Thirty-first night revellers face an unprecedented civilisational imperative tonight: do we, heartlessly, set off crackers and whistling skyrockets and clink glasses? Or, do we allow the ear-splitting crack and thunder of shelling and bombing of Gaza to invade our homes and venues (via smartphones, TVs) so that humanity tenderly shares in Palestine’s living agony?
As 2024 dawns, humanity faces an awful future for its natural habitat, but the sheer, unspeakable, savagery of the ongoing war against Palestine seems to have sharply awakened people to political realities and a popular search for drastic change. As many analysts and think tanks across the world are beginning to ponder: was 2023 a dramatic, if horribly violent, turning point in the global geopolitical order?
The year 2023 seems to have opened the eyes of new, better educated, generations of global citizens, in the Global South, who have been brutally alerted to some yet lingering horrors of the world’s colonial past and fading super power hegemonism.
With many other conflicts in the intervening years both in West Asia and elsewhere – especially the Western retreat from Afghanistan, Arab-Iranian tensions and the Ukraine War – the world had become used to thinking of “Palestine” as comprising just two small pockets of territory demarcated as the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
Forgotten was the little mentioned reality that even those two enclaves were forcibly occupied and controlled by Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) and that, indeed, the much larger part of Palestine was actually only recently declared the ‘State of Israel’. Just 70 years ago, ‘Israel’ was merely a political idea and an illegally launched land settlement programme by European Jewish migrants.
These Jews were being encouraged by European Governments and local communities to migrate to different parts of the world, first mainly to North America but also to South America. By the end of World War I, when European powers took over the neighbouring West Asia region from the defeated Ottoman Empire (centred in Turkiye), these Jewish migrant ventures began to negotiate with those European occupying powers for a slice of territory in the Palestinian region to set up an independent Jewish State.
The seven-line ‘Balfour Declaration’, nothing more than a paragraph in a typed personal letter from Lord Balfour, a senior UK Cabinet Minister to the richest backer of the European Zionist Movement, Lord Rothschild, in 1917, became the basis of the Western colonial conspiracy to resolve the ‘the Jewish Question’.
Already, the European powers were, themselves, looking at their own Jewish minority as a ‘problem’ to be dealt with by exclusion rather than by inclusion and serious political management of an internal ethnic coexistence.
But not without one final attempt – an industrial scale one – of ‘solving the Jewish Question’, a task taken on by Adolf Hitler’s National Socialist German Workers Party (NSDAP) or Nazi for short. The Nazis, once in power, set up virtually an industry of concentration camps and ‘extermination systems’, or ‘death camps’.
Local branches of the Nazi movement in Ukraine, Bulgaria, Lithuania and other East European States, also enthusiastically participated in these death factories. However, the nearest the Nazis came to using military force to exterminate a Jewish community was the military assault on the Jewish Ghetto of Warsaw in 1941-2 when the Jewish residents there resisted efforts to round them up for the death camps.
After the horror of the Nazi racist extermination campaign, as well as the guilt over the willing participation of other Europeans in it, the victorious Western powers were happy not to have to deal with the Jewish Question by, instead, sending them all abroad. Why did not the Europeans find some territory for an exclusive Jewish state in Europe itself? Why was there a reluctance to create structures and programmes within their own societies to democratically integrate this minority?
Instead of countering anti-Jewish racism, a purely Continental phenomenon, the Europeans, so imbued with racist, colonial mentality, sought to export their own ethnic minority to another part of the world. Zionist mythology of a ‘Promised Land’ was encouraged, as was seen in Lord Balfour’s “promise” as far back as 1917.
Strategic error
The blind persistence of the Western powers in supporting the Palestine carnage is a major strategic error. Such mass murder can be done secretly if there is no mass communication, like against the Caribs and other Native Americans, against the Blacks in Congo, Francophone Africa, and in Australia.
But not today. Especially after the world community has already dealt with one such 20th century colonial monstrosity in South Africa. Today, the Third World has become a much more powerful Global South. Self-confident, as the Global South is today, with its matured indigenous intellectual potence, both in terms of political understanding as well as philosophical vision, this ‘other half’ of world humanity, is taking up the challenge of rolling back the last redoubt of Western Colonialism.
