Free Palestine, free the world

We are aware of what happened on 28 February. Israel and the US bombed and brought death and destruction upon Tehran (again, while negotiations were ongoing).

They struck a school, killing over 160 young girls mostly aged 7–12 years. As with Gaza, they killed children.

But in Gaza they murdered more than 20,000 children. As with Gaza, the infanticide comes and goes with impunity.

As in Gaza, Zionist Israel and the US (complicit to the hilt) have destroyed Iranian hospitals and infrastructure. Residential blocks too.

Both in Gaza and in wider Palestine, there is total disregard for international law.

As in Gaza and the rest of Palestine, crude overwhelming military power is brought upon Iran, led by crude and vulgar men, the likes of Benjamin Netanyahu and Donald Trump and their cabinet clones.

That massive military power has historically been coupled with political and economic dominance. It is the same combination of hegemonic power that has enabled the colonisation of Palestine for more than 100 years.

It is the same imperialist gangsterism that allowed Trump to order American forces to intrude into Venezuelan airspace and territory in January 2026, kill several people and abduct the Venezuelan head of state.

Amazingly, amid the illegal attacks on Iran, the New York Times reported in March that the US was also involved in an operation that struck a supposed narco-terrorist camp in Ecuador. The “camp” turned out to be a dairy farm with no evidence of drug activity.

Venezuela, Iran, Cuba, Ecuador… smaller, weaker countries picked off or attacked one after another and more are hinted to come. This is unacceptable. And it comes with a long history.

Violent imperial power also expresses itself in non-military ways. Murder by starvation, for example.

In Gaza, Zionist Israel induced catastrophic-level famine in 2025 by choking off food supplies (plus medicines, medical equipment and fuel) – a crime against humanity.

As a corollary, The Lancet, a global health journal, estimated that since 1970, more than 30 million deaths have occurred associated with unilateral US and EU sanctions: “From a rights-based perspective, evidence that sanctions lead to losses in lives should be sufficient reason to advocate for the suspension of their use… It is hard to think of other policy interventions with such adverse effects on human life that continue to be pervasively used.”

Where are these more than 30 million excess deaths? (Enough to almost decimate the entire Malaysian population.) They are in the low-income countries in Africa, Latin America, parts of Asia including West Asia – Venezuela, Iran and Cuba included.

In Cuba today, US sanctions have caused the collapse of power supply with all the ramifications that entails. Six decades of US sanctions, which affect civilians, have wrecked the supply of medicine and functioning healthcare. They lead to excess deaths in Cuba just as they have from decades of sanctions against Iran and other countries.

And guess what? In the Lancet estimate, half the 30 million excess deaths were children under five. Again – the massive killing of children.

Palestine – an axis for understanding

There is something deeply sick and inhuman about rich, powerful Western countries that repeatedly exercise their power in ways that make masses of disadvantaged, vulnerable people in non-Western countries miserable, suffer and die – including the massive killing of children.

This, of course, is a general statement. There are many in those rich countries who are also weak and vulnerable and exposed to the rapaciousness of their elite oligarchic class – just as there are elites within the Global South who gain at the expense of their own disadvantaged groups. It is also a general statement because we know that the practice of empire-building and domination is not exclusive to Western nations.

But in terms of ongoing global, centuries-old, neo-imperial hegemonic domination, the US and Western Europe have the dubious honour of being unsurpassed.

Indeed, the battering ram used in Palestine is the same now being used in Iran, Venezuela, Cuba and other countries. It is made up of layers of military, technological, economic, political and cultural power. It wields not just military violence against weaker countries but also embargos and sanctions and strangles them with impunity.

It is disgraceful that at a time when the dominance of Western hegemons, epitomised by the US, is on the decline and under challenge, they lash out by using the most powerful thing at their disposal: technological military force. It is disgraceful because to resort to violent military bullying is infantile, inhuman and unworthy of the West’s own loftier ideals.

The same crude colonial tactics have long been used on Palestine. If we understand Palestine and its history and how its people have been bullied, erased, dispossessed and now killed in a genocide in Gaza, we should be sensitised about what is now happening to Venezuela, Iran and Cuba.

