Ending the Colonialist Order

The Global Left Perpetuates the Cruelty of Colonialism

The global left bases its entire foreign policy on its opposition to colonialism. So why is it when an opportunity arises to end the horrors that colonialism has wrought on the developing world, they refuse to do what needs to be done? There was some good to colonialism and that was in bringing much of western agricultural technology to what we used to call the third world making famine a rarity in areas where it used to be regular. Free trade allowed poor countries to sell cheap items to rich countries pulling some of them out of poverty.

But there have been horrors that colonialism brought, and the main one was the creation of artificial borders where there were none. Tribal homelands were divided up or certain minorities were forced to live in countries ruled by their traditional enemies. Many of the endless wars in Africa and the middle east can be attributed to these borders.

Let’s take the middle east as a test case in erasing the colonialist borders. We now have an opportunity, with the election of President Trump and universal hatred of Hamas and Hezbollah, even amongst the Arab League, to redraw the borders of the countries that are now nominally Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Iraq and Jordan. We could add Saudi Arabia to the mix as well as those areas known as the West Bank and Gaza that have no legal sovereignty at all. The liberal international order has broken down. Good or bad, it no longer exists. The US Navy under Biden did not enforce freedom of the seas, Russia invaded Ukraine and does not recognize their border with that country, China continues to take over the South China Sea, unopposed. All through the middle east there are border issues. Kurdistan itself spans four countries due to colonialism.

Palestinian nationalism rejects all solutions that don’t result in a Palestinian state from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, without Jews. It insists on the borders that the British colonialists determined when they split the region with the French and then split their Palestine mandate to create the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan be the borders of their state.

Israel, in fact, is the least colonialist state in the region as it has been opposed most of the time by the main colonial countries. Herzl and Zionism started before WWI and his vision was marred only by his failure to get any support from colonialist powers – not the Ottomans, the British or the Germans. True enough, we have the Balfour Declaration calling for a Jewish home in Palestine but that was quickly reneged upon by the series of White Papers limiting Jewish immigration. A Jewish homeland without Jews seems to have been the goal of all British governments until it left in 1948 (and maybe is again, today). It was only the anti-colonialist moves of the Zionists that finally, after WWII got rid of the British.

The UN Partition of 1947 was an attempt to divide up the country according to ethno-religious lines but that was rejected by the colonialist supported Arab armies – specifically the Arab Legion of what is now Jordan as well as troops from as far away as Iraq. We all know what has followed as the post 1949 Israel was continuously attacked by outside armies and opposed by most colonialist powers. The French sold arms to Israel until 1967 and there was cooperation with the French and British in 1956 but for the most part the only ally Israel could count on since 1967 has been the traditionally anti-colonialist United States.

This is not just about Israel, it is about the absurd borders of Sykes-Picot and the damage it has caused the people throughout the region. The borders of Syria, Iraq, Jordan, Israel and Lebanon need to be redrawn in order to finally end the colonialist absurdity that was forced upon the peoples of the region. The Kurds, Druze and the Jews should have their borders defined with the Druze given the option of being a minority in Israel or a majority in their own (small) country. The Kurds will have to come to an arrangement with Turkey but should get a nice chunk of land in what is now Syria and Iraq and, if the Islamist regime falls, Iran, too.

As for the rest of the Sykes-Picot countries, Lebanon, what will be left of Syria and Iraq they will have to either go the way of the Emirates and have a confederacy or a toned-down nation-state. Hashemite Jordan serves a purpose in taming radical Islam and those who consider themselves Palestinians need to be offered an Emirate solution or emigration. The refugee issue will need to end in one of those two ways.

The global left hates colonialism, hates Israel, hates Trump, hates everything to do with common sense – but when it comes to the middle east clings desperately to the system violently created by the colonialists. The UN is the body that perpetuates this colonialism by its opposition to any solution that does not incorporate colonialist borders.

President Trump is no visionary, but he is the realist par excellence. He likes to look at situations as they are rather than as they should be and proposes solutions that go against traditional colonialist thinking. The reality is that the post-WWII order is no more. The two proofs of this statement are Gaza and Syria. Gaza is a territory with no legal status under the UN-Liberal internationalist order and all the attempts to call israel the occupier even though it didn’t occupy it led to the Hamas order and the “cruel-ization” of the Gazan residents. Pretending that it is a state or a country doesn’t make it real.

In Syria, we are seeing the reignition of the civil war. The Allawis, under General Jiat Sulieman Dalah a commander in Assad’s 4^th Division is now leading a battle against the Al-Julani forces that are trying to consolidate control through the terror they know so well. They have been slaughtering Allawis on the Mediterranean coast and Dalah is fighting back. The Druze and the Kurds are fighting to make sure they are not part of a new Islamist terror state. The colonialist creation that is Syria ought not to exist. The reports are that President Trump is looking to Israel and Turkey to take control over the parts of Syria that are near it and the Russians seem to be negotiating with Al-Julani to keep their bases in the Allawi coast. Everything is in flux.

If you are against colonialism you need to oppose both Palestinian statehood and Syrian sovereignty over their artificial borders. Both are perpetuations of the old colonialist mindset and both can lead only to war, cruelty and suffering.