Gaza Was the Global South’s Moment to Lead; They Blew It

By Karim Bettache  –  Jul 26, 2025

Before we begin, a necessary disclaimer from someone who has chosen to make China his home: I write this critique not from the comfortable distance of Western academia, but from within Chinese society itself, where I have witnessed firsthand the profound promise this civilization holds. China represents something desperately needed in our world—a counterweight to the suffocating hegemony of the West, a society that understands human relationships not through the atomized lens of Western individualism but through the deeper wisdom of interconnectedness and collective responsibility.

Chinese culture, with its millennia-old understanding that the individual exists within the web of community, family, and historical continuity, offers a philosophical alternative to the destructive narcissism that has brought the West to its current moral nadir. The Chinese approach to governance, economy, and social organization—however imperfect—represents genuine hope for a world choking on the failures of neoliberal capitalism and imperial arrogance.

I have lived among the Chinese people for 15 years, studied their culture, and come to appreciate the profound differences in worldview that make China not merely another global power but a fundamentally different way of organizing human society. This is why the following critique comes not from a place of hostility or Western chauvinism, but from a place of deep respect and, yes, love—the kind of love that demands honesty even when that honesty is painful.

Sometimes the harshest criticism must come from those who care most deeply about what a nation or civilization could become. It is precisely because I believe in China’s potential to offer the world something better that I cannot remain silent about its current paralysis. What follows is not an attempt to diminish China or the Global South, but a desperate plea for them to live up to the promise they represent.

The multipolar mirage
The mythology of the Global South as a beacon of resistance against Western imperialism has been shattered on the killing fields of Gaza. For almost two years, as Israel’s machinery of death has crushed Palestinian children into dust, as hospitals have been blasted into rubble, as entire bloodlines have been erased from existence, the vaunted champions of the multipolar world have responded with the moral courage of accountants.

China, to many the economic juggernaut that will liberate the world from American hegemony, remains one of Israel’s most crucial trading partners. Russia, which positions itself as the defender of traditional values against Western decadence, continues to praise its relationship with the genocidal entity while Palestinian bodies pile up in mass graves. Brazil, and the rest of the BRICS constellation offer hollow diplomatic gestures while the genocide unfolds in real time, livestreamed to a world that watches in complicit silence.

The great irony is suffocating in its clarity: as the United States trains Uyghur-Chinese death squads and ratchets up tensions in the South China Sea, as Washington does everything in its power to encircle and destroy China, Beijing responds by praising its relationship with Israel—America’s most loyal attack dog—during a genocide. The cognitive dissonance would be laughable if it weren’t so morally perplexing.

China, with its massive economic leverage, refuses even to call the systematic extermination of Palestinians what it is—genocide. Instead, it deploys the bloodless language of bureaucracy, referring to the slaughter as a “humanitarian crisis,” as if the deliberate targeting of children were a natural disaster rather than a calculated campaign of ethnic cleansing.

Colonial mentality: the Global South’s fundamental crisis of confidence
The paralysis is not born of weakness but of a fundamental paralysis of spirit that has infected the leadership of nations that claim to represent an alternative to Western barbarism. I see this as a fundamental crisis of confidence: They fear what they oppose, trapped in a colonial mentality that convinces them they must still play by the rules of a system designed to destroy them. Rather than wielding their considerable power to actively resist, they cower before the very empire they claim to challenge, terrified that meaningful action might provoke retaliation from their supposed enemies who are already working overtime to annihilate them anyway.

Russia cozies up to both sides of the conflict, China prioritizes trade relationships over human dignity, and the collective BRICS leadership offers the Palestinians the same hollow solidarity that the West provides—endless meetings that produce nothing but press releases. They have internalized the imperial logic that tells them they are not yet ready, not yet strong enough, not yet legitimate enough to act decisively, even as that same empire trains death squads against them and encircles them militarily. This is the psychology of the colonized—always seeking approval from the master even while the master sharpens the knife.

The most damning evidence lies in the trade data that these governments cannot hide behind diplomatic doublespeak. Israel’s top export partners in 2025 read like a who’s who of the supposed “resistance axis”: China occupies positions five and six (including Hong Kong), with nearly a billion in trade continuing to flow even as the genocide reaches its most intensive phases. The numbers are even worse for imports, where China tops the charts at number one with more than $3 billion. Every dollar of this trade may translate into a bullet in a Palestinian child’s chest, every contract signed, a bulldozer flattening a refugee camp.

