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<a class="gmail-domain gmail-reader-domain" href="https://peoplesdispatch.org/2024/01/13/israels-war-on-palestine-and-the-global-upsurge-against-it/">peoplesdispatch.org</a>
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<h1 class="gmail-reader-title">Israel’s war on Palestine and the global upsurge against it</h1>
<div class="gmail-credits gmail-reader-credits">Vijay Prashad</div>
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<div class="gmail-reader-estimated-time" dir="ltr">January 13, 2024</div><div class="gmail-reader-estimated-time" dir="ltr"><br></div><div class="gmail-reader-estimated-time" dir="ltr">
<b>Never before in the 75 previous years has there been such sustained
attention to the cause of the Palestinians and of Israeli brutality
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<img src="cid:ii_lrdu6uog0" alt="ceasefire-gaza-israel-palestine-1024x576.jpeg" width="391" height="220"><br><p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<h3><strong>Genocide</strong></h3>
<p>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).</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<h3><strong>Legitimacy</strong></h3>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p><em><strong>Vijay Prashad</strong> is an Indian historian, editor,
and journalist. He is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at
Globetrotter. He is an editor of <a href="https://mayday.leftword.com/">LeftWord Books</a> and the director of <a href="https://thetricontinental.org/">Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research</a>. He has written more than 20 books, including <a href="https://smile.amazon.com/Darker-Nations-Peoples-History-Third/dp/1595583424/?tag=alternorg08-20">The Darker Nations</a> and <a href="https://smile.amazon.com/Poorer-Nations-Possible-History-Global/dp/1781681589/?tag=alternorg08-20">The Poorer Nations</a>. His latest books are <a href="https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1869-struggle-makes-us-human">Struggle Makes Us Human: Learning from Movements for Socialism</a> and (with Noam Chomsky) <a href="https://thenewpress.com/books/withdrawal">The Withdrawal: Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, and the Fragility of U.S. Power</a>.</em></p>
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