By LAURA RESTREPO & PEDRO SABOULARD*
Tolerance and complicity in Israel's war crimes push the West into the abyss of the inhumane
Gaza is not just Gaza. Martyred and indomitable, she is also a universal symbol. Represents the colonized world. To the immigrant, the oppressed, the woman, the Indian, the black person. The treatment Gaza receives is the same treatment the rest of us will receive. “Gaza is the first experience to consider us all disposable”: a phrase by Gustavo Petro, echoed by Greek politician and writer Yanis Varoufakis.
A gasification of the Third World as an imperial strategy
The genocide in Gaza polarized humanity. On the one hand, a solidarity and anti-colonial consciousness is growing worldwide, derived from support for the Palestinian people.
On a rainy afternoon in Bogotá, in June, a mega concert is held at the Bolivar Plaza. Against the backdrop of a huge Palestinian flag and the slogan Stop genocide, sing musicians such as Ahmed Eid, born in Ramallah, or the group Escopetarra, Colombian spokesperson for non-violence. With the kufiya black and white around the neck, the girls and boys waiting in long lines in the rain until the square overflows.
On the other hand, in opposition and linked to Israel's interests, intolerance, xenophobia, Islamophobia and the implementation of extreme methods of pillage, invasion and extermination are rooted.
Around the same date as the concert in Bogotá, at the Gubbangen theater in Stockholm, a group of masked Nazis attacked a pro-Palestinian meeting of left-wing parties, injuring fifty people. In Nuseirat, in central Gaza, a UN school was bombed by Israel, leaving fifty dead and dozens injured. In the city of Washington – when the massacres in Gaza already exceeded forty thousand – Benjamin Netanyahu appeared and spoke before the North American Congress, and received a standing ovation.
Faced with the horrors of World War II, writer George Bataille had a vision. Bataille saw “(…) the Earth projected into space like a woman screaming with her head on fire”. The image unfolds before our eyes today. We are witnesses of genocide: this will be our generational mark.
Israel and Zionism, with their policy of scorched earth and extermination, established the objective and the dynamics to follow
The Western powers that support and encourage this monstrous calamity transform their “rules-based order” into an order based on hypocrisy, violence and double standards: they condemn Russia's invasion of Ukraine, but tolerate Israel's invasion of Palestine.
Tolerance and complicity in Israel's war crimes push the West into the abyss of the inhumane. By allowing itself what it has tolerated from Israel, the West will assume war as a means and plunder as an end. There will be no anger or savagery that he does not consider lawful and does not use for his own benefit.
Children torn apart; women burned alive; people condemned to thirst and hunger; torture of prisoners; newborns destined to die; violation of any asylum, whether school, hospital or refugee camp. Not even Hieronymus Bosch, in his most delirious painting of hell, could imagine what appears in the media every day, every day.
Denying and ignoring the UN, Human Rights, humanitarian aid organizations or the high International Courts, and now free from the weight of ethics, respect and compassion, the ancient empires and the recent empire will gradually become furious machines , then released.
They will be armed to the teeth; they are already doing this.
Faced with a devastating environmental crisis, which has reduced subsistence resources and threatens to deplete them, rich countries have perfected the art of plunder. They will fill their cupboards at the expense of the rest of the world.
Once their civilizing breath is unmasked, they will try to maintain the facade by justifying any atrocity in the name of defending democracy.
There will be no coexistence code left.
Western dystopia is forming and is showing its face. It could be predicted that, just as the fall of Constantinople marked the ruin of the Byzantine Empire, the Gaza genocide sealed the end of Western civilization.
The Empire does not passively accept its irreversible crisis. Before losing its hegemony, it will try to drag the rest of humanity into its ordeal. As his privileges are questioned, he defends them with increasingly brutal bites.
It implements draconian measures against immigration, such as taking children away from their parents and keeping them in cages. Or like the infamous “asylum offshore”, which consists of detaining contingents of undocumented immigrants to deport them to desert and inhospitable areas of the planet, where isolation, hunger and death await them.
It entrenches itself in militarized borders and accumulates arsenals. It raises internal economies based on the arms industry: development at the service of death; cutting-edge technology for Armageddon; pharmaceutical laboratories, not for health, but for biological weapons; tactical and strategic bombs; hypersonic missiles. Atomic toys and other paraphernalia of mass destruction.
