Gaza does not mark the end of the settler colonial project. It marks, I fear, its final phase. Western states, enriched by their own occupations and genocides – in India, Africa, Asia, Latin America and North America – are returning to their roots as they face a global climate crisis and the obscene levels of social inequality that they engineer and sustain.
As the world breaks down, as the climate crisis drives millions and then tens of millions and then hundreds of millions of people north, in a desperate search for survival, the genocide in Gaza, which Israel is slow walking until it can resume its usual murderous pace, will replay itself over and over and over until the fragile social and environmental networks that hold the global community together disintegrate.
The refusal to extract ourselves from fossil fuels, the steady saturation of the atmosphere with carbon dioxide emissions (CO2), ensures soaring temperatures in which most life, including human life, will eventually be unsustainable. The global average concentration of CO2 surged by 3.5 parts per million, from June 2023 to June 2024, to reach an average of 422.8 parts per million, according to the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration. The following twelve months saw an even further increase of 2.6 parts per million of CO2. Violent conflicts, already exacerbated by extreme weather and water scarcity, will erupt across the globe with volcanic fury.
There is no mystery as to why the genocide is funded and sustained by Israel’s Western allies. There is no mystery as to why these states flout the Geneva Conventions, the International Court of Justice, the Arms Trade Treaty, the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, and international humanitarian law. There is no mystery as to why the United States has given a staggering $21.7 billion in military aid to Israel since October 7, 2023 and has repeatedly blocked resolutions at the United Nations censoring Israel, in what the latest UN report on Gaza calls an “internationally enabled crime.”
The US accounts for two-thirds of Israel’s weapons imports. But it is not alone. The report names 63 countries that are complicit in “Israel’s genocidal machinery” in Gaza.
In the words of a report from the Quincy Institute and Costs of War project, published on October 7 of this year, “[w]ithout US money, weapons and political support, the Israeli military could not have committed such rapid, widespread destruction of human lives and infrastructure in Gaza, or escalated its warfare so easily to the regional level by bombing Syria, Lebanon, Qatar and Iran.”
There is no mystery as to why thousands of citizens from the US, Russia, France, Ukraine and the United Kingdom serve in the Israeli occupying forces and are not held accountable for their participation in genocide.
Excerpted: ‘Israel’s “Internationally Enabled Crime”’. Courtesy: Counterpunch.org
