From the corn fields of Phrae to the streets of Jakarta, a stark dissonance defines our political reality. Our governments, including Thailand’s, perform a delicate dance: issuing cautious statements on Palestine while their material actions remain firmly anchored to the interests of Western capital and power. This contradiction exposes a central truth for the Global South: we are constantly instructed by the political classes on which conflicts deserve our outrage, a demand that serves imperial distraction.
The Western narrative machine insists we treat the war in Ukraine as the defining global crisis of our time. It is framed in the simplistic, Manichean terms of a “free world” defending itself against barbarism. This is a European war, a violent struggle between a waning American hegemony and a resurgent largely reactionary Russia over spheres of influence and resources. It is, in essence, a quarrel between empires in service of NATO. For the billions of us in the Global South, The Global Majority, it is a grim spectacle that consumes diplomatic energy and resources, yet one from which we derive no benefit and for which we bear no responsibility.
This pattern of enforced compliance was starkly demonstrated in Pakistan, where the attempt by Prime Minister Imran Khan to pursue a sovereign foreign policy of neutrality regarding the war in Ukraine was met with a swift corrective. His refusal to align unequivocally with the Western bloc triggered a US-backed vote of no confidence, culminating in his removal from office and subsequent imprisonment. This episode stands as a lesson for the Global South; deviation from the dictates of Washington and its allies, even through mere non-alignment, will be punished through regime-change operations dressed in the veneer of democratic process, proving that the price of sovereignty is perpetual conflict with an empire that tolerates no independence.
It is a demand that we pour our political energy into a conflict that reinforces the very bipolar, Cold War logic that has long been used to suppress and manipulate our sovereignty for centuries. Our attention to the war in Ukraine is demanded not out of solidarity, but to legitimise a Western narrative that requires compliant allies. We are asked to condemn one invasion while our “partners” fund, arm, and justify another, far more brutal, genocide.
Meanwhile, the ongoing genocide in Palestine presents a clear and unambiguous anti-colonial struggle. Here we see a systematic project of settler-colonial elimination, funded by the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, etc and diplomatically shielded by the European Union; The Global Minority. This is not a distant “humanitarian” issue; it is the open nerve of our collective historical subjugation. The resistance in Gaza fights against the same Western imperialist core that has orchestrated coups and murder in our own homes, imposed crippling economic policies, and enforced the position of both dictatorships and a reactionary bourgeois class that serve its interests.
In Kamal Aarif Kamaruddin’s excellent piece on our sister journal Jentayu, they argued that despite our moral opposition to the genocide in Palestine, we in The Global South are nonetheless complicit. This complicity is not only a matter of misplaced attention; it is material and deeply entrenched through the economic and supply chain veins that spread across the world:
After 2 years of boycotts and rallies, it is clear that the Malaysian state remains firmly loyal to the forces of Capital and Empire. The same government that shook hands with Ismail Haniyeh has no qualms joining forces with the zionist army bombing patients in Al-Shifa and massacring hundreds in a single 10-minute operation in Nuseirat.
Meanwhile, global corporations, financing the genocide have further entrenched their neo-colonialist interests in Malaysia. In July 2024, as humanitarian zones in Mawasi were relentlessly bombed, a joint consortium led by Khazanah, EPF, Abu Dhabi Investment, and Blackrock acquired shares of Malaysian Airport Holdings Berhad (MAHB), handing control of 39 Malaysian airports to the Blackrock monopoly.
Blackrock is a major sponsor of the ongoing genocide in Gaza, funding American weapons manufacturers such as Lockheed Martin Corp., Boeing Co, Raytheon Co, General Dynamics Corp, and Northrop Grumman Corp. For decades, Blackrock has funded America’s overseas wars of aggression, The cumulative death toll from the post-9/11 wars of counterterrorism has reached over 4.5 million in Syria, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, and Yemen in what could only be considered a modern Holocaust.
As it spreads war and devastation across the globe, Blackrock has maintained a monopolistic grip over the Malaysian economy; owning equity shares in hundreds of firms including Simes Darby, Petronas, Tenaga Nasional, and more. Since the past decade, Blackrock has played an increasingly influential role in almost every aspect of working-class life in Malaysia from EPF pensions to healthcare to “Syariah-compliant” banking.
While the most our Thai politicians do is post social media tributes to Palestinian martyrs, the architecture of our economy and superstructure is one of the many pillars of the genocide. With national pension funds and banking institutions deeply invested in the complex financial nexus of weapons manufacturers like Lockheed Martin, Boeing, General Dynamics, etc. Our digital infrastructure owned by Western tech giants like Google and Microsoft, firms integrated into the supply chains of surveillance and imperial war. Our proletariat even drafted in to provide agricultural labour for those Israelis who see themselves as too expendable to risk their lives in the fields next to Gaza. We participate in military exercises like Cobra Gold and RIMPAC with the armed forces of nations actively complicit in genocide, normalising the presence of war criminals on our soil and training alongside the armies enforcing a starvation campaign. And we even accept these génocidaires into our lands for R&R for a break from their atrocities.
This is the essence of our contemporary colonial bind. The Thai state, in its desperate pursuit of a place at the table of global capital, acts as a junior partner in an imperialist project that ultimately views our people and our sovereignty as disposable. We provide the raw materials, the cheap labour, the strategic location, and the political cover, while the masters in Washington and Brussels decide who is deserving of life and who is worthy of death. The same system that plunders the Congo for minerals and destabilises West Africa for profit is the system that is exterminating Palestinians. It is through no fault of our own that we are implicated in this catastrophe, as we too are victims through a global structure of violence that demands our compliance, however our acquiescence to the structure, to accept our place in it without revolutionary agitating against it is where the complicity lies.
Therefore, the issue of Palestine has to become the ultimate question for the Global South to answer. It forces a choice between a genuine substantive liberatory program and anti-imperialist stance rather than a subservient accommodation with empire. The liberal hand-wringing that asks why we do not care about “every conflict” like Ukraine equally is a cynical distraction, a deliberate obfuscation of the power dynamics between coloniser and colonised. Our solidarity cannot be a buffet for bourgeois politicians to pick from; it must be a strategic, material alignment with the oppressed against the oppressor.
For Thailand, and for the entire Global South, the path is clear. We must reject the distracting narratives of European wars and recognise that the central moral drive and political struggle of our era is necessarily in the liberatory resistance of Palestine. It is a struggle that mirrors our own histories and defines our potential future. We must actively dismantle the economic and military ties that bind us to the US-Israeli death machine, from divesting state funds from weapons manufacturers to rejecting complicit trade deals. Boycotting the areas of the economy demanded of us by the Palestinian people, and finally isolating and sanctioning the rabid Israeli dog.
Our place can not be in the conference rooms of Brussels & Geneva or the military headquarters of NATO. Our place is with the resistance in Gaza, with the people of Yemen under blockade for their solidarity, and with every nation that has known the boot of imperial violence. The genocide in Gaza has been a moment that has ripped away any remaining facade, revealing the true face of the world order. It is a choice between being a subservient client of that order or standing unequivocally with the revolutionary Global South. For a truly sovereign future, Thailand’s place must be in the latter.
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Art from Earth Liberation Studio
