"Why Should I Care about Gaza?"
The genocide in Gaza is this century's greatest atrocity, and we in the West are complicit. But if moral appeals can't reach you, at least consider this: you, too, will feel its reverberations.
Last month, at a summit led by the Hague Group, a coalition of nations seeking legal recourse against Israel for their ongoing crimes in Gaza, Colombian President Gustavo Petro sent shockwaves around the world with a bone-chilling omen: "Gaza is simply an experiment of the mega-rich trying to show all the peoples of the world how to respond to a rebellion. The plan is to bomb us all, at least those of us in the South. But they will end up, like Guernica, bombing themselves.” Over the last two years (and the over seventy-seven years of apartheid, displacement, occupation, and brutalization of the Palestinian people), the majority of Western states have aligned themselves stridently with Israel’s cause, lending the brutal regime hundreds of billions of dollars in aid and weaponry, culminating in this long-fomented and well-articulated aim to permanently expunge the last Palestinian refugees from their enclaves in Gaza and the West Bank.
As appalling images of gaunt children, exploding journalists, wanton destruction of essential services and dwellings, and buildings razed as far as the eye can see flood our feeds, it is becoming increasingly difficult for anyone with even a semblance of a conscious to ignore the atrocious and sordid crimes committed with the backing of so-called rules-based liberal powers. Western powers like France and the UK are now dangling the promise of (highly conditional) Palestinian statehood recognition like a carrot, simultaneously to pacify masses of increasingly fervent activists and to save face in what could very well be the final hour of arguably the 21st century’s most despicable mass atrocity.
At this late date, the vast majority have at least come around to acknowledging the genocidal nature of Israel’s campaign (even prominent Israelis are not being coy about it any longer). Even better would be to acknowledge that, to fully rectify this situation, Palestinians must be given a right of return to their ancestral homes and be granted equal rights and representation under the law. Though, if even these plainly evident appeals to humanity cannot reach you, consider Gustavo Petro’s ominous portent about the future that Gaza represents for us all.
In his forecast, Petro invokes 20th century thinkers like Aimé Césaire, Hannah Arendt, and even Michel Foucault. These intellectuals articulated the concept of the Imperial Boomerang. Imperialism, like we see in the expansionism, settlement, and exploitation of historical Palestine, is not often constrained to its direct subjects; instead, the mechanisms of control used to subjugate colonial vassals eventually come home to roost, like a boomerang. The Imperial Boomerang was devised as a post-mortem analysis of fascist regimes in Europe. Centuries of European imperial conquest laid the groundwork for fascism to direct those very same tendencies inward in places like Nazi Germany, Mussolini’s Italy, and Franco’s Spain. Despots like King Leopold II, who killed millions in the Congo in pursuit of wealth and resources, laid the groundwork for figures like Adolf Hitler to emulate him for domestic political control. It’s tragic that European leaders only felt particularly compelled to care once the victims of colonialism looked a lot like themselves (perhaps not too dissimilar to the way some contemporary liberals give more attention to war crimes in Ukraine than Palestine, but I digress).
But the imperial boomerang is not just an abstract historical concept. Yes, history can serve as a useful reference point for comprehending the idea, but in this case, the cycle is already playing out in real time. Israel has a well-documented history of proving out surveillance technology and weaponry against Palestinians before outsourcing it abroad. But the extent to which Israeli actors and their allies have already entrenched themselves within systems of oppression and authority is often not fully understood. Their military equipment, techniques, and tools can be seen in Western police forces, digital surveillance apparatuses exacted upon the civilian populations, and even methods of disseminating right wing propaganda.
