Palestine and Lucrece: when resistance refuses suicide

Shakespeare’s seminal poem draws the haunting parallel between the tragedy of Lucrece and plight of Palestine. Lucrece, the beautiful, pious, and faithful wife of Collatinus, was ravaged by Prince Tarquin; the people of Palestine, no less innocent, suffer under the violence of Zionism. In her grief, Lucrece writes to her husband and, upon his arrival, names her violator before taking her own life. Her body, carried by her husband, father, and Brutus into the streets of Rome, sparks a revolt that banishes Tarquin—just as the suffering of Palestine threatens to banish its modern tyrants.

However, there lies the rub, unlike Lucrece, the Palestinians have taken up their arms to seek revenge from their oppressor directly while the people of the world bear the wounded bodies of Palestinians, demanding from their shameless governments to act to halt the genocide.

Genocide is inherent to the West. It serves dual purposes, one the surplus army of workers is liquidated, and secondly, it resolves the inherent anarchy of capitalism. “World crises have always been”, Marx says, “the real concentration and forcible adjustment of all the contradictions of bourgeois economy”.

“It is now generally accepted” David Harvey states, “that almost all famines over the last 200 years have been socially produced and not naturally ordained”. The one Israel is carrying out is merely the repetition of imperialist history.

Land grab follows genocide. Its economic purpose is to monopolize the mineral resources, food chains and to build high-rise buildings to extract rent. Controlling the food production is an important reason because West cannot produce the crops required to feed its people. The dream of Ertz Israel—the hegemonic idea borrowed from the Monroe doctrine and Nazis’ Lebensraum—is linked to meet the same ends. Otherwise, the Jewish population is too small to justify such a dangerous adventure.

It’s not only about US hegemony or domination but about keeping the Middle East passive and in permanent chaotic decadence. Is it only the US, keen to keep the Middle East primitive, trapped in the dark ages or is there consensus among all powers — including emerging ones such as China and Russia — to maintain the status quo in the entire region?

The Soviet’s betrayal of Palestinians was a stain that “all the Neptune occasions cannot clean”. Why did the Soviets, mortal enemies of Zionism, recognize Israeli entity? “The reasons” for Rashid Khalidi “were simple: both looked with disfavour on the Palestinians because of the mufti’s (Hajj Al Hussani’s) years in Berlin, and neither had developed any links with them. The Palestinians, meanwhile, had even less of a presence in, or understanding of, the Soviet Union or the United States than they had had with regard to Britain.” This is too simplistic a reason. To begin with Israel posed to be a progressive socialist state in the sea of reactionary Arab monarchies.

The Soviets wanted a socialist island to consolidate their power in the Middle East. Their hope was dashed sooner rather than later. Israel was a Christian Zionist imperialist project. From its colonial womb it went straight to the lap of imperialism.

During Israeli aggression against Iran, Russian role was shrouded in mystery. During the outset of the Russian attack against Ukraine, Iranian Shahed/Kamikaze drones were instrumental in destroying the Ukrainian infrastructure. However, once Israeli aggression against Iran began Russian ruling class remained passive to the extent of either refusing or remaining hesitant to provide SU400 Jets to Iran. It was an outright betrayal.

Russian role in Syria was equally dubious. On one hand it helped the Assad government survive against the ISIS, and Al Nusra assaults especially when Obama was weighing his options of deploying US soldiers in Syria— a move vehemently opposed by the Pentagon. On the other hand, despite stationing forces in Syria, Putin allowed the Israelis to bomb a sovereign state on nearly a daily basis while preventing Assad from responding to those aggressions.

Besides US crippling sanctions, the Russian policy of remaining indifferent to Israeli aggression further undermined the beleaguered Syrian economy. Finally, Turkish-Qatari conspiracies and Turkey’s direct intervention overthrew Assad’s government, installing an Al-Qaeda puppet that consolidated Israeli domination in Syria— both Balkanizing it and obstructing an important supply route to the resistance forces in Lebanon. Not to mention the power-sharing arrangement between Turkey and Russia in Syria’s coastal areas.

During Israeli genocide, China, an established superpower, remained neutral and barring verbal condemnation hasn’t changed its position even when the human slaughter and destruction of Gaza have reached their acme. Before October 7, China a trading giant, was building the port of Haifa.

Trade volume between China and Israel had “reached USD 16.276 billion in 2024—an increase of approximately 11.7 percent compared to USD 14.567 billion in 2023”. During 2025, the trade has started to decline yet it is largely in favour of China.

Without entering into battle, China could have played a vital role in stopping the genocide. It could have suspended the trade with the Zionist entity and told the Sheikdoms not to supply oil to Israel unless they pressured the apartheid entity to withdraw its forces from Gaza.

Suspending the oil shipments would have shocked these Gulf entities into action. One bold step from Beijing would have altered the balance of forces in favour of Palestine.

For prominent Palestinian scholar Laith Marouf, ‘no one is interested in the Palestinian liberation because it will liberate the entire Arab world— a gigantic force bound to challenge all stakeholders in the globe’. His premise makes sense.

Israeli forces that failed to crush Hamas even after more than two years of relentless assaults on the civilian population— employing starvation as a weapon and with massive supply of ammunition from the US and Europe— are dreaming to occupy large swathes of Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia. Netanyahu has already alluded to it but Tom Barrack, a Lebanese-origin multimillionaire, the US ambassador to Turkey and Trump’s envoy to the Eastern Mediterranean and the Caucasus, has revealed Israeli expansionist designs, suggesting “Israel is not interested in adhering to the Middle East’s established borders set by the WWI Sykes-Picot agreement and has the “capacity or the desire to take over Lebanon and Syria”.

Israel has already attacked ten Middle Eastern countries. The latest one, on Qatar— often described as its “mistress”. In the guise of dialogue deception and treachery of the US and its proverbial ‘tail’ have surpassed the boundaries of tragedy and farce.

As mentioned above, controlling the global resources in the clutches of one lackey — a satellite entity — through expansionism is inherent to capitalism. AJP Taylor pointed out that Hitler was doing nothing different from Roosevelt and Churchill. In Orientalism, Edward Said addressed to this pathological behaviour of the Western capitalism.

“It is quite common to hear high officials in Washington and elsewhere speak of changing the map of the Middle East, as if ancient societies and myriad peoples can be shaken up like so many peanuts in a jar. But this has often happened with the “Orient,” that semi-mythical construct, which, since Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in the late eighteenth century, has been made and remade countless times by power acting through an expedient form of knowledge to assert that this is the Orient’s nature, and we must deal with it accordingly…”

Borrowing from Marx, Said concludes:

“My argument is that history is made by men and women, just as it can also be unmade and rewritten, always with various silences and elisions, always with shapes imposed and disfigurements tolerated, so that “our” East, “our” Orient becomes “ours” to possess and direct”.

As an extension of metropolitan capitalism, Zionists think that history is made by the big powers. This fallacy has condemned them to permanent grief. Action and reaction may not be equal at first, but in the end, reaction is invariably stronger than the action. “Revolutionaries” Gramsci says, “see history as the product of their own actions, made up of uninterrupted series of wenches executed upon the active and passive forces in society, and prepare the maximum of conditions for the final wrench (revolution). ...”

Despite international hostility or indifference people of Palestine are making history with Hamas as their vanguard. The death knell is tolling — not for Hamas but for Zionism. The time has come to banish Tarquin.

Copyright Business Recorder, 2025