AUTHORS

Natalya Bekhta, Divya Dwivedi, Shaj Mohan, Maël Montévil, and Ivana Perica

Do the Palestinian people and the Ukrainian people understand one another? Do they support one another? What are the distinctions between these two conditions of oppression? How are they related to the Kurdish people scattered from Turkey to Iraq; the sufferings of the lower caste and tribal people of India; the people of Dagestan; Iranian women; Uyghur people suffering in China (1), but exploited as militia in Syria (the most recent trophy of) by the west (2); Armenian Christians fleeing from their genocide into a Western-Islamic pogrom in Syria (3); the struggles for mere existence in Sudan from the crises mostly orchestrated by the USA and its proxy states (4); the Rohingya people without papers (5), abandoned at sea by Indian government? These were the questions that came up in conversations with friends in the third and the second worlds—the recently and reluctantly added unto “Europe”, oft named “Slavic”, considered as labour assets for the future, and culturally held in a demotic of a properly ‘European’ tongue, ‘Germanic’.

I

We have been under this question of comparison, or of the ratio of suffering between Ukraine and Palestine for months. We cannot yet say why the Palestinians, who are currently being exterminated, take certain positions. For example, we can only ever wonder if they know of the 3500-year-old oppression of the lower caste majority in India, of their slavery, of massacres and the pogroms? Perhaps they don’t, which must not change a bit what one feels for the struggles of Palestine, Sudan, Ukraine, the Saami people, Baluchistan, or Somalia. 

Do the Ukrainians, who have been under a war that keeps the conversations about its outcome—either through negotiations or through the war itself—away from them, know of the mass murder spree going on in Palestine? Do, they know how many have died in this war on all sides—for it is a peculiar world war that determines the fate of empires of this century in which Indians, Nepalis, French, and people of many other nationalities are fighting and dying—and which side has expended most lives? Do they wonder why such international militia is not allowed into Palestinian lands by those who control all the lands? 

Even we who are outside the zones of calamity don’t know all the answers. For ‘the west’ it is imperative that the Russian numbers of the killed appear higher, and for the Russians it is the greater Ukrainian numbers that serve their ends. We can wager that nearly 2 million people may have died, and mostly on the Ukrainian side. In symmetry, it is the wrong question to ask the Ukrainians, just as it is wrong to pose such a question to the Palestinians. 

II

Today, most political opinions are voiced by interested agents who may have little to do with the actual situation, although those who suffer are still the kinesis of those very interested agents and their masters. For example, a large number of social media accounts that support Israël are Indian and managed by the social media control system of the upper caste supremacists (known commonly as ‘Hindu’ right) (6), who are aligned with Russia and Trumpist America. Similarly, in France, the Russians have used social media to sculpt the political landscape in favour of the far right which is aligned with Putin. To this end, they propagated the notion of ‘Islamo-gauchiste’ and the perception of antisemitism among the right wing – going so far as to perpetrate antisemitic degradations – and  they amplified images of the (real) horrors taking place in Gaza on the social media of the radical left to marginalize the left and favour the unity of the right and far right (7). 

We can see Russian social media accounts binding Ukraine and Palestine together in a way that suits them, as merely anti-American, which is changing rapidly into indistinguishable interests to divide the loot of the world. The same with many social media and media representatives of Ukraine, who have often aligned with Israël-America. The actors behind these campaigns are often surprising, political technologists manipulating the so-called public opinion. 

The question also is: Why do the large masses of social media users so readily spread waves of hate and toxic messages? There are two components to the answer to this question. First, in the past two decades, due to the unity of what are called the ‘left’ and ‘right’ in politics regarding the fundamentals of economic and foreign policy and their serving as the sentinels of the super-rich oligarchs of capitalism in most parts of the world, electoral politics came to be the choice made about colours on a ballot. The voices which were outside of this consensus had to seek venues that are not controlled by the capitalistic media in their own countries in order to articulate their positions. It is here that Russian media entered as such an alternative, which could allow discussions of issues ranging from Wikileaks to American extermination wars, and it gathered many a respectable western intellectual. This process came to an end with the invasion of Ukraine. 

