So, you call yourself anti-imperialist?

The UN doesn’t work for the ancient peoples of our world. This is the case for why Israel should work with them to build an alternative.

Assyrian Christians, who fled the unrest in Syria and Iraq, attend a prayer for the 220 Assyrian Christians abducted by Islamic State jihadists from villages in northeastern Syria in recent days, at the Saint Georges Assyrian Church in Jdeideh, northeast of the Lebanese capital Beirut, on February 26, 2015. (photo credit: AFP/Anwar Amro)

(First published on the Times of Israel and edited since)

There are few things more natural than celebrating the upcoming Jewish holiday of Sukkot in Israel. There is no better example than the holiday to describe why the Jews are indigenous to this land. As my father Itzhak Beery points out, an indigenous people can be identified by three markers: first, their cosmology or spirituality is defined by a particular natural body (a mountain or river, for example). Second, their annual calendar is determined by the seasons of the region surrounding that natural body. Third, their holidays celebrate the seasonal shifts experienced in that place. Hearing the antizionists make claims against Jewish indigeneity as we celebrate the holiday of Sukkot – an ancient pilgrimage to our holy mountain to mark the grape harvest – shows how anti-indigenous antizionism has become.

That antizionism has been adopted by the rank and file of the United Nations is, unfortunately, to be expected. The UN was an imperialist organization from the beginning. It was built around the bipolar reality of the post-World War II era, with spheres of influence fought over by the then-powers of the USA and USSR. In the 1970s, following the oil boycott started by the Arab States as a weapon of war against Israel, oil money captured the UN’s agenda and agencies. Since then, The UN — a body purportedly meant to represent the interests of humanity — delayed any actual action to end our reliance on petrochemicals, perpetuating climate collapse.

With China’s rise as a global manufacturing superpower in the 2000s, the power dynamic settled into the pattern we see today: three main global blocks, all representing imperialist powers, none of which have any patience for pesky indigenous peoples like the Jews, like the Kurds, like the Tibetans, and their unwillingness to accept their place as subjects of this new world order.

Enough. Israel should make it a national mission to make common cause with other indigenous peoples. Practically, Israel should start by building a block in international bodies committed to solidarity against imperialist overreach. Other contemporary nation-states representing ancient peoples and their traditions — India, Ethiopia, Korea, Ecuador, and non-state peoples such as the Kurds, Assyrians, Nubians — have only to gain.

Because the current international system doesn’t only target Israel, it targets all of the indigenous peoples threatened by resource rich member states and their proxies.

The abject failure of the United Nations’s agencies UNRWA and UNIFIL to create the conditions for, or keep the peace with, Israel are indeed infuriating. Each had literally one job – to build up Palestinian self-reliance, to keep Southern Lebanon demilitarized. Each failed spectacularly. Many will die because of their irresponsibility.

Yet Israel is far luckier than the myriad other peoples recently failed by the UN in the Levant alone: the Kurds, the Assyrians, the Yazidi, the Maronites, a bit farther out in far larger numbers, the Nubian Sudanese, the Baloch, Uighurs. All still butchered and burned.

Instead of disengaging from the UN in response to its campaigns against Israel, campaigns funded by the oil-money backed Islamic alliance, I propose we push back. I propose Israel work to build an alliance of the ancients and work to create an old-new world order, one founded on the principle of self-determination at the heart of Zionism. A global coalition aimed at fighting against imperialism, erasing the arbitrary borders imposed by history, devoted to empowering old-new political communities celebrating pluralism and committed to the right to cultural autonomy.

What should be the agenda of such a block? To create a pluralistic world. And to achieve that, the top priority of the alliance should be to free the world from oil and the centralized industrial civilization it has built.

Petrochemicals have for too long fueled indigenous oppression. Until we free the world from oil, we will be enslaved to those powers who pump it and sell it and concentrate manufacturing to take advantage of economies of scale from using it. Ending the reign of oil will usher in a new era of distributed production, an era where the local will no longer be enslaved to the global.

To counter imperialist attempts to end Israel, Israel should lead a robust alternative to the earth-destroying industry oppressing so many indigenous peoples today. Israel can create this future by forming a climate-first manufacturing alliance of the ancients committed to the next industrial revolution, one marked by regenerative technology, decentralized manufacturing.

Yes, this will necessitate Israel face the hypocrisy of ruling over another people who does not want to be part of our cultural revival. Even if the Palestinians are not an ancient people with ancient traditions, they do not identify with our collective, and most do not intend to follow the path of Jews in the Diaspora and become loyal minority citizens within a majority culture. For Israel to lead the formation of an Old-New World Order, it must stop carrying that weight and devote itself to the Zionist value of self-determination for all residents of the land.

Instead of just complaining about the mendacity of the UN and the failure of the international community to stand up for the values it professes, we should act to disrupt it. We are the case study for the revival of the ancients, and we have the technology to lead the charge against petrochemical based industry.

We should start by building an alliance of the ancients to stand in solidarity with each-others right to self-determination, and create an alternative industrial system to break the chains of the oil-backed players. We should do it because Israel is in a no-win situation in the current international order. But if doing it for ourselves is not enough motivation, we should do it for them: those indigenous peoples whose on-going oppression does not make the front pages of the New York Times.