whether its so-called friends decide to stop playing by its rules.