Agiant Palestine flag flutters in the stiff spring breeze over the hundreds of grubby protester tents crowding the large esplanade of the University of Columbia, New York, NY. Are Sri Lankan students, aspiring degrees in the elite universities of the First World, thinking twice as they see chaos in these very same campuses these days?
Hourly, our Zoomers watch the rebellious tent culture of protesters crowding campus ‘quads’, police beatings and arrests of undergrads, professors joining in – none of it about education issues but about a burning global political crisis and a looming threat of nuclear war.
In fact, world governments as well as global civil society – especially interested parents – are closely watching the spread of today’s student protests across various parts of the globe. For parents of students sent at immense cost to the posh campuses, their concern is the safety of their children but also the safety of the higher studies investment, especially its future. Can their child finish her studies and, successfully? Will they have to re-invest in another college?
The world’s political leaderships watching this unusual spectacle and its spread are certainly concerned about these parents’ woes but also about much more. Governments and general political leaderships worry over both the votes and opinions of the mass of their citizenry in relation to the horrors of Palestine. They also worry over the urgent multiple national needs arising from the world-impacting West Asian disaster.
But some Governments must worry more than others, depending on the degree of impact of the West Asian crisis on their societies, their economies and their nation’s locus within complex webs of regional and global geopolitics. Governments of the Western power bloc – UE+NATO, the richest, most powerful states in the world – worry over general voter opinion while their business elites worry over consumer opinions.
For governments and ruling class coalitions of the dominant Western powers, most important is the continuation of their extremely advantageous status quo as current controllers of the global economy (not for long, though). These Western powers are also the primary users of critical mineral resources, much of it inside former European colonies, and are especially dependent on energy supplies from West Asia.
Multi-layered
These multi-layered strategic interests of the West drive their geopolitics. It is partly a similar set of strategic interests that also drive some of the rival and newly emerging geopolitical blocs like Russia-China, BRICS and, Shanghai Co-operation Organisation (SCO) to have their own vital minerals. Hence the underlying confrontation of power interests – at State and ‘bloc’ level – in the world’s geopolitical landscape. But how much are the citizens themselves involved?
As the persistent action of this Western power bloc demonstrates, their commitment to maintaining a powerful local ‘outpost’ State in West Asia, in the form of Israel – in its current, Euro-centric, statehood – seems paramount. Despite the high publicity gained by vocal dissenting movements within their societies, these states remain stubbornly and, quite blatantly, supportive of Israel.
These Western Governments’ willingness to risk their own voters’ ire indicates a political landscape in which such voter ire is yet to reach a ‘critical mass’ that actually disrupts current governance and electoral trajectories. It is only if electoral advantages begin to shift significantly, would political leaderships of the West begin making policy adjustments. President Joe Biden remains confident of victory at November’s Presidential Elections.
The horrors of Palestine – Gaza being the epicentre – are firmly located within the regional geopolitical complex that is West Asia. In geopolitical terms, it is an intricate complex of conflicts over direct mineral needs, inter-regional economic intercourse, political and military alliances and loyalties and, underlying all of that, a veritably evolutionary dynamic of inter-locked civilisations and their spheres of influence.
It is this last dimension – the actual, unique, geography of West Asia – that unlocks the other geopolitical complexities of the West Asian region.
The ‘West Asia’ of today is the narrow topographical confluence between three vital continents, namely, Africa, Asia and Europe. It is the proverbial ‘World Island’ innovatively theorised by one of the originators of modern geopolitical theory, British geographer-turned-politician Halford John Mackinder.
In 1904, Mackinder proposed his very original conception of a geophysical cum civilisational cum economic confluence of these three topographically linked continents. The linked continental landmass itself he called “Afro Eurasia”. From his vantage point of the dawn of the Twentieth Century, at the centre of a vast colonial empire that was vigorously accessing vast resources and exploiting diverse markets, Mackinder was able to identify this Afro Eurasia as the largest, most populous, and richest of all possible land combinations.
The past two millennia illustrate precisely the dynamic of such confluence. There were the European invasions across the neck of West Asia toward the Asian heartland, namely by Greece and Rome. There were similar Asian invasions across this same geographical ‘neck’ from central Asia to Europe, namely the Persian, Arab, Mongol and Turkic-Ottoman. In the medieval age, the Europeans again contested control of the Mediterranean seaboard of West Asia with several unsuccessful invasions which they called “Crusades”.
