Missing Link

In some personal news, I’m happy to introduce Missing Link, my new column for The Wire, on the social aspects of the events that move India.

In today’s column, I argue that it would be a mistake to characterise the spate of cow slaughter related lynchings as a breakdown of law and order.

“The crux of what we are seeing today is therefore not a “breakdown of law and order” but the promulgation of an entirely new system of law and order where fundamentally discriminatory laws, (that disproportionately target the businesses and food habits of Muslims and Dalits) are enacted by the state in the name of protecting majoritarian religious sentiments. These laws are then enforced by self styled vigilantes and fundamentalist militias acting in collusion with state forces. Tackling it will require more than police action against these militias on an ad hoc basis. It will require a complete unwinding of this system of discrimination, including the discriminatory laws that sit at their heart.”

You can read the full column here.

A beginning

“Aayega toh Modi hi” is a chant ill-suited for limping into power propped up by a capricious Nitish and a self interest driven Chandrababu Naidu.

It’s difficult to explain to outsiders what June 4 means to so many Indians. While it is certainly likely that Narendra Modi will form the new government, it will be a coalition. This includes partners like Chandrababu Naidu who quit the BJP led National Democratic Alliance in 2004 (ironically for their failure to curb Modi after the 2002 Gujarat pogrom) and again in 2018 (after disagreements with Modi), and Nitish Kumar, who has developed political flip flopping into an art form. It will be Modi’s first brush with helming a meaningful coalition, without the absolute majority that has hitherto backed his ‘my way or the highway’ style of alliance management. A parliament with no one party with a clear majority also means a return to the days of more parliamentary influence on governance, where cross coalition consensus has to be built for new legislation. Again, this is something the BJP, which has treated parliament as a rubber stamp for the last decade, will have to get used to. And yet, beyond any of these gains, what drives sentiment today is that the idea of the inevitability of Modi has been shattered.

“Aayega to Modi hi” (“Modi is inevitable”) is a chant often used by his supporters as a cry of power. To tell his opponents that their resistance to his ideas is futile, and even dangerous. That no matter what they do or say, a Modi government is inevitable. And it is this inevitability of Modi that has directed political funding, executive actions and to an extent, judicial decisions, in India for the last decade. It has also driven political analysis and the public discourse, where bigots have felt confident to drop their masks and openly dehumanise minorities, secure in the knowledge that Modi would forever have their backs. That has changed. “Aayega toh Modi hi” is ill-suited for limping into power propped up by a capricious Nitish and a self interest driven Chandrababu Naidu.

A handicapped opposition, with frozen bank accounts, threatened with judicial and executive action, and with two chief ministers in jail, fought with both hands tied behind their backs and shattered the illusion. That cannot be remade. Modi, like every other Indian politician, is now going to be treated as one of many. And to the one of many politician, the Indian electorate is a hard taskmaster.

But the impact of this election goes far beyond Modi or even Hindutva as a whole. It challenges the fundamental neoliberal assumptions that have dominated Indian political thought since liberalisation in 1991. Like a mantra, repeated blindly by believers, “reform” for the last three decades, has meant reduced regulation and increased privatisation, with little or no analysis on the actual impact of such moves. Development has meant hijacking natural resources and handing them over to favoured capitalists to be ruthlessly exploited. It has meant the bypassing of environmental regulation and mindless culling of the green cover of the country in the name of infrastructure building.

For the marginalised, inequality was assumed not to be a legitimate concern (“should everyone be poor?”, Modi disparagingly dismissed the question recently). Bare minimum poverty alleviation was all that mattered. Growth discussions were divorced from the creation of jobs, or larger planning for the transition of a large rural population out of agriculture and into other occupations.

