How Gaza broke the world-system

What does it mean when a system commits genocide?

This lecture, delivered by Iyad El-Baghdadi at the University of Oslo on Tuesday, October 21, 2025, argues that the war on Gaza is not only a political rupture but a paradigm-breaking moment - one that exposes the deep structures of the current world-system and signals its collapse.

Drawing on frameworks from Ibn Khaldun to contemporary systems theory, Iyad explores how to read this moment, locate ourselves within a generational shift, and begin the work of building what comes next.

Chapters

• 00:00 Introduction
• 08:24 First topic
• 22:10 Second topic

Transcript

I think I think we're good to start. Yeah. Before we start, I just want to get a sense of the audience, the people in the room. How many here are students in the university? Just by a show of hands, how many of you are doing Middle Eastern studies or political science? Almost everybody.

How many are Palestinian or Arab or of Arab background?

Okay. It's not very often that we get to hear Palestinians speak about the world system. A lot of the time either we're not platformed or spoken about but not really given the mic. Or we are only presented to speak about our pain and our trauma and our victimization. This is a different kind of lecture because we'll be talking about how Gaza is really changing the world and we're going to zoom out to speak about very very long historical arcs.

The news generally is used to a very fast and fast cycle where in a week you already forget last week's news and it's very disorienting. It's actually very confusing. It makes it very easy for you not to see where you are in history.

So this is the structure of the of our seminar today. It's really a simple structure if you think about it because we want to talk about the world system and how it's changing. It's two different parts. But I thought that speaking about it in that term in this kind of rhythm might might be too dry. And let's face it, we are I mean even people who are not Palestinian are feeling the heaviness of what's happening in the world. And so I thought that we should pace ourselves differently. So we're going to jump across between talking about system change and systems.

I think this is the question that's on everybody's mind at least certainly on my mind and the minds of people around me. We had been everything that we're doing in our in our lives for the past 2 years has been happening against the backdrop of genocide. This is not normal. And sometimes you have to ask what is normal even? Have we lost what what normal even means? It's two years of relentless moral injury, two years of this feeling of betrayal. And sometimes you have to ask like when does this end? Where where is it taking us? This is one of the questions I've had early on, like really right after October 7th, seeing the explosion of dehumanization of Palestinians, where is this taking the world?

Living as we are in a world order in a world system which is western dominated a lot of the time we don't really notice there are lots of frames that we just inherit we just take we don't really question maybe other people people in other cultures they see the world differently or they see history differently. If you're just joining us, can you come forward in front? Sit up here because we don't want to use a mic for the room.

I'll pause for a few minutes for people to just come forward if you're comfortable. Of course, let's start with talking about time itself, about history. We are used living in a western dominated world, Western culture to linear time. the idea that time always progresses and the past is primitive, the future is more progressive or more more evolved. It's not the only view of time and I'd like to offer you three different models of thinking about time.

There was a period of time in history where most cultures thought of time in cycles. This is because we lived closer to nature. You know, we could see thatthe moon has a has a monthly cycle, the sun has a yearly has a daily cycle, the seasons rotate. And so, it was normal for people in many cultures to think of time in cycles, in generational cycles.

The ancient Greeks, for example, thought of time in this in this in this way. And certainly the Islamic and Middle Eastern oriental, you know, oriental civilization generally uh thought of time in cycles. If you remember the movie 2012, which was about I don't know I think I'm dating myself when I make references from movies from like 10 years ago but it was a movie basically about the end of the world and it was basically um appealing to this idea that the Mayan calendar marks 2012 as the end of the world. But then this is a western interpretation. It was the end of a cycle in the Mayan calendar. There are cultures that think of cycles not only in terms of generations but millennia but cyclical time and this is the view that I adopt.

It encodes a certain view of the human being. It's a humble way of thinking about time. I'll give you a little example about uh the Arabic language itself. The Arabic word for state, a state just like Norway is a state is 'da'. The root 'da' literally means that which circulates, that which changes, which is the exact opposite of the western term state, which means that does that that doesn't change. So you can see how even our language encodes different paradigms.

