By Ameer Ali –

Dr. Ameer Ali

Israel would “form a part of a wall of defence for Europe in Asia, an outpost of civilization against barbarism”. This was how Theodor Herzl, the founder of political Zionism – the Jewish response to Christian Europe’s antisemitism, couched his idea of Israel to win the hearts and minds of European powers that were no strangers to settler colonialism. Just as Europe justified its conquest and colonization of Americas, Africa and Asia five centuries ago as mission civilisatrice designed to pull the indigenous, uncivilized and barbaric communities out into the world of modernity and civilization so was Herzl selling his future Israel as a blessing in disguise to barbaric Palestine. “It is their wellbeing, their individual wealth, which we will increase by bringing in our own”, he added. Thus, colonization of Palestine by Zionists was presented as continuation of Europe’s own historic mission. Even the degrading epithets “human animals” and “cockroaches” for example, which Israeli politicians and military men employ today to dehumanize Palestinians are no different from the ones such as “savages”, “barbarians” and “cannibals” employed by European colonialists.   

Once the Europeans conquered the lands of the indigenous, guns and cannons were readily employed to subdue any rebellious leaders and their followers. Wholesale massacres and genocide of natives were more the rule than exception in the history of colonialism. The bloody history of colonial America is its best illustration.   

Today, Israel is not an outpost of civilization against barbarism but the frontier of Global North’s imperial expansion and bulwark against any power or powers trying to reshape the Middle East. With the final destruction of the Ottoman Empire after World War I imperial Britian and France with approval from Russia shared the former Ottoman provinces by the Sykes-Picot treaty of 1916 and vowed never to permit another Islamic power to rise again to challenge the might of Europe. The Balfour Declaration of 2 November 1917 which promised to establish in Palestine “a national home for the Jewish people”, who were only 6 percent of its total population while refusing to name the majority as Palestinians but only as “existing non-Jewish communities” and promising to protect only their “civil and religious rights”, prepared the ground for the influx of Zionists from outside. The creation of Israel in 1948, was also in a sense, a plan to get rid of the hated Jews or “Christ killers” from Christian Europe and seek absolution from God for European silence while Hitler was unleashing the Holocaust.  A guilty conscious Britian thus became extraordinarily generous towards the Jews when it created Israel from the Mandated Territories in which the Jews who were only one third of the population and owning around 6 to 7 percent of the land were given 56 percent of the best land in Palestine. Thus, Israel, a country born out of injustice has been allowed by its creators to thrive on injustice.

After the Second World War when the imperial baton changed hands from Britain to US and when Communist USSR emerged as the new challenger to an American led capitalist order the strategic importance of Israel in the Middle East skyrocketed. To US and Europe, Israel needed to be strengthened militarily to defend itself against any threat either from its neighbours or from afar.  Over the years, US secretly aided Israel to become the only nuclear power in the region while UK, France and Germany among others weaponised that country to its teeth. In “the hundred years war” fought between Israel and Palestine since 1917, there was “massive intervention of the greatest powers of the age on the side of the Zionist movement and Israel: Britain until World War II, and the United States and others since then. These great powers were never neutral or honest brokers, but have always been, and still are, active participants in this war in support of Israel” (The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine, Profile Books, 2024 edition, p. 257).   

In the current war of genocide in Gaza, US alone has supplied $22 billion worth of weaponry to Israel between 7 October 2023 and January 2025 with logistic support and soldiers. There are, according to Wahington Post, 23,000 US Jews fighting alongside IDF. UK, France and Germany that are now shedding crocodile tears for Palestinians and wanting to recognize Palestine as an independent state are other notable suppliers of weaponry. US and European corporations profiting already out of the genocide are going to be the same ones which would be making even more profit by rebuilding Gaza into another Riviera once all Palestinians are either ‘spirited away’ or killed or starved to death by Netanyahu. According to another source, Donald Trump has informed Netanyahu to go into Gaza with full force and finish the job soon. While Global North justifies Israel’s savagery as its right to defend itself, it does not want to accept the other side of the coin: Palestinians’ right for freedom and independence from 75 years of Israeli apartheid.

The genocide in Gaza as Global North wants the world to believe did not start on 7 October 2023, but seventy-five years ago in 1948 with the Nakba in which between 700,000 and 800,000 Palestinians were expelled or chased out of homes, and around 500 villages were destroyed. That calamity could have been prevented by neighbouring Arab countries had their rulers remained united and unselfish in their resistance. Khalidi quotes the following lines from a poem written at that time describing the pathetic response from Arab rulers:

Oh! little kings of the Arabs, by the grace of God

Enough feebleness and infighting

Once upon a time our hopes were on you

But all our hopes were dashed.

The same situation prevails even today. In the current war according to one report almost 8% of Gaza’s pre-October 2023 population had perished at the hands of IDF. All that the Arab leaders did was to bribe Donald Trump with a luxury aircraft expecting him to reciprocate by ending the war. Trump accepted the bribe with thanks but did nothing to stop the war.

UN and its aid agencies are pronouncing condemnation after condemnation and reading out media statements, and while UK, France, Germany, Canada, Australia and about twenty other countries including China are once again repeating the stale two-state solution and resolving to recognize Palestine as an independent state, none of them are prepared to intervene with force and stop the carnage and starvation of Palestinians. Their complicity in this crime is premeditated.

It is the “shame of the century” said Francesca Albanese the UN Special Rapporteur. A former rapporteur Richard Falk called it the “shame of humanity”. But he went a step further: “If we do not take actions of a serious and dramatic kind at this time” he added, “anything done in a more moderate fashion will be too late to save the surviving people who have already been traumatized by more than 22 months of genocide… We are trying to address the conscience of all people and encourage the kind of activism that will produce changes in government ahead – particularly an arms embargo and various sanctions … including the kind of solidarity with Palestinian struggle that proved so effective in the anti-apartheid campaign”. Falk also urged the UN General Assembly to ignore the Security Council and resort to armed intervention to stop the catastrophe. But which government in Global North would intervene militarily to end the genocide? Netanyahu is not acting alone but with full backing of the US Congress controlled by Zionists. What was set out in 1917 with the Balfour Declaration to wipe out any possibility of a nation called Palestine is now reaching its completion at the hands of Netanyahu and IDF. He had already displayed to the world a map of the Middle East without Palestine. Now by expelling or exterminating every Palestinian from Gaza and the West Bank he is hoping to achieve it. Who would stop this?    

If the big powers are not doing anything to restrain Israel, if the UN agencies remain powerless to implement any of their ultimatums and decisions, and if the Arab leaders are eager to normalise relations with Israel at the expense of Palestinians who is there except the non-state actors to resist with weapons to end the genocide? Worldwide pro-Palestine rallies are not antisemitic demonstrations in any sense, but a united voice of protest angered by Global North’s premeditated crime against indigenous Palestinians.