The Congress certainly shares some of the blame for this, for it is often their own talking points from the 1990s and the 2000s that have been taken forward by the BJP to their cruel (albeit logical) extreme. For the first time in 30 years though, the Congress seems to have changed track. Under the leadership of the veteran politician, Mallikarjun Kharge, who is Dalit, backed by Rahul Gandhi’s own experiences from his Bharat Jodo Yatra, his 4,080 km on-foot trek across the length and breadth of India, the Congress seems to have finally seen the limitations of their own post liberalisation imagination of India.

Their 2024 manifesto, or “Nyay Patra” allowed the opposition, for the first time in decade, to set the discursive agenda of this election. Their highlighting of inequality and the lack of backward caste representation in the country posed questions that the BJP found impossible to counter without resorting to communal dogwhistles. Consequently, all prior talk by the BJP of development and progress was sidelined in favour of a near continuous targeting of Indian Muslims. Led by Modi himself, the party mined the depths of right wing influencer talking points (Kunal Purohit offers an excellent analysis of these talking points here) to fashion their electoral campaign. From likening Muslim voting to “jihad”, to casting Muslim birth rates as demographic threats and consistently and repeatedly telling their voters that the opposition would seize their assets and give them away to Indian Muslims, all overseen by an indulgent election commission, the attempt to regain narrative control was both desperate and particularly communally vicious. And yet, it failed. In Banswara, for example, where Modi spoke of Muslims as “infiltrators” to whom the Congress would give property, the BJP lost by over 240,000 votes.

The supporters of the INDIA coalition are well aware that they have not crossed the 272 seat mark that would let them form the government, and end some of the pressing injustices enforced by the Modi government. And yet, June 4 offers a beginning. A chance for politics in the country to move away from mass religious radicalisation and violence and to return to addressing inequality and the needs of the marginalised. It must be built on, and looking at the mood of the electorate, it will be. In a country where the 1% hold 40% of the wealth, with extreme levels of youth unemployment and levels of inequality not seen since the days of colonialism, and frightening anti minority violence, it is a beginning that is very very welcome.

Aaron Bushnell and the geopolitics of individual resistance

Aaron Bushnell has ensured that the United States will no longer be able to appropriate individual actions of resistance for their foreign policy narratives, with their hypocrisy unchallenged.

The United States has historically appropriated the moral power of acts of individual resistance from around the world to drive forward its own foreign policy. With the general prevalence of American exceptionalism — the idea that the United States is uniquely virtuous — in foreign policy narratives, these acts of appropriation have rarely been questioned. The self immolation of Aaron Bushnell, a 25 year old active duty member of the US Air Force, has changed this.

On February 25, Bushnell immolated himself in front of the Israeli embassy at Washington D.C. to protest the ongoing genocide in Gaza. In a livestream, he described what he was about to do as an extreme act of protest:

“I am about to engage in an extreme act of protest, but compared to what people have been experiencing in Palestine at the hands of their colonisers, it's not extreme at all – this is what our ruling class has decided will be normal…I will no longer be complicit to genocide”.

In many ways, Bushnell’s actions fit into a long history of self immolation as a form of anti-colonial resistance. In 1963, a 73 year old Buddhist monk, Thich Quang Duc, immolated himself in Ho Chi Minh City to protest the South Vietnamese government’s treatment of monks. At least five other monks immolated themselves in South Vietnam in the months that followed. The International Campaign for Tibet estimates that 159 Tibetans in China and Tibet have self immolated since 2009 to protest Chinese rule. A further 10 Tibetans have self immolated in exile, including Tibetan teenager Dorjee Tsering who self immolated in Dehradun in 2016. When we move beyond the idea of immolation and to the broader idea of non-violent resistance and giving ones own life for liberation, Bushnell’s actions arguably constitute a fair example of Gandhi’s idea of “satyagraha” or truth force - a commitment to telling the truth to the world no matter what the physical cost.

