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Scoop
04-07-2025
- Politics
- Scoop
Can Israel Survive Without The West? The Answer Reveals Our Collective Power
The Israeli genocide in Gaza, along with the escalating regional wars it has ignited, has brought two chilling truths into our focus: first, Israel is deliberately and aggressively undermining the security and stability of the entire Middle East and, second, Israel is utterly incapable of surviving on its own. These two assertions, though seemingly distinct, are inextricably linked. For if those who relentlessly sustain Israel—militarily, politically, and economically—were to finally withdraw their support, the Middle East would not be the powder keg it has been for decades, a situation that has catastrophically worsened since October 7, 2023. Though no oversimplification is intended, the brutal reality is that all it would take is for Israel to withdraw from Gaza, allowing the devastated, genocide-stricken Strip the faintest chance to heal. Over 56,000 Palestinians, including more than 17,000 children and 28,000 women, have been brutally slaughtered since the commencement of this war, a horrifying tally expected to surge dramatically when comprehensive investigations into the missing are finally conducted. Only then could the process of returning to some semblance of normalcy begin, where the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people must be fiercely championed within an international system built, at least theoretically, upon unwavering respect for basic human rights and international law. The abhorrent "might makes right" maxim would have to be utterly expunged from any future political equation. Middle Eastern countries, both Arab and Muslim, must finally rise to the occasion, stepping up decisively to aid their brethren and to ensure that Israel is powerless to divide their ranks. For Israel, this demand is simply impossible, a non-starter and, understandably so, from its colonial perspective. Why? "Invasion is a structure, not an event," the influential scholar Patrick Wolfe has famously asserted. This profound statement unequivocally means that Israel's wars, commencing with the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, the Nakba, of 1948, and all subsequent wars and military occupations, were not random historical coincidences, but rather integral components of an enduring structure of power designed to eliminate the indigenous population. This renders as simply false the notion that Israel's behavior after October 7 was solely driven by revenge and devoid of strategy. We are perhaps excused for failing to initially grasp this distinction, given the grisly, unspeakable nature of the Israeli actions in Gaza and the palpable sense of perverse pleasure Israel seems to derive from the daily murder of innocent people. Yet, the language emanating from Israel was chillingly clear about its true motives. As Benjamin Netanyahu declared on October 7, 2023, 'we will turn Gaza into a deserted island'. That has always been an intrinsic, unchanging part of Israel's colonial structure, and it will remain so unless it is decisively reined in. But who possesses the will and power to rein in Israel? Israel operates through a network of enablers, benefactors who have long viewed Israel's existence as an indispensable colonial fortress serving the interests of Western colonialism. 'The connection between the Israeli people and the American people is bone deep. (...) We're united in our shared values,' Joe Biden declared with striking conviction in July 2022. Without even bothering to question those "shared values" that somehow permit Israel to perpetrate a genocide while the US actively sustains it, Biden was undeniably honest in his stark depiction that the relationship between both countries transcends mere politics. Other Western leaders blindly parrot the same perception. The unfolding genocide, however, has spurred some Western—and a multitude of non-Western—governments to courageously speak out against the Israeli war, Netanyahu, and his extremist ideology in ways unprecedented since Israel's very establishment. For some of these countries, notably Spain, Norway, Ireland, and Slovenia, among others, the proverbial 'bond' is demonstrably 'breakable' and their support is most certainly not 'unequivocal'. There are various theories as to why some Western governments dare to challenge Israel, while others stubbornly refuse. That important discussion aside, shattering the bond between Israel and the West is absolutely critical, not only for a just peace to finally prevail, but for the very survival of the Palestinian people. The nearly 21 agonizing months of unrelenting Israeli genocide have taught us a brutal lesson: Israel is, after all, a vassal state, utterly unable to fight its own wars, to defend itself or even to sustain its own economy without the direct, massive support of the US and others. Prior to the war, there were occasional outbursts from Israeli officials proclaiming that Israel is an independent country, not 'another star on the US flag'. These voices have since been largely silenced, replaced by a constant stream of begging and pleading for the US to come to Israel's rescue. While Palestinians continue to stand with legendary courage to resist the Israeli military occupation and apartheid, those who genuinely care about international law, justice, and peace must take decisive action by directly confronting governments that persist in helping Israel sustain the genocide in Gaza and the destabilization of the Middle East. Governments like Spain and others are doing what many had not expected only years ago: Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez is powerfully advocating for the suspension of the EU-Israel Association Agreement, an extensive trade deal in place since 2000, due to "the catastrophic situation of genocide." If more such governments were to adopt a similar, uncompromising stance, Israel would be choked off, at least from acquiring the very murder weapons it uses to carry out its barbaric genocide. It is our collective responsibility to march in lockstep behind such courageous voices and demand uncompromising accountability, not only from Israel, but from those who are actively sustaining its Israeli settler colonial structure. A- 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
