Palestine Changes Everything – Developing Economics

The on-going ethnic cleansing and genocide of Palestinians in 2023, marks the end of the façade of the peaceful Western liberal order. At least 940,000 people have been killed by direct war violence in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, and Pakistan. While these countries were subject to the different ebbs and flows of US imperial violence. Palestinians have paid the heaviest price.  The historical occupation of Palestine has always been a socio-economic precondition for the cohesion of the G-7 but the current ethnic cleansing can no longer be contained through the usual narrative control tools and an ever intensifying climate of fear promulgated to the ends of silencing and chilling legitimate support for Palestine internationally. As Steven Salaita notes, the genocide has shown us that ‘Impunity isn’t beholden to disapproval’, and we continue to bear witness to the genocide for ourselves and for the next generation. The current genocide is the clearest expression of the decrepitude of the Western order in a state of ongoing entropy. What follows shall be bereaved of the usual pretences of ‘democracy’ and ‘human rights’ and thus more naked, brutal and yet more reactionary. The Western order is generating the conditions for its demise. In this, Palestine leads the way. Palestine changes everything.

A New World Order: No more Gas-lighting

The Palestinian struggle reverberates across rule-setting institutions and yet again highlights the abject failure of multilateralism. After months of expressing ‘shock’, ‘regret’, and ‘condemnation’, and hackneyed references to the ‘staggering and unacceptable number of civilian casualties’ in Palestine, the UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres, invoked Article 99 of the UN Charter, to scale up the provision of humanitarian supplies for Gazan civilians.

This was done after 58 days of targeted and deliberate killing of civilians resulting in the murder of around 20,000 Palestinians. In addition to bombing residential areas, key targets were hospitals, schools and places of worship. According to the Palestinian Health Ministry, as reported by Reuters, around 70% of Gaza’s dead were women and children under the age of 18.

In invoking Article 99, Guterras rightly states that such has been done for the first time, during his tenure as Secretary General. What he doesn’t mention or even allude to, is that a resort to humanitarian intervention is not just an inadequate distraction from accountability, but additionally is yet another measure, which ultimately only reinforces US power.

The U.S has now twice vetoed Security Council resolutions calling for pauses in the fighting, to allow for humanitarian assistance. That the World’s largest military power is allowed to veto against a ceasefire in an on-going genocide, speaks volumes about the institutional power of the UN. Moreover, as always a singular emphasis on humanitarian approaches to the Palestinian occupation, moves the narrative away from the political. This is a textbook case for invoking the UN Genocide Convention and the convention is clear in its obligations, which:

“establishes on State Parties the obligation to take measures to prevent and to punish the crime of genocide, including by enacting relevant legislation and punishing perpetrators, “whether they are constitutionally responsible rulers, public officials or private individuals” (Article IV). That obligation, in addition to the prohibition not to commit genocide, have been considered as norms of international customary law and therefore, binding on all States, whether or not they have ratified the Genocide Convention.”

Feminist organisations based in the Global South  have called upon the Group of 77 and China, to invoke this convention. While there are on-going attempts amongst UN member states, to counter the US opposition to ceasefire, the fact remains the UN needs to address its institutional purpose; it cannot present itself as the sum of its member states, whilst these member states, continue to defer to the will of only one state. At this point in time, nothing but the Genocide Cconvention can secure the credibility of the UN as the UN’s current failure to protect Palestinians is not an unlikely exception to the history of previous UN operations – but  the function of an organised pattern. As noted by Sarah Roy, the planned reconstruction of Gaza, in the aftermath of three major wars on Gaza (2008–9, 2012, and 2014), led by the UN, as the main enforcer of the siege was crucial in enabling the consolidation of the Israeli stranglehold over the region. Beyond Palestine, the UN’s role in countries across the world has been far from stabilising.  Some key historical events, which stand out include the Serbrencia Massacre and Iraq’s Oil for Food Programme.  Additionally, in the context of Haiti, Jemima Pierre has shown how immunity from prosecution, has allowed UN bodies to effectively abscond from any realistic accountability.

Meanwhile, Israel is openly threatening both the UN and the International Criminal Court (ICC) as it bulldozes through every international rule. Israeli impunity is served by America’s domestic and foreign policy; the US Congressional House Resolution 894 for instance, now equates anti-Zionism to anti-semitism and the US continues to frustrate and block all policy passages to any multilateral resolution for a ceasefire.

Palestine as a microcosm of struggles against Western Imperialism

The Palestinian resistance is a people’s right to self-determination; it has been constant, unrelenting and as with any struggle for independence, is also rife with contradictions. But these contradictions are never portrayed as a product of choiceless-ness. Instead, as explored by Abdaljawad Omar and Louis Allday, the framing of a people’s historic resistance is presented as a monstrous nightmare designed to haunt and obstruct any alternative ways of thinking about Palestinians and in doing so, maintains an unwavering commitment to the existing status-quo. While the message is always that the issue is ‘complicated’, it is – concurrently and antithetically sold as an overly simplistic and an easily digestible narrative of murderous and tactless Arab villains.