The United States has historically used such individual acts of moral resistance to further their own agenda. When Mohamed Bouazizi, a fruit vendor in Tunisia, self immolated to protest an arbitrary government action against him, sparking the Arab Spring, President Barack Obama likened his actions to those of the founding fathers of America and Rosa Parks. Bouazizi’s actions, Obama said, spoke to a longing for freedom in people from “the relentless tyranny of governments that deny their citizens dignity”. In 2016, US Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton held up a picture of Dorjee Tsering while speaking in Minnesota and met his family on a trip to India.

Even when such protest is targeted against governments propped up by the United States, the distance and identity of the protestors have effectively distracted the American public from the oppressiveness of their own foreign policy. Thich Quang Duc for example was written about in the western media admiringly as “the Burning Monk”, and the Malcom Browne photograph of him sitting immobile as flames engulfed his body both suggested just enough oriental mysticism to distract from the root cause of his protest - an oppressive American puppet regime.

Aaron Bushnell however, as a serving member of the US military, challenges American narratives in a unique way. Decades of American soft power pushes have focussed on describing the United States military as a force for “good” in world affairs. It is not a coincidence that the name of almost every American military operation on foreign soil contains either the word “liberation” or the word “freedom”. The US never invades, after all — it only liberates. Even ostensibly anti-war thinking in American popular culture — Oliver Stone’s critically acclaimed 1986 film Platoon is an excellent example— focus disproportionately on the feelings of American soldiers and not on the harm being caused by those soldiers or a larger critique of American military interventions.

This inward absorption of the American public (both pro and anti-war) has been critical for their foreign policy. Keeping anti-war discussions to the financial cost of war or to the physical and psychological impact of war on American soldiers, has allowed generations of Americans to comfortably sidestep the shattering exercise of taking moral accountability for the extreme violence unleashed overseas by their government. Aaron Bushnell has broken this framework. He saw himself neither as a heroic American soldier nor a troubled American soldier. He saw himself as a soldier complicit in genocide, and decided to say so. And in doing so, Bushnell has asked his fellow Americans to hold up the mirror they hold to the rest of the world to themselves. Whether they do so or not, remains to be seen.

While the US has been quick to glorify self immolation when conducted against regimes they disapprove of, they’ve been harsh when the same lens is turned inwards. In 1965, a white American pacifist, and father of three, Norman Morrison, immolated himself in front of the Pentagon, holding his baby daughter (she was completely unharmed). Morrison’s wife released a statement explaining his actions as his way of protesting against the US government’s deep military involvement in Vietnam. Like Bushnell, the Morrisons had spent months trying different ways of protesting their government's actions in Vietnam, including withholding their taxes and lobbying with local politicians to no avail. Unlike Thich Quang Duc however, Morrison was painted by some sections of the American media as insane. Research scholars have since pointed out how Morrison’s everyday idiosyncrasies were magnified in the media and his preoccupation with the war in Vietnam was deemed unnatural and “un-American” by a press that had not yet fully revealed the extent of the involvement of the US military in Vietnam.

Similar narratives have been constructed with respect to Bushnell since his self immolation. His estranged parents have been given multiple platforms to term their son mentally unwell. Other commentators have insisted that speaking of Bushnell’s actions glorifies or encourages suicide. And yet, this time, these narratives have not taken hold. Bushnell’s actions, coming as they do, after months of daily visuals of the horrors being perpetrated in Gaza, together with his clear moral articulation of his case, make it difficult for him to be dismissed or discredited outright. Photographs of Bushnell have since been used in Free Palestine protests around the world. In the West, vigils have been held for Bushnell in multiple cities. Air Force colleagues of Bushnell’s have protested in their uniforms to honour Bushnell, and veterans holding a “Free Palestine” sign have burned their uniforms in solidarity.

American protestors of conscience are often honoured by the people whose causes they take up and forgotten at home. North Vietnam, for example, released a postage stamp to commemorate Norman Morrison and named a street after him. Racheal Corrie, the young American peace activist crushed by an Israeli bulldozer trying to save a Palestinian home, has a street named after her in Ramallah, but is barely remembered in the US. It’s difficult to say with certainty as to whether Aaron Bushnell will be remembered differently, but it is clear that after the genocide in Gaza, and Bushnell’s actions, the United States will no longer be able to appropriate individual actions of resistance, with their hypocrisy unchallenged.

