It all started on October 7, 2023.

Before October 7, Palestinian life had already been shaped by 75 years of settler colonialism, apartheid, and ethnic cleansing dating back to the Nakba of 1948, when Zionist militias expelled more than 800,000 Palestinians and destroyed over 500 towns and villages. After October 7 came more of the same reality, only intensified through the genocide in Gaza.

The claim that "it all started on October 7" is profoundly dehumanizing. It demands that Palestinians constantly prove the reality of their oppression before their suffering can even be acknowledged. A century of Zionist dispossession, imprisonment, siege, and killing is treated as irrelevant, while Palestinians are expected to explain, justify, and contextualize their own extermination.

By October 2023, Gaza, like the rest of Palestine, had already endured decades of colonization, occupation, and apartheid, with 80% of its population denied the right to return to homes only kilometers away. This reality was compounded by sixteen years of blockade, which had rendered Gaza uninhabitable. By 2022, 80% of Gaza's population depended on humanitarian aid, nearly half the workforce was unemployed, and around two-thirds of Palestinians lived in poverty. Before October 7, children in Gaza had already survived at least five major military assaults, enduring loved ones killed, schools bombed, and neighborhoods reduced to rubble. The claim that history began on October 7 requires erasing all of this.

What preceded October 7 is not a matter of opinion. Long before 2023, the UN had adopted more resolutions condemning Israel's violations of international law than any other state. International and Israeli human rights organizations had concluded that Israel was imposing apartheid on Palestinians, and the International Court of Justice had ruled that Israel's settlement project unlawful. Yet these findings were met with impunity, as Israel continued to receive the military, diplomatic, and financial support that ultimately enabled the genocide.

One does not need to revisit a century of Israeli colonial violence to disprove this myth. By mid-2023, Palestinians in the occupied West Bank were already experiencing the deadliest year on record, with skyrocketing military raids, settler violence, and killings.

The fixation on October 7 reflects a broader colonial habit of treating resistance as the problem while ignoring the structural conditions that produced it. From Algeria to Vietnam, Ireland to South Africa, anti-colonial struggles have repeatedly been judged and criminalized by their response to oppression, while colonial violence itself is normalized and justified.

The "it all started on October 7" narrative transforms the colonizer into a victim acting in self-defense while rendering decades of Palestinian suffering invisible. History begins only when Israelis are harmed; Palestinian suffering is treated as background noise.

The claim that "it all started on October 7" erases a century of Palestinian bloodshed at the hands of Zionist forces. From Deir Yassin in 1948, Qibya in 1953, Kafr Qasim in 1956, Al-Aqsa in 1990, the Ibrahimi Mosque in 1994, Jenin in 2002, and repeated assaults on Gaza in 2008-09, 2012, 2014, and 2021, Palestinians have endured generations of massacres and mass violence. October 7 emerged from a brutal colonial reality.