The ongoing Israeli genocide against the Palestinian people has provided an appalling reminder of the importance of critically studying the nature of imperialist practices in the 21st century. As a starting point we should recognise that the world we live in today has been shaped by the successful overthrow of empires. The success of anti-imperialist movements has seen human rights, including the rights to self-government and the sovereign equality of all states, progressively incorporated into the global order under the auspices of the United Nations.
The nature of imperial discourses and practices has adapted to this new reality where rights and freedoms have been formally institutionalised to an unprecedented degree. One response is associated with what the Indian scholar Patha Chatterjee calls the ‘imperial prerogative’, the power to declare an exception from the rules that others are expected to follow. US president Joe Biden’s attack on the moves by the International Criminal Court chief prosecutor to seek arrest warrants for Israeli leaders, despite endorsing the court’s attempts to bring Russian president Vladimir Putin to justice, exemplifies this tendency. This puts the very notion of international law and universal human rights under enormous strain and challenge. It reinforces the sentiment that US governments only support liberal rules when it is in their interests to do so. And by undermining the institutions that should be a check against resurgent imperialisms, it strengthens those that more explicitly oppose democracy and human rights.
The latest wave of imperialism has been marked by a rise in genocidal techniques of ‘population management’ and control. These methods can be found in a number of different states that cross different geopolitical ‘camps’. To analyse them we have to reject the idea that there is some kind of ‘anti-imperialist club’ of states aligned against the hypocrisy of the west.
Reactionary implications
The belief that the non-western geopolitical ‘camp’ is automatically progressive, a position with origins in the cold war era, is sometimes referred to as ‘campism’. George Galloway, whose by-election triumph in Rochdale earlier this year briefly propelled him back into the spotlight of UK politics, has long expressed some of the most reactionary implications of this thinking. At the high point of the Syrian civil war, he repeatedly defended the regime of Bashar al-Assad. He even condemned as traitors the Palestinian resistance movements based in Syria that had sided with the opposition to the regime, while lauding the pro-Assad Lebanese Islamist paramilitary group, Hezbollah.
Another, nominally more ‘Marxist’, version of this thinking is found in the arguments of Vijay Prashad who has celebrated the rise of China’s model of state capitalism, mischaracterising it as a socialist force leading the non-western states to a new world order. Prashad has even described China’s cultural genocide against the Uygur people as a progressive ‘deradicalisation’ integration policy.
The campist left inverts the Kissingerian formula of realpolitik, appealing to what Leila Al-Shami once described aptly as the ‘anti-imperialism of idiots’
Campist positions usually combine some level of political affinity to such states with strong assertions of the maxim that ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend’. Ironically, this is similar to the ‘realpolitik’ associated with the former US secretary of state Henry Kissinger. He divided the world into ‘spheres of influence’ and treated such questions as international law and human rights as trivial compared to the ‘hard-headed’ pursuit of state power within these supposed ‘spheres’.
The campist left inverts the Kissingerian formula. Rather than a defence of the west and US geopolitical interests, they appeal to an often-vague ‘anti-imperialism’. This group sees itself as the main, perhaps the ‘only’, true opponents of the US empire. But in reality they replicate imperial modes of thinking that erase the experiences of peoples living under authoritarian regimes. My co-conspirator Leila Al-Shami once described this aptly as the ‘anti-imperialism of idiots’. Opposition to these states is often dismissed as ‘liberalism’, as if the people who oppose their governments are mere collaterals in the march of the revolution. This type of thinking is logical for someone with Kissinger’s conservative and nationalistic politics. But it makes no sense for those that support genuine internationalism based on mutual respect and solidarity.
Assad and Netanyahu
The campist analysis misses the commonalities between states that appear to be in different ‘camps’ and the often-eclectic nature of their international relations. The Assad regime has in the not-too-distant past happily positioned itself as a western ally. It took part, for example, in the CIA’s torture programmes after 9/11. The Assad regime also bombed and destroyed the Yarmouk Palestinian refugee camp, which had more than 130,000 inhabitants before 2011. It is now largely ethnically cleansed. For its part, Israel has combined its special relationship with the US by cultivating ties with Russia. Prime minister Netanyahu has actively appealed to Israeli citizens of Russian heritage and, in 2019, his party even put up billboards in Tel Aviv picturing him with Putin, celebrating their close political affinity.
Assad’s destruction of Yarmouk was preceded by a campaign of dehumanisation. This has strong echoes in the practices of the Israeli state in Gaza today. The value of a Palestinian person under such a worldview is negligible. Palestinians have been so thoroughly dehumanised that the Israeli state views them as a ‘demographic threat’, and not a people with rights and freedoms. As the Israeli state controls the territory known as ‘Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories’ between the ‘river and the sea’, this dehumanising logic necessitates the creation of a second class of human beings, a system of semi-formalised apartheid.
Perhaps more revealing still is the way the Israeli government has come to understand the practice of this apartheid system of governance over Palestinians. This system has some similarity to the concept of ‘useful Syria’ that was used to describe Bashar al-Assad’s vision for ruling over the specific parts of the country that he and his Iranian allies value. This useful/useless dichotomy continues to influence the regime’s politics and practices today. It is an inherently violent logic that requires regular acts of violence, from direct bombardments to mass incarceration, torture and executions, to reaffirm absolute power over the civilian population.
‘Useless’ and dangerous
Assad was unusually forthright and open in speaking about the ‘useful’ and ‘unuseful’. But it projects. Both Zionism and Assadism are threatened by Palestinians and Syrians refusing to live subservient lives.
Assadism is perhaps best summed up by the pro-regime militia who wrote ‘Assad or we burn the country’ on the walls of besieged Syrian cities. This mirrors the practices of Israeli settler colonialism today, one perhaps best exposed by the IDF soldiers posing for holiday-style photographs amid the rubble of destroyed Palestinian homes in Gaza. In both cases there is a logic of extermination at play. But identifying such parallels is impossible in the campist perspective, which views one bombed out school as a horrible crime against humanity and another bombed out school as some kind of conspiracy to make a benevolent dictator look bad.
The campist approach misses the fact that such governments learn from and cooperate with one another. Israel has a long history of selling weapons that have been ‘battle-tested’ on Palestinians to other states, treating the indigenous Palestinian people as have to endure the erasure of their struggle because it doesn’t fit in a western-centric notion of anti-imperialism.
The line from Yarmouk or Aleppo to Gaza is much shorter than is often perceived. Those living under either Zionist or Assadist regimes deserve much more than what the international community is willing to give them. It is up to the anti-authoritarian and internationalist left to oppose any and all attempts to ‘divide and rule’ into such categories of population management, no matter what the rhetoric of the state practising these techniques may be.
The global spread of authoritarianism raises a need for sharpened analysis on the left. This should foreground the role of movements fighting for democratic change ‘from below’ regardless of the geopolitical alignments of the states and regimes they are contending with.