On a final note, Bushnell’s death was a tragedy, which no-one, including Bushnell, would want repeated. But a world that could dismantle some of the structures of oppression that Bushnell found intolerable would be a better place by far, for all of us.

A bruised legislature in a new building

Young people willing to make parliament the site of their protest are not just angry with the government, they seem to have lost faith in the legislature as a whole. It's important to examine why.

For people trying to make sense of the December 13th breach in the Indian parliament, focussing on the security aspect, while important, has not answered the fundamental question — why? A few have moved beyond security and focussed on the grievances expressed by the young people behind the incident. As per The Hindu, the Delhi police have not yet found any links between the accused and any terror group or political party (though the accused have all been arrested under the stringent Indian anti terror law, the UAPA). They reportedly told the police that they were upset with unemployment and rising prices. This is certainly plausible. Youth unemployment in India hovers around a staggering 24% and is among the highest in the world. And for graduates under 25, a report by the Azim Premji University estimates that this number rises to 42%. And yet, this doesn’t explain why, in a country a few months away from a general election, a group felt so disenfranchised that risking their freedom to protest inside parliament felt like the only option. Their very choice of inspiration, Bhagat Singh, a 20th century revolutionary fighting the policies of the colonial government in India, speaks to a high level of alienation from, and lack of belief in, the current electoral system. The question we must then ask is why has the political discourse in India failed to capture and channel this anger with policy into electoral politics?

In this respect, the last decade is interesting. Going by electoral results alone, it is possible to make the argument that despite a few losses here and there, the BJP’s electoral juggernaut remains largely intact. And yet, it has also been a time where the same BJP led government has been forced to walk back on fairly significant policy initiatives.

To understand this apparent contradiction it is important to begin with examining the deliberate weakening of the legislature itself over the last decade. Tarunabh Khaitan, analysing institutional erosion in the first BJP term offers several examples, including the rush to tenuously classify bills as “money bills” and thereby bypass the Rajya Sabha altogether, and the use of processes like the guillotine which allows the speaker to put bills to the vote without allowing discussion. The BJP government has from the outset also disregarded lawmaking conventions (like select committees) designed to bring in closer legislative scrutiny of bills prior to passing them into laws. As per PRS, the percentage of bills sent to select committees was significantly lower in the BJP’s first term than in the preceding decade, and has almost become non existent in this ongoing second term. Where possible, this government has sought to bypass legislature altogether and has preferred to operate through ordinances, and opposition strategies like walk outs and boycotts of parliament have only reinforced the overall impression of helplessness.

None of this is unprecedented in India, but usually, when one democratic institution is weakened in this manner, other institutions have held firm. The judiciary for example triggered the Emergency itself by holding firm on its disqualification of Indira Gandhi for electoral malpractice. But the last decade has also seen a gradual decline in the public expectation that the courts will step in to check the executive. And from upholding the classification of Aadhar as a money bill, to the delays in hearing campaign finance challenges, to the verdict on Babri, it is difficult to argue that the Indian judiciary has offered any meaningful check to the executive.

With the simultaneous weakening of two major institutions — the legislature and the judiciary — resistance to policy, both small and large, has shifted to the ground, and this has been more successful. Early in 2016, the central government issued a notification that would restrict workers from making withdrawals of their own savings from provident funds until retirement age. Almost immediately, a large crowd of mostly female garment factory workers collected in Bangalore to protest. The labour unions took the matter up and ultimately, the restrictions were rolled back. Similar collective action in 2017, by a very different socio-economic class of citizens ensured the withdrawal of the FDRI Bill. In the BJP’s second term, this method of protestors bypassing political opposition and engaging directly with the government through on ground protest has taken centre stage and successfully challenged legislation at the very heart of the government’s ideology. In 2019 and 2020, widespread protests ensured a pause in the implementation of the Citizenship Amendment Act and the proposed National Register of Citizens. Beginning in the end of 2020 and continuing into 2021, the country saw the largest and longest farmer agitation the world, which ended only with the repeal of the three farm laws that were set to significantly privatise Indian agriculture.

