The gruesome face of empire was on full display in Jerusalem on Monday 13 October as US President Donald Trump addressed Israel’s Knesset for over an hour. He cast the Gaza war as a triumph, lobbied for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s pardon, flaunted private wealth as an engine of U.S. policy, and spoke of peace as a prize for the powerful.

“You’ve won,” Trump told Israeli lawmakers. “Now it’s time to translate these victories… into the ultimate prize of peace.” He boasted of his debt to the Adelsons for his decision to recognise the divided city of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and support Israeli control over the occupied Golan Heights — “Miriam and Sheldon … they’d call me … she’s got sixty billion in the bank” — as if money were a legitimate tool of democracy and diplomacy. He called the destruction of Gaza “the historic dawn of a new Middle East.”

The Knesset speech, bursting with hubris and entitlement, was a declaration of imperial logic in its rawest form: the conflation of military domination, financial power, and the conversion of violence into virtue.

It is against this spectacle — of lawlessness proclaimed as legitimacy, of fortunes shaping foreign policy, of warfare dressed in the language of peace — that the Kuala Lumpur Conference on a New Just and Humane International Order that took place this past week must be understood. While Trump rehearsed the old order’s script of domination, Kuala Lumpur convened to imagine its overthrow.

The conference gathered ministers, scholars, and movement leaders from around the world to chart a collective response to the collapse of the so-called rules-based order. Convened by the Progressive International, Third World Network, and Polity, with the support of the Malaysian Prime Minister’s Office, the assembly sought to transform the growing moral consensus against imperial hypocrisy into a coherent political programme — in the footsteps of The Hague Group for Palestine, of which Malaysia is a founding member state.

Delegates diagnosed a system disintegrating under its own contradictions — an order that invokes law to justify domination while violating it with impunity. “Namibia is a child of international solidarity,” said Yvonne Dausab, former Minister of Justice of Namibia, calling on African states to restore “the collective power of the people” and make the AU’s reparations agenda a living project.

Malaysia’s Raja Dato’ Nurshirwan Zainal Abidin, Director-General of National Security, warned “those who are not at the table are on the table,” urging governments of the South to convert moral legitimacy into material power. Rob Davies, South Africa’s former Trade Minister, described how the North had “unilaterally abandoned the rules it imposed on us” and returned to “raw, unfiltered power.” Kinda Mohamadieh of the Third World Network cautioned that the remaking of world order “may take the form of brute power rather than multilateral practice” unless the South acts together with clarity and courage.

Alvin Botes, South Africa’s Deputy Minister of International Relations, invoked O. R. Tambo’s conviction that the liberation of one people is bound to the liberation of all. “Preventing genocide,” he said, “is a shared duty.”

PI Council Member Jeremy Corbyn declared that the existing order “was built on colonial power, sustained by economic domination, and justified as a civilising project.” The phrase “rules-based order”, he said, “means rules for others and impunity for themselves.”

He praised governments of the South — Malaysia, South Africa, Colombia, Honduras, Bolivia — for acting in defence of humanity where Western powers would not. Solidarity with Palestine and the defence of international law, he insisted, are “the moral frontier of our time.”

In his keynote address, Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim deepened the argument. Quoting Fanon, he warned that post-colonial elites risk becoming “as bankrupt as the colonisers they replaced.” “To accept injustice,” he said, “is to abandon civilisation.” Condemning the hypocrisy of leaders who preach human rights while excusing Gaza’s annihilation, he declared: “When law becomes selective, it becomes propaganda.”

In the final plenary, chaired by Varsha Gandikota-Nellutla of the Progressive International, Saleh Hijazi of the Palestinian BDS National Committee spoke of the “wary and reluctant” relief after Gaza’s latest ceasefire — each previous pause, he noted, had been followed by another massacre.

He described the killing of Jihad Jarrar, a 26-year-old Palestinian murdered by settlers on the night the ceasefire was announced, as a glimpse into the “full-force drive of ethnic cleansing and the creation of Bantustans.” The so-called peace plan, Hijazi said, should be called by its real name: “the Trump-Netanyahu genocidal plan.”

Palestinian rights, he affirmed, are inalienable; any peace without justice is merely a continuation of war. The plan arose, he warned, because Israel faces growing isolation — from grassroots movements, governments like Colombia and Malaysia, and the Hague Group translating moral outrage into political pressure. The Palestinian resistance is not alone. “What Palestinians ask,” he concluded, “is that the world continue this isolation — through boycott, divestment, and sanctions — until apartheid and genocide are dismantled.” He ended with Mahmoud Darwish: *“*Besiege your siege.”

From Kuala Lumpur, a message resounds across the Global South: the age of Western impunity is ending. The task now is not only to condemn the old order, but to build a new one — humane, moral, and grounded in equality among nations.

That project begins, as always, with solidarity.

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