So we have the cyclical view. Of course there's also progressive time or linear time which is like western modernity but also you know in a way it goes way beyond that because you know the Roman Empire for example lasted for 2,200 years. So it's normal to think for people who who grew up in this kind of this kind of part of the world to actually think okay maybe some things last forever.

There's also teological time which is messianic. The idea that the world is actually getting worse and we have to suffer. We have to somehow suffer because salvation is going to come. And we can see this in communism for example the idea that you know communism is the end of history. Liberalism as well is the end of history. We can see it also in messianic you know Christianity, messianic Zionism but also we see it recently with AI. The whole idea that we have to you know suffer with everything that AI is doing to our world because AGI is just around the corner. just suffer and salvation is coming. But here I'm going to like we're going to dig down into the cyclical view of history and we're going to talk about it for a little bit.

This is what a typical cycle looks like in in rhythmic time. You can see that every world system this this actually applies to all systems. So it's not only to the world system itself but any paradigm it goes through a cycle of emergence where a new paradigm actually a new paradigm or system emerges and it emerges out of the contradictions of the previous cycle. So you have to think of these cycles as I mean we're going to talk about how long a cycle lasts but you know it's you have to think about in generations. Um it emerges out of the contradictions of the previous cycle. So the previous cycle would have already created a lot of crisis. It's not interpreting, it's not explaining the world enough and so we need a different frame.

When the emergence happens, it's never actually one only one system which is which is emerging. It's a competition between different systems. Once a system emerges, once the system actually answers the the questions of the time and keep in mind that when I say answers the questions of the time, it doesn't mean it's the best system, I just mean that it is fit for the times. It consolidates with astonishing speed. It's kind of like selling water to a room full of people who just ran a marathon. It's a terrible thing to sell them water. I think it's better just give them water, but it's just a metaphor here. The idea here is that there's a thirst for something for something to order the world. And so it's adopted and it institutionalizes with astonishing speed until it reaches its peak.

But keep in mind that even this system, the new system was was created with its own contradictions. There are contradictions with it from the time it is born. And these contradictions are kind of like birth defects in a sense that it's not that they go away with time. They the body grows bigger and so the contradictions also grow bigger. The contradictions are never resolved. they end up expanding and expanding and expanding. The the the exceptional space becomes bigger and bigger and bigger until you reach past the peak. You go into decay. That's where the contradictions become so big that they start creating crisis. And the crisis become bigger and bigger and bigger until we get to the moment of breakage.

The moment of breakage is when the the the system or the paradigm no longer is able to fulfill its own promises. it doesn't work for a lot of people. Of course, keep in mind that for the people who are locked out of the system, the people who are marginalized, it never worked. So, they they these these will be the people who from the beginning were telling you this doesn't work, this doesn't work. They're ignored because they're marginalized and because it's working for most people.

The breakage is when it it stops working for everybody and more and more and more people find themselves on the outside. This is where we enter a period of limbo. And we're going to like zoom into the limbo a little bit more because that's that's where I believe we are. The limbo is where the old has broken, the new has not yet arrived and we are in a period of crisis.

This crisis phase can last for a long time. It can last for a generation really. There are things of course that can be done to make it last longer. There are things that can happen to make it last to to to uh that actually makes it last shorter. But eventually a shift happens and then you have a next system which answers the questions again answers the questions that were not fulfilled by the previous paradigm and then you have a new cycle and this is the way that cyclical time you know looks at history that history moves in cycles in rhythms.

So this is this is the cycle itself. I want to show you the generational view becuase at any time you have to assume that there are three coexisting generations. There are people who are today just being born. They're still children. And then there's us people in the middle of their careers and then there are people who are um you know in generational time when I say generation I don't mean the lifespan of a human being. I mean the effective life of a generation which is 25 to 40 years. uh which is to say three generations the churn of three generations would be somewhere between 75 to 90 years. This is how long the cycle lasts.

