Why the struggle against imperialism must be unified

A coincidence?

In Gaza, at least 63,000 Palestinians have been murdered, and 1.9 million displaced. In Sudan, hundreds of thousands dead, 15 million displaced, 8 million facing emergency or famine-level food insecurity. Both populations watch their children’s bodies consume themselves from starvation while those who claim to oppose hunger continue arming their killers. Dr. Tanya Haj-Hassan, who volunteered in both Gaza and Sudan, said: “Atrocities in Palestine, atrocities in Sudan that relate to malnutrition, that relate to famine, are a consequence of underlying structures that enable these things to happen.”

The structures she names have names themselves. Charles George Gordon. Herbert Kitchener. Arthur James Balfour. The British Empire that carved up Sudan and Palestine alike, that massacred 12,000 Sudanese at Omdurman with machine guns against spears, that promised Palestine to Zionist settlers while the land’s indigenous population had no say. In 1898, Kitchener watched through binoculars as Sudanese bodies stacked in heaps, remarked they received a “good dusting,” then retired for the day. That casual brutality, that conviction that some lives don’t register as loss, didn’t die with the British Empire. It metastasized into the system that starves Gaza and arms Sudan’s warlords today.

Both Britain and its successor empire, the United States, deliberately kept their colonies in states of dependency. In Sudan, they denied a strong centralized state, locked the economy into marginal agricultural production subordinate to British interests, deployed divide-and-rule tactics invoking racial doctrines for potency. In Palestine, they handed the land to European settlers and called it self-determination, then spent the next seventy-seven years funding Israel’s apartheid regime. The pattern is identical: fracture, extract, dominate, then leave the population to tear itself apart while you profit from the wreckage.

The UAE learned well from its Western handlers. Mohammed bin Zayed’s regime backs Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, the RSF warlord whose forces have committed widespread mass sexual violence and genocide in Sudan, while simultaneously providing a safe haven for Israeli soldiers implicated in genocide to party in Dubai. The RSF, which the UAE created through the “Khartoum Process” to serve as Europe’s border guard blocking African migrants, now uses that power to commit atrocities. Meanwhile, UAE flights to Ben Gurion airport continued throughout Gaza’s extermination, transporting materials to aid Israel even as they blocked humanitarian aid trucks for three months.

The propaganda runs parallel too. Israel calls Palestinians “terrorists” to justify genocide. The UAE calls Sudan’s military “Islamists” linked to the Muslim Brotherhood to justify backing the RSF’s slaughter. Both deploy the same tired script of framing resistance as extremism, manufacturing consent for mass murder, then claiming they’re fighting radicalism while they fund the most radical violence imaginable.

And where is the world? The UN appeal for Sudan is only 25% funded. USAID has been cut to the bone while military aid to Israel flows uninterrupted. Europe cuts humanitarian assistance to Sudan while selling weapons that end up in RSF hands. The same governments that vetoed every UN ceasefire resolution for Gaza ignore Sudan entirely, except when there’s gold to extract or a trade route to secure.

This is what Dr. Haj-Hassan witnessed driving through Sudan’s agricultural fields to treat malnourished children: “You think, how, in this modern world?” She remembered watching famine in Ethiopia as a child, thinking it was environmental, climate-driven, an act of God. “And you grow up, you mature, and you realize these things are man-made.”

Man-made, yes. But made by which men? Made by the same imperial architects who decided some populations deserve statehood and others deserve starvation. Made by the weapons manufacturers profiting from both death machines. Made by the Western powers who install dictators, arm militias, then wash their hands when the bodies pile up. Made by the UAE, which pushes divisive propaganda across the Muslim world to deter anti-imperialist struggle while collaborating with Israel to dismantle any resistance to occupation.

Some will say Gaza and Sudan are different. One is settler colonialism, the other is civil war between militias. But strip away the details and you find the same methods of violence: external powers arming local proxies, using starvation as a weapon, targeting civilians systematically, blocking humanitarian aid, then claiming the victims brought it on themselves. You find the same international “community” that could stop both “conflicts” tomorrow if it wanted to, but profits too much from the killing.

The shift in public opinion on Palestine, the hundreds of thousands marching where once there were only thousands, proves something is changing. But we cannot let Gaza’s visibility eclipse Sudan’s invisibility. The same ghost haunts both. The British Empire’s legacy of extraction and domination lives on in every blocked aid convoy, every weapons shipment, every ceasefire violated by those who never intended to honor it.

If we are to perform an exorcism, we cannot pick and choose which demons to name. Gordon and Kitchener must be condemned as prominently as Balfour. The UAE’s role in Sudan must be challenged as forcefully as Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Arms embargoes must target not just Israel but every government backing Sudan’s warlords. We must demand sanctions until complete withdrawal from occupied territory in Palestine and prosecution of war criminals in Sudan at The Hague.

Most critically, we must refuse the lie that these are separate crises requiring separate movements. Every picket line blocking arms shipments to Israel should also block weapons flowing to the RSF. Every union striking for Palestine should strike for Sudan. Every demand for accountability in Gaza must include accountability for Darfur. The solidarity cannot be selective, because the system killing both populations is not selective in who it devours.

The world tried to teach us that compassion is finite, that we can only care about one injustice at a time, that attention is scarce. But rage is abundant. Solidarity is infinite. And the connections between these struggles are not abstract theoretical exercises. They are material facts written in weapons shipments and bank transfers and diplomatic cables.

Until we dismantle this system entirely, until we break the supply chains of death that connect Tel Aviv to Khartoum to London to Washington, the pattern will repeat. New populations. Same ghosts. Same graves.

Until Complete liberation – Nothing less will do.

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