Israel, Ukraine, and US overreach

By Uditha Devapriya

At a recent BCIS seminar on the Israel-Palestine conflict, a former Ambassador suggested that the Arab world should form a common front. He blamed the UN for not doing enough to defuse and de-escalate tensions and contended that Joe Biden and Benjamin Netanyahu are using the conflict to boost their popularity, probably to prepare for elections next year.

The US is now focused on supporting Israel. All other considerations, including human rights concerns, have taken a backseat. Given the US’s insistence on aiding Israel and its refusal to recognise the rights of Palestinians and the genocide being worked up against them, only a front in the Global South, the Middle-East in particular, will do.

The US’s interventions in the recent conflict have been unhelpful at best and provocative at worst. Nearly 3,000 Palestinian children have been slaughtered, while Israel is preparing for a ground invasion of the Gaza strip. Defence officials have stated that they will forsake all responsibility for human lives in Gaza after the invasion.

This is, in effect, a declaration of war against everyone, regardless of their complicity in the unfolding violence. Meanwhile, in the UN, the US clashes with Russia and Brazil over the wording of their resolutions, vetoing the Brazilian one for not mentioning Israel’s right to self-defence. In other words, the US is concerned more with the protection of a nuclear power than the lives of millions of civilians cornered into a modern-day concentration camp.

All this has weakened the West’s hegemony and accelerated moves towards multipolarity. It has also weakened the US’s hegemony in the West. Other Western countries, including in Europe, have been less forthcoming in their support of Israel. Spain’s acting Social Rights Minister, for instance, has called on Europe to sever links with Israel. France and Germany have all but completely banned pro-Palestinian rhetoric, but France opposed calls in the European Union to suspend aid to Palestine. President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen continues to tweet contradictory statements day in and out, yet the lack of any consensus in the EU has empowered dissent against such officials. Unlike in the US, in Europe there seems to be a broader recognition of Palestinian rights.

Even at the height of its power during the Cold War, the US political establishment was guided by realpolitik, the doctrine that the exercise of power must be directed by cool, calculated reason and discretion. That principle no longer holds. The US has launched itself into the Middle-East irrationally and is taking sides with a nuclear power that has violated international law, overlooking its own commitment to the latter.

That, not surprisingly, has strengthened its strategic rivals. The invasion of Ukraine enabled Russia and China to get together: the violence in Palestine has enabled the Global South to get together with Russia and China. Against that backdrop, and in an attempt to justify its commitment to Israel, the US now suggests that Hamas and Vladimir Putin are one and the same.

Even mainstream Western publications like Foreign Policy and The Economist have begged to differ with this view of things. Writing in Foreign Policy, for instance, Howard French notes the perils of standing unequivocally with Israel.

“What is harder to do, though, is to explain away how having roughly seven million people of Palestinian descent living with unequal rights under Israeli authority, many of them confined in places such as Gaza or squirreled away in discontinuous parcels of homeland on the West Bank that are under constant pressure from expanding Israeli settlements, is consistent with ideas of democracy, or even of approximate equity.”

Despite this, the US insists on seeing Hamas on the same terms as Putin. The Global South does not and will not see things that way. Western support for Ukraine, which has cost the US more than USD 75 billion so far, could be justified on the basis that Ukraine, as a small state, was resisting the advances of a large settler-coloniser. To be sure, the Global South did not buy that narrative either: for them, the invasion of Ukraine was a proxy war between strategic rivals, which had no relevance for them.

It did not help that Western officials and journalists explicitly commented that Ukrainian refugees were “civilised”, looked like “us”, and did not hail from “a developing, third world nation”, in what may be the most racist media coverage of any recent war. Palestinian refugees, partly for these reasons, are closer to the Global South than Ukrainian refugees. They resonate more deeply.

Ironically, Biden’s views on Hamas and Putin do not carry weight even in the US, where there is a clear difference in perceptions about these two wars. There is bipartisan support for Israel. The Republican Party has unconditionally supported it, as Donald Trump’s actions during his presidency show. Ukraine, however, has been something of a hard sell among Republicans.

Kevin McCarthy’s resignation as House Speaker came amid debates about whether Washington should keep supporting Ukrainian resistance. While one Republican presidential hopeful has said that he opposes it, funds for Ukraine are running low. In this regard, Republicans have been ambivalent at best and unwilling at worst in their support for Ukraine, while they have been insistent on defending Israel. This ties in with their foreign policy, which has seen a shift since the Tea Party movement in 2009: more isolationist, less willing to intervene abroad, and more focused on defending proxies.

The US political establishment’s inability to draw a line between these two conflicts thus indicates a failure to grasp what’s happening out there. In the Global South, from Russia on one end to China on the other, including not just Asia but also Africa, there is a seismic shift in international opinion. In response to the Soviet threat, the US threw its weight behind China. This helped it isolate Russia and ensure its demise in a matter of two decades.

Yet such realism is missing today. Now it persistently imposes its worldview on the rest of the world, even if that worldview is not shared by anyone else. Moreover, no hegemonic power can sustain two theatres of war at the same time. No hegemonic power can win either by portraying both as the one and the same. The US has yet to realise this.

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