The generational view uh says that every generation is born into a different part of the cycle. So I don't know what your dates of birth are but if you are born in the 1940s50s maybe even up to the 60s then you were born in the consolidation phase of this world system. The world system the current world system was really born after the second world war. I was born in 1970s. I was born around the same the time that it peaked or it started to peak. You have to think of this in terms of what our job is because if you are born into the consolidation most probably you would be working in consolidation type jobs. The kind of work that you do in your life is basically is like okay this is something this is a system which is uh explaining the world. It's actually getting stronger. It's actually doing a lot of good things. And so you enthusiastically adopt it. If you are born into into crisis, if you're born into limbo, if you're born into consolidation, your life will look differently. This is what we're saying.

Now, let's talk about where we are right now because I believe that we are at a time of limbo. Keep in mind that so we're going to come back to the slide a little bit little bit later because here we're talking about systems. We haven't defined what a system is. We haven't looked at what systems are. But generally speaking, if you look, I actually put the UR here a little bit offset because I think we are closer to the shift than we are to the breakage. I think the breakage already happened.

In the previous slide here, I wanted to something I I forgot to mention here, which is that your positionality as as to the system itself as to whether you are one of the people who are the insiders or the marginalized makes a big difference of course on your experience. I was born as a stateless Palestinian refugee. This system has never worked for me. In fact, it was built upon you know based upon or has basically the nekba is around the same age as the system itself. So basically this has never worked for me.

So people like me would notice the breakage very early. We would start working on it much much earlier. We are in a moment here where you know when you go to a Palestine protest a lot most of the people you see are not Palestinian or Arab or Muslim. They're not people who look like me. It's people who look like everybody else. Everybody else in Norway. And this tells me that this is no longer it's not only me who's feeling it. Everybody's feeling it.

But yeah, we'll come back to to this. But I think before that, let's talk about systems. What is a system? Because a lot of the time we talk about changing the system sticking it to the system. What is a system? A system is really defined by three things. complexity, function, and endurance. By endurance, I mean that, you know, systems are not kind of onetime events. They actually do something. They're complic kind of coordination involved. But what what I'm suggesting here is that every system has to have these six functions.

And the functions are boundary system has to define who's in and who's out who does it work for. It has to have a provisioning system which is basically how is how are things how is how is material how is uh you know how are things provided within the system. There's a control which is governance etc. There's cohesion which is what is the story what is the way that we maintain cohesion. Keep inside of course cohesion means that people contribute to the system rather than are forced into the system and then there's the epistemic dimension which is how do we know how do we sense and then continuity or legacy how does the system continue

I'll offer you that this is fractal which means that you can apply it to different scales so over here you see a cell a university and a nation state and the five and the six functions a cell will have a cell membrane for example that's basically the in and out. It has metabolism in front instead of economics. It has gene regulation as a way of control. The cytokeleton basically is what keeps all of the organs together. You have receptors for basically how to know what's happening how to sense and then you have DNA replication for legacy how to keep going and I've offered this also for university and a nation state of course this is not a lecture about biology so we're not going to be speaking about cells we're going to be speaking about nation states and the world system.

If you want to take this and zoom it out to the world system then this is what it looks like and keep in mind that this world system is designed. It doesn't just happen. A lot of the time the the the success of a system, you know, when the system peaks, it actually or normalizes itself. It makes you think that this is normal and this is forever. What I'm doing here is kind of trying to strip away all of the clothing so that you can see the structure for it. It is.

So you have this system, this current world system is organized the nation states. uh the the inclusion or the right to have rights for example is citizenship uh you have visa hierarchies border regimes provisioning basically is capitalism uh financialized capitalism uh control is it's a US dominated of course the US is it's no longer a unipolar world it's kind of moving towards multipolarity but the US is still dominant cohesion the the the narrative that we use to say that this world makes sense is you know this liberal world order. uh epistemically you can say that you know how do we know we have academia we have universities such as Austin University but others we have think tanks establishing establishment media tech platforms and then you have how does this system replicate itself which is currently the centrist political establishment and it's connected elites and and uh communities.

