Hur Qassemi
“There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.”
Vladimir Lenin taught us regarding the kinetics of historical change. Certain events have the potential to unleash vast stores of fury against the status quo and expose the mechanisms of global power.
Third-Worldist intellectual Samir Amin argued in 2006 that the “Great Middle East” is the central battleground of imperialist war. He writes, “To defeat the Washington establishment’s project is the condition for providing the possibility of success for advances in any region of the world. Failing that, all these advances will remain vulnerable in the extreme.” In 1986, US Senator Joe Biden said, “Were there not an Israel, the United States of America would have to invent an Israel to protect its interests in the region.” Amin recognises both the interconnectedness of global anti-imperialist struggle and the centrality of Palestine. He continues, “That does not mean that the importance of struggles carried out in other regions of the world, in Europe or Latin America or elsewhere, should be underestimated. It means only that they should be part of a comprehensive perspective that contributes to defeating Washington in the region that it has chosen for its first criminal strike of this century.”
Just like Africa and Latin America in past centuries, Palestine today is the laboratory for imperialist powers. In addition to field testing the latest, most advanced killing technologies man has ever witnessed, surveillance and repressive techniques, the US empire experiments with the limits of its impunity. While the methods and technologies used by the Zionist entity enter global markets (through exports or training partnerships like those between US and Israeli policing forces) and are used for more bloodshed across the world, Aime Cesaire’s idea of the “imperial boomerang” ultimately rotates above Palestine, raining 2,000 lb MK-84s and bunker-buster bombs down onto the people of Gaza in an unrelenting genocide. The Zionist atrocities are virtually recorded and broadcast 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, revealing to the world the murderous psychopathy of Zionism that Palestinians know better than any.
The display of imperial violence is stark against the prevailing liberal attitudes towards a “rules-based” international order. To analyse the present contradictions, it is not only essential to examine the century of violence endured by Palestinians at the hands of Zionists before the beginning of this accelerated genocide, but also to contextualise Operation Al-Aqsa Flood within a framework of anti-colonial and anti-imperialist struggle.
We have seen that, due to the glorious resistance of Palestine, different groups and leaders, such as Burkina Faso’s Ibrahim Traore and Colombia’s Gustavo Petro, have started challenging Western hegemony, and the world has been divided into two camps: apologists of Western imperialism and those who stand against it. This segregation was made possible because of the direct revolutionary action that Palestinians took when they broke free into their land.
Despite the Zionist entity’s criminal, genocidal massacres of the Palestinian people, the Palestinian resistance continues to deliver blow after blow to the occupiers, forcing them into a military quagmire. This quagmire has now lasted nearly two years, with the occupation no closer to its stated goals of the destruction of the resistance and the recovery of settler captives. The seemingly unending flow of arms, intelligence, and logistical support from the combined Western powers has failed to deter heroic acts of resistance, from point-blank attacks on occupation tanks to the rigging of explosive devices that take the enemy by surprise.
These acts of resistance, caught on camera for the world to bear witness, have birthed an international movement from Gaza. Today, in every country – even those as fascist as Germany – there are protests for Palestine and against the Zionist entity – pledging solidarity not just with Palestine, but voicing disgust and disdain towards imperialism itself.
Students and professors across the US mobilised to decry the scholasticide in Gaza. It is not the failure of the resistance in Gaza that continues to fight the enemy with unknowable bravery, but the failure of the world to take appreciable action in support of the resistance, which permits the ongoing holocaust. Shaheed Syed Hasan Nasrullah reminded us that the genocide in Gaza proves that our tears, our blood, and our crying do not matter. What matters is our rockets and our weapons and the strength to use them wisely. In the context of global imperialism, armed resistance is the only weapon: it fractures the liberal illusions, exposing the oppressors and their bloodlust, and demanding that those who witness take a stand or remain complicit.
Since October 7, 2023, West Asia has been engulfed in flames. Liberal pundits of imperialism, who proclaim to uphold the decolonial consensus, are unmasked by their actions (or lack thereof). Palestine teaches us, beyond a shadow of doubt, the true extent of the West’s colonial practice and aspirations.
