As Goes Gaza Goes The World: Palestine and the Ongoing Black Liberation Struggle
For over 15 months, 471 days, Israel dropped over 70,000 tonnes of American made bombs on the Gaza Strip, a 25 miles long and 3.7-7.5 miles wide land area, densely populated by 2.3 million people, half of which are children. For over 15 months with sustained attacks by the Israeli Defence Force (IDF), along with attacks by illegal Israeli settlers in the West Bank. Palestine has gone through a horrific transformation that for many is unimaginable. The Palestinian Health Ministry reports that close to 50,000 Palestinians have been killed. That figure juxtaposed against 15 months of sustained bombardment, along with the over 11,000 Palestinians missing/under 42 million tonnes of rubbles: homes, businesses, and essential public infrastructure is an understatement.
Estimates are that over 20,000 of those killed are children. The British medical journal, Lancet in a July 2024 article argued that a conservative estimate of total deaths in conflict scenarios equated to “four indirect deaths per one direct death.” By this calculation, Israel’s genocide has likely resulted in the loss of over 250,000 Palestinian lives since October 2023 — 15 months of uninterrupted brutality, but for a few weeks of respite in November 2023.
The unabated wall-to-wall carpet bombing of The Strip has released hundreds of thousands of tonnes of toxic dust into the air, the enduring deadly consequences are hard to imagine. What future for the surviving Palestinians, if any will be left?
Gaza is literally no more: its lifesaving infrastructure, including Gaza’s water supply and medical system have been systematically destroyed, 80% of schools and universities have been damaged or destroyed. For the first time since the Nakba (the first genocide in 1948), Palestinian children in Gaza did not begin school the 2024/25 school year. Alongside this, is the Israeli regime’s and its illegal settlers record land grab across the West Bank over the past 15 months. This theft has been accompanied by increasing violence and ethnic cleansing against West Bank Palestinians: Over 700 have been killed, 5,000 injured, and thousands more arrested, bringing the number of Palestinian political prisoners to nearly 10,000 in Israeli prisons — many children and women.
North Gaza before the ceasefire was essentially ethnically cleansed through numerous massacres, whether bombing, shooting unarmed civilians, field executions of men and boys or by the Israeli military forcing residents to leave for the South. There were plans under way to annex the North. Israel had announced plans to extend its borders — that’s illegal under international law.
Israel’s use of starvation as a weapon of war created man-made famine in Gaza: Israel refused to allow aid into the Strip, illegal Israeli settlers were videoed blocking aid caravans or attacking and destroying medical and food aid intended for Gaza. The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA),the main relief agency responsible for aid to the Palestinians, was been banned by Israel. It’s now the remit of the Israeli Cabinet to rule an agency of the United Nations a terrorist organisation, as was the reason for the ban.
Amid the unspeakable brutality, the issue of complicity has never come under such harsh scrutiny. The Western establishment, led by the US have continued their unabated support for Israel with increased military aid packages and weapons sales. Most of the Israeli regime’s diplomatic and trade relationships remain sound. A contemptuous violation of international law, which requires that third states are obligated to do everything in their power to prevent genocide, not be party to committing war crimes. Consider that over 20,000 sanctions have been imposed on Russia for its invasion of Ukraine.
At the same time, media coverage of the genocide across mainstream Western outlets have called into question/placed squarely on the frontline, the of question journalistic ethics and professionalism, when news cycle after news cycle brazenly curate narratives of misinformation to bias to Israel’s genocide at the cost of dehumanizing the Palestinians. Where in history have we encountered that word dehumanization before?
Legacy media’s attempt to control the narrative went into full cognitive warfare immediately after October 7. Mainstream media riveted in the consciousness that October 7 was an “unprovoked” attack and Israel had a “right to defend itself”, deliberately avoiding the source of the violence on October 7, thereby the tacit normalization and de-contextualizing over 75 years of Israeli Apartheid Oppression, 56 years of occupation in the West Bank and 17 years of a brutal blockade on the Gaza Strip, where nothing gets in or out of Gaza without Israeli approval. Israel approves how much calorie Gazans are allowed. What was happening in Gaza on October 6, 2023, just before the Hamas attack? Certainly, that matters, or is it that to acknowledge the past is to justify the Palestinian Liberation Struggle within the context of historical liberation struggles, making it a just cause? Whataboutism is very material to this conflict.