In the early post-colonial era – from the late 1940s on – world society did repel Western Colonial dominance, and more than 100 newly free nations joined the United Nations by the late 1960s. If the UN membership in 1947-8 had included all these new Third World states, it would have been impossible for the UK and Western powers to have obtained UN authorisation to allow European Jewish migrants to forcibly create a new state of Israel in Palestine.
At that time, in 1947, the new UN body had just 59 Member States, most of them being either European or European origin Governments, including the several Latin American States. It was that White majority and Colonial power-dominated world body that was manipulated by the Western power bloc to oversee the crude, forcible and violent colonisation of Palestine.
The UK, having obtained a mandate from the UN to rule Palestine after driving out the Turkish Ottoman Empire from the region, then used that ‘mandate’ to enable the European Jewish migrant movement to set up their new State of Israel. This was only possible after well-armed and trained European Jewish militia carried out a military campaign against the indigenous Palestinians and violently drove out that population.
Nearly a million Palestinians, the vast bulk of the indigenous population, fled the Zionist terror and sought refuge in neighbouring Arab states. The UK then gave up its ‘mandate’ responsibilities and without dealing with that first ethnic cleansing, joined other Western powers in obtaining UN endorsement for the new Israeli State.
Indeed, the Western powers went further in this typically racist-colonial manoeuvre: they got the UN to set up a special refugee support agency, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East or UNRWA, for short. The UNRWA still runs the camps all over West Asia and in some North African States. Generations of Palestinians have grown up and continue to live in these camps, 70 years on.
Even as these Western powers sustained this permanent displacement of a native population, they have also sustained the new Israeli colonial State militarily and economically. Right now, these same Western powers insist on allowing Israel to continue with its military campaign.
In effect, Zionist Israel is what the South African Boer republics were in the 1940s. Those Boer republics soon formed the White exclusive ‘Union of South Africa’ under a complex regime of ethnic separation officially called Apartheid. Unsurprisingly, Israel has constitutionally evolved into a European Jewish exclusive religious state remarkably similar to the Afrikaaner (Boer) Apartheid system. The West Bank and Gaza are dramatically similar to the ‘Bantustans’ set up under Apartheid. Recently, UN agencies and international human rights bodies have begun formally labelling Israeli State as an ‘apartheid’ system.
Much of the Third World’s geopolitical maturing came through such campaigns in support of the overthrow of Apartheid South Africa. Sri Lanka too was a proud participant in this UN-led campaign along with a majority of the world community. The Western powers which supported White South Africa for decades were the last to accede to the UN strictures.
The West’s slow withdrawal of aid to Pretoria (the Boer capital) enabled the colonised indigenous South Africans and those of mixed race to successfully overthrow Apartheid and create a new, genuinely free and equal South African Republic. Today, new generations of South Africans – Black, Coloureds (mixed) and Whites – all live in ethnic amity with the only serious groups divisions being those of economic class and gender. ‘Race’ is no longer the template for injustice, violence and suffering.
Persisting carnage
The current persisting carnage in Palestine has served to drive home two harsh realities to the whole world community: firstly, the blatant geopolitics of Western hegemony in sustaining their last remaining such colonial settlement and, secondly, the truth of the Israeli State and the total non-existence of any Palestinian polity or nation, despite millions of Palestinians languishing in camps or as under-privileged vassals inside Israel.
Worse, the Zionist state is doing something which even the cruel Apartheid State never did: militarily oppress the indigenous population continuously for decades and outright bomb the Bantustans, and destroying their social infrastructure.
Another significant new factor is the ability provided by the Internet to share information between oppressed or subaltern communities and societies. Indeed, the literally 24-hour reportage via social media has brought the horror of Gaza into people’s drawing rooms just as TV news brought the Vietnam War into Western drawing rooms in the 1960s.
This coming year, then is likely to see a global community demanding a reconfiguring of the crisis in Palestine. New generations are scrutinising the fundamentals of the crisis and seeking models for a resolution. “Two States” has now been exposed for the farce that it always was.
The Israeli population is also learning that ‘security’ is only assured through peace and not brutal dominance. They too, will realise that what is needed is a reformed state which will enable all communities – Arab, Jew, Druze, Samaritan, Christian, Yazidi – to live peacefully.
