The colossal level of the West-backed destruction of life in Palestine and the (im)moral and material support the state of Israel has received from the US and its allies in Europe was enough to put serious question marks on the credibility, legitimacy, and acceptability of Western notions of democracy as the ideal form of government that must be universalised. Israel’s wars have seen some major protests in the West against their support for what is now clearly a genocide. But the so-called democratically elected governments have simply ignored demands put forth by these protestors. Instead, the neoliberal elite, which already has a very long history of killing millions in various wars since the beginning of the 21st century, proved true to its essence: an anti-people politics that creates, maintains, and reproduces a sharp distinction between popular demands and actual political decisions that are taken without taking the people into confidence. Taking the people’s demands into action matters, mainly because this is a fundamental claim of democracy. Ironically, it is this claim that is violated more often than not.

Ongoing protests across US universities against Israel and the subsequent crackdown against students are only a logical continuation of the illegality of the neoliberal model of politics, a situation that makes any criticism from the West on non-western systems of politics for being not ‘democratic’ enough equally illogical. More than a hundred students have been arrested merely because of their........

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