This is winter in Gaza. Palestinians are literally freezing to death, while not far away in Jabalia, which had been under siege for three months, the Israeli army had set up a holiday village for tired soldiers on the coast of Gaza. Take a break from genocide and come enjoy according the the soldier chef “a feeling of home here, with iced coffee, espresso, protein drinks, toast and flavored shakes for breakfast, and of course fruit and ice cream when the weather is hot”. One of the most overt declarations of how far removed from humanity the Zionist state is, and how characteristically it has aligned itself with definitively some of history's horrific crimes. .
This is not a war! This is genocide.
Indifference and Misconception
So, one of the most distressing things, certainly in the social media spaces, is to hear comments that the conflict between the Palestinians and Israel, is not compatible with the Black struggle, so “please leave Black people out of it; it's not our concern”. Understandably, much of it is grounded in identity politics: race, and the alienation, lack of solidarity/ support for the Black struggle among non-Black races and ethnicities. The genocide becomes their issue, their problem, why should we concern ourselves,when we have got our own problems? Reasonable!
Yet appalling because it is frustratingly demonstrative of our lack of understanding of what foregrounds our own struggle. Misreading history can lead to it repeating itself! An ominous warning: “As goes Gaza goes the world”, according to my Palestinian-American activist-friend.
As Gaza is a metaphor for a much broader liberation struggle, it automatically pulls us in. It is the microcosm of a much larger struggle that we the people, in what is now for the time being the Global South, as the delineation changes every so often, have been fighting for centuries: from European Imperialism and Colonialism to the present context of post the fledgling American Century — that rise to globalism by the American state, circa the Spanish American war, but more specifically after 1945 — the end of World War II when the United States (US) gained hegemonic dominance.
When the UN Secretary-General admonished in the weeks after The Al Asqa Flood, the codename for the attack on Israel, that we should not look at October 7 in a vacuum, he was uttering what has probably resided in his consciousness, perhaps for some time, and I daresay in the minds of many in the Western political establishment, so much so that they have laboured to erase it from the narrative.
Yet it is a crucial part of history that underwrites October 7. Contextually, the Palestinians are fighting against Zionist settler colonialism, but that struggle is imperatively located within the family of the anti-colonial/anti-settler colonial struggle. Within that historical architectural framework we find common ground with the people of Palestine. Especially as our struggle is not mission accomplished.
As abominable as October 7, 2023 may be to the sensibilities, we have to do two things:
1. Place the struggle within the context of a National Liberation Struggle and make that connection between all National Liberations Struggles. And within that historical context, Gaza becomes part of a broad patchwork of resistance, no different from the the slave resistance against colonialism/imperialism/settler colonialism in the New World: the Maroon Wars, the Haitian revolution, the National liberation struggles in Africa: Algeria, Mozambique, Angola, the Mau Mau in Kenya, the ANC in South Africa, Kashmir, East Timor, the continued struggle of the IRA, the people of West Papua. In fact Gaza is overtly the last remaining stronghold of imperialist/settler-colonialism in its most vulgar and brutal manifestation.
“Everything Israel does is defined by the fact that it’s a settler colonial state”. While there may be variations in the operational framework, the strategy is the same as the old settler colonial stalwarts: British in India, Kenya, the French in Algeria, the Dutch in South Africa.
2.Place the Palestinian National Liberation struggle, generally within the context of the struggle against Western imperialism/colonialism and settler colonialism but particularly within the context of Zionism.
Within the context of Zionism because we have to counter years of manipulation, and fabrication of the truth by the Western political establishment, western media,TV series and documentaries, Hollywood movies the likes of Schindler's List et al that remarkably trolls Jewish suffering, the creation of a Jewish state but never the back story of how that state came to be. We have to decolonize our minds.
And as controversial as it may be, Christianity itself. For if American military support is what upholds Israel as a feared military superpower in the Middle East, Christianity is the social philosophy/ideology that underpins it, and carefully inoculates it. How shockingly devastating to hear not only Evangelicals, Christian Zionists, but the followers salivating over some self-fulfilling prophecy while children are blown to pieces. Perhaps Christianity itself needs to do some soul-searching.
