People unfamiliar with the Islamic world might not understand what a bloody chasm exists between Sunni and Shia power players in the region. A brutal and ghastly history of warring ethno-fascist states.
Israel has done more to bridge the Sunni-Shia divide than probably even the Christian crusaders of millennia past. (That might have been hyperbolic, but you get the idea.)
A brief examination of the just concluded speech by the leader of Hezbollah confirms this. Hassan Nasrallah speaks directly to Palestinian hearts and minds. No doubt, he does this with his own utilitarian interests in mind. (Who doesn’t?)
But when the rest of the world has abandoned the Palestinians, those fighting against their oppressive conditions will go to the Nasrallahs and Khameinis for support. So they’ve been doing just that. For years, maybe decades now.
Any one of us would, if placed in the same situation. The enemy of my enemy and so on…
Palestinian militants are not fools to think that Iran, and their proxy Hezbollah, or even other Arab and Muslim players like Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Turkey have the cause of Palestinian liberation purely at heart. All of us inherently understand rationale theory at a pragmatic level. The only life condition that weakens that understanding is privilege.
Without fail, I have found that the wealthier someone is the stupider they tend to be with regards to understanding other people’s rationales. This is simply because they can afford to be that dumb for a temporary period of time. This is very true for powerful Western states as well.
We in the wealthy, privileged West need to come to terms with the fact that this brief era of Western dominance is rapidly coming to an end. Our egos need to come down from the grandiosity we have been accustomed to. For our own sake.
Let us pay heed to what James Baldwin said, when he asked us to understand that “if I’m starving, you are in danger.”
Israel is living this right now. The entire Western world is going to follow suite.
As the last Western settler-colonial outpost it represents in state-form what Baldwin speaks of. Instead of sharing, Israel is arming itself to the teeth with weaponry and psychopathy to defend a gilded cage of its own making, with American and European patronage.
But the oil is going to run out sooner or later. And with it, the patronage, at a time when the divide between the military haves and the military have-nots is rapidly decreasing. Sharing is not so much haughty charity as much as it is a necessity for survival.
That’s a lesson we can all afford to learn.
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Broken Shackles Media | Citizen Journalism | Nov 3 2023
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