The world today lives inside a tale of global impunity for some of its deadliest elements and most destructive actors. Alongside this mayhem, we find pockets of order and restraint, occurring not due to formal accountability or any rules, but purely due to countervailing pressures.
Imagine the seaboard stretch of Greater Colombo, from Moratuwa to Peliyagoda: the most urbanised, most densely populated area of Sri Lanka. It is the most clogged with buildings, including commercial blocks, housing, tenements, schools, large hospitals, museums, an airport, hotels, universities, parks and even a zoo, an area about 40 km in length and about 10 km inland with a population of less than two million.
Imagine this entire strip of inhabited, busily productive territory, blasted to rubble, 60 percent of buildings fully flattened, 90 percent of homes destroyed, rendered “un-liveable”, but yet its entire surviving population still “living” there in tents, shanties, in the shelter of collapsed buildings, amid the stench of rotting corpses and human excreta. No ‘running water’ or electricity; no healthcare – leave aside education and religious life.
While imagining Colombo in this state would be mind-boggling, most readers would immediately think of the constant visuals they see on TV news, websites, newspapers of the Gaza Strip after 15 months of incessant bombardment and invading troops with guns blazing. The visuals leave out the nightmare sounds of exploding 1,000 kg bombs, rockets, shells and gunfire that have snuffed out 47,000 lives. But readers can imagine the aural ambience.
Mass slaughter
Realise that this destruction, this mass slaughter is continuing right now and has been publicly, boastfully, waged for the whole world to see for over one and a half years; All the world’s appeals, condemnations, protests, judicial rulings, world governing body resolutions, legal prosecutions, rudely dismissed or arrogantly ignored.
All this cruelty and destruction is perpetrated without any repercussions whatsoever – except for the few pinprick retaliatory home-made rocket firings that damage shop fronts and injure a few people – and, a handful of single drone missiles launched from distant Yemen that just barely reach intended targets and also cause little damage.
Whether or not the military actions on both sides are justified by ‘self-defence’ or national survival, readers know the accuracy of the description above, the awful reality of human actions and events. The narrative above tells us who is doing what to whom.
That extent of Greater Colombo territory described above is the extent of the whole Gaza Strip enclave. And the Strip has nearly double the population. Nearly two-thirds of the population have lived in poverty (according to the World Bank) and thousands live in United Nations (UN)-run refugee camps. Amid all this deprivation and chaos, the Strip also had hospitals, schools and cultural centres gifted and maintained by sympathetic foreign nations or charities.
But after 15 months of full-scale war, of a specific nature unprecedented in human history, Gaza – only 41 km long and 10 km wide is now in large parts “uninhabitable”, according to all the world’s habitat experts. But Gaza’s entire population, unlike Colombo’s slightly smaller population, cannot flee to a safer part of their larger homeland of Palestine. They just continue to inhabit this un-liveable home.
And now the American Government – the “leader of the free world” – wants to throw the Gazans out of their home, but cannot think where to put them after both Egypt and Jordan rejected any such moves. (There is even an AI generated movie clip of Gaza as the “Riviera of the Middle East”).
In the first place they are not allowed to escape. And if they wanted to escape, they are not allowed to, militarily. In the second place, there is no “larger homeland” of Palestine to which they may escape. Indeed, most, if not all, Gazans are grimly determined to cling to their now scorched earth, precisely because they have nowhere else to go.
Compare this horrific scenario in West Asia with the scene in East Europe. When a militarily threatened Russia launched a “special military operation” against neighbouring Ukraine in 2014, the dominant Western power bloc not just condemned it but immediately began arming and financing Ukraine. Faced with this enhanced military threat from its past Cold War enemy NATO, Moscow intensified its military operations with a full-scale invasion of eastern Ukraine.
Russia is now under severe political and economic sanctions by the Western powers. Significantly, much of the rest of the world did not react similarly. The watching Global South in particular, already familiar with the West’s anti-Russian strategies, especially NATO’s pursuit of a military encirclement of Russia, has remained more or less aloof and unsympathetic. The contrast with West Asia – a vital part of the Global South – is stark.
In Eastern Europe, Russia, a nuclear superpower, is in confrontation via proxy-victim Ukraine which is armed and funded by the equally militarily powerful Western power bloc. Ukraine itself is a wealthy nation with many natural resources.
Pampered by NATO and the EU, when hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians were displaced by advancing Russian Forces, they were warmly welcomed with coffee and food when they fled to neighbouring European States in heated, comfy trains and buses or their cars. Their fellow Whites continue to host them.
The military contest in Eastern Europe is an evenly balanced one. The agenda of NATO-EU has been to wear-down Russia, to weaken this giant State on the eastern flank of rich Europe.
Mineral reserves and infrastructure
Moscow knows the West’s intentions and has been grimly persisting with its invasion even if the War has cost much in terms of both troops and military hardware. Being a Great Power already and, one with a vast hinterland – literally the world’s biggest – rich in mineral reserves and strong economic infrastructure, Russia has simply persisted with this war of attrition.
Moscow has a final trump card which the whole world knows: a countervailing nuclear force to that of NATO’s arsenal, which includes nuclear weapons on French and British soil. And NATO has constantly acknowledged this reality of well-matched military power. The doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction prevails ultimately.
Force is being met with equal countervailing force. Too late, Ukraine has realised that it is a pawn in this great game of great power contestation. Perhaps US President Donald Trump was not too far off the mark when he chided Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky of trying to precipitate “World War III”.
The parallels to Israel-Palestine are hard and clear. The dissimilarities are even more stark. Israel is well financed and well-armed (with its own little, albeit undeclared nuclear arsenal as well) by the Western power bloc, which actually created this proxy colony in West Asia. Palestine is the victim and has been so for nearly a whole century.
But there is no countervailing force in support of Palestine that equally matches that of the West and its proxy Israel. The only countervailing force is the tiny pinpricks of home-grown resistance movements that do not have a territorial hinterland to hide in. The only insurgent base area for the Palestinians has been the tightly packed Palestinian community itself and some sections of the neighbouring Arab and other Muslim nations (Iran).
This Opposition has remained a fierce resistance (Intifada) for the entire period of the establishment of colonial Israel, but it remains a ridiculously weak resistance and nothing more. It is certainly not a ‘countervailing force’ that can match Israel and the mighty, aggressive, Western bloc. Even this meagre resistance is immediately and harshly crushed whether it is inside Occupied Palestine or in neighbouring Lebanon or Syria or more distant Iran and Yemen.