Waiting—yet again—for Westerners to take the lead
Meanwhile, in the streets of Berlin and London, in the university campuses of the United States, it is Western citizens—the very people whose governments enable this carnage—who are putting their bodies on the line. They are the ones being beaten by police, fired from jobs, ostracized by their communities for demanding an end to the slaughter. Greta Thunberg led a Gaza aid flotilla that was intercepted and she was deported by Israel—a young Swedish activist doing what entire Global South governments with their navies refuse to do. The most prominent voice documenting the genocide at the UN level is Francesca Albanese, a white European woman whose moral clarity puts entire governments to shame.

The bitter truth that exposes the moral inertia of the Global South is this: the very people whose tax dollars fund Israeli bombs are showing more courage in opposing genocide than entire governments that claim to represent the oppressed. We are witnessing the grotesque irony of waiting for Western activists to pressure their own war-criminal governments while nations with the economic power to end this horror tomorrow choose comfortable complicity instead.

Only Yemen—the poorest country in the Arab world, devastated by years of war—has shown the moral clarity to take concrete action, attacking Israeli shipping and paying a terrible price for its principles. The resistance axis in West Asia continues to engage militarily despite overwhelming odds, while Iran provides what support it can within the constraints of avoiding regional annihilation. But these are the actions of those already at war, already marked for destruction by the empire. The great economic powers of the Global South, those with the leverage to end this genocide through economic pressure alone, remain paralyzed by their colonial mentality, leaving the world to wait once again for white Europeans and Americans to develop the conscience their own governments lack.

How History Will Recall the 2025 Gaza Famine

This is not to absolve the West of its primary responsibility for creating and sustaining this nightmare. The United States, Germany, the United Kingdom, Canada, the Netherlands and the rest of the West remain the indispensable enablers of Israeli barbarism, providing the weapons, the diplomatic cover, and the financial backing that makes the genocide possible. European nations compete to see who can more enthusiastically support child murder while wrapping themselves in the language of ‘civilization’ and ‘human rights.’

But the failure of the Global South represents something more insidious—the corruption of the very movements that promised to offer humanity an alternative. These nations had the opportunity to demonstrate that a different world was possible, that economic and political power could be wielded in service of justice rather than profit. Instead, they have revealed themselves to be cut from the same cloth as their Western counterparts, differing only in the sophistication of their public relations.

The alternative to Western hegemony dies in Palestine
The tragedy extends beyond Palestine, though Palestine remains the litmus test for any claim to moral leadership in the contemporary world. The same nations that cannot muster the courage to cut ties with an apartheid state engaged in genocide expect the world to believe they will challenge the fundamental structures of global capitalism and imperialism. The same leaders who prioritize trade relationships over human rights expect us to trust them to build a more just international order.

The BRICS summits produce communiques that read like they were written by a committee of morticians—bloodless, technical, devoid of any recognition that real human beings are being systematically exterminated while they negotiate the fine points of currency exchanges and trade agreements. Their latest declaration even endorsed the Israeli-backed Palestinian Authority for crying out loud.

This failure is not merely tactical but spiritual. It reveals they have internalized the logic of the system they claim to oppose. They speak the language of sovereignty and non-interference while children are burned alive in hospitals. They invoke international law while subsidizing its systematic violation. They promise a multipolar world while upholding the unipolar privilege of genocide.

The consequences extend far beyond the immediate horror in Gaza, though that horror should be sufficient to damn any government that enables it. The credibility of any alternative to Western hegemony dies with every Palestinian child that these supposed champions of justice fail to save. How can China claim to offer the world an alternative to American imperialism while its trade helps fund Israeli colonialism? How can Russia position itself as a defender of traditional values while it facilitates the destruction of one of Christianity’s most ancient communities?

Gaza was the Global South’s outspoken moment to rise
The answer is that they cannot, and their failure will echo through history. The Global South had its moment to prove that they had thrown off the yoke of colonialism, that power could be exercised differently, that economic leverage could serve justice rather than profit, that international relations could be governed by principle rather than expedience. Instead, they chose the path of moral cowardice disguised as pragmatism.

Perhaps most damning is the opportunity cost of this failure. While Palestinian children are murdered with weapons paid for by Western taxpayers and enabled by trade with the whole world, the very governments that could have stopped this genocide choose instead to negotiate the terms of their own subjugation to a system that will eventually consume them as well.

The genocide in Gaza is not merely a crime against Palestinians—it is a crime against the possibility of a just world. Every day it continues with the complicity of those who claim to oppose Western imperialism, that possibility dies a little more. The blood on their hands is not just Palestinian blood—it is the blood of every future victim of a system they had the power to challenge but chose instead to enable.

History will not forgive this betrayal, because history is written by the dead children whose voices they chose not to hear.

 

 

(Bettbeat Media)