The unspeakable human suffering in Palestine is a cause to revisit a few familiar but forgotten truths. And if nothing else, it is also an invitation to put to rest a few foundational myths of the world order, and more specifically Pakistani nationhood. But first to repeat and fine tune a few truths is in order. That the present crisis did not begin on October 7th, 2023 is well known in the world, outside of the halls of power in the ‘Western Democracies’. It did not start in 1948 either with the founding of the State of Israel, or in 1938 with the start of the Nazi anti-Jewish pogrom (Krystallnacht), which culminated in the Holocaust and the legacy of Western historic guilt for it.
It started perhaps most tangibly with the Balfour Declaration in November 1917 by the British Foreign Secretary Sir Arthur Balfour, establishing the intent of the British government to establish a Jewish homeland in the Ottoman province of Palestine. The declaration was the outcome of negotiations between the British government and the Zionist movement, with no input whatsoever from the local Palestinian population. Zionist and local indigenous Jews formed a miniscule minority of the population in Palestine at the time. The declaration energised the relatively stagnant Zionist movement at the time, and culminated through many well known milestones to where the Palestinians are being relentlessly targeted by Israeli bombs, and many young Israeli dead bodies populate the graveyards, through decades of conflict.
My many friends do not tire of lamenting the complicit silence of the Muslim world. Others express outrage at Western hypocrisy and complicity in the ongoing genocide of the Palestinians. I think both complaints are fair at a human level, but are misplaced at a cultural & political level. First, Pan-Islamism, was etched in the Pakistani consciousness by the Lahore, 2nd Islamic Summit Conference. The Islamic solidarity/Ummah Kool-aid was sold to generations of Pakistanis, by both democratic and military governments. Therefore, the frame of thinking about the world for almost all Pakistanis from generation X onwards has been through the religious lens.
It is blindingly obvious today, that the Palestinian struggle for decolonization is not just against the state of Israel but the entire West. The dichotomy between the colonial State of Israel and the human rights loving West has been laid bare as a fraud, for the whole world to see.
The Muslim Ummah is a fiction. It is a fiction promoted by the culturally Orientalist gaze of the West, which needed the Ummah to insulate itself from the long and tangled history of hybridity, connection, co-creation with West Asia and North Africa to fabricate for itself the so-called enlightened (Christian) ‘Western’ identity. Secondly, it was an urgent fiction during the 20th century as an anti-communist trope to undermine the emergent class-based consciousness and solidarity in the post-colonial world. It is not a surprise that the feudal monarchies of the Persian Gulf, and then American aligned right-wing military states of South and South West Asia were at the forefront of promoting the story.
A Western sponsored fiction is not materially delivering in terms of solidarity with the Palestinian people should hardly be a surprise. Afterall, the Palestinian cause was never about religion. Christian Palestinians were always at the forefront of the Palestinian liberation struggle starting with near domination of Palestine Liberation Front (PLO) by Christian Palestinians, George Habash being the best known. Palestinian cause was always about an anti-colonial struggle against Zionism--one of the most insidious imperialist doctrines legitimising Palestinian dispossession and colonization of their land.
The financial crisis of 2008 and many before that laid bare the feet of sand of the gigantic military industrial behemoth of the West.
The era of neoliberalism diverted attention of the world from the ongoing Imperialist project of the West. Terms like class struggle, anti-colonialism, women’s equality, and imperialism were the engines of intellectual thinking in the global South and the progressive North for most of the 20th century. In the 1990s new terms like globalization, capital markets, privatization, dot com and clash of civilizations defined the post-Cold War world, except that they didn’t. The Southern elites bought into the new story peddled by the likes of CNN, BBC, social and print media hook, line and sinker. The old/new stories of colonialism and racism, however, remained as relevant and urgent as ever.
The financial crisis of 2008 and many before that laid bare the feet of sand of the gigantic military industrial behemoth of the West. The West can’t even deliver to its own majority of the populations the promise of prosperity and a future through markets. There is a deep crisis of legitimacy and competence that the neoliberal order faces today, and Palestine, I argue is at the heart of that crisis.
It is blindingly obvious today, that the Palestinian struggle for decolonization is not just against the state of Israel but the entire West. The dichotomy between the colonial State of Israel and the human rights loving West has been laid bare as a fraud, for the whole world to see. The democratic West really is a subsidiary of the imperialist corporate and commercial interests which keep its ruling elites in place. Israel is a Western outpost (self-declared) upholding Western values (we know what those are) in the heart of West Asia. Therefore, the affinity between the Western elites and Zionist Israel is the same as between sand and cement in a concrete wall—solid.
The only solidarity that Palestinians can count on is not religious-Islamic, or linguistic-Arab, but rather the political, anti-imperialist Left. From North to South America, from Europe to Africa, from West to East Asia it is the political Left that is marching in solidarity with Palestine. Hindus, Sikhs, Christians, Jews, Buddhists, and Muslims of the Left are getting suspended, losing their jobs and raising their voices for Palestine. The world order going forward will be moving back to political lines of opposition between the forces of the empire in the global North and South and those against. Cross national Leftist solidarity is re-emerging, and the Palestinian cause is the cement binding this emerging movement.