[News] Western activism and the Axis of Resistance

[Anti-Imperialist News]

english.almayadeen.net
<https://english.almayadeen.net/articles/opinion/western-activism-and-the-axis-of-resistance>
Western activism and the Axis of Resistance
Roberta Rivolta
September 19, 2026
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Western pro-Palestinian activism isolates Palestine from its regional
allies, depoliticizing its struggle and reinforcing colonial divisions.

   - [image: Western activism and the Axis of Resistance]
   <https://alpha-en-media.almayadeen.net/media/image/2026/9/19/525e31cc-a095-4f40-a264-c054abc22aa6.png?v=4&width=1000>
   Faced with this generalized aggression against an entire region, a large
   part of the Western pro-Palestinian movement continues to display an
   inexplicable difficulty in extending its solidarity beyond the borders of
   Palestine (Illustrated by Zeinab Al-Hajj to *Al Mayadeen English*)

When, on 13 October 2025, Hamas was dragged into signing an agreement that
neither "Israel" nor the United States intended to respect, a large portion
of the Western pro-Palestinian movement registered it as a victory of its
own, given that in the previous month millions of citizens had taken to the
streets waving Palestinian flags.

Soon, however, it became evident that the treaty, predictably, was not at
all aimed at ending the conflict. Rather, it was essentially designed to
remove it from the global public eye and, even more significantly, to
delegitimize the support Palestine was receiving from its regional allies

Indeed, while Western attention was focused on the Sumud Flotilla, "Israel"
was under crossfire from all members of the Axis of Resistance.

Hezbollah had immediately opened a second front with the stated goal of
relieving military pressure on Gaza. The following day, Yemen also
intervened with a first missile attack. The Iraqi resistance followed suit
shortly after, with attacks against US targets in Iraq and Syria. Iran had
launched the first True Promise operation on 13 April 2024. The naval
blockade imposed by Ansarallah in the Red Sea had led to the closure of the
port of Eilat, resulting in economic and military difficulties for the
Zionist colony, since that port provided logistical support to the Israeli
navy.

On 6 June 2024, the first simultaneous combined attack by Yemeni and Iraqi
forces was launched, followed by numerous joint operations coordinating
multiple formations of the Axis in various configurations.

In light of the growing coordination of the anti-Zionist resistance in the
region, the imposition of the so-called "peace plan" had the effect of
defusing the Axis's momentum by removing the central element of the
conflict, Hamas, from the equation.

All members of the Axis paid a heavy price for their interventions
alongside Palestine.

A brutal and entirely illegal campaign of targeted assassinations deprived
Muslim peoples of their most beloved and charismatic leaders: Yahya Sinwar
and Ismail Haniyeh in Gaza, Hassan Nasrallah in Lebanon, Ayatollah Ali
Khamenei in Iran, as well as key figures in the military and governmental
apparatuses in all the countries involved, including Yemen and Iraq.

Concurrently, the civilian populations of the region came under relentless
fire from "Israel" and its US protector.

Southern Lebanon is still under military occupation, while the US pressures
institutions and the military in an overt attempt to trigger an outright
civil war. Yemen, led by the Ansarallah coalition, found itself once again
under Saudi bombardment, which it had escaped less than a year prior. Syria
capitulated after enduring 14 years of war and economic siege. Iraq was
repeatedly hit with large-scale bombardments and targeted assassinations.
And Iran, uncoincidentally the main promoter of the Axis of Resistance, has
been subjected to a war whose end is not yet in sight.

Faced with this generalized aggression against an entire region, a large
part of the Western pro-Palestinian movement continues to display an
inexplicable difficulty in extending its solidarity beyond the borders of
Palestine.

Not even the blatant violations of international law and of the ethical
principles that it claims to uphold have been enough to prompt a
re-examination of its ideological premises.

The fact that this aggression was directed against non-belligerent
countries was not enough. Nor was the fact that, as is now a consolidated
strategy for the Zionist coalition, civilian populations rather than
combatants have been targeted; everywhere, and not only in Gaza. The fact
that the countries under attack are the same ones that have spent
themselves for Palestine, in far more concrete, active, and substantial
terms than the West was willing or able to do, also does not seem to raise
questions.

No organized movement has formed in this part of the world in support of
Iran, Yemen, Lebanon or Iraq. Not even the assassination of 168 girls of an
elementary school aroused a real public reaction, beyond narrow and
marginalized fringes.

That this lack of empathy towards the Axis countries, and not by chance
primarily toward Iran, stems largely from the biased and partial narrative
of the media is certain, but it is not enough to explain the phenomenon
when considering the very rich galaxy of movements and associations that
make up the pro-Palestinian movement in the West.

This movement has over time built a consolidated and efficient
counter-information network that not only avoids falling victim to Zionist
propaganda, but is constantly engaged in monitoring and debunking media
lies. It is capable, that is, of producing its own alternative narrative
through which it commits itself with a certain effectiveness to keeping
attention alive on the Palestinian question, ceaselessly exposing the daily
abuses with which "Israel", even in times of "peace", silently carries out
its genocide.

So, it is not a matter of inattention. It is not a matter of fatigue of the
movement. It is a specific and deliberate choice.

Among the reasons underlying this choice, there is certainly a difference
in top-down control policies..
Activism focused solely on the Palestinian people enjoys a relative margin
of tolerance – on the part of the media, the cultural establishment and the
institutions – on condition that it maintains a strictly humanitarian and
apolitical character.

