Speakers at Sydney’s pro-Palestine rallies often begin their speeches linking the suffering of the people of Gaza to that of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians, highlighting the shared pain and the roots of resistance to colonialist occupation and ongoing oppression.

With placards and flags, protesters have now expanded their anti-imperialist, anti-colonialist condemnation beyond Israel’s ambitions in Gaza and the West Bank, to include Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Egypt, Iraq and even Türkiye. This is not as Israeli rhetoric would have you believe, in self-defence, but as part of a broader ongoing US and Western imperialist, colonialist agenda in the region we rarely read about in our mainstream media.

To what extent do these claims of a Western imperialist, colonialist agenda reflect the reality in the Middle East?

The global public no longer believes the daily slaughter of innocent Palestinian civilians is an Israeli act of self-defence. After almost two years of horrendous brutality in Gaza, the genocide and the ethnic cleansing can only be understood as a part of a bigger US and Western-endorsed dominate-and-control plan. According to an article published in The Cradle, “Goodbye ‘War on Terror’, Hello war on Arab Sovereignty”, Washington’s foreign policy agenda today “empowers Israel and dismantles Arab sovereignty across West Asia".

This is claimed to pave the way for Netanyahu and his extremist government to annex Gaza, then move on to empty and occupy the West Bank, then Lebanon and Jordan, as they have now done in Syria. Thereafter, they would move into other Arab countries and achieve the Zionist dream of Greater Israel from the river Nile to the Euphrates, it is claimed.

Today, the Zionist regime is doing exactly what its forefathers dreamed of doing: occupying and dominating without constraint, restraint or accountability. Enabled by the US and many countries in the so-called “democratic West”, Israel roams freely and bombs any country at will as has been witnessed in Lebanon, Syria, Iran and recently in Qatar. It can do this because the US has Israel’s back, arming it to the teeth and providing full cover with near total diplomatic immunity. Further military backing comes from European countries like France, providing Israel with unprecedented levels of weaponry.

You don’t have to be at Hyde Park or on Sydney’s Harbour Bridge to see, hear and feel the anger protesters express about the hypocrisy and the empty rhetoric of our Western “democracies” when it comes to Israel and human rights abuses. This extends to enforcing the international rules-based order that democracies often claim to uphold.

Protesters see our governments in the Middle East not as democracies upholding international law, but as part of the colonialist Western market-oriented “national interest” agenda of fracture, dominate and control. If this is not true, then why is the US selling weapons to Arab states in unprecedented numbers? And why do Australian manufacturers sell F-35 parts to Israel, knowing full well that they are being used to bomb and kill innocent civilians across the Middle East? “More than 75 Australian companies have contributed to the global supply chain for the F-35 program," according to the Defence Department. More than 700 critical parts of the fighter jets are manufactured in Victoria alone, according to the state government, as reported by The Guardian on 15 August 2025.

To many people at the weekly anti-war, now anti-colonialist, anti-imperialist rallies across Australia, the wars in Middle East are no longer seen as responses to claims of human rights abuses or of terrorism. They are seen as wars manufactured to create opportunities for market expansion by colonialist interests. What is shaping up in the Middle East is seen as a continuum from the colonialist agenda of the 1917 British Balfour Declaration to the 2025 Trump Gaza Riviera statement.

The establishment of the settler colonialist Zionist state, some argue, was to serve a Western imperial agenda to subjugate people of the region and to plunder their resources. Modern Zionism, as Jonathan Cook, would argue, “is a continuation of Western colonialism — the use of violence to subdue and dominate other populations, chiefly to control their resources — but with the benefit of a ‘moral’ cover story".

When Israel was created, Arab political leaders understood the strategy and saw Israel for what it was – a Western, colonial outpost. Gamal Abdel Nasser, the former Egyptian president, an Arab nationalist leader, saw Israel as a base for Western imperialism, planted to fragment Arab unity and prevent regional independence over oil and other resources as we witness today.

Today, Benjamin Netanyahu, stands defiantly at the UN podium to present to the world his greater Israel project. His brazen plan is to occupy all of historic Palestine, all of Lebanon, all of Jordan, all of Syria, all of Egypt, all of Iraq, huge swaths of Saudi Arabia and even a part of Türkiye and thus to remake a new, yet even weaker and more fractured, Middle East.

The current Arab leadership, weak, ineffective and lacking unity, has emboldened Netanyahu to begin execution of his plan starting in Gaza. It has also allowed President Donald Trump to openly speak of the ethnic cleansing of Gaza and turning the Gaza Strip into Kushner’s Riviera and South Lebanon into ‘Trump’s Economic Zone".

The US plan in Southern Lebanon is to dismantle and clear 27 Lebanese villages along the Lebanese-Israeli border and to turn them into a Gulf-run, Zionist-controlled, economic zone. Behind this land theft lies an even more sinister plan: to control and plunder Lebanon’s offshore gas fields, as well as the gas fields along the Syrian coast and the coast off Gaza.

Call it what you will, this land grab and resource theft reaffirms that the Western imperialist, colonialist hegemony in Middle East is alive and thriving.

The views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Pearls and Irritations.