Take, for instance, the close relationship between American police and the Israeli military. It is well reported that Israel, who has much experience punishing and controlling the Palestinian population, trains American police departments across the U.S. It’s likely no coincidence that American police, with their abysmal track record when it comes to abuse of force, extrajudicial killings, and overall lack of efficacy, would be trained by a state committing and endorsing myriad human rights violations. But the relationship extends beyond training; police often adopt military technology for use against American citizens not long after it is tested and used in Israel. Take, for instance, the Skunk, an Israeli firehose that spews putrid liquid as a means of controlling Palestinian crowds and has since been adopted by police departments across the West. Or, take the use of military grade drones and armored vehicles used to surveil and corral protesters in the United States. These tools often see their first application in Gaza and the West Bank. There are many recorded instances of Israeli police torturing and targeting Palestinians and activists, but that doesn’t stop police in places like Georgia from returning to Israel year after year to learn about “counterterrorism”, to observe and seek inspiration from the application of technology in Israeli methods of policing, and to entertain fanciful dreams of nationalized police: “One of the most valuable lessons [DeKalb Assistant Police Chief Sonya Porter] said she learned was how the entire Israeli police force, trained uniformly throughout the country, uses technology to improve communication between the stations.” Since this article was published in 2018, a controversial militarized police training center armed to the teeth known as “Cop City” has emerged in the south of DeKalb County, Georgia, near Atlanta.
Israel’s symbiosis with Western police states is not limited to the physical realm, though. Take one of just many of the spycraft designs born out of Unit 8200, an Israeli intelligence cell akin to the NSA. The infamous Pegasus spyware originally built to snoop Palestinian devices has since proliferated onto the phones of journalists and activists all over the West. Facial recognition technology deployed in Israel and developed by Israeli and American firms, like Elbit Systems, Anduril Industries, and Palantir are being deployed at border regions across the Western world to monitor migrant populations. Major tech giants like Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, and Google are cashing in, too, all too eager to provide Israel infrastructure that they subsequently use to spy on and brutalize Palestinians. And dissent against the war is being violently stifled. Whether it be initiatives like Project Esther in the U.S. (a Heritage Foundation playbook designed to crush Palestinian solidarity under the pretext of combating antisemitism), or the recent ban on the activist group Palestine Action in the UK (which saw the instantiation of harsh penalties like 14-year prison sentences just for even voicing support for the group), Western governments have made it clear that they are perfectly content to levy violence to stifle the growing discontent over the egregious treatment of Palestinians. Even Trump-aligned influencers are being flown out to be given a lesson in Israeli Hasbara (propaganda). The surveillance of Muslim groups post-9/11, the stifling of dissidents without due process, and the methods, manners, and tools used to surveil and suppress dissent: nearly all 21st century iterations of these phenomena can be traced back to a mutual exchange of tactics between the broader West and its colonial subject in Israel.
Contrary to the musings of antisemitic miscreants, this relationship is not predicated on a model of Western subservience to the “sole Jewish state” as part of some contrived Jewish plot to dominate finance or the world (never mind Israel’s own questionable track record of its treatment of Holocaust survivors or the fraught history of relations between Nazis and Zionist leaders during the early 20th century). Instead, think of this exchange as part of a broader pattern of behavior simply made more plainly evident and more rigorously documented in this latest instance of fascistic colonial escalation. The West has never been shy about aligning itself with and leveraging brutal regimes in the interest of expanding Western corporate hegemony the world over. From anti-communist purges in places like Indonesia and Guatemala (the latter of which was famously perpetrated by a banana company), to the modern-day arming of ruthless and undemocratic trading partners like Saudi Arabia (who has committed their own sectarian bombardment of Yemen), to the West’s own wars in Vietnam, Iraq, and beyond, literally millions have succumbed to the whims and fancies of capitalist hegemons over the last century. Israel, a western-endorsed settler colonial project whose maximalist aims can only be made possible through genocide, represents an outpost, a lynchpin, a hedge against the semiautonomous and often chaotic states which form the Middle East, a land of vital geographical significance atop hordes of precious resources. And in exchange for Israel’s destructive tendencies executed with utter impunity, the broader West receives precious data and analysis: a testbed for new and improved methods of repression and control.
Gustavo Petro’s recent comments are not his first words on the matter of Gaza. At a UN climate summit in 2023, he called the genocide “the rehearsal of the future,” prophesying that the potential hordes of climate refugees who are anticipated to flee their soon-to-be-uninhabitable homes in the Global South will face similar repression to that of the Palestinians. Already, we are beginning to see evidence of this, manifest in the militarization of border control, starting in the United States and spreading rapidly throughout Europe. If you can’t find it in you to care about the scores of innocent people being subjected to second-class citizenship, starved, and bombarded on the other side of the world, understand that their plight may represent the imminent fates of those a little bit closer to home, maybe even yourself.