▲ Palestinian mourners after one of the recent attacks by the Israeli army on the Palestinian population in Gaza.Photo Xinhua
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or it is enough to report the genocide in Gaza; it is urgent to give indignation effective avenues for political action
Gaza is not just Gaza. Tortured and indomitable, it is also a universal symbol. It represents the colonized world. The immigrant, the oppressed, the woman, the Indian, the black. The treatment that Gaza receives is the same as the treatment that the rest of us will receive. Gaza is the first experiment to consider us all disposablea phrase by Gustavo Petro, retweeted by the Greek politician and writer Yanis Varoufakis.
Gazification of the Third World as an imperial strategy.
The genocide in Gaza has polarized humanity. On the one hand, a global awareness of solidarity and anti-colonialism is growing, stemming from support for the Palestinian people.
On a rainy afternoon in Bogotá in June, a mega-concert is taking place in Plaza de Bolívar. Against the backdrop of a huge Palestinian flag and the slogan STOP GENOCIDE, musicians such as Ahmed Eid, born in Ramallah, or the Escopetarra group, Colombian spokesperson for non-violence, are singing. With black and white kufiya around their necks, the girls and boys who wait in long lines under the downpour, keep entering until they overflow the plaza.
On the other hand, in contrast to and linked to the interests of Israel, intolerance, xenophobia, Islamophobia and the implementation of extreme methods of plunder, invasion and extermination are gaining ground.
Around the same time as the Bogota concert, a group of masked Nazis attacked a pro-Palestinian meeting of left-wing parties at the Gubbangen theatre in Stockholm, Sweden, injuring 50 people. In Nuseirat, in central Gaza, a UN school was bombed by Israel, killing 50 people and wounding dozens.
In Washington, DC – when the number of people massacred in Gaza has already surpassed 40,000 – Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu makes his presence felt and speaks before the US Congress, where he receives a standing ovation.
Faced with the horrors of World War II, the writer George Bataille had a vision. Bataille saw the Earth projected into space as a screaming woman with her head on fire. The image unfolds before our eyes today. We are witnesses to genocide: it will be our generational imprint. Israel and Zionism, with their scorched earth and extermination policies, set the goal and set the standard to follow.
The Western powers that have supported and encouraged this monstrous calamity, transform their rule-based orderin an order based on hypocrisy, violence and double standards: they condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, but condone Israel’s invasion of Palestine.
Tolerance and complicity in Israel’s war crimes pushes the West into the abyss of inhumanity. By allowing itself what it has tolerated Israel to do, the West will adopt war as a means and plunder as an end. There will be no anger or savagery that it will not consider lawful and will not use for its own benefit.
Children torn to pieces, women burned alive, villages condemned to thirst and hunger; torture of prisoners, newborns destined to die, violation of all asylums, be they schools, hospitals or refugee camps. Not even Bosch, in his most delirious depiction of hell, could have imagined what appears on screen every day today.
By disavowing and ignoring the UN, human rights, humanitarian aid organisations and the high international courts, and freed from the weight of ethics, respect and compassion, the ancient empires and the recent empire will gradually become raging, unleashed machines.
They will arm themselves to the teeth; they are already doing so.
Faced with a devastating environmental crisis that has depleted and threatens to exhaust subsistence resources, rich countries are perfecting the art of plunder. They will fill their larders at the expense of the rest of the world.
Once unmasked from their breath civilizingThey will try to maintain the facade by justifying any atrocity in the name of defending democracy.
There will be no code of coexistence that will remain standing.
The Western dystopia is brewing and rearing its head. It could be predicted that, just as the fall of Constantinople marked the ruin of the Byzantine Empire, in the same way, the genocide in Gaza seals the end of Western civilization.
The empire does not passively accept its irreversible crisis. Before losing its hegemony, it will want to drag the rest of humanity down with it. As it sees its privileges questioned, it defends them with ever more brutal bites.
It implements draconian measures against migration, such as snatching children from their parents and holding them in cages. Or like the infamous offshore asylumwhich consists of detaining contingents of undocumented immigrants to deport them to desert and inhospitable areas of the planet, where isolation, starvation and death await them.