Second, the trust in the traditional media has all but totally eroded in the world, which owes to several developments:

1. the naïve assertion by the media and politicians or the pretence that the job of the media is to tell all truths, and that they can indeed tell it, ‘the whole truth’; (Here we enter the philosophical question of pertinence, which means, that to which we can hold our attention to. It is impossible to report on and attend to all that takes place, and all living beings are opened to the world through the schema that determines pertinence. The regula of the public sphere is often forgotten—we must give reason for the very schema that determines pertinence. Media negotiates with distinct but co-articulated powers including the state, the industries, the militias, the mafia. Often this schema of negotiations and the reports that media filed was rendered as the optimal concern; that is, the point at which the concerns of a society met with the concerns which it can afford to attend to and can ill afford to ignore. However, the reality is that this power to determine the world for the majority of the world who toil in its sustenance was deployed in order to create a world in which the oligarchic powers could thrive. The new fascisms have re-adjusted the liberalist schema and have since constituted a schema of ever-present threats—the migrants, the homeless, the victims of drugs, Muslims, Arabs, the racialised inferiors of the earth, the refugees); 

2. the exposure of extraordinary military and capitalistic control of the media to sustain a war economy in America by the early work of Noam Chomsky; media control through the state in China, Iran, Qatar, Saudi Arabia; oligarchic and fascistic control of the media in India, Russia, and Ukraine;

3. the appearance of WikiLeaks and other whistle blower cultures which were made possible by the values of the early days of the internet, which includes anarchism, although the hacker ethics is of those early days are incompatible with the new technologies and their scale of today; 

4. the changes in organization of mass media, for exampel with the multiplication of TV channels, including continuous news channels, without the proper means to do serious journalism.  This situation led to the multiplication of talk show and the decline of investigation, reporting, and foreign correspondents; it also enabled media strategy, initiated by Tony Blair and differently by Silvio Berlusconi to saturate the media to control them.

5. and most recently, the support of the capitalistic media of ‘the west’ for the genocide of the Palestinians, and their near total disregard for the Ukrainians as people—the end—in favour of treating them as a means, to create a buffer between Russia and ‘the west’. 

We may only wager an answer to the question about the wider support that almost always (because post-Munich it was not easy to mobilise for Palestine) existed for Palestine. First, Palestine is not a country, it is no state, but just a people—the Palestinian people—killed and scattered by the west, which also attracted communist, anarchist and socialist activists from Asia from 1948 and Europe in the 1960s. It is a struggle that is older than Ukraine’s (but much younger than that of the lower caste majority of India), and at the same time coincidental with many of the anti-colonial liberations, including India, which then took it as a cause to complete the anti-colonial struggle. For example, India did not have diplomatic relations with Israël until the upper caste supremacists, who are themselves very closely aided by America, came to power. It is also the very hopelessness of the Palestinian struggle—a slow decay, a gradual retreat, decades long concession of territories, a rising cadence of acceptable horrors towards them—that created the waves of support for it after 1968. This particular kind of support has, we should suspect, has something theological about it. 

We did ask some friends in ‘the region’ many of the questions, who have said that they identify with, or have solidarity with, Ukraine. However, this identification appears to be based on the perceived analogies of the two distinct situations by each individual. For example, it was understood as a situation continuous with Balochistan, Kashmir, Dagestan, Kurds, Armenia and so on as the persistence of the imperial wars from the 18th century onwards against the desire of the people to find freedom, or counter to the drive of the people towards politics. Some saw in Zelensky a Mahmoud Abbas of the west, partly because of his open support of Israël and Ukraine’s technical participation (8) in the Syrian invasion led by Turkey and funded by Qatar, and later Israël, on behalf of the west (9). 

But there is also tremendous ignorance, which is understandable, as we see that many in India still remain oblivious to the events in Sudan, where a genocide is played out like a multi-team football game in which one way or another China, Israël, Russia, United Arab Emirates, and United States of America are some of the players (10). There are parts of India called the “North-East” where oppressions and wars are going on, of which one can rarely find news reports, and often we can learn from some bits and pieces that are carried in different international newspapers. Why are we unable to see one another in spite of the possible total interconnectedness permitted by the new technologies? 

There are many reasons, but most significant is the control system which determines what one buys in the super market and what colour one votes for in elections determines what one is allowed to know, or see. We have been taught and forced to keep most of the world as unseen, ahoratos (11). We see extraordinary political crimes permitted and committed in these conditions which render each other ahoratos.. 

III

This needs to be explained. The very first questions in politics are which individual suffers, how many, where, under what conditions of inaction, who is poised to benefit from their suffering? This is followed by how can we together end this suffering, but absolutely without the surrender of freedom of those who suffer. This freedom is unconditional. Instead, all that we can see in the newly restored ‘geopoliticised’ (a Nazi technique of power) popular discourses is the presentation of conditions as the means to achieve horrendous ends, perhaps even worse than what went on in the last century. 

