UK and US genocide complicity is allowing China to take the humanitarian high ground

Britain and the United States intransigent support for continued Israeli atrocities is allowing China to take the humanitarian high ground, and the consequences could be dramatic.

At this week’s UN Security Council vote on a Gaza ceasefire thirteen of the fifteen nations voted in favour, the US were the only country to vote against, and the UK were the only country to abstain.

The US power of veto meant that despite overwhelming international support for a ceasefire resolution, it couldn’t be adopted.

The Chinese ambassador Zhang Jun said: "The continued passive avoidance of an immediate ceasefire is no different from giving a green light to the continued slaughter".

The fact is simple. The US and UK are increasingly isolated in their support for Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza.

The US continues to pump money and weapons into their savagely racist settler colonial state, no matter how depraved their atrocities get, and uses their Security Council veto to defy global opinion that it should be stopped.

Meanwhile in Britain the Tory government continues defying public opinion to belligerently support Israel, while the Speaker of the House of Commons and the Labour Party cynically collude to insinuate that the first Muslim leader of a western government, Humza Yousaf, was essentially stoking domestic terrorism by referencing Israel’s "collective punishment" of Palestinian civilians in an SNP ceasefire motion.

These grotesque insinuations that Yousaf was stoking domestic terrorism, and that pro-peace activists are a violent extremist mob were invented purely as cover for Keir Starmer and Lindsay Hoyle’s disgraceful parliamentary stitch up to avoid calling out Israel’s "collective punishment" of Palestinian citizens.

Meanwhile the International Court of Justice at in the Hague continues to hear South Africa’s compelling case that Israel is guilty of committing genocide in Gaza.

In China’s statement to the court their UN ambassador Zhang Jun accused Israel of engaging in "oppression that has severely undermined and impeded the exercises and full realisation of the Palestinian people’s right to self-determination", pointed out that the right to armed resistance against foreign invaders is enshrined in multiple international treaties, and made a clear distinction between this kind of armed resistance against invaders and occupiers, and terrorism.

The US and UK’s continued complicity with Israeli genocide is allowing China to take the humanitarian high ground, which has numerous serious geopolitical implications.

It’s impossible to understate the disgust and horror in the Islamic world that Britain and the US keep allowing Israel to continue their genocide with impunity (which is especially hypocritical given their rush to impose sanctions on Russia and Putin-linked individuals after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine).

China’s overt condemnation of Israel and solidarity with the oppressed Palestinians is likely to win them more plaudits at a time of rapidly growing Chinese economic and diplomatic influence in Arabic countries and the wider Muslim world.

On January 1st 2024 Iran, Egypt, and the UAE were welcomed into the BRICS alliance (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa), strengthening their efforts to break away from the US-European IMF-World Bank economic hegemony, and give more power to the global south.

With the two most populous countries in the world, the former super-power of Russia, and by far the largest economy in Latin America already onboard, the addition of multiple large Muslim economies further strengthens the alliance.

The gradual erosion of the United States’ once seemingly unassailable economic dominance is happening before our eyes, and their intransigent complicity with Israeli atrocities can only drive more Arabic and Muslim nations into the welcoming arms of the alternative.

Much could be said about China’s own human rights record, their occupation of Tibet, their designs on Taiwan, and the implications of their assertion of the right of occupied people to engage in armed resistance on their own affairs.

It’s often difficult to differentiate between the tides of anti-Chinese propaganda in the west, and legitimate concerns and criticisms, but you’d be as foolish to believe all the sinophobic propaganda as you would to pretend China is some kind of unimpeachable utopia.

However what’s absolutely clear is that Britain and the US are allowing China to take the moral high ground on the world’s most urgent humanitarian disaster, while they remain wilfully complicit.

This genocide complicity doesn’t just fundamentally undermine British and American claims to be the moral arbiters of right and wrong in the world, it’s providing the opportunity for others, with problematic issues of their own, to demonstrate greater legitimacy and respect for global conventions and international laws.

This Anglo-centric worldview of being "the good guys" has already been severely eroded by foreign policy disasters like the illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq, the spectacularly failed two decade occupation of Afghanistan, and the wilful destruction of Libya, and now, by allowing their savagely racist colonial settler-state to carry out a genocide with impunity, Britain and the US are further undermining their own narrative.

And if this outrageous genocide complicity drives even more countries into the welcoming arms of China, it’s quite clearly their own fault.