By Ameer Ali –

Dr. Ameer Ali

“It is important to also recognize the attacks by Hamas did not happen in a vacuum. The Palestinian people have been subjected to 56 years of suffocating occupation. They have seen their land steadily devoured by settlements and plagued by violence; their economy stifled; their people displaced, and their homes demolished. Their hopes for a political solution to their plight have been vanishing” ~ Antonio Guterres, UN Secretary-General    

“Violence is a cleansing force. It frees the native from his inferiority complex and from his despair and inaction; it makes him fearless and restores his self-respect” ~ Frantz Fanon 

The rocket attacks on Israel by the Palestinian group Harakat al-Muqawama al-Islamiyah popularly known as Hamas on 7 October 2023 was the result of years of advance preparation to overcome the qualitative military and technological edge possessed by Israel’s IDF equipped with weapons supplied and training provided by successive American governments. Although those rockets reportedly killed 1200 civilians with another 250 captured as hostages, according to Western sources, two independent researchers, Beverley Milton-Edwards and Stephen Farrel (HAMAS: The Quest for Power, Polity Press, 2024) found 300 Israeli soldiers killed in addition to more than 360 civilians who attended a music festival near Re’im, a town closer to the border of Gaza. There is no dispute about the hostage figure.

However, as the UN Secretary General said in the opening quote, those attacks though “appalling” was the last weapon in the hands of Palestinian freedom fighters, and nowhere in the history of settler colonialism freedom had been won without bloodshed. Even Mahatma Ghandi’s ahimsa struggle would not have won independence to India had it not been for Subhas Chandra Bose’s underground military operations against the British.

It is more than 18 months since Hamas declared its readiness for a war, but that war continues without an end, and the target of its enemy is not only the destruction of Hamas but beyond that to get rid of all Arab Palestinians dead or alive from Gaza and eventually from the Occupied Territory so that the entire Palestine would be annexed to create Eretz Israel.

However, this freedom struggle has turned out to be a war between Global Israel and Global Palestine as Ilan Pappe, hard-hitting Jewish historian, portrayed. While Global Israel includes, according to him, “most governments, mainstream media and some parts of academia in the Global North, with the US and the UK at the forefront, and some governments from the Global South with tacit support of large military corporations and the military and security industries”, Global Palestine is a “coalition of civil society movements around the world, working in tandem with oppressed minorities, some governments in the Global South, and many human rights organizations, all showing solidarity with Palestine struggle for liberation. It includes people of all faiths and none and from all walks of life”.

Recently, Professor Emeritus Richard A Falk at Princeton University and author of Palestine’s Horizon: Towards a Just Peace (2017) in an interview published in Palestine Chronicle (29 March 2025) views the current situation in Gaza as “a second coming of Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilization thesis, where Western nations unconditionally support Israel while support for Palestine largely comes from the Islamic world”. More pointedly according to Falk, “all the complicity on the Israel side comes from Western white liberal democracies, and all the support of tangible character comes from Islamic-oriented groups in the region”.  “So, you have this kind of civilizational alignment within which the alliance with Israel” he continued, “is just a piece in the larger puzzle”.

Sadly though, what is missing in both Pappe’s and Falk’s categorization is the silent complicity or alignment with Israel of certain Muslim Middle East regimes like UAE (see, Ramzy Baroud, in Counterpunch, 27 Mar 2025). Their hurried desire to normalize relations with Israel via the Trump-engineered Abraham Accord, and their tacit support for the recent foreign inspired anti-Hamas demonstrations in Gaza depict those regimes’ monumental betrayal of the Palestinian cause.  As Huntington put it bluntly, “Betrayal of kin is the price of peace in a fault line war” (The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, Simon & Schuster, 1996, p. 297).