This time, the narrative has been cheapened by the sheer scale of atrocity. While the West-centred intellectual praxis is centred around certain myths about what the World can and cannot do for the colonised, the brutality of Israeli genocide in Palestine has amplified the necessity of Palestinian resistance; it is now being echoed in the streets of every country, including in the authoritarian West and  no amount of populist law making, can legislate reality away.

More than ever, this is a reminder of why the Palestinian resistance has always been integral to the anti-colonial struggles of the third world. The Palestinian genocide is a rare moment of clarity, which very starkly accentuates the very contemporary nature of Western colonialism.

The Corporality of Financial Capital and International Development  

Most analysis on the rise of financial capitalism and deindustrialisation in the West, is presented as a process of unrelenting deterritorialization. This idea is concerned with analysing the causes of oppression of the Western working classes, often encapsulated in terms such as ‘austerity’. In these approaches financialisation is often presented as an abstraction; an acceleration of neoliberalism and an unbridled stage of capitalism. What takes place in the third world as a driving source of financialisation is often observed as peripheral to such analyses.  In fact, the financial subordination of the third world has been actively accompanied by its annihilation.

In comparison to any other occupied nation in recent history, Palestine has shown time-and-time again that it is the concrete territory, in which the Western arms race is realised. The deindustrialisation of the West is not accompanied by a decline but an escalation of production in arms, with the US in lead position. The corporeality of this productive power has always been realised and is acutely visible in dead and maimed bodies of Palestinians. The American way of war has consistently substantiated and reproduced itself in  American support for Israel. In the historical and comparative case of the Arab world, Ali Kadri has noted that the:

“Arab world exhibits higher rates of surplus value creation relative to its population because the premature elimination of human lives in war is a far higher rate of surplus value creation than that of the slow consumption of labour power.”

This assertion is met with scepticism by some in the West, however, we find no alternative answers to the question of why certain territories and geographies consistently deal with dead civilians?

Palestine has also been the most consistent site for US-led global humanitarianism efforts, as it is simultaneously and relentlessly bombed. It is the quintessential poster-child for the mobilisation neoliberal jargon and double-speak such as reconstruction, rehabilitation and even resilience. All these words encompass the interplay between violence and Western humanitarianism; American arms to Israel and American aid to Palestine are provided simultaneously with no contradiction in foreign diplomacy nor with any concern for humanity. As Palestinians suffer acute starvation and homelessness alongside constant bombing, the focus of the global humanitarian movement is on providing aid and ending starvation.  The cyclicality of the development paradigm is thus self-perpetuating.

In confronting this notion of development, Adam Hanieh previously proposed a reframing of development as resistance and struggle, which entails asserting the unity of Palestinians as a whole; rejecting the narrowing of the Palestinian question to the West Bank and Gaza and also including the Palestinian refugees, diaspora and those who now have Israeli citizenship. In more than one way, this proposal has been brought to the centre by the perpetrators of this Western-sanctioned Nakba 2.0. For the victims of the War on Terror specifically and also those in confrontation with the everyday violence of imperialism, the sanctity of international institutions, international law and liberal governance have always been a ruse for softening the image of violence. Palestinian genocide and Palestinian resistance has firmly changed this.  And so the veil has been lifted and there is no way of undoing what has been being done. Palestine changes everything; – the message to the third world is that as the empire hollows, falters and fails, its flailing impunity is boundless and anyone can be next. While the bravery of Palestinian journalists and activists expose the future of third world. Hiding and censoring this has been the precise role of mainstream journalism.

Palestinians have said over and over again that they do not want to be forgotten, as the faceless casualties of Israel. ‘I am not a number’. They claim their identities as well as their generational struggle. In a hyper-individuated world, the sheer strength and resolve of Palestinians to resist while knowing the inevitability of a painful death as a collective, defies the capitalist rationality of individual self-interest, self-protection and fetishised survival of the fittest. This is not emotional bravado but a political act for a shared future. They show us the meaning of a collective struggle for a historic cause. They show us that land and sovereign rights to live as a nation remain central to all liberation movements. For our sake, we can stand with them.

From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be free. Long live Palestine.   

Farwa Sial is a Research Associate at the Department of Economics, School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS). Her research focuses on the changing nature of capitalist development in context to imperialism with expertise in areas including development finance, comparative development and industrial policy. She tweets at @FarwaSial.

Read the piece in Arabic: فلسطين تغيّر كل شيء