Before we move on I want to introduce speaking and thinking in structural terms because I think a lot of the time we're used to to to talking about a lot of things in interpersonal terms but we're we are here talking about systems for example when we talk about inequality is basically saying that I don't have as much as you do but once you map that into a society into a system it becomes something else it becomes hierarchy so here I offered some examples because bigotry means I hate you but it could be private bigotry It could be that I don't like people of a certain color or a certain, you know, certain u gender or whatever. and it's only me. It's basically I don't want them in my house, etc. But it's not systemic, right? When it becomes systemic, it becomes racism, which is that the system is designed to exclude to include and exclude. Misogyny, for example, yeah, some people some some people might not like women, but then when it's actually systemized, it becomes patriarchy and so on and so forth. You have violence, structural violence, inequality, hierarchy. But I want to speak really about hierarchy. Structural structural inequality. When we say hierarchy here, I'm not talking about administrative or functional hierarchy. Functional hierarchy is basically you have, you know, a family unit, you have a team, and you need some people to do some things, some people to do other things. It's it's done for administrative purposes. It's not basically about human worth.

Um, yeah. So this is basically a slide about the differences between between structural and interpersonal and structural. We can skip this one but I want to offer you this because there's a very famous metaphor of the blind men and the elephant. I don't know if you've heard of it. Any anyone heard of it?

Great. Because it's actually very common in in my part of the world. Uh it's actually it's I think it comes actually from India. the idea that a lot of blind people were you know feeling around. There's an elephant and they're feeling around and every one of them is saying that hey I feel something something different. So some people are actually feeling the tusk and they're saying oh it's a spear. Some people are feeling its legs and they're saying it's a wall and some people are feeling the trunk and saying it's a snake but actually it's an elephant. They're all right.

When we look at this world system we see that you have capitalism. It is capitalistic and capitalism requires capitalism encodes hierarchy because capitalism cannot work. If we back it up a little bit and talk about hierarchy again what we mean by hierarchy is that the system cannot work unless there are people on top and people on the bottom. It's not just that it does that. It can't work otherwise. So basically if you have in capitalism if everybody owns assets and nobody has to work then capitalism is over. do needs some people to own assets and some people to have to subsist otherwise capitalism cannot work. So it has to have hierarchy in order to work. Similarly, colonialism requires you to have a metropole and a colony. If both of them are independent, colonialism cannot work. Similarly with neo colonialism which is basically what colonialism hap you know evolved into you need a developed world which is the creditor world and then you you need the third world or the the you know uh uh what do you say global majority or global south which are you know indebted and uh they're the source of sources of you know migrant waves and refugees etc etc with racializ racialized patriarchy of course the idea is that I believe that patriarchy has fused with racism it's become a racialized patriarchy Archy uh again you have a ladder of human worth a glo so what we have is a global cast system which has provided us with enough mobility in order to hide itself in order to tell us that actually we live in a global uh you know in a fair world but not enough mobility to threaten it to threaten the to threaten the structure or to to reveal the structure

uh what enables structural inequal hierarchy in the first place like what how does hierarchies form in the first place. Do you need inequality to pre-exist? Do you need a story to justify it? So, basically, equality is normal. I don't know if you've seen the how many of you have seen the video of the capuchan monkeys who are given, you know, one of them is given like grapes and one of them is giving cucumbers. Have you? So, it's basically a famous experiment that happened 20 years ago, I think 2003, 2004, where two monkeys are given two different uh uh foods. One of them is giving grapes which is actually has a higher calorie you know it's basically a more valuable food and the other is giving cucumbers and uh the you can actually go online and you can see the video it's really funny uh but you know the you know the capuchan monkey has a very humanlike face you know so you can see basically how it's like WTF why why are you giving me cucumber why is he getting the grapes and I'm getting the the cucumbers right so like he actually throws it at the takes the the cucumber throws it at the the the the lecture the sorry the the the experimentter and this tells you this is this actually you can there's there's actually a page on Wikipedia you can go into and you can say it's there's there's a whole field of study called inequity aver aversion uh even crows and dogs and different kinds of like basically a lot of animals not even humans are aver have this aversion to inequality what I'm trying to say is that equality is normal equality is built into us the idea that we should get we we are alike and we should have equal things. It's it's normal. What does it take for you to convince you of hierarchy to make you contribute and live in a world in hierarchy? You need a story. A story that justifies why some people are going have have to be on top and some people have to be at the bottom. You also need structural violence because you need structural violence here does not mean beating people. It means harming people. Harm is is a bigger word than than than physical violence. And then you have shame. Shame is basically the psychological part of hierarchy. You need to be shamed in order to comply. So yeah, equality is normal. Hierarchy requires a story.

