[News] Israel’s war on Palestine and the global upsurge against it

[Anti-Imperialist News]

peoplesdispatch.org
<https://peoplesdispatch.org/2024/01/13/israels-war-on-palestine-and-the-global-upsurge-against-it/>
Israel’s war on Palestine and the global upsurge against it
Vijay Prashad
January 13, 2024

*Never before in the 75 previous years has there been such sustained
attention to the cause of the Palestinians and of Israeli brutality *
------------------------------
[image: ceasefire-gaza-israel-palestine-1024x576.jpeg]

Hundreds of millions of people across the world have been deeply moved by
the atrocity of the Israeli war on Palestine. Millions have attended
marches and protests, many of them participating in such demonstrations for
the first time in their lives. Social media, in almost all the world’s
languages, is saturated with memes and posts about this or that terrible
action. Some people focus on the Israeli attack on Palestinian children,
others on the illegal targeting of Gaza’s health infrastructure, and yet
others point to the annihilation of at least four hundred families (more
than ten people in each family killed). The focus of attention does not
seem to be diminishing. Holidays in December went by, but the intensity of
the protests and the posts remained steady. No attempt by social media
companies to turn the algorithm against the Palestinians succeeded, no
attempt to ban the protests—even the display of the Palestinian
flag—worked. Accusations of antisemitism fell flat and demands for the
condemnation of Hamas were dismissed. This is a new mood, a new kind of
attitude toward the Palestinian struggle.

Never before in the 75 previous years has there been such sustained
attention to the cause of the Palestinians and of Israeli brutality. Israel
has launched eight bombing campaigns on  Gaza since 2006. . And Israel has
built up an entire illegal structure against the Palestinians in East
Jerusalem and the West Bank (an apartheid wall, settlements, checkpoints).
When Palestinians have tried to resist—whether through civic action or
armed struggle—they have faced immense violence from the Israeli military.
Ever since social media has been available, images from Palestine have
circulated, including of the use of white phosphorus against civilians in
Gaza, and including the arrest and murder of Palestinian children across
the Occupied Palestine Territory. But none of the previous acts of violence
evoked the kind of response from around the world as this violence that
began in October 2023.
*Genocide*

The Israeli armed violence against Gaza since October has been in a
qualitatively different form than any previous violence. The bombardment of
Gaza was vicious, with Israeli aircraft hitting residential areas with no
concern for civilian life. The number of dead increased day by day at a
rate not seen before. Then, when Israeli ground forces entered Gaza, they
effected an illegal mass eviction of the Palestinian civilians from their
homes and pushed them further and further south toward the border with
Egypt. The Israelis violated their own promises of “safe zones,” hitting
areas more densely packed than before because of the internal displacement.
It was this scale of violence that provoked an early use of the term
“genocide” to describe what was happening in Gaza. By early January, more
than 1% of the entire Palestinian population in Gaza had been killed, while
over 95% had been displaced. The kind of violence used here was not seen in
any contemporary war, neither in Iraq (where the US disregarded most laws
of war) nor in Ukraine (where the death toll of civilians is far smaller
despite the war now lasting two years).

The momentum of mass protest pushed the government of South Africa to file
a dispute in the International Court of Justice (ICJ) against Israel for
the crime of genocide. Both countries are parties to the 1948 Convention
Against Genocide, and the ICJ is the venue for dispute settlements. The
84-page filing by the South African government documents many of the
atrocities perpetrated by Israel, and also, crucially, the words of Israeli
high officials. Nine pages of this text (pp. 59 to 67) list the Israeli
officials in their own words, many of them calling for a “Second Nakba” or
a “Gaza Nakba,” a use of the term “Nakba” or Catastrophe that refers to the
1948 Nakba of the Palestinians from their homes that led to the creation of
the State of Israel. These words are chilling, and they have been widely
circulated since October. Racist language about “monsters,” “animals,” and
the “jungle” shape the speeches and statements by these Israeli government
officials. Israel’s Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said on October 9, 2023,
that his forces are “imposing a complete siege on Gaza. No electricity, no
food, no water, no fuel. Everything is closed. We are fighting human
animals, and we are acting accordingly.” This, along with the character of
the Israeli military strikes, is sufficient as a benchmark for the
accusation of genocide. At the hearing at the ICJ, Israel was unable to
respond credibly to the South African complaint.

It is a combination of the images from Gaza and the words of these Israeli
high officials—backed fully by the United States government and many of the
governments of European states—that provoked the sustained anger and
desolation that has driven these mass protests.
*Legitimacy*

Over the course of the past two years—from the start of the war in Ukraine
until now—there has been a rapid decline in the legitimacy of the West,
notably the countries of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), led
by the United States. These wars are not the cause of this drop in
legitimacy, but they have accelerated the decline in the legitimacy of the
NATO countries, particularly in the Global South.

Since the start of the Third Great Depression in 2007, the Global North has
slowly lost its control over the world economy, over technology and
science, and over raw materials. Billionaires in the Global North deepened
their “tax strike” and withdrew a large share of social wealth into tax
havens and into unproductive financial investments. This left the Global
North with few instruments to maintain economic power, including by making
investments in the Global South. That role was slowly taken up by China,
which has been recycling global profits into infrastructural projects
across the world. Rather than contest China’s Belt and Road Initiative, for
instance, through its own commercial and economic project, the Global North
has sought to militarize its response with massive spending (three-quarters
of global military spending is by the NATO states). The Global North has
used Ukraine and Taiwan as levers to provoke Russia and China into military
conflicts so as to ‘weaken’ them rather than contest growing Russian energy
power and Chinese industrial and technological power through trade and
development.

It is clear to the majority of people in the world that it is the Global
North that has failed to address the crises in the world, whether the
climate crisis or the consequences of the Third Great Depression. It has
tried to substitute a language of euphemism for reality, using terms such
as “democracy promotion,” “sustainable development,” “humanitarian pause,”
and—from UK Foreign Secretary Lord David Cameron and Germany’s Foreign
Minister Annalena Baerbock—the ridiculous formulation of a “sustainable
ceasefire.” Empty words are no substitute for real actions. To speak of a
“sustainable ceasefire” while arming Israel or to speak of “democracy
promotion” while backing anti-democratic governments now defines the
hypocrisy of the Global North’s political class.

The Israelis say that they will continue this genocidal war for as long as
it takes. As each day goes by of this war, the legitimacy of Israel
deteriorates. But behind that violence itself is the much deeper end of the
legitimacy of the NATO project, whose sanctimonies sound like nails being
dragged across a bloodied chalkboard.

*Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor, and journalist. He is a
writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter. He is an editor of
LeftWord Books <https://mayday.leftword.com/> and the director of
Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research
<https://thetricontinental.org/>. He has written more than 20 books,
including The Darker Nations
<https://smile.amazon.com/Darker-Nations-Peoples-History-Third/dp/1595583424/?tag=alternorg08-20>
and The Poorer Nations
<https://smile.amazon.com/Poorer-Nations-Possible-History-Global/dp/1781681589/?tag=alternorg08-20>.
His latest books are Struggle Makes Us Human: Learning from Movements for
Socialism
<https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1869-struggle-makes-us-human> and
(with Noam Chomsky) The Withdrawal: Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, and the
Fragility of U.S. Power <https://thenewpress.com/books/withdrawal>.*
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