(Neo)Colonialism still prevails
The past two years have clearly shown that colonialism never vanished from the Global South. The same pursuits of expanded markets, land, and of racist supremacy which tore apart the heart of Latin America, the Middle East, and Asia are still here, although in a different and less obvious disguise.
Colonialism finds its base in the theories propagated by John Locke, the lodestar of Liberalism, for whom liberty and freedom existed only for the Whites. Domenico Losurdo has very thoroughly investigated and critiqued his work.
The organic intellectual writes: “Let us now pass on to the Glorious Revolution and Locke. The Two Treatises of Government may be regarded as key moments in the ideological preparation and consecration of the event that marks the birth of liberal England. We are dealing with texts deeply impregnated with the pathos of liberty, the condemnation of absolute power, and the appeal to rise up against the wicked ones who seek to deprive man of his liberty and reduce him to slavery. But every now and then, frightening passages open up in this ode to liberty, where slavery in the colonies is legitimized.”
He goes on to deconstruct Locke’s arguments, which misused religion to justify slavery and colonization: “The Second Treatise makes repeated reference to the ‘wild Indian’, who moved around ‘insolent and injurious in the woods of America’ or the ‘vacant places of America’. Ignorant of labour, which was the only thing that could confer property right, and occupying a land not ‘improv[ed] by labour’, or ‘great tracts of unused’ ground’, the Indian inhabited ‘unpossessed quarters’, in vacuis locis. In addition to labour and property, Indians were also ignorant of money. They thus not only proved alien to civilization, but were also ‘not … joined with the rest of mankind’. As a result of their behaviour, they were not solely subject to human condemnation. Unquestionably, ‘God commanded … labour’ and private property, and could certainly not want the world created by him to remain ‘common and uncultivated'”.
Similar themes are found in the works of many early proponents of Liberalism. For example, the Dutch so-called “humanist and lawyer” Hugo Grotius says in The Rights of War and Peace that, “‘the justest War is that which is undertaken against wild rapacious Beasts, and next to it is that against Men who are like Beasts [homines belluis similes]’.”
The same rhetoric that valorises unrelenting violence against a racialised other continues in the pulpit of US President Donald Trump, a war criminal. Trump said about Gaza amid the most horrible genocide in recorded history that, “The US will take over the Gaza Strip and we will do a job with it too. We’ll own it…. You’re talking about a million and a half people … we just clean out that whole thing.”
Moreover, when German Chancellor Fredrich Merz said that Israel was “doing the dirty work” for Europe and the US by attacking Iranian scientists and civilians, he exposed the fascism and racial supremacy embedded in the European system against those who are considered other or Oriental. Furthermore, it revealed the disdain the imperialist powers have for countries that dare to pursue not only sovereignty but also take a stand against the encroaching plans of the American-led order. Iranians were reduced to natural, if politically inconvenient, targets for violence and execution, whom the powerful should make sure can not interfere with the violence of the colonialists. This is the very same script that Palestinian scholar Edward Said comprehensively explained decades ago.
For the imperialists, people from the Global South will always be sub-humans as the legacy of their barbarism, disguised in magnificently impressive civilization, continues.
Resistance: The Only Dignified Way Forward
When the freedom fighters of Palestine broke out from their open-air prison into the occupied land to liberate it, they sent the message to the Global South that it was possible to throw out the invaders. The West had developed an image of invincibility and superiority over the years, showcasing its military technology and projecting its strength through this lens. Al Aqsa Flood shattered this image.
The Palestinian operation created ripples of revolutionary energy that reached Lebanon, Yemen, Iraq, and united the Ummah. This moment was the first time that the younger generations of today, who were raised with nothing but the propaganda of the Neoliberal World Order, saw a flashing image of liberation–an indelible testament to the power and strength of resistance.
Fanon very wisely guided us about the phenomenon of decolonization, “which is always violent”. Not only did the resistance fighters feel the hope of liberation but also millions of the oppressed of the Global South.