In that sense, Palestine is like a common axis for understanding a good deal of the wars and troubles being inflicted on much of the world by neo-imperial western powers, in particular the US.

Thus, for instance, the US has been the primary enabler of Zionist Israel’s acts of genocide and forced displacement in Gaza and Palestine. (Israel itself is a settler-colonial power in the region.) The US is also the aggressor in Iran together with Zionist Israel.

In each case, aggression is used to either beat down a people who resist and will not surrender their right to exist in dignity, or a country that refuses to bow to US demands.

In either case, various European countries play the role of active or passive enablers, together with comprador Arab governments.

Palestine’s shackles are the shackles of others

Colonialism and empire got together with white supremacism in the 19^th and 20^th centuries and gave birth to the ethno-nationalist ideology of Zionism for a segment of European Jews.

That, in turn, led to the creation of the Zionist state of Israel in 1948, at the expense of the native Palestinians. 

When the Palestinians, unsurprisingly, resisted their oppression in their own land, they were labelled terrorists and, later, “jihadist terrorists”, as if they were radical elements threatening the Zionist state of Israel for no rational reason.

The hegemonic powers would have you think that you are not supposed to resist even when wrong is done to you. In the same vein, if a Venezuela, Iran or Cuba decides to be independent and not bow to the hegemon’s wishes, then it will be punished.

It is more than rhetoric to say that if we free Palestine, then we start to free other forms of repressive dominance.

Dismantle the shackles around Palestine, and we start to dismantle the shackles around other dominated parts of the world.

Ousting a bad regime?

The likes of US President Donald Trump and his predecessors sit on a self-righteous perch underpinned by great power. From that perch, they pontificate about bad people in bad regimes doing bad things to their own people.

And so, they say, out of the goodness of their intentions, they have to bomb, destroy, kill and assassinate to help the poor people in those countries overthrow their governments.

They will also issue other self-serving, mealy-mouthed justifications for their actions, famous among which are Iraq’s non-existent weapons of mass destruction, more than 20 years ago.

Nevertheless, a conundrum exists in a case like Iran’s.

On the one hand, military violence is used on the country by Israel–US on the basis of self-serving justifications.

On the other, there is a segment of Iranians themselves who see and have suffered from draconian aspects of the government of the Islamic Republic since 1979.

Hence, there are Iranians who may be glad for what Israel and the US are doing to their country because they see that as a way for the current government to fall and be replaced by another – perhaps even the return of the former Shah’s son in a reprise of a Western-dominated imperial order.

If we are non-Iranian, we would not be able to make a judgement about Iranians and what they wish to see unfold. Nevertheless, an opinion is still possible based on what we see.

That opinion would suggest that any form of working with the illegal, unwarranted and destructive Israel–US attacks on Iran to change its government is working with evil incarnate.

It would be aligning with those who have been committing and are complicit in acts of genocide and the mass murder of children and civilians in Gaza. Their actions belie their supposed dedication to values such as freedom, democracy and self-determination.

They are people whose words and actions cannot be trusted, as so clearly demonstrated on repeated occasions when, with one face, they negotiate and, with another, they strike and attack in amid negotiations – June 2025 in Iran, September 2025 in Doha, February 2026 in Iran again.

In such a scenario, the term Faustian bargain is almost inescapable.

But Malaysia is far away?

People in Malaysia may think they are far from troubled West Asia. But we can see how we are not immune.

The rise in oil prices with consequential increases in food prices is an obvious example. Malaysia is 60% dependent on food imports. Transport, fertilisers and, conceivably, medicine and healthcare are all vulnerable.

This is partly why we must care about what happens outside.

It is also why we should care when things are not done right domestically. For when we do things wrong in our own country, we become vulnerable to external pressures, and we lose self-reliance and autonomy and become subject to domination too.

The other reason why we should care is that the best of our own cultures and traditions call on us to do so, as people who share a common humanity with others who suffer and are being trampled upon.

So, whenever we can, let us stand up and say no to injustice.

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