Global leaders have a selective view of sovereignty. It matters, as long as it’s in their interests | Kenan Malik

SExcessive things. Except when not. This is not when the sovereignty of other people impedes the needs of your nation. Then the sovereignty (for any other country or people, at least) becomes a great dust in the storm. It is something that people can Shaghus Islands And gaza can witness.

Last year, Britain ended an agreement To deliver the Shaghous Islands to MauritiusA heat deal at the end of the history of British rule. Many of the deal’s criticism is equally inherited.

Britain was accustomed to the Archipelago of French rule in 1814 and its management from Mauritius, 1,300 miles, another colony was extracted from France. When Mauritius gained independence in 1968, Britain retained the Shaghus Islands itself, after it reconfigured it as a new colony – the “British Indian Ocean region”. “The primary goal”, according to a secret government note, was to ensure that “it could be used to build defense facilities” – especially an American naval base on the island of Diego Garcia – and “to be able to wipe it from its current inhabitants” without confronting “Political incitementBritain had, according to the lawyer for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, “preserving the imagination that the Shaghus residents are not permanent or semi -permanent population,” because otherwise, their democratic rights must be protected. By 1973, Britain was placed, where Britain was forced to leave all the Shaghusi, who were exiled to a life in Mauritius and Sishle, with a large number of ends in Britain.

Under a process that started before Conservatives in 2022 It ends by the Labor Party, Britain will now transfer sovereignty from the islands to Mauritius, with the exception of Diego Garcia, the home of the American military base. This will remain under the control of the United Kingdom, according to the 99 -year lease agreement, which Britain will make It seems that paying 90 million pounds per year.

People who did not have an opinion on all this are CHAGOSSIANS themselves, and who were brought to the islands as slaves and professional workers, who were forced after liberation to work on farms Under the “feudal” systemIn the words of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, it is forbidden to possess any property (which allowed Britain to preserve the imagination that they were not a permanent population), and they were forcibly deported to poverty, and they are now handed over to Mauritius, a country they faced Discrimination and poor treatment. The Shaghousi activist Rosie Levik also noted: “The same states who dealt with my family, such as goods, are negotiated again on the future of our society without involving The actual society itself“

The failure to consult Chagossians has been captured by critics of the Mauritius deal. For most critics, it is a simple issue, compared to their real anxiety, “a self -blow to UK security and Strategic interestsHe also presented the recent policy exchange report. Foreign Minister, Foreign Minister David Lami, said: “We have just handed over British sovereign lands to a small island state that is an ally of China.” In his interests he believes that he serves: international diplomatic elite banks or the interests of the British people Our national interest? “

On both sides of the debate about whether British or Mauritanian sovereignty should prevail over Shaghus, the rights of Shagusians are greatly ignored. This selective interest in sovereignty is not unique. Looking at Gaza. There is something after politics in the twenty -first century Donald Trump’s plan To bring peace to the Middle East by “transporting” the Palestinians in Gaza and turning a mass grave to a holiday complex.

It is tempting to reject this as a very coherent thing, which is the view of the “first America” ​​that the narcissistic poles enjoy. However, it is an argument that speaks to the deeper vein of contemporary thinking. For Trump, the relationship of the Palestinians Gaza It is transactions. Gaza is not a “home” for those who live there, nor Palestine for the Palestinians. They can live anywhere because they do not have any collective national identity.

It is a view that interlocking Israeli politicians adopted, from Benjamin Netanyahu to Itamar Bin Ghafir. “There is nothing like the Palestinian nation. The Minister of Finance in Israel, Bezallil Smotrich, insisted“ there is no Palestinian history. ”Palestinian nationalism is artificial, manages the argument, while the Jewish claim to the land is deeply rooted in a history of thousands of years. The Palestinian identity, note. The historian Rashid Khalidi, like all identities, whether Jewish, American, or English, is not a fundamental transcendent, but it was “built”, and it develops over time, and the assimilation of different strands. It has been re -formulated several times over the past century, especially in response to the formation of the state of Israel.

The aspirations of the Palestinians and Jews can be embodied in two states, with equal powers, or through one country with equal status and rights for both peoples. Today, despite this, the Palestinians live either as citizens in a state, according to the law of the Israeli nation -state, “the right to exercise the determination of the national destiny … unique to the Jewish people”, and a place, as he put it in the previous Minister of Justice, Ayleet Shaked, must Preserving the Jew “even if it was so Rights violateOr under occupation in the West Bank; or, until the current war, everything except the occupation in Gaza.

The deprivation of the legitimacy of Palestinian aspirations as a people makes the “transition”-the ethnic cleansing-for the Palestinians acceptable, as well as the destruction of Gaza in the first place, in the name of “self-defense”. Former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Mir also claimed about half a century ago, because the Palestinians “were not present” as a people, could not be “we took out, took them and took us. Their country is far from them“.

It is true that, even with the brutality and humiliation they face, the Palestinians are better in light of the Israeli rule than Jews in Palestine, run by Hamas. This is not an argument, though, to restore Palestinian rights or reject their aspirations. From the Shaghous Islands to Gaza, sovereignty discussions are about to deprive some peoples as far as they are about to confirm one allocating.