Western Powers do not Defend Humanity. They Defend their Domination.
Gaza has torn the mask from an empire of lies.
It has exposed the hypocrisy of those who preach human rights while excusing Gaza’s annihilation. Their double standards, their selective justice, have turned international law into a propaganda tool. What we are witnessing is not simply a failure of morality — it is a system disintegrating under its own contradictions, an order that invokes law to justify domination while violating it with impunity.
The so-called “rules-based order” has always meant rules for others and impunity for themselves. Its origins lie in colonial conquest, its continuation in economic coercion, and its justification in the deceit of “civilization.”
Those who once claimed to civilize now destroy in the name of democracy, while the post-colonial elites who replaced them risk the same moral bankruptcy as their predecessors. Injustice remains their engine—the contrary of civilization.
Western powers do not defend humanity. They defend their domination.
It is in this light that Gaza cannot—and will not—stay in Gaza. The liberation of one people is bound to the liberation of all. Preventing genocide is not a slogan; it is a shared duty.
Solidarity with Palestine and the defence of international law have become the moral frontiers of our time—the measure by which a new, humane order might begin to take shape.
Jerusalem, October 13, 2025: The Empire is Exposed in its Rawest Form, a Fusion of Military Power, Financial Privilege, and Moral Void.
One of the movements reclaiming this moral ground is the Progressive International—founded in May 2020 to unite, organize, and mobilize the world’s progressive forces. Over a hundred organizations representing millions across every continent have joined: Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana from the UK, Silvia Federici from Italy, Colombia’s president Gustavo Petro, Yanis Varoufakis from Greece, David Adler, and the peace movement Code Pink, among many others.
In its thirty-eighth Briefing of 2025, the Progressive International contrasted two visions of the world: one displayed in the spectacle of power in Jerusalem, the other in the collective resistance of Kuala Lumpur.
On 13 October, in Jerusalem, Donald Trump addressed Israel’s Knesset. For over an hour he celebrated the destruction of Gaza as a “historic dawn.” He lobbied for a pardon for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, flaunted his debts to billionaires Miriam and Sheldon Adelson — “she’s got sixty billion in the bank” — and presented private wealth as the engine of U.S. foreign policy. “You’ve won,” he told Israeli lawmakers. “Now it’s time to translate these victories into the ultimate prize of peace.”
It was not peace he offered, but a grotesque inversion of it: domination dressed as triumph, hubris declared as virtue. Trump’s words exposed the empire in its rawest form—a fusion of military power, financial privilege, and moral void.
This is not only about technology. It is about the system of power that the technology reinforces. Gaza shows us the blueprint: identity + data + tech + state power.
From October 13th to 15th, the Kuala Lumpur Conference on a New Just and Humane International Order Convened
Half a world away, from October 13th to 15th, the Kuala Lumpur Conference on a New Just and Humane International Order convened to imagine the opposite: a world freed from imperial arrogance. Organized by the Progressive International, the Third World Network, and Polity, with the support of the Malaysian Prime Minister’s Office, the conference gathered ministers, scholars, and movement leaders to chart a response to the collapse of the “rules-based order.”
While Jerusalem glorified conquest, Kuala Lumpur spoke the language of liberation. Its purpose was to transform the growing moral consensus against imperial hypocrisy into a coherent political programme — following the path opened by The Hague Group for Palestine, of which Malaysia is a founding member.
In the final plenary, chaired by Varsha Gandikota-Nellutla of the Progressive International, Saleh Hijazi of the Palestinian BDS National Committee described the “wary and reluctant” relief after Gaza’s latest ceasefire. Every previous pause, he reminded the audience, had been followed by another massacre.
Hijazi told of Jihad Jarrar, a 26-year-old Palestinian murdered by settlers on the night the ceasefire was declared — a glimpse into what he called “the full-force drive of ethnic cleansing and the creation of Bantustans.” The so-called peace plan, he said, should be called by its true name: “the Trump-Netanyahu genocidal plan.”
Palestinian rights, Hijazi affirmed, are inalienable. Any peace without justice is merely a continuation of war. Israel’s isolation, he argued — from grassroots movements, from governments like Colombia and Malaysia, from the moral insistence of The Hague Group — has forced the empire to reveal its desperation.
“The Palestinian resistance is not alone,” he concluded. “What Palestinians ask is that the world continue this isolation — through boycott, divestment, and sanctions — until apartheid and genocide are dismantled.”
And he ended with the words of Mahmoud Darwish: “Besiege your siege.”
