US Congress and Beijing’s Diaoyutai State Guesthouse
a geopolitical split screen
This week offered the world a clarifying geopolitical split-screen.
On one side, the US Congress welcomed a war criminal and fugitive from justice. In the course of his hour-long speech, Benjamin Netanyahu received 58 standing ovations from elected officials in the US, while security forces brutally repressed protesters in the streets of Washington.
On the other side, Beijing’s Diaoyutai State Guesthouse welcomed Palestine’s 14 political factions. The groups, which include Fatah, Hamas, and the communist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, reached an agreement, brokered by China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi, to form a national unity government.
The two images hold radically different — if intimately connected — visions for the future of the world order.
US imperial hegemony is waning. Yes, it can still dominate the world militarily and arm Israel to the teeth. Yet the US’ so-called moral leadership — its ability to lead by consent — is being buried under the rubble in Gaza. It is impossible for the US to present itself as a defender of human rights and international law while its officials arm, finance, and applaud the indiscriminate massacre of Palestinian civilians.
Outgoing President Joe Biden famously describes Israel as a US imperial outpost, repeating for decades the same line: “If there were no Israel, we’d have to invent one to safeguard US interests in the region.” But the US political class’ literal and figurative embrace of Bibi’s brash denial of the value of Palestinian life revolts the great majority of the peoples of the world. Israel’s settler-colonial crimes are the US’ crimes. Biden — with bipartisan political support — is Netanyahu’s partner and enabler in genocide.
According to Netanyahu’s speech, Israel’s genocidal campaign against Gaza won’t end until “total victory.” His intentions were clear: “Give us the tools, and we’ll finish the job faster.” To him, the protestors who clogged the streets of the US capital were nothing but “Iran’s useful idiots.”
Netanyahu painted in primary colours for his appreciative audience, claiming the war that they were funding was a “clash between barbarism and civilisation.” He described the assault — which has directly killed tens of thousands, including children assassinated by sniper fire — as between "those who glorify death and those who sanctify life.” In all, the genocide may now have claimed as many as 186,000 lives with many more on the near horizon due to lack of food, water and the means of life. Estimates suggest that children account for at least half of the deaths. Now, nearly every single person in Gaza is perilously ill, injured or malnourished as its infrastructure lies in bombed-out ruins.
Netanyahu had the gall to wash his hands of the starvation of the population claiming that "if there are Palestinians in Gaza who aren't getting enough food, it's not because Israel is blocking it. It's because Hamas is stealing it.”
That is not a view shared by the International Criminal Court’s Prosecutor Karim Khan, or by any of the relief agencies operating on the ground. In Khan’s May application for an arrest warrant for Netanyahu and his Defence Minister Yoav Gallant for criminal responsibility for war crimes and crimes against humanity, “starvation of civilians as a method of warfare as a war crime contrary to article 8(2)(b)(xxv) of the Statute” was top of the charge sheet.
In Washington, we saw one vision for the future of humanity — one in which Gaza is a warning to all those who dare resist the contours of the US’s New Cold War.
11,000 kilometres away and just the day before, the Beijing Declaration was signed by 14 Palestinian factions. It followed three days of intense talks in Beijing with the ground laid in earlier talks between Hamas and Fatah, the two largest factions, hosted by Beijing in April.
China is increasingly positioning itself as an honest broker in disputes and conflicts around the world. Last year, China mediated an agreement to reduce tensions and improve bilateral relations between Iran and Saudi Arabia. The deal helped end the brutal, eight-year war in Yemen that had claimed at least 377,000 lives through direct violence, famine and a lack of healthcare. The regional rivals restored diplomatic ties and restarted a security cooperation agreement. There is no doubt that without the deal, Yemen would not be able to stand in solidarity with Palestine as it does today.
China’s longstanding official policy of non-interference in the internal affairs of other states is being adapted to include international facilitation. China’s foreign minister, Wang Yi, who brokered both the Saudi-Iran and the Palestinian factions deals said this week that “reconciliation of the Palestinian factions is an internal affair for Palestinians but at the same time cannot happen without international support.” He said the Declaration was an “important historical moment in the cause of Palestinian liberation” and part of the driving "principle of Palestinians governing Palestine."
To that end, the Declaration binds all 14 factions to work together on forming a government of national unity to begin reconstruction of the shattered territories, unite the Palestinian institutions divided across the West Bank and Gaza and prepare for national elections.
It is often remarked, following Aimé Césaire and Franz Fanon, that colonialism decivilises the coloniser as it brutalises the colonised. It follows that resistance to that brutalisation in the colony and the metropole is the real civilising force for both the colonised and the coloniser. The dignity of asserting our common humanity in the face of brutality is the basis of true civilisation.
We see that spirit here. In Beijing, the Palestinian factions took practical steps towards their assertion that Palestinians will govern Palestine, as is their right. In Washington, people flooded the streets to oppose the Israeli-American destruction of Palestine, while a minority of the US political class engaged in feeble gestures of protest: 135 Democrats and the Independent Bernie Sanders did not attend Netanyahu’s address, up from 50 in 2015. The Congress’ sole Palestinian-American representative, Rashida Tlaib, attended the speech not to applaud but hold up a sign condemning Netanyahu as a “war criminal” and “guilty of genocide” — the only dissenting voice in the room.
As this newsletter has been documenting, the pendulum of world history is swinging from North to South. The mutinies in both the North and the South are growing and becoming more connected by the day. And as they do, a new world built on dialogue and cooperation peeks through the cracks of a crumbling imperial order.
In solidarity,
The Progressive International Secretariat
