Authored by Kamal Aarif Kamaruddin, Reviewed by Aarani Diana Santhananaban, All photos are provided by GEGAR.
Since October 7th – which remains one of the greatest acts of decolonisation by an occupied population in modern history – I joined the millions of people across the world who, out of a sense of moral and historical urgency, became radicalised into joining the mass actions against the ongoing genocide in Palestine.
Along with a few fellow comrades, we formed Gegar Amerika, later known as GEGAR (Gerakan Gabungan Anti-Imperialis), – a progressive, anti-imperialist and anti-zionist collective united for the liberation of Palestine.
We slept in tents for 7 days outside of the U.S. embassy; defended the encampment against police and state authorities; joined hundreds in staging a sit-in against the police for its defence of the U.S. embassy in January 2024, and got called into questioning by the police for organising a protest against the NATSEC military exhibition in May 2024, which hosted the biggest sponsors of the genocide including Lockheed Martin, BAE Systems, and Leonardo.
On June 10th last year, we disrupted the U.S. National Independence Day Dinner in KL, which hosted the U.S. Embassy while hundreds were being massacred in a joint US-Israeli operation in Nuseirat refugee camp.
Since then, we continued to organise direct actions against complicit Western imperialist embassies and zionist corporations; from PNB and Sime Darby’s ties to Caterpillar to the starvation campaigns waged by Israel, America, U.K.,, and European Union against Gaza.
Yet, as we near the eve of Hari Kebangsaan and Hari Malaysia, the Malaysian government and its institutions, in spite of its nationalistic and superficially pro-Palestinian rhetoric, continues to serve and enforce the agenda of its imperialist masters.
After 2 years of being on the frontlines against genocide, it is clear that the question of Palestine is no longer just a struggle against a 77-year old zionist occupation. In the heart of Malaya, it is also a struggle against the oppressive neo-colonial state in Putrajaya, which upholds the interests of Washington and its Western allies, while oppressing workers and Indigenous peoples at home.
Our solidarity as Malaysians falls flat as long as we refuse to confront a basic but uncomfortable reality: that until Malaysia breaks away from the forces of U.S. imperialism, we are and continue to be complicit in the U.S.-Israeli death machine. We have been and are still enabling the genocide of Palestinians.
Recently, in July 2025, the Malaysian military hosted U.S. and Australian armed forces in Perak, as the Western-imperialist war machine actively committed genocide and mass murder across Palestine, Yemen, Lebanon, Iran, and Global South. Not only does it partner us in genocide: it invites the presence of war criminals in our communities; polluting our environment and neighbourhoods with tanks, fighter jets, and armed trucks, muddying our moral standards, and tainting our obligations to the oppressed.
Meanwhile, next year, in 2026, the Royal Malaysian Navy will participate in the bi-annual RIMPAC naval exercise in Hawaii alongside the imperialist America and zionist state of Israel. The RIMPAC exercises is a microcosm of capitalism’s murderous tendencies: the fascist militaries of the global ruling class gather in the Pacific to exchange the technologies, tactics, and strategies that they have gained from waging wars and counterinsurgencies against poor and oppressed bodies around the globe.
Not only does our navy participate in a military exercise alongside genocidal forces, but activists in Okinawa and Hawa’ii have long protested the RIMPAC exercises for its destruction of Indigenous lands, contamination of air and water, and sexual and patriarchal violence against Indigenous women, girls, queer and gender-diverse people.
After 2 years of boycotts and rallies, it is clear that the Malaysian state remains firmly loyal to the forces of Capital and Empire. The same government that shook hands with Ismail Haniyeh has no qualms joining forces with the zionist army bombing patients in Al-Shifa and massacring hundreds in a single 10-minute operation in Nuseirat.
Meanwhile, global corporations, financing the genocide have further entrenched their neo-colonialist interests in Malaysia. In July 2024, as humanitarian zones in Mawasi were relentlessly bombed, a joint consortium led by Khazanah, EPF, Abu Dhabi Investment, and Blackrock acquired shares of Malaysian Airport Holdings Berhad (MAHB), handing control of 39 Malaysian airports to the Blackrock monopoly.