Um coming back to the world system itself and how it evolved. I think I'm going to run through this very quickly because it might be it might take a long a long time but I'll give you the milestones. 1945 the end of the second world war.

Um in 1974 you have the petro dollar system which actually established the US dollar as the world reserve currency. Uh and in meshed it with oil with uh with you know the Gulf states. Uh 1991 you have the end of the Soviet Union and the start of this narrative about the end of history. This is where the system actually peaked. Uh 2008 you have a financial crisis that we have still have not recovered from. It's things have gotten worse since then. Uh in 2011 you have the Arab Spring when people like me got onto the world stage and then finally 2023 we have Gaza the genocide which is a paradigmatic signal that the system is coming to its end.

Um but we look now at this is the same slide as before but I want you to consider that every one of these functions is in crisis. Every one of these functions is in crisis.

When it comes to boundaries, we have I mean I was stateless until two years ago. Uh but then we have a migrant crisis. You have a refugee crisis. Keep in mind that Gaza is also a refugee crisis. A lot of the people in Gaza are themselves refugees or the children of refugees. And then they cannot leave because if they leave that's ethnic cleansing and if they stay is genocide. uh capitalism is already you know we already have a a uh a crisis of extreme wealth inequality where the 1% are getting more and more and more and uh people are you know you know people have to work longer hours they have to subsist etc. Uh when it comes to control uh again you have a world which is you know the control mechanism itself democracy itself is in is in danger. We have a democracy crisis. We have a cohesion crisis when it comes to people feeling we live in an unfair world. We have an epistemic crisis because the truth is no longer protected. Uh whether it's on social media platforms or AI etc. the truth itself is no longer protected or sacred. and and certainly we have a continuity crisis because there is a a worldwide collapse in the political center. the political center which was this mechanism of like how do we get how you know people basically uh in power or always part of this elite or connected to these elites uh they're in crisis across the world and you can see basically the rise of the far right and the far left mostly the far right and we'll talk about that why

so here I'm going to talk a little bit about why Israel is so exceptional in this world systems itself is a European an project by European Jews fleeing European persecution. Uh the founders of the state of Israel are European Jews. They're not, you know, there there are lots of Jews across the world. Certainly lots of Jews in the Arab world. U the the Arab Jews at the time were actually part of the Arab National Project, Arab Anticolonial Project. Uh Israel basically hijacked uh Jewish agency across the world and basically made it a European consciousness.

Uh but keep in mind that every system when it is created needs to create an exceptional space. It needs to create a space where the rules don't apply because that's part of sovereignty. Sovereignty means that you can break your own rules. Only you can break the rules. Nobody can but you can. That's what's make you sovereign. Um this world system needed to create an exceptional space. U how do you so keep in mind that I said that the world order this current world system started in 1945. What was the previous order? The previous order I would say started in the mid uh 19th century maybe around 1848 and that was a system that was a world system which uh um combined colonialism with nationalism. So the late the the late 19th century was basically the scramble of Africa for for Africa. Uh Africa was entirely colonized between you know around 1880 and uh and uh 1914. Uh but you also have the rise of nationalism. So for example in the mid uh 19th century Germany was not a unified state. Italy was not a unified state. Uh uh Germans lived in multiple countries for example. What happened within before before the second world war is uh is this consolidation where European nations organized themselves into nation states ethnic nation states um and then they colonized the world. Of course colonialism started a lot longer a lot before that but this it kind of became the global regime around around that time.

How is it that the nations that gave us colonialism, two world wars, 100 million people dead, you know, globalized racial racial hierarchy came out of the second world war saying we are the good guys.

Well, you create you absolve yourself by by uh um claiming moral authority and avoiding self-crutiny by creating this space called Israel where you say we are no longer racists. We're no longer fascists. We're no longer Nazis. Uh look, we're actually the people who were who suffered for a thousand years under European anti-semitism now have their own states. And this state is fully integrated with us. It's it's part of our family of nations. It's part of our western order.