Ammon
02-07-2025
- Politics
- Ammon
Can Israel survive without the West? The answer reveals our collective power
The Israeli genocide in Gaza, along with the escalating regional wars it has ignited, has brought two chilling truths into our focus: first, Israel is deliberately and aggressively undermining the security and stability of the entire Middle East and, second, Israel is utterly incapable of surviving on its own. These two assertions, though seemingly distinct, are inextricably linked. For if those who relentlessly sustain Israel, militarily, politically, and economically, were to finally withdraw their support, the Middle East would not be the powder keg it has been for decades, a situation that has catastrophically worsened since October 7, 2023. Though no oversimplification is intended, the brutal reality is that all it would take is for Israel to withdraw from Gaza, allowing the devastated, genocide-stricken Strip the faintest chance to heal. Over 56,000 Palestinians, including more than 17,000 children and 28,000 women, have been brutally slaughtered since the commencement of this war, a horrifying tally expected to surge dramatically when comprehensive investigations into the missing are finally conducted. Only then could the process of returning to some semblance of normalcy begin, where the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people must be fiercely championed within an international system built, at least theoretically, upon unwavering respect for basic human rights and international law. The abhorrent "might makes right" maxim would have to be utterly expunged from any future political equation. Middle Eastern countries, both Arab and Muslim, must finally rise to the occasion, stepping up decisively to aid their brethren and to ensure that Israel is powerless to divide their ranks. For Israel, this demand is simply impossible, a non-starter and, understandably so, from its colonial perspective. Why? "Invasion is a structure, not an event," the influential scholar Patrick Wolfe has famously asserted. This profound statement unequivocally means that Israel's wars, commencing with the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, the Nakba, of 1948, and all subsequent wars and military occupations, were not random historical coincidences, but rather integral components of an enduring structure of power designed to eliminate the indigenous population. This renders as simply false the notion that Israel's behavior after October 7 was solely driven by revenge and devoid of strategy. We are perhaps excused for failing to initially grasp this distinction, given the grisly, unspeakable nature of the Israeli actions in Gaza and the palpable sense of perverse pleasure Israel seems to derive from the daily murder of innocent people. Yet, the language emanating from Israel was chillingly clear about its true motives. As Benjamin Netanyahu declared on October 7, 2023, 'we will turn Gaza into a deserted island'. That has always been an intrinsic, unchanging part of Israel's colonial structure, and it will remain so unless it is decisively reined in. But who possesses the will and power to rein in Israel? Israel operates through a network of enablers, benefactors who have long viewed Israel's existence as an indispensable colonial fortress serving the interests of Western colonialism. 'The connection between the Israeli people and the American people is bone deep. (...) We're united in our shared values,' Joe Biden declared with striking conviction in July 2022. Without even bothering to question those "shared values" that somehow permit Israel to perpetrate a genocide while the US actively sustains it, Biden was undeniably honest in his stark depiction that the relationship between both countries transcends mere politics. Other Western leaders blindly parrot the same perception. The unfolding genocide, however, has spurred some Western, and a multitude of non-Western, governments to courageously speak out against the Israeli war, Netanyahu, and his extremist ideology in ways unprecedented since Israel's very establishment. For some of these countries, notably Spain, Norway, Ireland, and Slovenia, among others, the proverbial 'bond' is demonstrably 'breakable' and their support is most certainly not 'unequivocal'. There are various theories as to why some Western governments dare to challenge Israel, while others stubbornly refuse. That important discussion aside, shattering the bond between Israel and the West is absolutely critical, not only for a just peace to finally prevail, but for the very survival of the Palestinian people. The nearly 21 agonizing months of unrelenting Israeli genocide have taught us a brutal lesson: Israel is, after all, a vassal state, utterly unable to fight its own wars, to defend itself or even to sustain its own economy without the direct, massive support of the US and others. Prior to the war, there were occasional outbursts from Israeli officials proclaiming that Israel is an independent country, not 'another star on the US flag'. These voices have since been largely silenced, replaced by a constant stream of begging and pleading for the US to come to Israel's rescue. While Palestinians continue to stand with legendary courage to resist the Israeli military occupation and apartheid, those who genuinely care about international law, justice, and peace must take decisive action by directly confronting governments that persist in helping Israel sustain the genocide in Gaza and the destabilization of the Middle East. Governments like Spain and others are doing what many had not expected only years ago: Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez is powerfully advocating for the suspension of the EU-Israel Association Agreement, an extensive trade deal in place since 2000, due to "the catastrophic situation of genocide." If more such governments were to adopt a similar, uncompromising stance, Israel would be choked off, at least from acquiring the very murder weapons it uses to carry out its barbaric genocide. It is our collective responsibility to march in lockstep behind such courageous voices and demand uncompromising accountability, not only from Israel, but from those who are actively sustaining its Israeli settler colonial structure. 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).
