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A Hobbesian world order in the making that East Asia cannot avoid
The armed conflict in West Asia risks spilling over beyond the region, with direct ramifications in East Asia.
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Trucks carrying humanitarian aid arrive at a storage facility in Khan Yunis in the southern Gaza Strip on Oct. 21, 2023, after passing through the Rafah border crossing from Egypt. (AFP/Belal Al Sabbagh)
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s of 2023, it is estimated that there are some 1.4 billion Muslims of various persuasions in the world. With or without the war in Gaza, the lives of Muslims in their own world order have been nothing short of Hobbesian.
It was Thomas Hobbes who affirmed that without a "Leviathan", an all-powerful sovereign akin to what contemporary political scientists call, rightly or wrongly, the "state", the lives of those unprotected by a sovereign would be "short, brutish and cruel".
Wars and more wars will be a regular feature. The deaths in Gaza now stand at the highest point in 15 years, and the number will keep growing.
This is the reality of being born in the wrong part of the Muslim world. There is very low regard for the human security, let alone the human rights, of Muslim residents in Gaza and by extension, the West Bank under the rule of the Palestinian Authority (PA).
While the barbarism of Hamas and the Palestine Islamic Jihad on Oct. 7 in Israel cannot be excused, and granted that two wrongs do not make a right, that is precisely the milieu from which they grew up: a society marked by constant social political and economic convulsions, an environment that is totally oppressive and toxic, where bombings and human butchery are the norm.
While Israel was enjoying its olive trees, a figure close to 70 percent of the 2.2 million population in Gaza, even those who do not support Hamas, still live in abject and permanent squalor.
Indeed, one research on Palestinian suicide bombers has found that half of them come from backgrounds where their homes had been stripped down. This happens in Gaza and the West Bank alike.