Fanon writes that, “Thus the native discovers that his life, his breath, his beating heart are the same as those of the settler. He finds out that the settler’s skin is not of any more value than a native’s skin; and it must be said that this discovery shakes the world in very necessary manner. All the new, revolutionary assurance of the native stems from it. For if, in fact, my life is worth the settler’s, his glance no longer shrivels me up nor freezes me, and his voice no longer turns me into stone.”
Connected with this vital aspect is the anti-imperialist struggle of the Islamic Republic of Iran. The “True Promise” operations demonstrated that the Ummah and the Third World are capable not only of challenging Western hegemony with ideas and values but also through direct military action. It proved that superior military technology is not only in the hands of the the imperialist invader, but the sovereign defender. This idea was clearly debunked once and for all. Despite losing elements of the leadership of Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the revolutionary government was able to reorganize itself and send a deadly blow to the Zionist regime and its masters through home-built technology. The people in other Muslim countries must ask themselves, if Iran could do it with hundreds of high-pressure sanctions, why they couldn’t and still can’t they do it? The answer may be unpleasant as it will tie to not only unwillingness, but rather servitude to imperialism.
Resistance has also brought people together all over the world, those who believe in freedom for all people and for all oppressed nations. The Western conception of individualism is on its last breath in the Global South as people are realizing that it serves only Western interests. Fanon also pointed that out. “[t]he very forms of organization of the struggle will suggest to him a different vocabulary. Brother, sister, friend – these are words outlawed by the colonialist bourgeoisie, because for them my brother is my purse, my friend is part of my scheme for getting on… Hence forward, the interest of one will be the interests of all, for in concrete fact everyone will be discovered by the troops, everyone will be massacred – or everyone will be saved. The motto ‘look out for yourself’, the atheist’s method of salvation, is in this context forbidden.”
The culture or civilization of the Global South was never inferior to that of the North. However, in order to dominate the colonized whose culture, of course, was never embedded in loot and plunder, the colonialists had to invade the oppressed land and impose their own cultural values, forcing the colonized to think that their culture is that of barbarism and savagery. Only the reverse holds true.
The attack on culture and Third World civilization also came from intellectuals who wore the appearance of socialists, but continued nurturing the racist idea of Western civilization being superior to other cultures and societies.
Eduard Bernstein, who is today remembered as the greatest social democrat, had to say this about the colonized during the International’s congress in Stuttgart in 1907: “People who do not develop may be justifiably subjugated by people who have achieved civilization… Socialists too should acknowledge the need for civilized peoples to act like the guardians of the uncivilized. … Our economies are based in large measure on the extraction from the colonies of products that the native peoples have no idea how to use.”
Another member of the International, Hendrik van Kol, said that “Suppose we bring a machine to the savages of central Africa. What will they do with it? Perhaps they will start up a war dance around it. Perhaps they will kill us or even eat us.” While he said that, there was a loud laughter as other members approved of this joke. This happened during the congress of the International!
It was however never about cultural or civilizational superiority. If anything, it was only about power and the strength of firepower alone that made it possible for the colonialists to maintain the exploitative system as Michael Parenti has pointed out. He writes, “Superior firepower, not superior culture, has brought the Europeans and Euro-North Americans to positions of supremacy that today are still maintained by force, though not by force alone.”
This is proved even further by history when Columbus wrote in his diary, recalling as he stepped into the Bahamas Islands, that the Arawak “..have no iron. Their spears are made of cane…. They would make fine servants…. With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do… whatever we want.”
This cycle can only be broken by use of violence by the oppressed nations. By maintaining deterrence and determination that have been shown by Yemen, Hezbollah, and the Islamic Republic of Iran in recent times.
This piece is part of a series by the author. Keep an eye out for further installments on VoxUmmah.com
Hur Qassemi, a student organiser for Palestine in Germany, advocates decolonised education and views resistance to Western hegemony as vital for oppressed nations’ liberation.