These protests were diverse, but they shared certain commonalities - first, they were highly specific in nature with very specific demands, usually the repeal of a law or policy.  Second, they largely shunned formal association with political parties, though many opposition leaders offered their support, relying instead on alternative forms of organisation including labour and farmer unions, student unions, religious and community leaders and civil society. Finally, the spill over effect of these massive on-ground protests into the electoral sphere has been minimal.

What this means is that protests in the Narendra Modi years, unlike in the Indira Gandhi years, do not develop momentum and evolve into larger electoral movements seeking to unseat the government. Instead they play the role an opposition otherwise would - offering policy specific challenges to a government, and disbanding when those demands are addressed. It is clear the ruling government also sees them as such. There were far more negotiations with the farmer union leaders on the farm laws than there was discussion in parliament where the legislation was rushed through both houses. And unlike during Indira Gandhi’s Emergency where all of the opposition was jailed first, Narendra Modi’s government has focussed its political arrests on civil society, journalists and Muslim student leaders.

Since December 13th, 141 opposition members of the Indian parliament have been suspended from the winter session for “unruly behaviour” for demanding the home minister address parliament. And apart from a few analysts, this mass suspension of the opposition from a parliamentary session where key legislation on criminal law and telecommunications censorship are to be tabled, hasn’t triggered outrage. This does not necessarily mean the government has mass support for its actions. It merely speaks to the fact that the legislature isn’t seen by many as the key site of resistance to government policy anymore.

This is worrying. While politics certainly is more than electoral politics and should include every means by which the residents of a country engage with their government, the mainstreaming of on ground protest and the sidelining of the electoral process speaks to a loss of institutional credibility that goes beyond a single government. Young people willing to make parliament the site of their protest are not just angry with the government, they seem to have lost faith in parliament as a whole.

For people with access to alternative institutions like labour unions, or religious community leaders or caste justice based organisations, this loss of faith has not been catastrophic, as these institutions have stepped into the void. They have channeled this anger into policy specific on ground demonstrations. But for young people like those involved in the December 13  incident, without access to organised movements like the labour union movement or caste based justice movements, their protests have been tragic.

The last weeks of this year should leave us with significant questions in our mind that will have ramifications beyond 2024. In a vibrant democracy, on ground protests feed into and form the basis for electoral action. Civil society, the judiciary, parliament and the electoral process work together to hold governments accountable. In authoritarian regimes, on the other hand, on ground protests erupt sporadically, are suppressed brutally and on occasion win concessions when the intensity of the protest means it cannot be suppressed. It is clear that the Narendra Modi government is far more comfortable dealing with the latter. But the preservation of Indian democracy requires us to slowly find a way to connect on ground anger with the electoral process again. For the opposition, it means making people who have lost faith in our democratic institutions believe that they can and must be repaired, not cast aside.

It’s more than TikTok: From historical homelands to settler colonialism

By classifying Israel as a settler colonial project, Palestinian scholars have found a narrative that is both compelling and into which multiple facts of their current existence can be slotted

(The first part of this series examined the shift in Palestinian liberation discourse from territory to rights. This second and final part examines the challenge posed by settler colonialism narratives to traditional Zionist narratives and the public recasting of the US as a partisan instead of a mediator to this conflict.)

“Facts do not at all speak for themselves, but require a socially acceptable narrative to absorb, sustain and circulate them. Such a narrative has to have a beginning and an end. In the Palestinian case, a homeland for the resolution of its exile since 1948.”

