How The Global South Sees The Israel-Hamas War
Frustrations with the Western-led world order are reaching a boiling point.
Emerging countries — the so-called Global South — represent 80 percent of the world’s population. The Global South includes countries as micro as the Federal Republic of Micronesia and Haiti to countries as macro as Indonesia and Nigeria. And though the Global South is comprised of over 135 countries, from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe, they do not speak with a single voice — as of yet. “Despite having common ground on the conflict, analysts say the Global South – the loosely defined band of postcolonial and developing countries that spans Latin America, Asia, Africa and Oceania – is not likely to act as one because it is a diverse group without defined leadership or structure,” writes Hayley Wong in the South China Morning Post.
But with every red glow of a missile traversing the sky, as well as with every Gazan child that is killed, the temperature of frustrations against the Western-led world order inch towards a boiling point. “After all this time that the North has organized the world according to its interests, it is now up to the South to change the rules of the game,” Cuba’s President Miguel Diaz-Canel said at the opening of the G77+China summit in Havana in September. Further, the echoes of the sheer physical destruction of Gaza has reverberated throughout the Global South, as the land has “sacred history” among Muslims, Jews and Christians throughout the world. As a result of Biden’s symbolic embrace of Netanyahu’s prosecution of the Israel-Hamas war, questions have arisen about the very fundament of the Western-led world order.
Ultimately, the question arises — was it wise for President Biden to hug Netanyahu so closely? The reason behind the act is obvious and wholly noble-intentioned. President Joe Biden grew up in the shadow of the Cold War and World War II. The horrors of the twentieth century — and his reaction against those horrors — shaped the contours of the President’s foreign policy thinking. The October 7 terrorist attack was the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust. So the reasoning behind Biden’s hewing closely to the Netanyahu coalition’s prosecution of the war against Hamas is understandable. But is it wise?
Current college students, clearly, do not have a recent memory of the horrors of the Holocaust. Their experience of Israel is as an apartheid state. Further, it is not just radical college students that hold this view, but a growing percentage of US Jews feel the same. And one of the great problems of Netanyahu, of his almost superhuman thick-headedness and obnoxious, hyper-masculine chest thumping, is that he does not care about world opinion. Israel had the world on his side in the immediate aftermath of the terrorist Hamas attack on October 7, but by the end of November, it had already lost it entirely because of the Prime Minister’s inability to leverage the country’s soft power advantage. Binyamin Netanyahu is a Vulcan at heart, illiterate in the language of soft-power and entirely proud of the fact that he doesn’t do diplomacy, which in his estimation is for sissies. Netanyahu speaks in the frank language of the Iron Dome, of US military assistance that accounts for roughly 16% of Israel’s military's budget.
So I ask, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, is this the craggy shore that the American ship of state ought to be hugging so closely? From Foreign Policy’s Oliver Steunkel:
In the global south, this perceived inconsistency may prove to be particularly damaging to Western claims of a “rules-based order”—the central refrain leaders from Europe and the United States invoke to rally support for Ukraine’s fight against Russia. Many developing countries see the West’s posture on Israel-Palestine as evidence that it is applying international rules and norms selectively—according to geopolitical interests rather than in a universal fashion. In conversations with me, several diplomats, both from the West and the global south, have said that this double standard will harm efforts to bring non-Western countries into Ukraine’s corner.
U.S. President Joe Biden’s Oct. 19 remarks from the Oval Office were a stark example of how resolute U.S. support for Israel may make sense in terms of domestic politics but undermine Washington’s efforts to build broader global support for Ukraine. Biden’s decision to link Ukraine’s struggle to that of Israel—arguing that both are democracies facing enemies that seek to “completely annihilate” them—seemed designed to try to convince congressional leaders to approve a budget request for additional military aid for both countries.
Yet Biden’s comments raised eyebrows in developing countries, where the comparison between Ukrainians and Palestinians is more intuitive than between Ukrainians and Israelis. That’s because many view the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through the prism of occupier vs. occupied. Palestinians, in particular—almost half of whom back Ukraine against Russia’s invasion—were disappointed when Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky expressed immediate, unyielding support for Israel in the aftermath of Hamas’s brutal attack but said little about Gaza or Palestine.
As Fiona Hill aptly summed it up in a recent interview with Foreign Policy, Biden’s comparison was “good congressional politics—but it’s not good global politics.”
Indeed. A few countries have stuck, although loosely, with Netanyahu. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who has ambitions to lead the Global South, has given voice to some of the frustrations of emerging nations. "This is the time when the countries of the Global South should unite for the greater global good," Modi said last Friday, in a speech at a virtual summit emphasizing issues such as poverty reduction, resource efficiency and food security. India, a card-carrying member of BRICS, is also a powerful member of the Global South; in many ways the most likely nation to become the unofficial group’s spokesman.
But India — and the Modi government, in particular — happens to have strong ties to Israel. Israel is India’s biggest supplier of weapons. And since establishing diplomatic relations with Israel in 1992, the two countries have hewn closely together with regards to technology — particularly software — as well as weapons. And, finally, Benjamin Netanyahu and Modi appear to be politically, as well as personally close. Was it Tolstoy who said that all right-authoritarian politicians are more or less similar?