So you have this I mean a little note about knowledge tools over here and I call I I mean I I might be saying a lot of things about AI my my you know anxiety around AI but actually it is still a very useful tool. Um, and so I would encourage you to take everything. I mean, we might make the the presentation available for download for people who want who want that. But I would encourage you to take any of that and throw it at Chad GPT and see what it says and it'll it'll come up with interesting questions. But you can ask this question, in what ways is Israel exceptional in history? Has there anything has there there been anything in history which is similar to Israel? the idea of ethnic nationalism on someone else's land or the idea of a state which is so desperately dependent on constant western aid but entirely hegemonic when it comes to its own region um but also a state which was created by genocide you know by survivors and and uh you know survivors of genocide themselves.

Keep in mind of course uh this is a narrative which is used a lot that uh uh Israel was created by Holocaust uh refugees or Holocaust uh survivors. It's not entirely true because the the the Zionist project goes way be before the second world war um and the state of Israel the the relationship between uh uh the state of Israel and Holocaust actual Holocaust refugees people who are liberated from the camps is very complicated but you can still see it. Netanyahu, for example, recently in a in a in a speech referred to how Israel after October 7th, he's like, "We were not we fought back and we were not uh driven to the slaughter." This is a reference within Israeli society to the Holocaust refugees. Uh there was a shame of that that you know that so many Jews were were driven to the slaughter and they didn't fight back. There is something about um and here I'm I'm kind of treading carefully here because that this this what I'm saying here might get me in trouble but there's something about how Palestinians have resisted for 100 years that is very very very frustrating not only to the world order but especially to Israelis.

So anyway, Israel is a very exceptional project. It's a very exceptional space. But I want to offer you that the Gaza genocide is also extremely exceptional. And sometimes because we're living through it, we don't really realize just how exceptional it is. This is not only Israel's crime. Going back to the six functions of a system, if you look at every function, you will see that the western order is deeply implicated in every part of the genocide.

This is the west genocide and the west the western system cannot stop it without u indicting itself and it cannot uh ignore it without uh sorry I'm looking at my own slide without exposing itself. Keep in mind that sorry I want to take a little break. Um can I get some water? my my my throat is getting dryly that my throat is getting dry and partly that this is emotional. This is hard and it's hard especially for a Palestinian to speak about Palestine during genocide.

But what I'm offering to you here is that nothing is going to go back to normal after this. It can't. uh every part, as I said, every part of the system is implicated. You can see right now that a lot of nations, for example, are uh doubling down on the two-state solution and recognizing Palestine. And you might think that this is actually happening for the benefit of Palestinians. It's not. It's happening in order to make their own policy coherent because if they actually acknowledge what's happening, it's a genocide, this is aparthide, this is settler colonialism, then they have to change their policy and they they can't. if acknowledging, you know, recognizing a Palestinian state and saying two-state solution, two-state solution like it's some kind of mantra, uh, is a way to actually keep their own policies coherent because otherwise they'll have to change radically and, uh, and the system cannot have that.

But what I'm offering here is the Gaza genocide is an exceptional event. It's a border. It's a it's a paradigmatic event. It's paradigmatic signal and nothing is going to go back to normal after this.

Let's get back to the cycle and the limbo phase. And you'll notice on the side that I mentioned that um there are four responses in the in a period of limbo.

What a limbo means really is that the promises of the system are no longer being fulfilled. The contradictions are there for everyone to see and there's a demand for a new system. there's a demand for solutions and there's normally uh these four different reactions. There are reactionaries who are who will tell you let's go back. This is not working. Let's go back. The problem of course is that there's no back to go to uh the the world has already changed. Uh the structure has changed. History has moved forward and so the the the the solutions of the past can't work. Uh but it's just that these reactionaries normally are part of the people who the system was created for. The system worked for them. The system was built for them. And as the systems contradictions became bigger, they they were the the coverage that they were receiving is less and less and less. So ultimately they're like wait this used to work for us. Why don't we just go back? Everything will be fine.

