Don’t back the wrong side on the Middle East conflict 

Last week Israel carried out one of its most heinous crimes since the recent conflict with Hamas began on 7 October 2023. At least 112 Palestinians waiting for food aid were killed and 750 wounded after being bombed and shot at by Israeli forces in Gaza. This barbaric act was reported the same week the United States’ Secretary of Defence Lloyd Austin told Congress that the US Government placed the death toll of women and children in the ongoing Israeli attack at more than 25,000. In total, more than 30,000 Palestinians have been killed in bombardment by Israel since 7 October when Hamas forces retaliated to decades-long occupational crimes committed by Israel. 

Israel is today carrying out a genocide with the full support of the United States and its Western allies. President Joe Biden or his administration has shown little concern or empathy towards the thousands of Palestinians being massacred by Israel. Officials who wept over the Russian invasion of Ukraine and civilian deaths in that conflict have shown little emotion towards the Palestinian people. The dehumanising of the Palestinians, blaming them for the attacks by Hamas on 7 October and providing Israel with all the military, political, economic and diplomatic means to carry out an ethnic cleansing and genocide of the Palestine is in fact the policy of the United States. 

This is no different in the United Kingdom. Its Government has branded those who are protesting demanding a ceasefire in Gaza as extremists. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak called it “beyond alarming” that a pro-Palestinian candidate won a byelection last week. Apparently, this is a threat to democracy. 

It is clear that these Western nations see Palestinians as subhuman and their colonial creation, Israel as beyond the reach of any international law. In this context it is more than alarming that President Ranil Wickremesinghe has decided to aid the Western powers by supplying Sri Lankan naval vessels for joint operations in the Red Sea. 

The Houthi group operating out of Yemen intensified its attacks on Western shipping interests, particularly those ships that are trading with Israel. This was a direct result of the ethnic cleansing and genocide now being carrying out by Israel. In international law there is a right for those under occupation to resist. The Houti action is part of that resistance against a genocidal, apartheid State.  Sri Lanka need not support this campaign by the Western alliance that has lost all moral leverage in the international arena. They are once again backing the wrong side of history just as they did with apartheid South Africa, Namibia and Rhodesia. In these countries white minorities were forcing their will against the black majorities. In these monumental struggles the US, UK and most of Europe backed the apartheid regimes imposing their will on the native majority, until it was no longer feasible to do so. Though they later embraced the likes of Nelson Mandela, these were the countries which made his likes terrorists and rebels while propping up the regimes that persecuted them.

Today Israel is a settler coloniser State that not only denies the fundamental freedoms and rights of the native population of Palestine but is now actively involved in ethnically cleansing them from the last remaining lands and carrying out an active genocide. Sri Lanka has always stood against such colonisation and supported the liberation of native peoples. The President should not drag our country into the wrong side of this conflict which history will eventually determine as an epic battle between white supremacy and a struggle for survival and freedom of a colonised and subjugated people.