Azzam Tamimi
Middle East Eye / January 22, 2025
This inhumane world order stood by watching, while Israel’s genocide against the Palestinian population of Gaza unfolded
The worldwide Palestine solidarity movement is steadily becoming a campaign against hypocritical American hegemony.
Since 7 October 2023, the world has heard many renowned politicians warn, time and time again, that Israel’s war on Gaza would not achieve its declared objectives of rescuing the hostages and destroying Hamas.
Many cautioned that you simply could not kill an idea. Among the very last voices expressing such sentiments, just hours before announcing the ceasefire deal, was a staunch Zionist.
This was US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who infamously proclaimed upon arriving in Tel Aviv soon after the 2023 Hamas attack that he came to Israel not just as an American, but as a Jew.
Conflating Jewishness with Zionism was not his biggest sin. In more than 465 days of war on Gaza, Israel, fully backed by the US, killed or maimed hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, destroyed the territory’s infrastructure, and reduced entire neighbourhoods to rubble, while eliminating several top Hamas leaders.
But the campaign failed to deliver for Israel what Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had vowed to accomplish.
The ceasefire agreement that was eventually signed between the two sides in Qatar was exactly what US President Joe Biden had proposed months earlier, in May 2024 – a deal that had been accepted by Hamas, but rejected by Israel.
Several factors combined to precipitate this month’s agreement, including the role played by both the outgoing and incoming US presidents. But above all, it was the steadfastness and resilience of the people of Gaza, and the heavy losses sustained by his troops in northern Gaza that brought Netanyahu to his knees.
Quagmire of collaboration
All the talk about post-Hamas Gaza seems to have evaporated. Hamas, which is proscribed as a terrorist group in the UK and other countries, has proven it is still the main player on the Palestinian side. Evidently, it was Hamas that the ceasefire agreement had to be negotiated and signed with.
This breakthrough coincided with the exposure, like never before, of the Palestinian Authority (PA) in Ramallah as not just an Israeli lackey, but as a security organ of the occupation.
The last few weeks before the signing of the ceasefire deal saw PA troops impose a brutal siege on the inhabitants of Jenin, exacting on them the same sorts of punishments they would endure at the hands of Israeli occupation troops, including starvation and killing.
Hamas members in the occupied West Bank were no longer the sole targets of PA-Israeli security collaboration. Both the PA and Israel set out to hunt down Palestinian young men who dared to resist the occupation or protect their families against the abuses of Jewish settlers.
Emboldened, armed and encouraged by Israel’s extreme right-wing coalition government, Jewish settlers have been on a rampage, intimidating Palestinians, attacking them in their homes, burning their crops, uprooting their olive trees and burning their cars.
The goal has been to drive as many Palestinians as possible to flee their homeland, thus effecting a second Nakba.
Amid all of this, for many Palestinians, Hamas has emerged as the true representative of the people. It is the one leading the national struggle for liberation, while the PA continues to sink deeper into the quagmire of collaboration with Israeli occupation authorities.
Compensating for losses
This is why Israel’s summation of what it thinks it has inflicted upon Hamas over the past 15 months is not relevant here. What really matters is what the people of Palestine, and their supporters around the region and the world, believe.
There is no question that Hamas is emerging from the recent war scarred and wounded, and throughout the past 15 months it has lost some of its most senior leaders, and perhaps a number of its affiliates. But the movement has never stopped recruiting, and it is believed to have compensated for many of its losses.
Neither the war nor the siege, nor having been let down or conspired against by Arab regimes in the neighbourhood, nor still being designated as a terrorist organisation by many western governments, has weakened the resolve of the Palestinian resistance forces in Gaza.
For many Palestinians, the resistance movement in Gaza has defended the people of Gaza not only against Israel’s brutality, but also against the unjust world order that supported the Israeli occupation and provided the tormentors of the Palestinian people with political and diplomatic clout, while arming them to the teeth. Without this support, the Israeli war on Gaza could not have continued for as long as it did.
This inhumane world order stood by watching while Israel’s genocide against the Palestinian population of Gaza unfolded. The growing global pro-Palestine movement is steadily becoming a campaign against the oppressive and hypocritical US-dominated world order, which has proven, since the end of the Second World War, to be a threat to humanity.
Indeed, future historians might conclude that the events of 7 October 2023 triggered a process that, while precipitating untold devastation of Gaza by Israel, eventually led to the end of this world “disorder”.
Azzam Tamimi is a British Palestinian academic and political activist; he is currently the Chairman of Alhiwar TV Channel and is its Editor in Chief
