Israeli military actions in the narrow strip of land that is Gaza have deliberately created “human debris” of the people living in it. The significant aspects of the terrible conditions of Gaza are a denial of Palestinian statehood, continuing Israeli military occupation and, most importantly, refugee status that stretches back to the past of the Nakba.

In just under two years since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, we have heard from the United States (US)-led West of the constant refrain of securing a rules-based international order that is most threatened by the likes of Russia and China. Such a call for a rules-based order with human rights as its centrepiece is welcome. It is to be supported and encouraged along with the idea of defending democracies against autocracies President Joe Biden has reiterated several times. Yet those very ideas of a rules-based international order are shredded by the West in response to Israel’s actions in Gaza. Juxtaposing the Western response to the Russian aggression in Ukraine with the response towards Israel’s actions in Gaza suggests a fundamentally unsustainable contradiction at the heart of the current world order. The ructions across the world, most pronouncedly in the form of the Ukraine crisis and the current war in Gaza, suggest the obsolescence of the existing world order. There is a pressing need for a new world order, one that waits to be born, from the womb of the present one, that in its turn stifles and seeks to kill it as that very same womb cannot bear it anymore.

American journalist Christian Caryl (2013), in his book, Strange Rebels: 1979 and the Birth of the 21st Century, suggested that the best way to understand the almost roguish nature of the 21st century is to look at its foetal form in the political events around 1979, pre-eminent among them being the rise of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan in the US and the United Kingdom (UK), the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the Iranian
Islamic revolution, the assumption of the papal office by Poland’s Pope John Paul II, and the reforms of Deng Xiaoping in China. The problems of the 21st century can only be overcome with a decisive break from the complicated carryovers of its conception in the 20th century, thereby birthing another world order.

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