This imposes a reiterated distancing not only from the countries and
formations of the Axis, but from the Palestinian resistance movements
themselves, Hamas first and foremost.

Even the public figures who are allowed to express solidarity with
Palestine through official channels conform to this requirement of
depoliticization. Therefore, In most cases their challenge to the global
establishment translates into a generic solidarity with the Palestinian
population, but slides towards positions entirely compatible with left-wing
Zionism when the gaze shifts to Hamas, Iran or Hezbollah.

In truth, the depoliticization imposed by the establishment is rooted in
the founding ideology of the West, which is shared, more or less
consciously, by the majority of the population, including the
pro-Palestinian movement. This ideology feeds on the universalism developed
in Europe, particularly from the 18th century onward, when the
philosophical movement of the Enlightenment, under the deceptive claim of
liberating human beings from their "superstitions", in fact elected the
Westerner, with his specific peculiarities, as the archetype and model of
all humanity. And, consequently, it delegitimized any other form of social,
political, economic, religious and cultural organization.

The "universal man", supposedly detached from the constraints, in reality
inescapable, of history and geography, has produced as a consequence an
idiosyncratic relationship between the Westerner and history.

To preserve the moral, political, economic and cultural primacy granted by
the Enlightenment, the Westerner is forced to flee from history, on pain of
falling back, from an absolute model, into the contingent: a human among
humans, a nation among nations, a system of thought among many other
equally legitimate systems of thought.

However, the removal of history reduces conflicts to the "good versus evil"
paradigm, in which actions and actors possess an intrinsic ethical value
independent of circumstances.

Within this dichotomy, the "propaganda" of a substantial portion of the
Western pro-Palestinian movement aims to reduce Palestine to an equally
abstract entity composed of victims, condemned to inaction in order to
preserve their innocence.

Statistics concerning women and children are therefore highlighted,
military actions are hidden or disavowed, the role of Hamas is barely
tolerated, and the Axis allies are ignored or, more often, fiercely opposed.

Isolated from the rest of the region, transformed into an entity detached
from time and space, and essentially stripped of its identity as an Arab
and Muslim nation, Palestine thus becomes the stage upon which the
Westerners project the dream of themselves as agents of good, reclaiming
under new guises the desire for center-stage prominence that animates their
ethnocentric culture.

Indeed, upon closer inspection, this is the true function of all that
entire segment of the movement that defends the population but condemns
Hamas: to comfort the supremacist Westerners with the fact that the
liberation of Palestine can come through the West; to comfort them with the
thought that, for better or worse, they are the ones determining the course
of events; to reaffirm that not only the violence of their power
apparatuses, but also their innate sense of justice are superior to those
of others; and that, for better or worse, the West remains the true engine
of history.

Yet the depoliticization of the Palestinian question entails the reduction
of the occupation to an anomaly of history, to an immanent manifestation of
an abstract evil devoid of geographical location, dissociated from the
anti-colonial struggle blazing throughout the region.
It is the bottom-up replication of Zionism's own strategy.

Because whoever remains silent on the geopolitical causes of the conflict,
whoever refuses solidarity with the other nations of Western Asia, whoever
bans Iranian flags from demonstrations after having banned Syrian ones for
14 years, whoever circumscribes political discourse by hiding behind the
justification that "we must not divide the movement" in reality is doing
nothing other than re-enacting, in different attire, the same plan of
fragmentation of the Arab and Muslim world cultivated by the United States
and "Israel".

They are doing nothing other than isolating Palestine from its natural
allies, namely the forces fighting for the liberation of the entire region
from Zionist occupation and from Western – military, political, economic –
interference.

Because even amid the exceptional gravity of the ongoing genocide, the
right to self-determination is not denied to Palestinians alone. The right
to self-determination is denied to Yemen when it is attacked by a coalition
of over 10 nations simply for having freed itself from a puppet government
subservient to Saudi Arabia and the United States. The right to
self-determination is violated when, in the wake of the Islamic Revolution,
Iran finds itself not only gripped in an economic vice, but subjected to
continuous and repeated military aggressions and regime-change attempts.
Iraq's right to self-determination is violated not only through invasions
but also when the President of the United States takes the liberty of
blackmailing an entire nation because he does not like its electoral
results.

The principle of self-determination is denied to Lebanon when the United
States imposes on it the highest institutional offices of its own choice or
when it orders the disarmament of its only effective territorial defense
force. The right to self-determination was also violated in Bahrain in
2011, when the US sent the Saudi army to crush a popular uprising in blood.
The right to self-determination was stolen from the Syrian people across
nearly fifteen years of war and economic siege, and again when a terrorist
was imposed on them as president, who is massacring thousands of citizens
on an ethnic basis in general silence.

Western activists are neither morally nor politically entitled to insinuate
themselves as a wedge between peoples who are victims of the same
aggression. Western activists are neither morally nor politically entitled
to ignore that these divisions are the obvious and explicitly stated goal
of Zionism.

On the contrary, anyone participating in the political debate in the West,
at any level and in any capacity, today should take on the task of
consistently placing Palestine within the geopolitical dynamics to which it
belongs, and fighting against any attempt to isolate it from the rest of
the region.

Because the independent forces of Western Asia are its natural allies,
attempting to sever Palestine from the network of solidarity and alliances
to which it belongs by ethnic and religious identity, and by political and
geographical coordinates, is, itself, a form of colonialism.
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