Gaza and the world since last October

Today marks exactly a year in the latest phase of the long-running Israel-Palestine conflict. In Gaza as in the rest of Palestine, we are confronted with a straightforward question of landgrab, forcible expulsion of an indigenous people, armed occupation by others, denial of self-determination, and human rights violations of genocidal proportions. This is the real question on the table for Palestine, Israel and the world since October last year, and indeed for nearly eight decades.

Yet, since history is a narrative of the powerful, however far the official narrative is from the actual truth, the Israel-Palestine question is neither presented nor understood this straightforwardly by many, including by many of those who should—and do—otherwise know better. And today’s narrative of that dominant history is presented as everything started on October 7, 2023, the Palestinian armed group, Hamas, barraged into Israel and killed 1,139 Israelis. Since then, Israeli airstrikes and ground invasions of Gaza have killed 41,788 Palestinians, including 16,500 children. In addition, more than 96,794 people have been injured, while over 10,000 are still missing and unaccounted for, according to tallies published a few days ago on Al Jazeera website.

According to this official history, almost nothing happened in Gaza before October 7 last year, never mind that the Israeli military killed 7,118 Palestinians in Gaza in the same conflict since 2008, and before the outbreak of the latest war, according to data by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).

Never mind, too, the 723 Palestinians killed by Israeli forces in the West Bank, where there is no Hamas, since October 7 last year, nor, indeed, the 234 Palestinians killed in the same West Bank last year before October 2023. History, of the past or contemporary times, it seems, tells only one side of a story. But even if we accept the official version of this conflict, that Hamas and Palestinians are the aggressors, while Israel, the occupying force that is armed to the teeth is the victim, how shall we take stock of events since last October?

Despite all the dominant rhetoric, it all still looks pretty straightforward to me. First, Israel, in denying Palestinian humanity in the full glare of the world through both force and words, has lost its own. The world is no longer buying this narrative of Israel as the victim with the ultimate right to “defend itself”, an assertion that now rings so hollow, were it not backed by the military, political and diplomatic support of its so-called allies.

Before October last year, most people around the world really didn’t know the situation in Palestine, and didn’t much care to side with the Palestinians. This has changed dramatically since last year. More than 90 per cent of world leaders at the UN General Assembly (UNGA) two weeks ago spoke up for Palestine and directly criticised Israel’s war on Gaza. Many outrightly called Israel’s “right to defend itself” a genocide in Gaza, not to mention the hundreds of UNGA delegates who walked out on Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, during his turn to speak.

The whole world now appears to stand with Palestine on this issue, however feeble the support might be at the moment. More importantly, by doing everything to scuttle any chance of a ceasefire or peace, while also doing everything to escalate the conflict into an all-out regional war, Israel has exposed itself clearly around the world as a brutal colonialist state drenched in an anti-life ideology, as a British musician put it to Piers Morgan in one of his recent shows.

By directly targeting and killing thousands of Palestinian and Lebanese civilians, women and children, including through the use of an otherwise civilian technology, in the name of destroying Hamas and Hezbollah, Israeli leaders have exposed themselves as completely lacking in humanity and any impulses for enduring peace.

The Palestinians have lost so much of their lives, limbs, livelihoods and homes in the past year. But Israel is not winning this war at all, even if it succeeds in destroying everyone and everything around it. Instead, there is a sense in which Israel has lost even more than the Palestinians in this conflict: millions and millions of people around the world now think of Israel and its leaders in the most unprintable, negative impressions ever, which was most certainly not the case before October 2023.

Israel’s loss of credibility in the moral side of the conflict between it and Palestine applies just as much to Western governments and media, particularly, however. For very long, the West has provided leadership to the world, like it or not. Most people had, and still do, looked up to the world for political, economic cultural, and even moral direction. Anything Western is almost automatically taken as the global standard.

Part of the reason for this is the universal appeal of some Western moral and political economic ideologies: democracy, human rights, rule of law, equality of people, human dignity, etc. Billions of people around the world have bought into these ideals, even where they are denied them, or where people still recognise that the West has never fully lived up to them.

But the political behaviour of Western governments and media over Gaza since October last year has dealt a huge blow to this moral dominance of the West in the eyes of the world today. And here, the issue is not just that Western countries supply much of the arms and ammunition used by Israel to kill and mutilate Palestinian bodies. It is not also the unwavering political, economic and diplomatic support the Western countries provide for Israel. It is rather about how the rest of the world has seen Western leaders, from Biden to whoever, grovelling and kowtowing to Netanyahu.

People have long known that Israel wields enormous influence in the domestic and foreign policies of Western countries. But seeing American, Australian, Canadian and European leaders appearing entirely helpless, powerless and spiritless at the feet of Netanyahu is new to the rest of the world.  It is the increasing impotency and timidity that Western leaders have displayed before one man.

Add to these the blatant disregard for facts, context and empathy with which most Western media have reported Gaza since last October, and the almost violent approach of Western journalists and pundits to force a twisted version of the Gaza story down the throats of audiences around the world. And for sure, for the rest of the world today, the political and moral justifications provided by Western nations for their involvement against Russia in Ukraine feel hollow and lame.

But Israeli and Western failures in this conflict since last year do not come anywhere near those the Arab and Muslim worlds. It is the Arab countries that will bear the brunt of an all-out war in the region. Yet, it is they whose voices are completely muted in this conflict. Even as I write, it is mostly in the same Western countries that you see people protesting and speaking up every day for Palestine.

The Arab and Muslim countries themselves are almost non-existent. In Ukraine, western countries have banded together to impose punitive sanctions on Russia, and even more, to fight the fight for Ukraine by proxy. Arab countries have sufficient global leverage of their own for at least calling de-escalation and ceasefire. But there is little indication of any will or strategy to use it.

In short, that more than 40,000 people, and still counting, have to die in this conflict, is for me, less the failure of Israel and the West, than it is the failure of the Arab and Muslim worlds. And there, on current evidence, there is little evidence of hope of any moral and political reawakening.