Israel and the Global South

By Uditha Devapriya

In a recent interview with Foreign Policy, former Israeli Prime Minister and Defence Minister Ehud Barak outlined four challenges in the ongoing conflict.

The first of these is the hostages. The second is the risk that the conflict will spread to Hezbollah in Lebanon. A third constraint is international law, which we are committed to. Lastly, even if we accomplish our goal of removing Hamas’s physical infrastructure and governing capabilities in the Gaza Strip, we do not intend to stay there for the next 10 or 20 years, so who takes the torch from us?

By separating the hostage issue from all other issues, Barak implies it can be viewed in isolation. But the hostage issue is very much linked to the other challenges. On the one hand, it has serious international law implications. On the other, it is strengthening Hamas’s links with Hezbollah. At the same time, it raises the question of the Israeli government’s legitimacy, or lack thereof, in the Gaza Strip, which in turn begs the question as to who, or what, will govern the region. This last point, moreover, will depend on whether the IDF (Israel Defece Force) defeats Hamas. Israel is doing all it can to achieve that objective. Yet for how long can the country hold the line, and for how long can its allies do so?

Barak also discounts that which even Western journals like Foreign Policy have highlighted, the Global South’s perceptions of the conflict. If the results of the recent UN resolutions are anything to go by, there is very little division in the region over the plight of Palestinians. India’s decision to abstain has been due to domestic political compulsions (growing pressure not to take sides with Arabs or Muslims abroad) on the one hand and a desire not to be out of the Global South community on the other. Abstentions provide an easy way out. Yet while commentators have criticised India for not coming out strongly on the issue, I see it as a move on India’s part to strengthen its position in the Global South while countering China’s domination of groupings in that part of the world.

It is questionable whether Israel has considered these developments. Ukraine did, which is why Zelenskyy made it a point to visit Asian and African leaders, including Modi. While that campaign was unsuccessful – the Global South does not agree with the West’s narrative of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine – the optics of the war at least fit the West’s framing of it as a large colonial power subjugating a small, defenceless State. Israel is a harder sell: it has opened itself up to charges of genocide from UN officials, while the Western Left, which has stood and continues to stand with Ukraine, has come down hard on it.

The Global South is aware of the West’s duplicity over Ukraine and Israel. President Biden has tried to equate the two on the basis that both countries are surrounded by powerful enemies. But this conveniently trivialises and falsely equalises their historical origins. There are, to be sure, a multitude of narratives around Ukraine, and whether it constitutes a separate entity, as Ukrainian nationalists allege, or a part of Russia, as Putin and his coterie contend. As Rohini Hensman has observed,

If someone suggested that we could understand the Black Lives Matter struggle without some knowledge of the historical background of slavery, lynchings, Jim Crow and so on, we would find it unconvincing, to put it mildly.

In that sense, the historical origins of Ukraine include debates on statehood and nationality. Israel’s origins, on the other hand, lie in Biblical prophecies, which do not amount to much when television screens churn out images of Palestinian refugees being cornered like rats and treated like outcasts. But there is another, perhaps more important reason for Israel’s existence, and that is the West’s collective guilt over the Holocaust. Anti-Semitism is very much out there, and it must be condemned unequivocally, not in the least because it harms the cause of Palestinians. Yet for a greater part of the Global South, particularly in the Arab world, the Holocaust was, and is, a “Western” problem.

It must be noted, moreover, that the manufacturers of the Holocaust perfected techniques borrowed from American and European colonisers. The Nazis advocated “scientific anti-Semitism”, which had its roots in the writings of European racial theorists like Arthur de Gobineau. Even 19th century European thinkers like Montesquieu and Rousseau were not immune to these sentiments.

To be sure, Hollywood, and Western pop culture in general, have built up an industry depicting Nazis as the bad guys: when we think of Nazis today, we think of Harrison Ford, with his hat and bullwhip, giving them a good run for their Reich in search of Biblical artefacts. Yet as Alex Ross has written in The New Yorker, Hitler borrowed the American experience for his Final Solution.

Enslavement of African-Americans was written into the U.S. Constitution. Thomas Jefferson spoke of the need to “eliminate” or “extirpate” Native Americans. In 1856, an Oregonian settler wrote, “Extermination, however unchristian-like it may appear, seems to be the only resort left for the protection of life and property.” General Philip Sheridan spoke of “annihilation, obliteration, and complete destruction.”

For much of the Global South, then, images of Ukrainian refugees fleeing their homes do not resonate as much as the nightmare that the people of Gaza have been enduring since 1967. They see the Holocaust as the fault of the West, and trace its origins not so much to Nazism as to the West’s legacy of suppressing colonial peoples. Such narratives are justifiable and grounded.

And regardless of what Western officials will say, they will hold ground in this part of the world. The fact that the Anglican Church of Ceylon, no less, visited the Palestinian Embassy and expressed solidarity with them shows that this cuts across religious divisions. Now, more than ever, the Global South has unified on a concrete issue.

Israel can ignore that only to their peril. Yet there are signs that it is coming to terms with this. Barak himself seems to have realised it: “[W]e will probably,” he says, “lose the support of public opinion in many parts of the free world.” How true.

The writer is an international relations analyst, independent researcher, and freelance
columnist who can be reached at udakdev1@gmail.com.