- Edward Said, Permission to Narrate, 1984

Historical homeland

Notwithstanding its underlying ethnonationalist ideology, Zionism was, until recently, predominantly painted as a progressive cause in the West. Despite this view categorically not being shared by other post-colonial states — in 1975, for example, the UN General Assembly passed resolution 3379 determining Zionism to be a form of racism and racial discrimination — western progressives have by and large exempted Israel from the criticism and scrutiny reserved for colonial projects. (Israeli diplomatic efforts ensured the withdrawal of resolution 3379 in 1991.)

Palestinian scholars argue that this support was built on the widespread acceptance of two popular Zionist narratives which, in the words of Edward Said, gained “orthodoxy by repetition”. The first is the acceptance of Jewish national rights in Palestine as historical, longstanding and factual and the corresponding erasure of Palestinian national rights, and Palestinian history preceding the 1948 partition of Palestine. In one stream of scholarship, the land on which the Jewish state was built was projected to the western audience as being largely unoccupied or inhabited by nomadic Arabs who had no attachment to the land and were indistinguishable in identity from Arabs in surrounding states. Works like Joan Peters’s From Time Immemorial: The Origins of the Arab Jewish Conflict in Palestine (1984) go as far as to suggest that the vast majority of Palestinians expelled in 1948 were Arabs from Egypt who had only entered Palestine a few years before their expulsion. Peters’s work, which received scathing reviews in the UK for its glaring data inconsistencies and misquoting of sources and which the Observer called “a ludicrous and worthless book” was generally praised by American reviewers and remains a popular source for pro-Israel social media content to this day.

Rashid Khalidi, writing in 2020, explains the appeal of this “from biblical times” narrative in the West:

“Underlying this feature and amplifying it, was the profound resonance for Jews and also for many Christians of their biblical connection to the historic land of Israel. Expertly woven into modern political Zionism, this resonance has become critical to it. A late nineteenth century colonial national movement thus adorned itself with a biblical coat that was powerfully attractive to Bible reading Protestants in Great Britain and the United States, blinding them to the modernity of Zionism and it’s colonial nature: for how could Jews be “colonizing” the land where their religion began?"

Khalidi points out that threads of this are formalised in the 1917 Balfour Declaration (which recognised this right to a national home in Palestine for the Jewish people) and the 1922 Palestinian Mandate drawn up by the newly formed League of Nations in the aftermath of the defeat of the Ottomans in the first world war. The mandate provisionally recognised the national rights only of the Jewish population in the territory (who at this time made up approximately 6% of the total population) and ignored the national rights of the remainder of the population. The mandate also recognised the Jewish people (and only the Jewish people) as having a historic connection to Palestine.

The prevalence of this “empty land” narrative, despite being furiously contested by Palestinian scholars and politicians, has allowed Western progressives to by and large ignore the violent mass displacement of the existing population of Palestine (which was 67% Arab in 1948) that followed the creation of the state of Israel and further removed any requirement for the consent of the Palestinian people to the Zionist project.

The second such narrative is the continuous description of the settlers of Israel as an unfairly victimised people, whose right to the land despite being religiously, morally (given the immense suffering of the Holocaust) and legally sanctioned (by the United Nations) was being perpetually challenged by brutal and unreasonable Arabs.

Popular culture was more influential than academic writing in creating and sustaining this narrative. Leon Uris’s 1958 bestselling novel Exodus is a classic case in point. Despite being panned by critics, it sold in the millions. Writing in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, Bradley Burston describes the Exodus mania in the US. He writes, “it was nearly as common to find a copy of "Exodus" in American-Jewish households as to find the Bible - and, of the two, not a few Jewish households apparently had only “Exodus." David Ben-Gurion, the first Prime Minister of Israel is said to have remarked of Exodus, “As a literary work it isn’t much, but as a piece of propaganda, it’s the best thing ever written about Israel.”