Keep in mind that reactionaries today you can see the rise the rise of the far right everywhere. Reactionaries can never actually offer you another solution. they can't really offer a solution. When they are in power, they create they they increase the crisis. They actually make the problems worse. They never actually solve it. Their role in a cycle actually is accelerators. They accelerate the crisis. So you can see for example that yeah, someone like Trump can can make it into power, but then once they're in power, they don't really solve the problem. They don't really create a new system. They just create more crises that actually accelerate the turn.

Then you have nihilists. The nihilists basically were never covered by the system and they're like this really sucks. Let's just burn it all down. I think of ISIS but I also think of a lot of other people who might not be religious but they still think in the same same sense that you know this is not working. Let's just burn it all down.

You have the centrists who are still part of the system and they deny that everything anything is happening and as time goes on they become more and more and more ridiculous because everybody can see it except them. Uh the thing is it's not that they cannot see it, it's that they cannot afford to see it. They cannot actually you know it's not the moment they say we can see it then they have to offer a solution but they can't.

And finally have the visionaries and the visionaries will say you know this is not working we need to replace it. So there's a there's a very big difference here when you say it's not working we need to tear it down or when you say it's not working we need to replace it. If you if you do the first you become a nihilist and you just basically build uh an organization which is hellbentil on destroying everything. But if you if you do think in terms of we have to replace it then you have to be an architect. You have to think in systems and you have to think how do we replace this.

Um the visionaries uh normally are populated. I mean it's not it's not that the visionaries are always people who are marginalized but a lot of marginalized people end up as visionaries because they were never included in the in the previous cycle and you know they were not never never covered. So it makes sense for for me as someone who's a Palestinian stateless refugee to to be working on the next system because this system was never my home. In a way creating a new system is a way of creating a home.

So if we say that we have to create a new world system then what does it mean and let's look back at the work ahead and we say that there are six functions to a system these are the questions that we have to answer on this slide you have an entire menu of change and if you're young and if we acknowledge that you're living in a period of limbo and that you're going to live hopefully long enough to see the next system arise and maybe even become one of his consolidators. This is your work. What you're seeing here is your life, the rest of your life.

Um, this is also how we think about ourselves in Kawakab Foundation. This is how we think about our work and our project. And so whenever we we we pull this and we look at it and we're like, okay, are we answering this? Of course, we know that this is not the job for a single organization or a single team. This is a job for entire generation or really for the entire world.

What does it take in order to work on systems? Like what does it take in order for you to um disconnect yourself from the churn of the here and now and and start to think in longer terms. I want to offer you this other model because earlier we looked at this cycle u and uh this is not the only this cycle runs in generations like I said it's not the only cycle it's represented by the middle one which is historical time which runs in generations and this is where actual system change happens and paradigms shift but then there's a much bigger cycle which has cosmological time this is the rise and fall of um conceptions of the human being, worldviews, cultures, religions, spiritual uh movements,

um Europe itself is going through its own cosmological transition because Europe used to think of itself in terms of Roman, you know, basically Roman Christian fusion. And then in this in the 18th century, you had enlightenment, secular humanism, etc. And that's another cosmology. It's another view of the human being. And it's not complete. Cosmological cycles run in millennia. So in a way it's still in transition. Um and but then cosmological time is such a long arc that it it blends into the background. We normally don't really think of it. It's just in the background of our of our minds even though sometimes it becomes relevant.

And then you have political time which is I think everyone is familiar with political time. It's crisis time. It's basically the week's news and we get stuck into it and it gets faster and faster and faster. uh political time is conservative in a political sense. It's conservative in a sense that it favors people who already have power. So political time means that if you already have power, you already have a platform, you already have a media organization or you have you know media infrastructure, you will be louder. And so so long you are stuck in political time, you cannot really build power. Political time favors the already powerful.

Most of our activism is actually trapped in political time. Most of our activism is stuck in the news cycle because we want visibility. We want views and the algorithms unfortunately also feed that. Um, and I'm not saying here that all of us should exit political time. Some people still have to go to the protests. Some people still have to to do interviews and do vi, you know, actually achieve virality. But then if all of us are in political time and nobody's in historical time, then you know we're not really changing anything. Um we're we're deepening the uh the the the crisis of the system.