Countries in the Global South remember the humiliations of colonial rule, and African nations are the strongest example of this historical memory. South Africa, particularly, seems to be spreading its wings from allying itself with the American position on just about anything. It was not the first time in recent memory. In 2022, America called for a condemnation in the United Nations of Russia, for its invasion of the Ukraine. The positions of several African nations in that vote were a surprise. “In fact, 28 out of the 54 African countries (just over 51 percent) represented in the U.N. voted in favor of the resolution (Figure 1), a sharp contrast to the 81.29 percent of non-African countries that voted in favor of the resolution. Of the 35 countries that voted to abstain, 17 (48.6 percent) were African—including Algeria, Angola, and South Africa,” wrote Abraham White and Leo Holtz for Brookings. South Africa’s stance on Russia is still something of a geostrategic puzzle, but it is now a matter of the new normal.
Since then, representatives from Hamas have visited South Africa (but have not met with Cabinet officials). The third largest economy in Africa by GDP (after Nigeria and Egypt), South Africa is an important place in the Global South for a non-official visit. We will not entertain the possibility that South Africa’s indulgence with Hamas representatives has anything to do with the historical strategic alliance between Israel and the Afrikaner government during the Cold War? Also, Russia was more of an historical ally to the ANC during the Cold War than, say, Reagan’s America.
Russia, clearly, is using the unpopularity of the Israel-Hamas war for their own purposes in the Global South. China. America’s chief geopolitical rival on the global stage, is on the same page. Both China and Russia are promoting the question: Is international law of two types — one for the wealthy north and another for the Global South?
In Latin America the situation is even more incendiary. Bolivia has been the first country to sever diplomatic ties with Israel over the Gaza bombings. Further, Bolivia’s neighbors Colombia, Honduras and Chile, recalled their ambassadors for consultations. Argentina, Brazil and Mexico called for an end to Israeli operations. Netanyahu didn’t miss a beat.
The term Global South was first used in 1969 by political activist Carl Oglesby. Writing for the left-Catholic magazine Commonweal, Oglesby argued that the Vietnam War was the culmination of the global north’s “dominance over the global south.” But global South-dominated BRICS nations — Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa — continue to rise in their share of the world’s GDP, and have begun to become more militarily cooperative with one another, besides. One of the more interesting geopolitical events in my lifetime is that the Global South nations are asserting themselves on the international stage with more confidence than has ever been seen. And while that would have been a cause for serious concern in a the previous, white-supremacist leaning eras, it is certainly not considered a threat to college students.
By 2050, according to PwC, six of the seven largest economies in the world could be emerging markets. China’s brokering deals between Iran and Saudi Arabia, and Brazil’s breathtakingly bold peace plan for Ukraine are significant touchstones in the Rise of the Global South. Is this how the world gets to a multilateral, international-law based world order?
Will historians of the future look back on the Israel-Hamas war as the moment America truly lost the Global South? It had all been going so well, with Kamala Harris and Blinken doing picture-perfect soft power visits abroad. A Trump Presidency will almost certainly mean that, should it come to pass. Or maybe — just maybe — we should not be so quick to automatically assume that the college kids have it wrong, as President Biden does, adhering to Cold War strategies that are lost on the young. The young certainly need to acknowledge and understand the fundamental evil of the terrorist actions of Hamas on October 7th more often than they do. And they certainly need to draw deeper distinctions between, say, African colonialism in the Belgian Congo and the situation in Gaza. But it is highly curious that the message that the Global South has been broadcasting, in the capital cities of the world in protest, on the Arab street, at the United Nations, in bilateral and multilateral settings throughout the Global South, is largely the same one that echoes across quads on college campuses in America and throughout the West.
And maybe — just maybe — President Biden ought to be listening harder to their chants and not just automatically dismiss them as the old Cold Warriors used to.
“Three dynamics — one under way, one occurring in real time, and one conceivably occurring in the not-too-distant future — are threatening to enable North Korea’s destabilizing foreign policy practices. The first dynamic is Russia’s invasion of Ukraine; the second is an increasingly roguish direction for Iran and Syria; and the last is a potential Chinese invasion of Taiwan. All of these dynamics might help to grow and embolden the pool of nations subjected to international sanctions and opposed to the liberal international order. As demonstrated in the examples below, such countries perceive an increasingly small cost for engaging in illicit transactions with North Korea. In this way, global disintegration will provide refuge and sustenance for an unleashed Pyongyang that has unprecedented opportunities to proliferate, profiteer, and compel with near impunity.” (Jonathan Corrado/War on the Rocks)
“But Boebert’s performance was noteworthy not just for her personal boorishness but also as part of a larger pattern of right-wingers vandalizing musicals. Strange as it may sound, one of the cultural symptoms of the Trump era is the hard right’s affinity for musicals—an art form they also repeatedly desecrate. Donald Trump himself is a prime example. No president has had such an intense love for musicals. In the White House, music was key to calming down Trump during his frequent outburst of anger. As The New York Times reported in 2021, White House official Max Miller—nicknamed the ‘Music Man’—was tasked with playing show tunes like ‘Memory’ from Cats to ‘pull [Trump] from the brink of rage.’ This is truly a case of music having charms to sooth the savage breast.” (Jeet Heer/The Nation)