Rakyat Post
27-05-2025
- Politics
- Rakyat Post
Knowing The History Of Israel-Palestine: Injustice From The start
Subscribe to our FREE This article first appeared in 'Europeans needed land, the indigenous population resisted its seizure, and so they were exterminated.' 'Settler colonialism destroys to replace.' These quotes put in a nutshell what has been going on in Palestine for almost a century, driven by Zionism, the founding ideology of the state of Israel, which is now committing a genocide in Gaza. The first quote is from Kehinde Andrews' The New Age of Empire. The second is from Patrick Wolfe's article 'Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native' in the Journal of Genocide Research. Wolfe also quotes Theodor Herzl, the founding father of Zionism: 'If I wish to substitute a new building for an old one, I must demolish before I construct.' We need to face the issue in front of us – a genocide of a people is taking place in Gaza against the background of settler-colonialism and racism. The International Court of Justice (ICJ) refers to it as 'plausible genocide'. The ICJ is a court of law and, yes, we can imagine how the judges have to wring their legal hands to determine if it is indeed genocide. But while the wringing goes on children, women, civilians are dying, starving and malnourished from indiscriminate bombing and forced blockades of food and supplies. We have to go beyond the wringing. There was no court to wring its hands while 99% of the natives died in what ended up as the genocide of the Americas. There was no court to wring its hands when only about 75,000 Aborigines were left in 1900 out of about one million in 1788, when the British first arrived, leading to the genocide of the natives of Australia. Surely, we cannot repeat such wringing only to then have history catch up and then find that – oh, umm, in the end the Palestinian population did suffer a genocide at the hands of the Israelis. As the office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights says, 'While States debate terminology – is it or is it not genocide? – Israel continues its relentless destruction of life in Gaza, through attacks by land, air and sea, displacing and massacring the surviving population with impunity.' (End unfolding genocide or watch it end life in Gaza: UN experts say States face defining choice | OHCHR). It is instructive that the concept of a genocide was not conceived of in the West until it happened to white Europeans in Europe itself (ie the Nazi Holocaust). As Kehinde Andrews points out: 'The fact that the term genocide only came to exist in the West during the [Nazi] Holocaust is testament enough to the problem. Systematic killing of hundreds of millions of 'savages' in the colonies did not merit the creation of a new concept.' Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has a penchant for describing Israel's so-called 'war' against Hamas as being one between civilisation and barbarism, seeing Israel at the front line of that battle. The message is that Israel is fighting that civilisational war as the representative of the modern civilised (read Western) world in a region that is inherently lacking in civilisation. But given the unfettered prolonged bombings, given the wilful starvation of a whole population as a weapon of war, who really are the barbarians? It is easy to say that the issue is complicated, or to wave things off because the Middle East is always fighting anyway, or to say we cannot do anything. There are actually things we can do – boycott Israel-complicit products and services, talk about the injustice, write to the US embassy, protest, march… But one fundamental thing we should also do is to know the history of the problem. This is important so that we do not just see each episode of violence as just another episode but as part of a long train of ongoing historical injustice. We too were colonised and have been subject to racism. We should thus be better able to empathise with the Palestinians who, to this day, still face the violent end of it all and are fighting for their survival, dignity, freedom and self-determination. Injustice from the start The state of Israel was formed on the basis of a UN partition plan adopted by a resolution of the UN General Assembly on 29 November 1947. At that time, the indigenous Palestinians made up a two-thirds' majority of the population while a third were Jewish newcomers who owned less than 6% of the total land area. Yet, Resolution 181 of November 1947 granted 56% of the land to the minority Jewish settlers and just 42% to the majority native Palestinians. On that basis, the state of Israel was established on 15 May 1948. The division of the land was completely disproportionate to the demographic realities on the ground. This was driven partly by a desire to compensate the Jews for the Nazi Holocaust in Europe. We can see how fundamentally unjust this was, especially from the perspective of the Palestinian natives of the land. Your land is partitioned without your consent with a disproportionate majority portion given to newly arrived settlers, to compensate them for a genocide they suffered in Europe that had nothing to do with you. It is no wonder that such an unjust and ill-conceived plan sparked protest actions leading to what became known as the first Arab-Israeli war. The dispossession of the Palestinians had begun. Just one day after UN Resolution 181, organised fear, militia violence and expulsions started to be employed against the Palestinians. This was carried out by Zionist paramilitary groups with a series of attacks on Palestinian villages and neighbourhoods. These initial Zionist assaults were severe enough to cause the displacement of almost 75,000 people. This was the start of the ethnic cleansing of Palestine – well before the Zionist state of Israel was proclaimed in May 1948. On 10 March 1948 the infamous 'Plan Dalet' was adopted by the Zionist leadership. This was a