He trains in the management of existential catastrophes. If you erase the trace of the past and the beat of the present, over the portal of the future the flag will rise: “Nothing will have been. Nothing will be.”
With its political apparatus aged and obsolete and its institutions discredited, the colonialist power has a way out, which it accepts without much reservation: to give free rein to the rise of fascism. Transit is happening in both the United States and Europe. If not stopped, they will establish themselves as barbaric nations, a shadow of their own shadow.
The end of American dominance
These are the signs of your decline. What Pulitzer Prize winner Chris Hedges characterizes as “the end of American dominance”.
When an empire falls, it is because it has already fallen.
Despite the noise, in a square in Bogotá young people are singing in support of Gaza. And in North American universities – centers of knowledge and power – students set up camps, confronting the administration and the Police, to denounce Israel.
Resistance grows stronger, the public grows. Millions of people around the world – especially young people – express their outrage at the horror unleashed against the Palestinian people.
Never before have so many come out to demonstrate in the streets. Rivers of people, tens of thousands, in London, Baghdad, Vienna, Johannesburg, Cairo, Mexico City, Kuala Lumpur, Washington, Madrid. Not even during Vietnam was the global population mobilized in such proportions, defying punishment, accusations, arrests and dismissals.
In the heat of the protest, an anti-colonial generation is being forged that does not adhere to the Western model of civilization. Search for a new, dignified and fair way of living and thinking.
Earth's indignant are emboldened, like David against Goliath. In Latin America, Africa, Asia, the Middle East, people subjected to old and new subjections stop looking to the North to look at themselves. They find affinities and chart paths to freedom. By recognizing each other, they invert the geopolitical map.
Anti-colonial consciousness, which begins as just a rumor, a vapor, an expectation, is condensing in the Third World and in the bustling periphery of the great cities of the First. Transformed into a vanishing point, the effervescence of the rebellion can be embodied in a political program and an action plan.
"In the dark depths of my soul, invisible, unknown forces were fighting a battle in which my being was the ground, and my whole being trembled in an unknown battle.".
(Fernanda Pessoa)
If faith moves mountains, collective consciousness climbs mountain ranges.
Western rulers are left alone in the abject act of embracing and congratulating the genocide, providing him with weapons and resources so that he can complete his work of extermination.
There are exceptions. Although few, honorable: those who, in the full exercise of their independence and dignity, denounced the genocide perpetrated in Gaza by Israel. These are the governments of South Africa, Ireland, Spain, Brazil and Colombia.
Here and there they wave goodbye handkerchiefs. Farewell, arrivederci, bye, see you later to the Trumps, the Bidens, the Netanyahus. Goodbye to the Macrons, the Trudeaus, the Sunaks. Chao-chao Milei and Úrsula von der Leyen. History will remember them as architects of genocide.
There are other voices that are heard today. The anti-colonial current has its prophets, its YouTubers, its activists and poets. Together they form a choir, open paths, weave philosophy. They accompany Julian Assange in his commitment to uncovering truths to expose the crimes of power.
Their names are Noam Chomsky, Chris Hedges, Lula da Silva and Tarik Ali. Yanis Varoufakis, Ramón Grosfoguel, Jeremy Corbin, Susan Sontag and Jean-Luc Mélenchon. Roger Waters, from Pink Floyd. Australian writer Caitlin Johnston. Amy Goodman's Democracy Now. Irish MP Clare Daly. And Gustavo Petro. (And without a doubt Saramago, if he were still here…). Everyone agrees in repudiating Zionism and supporting Gaza.
Because Gaza represents the poor people of the planet, the disinherited, the plundered and exploited and then demonized, despised and considered disposable. The extermination policy designed for Gaza is just a model. An experience of what is intended to be applied, and is already being applied, to the masses of migrants, of non-white races, of non-Christian religions.
I will step on the streets again
of what bloodied Gaza was
and in a beautiful liberated plaza
I stopped crying for those who were absent.
(Paraphrasing Pablo Milanés)
A liberated Gaza would break the automatic sequence of destruction. It would symbolize the burial of the old order and access to a space of dazzling and unexpected possibilities. A secular miracle.
*Laura Restrepo is a Colombian writer and journalist, graduated in Literature and Philosophy from the Universidad de los Andes. Author, among other books, of Delirium (Cia das Letras).
*Pedro Saboulard is a writer. Author, among other books, of Pathetic epic (Alfaguara).
Translation: Ricardo Kobayaski.
Originally published in the newspaper The Journey.
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