For over a century, an entire people has been dispossessed, deported, and abandoned. Since October 8, 2023, more than 80,000 tons of bombs have been dropped on Gaza, while colonization in the West Bank continues unabated and the two-State solution drifts ever further away. Europe watches… and does nothing.

In this rigorous yet accessible essay, Bichara KHADER retraces the genesis of the Palestinian tragedy from 1897 to 2025. This is not just another history of Palestine, but a new way of looking at it—one that highlights the structural asymmetry between Israelis and Palestinians and explores the “domino effect” of the Palestinian tragedy on the Middle East, the Mediterranean, and Europe.

In the perpetuation of this tragedy, the West bears a heavy historical responsibility. The United States’ unconditional support for Israel, coupled with the European Union’s diplomacy of indifference and empty declarations, have allowed the Israeli occupation to persist, the creeping colonization of the West Bank to expand, the destruction of Gaza to continue, and Israel itself to slide into religious and supremacist extremism. In this sense, the Palestinian question exposes our moral failure.

The book concludes with a deeply humanist reflection—an invitation to both Israelis and Palestinians to break free from the ecology of pain and hatred that blocks the paths of the future, and to seek a reasonable solution to a conflict that cannot be resolved through the explosive formula “either us or them.”