plan to ethnically cleanse the country to make it as fully Jewish as possible, with as few Palestinians as possible. It led to the uprooting of Palestinians from urban centres accompanied by massacres (most notably, at Deir Yassin). This was the unfolding of the Nakba of 1948, described by Rashid Khalidi in his highly accessible book The Hundred Years' War on Palestineas a 'seemingly endless train wreck'. By the end of the first phase of the Nakba – before Israel's founding on 15 May 1948 – about 300,000 Palestinians had been displaced and key economic, civic and cultural centres had been devastated. The second phase, following 15 May, saw the defeat of weak Arab armies and further expulsions and massacres resulting in the displacement of another 400,000 people – a total of about 700,000 native Palestinian inhabitants. (The Nakba has never ended and continues with the ongoing displacement of Palestinians over the whole of the occupied territory of Palestine with its worst manifestation in Gaza today.) Through the use of armed force, the original 56% allocated to Israel under the UN partition plan was increased to 78% and was never reversed. The series of events that has led to the historical injustice of the case of Palestine was spearheaded by premeditated ethnic cleansing. Ilan Pappe's authoritative work The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine draws on the Israeli military archives, Zionist leaders' diaries, their minutes of meetings and Palestinian historical sources. It establishes a 'clear-cut case of an ethnic cleansing operation … regarded under international law today as a crime against humanity'. It is revealing that David Ben-Gurion, Israel's first Prime Minister, wrote to his son in 1937: 'The Arabs will have to go, but one needs an opportune moment for making it happen, such as war.' As we have seen above, war he did make with the establishment of the state of Israel 11 years later in 1948. The underlying idea that 'the Arabs will have to go' has remained part of Israel's existence, with the right-wing government today being explicit about it. -By Tong Veng Wye, Aliran member. Share your thoughts with us via TRP's . Get more stories like this to your inbox by signing up for our newsletter.
Yahoo
22-04-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Provost: Purdue will not provide numbers on students affected by visa revocations
WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. – Purdue officials declined to tell faculty members many details about international students whose visas have been affected by a recent wave of Trump administration visa revocations in a meeting Monday afternoon. When a member of the university's University Senate asked how many students have been affected by the revocations, Provost Patrick Wolfe said officials have no plans to provide the numbers of the students affected, saying he neither wanted to under- or overstate the number. Purdue President Mung Chiang addressed the visa revocation at the meeting, making a statement that was nearly word for word the same as a press release the university published Monday morning. 'We all recognize this is an anxious time for our international community, and we are providing both overarching and tailored support to those impacted, consistent with our responsibilities as a public, land-grant host institution in an evolving context of current federal actions and court cases,' Chiang said. 'Purdue has been in contact with anyone who has become aware of a change in their visa status according to government databases. Impacted individuals are encouraged to contact the embassy of their home country and to seek outside legal assistance to address their individual situations,' the press release said. Wolfe encouraged senators to continue following the news for updates. A Purdue spokesperson also did not answer how many students have been affected, instead deferring to the press release. The federal government has been revoking hundreds of student visas around the country, but the reasons for their revocations seem to vary. U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in March that 300 students studying in the United States have had their visas revoked. The New York Times listed Harvard, Stanford, the University of Texas at Austin, Minnesota State University and the University of California as some universities affected. Those connections, the Times pointed out, may be related to student involvement with pro-Palestinian movements or from legal infractions, such as speeding or driving while intoxicated. Last week, the American Civil Liberties Union of Indiana filed a lawsuit against federal officials on behalf of seven international students in Indiana whose visas were revoked. Five of those are Purdue students from China, four of whom have been charged with a crime in the United States. Three of those charges have or are scheduled to be dismissed. Emails to the students affected said they are to 'make immediate plans to depart the United States' and must immediately cease any employment they have in the country, leaving them with no income. The ACLU lawsuit pointed out that the students were not guaranteed they would be deported to their home country or offered due process. On Thursday, a federal judge denied the ACLU of Indiana's request for a temporary restraining order that would have protected those Indiana international students from involuntary removal. "While the Court understands the turmoil that Plaintiffs are experiencing because of the sudden and unexpected termination of their F-1 student status in SEVIS, Plaintiffs have not demonstrated irreparable harm to warrant the extraordinary exercise of judicial power required for the Court to issue a temporary restraining order," U.S. District Judge James Patrick Hanlon wrote in Thursday's ruling. This article originally appeared on Lafayette Journal & Courier: Provost: Purdue will not say how many students hit by visa revocations