Uris uses the classic western movie setup, with a clear good guy — Zionist protagonist, Ari Ben Canaan — forced to take up arms to fight a horde of murderous Arabs and the unfair British. It is very much the classic underdog story of a hero triumphing against all odds culminating in the creation of Israel. The 1960 Hollywood film which had the blond haired, blue eyed Paul Newman playing Canaan (cast as much for his looks as his squeaky clean personal image), succeeded in making a generation of Americans relate to the new state of Israel like nothing had before. It also cemented in these minds the Arabs in Palestine as an illogical and violent people whose actions were motivated by nothing but blind hatred for Jews. This portrayal of the Arab male in Hollywood as a violent extremist is a trope that has continued in Hollywood ever since. In his 2003 book, Reel Bad Arabs, Jack Shaheen reviews 900 films with Arab characters and finds only six with positive depictions of Arabs. Palestinians are continuously only depicted as evil terrorists — beginning with Black Sunday (1977) which shows Palestinians about to massacre 80,000 American sports watchers, and continuing through the 1980s and 1990s with blockbusters like The Delta Force (1986), Wanted: Dead or Alive (1987), Navy Seals (1990), True Lies (1994) and Executive Decision (1996).

While none of these narratives has been left unchallenged — Palestinian scholars and their allies have spent decades dismantling them, debunking data and providing evidence — these efforts did not make significant inroads into the popular discourse in the US at the time. To borrow from Said, they lacked a socially acceptable narrative to be slotted into. Until now.

Changing the race conversation in America

The last decade in particular has seen two important developments in American popular culture that are of relevance here. First, a widespread discussion of racism as systemic as opposed to individual. Beginning in the aftermath of the 2014 police shooting of 18 year old Micheal Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and the demonstrations that followed, and peaking in intensity after the 2020 police killing of George Floyd, which saw the largest ever public demonstrations in the US, this discourse has moved beyond police brutality to cover a diverse range of subjects, including the lack of representation of people of colour in major American cultural conversations (including in the media and Hollywood). It has asked important questions about the stereotyping and racial prejudices apparent in popular works of cinema and fiction, and has, most importantly, created an American generation with a deep (and perhaps unprecedented) understanding of the exact mechanics of systemic inequality, including erasure. This has meant that for young Americans (the most racially diverse American generation to date), narratives that were designed to soothe earlier generations only serve to irritate. Hints of the superiority of “western civilisation” (extremely popular with the Thomas Friedman generation) are now seen as comically racist.  The very same Paul Newman branding of the Zionist as blond haired and blue eyed to this generation suggests colonialism rather than familiarity, and the longstanding Israeli social media strategies which were designed to appeal to the west (which recommended highlighting the fundamentally western nature of Israel) only serve now to reinforce this suggestion of colonialism.

The second, though less widespread change across the US, Canada and Australia has been more vocal conversations about the ethnic cleansing of the respective Indigenous populations of the lands and the harms inflicted by settler colonialism in these countries. While a recent referendum in Australia to constitutionally recognise Indigenous people failed with 60% voting against, polling indicates that a majority of under 50s voted for the referendum (with 18-24 year olds in particular overwhelmingly voting for the referendum). In 2021, investigations unearthed mass graves at the site of a Canadian school set up as a part of a policy “assimilate” Indigenous children, sparking a widespread conversation on the impact of such policies in particular and settler colonialism in general. While these conversations are yet to yield meaningful results for Indigenous populations in the US, Canada and Australia, they have rendered younger people in West more aware of the harms of settler colonialism and more sensitive to suggestions of it.

In this milieu, works like Rashid Khalidi’s The Hundred Years War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance 1917 - 2017, a comprehensive but also deeply personal history of the Palestinian conflict, that makes a clear and compelling case for seeing Zionism as a settler colonial project, have made their mark. Khalidi’s book topped bestseller lists when it came out in 2020 and provides an army of material for Tik-Tokers, with videos relating to Khalidi (and highlights from his book) available in abundance. The Zionist counter to this argument has been less impactful. In an opinion published in Haaretz in 2021, Steven Lubet and Jonathan Zasloff term the framing of Israel as a 'settler colonial state' (a practice which they claim is now routine in academia and the US media) "a disheartening signal of the primacy of political activism over critical inquiry” and yet, the facts they present do little to dispel the fundamental thesis of Khalidi’s book.

