Another Palestinian war hero dies in combat in the ruins of his homeland of Gaza.
Yahya Sinwar, a 61-year-old father of three, was only one of several dozen of his fellow citizens massacred in Israeli bombings and targeted ground operations last week. The death toll in the genocide ongoing in his homeland now exceeds 42,500 officially confirmed with nearly 200,000 more missing and unaccounted for.
Longtime Hamas military commander and, recently elected overall Hamas movement leader, Yahya Sinwar, was killed in firefight when an Israeli special forces squad surrounded him among ruined buildings in war-battered Rafah city last Tuesday. And yesterday, Israeli Premier Benjamin Netanyahu was fortunate not to be home when it was hit by a drone fired from Lebanon.
The assassination of another legendary colonial resistance leader is but the latest in a series of killings of the Palestinian Hamas movement’s top leaders. The pattern is stark and most alarming. Each killing is done with much collateral damage of different kinds.
Damage
The damage is either in terms of many more people killed alongside the principal target or, serious inter-state aggression as in the bombing of Iran’s diplomatic mission in neighbouring Syria or, the targeting of other country officials or community leaders or, a bombing strike in the heart of the capital of a major regional power.
The immediate outcomes of these assassinations, the perpetrating power, Israel, either openly takes responsibility or hints at it. Israel also openly hints at future repeats. At the same, Israel’s principal sponsors that sustain the entire aggressive geopolitics now affecting the whole of West Asia, the Western powers, also either fully endorse these actions and deny illegalities or, make routine verbal admonitions with no indication whatsoever of preventive or punitive action.
However, the longer such flouting of geopolitical norms and violation of law continues, the more restive the world community becomes because of the stress that all of humanity must continue to suffer.
The Western power bloc, once a legitimate champion of liberal democracy, civilised geopolitics, and international law, has, in the course of this historically unprecedented and humanly intolerable practice of genocide on a scale that destabilises the global order, lost that legitimacy. This leaves a moral and political vacuum that needs filling for the sustenance of planetary stability.
Already there are new forces that are emerging across the planet in the form of newly prospering, former colonised nations like South Africa, Brazil, India and, also, newly assertive great powers like China. This new gathering of states is now called ‘Global South’.
The discrediting of that earlier historically singular role played by the Western liberal democracies in the emerging post-colonial world system – i.e. the Western powers – is the cue for the Global South and related new planetary networks to play greater roles in the geopolitics for peace, stability, justice.
Thus, when a single small state so persistently creates chaos and is allowed to sustain it for a whole year, the world community as a whole is pushed to seek alternative scenarios. That misbehaving state gets a reputation of a ‘rogue’ and a dangerous one at that.
Crisis-fatigue
Being a tiny state, the larger world community has the facility of not risking too much damage in the management of this crisis. All that is preventing a solution then, is seen in the protective umbrella provided to the small state by a great power bloc – the world’s most powerful, no doubt. But what if that power bloc continues down its current slide into illegitimacy, geopolitical unpopularity?
That happened to a large extent in South Africa, enabling world pressure to help quicken the total transformation of a de-stabilising racist (Apartheid) colonial state into a nationally democratic one. It is the crisis-fatigue that is pushing most of the world community in the same direction in relation to Israel-Palestine.
Already, many parts of global society, especially of the non-European, non-colonial Global South, have begun re-examining the Palestinian crisis as a currently unfinished de-colonisation process. There are many Global South states that acknowledge the typically colonial nature of what happened in Palestine in 1947-48. They see the need to complete this de-colonisation.
The non-colonial world knows fully well that if the United Nations had the kind of membership it has today (some two thirds of the nearly 200 member states are from the Global South) in 1948, the Western powers could never have forcibly implanted another European colony on a non-European society and its territory.
Last week, French President Emmanuel Macron created a minor stir in Western capitals as well as among the Global South nations on the side of Palestine when he unexpectedly referred to the very artificial and poorly legitimised nature of the Israeli state itself. Western diplomats chose not to take much notice of the French leader’s remark.
Usually, such questioning of the existence of Israel is strictly taboo in Western circles, only raised in less mainstream or marginalised networks. The bulk of the Western mass media and public discourses avoid discussion of the way the Zionist Jewish exclusivist state was set up in 1948 with the use of military force that ethnically cleansed Palestinian territory.
European Jewish militia, some of them openly describing themselves as Zionist “terrorist” groups, set about massacring whole neighbourhoods of the Arab and other ethnic minority indigenous population that made up its original inhabitants. The British colonial administration simply stood by and watched the anti-Arab mass ethnic pogroms in the process of the establishment of Israel under Western-steered UN auspices.
De-colonised
The incipient United Nations body at the time (1948), under Western leadership, ensured UN mandates that legally transferred the entire territory from British and French colonial control to a newly established Government of Israel. With most of the world’s nations yet to be decolonised, the majority vote in the UN comprised largely the Western powers along with formerly colonial, White-dominated states like Australia, USA, Canada, and a few new Latin American states.
French news media reported last week that, during Tuesday’s weekly meeting with his Cabinet, President Macron warned Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu not to “ignore United Nations decisions”. “Mr. Netanyahu must not forget that his country was created by a U.N. decision,” the highly respected French leader is quoted as saying, referencing the U.N. General Assembly’s November 1947 vote that awarded the newly set up Government of Israel the bulk of territory of (forcibly de-populated) Palestine.
Western discourse is firmly locked into a framing of Israel’s creation as a ‘refuge’ for a distressed, displaced, ethnic minority bereft of a ‘homeland’. This discourse, essentially a 19th century European Jewish Zionist ideology, persistently glosses over the fact that this particular ‘population’ was not a singular community.
Rather, those thousands of groups of European Jewish emigrants were the Jewish sections of numerous European nations (speaking diverse languages with diverse histories). They comprised European Jews who had either survived Nazi ethnic extermination operations or, were displaced or impoverished by the Second World War or, were simply seeking escape from Europe’s generalised anti-Jewish racial harassment (including pogroms).
Rogue
The subject of the state of Israel’s illegitimacy and, the racist, colonial nature of its origins, has, in recent months, been suddenly brought to the fore. This arises from the global community’s shock over the extreme violence of the Jewish states actions within the territories it controls (again, illegally) and also against neighbouring states.
Much of the Jewish state’s recent actions have been in violation of many of the UN systems laws and multilateral frameworks and, are deemed to be so by the world community, including international legal and regulatory bodies. The world community outside the small bloc of powerful states that supports Israel, has had enough of Israel’s decades of persistent non-compliance.
It was this ‘rogue’ behaviour by Israel that has prompted France to publicly hint at the possibly rogue nature of the very creation of this wayward nation-state.
Following the persistently illegal and barbaric behaviour by Israel, geopolitics encouraged and equipped by the Western powers – its former colonial sponsor – much of the larger global community is now pushed to look beyond this most dangerous disruptor of world stability.
A whole year’s deliberate sustaining of this chaotic behaviour of a single state by the Western bloc which, in turn, the dominant force in the system of institutions that manage the global order, is prompting the rest of the world community to seek alternatives, alternatives sharply different from the so-called “two-state solution”. This shift in paradigm may point to a long term movement away from the current ‘forever war’ in West Asia.