To talk about the conflict is to conflate it with Zionism, and Zionism is akin to racism! Zionism is a racist political ideology of Jewish ‘supremacy’ used to justify a colonial project of ethnic cleansing, genocide, and land theft foregrounded in notions of racial superiority, differentials and entitlement. Zionism bears traits no different from the European white ‘supremacist’ doctrine that anchored slavery and colonialism. Both are of ideologically utility in the process to commit genocide.
Hence the racist rhetoric coming out of the Israeli leadership after October 7 and the subsequent actions since, led the world’s leading specialists on the subject of genocide to declare that Israel is indeed carrying out a combination of “genocidal actions, ethnic cleansing and annexation of the Gaza Strip.
Unlike the Palestinian struggle, Zionism is not a part of the history of national liberation movements as we know it, despite how it may be taught in Euro-America academia. To cite Patrick Wolfe’s groundbreaking theory of the “logic of elimination” , Zionism is a part of the racist ideological thinking that upholds the settler colonial project, thriving as it does in an atmosphere that normalizes the perpetuation of genocide and repression of the indigenous owners of the occupied land. The disproportionate division between the land and the indigenous population is central to the project: land with as few of the people as possible.
“Settler colonialism destroys to replace”. In the words of Theodor Herzl, founding father of Zionism, “If I wish to substitute a new building for an old one, I must demolish before I construct” (Theodor Herzl, Old–New Land [Altneuland, 1902], Lotta Levensohn, trans. (New York: M. Wiener 1941), p 38.). Israel has been doing a lot of destruction for over 76 years. In an ever enforcing neo-liberal global order, there are lessons to be learned from Gaza in understanding the doctrinal workings behind settler colonialism.
The Global South, Impunity For Israel And International Law
Yet even without the historiographic references, we can’t deny Gaza. “Palestine is a moral litmus test for the world”. If we do, we are alienating ourselves from the parameters of moral and ethical principles that define our very being —- principles that would anathematize genocide. Through this alienation we are participating in a sort of ideological swap that historically has proven to be harmful. We are separating ourselves from the sorts of gross exploitation and violence that is definitive of our past and present, as Black people and citizens of the Global South, where the majority of fatalistic acts of imperial aggression have and continue to be played out. We are ignoring our own historical experiences, under a social order that has been marked by violence and ideology as crucial props for its survival.We are refusing to embrace, that the same white ‘supremacy’ that informed enslavement, informs Palestine .
We are witnessing in our lifetime, not only genocide Livestream, but one of the most omnipresent signals of global moral decay of the world government in its inability, unwillingness, to stop genocide, and consequently, its complicity. Duplicitous when one remembers that these are the very nations that flaunt the rules based international order, as the foundational principle that is necessary to reinforce and promote the conditions needed for global peace and prosperity. The glaring inaction translates to an eerily unspoken normalization of the most heinous attack on humanity. Especially against the background of the millions marching globally against genocide.
Lessons to be Learned from Gaza
Israel with the complicity of the North Atlantic Alliance isn’t just carrying out a military operation. It all seems like a sort of performative theatre, where Gaza becomes a theatrical space, where the aesthetics and content function to send a chilling set of messages: to the Arab world the level of cruelty is designed to re -establish Israel’s deterrent power — lost with the October 7 attack —- in the eyes of friends and adversaries in the Middle East. For years since the 1967 Six Day War, Israeli military dominance, shored up by American and European military aid, has been the tactical force that has made Israel seem untouchable — until October 7, 2023; to the Palestinians, resistance is not an option; to the people in the Global South, the subliminal “as goes Gaza goes you”.
Perhaps in all this, though, Gaza raises hope for the dispossessed. To paraphrase a friend, out of decades of oppression, displacement, imprisonment, and decapitation emerged a Palestinian leadership determined to fight until the end despite the overwhelming odds. “Resist to exist” is what Palestinians have been doing for over 76 years. Sounds very familiar. As goes Gaza goes the world!