A New Phase of Palestinian Struggle

The Palestinian struggle has reached a new phase after Netanyahu unilaterally broke the Qatari brokered cease-fire.  A new wave of aerial and ground attack is in operation to finish off Israel’s seventy-five years old Nakba or ethnic cleansing. It is pointless to reproduce the number of human deaths and the extent of Israel’s physical destruction of Gaza because those deaths are always undercounted and the scale of destruction systematically sanitized by the Western media. That is why there is an urgent need for reclaiming the Palestinian narrative for the world to know the truth as pointed out by Ramzy Baroud in Counterpunch, 25 Mar 2025.            

It was Donald Trump who initiated the idea of total evacuation of Palestinians from Gaza, settling them in neighbouring Arab countries and rebuilding Gaza into a Riviera, possibly with Zionist funds, before handing it eventually to Eretz Israel. Egypt, Jordan and the so-called Arab League dismissed the Trump plan and presented their own counterplan to rebuild Gaza without any evacuation. It has now come to light that treacherous UAE a signatory to the Abraham Accord had secretly approached Trump to reject that counterplan. As a result, and may be with approval from UAE and other Arab traitors, Netanyahu has now undertaken what Trump planned to do and has instructed Mossad’s Intelligence Office to negotiate with countries in Africa and notably with the trouble-stricken South Sudan and Somalia, and also  possibly with Indonesia for them to receive what Netanyahu calls “voluntary” Palestinian expatriates, which in reality would be a forced exodus of people who would be systematically starved of food and water and deprived of a shade to sleep under. Shockingly, the so-called civilized Western world is silent, and all UN agencies are powerless to stop this organized crime because, as Falk argues UN is “designed to be weak with respect to the enforcement of international law”. Netanyahu’s untouchability despite an arrest warrant issued against him by ICC backs Falk’s assessment of UN’s “enforcement gap”.

Netanyahu has already issued sweeping evacuation orders covering most of Gaza’s Rafa, and in sheer desperation or may be as last resort Hamas has called for a global armed uprising against Gaza relocation. Will that materialize?    

Armed Global Uprising   

When the Cold War ended it was celebrated in the West as the “end of history” as Francis Fukuyama captioned his book. He went on to elaborate his thesis by arguing that it marked “the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government”; and to cap Fukuyama’s thesis a “New World Order” was declared by the then US President Ronald Regan. In that order, Israel was celebrated as the only liberal democracy in the Middle East. How would this order now justify what that democracy is doing in Gaza? With a Fascist minded President ruling from the White House and trying to annex more territories to the United States – peacefully if possible but violently if forced to – is history not moving backwards to the age of conquest and conquerors? Just as Trump is determined to conquer Iceland so is his friend Netanyahu wants to conquer Palestine and cleanse it of all Palestinians. Gaza is the beginning of the conquest which will end with the West Bank. What Israel is trying to achieve is to eliminate by every possible means the identity of any part of Gaza and West Bank as Palestine. The planned settlement of Jews in the West Bank, whose population has exceeded one half of a million this year, is part of a grand strategy to end the so-called two-state solution to the issue over Palestine.           

There are no geographical boundaries separating Pappe’s Global Israel from Global Palestine. They are part of a global mix of governments, people and institutions. Worldwide protests demanding the genocide in Gaza be stopped and in which protests even Jews participated best illustrates this mix. So far, these protests which had earned the sobriquet antisemitism remained peaceful except when state gendarmerie used unwarranted force to disperse the protestors. But with Hamas in Palestine, Hezbollah in Lebanon and Houthis in Yemen already in the fray would the Islamic segment in Global Palestine and Global Israel heed the call from Hamas and respond in kind? That possibility should not be dismissed given the deep emotional attachment world Muslims have towards Palestine.

However, given Israel’s master plan approved by the civilizational Western alliance to remove Palestine from the world map and leave the Palestinians either dead or as wandering exiles like the Biblical Jews while the world of Islam and particularly its Arab quarter remains silent at best and complicit at worst the time may have arrived for another outburst of political Islam.