The Israeli aggression against Gaza has reached an unbelievable degree in conveying the meaning of barbarism and savagery. This is at a time when the media praising this aggression is trying to attach the attribute of barbarism and savagery to the attacked, who are mostly children and women taking refuge in schools and hospitals. Man stands before the horror of the destruction, killing, displacement, deportation, and starvation that is occurring, unable to understand. He wonders: Does all of this fall within the category of the legitimacy of self-defense, or is what is happening not subject to moral controls for investigation?
Our goal in these lines is to get out of the circle of bloody daily details to consider what events indicate in terms of major meanings that reveal to us the nature of the global system within which nations are organized forcibly and not voluntarily. We are not concerned here with delving into the manifestations of weakness, humiliation, and impotence in the face of the war of extermination that is targeting the Palestinians of Gaza. Rather, we are concerned with looking at the force behind this genocide. It is known that what is happening is happening primarily with the blessing of the United States of America.
America has entered a predicament from which it is difficult to emerge, and it insists on providing military, moral, and material support to support Israel in its barbaric aggression, which has no goal other than to punish an entire people. Just to satisfy the desire for revenge
America uses the excuse of aligning itself behind a strategic ally. In order to justify its involvement in the heinous aggression against the people of Gaza; This leads us to ask: Is what is happening – the systematic destruction of the means of survival for an entire people – achieving a geo-strategic interest, or, on the contrary, harming this interest? We imagine that America’s geo-strategic interest requires containing the military situation and co-opting the parties to the conflict, given that this conflict has repercussions that extend to the entire Arab region, which makes it fear that America’s image in the Arab and Islamic world will be undermined, and that would harm not only its geo-strategic interests. But cultural, ideological and economic as well.
The reality is that America is – in fact – blind to its strategic interests, and what blinds it is its fall into the logic of imperialism, this logic that has dictated empires throughout history to expand for the purpose of subjugating others by force of arms and forcing them to surrender. During the twentieth century, America was able to subjugate Germany and Japan by force and force their fighting armies to surrender. The American military mind will not be satisfied with anything less than a complete surrender of Gaza that will ensure the eradication of the sense of resistance from people. This is what is meant by victory, as its meaning is defined in the imperialist dictionary; Otherwise, it is a defeat that scratches the pride of the empire, whose sense of greatness has reached such a degree that it allows itself to decide who deserves to be kept alive, and who is permissible to be exterminated.
Everything suggests that the era of the United States of America is at an end; This is because it has reached the stage that the American historian Paul Kennedy, in his book on the rise and fall of the great powers, calls the stage of “imperial overstretch”, which is the stage at which the great power lacks the means necessary to achieve its expansion goals.
America has entered a predicament from which it is difficult to emerge, and it insists on providing military, moral, and material support to support Israel in its barbaric aggression, which has no goal other than to punish an entire people. Just to satisfy the desire for revenge. America has been seeking – over the past two decades at least – to win over the Arab world so that it becomes a strategic partner in confronting Chinese expansion. There were many indicators that led observers to believe that things were on the way to stability, especially the indicator related to the Arab-Zionist conflict, which decision-makers in America believed that its intensity was decreasing.
America is trying in vain to hide the truth about the massacres taking place on the ground against the people of Gaza, and in vain it is trying to promote the idea of “containing the conflict,” an idea that is essentially encircling the place to allow Israel to complete its work without being disturbed by any third party. Images of the systematic annihilation of Gaza open a new front of conflict for America. Whatever the outcome of the war and its outcomes, America will find itself forced to fight the battle of public opinion, not only in the Arab and Islamic world, but across the world. Although it is able to resolve the conflict on the ground, it is difficult for it to resolve the battle at the level of the geography of emotions and feelings.
Whoever contemplates the demonstrations that are roaming the streets of the Arab and Islamic world will find that the feelings of anger, resentment, and feelings of injustice and humiliation that simmer within them feed into the hate speech of the American model of imposing force and managing conflicts, and we do not think that America can remedy the matter easily. The American position on the aggression against Gaza contributed and continues to contribute to undermining the idea of a civilizational alliance with Islam. Whoever listens well to the voice of the Arab and Islamic world today will find that it strips credibility from Western discourse in general, and American discourse in particular, regarding the values of democracy and human rights. It is as if we, the peoples of the Arab and Islamic region, or the peoples of the entire South, feel that America has reached the extreme in arrogance that is not controlled by laws, principles, or values.
James Petras and Maurice Morley wrote a book entitled: “Empire or Republic? American Global Power and Domestic Decay.” This book indicates that the success of the United States in the ideological and cultural field was measured by the decline of Marxist influence and nationalist ideologies, and the growing popularity of American forms of hegemony, especially among Latin American elites who – under the pretext of pragmatic realism – became unabashed in embracing free trade and projects Regional integration, debt repayment and other things that were previously denied.
The same thing happened in the Arab world, where the discourse of pragmatic realism began to overshadow all discourses critical of the American model of cultural and economic hegemony. The fragmentation of the public space – due to digital media – has contributed to narrowing the arena for ideological inflation and empowering the discourse of money, business and interests under the roof of a new culture in which the boundaries between cultural and religious identities are almost erased. However, the aggression against Gaza came to incite awareness to ask new questions related to the fate of peoples before American imperialism.
What is happening in Gaza is enough to narrow the arena of ideological disagreement between the various cultural and intellectual components of the Arab world. These components, despite their differing ideological views, seem to be coming together around questioning the American imperialist model. Not only that, but what is happening in Gaza divides the American interior into two parts: one part follows the logic of imperial America, and another part practices protest. A victory for the logic of the Republic. This division – which reminds us of the division in American society over the Vietnam War – will exhaust America internally and increase its lack of focus externally, which will inevitably serve the interest of the rising powers and strengthen its position in tomorrow’s world.
Could America have done anything better than what it did? Could she have taken a better position than the one she took? The answer is that – in any case – it is difficult to imagine a worse position than the one I took; This is a position that goes too far in the logic of expansion and the imposition of force, which would block the way to all future initiatives, and would irrevocably rob America of its status as a sponsor of peace in the region.
Is there a horizon for peace? A horizon for resolving the dilemma of the Palestinian issue? It may be difficult to imagine this horizon in the context of the war raging today, but moral responsibility requires working to find a solution that will spare the region from further destruction, devastation, and loss of life. Part of the solution lies in disengaging the link between Israel’s religious idea and America’s imperial policies. The combination of the two promises a dark future in which there is no place except for wars of faith. Isn’t it a great irony to hear the religious extremists in the Israeli government addressing the West, saying that the war against Gaza is a war to protect the Western liberal, civilized system? Continuing with this type of fabrication leads us blindfolded towards the abyss, towards religious wars based on dogmatic rigidity, as well as breathing new life into the colonial discourses of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century.
If the West – under the command of the United States of America – were in harmony with itself, it would seek ways out of the impasse of the existential conflict that has brought together the Israelis and Palestinians for nearly a century, and it would work to approve a treaty similar to the Treaty of Westphalia, giving the warriors a chance to rest. It extracts from them the acknowledgment of the impossibility of annihilating the other, and then draws for them a horizon for sharing space in a way that guarantees a decent life for all while respecting religious privacy and sacred places. However, the reality is that the West has fallen into stark contradiction, as it tries to combine preaching the values of citizenship based on liberal democracy and equal rights on the one hand, with blind alignment behind a state based on the foundations of religious and ethnic discrimination. Thus, he proves that he is unable to live up to the values that he has been preaching for a century.
