The Ruins of Palestine.
We are like addicts who scream "no" while stabbing the needle into our arms. The rational mind recoils from the horror, but the economic body continues its automated motions of complicity.
Originally published in BettBeat Media.
We are witnessing something unprecedented in human history—not merely another genocide, but the complete paralysis of global civilization in the face of mass slaughter. Every nation condemns the systematic extermination of Palestinians. Every leader speaks of international law and human rights. Yet not a single country—neither the imperial powers nor their supposed opposition—has managed to stop contributing to the killing machine grinding through Gaza.
This is not a failure of political will. It is something far more terrifying: the complete hijacking of human agency by an economic system that has grown beyond our control.
Theater of Powerlessness
The theater of powerlessness plays out across every political alignment. In the West, we watch the grotesque spectacle of leaders like Macron delivering impassioned speeches about Palestinian rights while France remains one of the world's largest arms exporters. But perhaps even more revealing is the performance of the BRICS nations—those countries that position themselves as the anti-imperialist alternative to Western dominance.
China, Israel's largest source of imports, “exported $13 billion worth of goods to Israel in 2022, $16 billion in 2023 and $19 billion in 2024”. Growth is set to continue in 2025 as the genocide rages on in full effect. Chinese companies manufacture the civilian drones that Israeli forces convert into weapons to hunt Palestinian children through the rubble. Russia maintains almost $4 billion in trade with Israel while Putin, who regularly invokes "genocide" to justify his invasion of Ukraine, cannot bring himself to use the word for Gaza. India supplies weapons and technology to Israel while importing Israeli surveillance systems, making it Israel's most reliable arms customer.
Even South Africa—the one BRICS nation to file a genocide complaint at the International Court of Justice—continues shipping coal to fuel Israel's power grid. The same ships that carry statements of moral outrage carry the energy that powers the killing machine.
This is not hypocrisy. This is something more systematic and more terrifying. These are not evil people making conscious choices to enable genocide. They are trapped actors in an economic system that has evolved beyond human intention, a system that now operates according to its own logic of profit and growth, indifferent to the moral horror it produces.
“This reveals capitalism's ultimate achievement: it has created a machine so complex, so interconnected, that it can compel an entire species to participate in its own moral destruction while everyone involved insists upon their innocence”
"Champions" of the Global South
The failure of BRICS to meaningfully oppose the Palestinian genocide exposes the ultimate fraud of our political categories. These nations—representing half the world's population and presenting themselves as champions of the Global South—cannot even use the word "genocide" in their official statements. Their July 2025 summit declaration could have been written by any Western foreign ministry: careful diplomatic language that acknowledges "concerns" while maintaining business as usual.
Consider the absurdity: governments, representing populations that overwhelmingly oppose the slaughter, find themselves unable to stop their own countries from enabling it. But even more damning, governments that came to power through anti-colonial struggles, that position themselves as alternatives to Western imperialism, prove equally powerless before the economic imperatives that bind them to genocide.
The BRICS nations understand precisely what is happening. Their intelligence services have access to the same casualty estimates that reveal the true scale of the slaughter—likely 500,000 to 600,000 Palestinians killed, not the absurdly low official count of 62,000. They know that Israeli forces are systematically targeting hospitals, schools, and refugee camps. They know that China's commercial drones are being converted into child-killing machines. They know, and yet the economic tentacles reach everywhere—defense contracts, trade agreements, financial instruments, supply chains, technological partnerships.
“What makes the BRICS failure particularly clarifying is that it destroys the comfortable fiction that there exists some alternative pole of power capable of challenging the imperial system”
Hostages of Capitalism
To truly disengage would require dismantling the very foundations of their integration into the global economy. China's Belt and Road Initiative depends on the same logistics networks that supply Israel. India's technology sector is intertwined with Israeli cybersecurity firms. The UAE has positioned itself as a financial hub by maintaining relationships with all sides. Even Iran—the sole BRICS member genuinely opposed to Israel—finds its resistance circumscribed by the need to maintain economic relationships with allies who trade with the genocidal state.
This reveals capitalism's ultimate achievement: it has created a machine so complex, so interconnected, that it can compel an entire species to participate in its own moral destruction while everyone involved insists upon their innocence. The system has become autonomous, feeding on growth and expansion with the same blind hunger that cancer feeds on healthy cells.
What makes the BRICS failure particularly clarifying is that it destroys the comfortable fiction that there exists some alternative pole of power capable of challenging the imperial system. These nations control 40% of global fossil energy resources and 30% of global GDP. They have the material capacity to isolate Israel economically. Yet they continue to fuel its war machine while issuing statements about international law and Palestinian rights.
The economic logic has become inescapable. The UAE, despite positioning itself as a mediator, hosts 34 Israeli arms companies at its defense exhibitions. Brazil maintains defense technology partnerships with the same Israeli firms whose weapons shred Palestinian families. Ethiopia imports Israeli air defense systems while Egypt secretly coordinates military operations with Israeli forces.
Drug Addicts
We are like addicts who scream "no" while stabbing the needle into our arms. The rational mind recoils from the horror, but the economic body continues its automated motions of complicity. Every government that condemns genocide while maintaining economic ties with the perpetrators demonstrates this same tragic split between consciousness and action.
The Palestinian genocide is not an anomaly—it is a revelation. It shows us what we have become: a species trapped in systems of our own making, forced to participate in atrocities we desperately wish to stop, watching helplessly as economic logic overrides every impulse toward human decency. The failure transcends political boundaries—imperial powers and anti-imperial movements, Western democracies and emerging multipolar alternatives, all find themselves equally enslaved to the machine.
The corporations know. The bankers know. The politicians across every ideology know. Yet the machine grinds on because stopping it would require acknowledging that our entire way of organizing human civilization rests on systematic violence. It would require admitting that there is no escape within existing structures—that capitalism has hijacked not just Western imperialism but every alternative to it.
Until we name this reality clearly, until we acknowledge that capitalism has hijacked our humanity completely, we will remain trapped in this nightmarish performance where everyone condemns genocide while everyone enables it. The machine will continue to feed, and we will continue to pretend that our powerlessness is a choice rather than the inevitable consequence of surrendering human agency to economic forces that recognize no moral boundaries, no political allegiances, and no human values beyond profit and growth.
The question facing our species is no longer whether capitalism can be reformed or whether alternative power blocs can challenge it. The question is whether we can free ourselves from its grip before it completes the destruction of everything we claim to value—including our own capacity for survival.
- Karim
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