Readers of my columns are surely entitled to raise with me the issue of the relevance of following the genocidal murders of over 35,000 native Palestinians, the serious injury to another 75,000, the severe denial by Israel of food and the essentials of life to Gazans, the continuing capture by the Israeli Zionists of native lands, and the fact of yet another push of Gazans completely out of their home of 2,000 years. Importantly too, the deep involvement in all of the above and more by Euro-America.
Why should it be an important matter for us here in the Caribbean and in the rest of the developing world, thousands of miles away from the Middle East, for you to focus on?
In a sentence, it is important as the battle being fought by Hamas and people of humanity across the world, even in the citadels of Euro-America, is one that seeks to confront and remove the stranglehold that Euro-America has on the world, its people, their resources, and the imposition and exercise of economic and political power and military might.
My response also takes into consideration the said pattern of domination within Euro-American societies, in which minority ethnic and socio-economic groups control the large majority, with race and capital being significant factors. We in T&T and the Caribbean need to be fully aware that the eventual outcome of this struggle by Hamas and people of humanity, especially informed and conscientised students and those with an understanding of the historical context of what is happening in Gaza, the West Bank, and now in the southern Palestinian city of Rafa, can determine the direction in which world civilisation and humanity will advance or be retarded. It is palpably in all our interest in the times of neo-imperialism, that this genocidal attack on Palestinians and the ongoing attempts to remove them from their homeland of 2,000 years should be defeated, ultimately by world public opinion and the resilience of the freedom fighters.
I consider it my responsibility in the circumstances to bring information and analysis to assist readers in acquiring and/or sharpening an understanding of and a commitment to the attempt by Hamas to change the direction of 21st-century civilisation. Resistance to the savage and, in many ways, desperate efforts to maintain the status quo constitute a major pushback on 500 years of Euro-American domination of the peoples of the world and their resources. We all have to be aware, engage in the fight in whatever manner we can, and recognise the price the Palestinian people are paying for all of us.
One central aspect of the fightback is to counter, with truth, historical data, and enlightened and informed analyses, the avalanche of self-serving Western propaganda designed to keep that stranglehold on world power through mind-bending, even mind-altering reportage and opinion by the Western media purporting to be objective.
A small but important note to Black and Brown America, which has suffered for hundreds of years from sequential episodes of the same power-dominating ethic, one that has inflicted even more self-diminishing blows physically and on the psyche and sense of self-worth of a people, is the need for those affected to remove themselves from a place of control.
The Black and Brown populations must also take note of the fact that no American administration, through the many decades of the most inhumane treatment, murder, or dispossession of their kith and kin by the minority white population in South Africa, came to their rescue.
If therefore there is to be meaningful change to the international status quo, the true nature of the violent occupation and confiscation of Palestinian lands from its people by Israel, ably supported and with its sense of professed religious and righteous propulsion from God, the Euro-American-Israeli combine must be diverted from its path.
It must also be told often and penetratingly, that the battles fought in the field by the Palestinian Liberation Organisation, Hamas, and Hezbollah, by generations of Black Americans and other freedom fighters, have been taken on at an institutional level.
We must also know of the institutional attempts to conquer domineering colonial rule through the Non-Aligned Movement of the 1950s into the 1970s with demands for a New World Political and Economic Order. For decades, there has been recognition for change at the level of the United Nations and the whole Bretton Woods system, including institutions, rules, and regulations that were constructed in the post-WW11 period to serve the interests of the Euro-American world.
Surely it cannot be a fair and workable system in which 143 of the 193 UN members vote at the General Assembly to recognise Palestine as a state only to be blocked by the US and its handful of satellites.
With such an appreciation of the need to break loose from Euro-America’s domination, the Caribbean needs to arrive at the understanding that its own full and true independence is very much tied to the outcome of the war being contested against the Israeli-Euro-America combine.
Tony Rakhal-Fraser is a freelance journalist, former reporter/current affairs programme host and News Director at TTT, programme producer/current affairs director at Radio Trinidad, a correspondent for the BBC Caribbean Service and the Associated Press, and a graduate of the UWI, Mona and St Augustine Institute of International Relations.
