Late on Tuesday, October 17, Joe Biden boarded Air Force One and set course for Israel with the aim of trying to contain the effects of the Gaza war and prevent its spread throughout the region . At the very moment of climbing the stairs of the plane, I already knew that the visit, politically risky, would be a failure. Shortly before leaving, Jordan's King Abdullah II canceled the summit that was supposed to bring him the next day with the President of the United States and the leaders of Egypt, Abdul Fattah al-Sissi, and the Palestinian Authority, Mahmud Abbas, to address the Gaza crisis. Aborted the summit, Biden's trip had only one destination: Tel Aviv.
The cancellation of the meeting was justified by the Jordanian monarch because of the bombing of the Al-Ahli hospital in Gaza, which Israel was accused of and which supposedly killed hundreds of people. In the end, the reason matters little. The diplomatic contempt was capital. The knock on the door exposed the lack of authority of Washington, whose hegemony is increasingly contested, and definitively ruined Biden's attempt to show an apparent balance in the conflict.
During the seven hours he spent in the Holy Land, Biden expressed his solidarity with the Jewish people for the terrorist attack by Hamas and reiterated the strong commitment of the US to the security of Israel. And all he could get from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was the creation of humanitarian corridors to facilitate the evacuation southward of the Palestinian civilian population fleeing the bombardment of northern Gaza and pave the way for the humanitarian aid
Biden urged his interlocutor not to get carried away by anger and to learn from the mistakes of the US after the attacks of 9/11 in 2001 (remember: the war launched in retaliation against the Taliban regime in ' Afghanistan lasted twenty years, caused tens of thousands of deaths and ended with the American withdrawal and the return of the Islamists to power as if nothing had happened). But it was clear that he would not listen. Israel has decided to launch a military invasion of Gaza that seems to end up mired in the same mud as Afghanistan, and the warnings of almost all analysts are of no use.
The alignment of the US and Europe with Israel – with all the nuances that have been introduced in Washington and Brussels regarding respect for civilians – has aroused the misunderstanding and rejection of the Arab countries, which accuse the US and its allies of treating Israelis and Palestinians with a double whammy. And it has opened a new crack in the fracture that separates Western countries from the rest of the world and, in particular, from the so-called Global South. The world has not followed the West in the confrontation with Vladimir Putin's Russia over the invasion of Ukraine (maybe the Americans did not do the same in Iraq in 2003?) nor in the economic and diplomatic struggle that they stand with Xi Jinping's China. Nor will they do it now in defense of Israel.
The anti-French sentiment that has been spreading lately in some countries in central and western Africa has been analyzed preferably as a consequence of France's neo-colonialist policy, but perhaps it also responds to the same global context. The West is alone. More alone than one. And maybe you should ask why.
A word has begun to be commonly used among specialists to explain this disaffection: resentment. The French political scientist Michel Duclos attributes it to Western arbitrariness when it comes to deciding who, and under what circumstances, has the right to use force in international relations. The law of the funnel...
According to Mark Suzman, executive director of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, this resentment has its roots in the failure of developed countries to fulfill commitments regarding the global distribution of vaccines against covid, as well as in aid to mitigate the effects of climate change. In an article published in Foreign Affairs in early September, Suzman cited a statement by South African President Cyril Ramaphosa at the New Global Financing Pact summit held in Paris in June: “The countries of the Northern Hemisphere were hoarding (the vaccines) and they didn't want to release them at the time when we needed them the most. This generated disappointment and resentment in us, because we felt as if life in the Northern Hemisphere was much more important than life in the Global South”.
While Israeli bombs are falling on Gaza, Russia and China are trying to get the most out of the new situation, which weakens the American position in the world. For Putin in particular, the crisis offers him an unexpected respite: the war in Ukraine has practically disappeared from the media and political radar.
In any case, what former French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin calls “Westernism” – that is, the idea that the West is the one that sets the pattern and others follow it – can be considered outdated.
