The Remarkable Decline in the Global North’s Leadership
IMPERIALISM'S 'OUR GANG'
Photograph Source: European Commission (Dati Bendo)
A group of young people in Paris are enjoying a drink in a café on an unseasonably warm evening. The conversation drifts into politics, but—as one young woman says—“Let’s not talk about France.” The others nod their assent. They focus on the U.S. presidential election, a slight bit of Gallic arrogance at play as they mock the near certainty that the main candidates will be President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump. Biden is 81 years old and Trump is 77. A Special Counsel in the United States has called Biden an “elderly man with a poor memory,” hardly the words required to inspire confidence in the president. Trying to defend himself, Biden made the kind of gaffe that is fodder for online memes and affirmed the report that he tried to undermine: he called President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi of Egypt the “president of Mexico.” No new evidence is required, meanwhile, to mock the candidacy of Trump. “Is this the best that the United States can offer?” asks Claudine, a young student at a prestigious Parisian college.
These young people are aware enough that what appears to be comical on the other side of the Atlantic—the U.S. presidential election—is no less ridiculous, and of course less dangerous, in Europe. When I ask them what they think about the main European leaders—Olaf Scholz of Germany and Emmanuel Macron of France—they shrug, and the words “imbecilic” and “non-entity” enter the discussion. Near Les Halles, these young people have just been at a demonstration to end the Israeli bombing of the Rafah region of Gaza. “Rafah is the size of Heathrow Airport,” says a young student from England who is spending 2024 in France. That none of the European leaders have spoken plainly about the death and destruction in Gaza troubles them, and they say that they are not alone in these feelings. Many of their fellow students feel the same way.
The approval ratings for Scholz and Macron decline with each week. Neither the German nor the French public believes that these men can reverse the economic decline or stop the wars in either Gaza or Ukraine. Claudine is upset that the governments of the Global North have decided to cut their funding for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), the UN Palestine agency, although another young person, Oumar, interjects that Brazil’s President Lula has said that his country will donate money to UNRWA. Everyone nods.
A week later, news comes that a young soldier in the United States Airforce—Aaron Bushnell—has decided to take his own life, saying that he will no longer be complicit in the genocide against the Palestinians. When asked about the death of Bushnell, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said that the President is “aware” and that it is a “horrible tragedy.” But there was no statement about why the young man took his life, and nothing to assuage a tense public about the implications of this act.
Eating an ice cream in New York, U.S. President Joe Biden said that he hoped that there would be a ceasefire “by the beginning of the weekend” but then moved it to “by next Monday.” The meandering statements, the pledge for a ceasefire alongside the prevarication, and the arms deliveries do not raise the confidence of anyone in Biden or his peers in Europe.
With the Emir of Qatar beside him, France’s President Emmanuel Macron called for a “lasting ceasefire.” These phrases—“lasting ceasefire” and “sustainable ceasefire”—have been bandied about with these adjectives (lasting, sustainable) designed to dilute the commitment to a ceasefire and to pretend that they are actually in favor of an end to the war when they continue to say that they are behind Israel’s bombing runs.
In London, the UK Parliament had a comical collapse in the face of a Scottish National Party (SNP) resolution for a ceasefire. Rather than allow a vote to show the actual opinions of their members, both the Labour Party and the Conservative Party went into a tailspin and the Parliament’s speaker broke rules to ensure that the elected officials did not have to go on the record against a ceasefire. Brendan O’Hara of the SNP put the issue plainly before the Parliament before his words and the SNP resolution was set aside: “Some will have to say that they chose to engage in a debate on semantics over ‘sustainable’ or ‘humanitarian’ pauses, while others will say that they chose to give Netanyahu both the weapons and the political cover that he required to prosecute his relentless war.”
Global desire for an immediate stop to the Israeli bombing is now at an all-time high. For the third time, the United States vetoed a UN resolution in the Security Council to compel the Israelis to stop the bombing. That the United States and its European allies continue to back Israel despite the widespread disgust at this war—exemplified by the death of Aaron Bushnell—raises the frustration with the leadership of the Global North.
What is so particularly bewildering is that large sections of the population in the countries of the North want an immediate ceasefire, and yet their leaders disregard their opinions. One survey shows that two-thirds of voters in the United States—including majorities of Democrats (77 percent), Independents (69 percent), and Republicans (56 percent)—are in favor of a ceasefire in Gaza. Interestingly, 59 percent of U.S. voters say that Palestinians must be guaranteed the right to return to their homes in Gaza, while 52 percent said that peace talks must be held for a two-state solution. These are all positions that are ignored by the main political class on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. The qualifications of “lasting” and “sustainable” only increase cynicism among populations that watch their political leadership ignore their insistence on an immediate ceasefire.
Clarity is not to be sought in the White House, in No. 10 Downing Street, or in the Élysée Palace. It is found in the words of ordinary people in these countries who are heartsick regarding the violence. Protests seem to increase in intensity as the death toll rises. What is the reaction to these protests? In the United Kingdom, members of parliament complained that these protests are putting the police under “sustained pressure.” That is perhaps the point of the protests.
This article was produced by Globetrotter.
By Ramzy Baroud
Jared Kushner, a former US official whose relationship to power is that he married the wealthy daughter of a man who was later to become the US president, once attempted to teach Palestinians how to handle their own struggle for freedom.
In 2020, he advised Palestinians to stop ‘doing terrorism’, summing up the Palestinian problem in the claim that ‘five million Palestinians are (..) trapped because of bad leadership’, not the Israeli occupation or US support for Israel.
