When my close friend Asad Rehman suggested that I close this meeting, he specifically asked me to talk about the current political situation, but in a way “full of hope”. The task is difficult. I'm not certain I can handle him. Let's see if I can do anything else.
Last time I was in London was at the end of September, just 5 months ago. But these 5 months have passed like a 100 years.
A 100 years of crying for Palestinian parents over the bodies of murdered and mutilated children. A 100 years of bombing schools, raiding hospitals and desecrating mosques. Happy birthday, TikToks of war crimes shot by Israeli soldiers. A 100 years of blocking food trucks by teenagers taught Fascism. A 100 years of open calls to annihilate 2 million people, occupied, imprisoned in the ghetto. A 100 years of aspiration for plans to leave Gaza with 1 large parking lot. Israeli resort. Museum. The butcher. Buffer zone.
A 100 years of throwing people out of work for telling the truth; a 100 years of stubborn publicism. 1 100 years of ban on the word “Palestine” at universities and a 100 years of non-governmental organisations avoiding the word “genocide”. A 100 years of vetoed and failed ceasefire resolutions.
All this makes it hard for me to find words filled with hope. I can draw something else out of me. Something I've never felt so powerfully before: determination. Commitment. Commitment to the moves that this gathering represents today. Movements for actual equality and justice – social, racial, gender, economical and environmental justice. These movements be in all country. And in these last terrible months, they're increasing at an incredible rate. Not only the number of marches and blockades grows, but besides the depth of analysis. Openness is increasing to establish relations between movements and cases. There is increasing readiness to name hidden systems by name.
If these months have taught us anything, it's that we have nothing but these moves. Neither in your country nor in mine is there any another moral leadership another than that which grows bottom-up. We only have each other.
Let's halt there for a second. due to the fact that that's what the horror is and the vertigo of our historical moment. The Israeli extermination run in Gaza is not the first genocide in fresh history. It is not the first time that fascist forces openly combine the aggressive ideology of supremacy with the boundless fierceness in eliminating a nation that they consider a demographic threat.
Unique – at least since the openly colonialism and its genocide – is the unity with which the political elites of the global North (and not only) look at this slaughter. After all, erstwhile fascism grew stronger in Europe in the 1930s, in the political class of our countries he found powerful allies, but besides powerful opponents.
It's not like that today. Throughout the alleged spectrum of today's politics – from the haunted far right to the devious centreleft – we see powerful actors who sideline differences to unite in active support for crimes against humanity. This edition of Fascism did not separate our political class, but it did. united: Donald Trump agrees with Joe Biden; Rishi Sunak with Keir Starmer, Emmanuel Macron with Marine Le Pen; Justin Trudeau with Giorgia Meloni; Viktor Orbán with Narendra Modi.
So we gotta ask: what precisely do they agree to? In the name of what do they unite? What do they stand for erstwhile they say Israel “has the right to defend”?
The answer that they unite in defence of a single state seems unfortunately besides simple to me. It is, of course, but they ally in defense, too. common value system. In the face of global economical apartheid and accelerating climate decay, they share a shared, supremacyal imagination of safety for the few. This imagination is the reverse of a strong refusal of any mention to the hidden causes of crises: capitalism, unlimited growth, colonialism, militarism, white supremacy, patriarchy.
How He Writes Sherene Seikaly, we live “in a time of disaster” and “Palestine is this paradigm”.
Israel, on the another hand, is simply a pioneer. For decades now – since He abandoned all appearances of the peace process – Israel provides safety and expands its territory through a complex strategy modern dams, walls and rocket shield – alleged Iron Dome. Her architects pride themselves on her ability to capture missiles and missiles to disable any threat. This strategy of modern surveillance and hoarding is 1 of the material realities of a peculiar geographical area. It is simply a way of life for Israelis and a way of slowing the extinction of Palestinians and Palestinians long before last October 7.
The Iron Dome is besides a pattern – it is simply a highly concentrated, claustrophobic version of the same safety model that implements all global governments North; the same governments that advocated the genocide run of Israel. In this model, the borders of rich countries – enriched with their own colonial genocides – protects their own version of the Iron Dome.
The Iron Dome is actually a global phenomenon. It extends along our own fortified borders, equipped with deadly fences, walls and guarded centres, up to the global gulag of overseas exile camps, floating prisons where illness is swarming, fearing he drank at Rio Grande and border guards in the Mediterranean, who passively look at sinking boats.
The Iron Dome besides reaches inside our countries and cities, where inequality is unbearable and the cost of surviving far besides high. The bloated budgets of the militarized police let her force to clean urban parks from people's camps in a homelessness crisis and drive community-organized blockades of oil projects conducted without their consent.
