PRESIDENT Cyril Ramaphosa was this week set to participate in a critical indaba in the Egyptian capital, Cairo, aimed at forcing Israel to stop its obliteration of Palestine’s Gaza strip in which the population is facing potential extinction.
The Cairo Summit, to feature at least a dozen heads of state – mostly from the Arab world – was expected to push harder than the failed attempts by Russia and China at the UN Security Council to push through a resolution calling for an immediate ceasefire.
Earlier this week Jordan, a key player in pursuit of a two-state solution that will include the establishment of a free, independent state of Palestine existing fearlessly side-by-side with Israel, cancelled a scheduled face-to-face meeting with US President Joe Biden in Amman.
This was in retaliation against Israel’s bombing of a hospital in Gaza, killing more than 500 patients, medical staff and civilians who had sought shelter in the misguided belief that Israel would not attack a medical facility, in line with the Geneva Convention.
As Ramaphosa was heading out to Cairo his ruling party, the ANC, was marching in the country’s capital, Pretoria, in support of the beleaguered Palestinian people.
They demanded, among others, that South Africa must altogether cancel the thus far degraded diplomatic relations with apartheid Israel.
So far attempts to get Israel to allow international aid to reach Gaza have come to naught. Israel has flatly refused to allow aid to Gaza from their geographic area, accusing the people of Gaza of being “human animals”.
The visit to Israel by Biden to show solidarity with the Jewish state amid the bombing of the Gaza hospital has not sat too well with the majority of the global south and the civil society groups in the western capitals.
Protests against Israel continue to be on the rise in spite of the stream of visits by western leaders to Tel Aviv, where the objective is to scare the Arab world in particular from openly supporting Palestine.
However, as the western leaders flock to Israel in a major geopolitical gamble, their own citizens continue to take to the streets in large numbers to show their disapproval of a controversial foreign policy that blindly supports Israel.
And, as the international community scrambles for a cessation of hostilities between Israel and the Palestinian people, the death toll in Gaza is rising sharply, with thousands of civilians buried under the rubble.
Israeli authorities are also planning a ground invasion of Gaza, coupled with a sea and air onslaught that Iran has already warned may trigger the growing risk of the war expanding across the Middle East.
So far, Israel has delayed its much-anticipated ground invasion of Gaza. The visit by Biden is cited as one of the main reasons behind the delay. Also Jordan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the Arab world supported by the African Union remain determined to thwart Israel’s deliberate displacement of the Palestinians from the Gaza strip into Egypt.
The Arab League has argued that Israel’s plan is to force mass migration of the Palestinians into foreign lands and never to let them back to their homeland.
At the centre of the Israeli-Palestinian war is a factor none of the Israeli backers from the global north seem prepared to raise. That factor – call it the elephant in the room if you like – is Israel’s illegal occupation of the Palestinian land for the last 75 years.
Not only is Israel illegally occupying Palestinian land, government-after-government in Tel Aviv appears to compete about the extent of harshness towards the treatment of the Palestinians.
Most activists around the world have likened Israel’s treatment of Palestine worse than apartheid in South Africa in the period that preceded the dawn of democracy in April 1994.
Palestinians’ movement of restricted, their rights curtailed or none-existent in many respects, arbitrary killing and detention without trial is the order of the day and hostile legislation enacted in Tel Aviv is the only law for Palestinians in the land of their forebears.
As all this happens unabated – aided by the US and its allies – generation after generation in Palestine is born and bred and perishes under the worst forms of dehumanisation the world has ever seen.
As things stand Israel, enraged by the attack by the Palestinian group Hamas on its territory, continues to exhibit uncontrollable rage aimed at the total removal of the Palestinians from the face of the earth, particularly those living in Gaza.
Israel’s delayed ground invasion of Gaza is also attributed to the dangers of urban warfare combined with Hamas’ tunnel networks that threatens to “suck Israeli forces into a quagmire” and thereby put an unwelcome dent in the reputation of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF).
The IDF is among the top 10 militaries in the world, completely supported materially by the world’s only remaining superpower, the US. But, as international relations change through the 21st century and the global south align itself with the rapid rise of China and Russia’s military might, the US dominance is fast waning, surviving partly on reputation than unmatched power.
The dismal failure of the UN Security Council to reach a consensus on stopping the plight of the Palestinian people is reflection on the growing divide between the US-led global north and the global south nations, led largely by BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa).
This adds greater significance to the Cairo Summit, happening at a time where so-called smaller nations are colonies of the Western powers no longer.
Additionally, Biden’s administrations is completely misled in his belief that the US is an invincible power. Russia and China lead BRICS and the global south are major nuclear powers. China’s economy is expected to overtake that of the US as the world’s number one economy within the coming years.
Above all, the global south nations have discovered the art of cooperation and solidarity similar to the ways in which the global north has exercised ideological solidarity over a long period of time.
All these outlined developments, plus many that are unstated, challenges the geopolitical status quo like never before.
The advancement in technology and sophistry of military innovation threatens in particular the US. In all the major previous global conflicts including WWI and WWII, the US has survived unscathed largely due to its far-away geographical position.
But nowadays, a weapon fired from afar can reach targets unthinkable historically.
Meanwhile, a report by the UN Human Rights Office has described the bombing by Israel of schools and hospitals in the Gaza Strip as “crimes against humanity”. This is the same description that the UN had used to condemn apartheid South Africa.
The deputy Chair of the Russian Security Council, Dmitry Medvedev, said after reflections on the siege of Gaza by Israel and the failed adoption of the Russia-led proposed resolution: “The world, led by the United States, continues to slide into the deepest abyss.”
He further said that a myriad of geopolitical disconnections and belligerent approach to international relations “point to the accelerated disintegration of the very fabric of Western society”.
Agree or disagree with Medvedev, the bare facts and naked truth is that the international world order is changing rapidly, and will never be the same – meaning dominated by the US-led global north.
These changes of great significance have also forced the UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, who this week visited the Rafah checkpoint, noted: “Two million (Palestinians residing in Gaza) people suffer behind these walls and they have no food, water or fuel.”
Israeli has implemented an inhuman embargo of basic services to the Gaza Strip. The international community has condemned the move as “collective punishment”.
Even Biden, under notable public pressure from his domestic base, was forced to remark that Israel should not be “blinded by rage”.