The question of Ukraine and Palestine are one for this reason; no condition, no argument, no geo-poli-technique can justify what is taking place in either region. Further, none of the so-called solutions to Ukraine—divide it between Russia, Europe and America—is acceptable because the very existence of freedom, which is what people are, what each individual is, is going to be thus divided and partitioned, and hence annihilated. They—Trump, Starmer, Putin, Baerbock and all the rest—speak as if the Ukrainians are a lump of clay before the white gods who may or may not shape them, may or may not give them life. But there is the outline of a new world order here: Palestine’s “outcome” will be used to justify Ukraine (and much worse in Africa), Ukraine will be used to justify Greenland and Taiwan.

Here ends the symmetry between Palestine and Ukraine, and we see two distinct forms of horrors emerge. The Palestinians have to merely die, and leave all that land to Israël-America. But Ukrainians must live on as mere buffer, or delaying mechanism, or at best a transponder to their own dividers. Ukrainians are told that they must harvest wheat for the west and make minerals for the Russians. Ukraine shows that a newer slavery is arriving, in all the weaker regions of the world. And it shows that most of the recently added parts of Europe with histories much older than Germany, France, and the rich Nordic countries are likely to be divided as zones of influence and exploitation. 

There is also the anti-imperialism based support for Palestine and Ukraine. But with Ukraine this kind of support appears to be a bit confused; on the one hand there is the nearly total mainstream support for Ukraine in western media, while these supporters refuse to acknowledge out of fear and shame that Russia is not a country but a brutal empire; on the other hand, the self-identification of many who represent Ukraine as “white”, which distances Ukraine from Palestine, Sudan (12), and Somalia.

It is not “realism” to enunciate the ‘conditions’, which we find to be a growing popular quasi-theoretical manoeuvre in politics, popularised by the academic works of John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, who have both opposed the ongoing genocide of the Palestinians Israël and the west. The theory of geopolitical realism asserts two ‘realities’ as the condition and limit for all politics: that the nation states, borders, natural resource raids and plundering of smaller countries by bigger ones, and militias among others are the realities or the facts of the world; and, the will of the states with the greatest degrees of power to determine the future of the world by taking the former ‘realities of the world’ are its conditions. Instead, what we can observe is that all realities of this world are realised through politics; or as it is often the case, the contestation between politics as the fight for freedom and oligarchies of various kinds, including those of the racialised totalitarianisms and of theologisation.

The only realism in politics is that which we want to realise, which is always freedom. In this world for which we are each responsible, if something persists as a reality (puppet regimes of west Asia), and thus forms the actual condition for realising political ends (for America through the militarised Islam of Al Qaeda, ISIS, Al Nusra to destroy democratic possibilities in Asia), it too should be read only as a failure of the collective faculty of realisation or politics. The power to realise the world has now receded the furthest from the people, and it is more than ever at the risk of total eclipse; such an eclipse will create an unliveable world for all, and that world can only be a fleeting feast for the oligarchs just before anomia sets in. In that sense, the dark art that is ‘geo-politic’ and nationalisms prevents us, all of us (Ukrainian, Palestinian, Indian, Iranian, Sudanese, Somalian, Romanians, Danish …), from seeing what is coming—which is the partitioning of the world among three powers—China (13), Russia and the USA.

But we can do something together, and soon, which still remains within our powers. First, the regions that are second and third worlds need to be liberated from the map of calculations of the first worlds or the superpowers. Towards this goal, histories have to be theoretically articulated with distinctions drawn from both the past—of the constitutive components or the homological powers of our regions—and also of the future; that is, we may not want to have all that the first world has accumulated, but we may want newer ways of freedom, or politics. 

We can assert the political, historical, and philosophical autonomy of our regions of the world theoretically first, so that politically we can all refuse to be the pins on the board of world map on which the first world dreams our nightmares. Solidarity without conditions is the only way we can also educate and entrust ourselves into one another. So, our request to you (whoever, wherever) always is educate us. And demand of us the same education. 

But mostly we all learn best from the people themselves. Is it not true of Palestine and Ukraine as well? We all want to know from the people. The same for the people of Dagestan or the Kurds or the Somalians or the Iranian women or the Sudanese feminists. We must want to listen to them while holding each other’s hands. Can we create a forum where we can do that? 

Perhaps we are each already doing it. 

We should promise that we shall never give up on each other, until the very end; we are for one another without conditions, as people without exception. 