We have to work in historical time at least my team certainly we work in historical time but also we there is a skill there of living between on the on the border between historical time and political time where you can say that I can go into political time. I can write something which is highly relevant to the news today but it pulls people towards thinking in systems. This is the kind of um work that I like to think that we want to do and we do at Kawaki.

Um finally I'm got coming to the end of the of of my presentation here. I think I've kept time really really well. Uh but a note about listening to Palestinians because like I said at the at the beginning, we don't really um I mean I I follow a lot of independent media that actually speaks a lot about Palestine and you know what's missing? Palestinians. They speak about Palestine a lot, but it's very rare that that that they would give Palestinians the platform, especially to give them the platform to speak about uh the world. not only to speak about who died last week or how do they feel about their pain, but really like how do we how do you think about history? How do you think about change?

Um Edward say uh Palestinian American author and uh and academic. He coined the word the the the the expression the victims of the victims and the refugees of the refugees. Uh I'm reminded here with by uh a news uh segment that I saw this was two years ago, three years ago before the Gaza genocide. It was after the the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Um and it was a news a news item about Ukrainian refugees, Jewish Ukrainian refu refugees who were displaced by the war. And so they ended up in Israel and Israel took them and gave them a house in the West Bank in a settlement on someone else's land. And the idea here is that Palestinians are at the end at the bottom of the oppression food chain where we are the victims of the victims of the victims and the refugees of the refugees of the refugees.

Uh Palestinian identity itself is very radical because there's nothing in this world system for us. There's nothing in this world system that offers us a home. Which is why if you are genuinely Palestinian, if you are Palestinian, you have to embrace that radicalness. The idea that we have to uh create a home for us, but for everyone, maybe it's time for the refugees of the refugees and the victims of the victims to offer offer everybody, all of us salvation and a home.

If you go into uh any protest, you see that uh like I said, we're not the only ones there, but also that the our flag, the Palestinian flag, has become really the flag of change. It's not really only a national flag anymore. You see it when people want to express that this system is not working and we need a replacement. So, Palestine has become so much bigger than Palestine and it's actually a challenge to us. It's uh it's an both an opportunity and a challenge to us as Palestinians because here we have to decide who we want to be. Do we want to be another national project or do we want to be a global project of collective liberation and systems change?

Um a note over here about generations because I talked a lot about longtime cycles and generational cycles. Uh this didn't start in in October 7th. We know that um in a way it started in 1917 with the Balffor declaration. Keep in mind that the Balffor declaration was declared even before the British occupied Palestine. Uh but in certain ways it actually precedes that. Um it's been I mean I mean u Rashid Khaled who who wrote the book at the hund 100 years war on Palestine he very specifically uh talked about it in generations and like in u in uh wave after wave of attack on Palestinian identity.

Here's the thing in 100 years Palestinians never won but we were never defeated. In a 100 years many things changed in the world like the USSR came and went. um regimes fell you know came and fell technologies came and came and went. One thing has been a constant for more than 100 years which is Palestinians have been resisting. This is exceptional because just like Israel is exceptional, the Gaza genocide is exceptional. I believe the Palestinian people are exceptional and we are offered here both an opportunity and a challenge and a weight uh you know to to offer the world a better place to offer the world you know uh to create a system which can include all of us and this word all of us is where I want to speak about our platform which is launching next year.

Kawaakibi Foundation is an organization which was born out of the Arab Spring. Uh I am certainly an Arab Spring refugee. Uh the founders of the team, the co-founders of the team also were Arab Spring refugees from all across the Arab world. But once we came to Norway uh we started also expanding our team. So it's not only people who are like me but also people who are like Kristine and people who are not you know not from the Arab streets but people who are coming here for from from a different different place.

So with a different vision means all of us. It literally means all of us. The word Kulna means all of us in Arabic. And this is exactly what we mean. We we mean collective liberation.

The platform is not launched yet. It's going to be launched next year. But you have the QR code here and you can follow us on Instagram and you can get a little bit more regular updates about what we're doing. And with this I say thank you and we have about half an hour for discussion and for questions and answers and yeah thank you very much.