It entrenches itself in militarized borders and accumulates arsenal. It builds internal economies based on the arms industry: development in the service of death; cutting-edge technology for Armageddon; pharmaceutical laboratories, not based on health, but on biological weapons; tactical and strategic bombs; hypersonic missiles. Atomic toys and other paraphernalia of mass destruction.
He is trained in the management of existential catastrophe. If he erases the trace of the past and the heartbeat of the present, over the portal of the future they will raise the proclamation: NOTHING WILL HAVE BEEN. NOTHING WILL BE.
With its political apparatus arthritic and obsolete, and its institutions discredited, the colonialist power has one way out, which it welcomes without much reservation: giving free rein to the rise of fascism. This transition is taking place both in the United States and in Europe. If it is not stopped in its tracks, they will establish themselves as barbarian nations, a shadow of their own shadow.
These are the signs of its 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, young people supporting Gaza are singing in a Bogota square. And in the United States’ universities – centres of knowledge and power – students are setting up camps, confronting management and the police, to denounce Israel.
Resistance is strengthening, audience is growing.
Millions of people around the world – especially young people – are expressing their outrage at the horror unleashed against the Palestinian people.
Never before have so many people taken to the streets. Rivers of people, tens of thousands, in London, Baghdad, Vienna, Johannesburg, Cairo, Mexico City, Kuala Lumpur, Washington, Madrid. Not even in Vietnam did the global population mobilize in such numbers, defying punishments, accusations, jail, dismissals.
In the heat of the protests, an anti-colonialist generation is emerging that does not adhere to the Western model of civilization. It seeks a new, dignified and just way of living and thinking.
The indignant of the Earth are emboldened, like David against Goliath.
In Latin America, Africa, Asia and the Middle East, peoples subjected to old and new forms of subjugation are turning their gaze away from the North to one another. They are finding common ground and plotting routes to freedom. By recognising one another, they are inverting the geopolitical map.
Anticolonial consciousness, which begins as a mere rumour, a vapour, an expectation, is condensing in the Third World and in the agitated periphery of the great cities of the First World. Transformed into a vanishing point, the effervescence of rebellion can be concretised in a political programme and a plan of action.
If faith moves mountains, collective consciousness climbs mountain ranges.
Western leaders are left alone in the abject act of embracing and congratulating the genocidal maniac, supplying him with weapons and resources so that he can complete his work of extermination.
There are exceptions. Although few, they are honourable; those who, in full exercise of independence and dignity, have denounced the genocide perpetrated in Gaza by Israel. These are the governments of South Africa, Ireland, Spain, Brazil and Colombia.
Here and there the handkerchiefs of farewell wave. Farewell, arrivederci, see you around, Trumps, Bidens, Netanyahus. Goodbye Macrons, Trudeaus, Sunaks. Bye-bye, Milei and Ursula von der Leyen. History will remember them as the architects of genocide.
There are other voices that are heard today. The anti-colonialist movement has its prophets, its youtubersits activists and its poets.
Together they form a chorus, pave the way, weave philosophy. They follow Julian Assange in his commitment to unravel the truth in order to bring to light the crimes of those in power.
They are Noam Chomsky, Chris Hedges, Lula da Silva and Tarik Ali. Yanis Varoufakis, Ramón Grosfoguel, Jeremy Corbin, Susan Sontag and Jean-Luc Melenchon. Roger Waters, from Pink Floyd. The Australian writer Caitlin Johnston. Amy Goodman, from Democracy Now. The Irish MP Clare Daly. And Gustavo Petro. (And certainly Saramago, if he were still here…) They all agree in their repudiation of Zionism and in their support for Gaza.
Because Gaza represents the poor peoples of the planet, the disinherited, the exploited and despoiled, then demonized, despised and considered disposable. The policy of extermination designed for Gaza is only a model. An experiment of what is intended to be applied, and is already being applied, to the masses of migrants, non-white races, non-Christian religions.
I will walk the streets again//of what was once bloody Gaza//and in a beautiful liberated square//I will stop to cry for those who are absent. (Paraphrasing Pablo Milanés)
A liberated Gaza would break the automatic sequence of fatality. It would symbolize the burial of the old order and the access to a space of dazzling and unexpected possibilities. A secular miracle.