Blackrock is a major sponsor of the ongoing genocide in Gaza, funding American weapons manufacturers such as Lockheed Martin Corp., Boeing Co, Raytheon Co, General Dynamics Corp, and Northrop Grumman Corp. For decades, Blackrock has funded America’s overseas wars of aggression, The cumulative death toll from the post-9/11 wars of counterterrorism has reached over 4.5 million in Syria, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, and Yemen in what could only be considered a modern Holocaust.
As it spreads war and devastation across the globe, Blackrock has maintained a monopolistic grip over the Malaysian economy; owning equity shares in hundreds of firms including Simes Darby, Petronas, Tenaga Nasional, and more. Since the past decade, Blackrock has played an increasingly influential role in almost every aspect of working-class life in Malaysia from EPF pensions to healthcare to “Syariah-compliant” banking.
Meanwhile, in its drive to secure financial investments from Western imperialist entities, Anwar’s government is pushing for the construction of Microsoft and Google cloud infrastructure and data centres across Malaysia, exploiting our environment, and polluting our land, water, and air. In allowing our resources to be colonised by Western tech giants, Malaysia becomes an integral link in a long imperialist supply chain from the mining and exploitation of minerals in the Congo and Bolivia, to the supply of digital infrastructure and services for Israeli and American war criminals.
In an age of global Western domination and militarist wars, Lenin’s hypothesis on imperialism remains apt. Under imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism, the dominant form manifests through financial capital. Powerful financial institutions like Blackrock transfer wealth from the colonised nations upwards to the ruling American oligarchy; destroying the planet, people, and land in the process.
This system of unequal exchange between the Global South and Global North – where financial capital and trade are monopolised by American oligarchs like Blackrock – is maintained by a global archipelago of U.S. military bases, prisons, and CIA-run torture sites; reinforced through military exercises like Keris Strike and RIMPAC, which are prepared to wage war and genocide against any colonised population that dares to fight back against capitalism.
Our eagerness to collaborate with Western imperialists, as Palestine is fighting a war of liberation against the same global superpowers, reflects the state’s betrayal of our solidarity with the Global South and our complicity as junior partners in Western imperialism.
As Fanon notes in the Wretched of the Earth, in the advent of formal independence, colonisation does not cease but is merely refashioned by the ascendant ruling class to secure their material interests within the newly independent polity. In the absence of the coloniser class, the post-colonial bourgeoisie reproduces the colonial relations of extraction and exploitation against its own subaltern populations; adopting the consciousness, tactics, and tools of their previous colonial oppressors.
Thus, the same neo-colonial state collaborating with the US-Israeli war machine and openly shaking hands with American genocidaires at luxury dinner parties is dismantling our public healthcare systems at the behest of the IMF, building megamalls and skyscrapers through the exploitation of migrant workers, displacing Orang Asli for logging concessions, and burning the homes of thousands of stateless Bajau Laut in Sabah for a glorified tourist resort – all to drive profits and attract investments so that we can secure our place in the global “developed” oppressor class.
The controversies over Malaysian institutional complicity with America and Israel mark a fundamental rift in the political conscience of Malaysians, one that has become a moral litmus test between genuine supporters of Palestine and its detractors: between those seeking genuine liberation and sovereignty from Western imperialist hegemony, and those demanding submission, capitulation and accommodation with the forces of Empire.
Careerist politicians, mainstream NGOs, and opportunists who have only latched onto the Palestinian cause for political expediency have made their true stance clear: that when the conversation on Palestine shifts from the vague lens of “humanitarianism” to the broader issue of American and Western imperialism in the Global South, their material interests overwhelmingly align with that of Empire.
In the words of our own defence minister – when confronted for hosting zionist weapons manufacturers at the NATSEC military expo in May 2024 – the supremacy of the free market reigns over the mass graves of Palestinians.
Our moral duty to support the colonised – despite once being occupied by British imperialism ourselves – is inferior to, for example, 80 million dollar deals with Lockheed Martin and BAE Systems for AN/AAQ-33 Sniper Advanced Targeting Pods.
