The People Without a Map: Diaspora, Conscience, and Palestinian Recognition

Two years after the onset of the Gaza genocide, the State has vanished, but the people remain. Across the world, the Palestinian diaspora embodies a conscience that refuses erasure.

François Vadrot, Oct. 7, 2025                           

Silhouette of Gaza, void at the heart of a sky saturated with stars. Around the darkness, the light — that of the living dispersed.

On October 7, 2023, what was first presented as a new “war” between Israel and Hamas marked instead one of the most violent episodes in a process that began in 1947: the progressive destruction of the Palestinian people. Two years later, the military fiction has collapsed. It was not a war, but an annihilation.

And yet, beyond the ruins, Palestine endures through its diaspora — a people without a map, but not without memory. This recognition, the acknowledgment of the Palestinian People on the same moral level as the Jewish People, now defines the century’s deepest moral fault line.

Gaza, Destruction, and the Return of the Real

Two years after October 7, 2023, the truth can no longer be evaded: Gaza did not endure a war but a genocide. The report of the United Nations Independent International Commission of Inquiry, published on September 16, 2025, formally concludes that Israel has committed, and continues to commit, acts constituting genocide as defined by the 1948 Convention. The experts document, with evidence, the four legal criteria: “killing members of the group, causing serious bodily or mental harm, inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about its destruction, imposing measures to prevent births,” with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, the Palestinian people of Gaza.

The report dismantles the fiction of a “war”: these are not “disproportionate operations,” but a systematic campaign of destruction. Civilians were the target — bombings on evacuation zones, executions inside shelters, hospitals and schools razed, water and power infrastructures annihilated, the deliberate use of starvation as a weapon (the blockade of infant formula, fuel, and water). The report details the targeting of children — “including toddlers shot in the head and chest” —, the destruction of Gaza’s only in-vitro fertilization clinic, and the repeated use of sexual violence as a tool of domination. Even symbols of continuity — mosques, churches, cemeteries, universities — were deliberately obliterated.

The numbers defy language: over 50,000 dead, 83% civilians, 200,000 homes destroyed, and 1.5 million people displaced in a strip rendered uninhabitable. A military expert cited by the UN notes that Israel “dropped in one week more bombs than the United States did in an entire year in Afghanistan.” The report concludes: “There was no military necessity to justify this pattern of conduct. The people of Gaza, as a whole, were the target.”

What has been destroyed is not merely life, but the very condition of living. What collapses under the ruins is not a political entity — it is the possibility of inhabiting the world.

Yet precisely in this total negation appears the trace of survival: where the land is destroyed, memory expands.

A Global Diaspora, Mirror of Erasure

Since the Nakba of 1948, Palestine has dispersed and reconstituted itself in exile. Of the nearly fifteen million Palestinians worldwide, more than half live outside their homeland. Six million are registered as refugees with UNRWA — a displaced people whose condition of exile has become hereditary.

The Palestinian diaspora stretches from the Levant to Latin America. The largest community outside the Middle East is in Chile, with about half a million descendants. Other diasporas exist in Honduras, El Salvador, Brazil, Europe, and North America. These communities — integrated yet lucid — have turned Palestinian memory into a way of life in exile: preserving language, cuisine, music, hospitality, resistance — all acts of persistence.

Palestine, then, is no longer a territory. It is a diffuse presence, a mental homeland, an invisible continuity linking Gaza, Bethlehem, Santiago, and Berlin. Where the State has vanished, the people endure.

Why Non-Muslim Nations Feel Concerned

It is not religion but the memory of the world that has reawakened solidarity with Palestine. On September 27, 2025, Colombian President Gustavo Petro denounced “the ongoing genocide in Gaza” at the UN General Assembly, accusing the West of turning international law into a selective tool. Days later, the United States revoked his diplomatic visa, an unprecedented sanction for a Latin American head of state.

Yet behind this confrontation lies a deeper resonance. In Latin American imagination, Palestine embodies the mirror of dispossessed and colonized peoples. In Chile, Honduras, Colombia, families of Palestinian descent remind their societies that dispossession is not a concept but a lineage. And even where the diaspora is small, Gaza acts as a symbol — the image of the human being declared superfluous.

From the Dream of a State to the Recognition of a People

For decades, diplomacy assumed that peace could be drawn on a map. But the paradigm of the “two-state solution” has collapsed. The true question is no longer the recognition of a Palestinian State, but of the Palestinian People, on the same moral standing as the Jewish People.

To recognize a State is to grant a flag; to recognize a people is to affirm a history, a dignity, a right to exist. Since 1948, the West has acknowledged the Jewish people in their suffering and rebirth, yet in the same gesture denied the people born from that dispossession — the Palestinian people. The war on Gaza has stripped this moral asymmetry bare: one people recognized in its humanity, the other reduced to a “demographic threat.” That fracture has become unbearable.

The Mirror of Exile: From the Wandering Jew to the Perpetual Refugee

The figure of the perpetual Palestinian refugee echoes that of the Wandering Jew: one was a theological invention, punished for refusing the Messiah; the other, a political product, punished for refusing colonization. Both embody the same anxiety of power — the fear of a people without a place.

But whereas the myth of the Wandering Jew justified fear, the condition of the Palestinian refugee exposes the modern manufacture of displacement. The former was solitary, wandering by guilt; the latter collective, wandering by decree. One atoned for an imagined sin, the other suffers a real punishment.

And history, cruelly, has inverted itself: the people once pursued for their dispersion have become the agents of a new dispersion. Not by essence, but by the reproduction of a mechanism. This is the heart of the tragedy: the memory of exile did not prevent the creation of another exile.

Yet within this wounded symmetry lies a possibility. The exiled Palestinian, like the Jew once was, bears the conscience of the world — that of the human without refuge, who forces every society to confront its own humanity.

Conscience as Territory

Everywhere Palestinian voices circulate — in Chilean universities, African collectives, European protests, American campuses — the moral map of the world is redrawn. The diaspora is not only an exile; it is a form of universal presence, a constant reminder that a people cannot be erased without erasing part of humanity itself. Palestine is no longer a disputed place but a principle of truth, the one that distinguishes civilization from its parody.

Conclusion: The People Without a Map

Two years after the beginning of the genocide, Palestine no longer exists on the map, but it endures in the world’s conscience. It embodies the irreducible part of humanity that neither bombs nor hunger can abolish. To recognize the Palestinian People on the same level as the Jewish People is not to compare two sufferings; it is to restore the symmetry of rights. As long as one remains untouchable and the other erasable, civilization itself will hang in suspension.

The political map has dissolved; the moral map now illuminates. And on that map, at the center of the void, one name remains: Palestine, the people without a map.

Disclaimer

This article is based on the United Nations Human Rights Council’s Independent International Commission of Inquiry report, Legal analysis of the conduct of Israel in Gaza (A/HRC/60/CRP.3, 16 September 2025, PDF, 1MB), concluding that Israel has committed acts constituting genocide in Gaza under the 1948 Convention.

The text belongs to the field of political essay writing: it seeks moral and symbolic coherence rather than documentary exhaustiveness.