Global wave of support for Palestine: new dimensions

By: Abdul Majeed Sweilem

The Israeli state, the United States, even Western officials, and Arab and regional authorities — all without exception — continue to view the popular uprisings in support of Palestine in a limited, short-sighted way. They still see them as a temporary show of solidarity that will fade once the aggressive war stops, if it stops, or that will be eroded should the occupying state, backed by the United States, manage to achieve a decisive battlefield breakthrough in the Gaza Strip.
Some bet that such a breakthrough would not only produce that result, but they hope — some of them all — that it will spread to other hot arenas, culminating in the occupier tightening control over the entire “vital space” of the U.S.-Zionist alliance. That would include a geographic and demographic re-engineering of the region, and the distribution and redistribution of the region’s wealth and resources to U.S. investment and plunder conglomerates merged with Zionist capital, with shares of control over those “wealth and resources” divided and redivided after defining the quotas of new political districts under new terms of subjection.
These assessments are by no means fanciful. To make the picture clearer, imagine the opposite: that the breakthrough Benjamin Netanyahu — whom the author describes as the head of a government of extermination and brutality — is desperately seeking, and which the United States is backing with all its energy and instruments, fails; that all the cards are shuffled, Israeli leadership stumbles in this bloody war and halts midway, and the U.S.-Israeli team emerges from its criminal campaign of annihilation with half-achieved objectives, half-wins, or half-defeats.
Reaching such outcomes would be an earthquake that destroys the entire plan and would strike at the heart of the U.S. strategy in the region, including the role and standing of the occupying state, and would also decisively affect the regional order and the Arab system at its core, leaving no room for doubt.
Gaza was, in fact, the epicenter of the earthquake that shook the entire region and whose repercussions spread worldwide. Those repercussions, including military and security ones, were nothing more than the direct and indirect reflection of that opening, and the global reaction to it — the reaction among the peoples of the world — was unprecedented in human history.
What is happening in the form of a broad, powerful global uprising has gone far beyond a matter of humanitarian sympathy — even if that dimension remains real and important — because the movement of people around the world in support of Palestinian freedom and independence has, during this criminal war of annihilation, moved from a stage of humanitarian sympathy to political consciousness in these movements. That awareness has then advanced to a higher, more significant stage: an understanding of the dimensions and dangers inherent in this brutal war of aggression and destruction, and its ramifications. In this understanding, world Zionism — in its Israeli manifestation as the spearhead, in its “Western” manifestation, especially American, represented by Christian Zionism, and in an Islamic manifestation represented by some regimes across what is called the Islamic region, including a small number of Arab regimes and sectors so far — is seen as central, and is fully supported by the U.S. “right-wing” administration and by hard cores of extremist, quasi-fascist right-wing elements in some Western countries.
In this sense, the uprising of the peoples of the world in support of Palestine is a historic struggle that will produce, among other things, radical transformations in the West: directly affecting political officials, states, parties and organizations; at the intermediate level, bringing new leaders into the centers of decision-making in these countries; and across all these levels, including within the United States itself.
In the near term, given the insistence of the United States and Israel on invading Gaza City and central areas of the Strip, and the brutal arrogance of the Netanyahu government’s leaders, it is likely that this uprising will turn into direct actions that move the boycott movement against the occupying state to new qualitative levels. That could compel Western governments in Europe and other centers such as Japan, South Korea and Australia to take punitive measures that become economic burdens beyond what the occupying state and its economy can easily absorb, leading to new qualitative repercussions.
In all these senses, the global popular uprising has been integrated into a new, broader international context, making Palestine objectively the locomotive of the current era — a locomotive that will accelerate the collapse of the Western systems most closely attached to the U.S.-Zionist alliance, and of systems that have begun to distance themselves, gradually and sometimes reluctantly, from the moral, political and even legal shame that is taking hold not only in international legal institutions but most importantly – and this is the crucial point – in the increasingly rapid convictions of the peoples of the world who yearn for liberation and emancipation from the ugly image revealed by neoliberalism and right-wing populisms that have betrayed their peoples’ interests and in one way or another have subordinated themselves to U.S. and Zionist policies in a humiliating, subordinate manner.
And even if, which is unlikely, the U.S.-Zionist alliance succeeds in achieving a major strategic breakthrough in Gaza — a breakthrough that would be the most significant in the regional and international context — such an outcome would not extinguish the movement of the world’s peoples. Many argue that such a breakthrough would not provide the United States or the occupying state with a real way out of the crises engulfing them, given the actual changes in international balances and recent developments such as those seen at the Shanghai summit and the alarming live military display of Chinese forces, which sent clear messages about China’s shift from softer economic competition toward new political roles, backed by military strength that now rivals U.S. capabilities and could become — if it has not already — an effective counterpart to Western military power, in addition to messages Beijing conveyed through the three leaders at the military parade.
I mean that the movement of peoples that supports and shelters itself under Palestine is on alert and mobilized, born of a historic shift in this movement from humanitarian sympathy to political and social awareness, and to an awareness of the unity of the struggle and shared fate.
Therefore, to those who lament, wail and lament publicly in political and media forums about disagreements and disputes over the “Gaza opening” — which has turned into a genocidal, barbaric war targeting our people, its history, rights and existence — we say: we must choose. There is no choice but to stand either with the war to exterminate our people through killing, liquidation and displacement, or with our people and with the peoples of the world in defense of Palestine — its cause, its people and its homeland — its past, present and future. Enough hiding behind differences and disagreements over the “Al-Aqsa flood,” whether in action, vision or sacrifice, to conceal the inability to see the truth or the failure to step back from turning politics into a craft that can pass only through the eye of a needle of a faction, leadership or organization, lest we go further than that.