For all Palestine, particularly Gaza, is reduced to visibility or invisibility depending on how it best serves the Israeli and Western narratives, the spotlight should remain on Palestine until it is decolonised from Israel’s settler colonial enterprise. 

In recent comments, Colombian President Gustavo Petro described Israel’s genocide in Gaza as an experiment threatening the Global South. “What we are seeing before us is the making of barbarism and undoubtedly the possibility of a world war. It means the destruction of thousands, tens of thousands of lives that have nothing to do with geopolitics but still end up beneath the missiles,” Petro stated. 

Israeli politicians have openly stated they would replicate Gaza in Lebanon. Israel has forcibly displaced one million people in South Lebanon. Israel’s Defence Minister Israel Katz has stated that the displaced Lebanese people will not be allowed to return to their homes as they pose a security threat to Israel. After all, Israel’s security narrative worked to ensure Gaza’s displacement – why not for Lebanon? The US, meanwhile, is ratcheting its foreign intervention in South America and the Caribbean, with Cuba facing the harshest period as it increasingly faces diplomatic and economic isolation. Western violence, embodied by Israel and the US, continues to target countries that have resisted subjugation for decades. And yet, instead of highlighting decades of struggle against colonialism and imperialism, the targeted countries serve as a backdrop for justifying US and Israeli violence.

With just these two examples, Cuba and Lebanon, the US and Israel are building the current violence on decades of repressing political expression, decades of maintaining a violent narrative to justify various forms of violent intervention. 

With just these two examples, Cuba and Lebanon, the US and Israel are building the current violence on decades of repressing political expression, decades of maintaining a violent narrative to justify various forms of violent intervention. 

Palestine, meanwhile, is reduced to a humanitarian problem, now amplified in Gaza. Since Israel commenced its war on Iran, aided by the US, aid trucks entering Gaza fell by 80 per cent. Away from the humanitarian predicament, which Israel finds necessary to maintain for a slow genocide that does not attract international attention in the same way its bombs did, Israel and the US are still pressuring Hamas to disarm.

READ: UN experts warn Israel’s Gaza aid restrictions worsening crisis for women, girls

“In the context that our people are still under occupation, talking about disarmament is an attempt to make our people an easy victim to be eliminated and easily exterminated by Israel, which is armed with all international weaponry,” Khaled Meshaal stated at the AlJazeera Forum in Doha last month. 

Where there is resistance, the US and Israel want subjugation. Palestine, Cuba and Lebanon have not extended their anti-colonial resistance to other countries. The struggle is a national one. The US and Israel, on the other hand, have no qualms on expanding the scope of their violence for international destabilisation. And while attention is focused on the current violence beyond Gaza, particularly Iran, it is only a matter of time before Palestinians face another chapter in the decades-long Zionist ethnic cleansing.

Palestine is an experiment for what is happening globally, true. But it is also the epicentre where the violence Palestinians experience is unleashed on other countries, before coming back to Gaza for another refined round. 

BLOG: Making humanitarian aid work for everyone but the recipients

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.

© Middle East Monitor