There is an increasingly prevalent refrain by so-called progressives, that Malaysia, and by extension, Malaysians, somehow unconditionally support Palestinian liberation but fail to express sufficient solidarity when it comes to every other “humanitarian” cause. While true in Malaysia’s largely racialised and reactionary context, the genocide of Palestinians has become a convenient heuristic cynically instrumentalized by middle-class liberals, who are not normally concerned with anti-colonial liberation, to lazily drum up support for a neglected progressive cause, or expose the hypocrisy of their perceived political opponents without actually doing the work of building solidarity with the oppressed. Not only is this dehumanising to Palestinians going through an ongoing Nakba, it undermines any effort to build a collective movement for the liberation of the Global South.
This prevalent rhetoric, often adopted as truth without question, does not hold up to reality within a neocolonial and imperialist context. In truth, the symbols, discourses, and language of Palestinian liberation are merely appropriated, sanitised, and co-opted by the ruling elite and capitalist companies to preserve their cultural hegemony amidst growing anti-US, anti-zionist sentiments.
What is perceived as Malaysia’s support for the Palestinian cause is in fact the weaponisation of the Palestinian struggle by right-wing ethnonationalist groups to mobilise support for fascist racial and religious ideologies; crushing the potential for genuine progressive, inclusive anti-imperialist formations, while defanging the true dimensions of the Palestinian struggle as an overarching resistance to the U.S. imperialist war machine. Meanwhile, under the invisible hand of the free market, almost every single institution in Malaysia continues to maintain material ties with corporate giants and military entities supporting apartheid and genocide.
Decolonisation is not a metaphor. It cannot be substituted by the rhetoric of bourgeois politicians or the cynical co-optation of revolutionary Palestinian symbols by the elites, private corporations, racial and religious supremacists, and liberal non-profit industry. Decolonisation demands something much greater than us – a concrete commitment to a radical politic – which ultimately strives for the abolition of all forms of exploitation, colonisation, and oppression in the quest for genuine socialism and democracy.
The struggle against the United States, Western corporations, and RIMPAC naval exercises is therefore no longer just about Gaza: it is a struggle for our collective humanity against an empire which only brings death and destruction to its global neo-colonies.
It is a struggle against a capitalist system which plunders the Earth for the profit of a few multinational oligarchies; undermining our economic sovereignty while exploiting our wealth, labour, and resources to fund genocides and wars abroad.
It is a struggle against the complicity of every single neo-colonial institution in Malaysia; from the police to the armed forces to the government, who exchange weapons with zionist arms manufacturers and train alongside American and Israeli military forces while paying lip service to the Palestinian cause.
As Gaza becomes the graveyard of its occupiers, and the global divide between the colonised and coloniser becomes ever more clear, Malaysia is presented with a choice: either stand with the oppressed and be a part of the revolutionary Global South, or betray the fight for liberation to be a subservient client of the Euro-Atlantic order.
For me, in the past 2 years of genocide, it has never been clearer that our true heart and place belongs to the Global South.
It belongs with the Palestinian resistance in Jabalia and Beit Hanoun fighting against global superpowers with only recycled rockets and Soviet-era munitions.
It belongs with the people of Yemen who are showing the true meaning of solidarity despite being sanctioned and besieged by the entire world.
It belongs with every single soul in the Global South who has watched the televised genocide happening live in front of their eyes, and who see in the genocide of Gaza part of what the colonisers did to their own ancestors.
It belongs with all revolutionaries, past and present, from Malaya to Haiti; Algeria to Vietnam, who have fought, struggled and died for a better planet.
62 years after the formation of Malaysia, our post-colonial ruling class has accepted a compromised position within the global imperialist order in return for the scraps and bits of empire.
We divorced ourselves from the global proletarian revolution in return for their false promises of economic prosperity.
We accepted comfort, privilege, and collaboration over the revolutionary values of struggle and sacrifice.
This Hari Kebangsaan and Hari Malaysia, enough is enough: our solidarity is no longer for sale.
Malaysia’s place is in the Global South.
Malaysia’s place is in the Resistance.
This piece was co-published with GEGAR, a progressive youth-led movement which aims to build a united multicultural and transnational front in Malaysia against Zionism and U.S. imperialism; condemning U.S. interventionist aggression in the Global South centering the liberation of Palestine and with liberation struggles across the Majority World.
You can find them on Instagram (@gegaramerika) or Twitter (@GEGAR_official) or their official website (Gegar.org)