Gaza has created a crisis and international debate at various levels. On the political side, the duality of the Western position is most evident since the end of the colonial era. On the media side, there is a blatant exposure to the chaos of information and its employment, and the inability of the media to keep pace with the political position, in contrast to the simplicity of the truth. Economically, the whole region and the world are reassessing the feasibility of investing in the region without resolving the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, which is the essence of the recent normalization agreements whose dreams collapsed in an instant. Morally, traditional political parties, from right to left, are in conflict between their commitment to the deep interests of the governing establishment and their grassroots. Western liberalism is at its deepest predicament, with some international relations scholars speculating that it has entered a post-decline phase.
What the Western political and media machines produced
The West is free from its mind on the Palestinian issue at every glimpse of the possibility of reproducing the struggle of the Palestinians, as a struggle of national liberation. This is evident in all forms of intimidation and phobia produced by Western political and media machines towards the discourse of the Palestinian resistance. The idea of liberation was ended with the termination of the PLO through paths of a deceitful settlement, which gave the organization power without sovereignty, and a people without land. Oslo created the PA to move the Palestinian struggle from liberation to a project of building governance under the rules of Israeli-Western hegemony. For Israel's international sponsors, the problem with this round of war on Gaza – and to a lesser extent previous rounds of fighting since 2008 – is that it brings the scene back to pre-Oslo to national liberation. This problem stems from the fact that the idea of armed action against Israel – regardless of agreement or disagreement with it, its usefulness, or whether it is against military or civilian personnel – is itself a dilemma; not out of concern about asymmetrical power, but fear that the Palestinian cause can be overwhelmed as a humanitarian crisis and redrawn as a liberation movement.
Breaking the siege
The West had little trouble with the idea of ships flying from Europe carrying aid under the rubric: "Breaking the siege on Gaza." He had no problem with the hundreds of charity campaigns launched for Gaza. Relatively speaking, the UN Human Rights Council's repeated condemnations of Israel are little overlooked, with attempts to domesticate the council. He does not move aggressively to curb the escalation of reports of international condemnation by human rights organizations of the occupation's practices, although he does not like them. But he is aggressively recruiting his legal advisers to look into the smallest details of legal loopholes in his democratic system in order to prevent the raising of a Palestinian flag, or to prevent solidarity from chanting: "Palestine is free from the sea to the river." The chant that has become preoccupying entire governments, and has turned into a debate at the highest levels of decision-making and media in Europe, in order to interpret it and extract what can be extracted from jurisprudence and assets in the aggressiveness of words and their repercussions. He sees the keffiyeh of the Palestinian farmer – the cultural expression of identity – as a sign of hatred because it was associated with the era of the Palestinian revolution.
What is essential in the West's aggressiveness towards the Palestinians is its war on everything that refers to its cause as a national liberation project. It is okay to support everything that makes it within the scope of a humanitarian crisis. You can talk until the morning about crimes against children, but don't mention anything about a child who threw a stone at an Israeli military vehicle. Some platforms may allow you to upload a photo of Palestinian children torn apart by the Israeli killing machine, but not Fares Odeh, throwing a stone at an Israeli tank. Speak freely about international law that protects civilians and their rights, and about the law that criminalizes occupation and its practices, but do not dwell on international law that allows resistance to occupation, or that gives a people under occupation a right to self-defense. Within these frameworks, the global solidarity movement with Palestine is being restricted, with the aim of creating templates for solidarity discourse that are very similar to the calls of the United Nations for solidarity with the victims of any earthquake or air storm.
De-emancipation
The mainstay of Western positions is to de-liberate the Palestinian people and their struggle, and to fight for the narrative of the Palestinian tragedy not to turn into that. What happened on October 7 is more terrifying for Israel and the West from this point of view, than an act that targeted civilian groups, inflicted human and material losses, or revealed the failure of the Israeli security and military system, bringing them unprecedented and unexpected humiliation, with the importance of all this in explaining the scene. Therefore, decontextualizing the October 7 operation was a well-established rule in the determinants of Western political and media discourse.
The most famous British journalist Andrew Marr, who was the political editor of the BBC and the presenter of its most important political programs, writes in his article on the News-State Man website: "... , this is not the time for non-controversial journalism. We demand that the history of the Israeli occupation not be linked to the hateful terrorism waged by Hamas. But without context, without explanation, all we remain with is the chaos of inexplicable human evil, with which there is no political way out." The Western political and media elite is fully aware that what is happening today is the price of prolonged policies in securing full immunity for Israel's violations and in denying Palestinians their right to land and struggle, and to express it. They are aware of the reality of the scene, its ugliness and its effects, but look after the war, when the international community comes forward to propose a political solution, which they want to be based on the humanitarian crisis of the Palestinians, not on the basis of liberation demands as a people with national existence and demands in a land they have owned for thousands of years. The West's bias against the Palestinians is not only a disregard for their present and their tragedy, but also a theft of their history as a people marching towards liberation from occupation and national independence. The humanitarian support – without questioning its size and value – provided by the West to the people of Gaza – would seem like a reasonable answer to a humanitarian tragedy in which it is a partner, while its humanitarian aid would not seem sufficient to respond to demands for the right to national liberation.
The people need
In the eyes of the Western political and media elite, the Palestinian people need UN initiatives, UNRWA, charities, reconstruction conferences... Etcetera. But it does not need a national liberation movement or at any level, neither peaceful nor armed. The best evidence of this is the occupation's continued destruction of even the structures of the Palestinian Authority and its status as a political entity, and the maintenance of its security and service role, which exempts Israel from the entitlements of its occupation. Power has taken root as a bureaucratic apparatus that operates as much as it receives money from Western donor countries. Together with the Israeli occupation, the West contributed to preventing the economic or political sustainability of the PA. This has nothing to do with the dialectic of the PA's national and representative role, and in the fact that it no longer represents liberation hopes for Palestinians, but its reality today is part of Israeli and Western Zionist extremism against the idea of a group with national dignity and political aspirations.
This war is not only against the Palestinian people as a national group, but also against their original idea of liberation. The Western restriction on the discourse of the international solidarity movement with Palestine aims not to allow the narrative of Palestinian liberation to emerge again, while at best maintaining it as a humanitarian crisis that needs a solution of its kind.