The same forces are waiting ready to suppress the next wave of demonstrations for racial justice, which they know is inevitable. The Global Iron Dome is besides a network of surveillance tracking signalers and whistleblowers, as well as a war against journalists and journalists who dare to tell the fact about war and surveillance. Julian Assange is only their most celebrated symbol.
As with Israel itself, the existence of a global Iron Dome stems from the belief that countries are allowed to respond violently to human demands for fundamental rights and to meet essential needs. It besides stems from the determination that people who do not live in politically guarded, erasive safety systems simply remove – close them, push them, watch them drown. There is besides reservations about the privilege of responding by lethal force to the opposition of the oppressed.
The Israeli Iron Dome is an utmost case due to the fact that the state does not hide its ethnonationalism and ideology of supremacy. Let it be clear, however, that from the beginning Israel followed racist, colonial laws, procedures and practices borrowed from earlier colonial eras, developed by our own countries. Israel is besides a model for others – the Iron Dome was built from the beginning with its exports in mind.
We request to realize this due to the fact that on October 7, this model and this dome collapsed in front of the world. The Hamas attack – a beastly, terrible attack – broke the illusion of safety for the fewer that this model is spreading. This frightened not only the Israelis, not only the government of Benjamin Netanyahu. This has besides shaken our own authorities deeply.
Because if the armed walls and fences and drones and the dome didn't hold, what does that tell us about the illusion of safety and control in our own countries? The question is: since the Iron Dome of Israel broke, what will happen to another iron domes? In view of the mass displacement of people, caused by endless wars, the criminal arson of the climate and the cruel economical policy of pauperization, will they besides break?
I believe that it was due to this fear that our governments were so unprecedentedly united that they were convinced that the stronger was always right. That whoever has the most modern weapons and the highest walls will effectively master and sustain billions of expropriated, desperate people. This conviction best explains why the governments of the wealthy planet joined the Israeli rage of vengeance with specified unwavering enthusiasm, and why so many of them did not even call for the absolute minimum, or permanent ceasefire, for months to come.
State authorities realize that Israel's endless run is besides a form of mass media: it is simply a message. This message is sent not only by the Israeli government, but besides by any government that blesses this aggression – by word, by vote or veto at the UN, by handshake in a photograph, by weapons, by money, by repression against people who publically solidarity with Palestine in their own countries. The message is simple: gold plated bubbles of comparative safety and luxury, scattered throughout our cruelly divided and increasingly hotter world, will be protected at any cost. Including genocidal violence.
In many ransacked areas of our planet, this obscene message is understood without reproach. It was immediately deciphered by Colombia's president Gustavo Petro. As early as October, a fewer days after Israel invaded, wrote:
"The barbarism of consumption based on the death of others leads us to the unprecedented success of Fascism and thus to the death of democracy and freedom. This is the global year 1933."
In Israel’s attack and government support for Israel The north and right-wing forces of South Petro saw the announcement of our common future:
“The suffering we see in Palestine will be the share of all the nations of the South. The West defends its excess consumption and the standard of surviving based on the demolition of the atmosphere and climate, knowing that it will origin an exodus from the south to the north."
The system, recalls Petro, "ready is liable for death" to "defence the bubble of consumption of the rich of this planet, not to save humanity, most of which, like Gaza's children, are expendable."
It is worth reading the full message by president Petro, in my opinion an epochal one. But I'll jump to the end:
“If we do not change power, we will shrink to barbarism. The life of humanity, and above all the life of the confederate nations, depends on what way humanity will take to overcome the climate crisis. Gaza is just the first experimentation to consider us all unnecessary."
What else can I say? possibly just this: the War on Want organization is here today. And the war on poorness is the only war worth fighting, which we must do. We will either replace the device of death with a fair redistribution of goods within the limits of the capabilities of the planet Earth – which many and many of us here present mentioned, speaking of a global green transformation – or this nightmare will consume us all.
We only have each other. We only have our moves and the strength to build ourselves. We only have our solidarity. Determination. Commitment. And a common moral commitment to the priceless value of life.
On this we can build a planet without iron domes. And by doing that, we'll work our way up to hope.
**
Naomi Klein is simply a lecturer in climate justice at the Faculty of Arts at the University of British Columbia and author of, among others, No Logo (interview of Hanna Pestula-Lewicka, Isabella 2004), Shock Doctrines Katarzyna Makaruk, Tomasz Krzyżanowski, Michał Penkala, Warsaw 2008) and It changes everything. Capitalism vs. Climate Katarzyna Makaruk, Warsaw 2016).
Text is simply a evidence Naomi Klein's appearance made remotely at the “And inactive We Rise” Activist Festival, held on 24 February 2024 in London. In English she translated Aleksandra Paszkowska.
