Palestine is here, now
Understanding the global context of Palestinian liberation
A lot of coverage of the latest battle of liberation in Palestine has rightly focused on the atrocities committed by Zionist forces and their practices of ethnic cleansing. As of writing, more than 6,000 bombs have been dropped on the densely populated Gaza Strip killing more than 2,000 Palestinians including at least 724 children and 45 whole families. These numbers are all expected to rise as the Zionist state prepares for a massive ground invasion. In addition to these dire statistics, Israel has intensified its blockade of the Strip leaving 2.2 million Palestinians, 70% of which are refugees and 50% of which are children now witnessing their 5th war, without access to water, electricity, food, and medical supplies.
While it is imperative to highlight these facts, they unintentionally reinforce, for those of us living away from the region, a false dichotomy of “here” vs. “there”. This manifests itself in the sentiment that although what is happening is bad, it remains something happening “there”, far away, and therefore doesn’t impact us beyond abstract morality, limiting political action to efforts of influencing political decisions related to “there” — this can be in the form of petitions to parliamentarians, boycotts, direct action, or fundraising.
This division is obviously false, and, unfortunately, undermines our solidarity with the Palestinian cause and obscures how the cause and its dynamics penetrate our everyday existence historically and in the here and now.
Not only is the occupation itself a direct result of sustained Western foreign policy (from Balfour on). But we have also seen how Western governments have mobilised right now to counter support for Palestine and reinforce the occupation of Palestine. The US and the UK are sending multiple warships each to the region “to send a clear message of deterrence to other states or non-state actors that might seek to widen this war” (losing the irony that their intervention signals its widening).
France and Germany have used claims of anti-semitism and support for Hamas to restrict and ban pro-Palestinian protests. These actions have led many to ask: Why are Western countries deploying such extreme measures domestically and internationally to support an occupying force which is a nuclear power, already receives billions in foreign military aid, and is infinitely more powerful than any resistance Palestinians can muster?
The practices of Western states have been rightfully called hypocritical. Why should Ukrainians have the right to defend themselves but not the Palestinians? Why do free speech, human rights, and democracy apply to everyone else but Palestinians? The claims of hypocrisy take the claims of Western governments at face value and assess them against their own liberal rhetoric which obviously returns as lacking. However, it is not enough to just point out the hypocrisy of Western countries, but understand that the practices of Western “developed” countries are actually consistent and have a material root. It is not hypocrisy alone that needs to be called out, but the notion of Western development en toto.
The engine of Western complicity
The Western lifestyle, including its liberal rhetoric, is maintained by 4 market dynamics:
- The availability of cheap labour outside of it which enables the production of cheap consumer goods and services and the externalisation of the costs of such production — including ecological costs.
- The availability of cheap raw materials which can be imported and transformed into commodities.
- Access to foreign markets to export these commodities.
- Using financial surpluses from the above activities to invest in “development” projects which secure Western hegemony/dependence and reproduce these dynamics.
This is obviously a crude simplification, but the above processes have defined the neoliberal world order since the national liberation campaigns of the 40s-70s removed Western power’s ability to practice extractivism through direct colonial domination. A microcosm of this dynamic can be found within the occupied territories of Palestine. Israel is presented as a “developed” country and a hub of technological and entrepreneurial innovation. Citizens there enjoy a quality of life equivalent to Western democracies. These are more than parallels, most Israeli citizens are themselves European colonists. This has allowed its participation in cultural events ranging from the Eurovision Song Contest to the Union of European Football Associations to appear as non-paradoxical.
The shiny promise of Israel however is maintained in part by foreign aid and support, but mostly by its access to cheap labour and land resources in the form of Palestinian bodies and land under its control through its violent military occupation. For example, Israel feeds itself through its control of the most fertile lands in the West Bank which are found in “Area C” and the Jordan Valley, both under complete occupation. A maze of checkpoints and permits as well as a high rate of unemployment in the West Bank means that Israel is able to discipline Palestinians into a reserve army of labour. More than 122,000 Palestinians, representing 22.3% of those employed in the Gaza Strip and 24.8% of those employed in the West Bank, work for Israeli firms to meet its construction and manufacturing needs.
According to a UN report, the occupation has cost the Palestinian people more than 58 Billion USD in economic revenue. The same report shows that
Without the Israeli closures and military operations, the poverty rate in the West Bank in 2004 would have been one third of the observed 35% and GDP per capita in 2019 would have been 44% higher than its actual value
The case of Palestine therefore reveals, in clear contrast, the unity of economic and political domination and exploitation. One entity's gain is another’s loss.
This dynamic is not limited to the occupied territories of Palestine but occurs and is reproduced on a global scale to create the capitalist order. North Africa and West Asia has always been a critical region of contention for the West and has been continuously subjected to haphazard division and violent intervention to maintain access to resources and markets. Israel functions as a spearhead for maintaining this order. This is not an outlandish statement, Joe Biden has made it clear, several times across his political career, that: “If there were not an Israel, we would have to invent one to make sure our interests were preserved”.
Western interests in the region have been preoccupied with creating a bulwark against the economic rise of China and other factors related to intensifying global competition. To further entrench itself in the region, the US has helped broker several “normalisation” deals between Arab states and Israel. Where Israel could claim that it was surrounded by hostile nations, it has now normalised relations with Egypt, Bahrain, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Oman, Jordan, and Morocco. All despotic undemocratic regimes with their own histories of oppressing their peoples.
The Palestinian cause, therefore, is important beyond being an example of a just anti-colonial or national liberation struggle, but as a critical link in the global struggle against imperialist exploitation and appropriation, and political oppression around the world. It is the fact that the Palestinian cause poses an existential threat to this global order which explains the quick and overwhelming mobilisation of the West against it.
Resistance against occupation and the global capitalist order
This is not to say that the Palestinian cause is explicitly anti-capitalist. This would be misguided and, more importantly, it would be unfair to burden the Palestinian people with the responsibility of undoing the global capitalist order when they are fighting to gain their most basic freedoms. However, the Palestinian struggle for self-determination presents a clear link to capitalist domination. This link should help us build better practices of solidarity and resistance.
While Palestinians are suffering directly from Israeli occupation, this occupation is enabled by the West and its ruthless drive to maintain unsustainable profits and placate its populations with access to cheap consumer goods which has become the ultimate symbol of “freedom” (coverage of the Ukraine war made it clear that the determining factor of who is or is not Europen and civilised is linked to access to Netflix, Instagram, or german cars). Our solidarity with Palestine should therefore not simply extend to pointing out the horrors of the occupation and the complicity of Western governments in it, but should include directly attacking the imperial mode of living engrained in our day-to-day life.
The liberation of Palestine and the freedom of all the over-exploited countries of the world thus begins by taking down the pillars of power which enable this domination. It is not just the apartheid state that needs to be smashed, but all states and the capitalist order they maintain. Our practical support should therefore not be limited to ensuring things get better “there”, but should include attacking capitalist relations “here”. This should embrace the Palestinian struggle for liberation as part of an expansive arsenal aimed at highlighting the contradictions of capitalism, and actively, through forms of direct action, increase class antagonisms domestically. This struggle should necessarily contain and bridge together ecological, racial, and workplace issues eschewing hierarchies of struggle. Let the bravery of the Palestinian people help us shed our fear of direct action and the comfort we find in our global social position and clearly and unabashedly declare that the struggle is here, now.
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