And, two million years before that, this West Asian geophysical confluence was the passage for the original exodus of Hominins from out of Africa to the rest of the Earth. Is it no wonder that this region cannot escape this continuing confluence of geopolitical energies; of energies connecting ever widening strategic interests, reaching the global level?
The most powerful governments – the West – remain firmly locked into a geostrategic sustaining of the current status quo of a militarily powerful client Israeli state dominating the eastern Mediterranean seaboard of West Asia – for over three-quarters of a century.
Their geostrategic commitment is demonstrated by not only a continuously enforced occupation of territory (Palestine) but also the enforced, continuous, unresolved, displacement and cross-border re-settlement of a whole indigenous population in the neighbouring States. Thus, the Israel-Palestine founding crisis has always been an entrenched crisis of the immediate neighbourhood – the Levant sub-region of West Asia.
The world has watched as this long-festering crisis has become a disaster for the whole of West Asia. Months of continuous politico-military disaster in West Asia has now resulted in extra-regional impacts across the globe as the instability of this vital energy supplier region and the political chaos in this spatial ‘confluence’ of Afro-Eurasia take effect.
The world’s response to this persistent strategy, and its immediate violent outcome in Gaza in particular, has varied in accordance with a range of intersecting geopolitical, religious-cultural and socio-economic interests. Hence, the global response landscape vis-à-vis Palestine is patchy and does not really show a predominance of those against what most people now see as an ongoing genocide and a permanent injustice against a colonised nation.
In the West Asian region itself, arising from 75 years of that extra burden of hosting millions of a whole displaced Palestinian population, hostility towards the West’s military project in Palestine is virtually endemic in the nations of this region.
However, while the hostility prevails at popular level, some West Asian Governments have been far more ambiguous, given their old colonial links with the West. There is also, some intra-regional rivalry between states – e.g. Iran vs Saudi Arabia – and, between some religious denominations such as between Sunnis and Shia, Ahmadiya, Alawiyah, Druze, and so on.
Petro dollars
The oil-rich Arab states are even more economically dependent on the West for another reason: their monarchies’ and emirates’ super wealth is invested in the West. They cannot even envisage de-dollarisation (a growing trend among forex savvy other, rising, Global South nations) because all their wealth is in petro-dollars. Only the non-monarchist republics like Iran, Syria and Iraq today can envisage such geopolitical independence. Even here, Iraq is a shattered nation and is partly controlled by the West through its post-war pacts.
Thus, we have, at another level of geopolitics, the hostility to the West by Iran and its allies. In these countries, there seems to be a clear congruence of opinion between the regimes and their citizens. It can be seen in their confidently firm geopolitics, whether in Iran, Yemen or Turkiye. Support for Palestine can also be seen in neighbouring Pakistan to the east and also in all the Muslim North African republics ranging from Tunisia westwards to Morocco. Even here, the gap between citizenry and regime is biggest in monarchist Morocco where the population is strongly pro-Palestine while the Government is lukewarm.
The gamut of governments of the Global South are somewhat divided with many former colonies strongly pro-Palestine and hostile to the Israel project. South Africa leads in this along with the majority of African states. Significantly, only the less Europeanised South American States strongly sympathise with Palestine, like Brazil, Venezuela, Peru, Ecuador and Bolivia. In Asia, most Governments tend to be supportive of Palestine with the regimes in Muslim majority nations being most active.
Governments across the world, especially in the Global South, increasingly now swing in support of Palestine. But we have yet to see massed protest demonstrations in the rest of the world that we see in Western cities and campuses and in some Arab and Muslim nations. This points to varying factors. The activism in the richest societies of the West arises from the affluent intelligentsia who are against their tax monies and the stature of their civilisation being used to sustain an unjust continued colonialism and an ethnic cleansing.
In the impoverished Third World outside the Muslim world, the whole picture is very different. In the poorest nations most people lack access to information – unless they are in a Muslim society where their religious affinity brings them some information.
Even if they do hear about the horrors of Palestine, their own daily struggle for survival distracts from protesting on behalf of others. Much of the world’s poor lacks the physical energy to protest anything, even their own deprivation.
Third World higher education is a totally different picture from Columbia University, NY. Still, we do see a slow broadening of global protest in support of perhaps the most deserving international cause since South African Apartheid and the genocide in Rwanda. Surely, justice will flow like a river.
