Can Palestinians get a little Humanitarian Intervention?
Of all the ideological mystifications created by the white West to rationalize and justify its brutal exploitation and colonization of the world the last five hundred years, the cruelest hoax ever perpetrated on the colonized and the entire world is the idea that the West has the capacity or intent to define and protect something called human rights.
The conquest fueled by advanced weapons and a style of war that has as its objective the annihilation of the enemy, the barbarians that poured out of what became “Europe” into what was eventually named the Americas burned, murdered, raped and destroyed cultures and peoples in a war of extermination. The people that were spared, or who escaped or resisted, were enslaved alongside Africans brought by the millions to provide free labor that would result in consolidation of riches and capital key to the development of what has been characterized as Western civilization.
In this process of conquest and subsequent global colonization there is absolutely no evidence to support the idea that what is referred to as Western civilization possesses any ideas that propels collective humanity forward. Every intellectual and religious production, from Christianity to the so-called enlightenment period was undermined and distorted by a fundamental flaw in European culture and thought. That flaw was graphically captured not by the cartesian assertion of Western “man” as rational, but by Thomas Hobbes’s accurate characterization of European society reflected in a “state of nature” or in civil society that life was, “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.”
This characterization was for life in Europe. For non-Europeans, the assumptions were even worse. Non-Europeans did not even qualify to be included in the category of “human.” The conquest, slavery and colonization institutionalized conceptual and moral frames that defined who belonged in the category of human and who was to be excluded. They defined who was human and, thus, deserving of inalienable rights and who were “killable” as Europeans “discovered” new lands and peoples, and exercised their “God given” providence of “manifest destiny.”
This exercise of power, of “white power” defined and informeds to this day by the colonial/capitalist, racialized, gendered world views of Westerners who still believe they have the right to determine who lives and who dies, who is provided for and who is not, and what kinds of governments should exist and whose lives count.
Native Savages, Niggers and Amalek: The White Supremacist Normalization of Genocide
Charles Mills argues that to understand the material base of global white supremacy it is necessary to understand the economic importance of the Global South in the rise of Europe and “the structuring of “whiteness” (and those racialized-as-white) as power.
The Indigenous peoples from the territories that became the United States have always expressed amazement by how after they were hunted down like animals. The scalps of Indigenous men, women and children used as evidence to confirm their deaths so as to collect a bounty, women raped and their lands stolen and villages burnt to the ground – how, after all of that, they, the Indigenous, were labeled as the savages. But that is the psychopathology of white supremacy. The victims of white colonial violence become the aggressors preserving the innocence and victimhood of whiteness.
Benjamin Netanyahu, representing the newly minted white people who make up the Israeli settler ruling class, pimping Judaism to rationalize their own present-day campaign of nazism against Palestinians, reminds the population of “Amalek,” the biblical enemies of Israel, that they deserved to be completely erased from history. He reinforced this idea by unleashing over four hundred and eighty days of bombings, burnings, starvation, rape of men and women by Israeli soldiers, forced displacement, and torture in Gaza.
But even with a temporary ceasefire in Gaza, the killings continue, as does the conquest for “Greater Israel” evidenced by land grabs in the Occupied West Bank and even extending into Southern Lebanon and, more recently, Syria. Palestinian children are now freezing to death in Gaza because the Israeli colonists refuse to allow more tents and mobile homes by restricting and weaponizing critical humanitarian aid. And, in the Occupied West Bank, the Israeli fascists are unleashing a military assault that appears to be the largest since the war of 1967.
The response to this criminal activity in the West Bank from those in the West who purport to stand for and protect human rights – silence.
Donald Trump laments about all of the deaths in Ukraine and sayshow he just wants to see the killing stopped. However, for Palestinians his message is literally, “bombs away,” especially if Palestinians do not surrender their legal and human right to resist and defeat their oppressors. Friedrich Merz, the newly elected Chancellor of Germany, just declared that he will invite Netanyahu to Germany even though he is an indicted war criminal and executing an active genocide of Palestinians.
Merz is proud of his invitation. Palestinian lives do not matter for Merz and, for that matter, most of the leadership in Europe. Therefore, the International Criminal Court Indictment of Netanyahu is seen as illegitimate. Moral outrage is reserved for real human beings, not Amalek. That is why Trump is more concerned with “white” Ukrainians and Russians even though both are “Slavs” and occupy one of the lowest rungs on the ladder of whiteness.
There can be no International Peace as long as the West has disproportionate power
The White Westernized left must rid itself of Eurocentrism and white supremacist biases.
I start from the very simple but tragic position that the disproportionate power of the ten percent of the human population that racialized itself as the white western world represents an existential threat to all the rest of us. This historic reading is not a call to genocide the peoples of the West but instead is a call for a serious confrontation with the rationalizing logic of white dominance, of the white supremacy ideology that prevails in societies of the West but is even more pronounced in white dominated settler societies like the U.S. and Israel.
When I read that the families of the over 600 Palestinians scheduled to be released by the Israeli occupying power are still in limbo, camping out in the cold waiting for their tormentors to release their loved ones, I am reminded of the very simple proposition that he who has the power to define is master.
In a world still characterized by the imposition of normalized white supremacy, who counts as human and whose lives count as lives is informed by the categories of existence informed by colonization, patriarchy, race ideologies and capitalism – the white supremacist, colonial//capitalist patriarchy as enemy of collective humanity. Understanding this and the contours and the driving material and non-material forces of “global white supremacy,” must be seen as critical to any left political and theoretical project, if it is a serious project.
The determination of who is a human with rights that are to be recognized is still a prerogative assumed by the leaders of the white West.
For the families of the Palestinians waiting to be released in Gaza, families already subjected to unspeakable horrors from the Israeli authorities that defined them as “Amalek” – The true nature of Israeli society and the White West is not mystified. They understand that Western civilization is a myth and is why there will be no humanitarian intervention for them, only more death and struggle. That is the lesson we all must take from the exposure of white West with its irrational support for racist fascism in the state referred to as Israel.
If the West can justify to itself the support for genocide against the occupied Palestinians, no colonized, exploited people or nation attempting to exercise their rights to national liberation and dignity is safe. In order for the world to live, the idea of Europe must die!
That is why for those of us who believe in universal dignity and the collective right to resist by any means necessary, we will be standing shoulder to shoulder with the resisters in Palestine and in Chicago and Atlanta and throughout the colonized world.
Ajamu Baraka is the Chairman of the Coordinating Committee of the Black Alliance for Peace and an editor and contributing columnist for the Black Agenda Report. Baraka serves on the Executive Committee of the U.S. Peace Council and leadership body of the U.S.-based United National Anti-War Coalition (UNAC) and the Steering Committee of the Black is Back Coalition.
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