The inexperienced politician, who once bragged about reading 25 books on the Middle East, presented Palestinians with the same clichéd rhetoric already offered to them by other ill-intentioned self-imposed ‘peacemakers’.
Palestinians “have a perfect track record of missing opportunities,” he said, re-hashing the condescending language once used by Israel’s former Minister of Foreign Affairs, Abba Eban: “If they screw this up, I think that they will have a very hard time looking the international community in the face, saying they are victims”.
But why bring up Kushner now?
Every few years, Americans, at the behest of Israel, peddle such ideas that the Palestinian cause is finished, that solidarity with the Palestinian people is dead and that the Palestinian people and their leadership should accept whatever political or financial crumbs thrown their way, courtesy of Washington, Tel Aviv and a few of their western allies.
Yet, every few years, the Palestinian people prove them wrong; that despite all the pressures – arm-twisting, sanctions, sieges, and relentless violence – they remain strong and not the victims ignorantly dubbed by Kushner.
What Kushner may not know is that there is a critical difference between victim and victimhood. While Palestinians cannot control their victimization, since it is imposed on them from an outside force, Israel – generously financed by the US – they do not seek to be victims.
Indeed, victimhood is a different issue. It is the state of perceiving oneself as a perpetual victim, with no aspirations, no agency.
While it is true that the ongoing Israeli genocide in Gaza is one of the greatest crimes of mass killings and ethnic cleansing in modern history, it is also true that no nation, in recent decades, has fought back as ferociously as the Palestinians. This is hardly the behavior of a victim.
The Joe Biden Administration, like every other US administration, has talked down to Palestinians, declaring them foolish for not accepting political deals that would fail to guarantee them the most basic of their long-denied rights. While Palestinians sought total and unconditional freedom, Camp David (1979), the Oslo Accords (1993), the Road Map (2004), and every other ‘offer’ before, during or after were political attempts at prolonging the Israeli occupation and denying the rights of the Palestinians. Kushner’s was not the exception.
All of these previous American ‘peace proposals’ were obviously unfair, as they were to Israel’s advantage and were designed entirely independent from international and humanitarian laws. All of these pro-Israeli proposals have failed, not due to the international community’s ability to challenge Washington, but due to the tenacity of the Palestinian people.
Palestinians defeated the US agenda, but that was not enough to clinch their own freedom, simply because they were in this difficult battle alone.
Solidarity with the Palestinian people has always been one of the pillars of all international solidarity movements worldwide for decades. The phrase ‘Free Palestine’ has been written on countless walls, in every language, in every city, town, or working-class neighborhood. Still, that solidarity was not enough to turn the tide, to achieve the coveted paradigm shift or to reach the critical mass needed to globalize the struggle for the freedom of the Palestinians the way that the struggle to end South Africa’s apartheid imposed itself as a moral necessity on the whole world.
There should be no illusions that the anti-apartheid struggle of South Africa and the struggle for Palestinian freedom are identical. Back then, the global geopolitical shift made it difficult for Pretoria to maintain its racial segregation regime. Moreover, the power of that racist government, if compared to that of Israel and its backers, is minuscule.
Washington sees Israel as an integral part of the US global influence. For US politicians, Israel is a domestic and not simply a foreign policy issue. Moreover, if Israel ceases to exist in its current dominant form, the US will lose a stronghold in a region teeming with precious resources, strategic waterways and much more. This is precisely why Biden has repeatedly declared that “If Israel didn’t exist, we would have to invent it”.
However, things are finally changing, and the new solidarity, ignited in response to the worst killing campaign in the history of the region, has exceeded the confines of conditional solidarity, ideological solidarity and symbolic solidarity, which, to some extent, had defined global solidarity with the Palestinians.
This solidarity is now expressing itself at the highest level of political discourses. In his testimony before the International Court of Justice’s public hearings (February 19-26), China’s representative, Ma Xinmin, went as far as defending, while referencing international law, the Palestinian people’s right to armed struggle. Russia’s Ambassador to the United Nations, Vassily Nebenzia, called on sanctions on “those who obstruct humanitarian access to those in need”. European governments, such as Spain, Ireland, Norway and Belgium, are using unprecedented language to describe Israel’s war crimes in Gaza, while demanding real action.
The Global South is back at the forefront of championing the cause of Palestine as the world’s most inspiring national liberation struggle.
None of this was born in a vacuum. While the majority of global protests and rallies in post-October 7 were related to Palestine and Israel, 86 percent of these protests were reportedly pro-Palestine. It is not only the frequency or size of current protests that matter, but their nature as well. This includes a group of Italian youth trying to storm the US consulate in Pisa; Palestine activists taking over the Congress building, and an American soldier self-immolating out of sheer anger at the culpability of his government in the crimes underway in Gaza.
This is truly earth-shattering. The critical mass for meaningful solidarity has finally been achieved, signaling that, once more, Palestinians have imposed themselves as the guardians of their own struggle, standing proudly at the frontline of the global struggle for freedom and justice.
This leaves us with the question: Who is truly “having a hard time looking at the international community in the face?” Certainly, not the Palestinian people.
Dr. Ramzy Baroud is a journalist, author and the Editor of The Palestine Chronicle. He is the author of six books. His latest book, co-edited with Ilan Pappé, is ‘Our Vision for Liberation: Engaged Palestinian Leaders and Intellectuals Speak Out’. His other books include ‘My Father was a Freedom Fighter’ and ‘The Last Earth’. Baroud is a Non-resident Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Islam and Global Affairs (CIGA). His website is www.ramzybaroud.net
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