NOTES

1. “OHCHR Assessment of human rights concerns in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, People’s Republic of China”, OHCHR Report, https://www.ohchr.org/sites/default/files/documents/countries/2022-08-31/22-08-31-final-assesment.pdf 

2. “What Are Uyghurs Doing in Syria?”, Foreign Policy, 04 April 2025, https://foreignpolicy.com/2025/04/04/uyghurs-tpd-syria-fighters/ 

3. “Christian leaders urge Syria’s new regime to guarantee safety, rights”, La Croix, 10 April 2025, https://international.la-croix.com/world/christian-leaders-urge-syrias-new-regime-to-guarantee-safety-rights 

4. See for the ongoing mass murders Justin Lynch, “In Sudan, U.S. Policies Paved the Way for War”, Foreign Policy, 20 April 2023, https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/04/20/sudan-civil-war-biden-burhan-hemeti-foreign-policy/ 

5. Indian home minister said of the Muslim refugees from neighboring countries, “Illegal immigrants are like termites”, See ‘“Shoot the Traitors” Discrimination Against Muslims under India’s New Citizenship Policy’, Human Rights Watch, https://www.hrw.org/report/2020/04/10/shoot-traitors/discrimination-against-muslims-under-indias-new-citizenship-policy. For the recent reports on crimes against them, see “India Is Accused of Inhumanely Deporting Rohingya Refugees”, Suhasini Raj, New York Times, 17 May 2025, https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/17/world/asia/india-rohingya-sea-deport.html  

6. See also https://thediplomat.com/2023/10/indias-digital-footprint-on-the-israel-gaza-war/  

7. D. Chavalarias, « Minuit moins dix à l’horloge de Poutine » 2024 : https://hal.science/hal-04629585v4 

8. The presence of what can be called “Ukraine” (for we do not know what its people think anymore) is noted in Sudan, and the Russian investment in the destruction of Sudan and the genocide has been shifting. See “Ukrainian special forces ‘in Sudan operating against Russian mercenaries’”, The Guardian, 06 February 2024, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/feb/06/ukrainian-special-forces-sudan-russian-mercenaries-wagner

9. The turning of the Turkish state into a mercenary force for the USA and the states which come under the latter’s interest—loosely European Union member states, puppet regimes of West Asia including Saudi Arabia and UAE, the UK—began with the illegal NATO bombings of ‘eastern Europe’. Today, Turkey is a most troubling factor in conflicts far removed from it, but which also fall within the former Ottoman territories, and it confuses and destroys the possibility of any real liberation struggles through the instrumentalized Islam, which is a creation of the USA through instruments such as ISIS and Al Qaeda. Dagestan independence movement falls within this ‘complication’. For Islamization, see https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/dagestan-shootings-spotlight-rising-islamist-threat-putin-2024-06-25/. For Turkey’s influence inside Russia, see “Turkey spreads influence inside Russia’s borders”, https://asiatimes.com/2023/02/turkey-spreads-influence-inside-russias-borders/# 

10. For China and Russia’s role in Sudan, see “Sudan conflict: how China and Russia are involved and the differences between them”, The Conversation, 08 June 2023, https://theconversation.com/sudan-conflict-how-china-and-russia-are-involved-and-the-differences-between-them-205947  For Israël, see “The US and Israeli role in Sudan's path to war”, The New Arab, 02 May 2023, https://www.newarab.com/analysis/us-and-israeli-role-sudans-path-war 

11. See Shaj Mohan and Divya Dwivedi, “Ahoratos, Palestine,” Philosophy World Democracy vol. 4, no. 11 (November 2023), https://www.philosophy-world-democracy.org/articles-1/ahoratos-palestine 

12. The weapons used to kill civilians in Sudan are known to arrive from within the terrain of the European Union, through the mediation of the puppet state of UAE. The direct and indirect American involvement has a long history dating from the cold war. However, the more recent network of US relations with the UAE may be founded on financial corruption, with the UAE having gained autonomy through it, as shown by the business deals of Trump’s son in law, which is not dissimilar to certain other American presidencies and the Erdogan family. See for instance “Jared Kushner Says $1.5Bn From Qatar, UAE Came 'Irrespective' of Trump Win”, Newsweek, https://www.newsweek.com/jared-kushner-says-15bn-qatar-uae-came-irrespective-trump-win-2004895 

13. Chinese power and intervention on the globe are through non-conventional means which go less reported due to the ‘western’ fear of losing the perception of primacy in the world. See Sujit Raman, Nick Carlsen, “The World’s Underground Bankers”, Lawfare, https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/the-world-s-underground-bankers