In this classification of Israel as a settler colonial project, Palestinian scholars have found a narrative that is both compelling and into which multiple facts of their current existence can be slotted — the Israeli military’s overwhelming use of force for example provides imagery of widespread destruction and humiliation that is common to colonial enterprises everywhere, with several young Americans noting the parallels in imagery between the displacement of civilian populations in Gaza and the Trail of Tears (the forced displacement of Indigenous populations into the so called reservations). Similarly, policies of detainment, trial by military court and house demolitions (all practices borrowed from the British) are immediately reminiscent of colonialism in any part of the world with experience of being colonised.

The sidelining of the US

In analysing the failures of the PLO in Oslo, multiple Palestinian scholars point to their mistaken faith in the US acting as a neutral party to the dispute. Khalid Elgindy, analysing the failure of Oslo, writes, “First and foremost was the uniquely asymmetrical power and political dynamics that existed not just between Israelis and Palestinians, as occupier and occupied, but also between the United States and the Palestinians given the centrality of the U.S.-Israel special relationship.” And yet, in the early 1990s, following the collapse of the Soviet Union, it would have been a seat at an American run peace process or no seat at all for the PLO.

This is not necessarily true today. With the Trump administration recognising Jerusalem as the capital of Israel in 2018 and the Biden administration’s ongoing unrestrained support for Netanyahu’s actions in Gaza, it is possible for the Palestinians to lay to rest the myth of American neutrality and consequently reasonably reject the US as a future mediator in the dispute. This has not gone unnoticed. Chinese premier Xi Jinping, marking the international day of solidarity with Palestine, remarked “the crux of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict lies in the long overdue realization of the legitimate national right of the Palestinian people to establish an independent state.” Interestingly this was Xi’s second statement on Palestine in the last fortnight. South Africa, in ceasing diplomatic relations with Israel is choosing to project itself as representative of the opinions of the global south on this. With India treading a careful line (with the prime minister choosing to absent himself) and Brazil, China, Russia and South Africa all speaking with various degrees in favour of Palestinian statehood at the recent BRICS virtual summit on Gaza, the idea of the US as the only possible mediator in this dispute isn’t as clearcut as it was a decade ago.

In a surprising move in the current crisis, Thailand chose to bypass the US (its longterm ally) and negotiate with Hamas directly through Iran. They managed to negotiate the safe return of a significant number of their hostages in the now ended ceasefire. In an interview with Sky news (snippets of which are being shared on social media), their chief negotiator confirmed that Iran was helpful in getting their hostages back, and went so far as to justify the taking of hostages itself by saying “ Yes. Because there are more than 6000 Palestinians captured in the past and their families can’t visit them. No one heard their cries. The world didn’t hear their cries. That’s why Hamas had to do this.” While this messaging may or may not be a part of the deal with Hamas, the point to note is that Thailand by bypassing the US has arguably had greater success.

Conclusion

To conclude, while the carnage in Gaza continues, the last 57 days have highlighted the effects of the changing Palestinian liberation narratives on American public opinion. While this is perhaps the highest ever level of public support for the Palestinian cause seen in the West to date, Israel will be counting on much of this being sympathy for their current predicament, which will end with the end of Israeli onslaught in Gaza. While the sympathy undoubtedly exists and the extent to which the Palestinians can transform this sympathy into lasting solidarity remains to be seen, it is important to note that the appeal of the current Palestinian liberation narrative is crafted not just on images of their pain and suffering but on a narrative grounded in the very principles that the West claims to hold dear - liberty, equality and the end of colonialism and apartheid, which makes countering them difficult.