Palestine is often treated as a stand-alone tragedy, a domestic war executed as exceptionally complicated, sensitive, or disinterested in the daily lives of people in the rest of the world. This is not only misleading, but it is also politically convenient to read. Palestine, when considered in the context of ecological disasters in Southeast Asia and political coercion in Latin America, seems not to be a unique exception, but a more general global phenomenon. Deforestation-induced floods in Sumatra, the long-lasting war and militarized extraction in Gaza, the political interference in the resource-rich Venezuela, all these crises are various manifestations of the same underlying order a global capitalist one that manages to survive thanks to extractivism and organised violence.

The massive flood disaster that recently hit Sumatra island, Indonesia, can be a real case study of this statement. According to the latest data, about a thousand people were killed, thousands more were injured, and nearly a million people were forced to evacuate. As Bobby Ciputra (2025) writes, the major floods in Sumatra are not sudden natural events, but the accumulation of two decades of systematic forest destruction. Every year, hundreds of thousands of hectares of primary forest are converted into oil palm plantations, mining concessions, and the pulp-paper industry. Until now, an average of more than 200,000 hectares of Indonesia’s forests are lost every year, exacerbated by the existence of 1,907 active mining business permits that have turned around 2.45 million hectares of forest—which should have served as a natural water absorber—turned into barren land owned by corporations.

Thus, the main actors behind this destruction are not extreme weather, but large corporations and agribusiness conglomerates, while communities bear the consequences in the form of floods, landslides, and the destruction of lives. Ironically, the North demands that Indonesia protect the “lungs of the world” and provide carbon credits, while their banks and markets continue to finance deforestation and import commodities from deforestation—a form of climate colonialism wrapped in green rhetoric (Ciputra, 2025).

When ecological disasters in Sumatra, the Amazon, or Central Africa are read side by side with what happened in Gaza, it becomes clear that the destruction is not a geographical coincidence, but a different expression of the same economic-political system. Contemporary global capitalism works primarily through what Eduardo Gudynas (2019) calls extractivisms: a mode of appropriation that takes nature and social life on a large scale for global markets, while systematically removing the social and ecological impacts from economic calculations. Extractivism is not continuous production, but rather dispossession—draining what exists, then moving to other territories when the destruction has been abandoned.

It is at this point that Jason W. Moore’s thinking helps explain why the ecological devastation in Southeast Asia is inseparable from the war in the Middle East. In Capitalism in the Web of Life, Moore (2015) asserts that capitalism does not survive primarily through market production alone, but rather through the creation of Cheap Nature, a continuous flow of cheap food, cheap energy, cheap raw materials, and cheap labor. Capitalism’s law of value, Moore writes, is essentially the law of Cheap Nature: a gravitational field that forces the system to constantly seek new territories to appropriate nature and social life at the lowest possible cost.

Within this framework, the expulsion of indigenous peoples in Sumatra, the Amazon, or India is not an aberration, but rather a structural necessity. Capitalism survives by opening  the frontiers of appropriation—territories that are “opened” through violence, colonialism, and the destruction of old social-ecological relations. Nature, local communities, and unpaid labor are reduced to cheap inputs so that capital accumulation can continue.

Crucially, Moore emphasizes the difference between exploitation and appropriation. Commodified labor is exploited; While most people and nature outside the labor market, such as women, indigenous peoples, ecosystems, and social life, are appropriated. Any exploitation of labor, Moore writes, depends on a much greater appropriation of unpaid labor and energy. In other words, capitalism can only work if most of the work and life are not recognized as values.

The current events in Venezuela also demonstrate a way extractivism is functioning not only based on ecological destruction and war, but also by direct political force. The kidnapping of President Nicolas Maduro by the United States, which was couched in the terms of the law enforcement and democracy, could not be divested of the large strategic resources that Venezuela possesses (oil, gas, and valuable minerals). In other extractive frontiers, sovereignty is also dispensed when a territory is difficult to integrate into the systems of world capital. Political destabilization, sanctions, and current direct intervention are the means of appropriate, which are directed toward re-opening the access to cheap energy and strategic resources. Venezuela is therefore partnering with Gaza and Sumatra as another location of violence mobilization to regain extractive access, proving that global capitalism extracts not only nature and labour, but political autonomy itself.

This extractive logic also finds its most brutal form in war. Gaza is a zone of extraction of the conflict. If in Sumatra what is extracted is wood and land, in Gaza what is extracted is the conflict itself—as a source of economic, technological, and geopolitical value. Civil infrastructure was systematically destroyed: hospitals, schools, water and electricity networks were knocked out. This destruction was then marketed as proof of the effectiveness of military technology and a “battle-tested” surveillance system.

Antony Loewenstein (2023), in The Palestine Laboratory, shows how Gaza functions as a living laboratory for the global security industry. The technology tested on Palestinians is exported to various parts of the world. Companies such as Elbit Systems, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman, and Boeing became major suppliers not only to Israel, but also to the United States and other regimes. Elbit’s drones were first used in Gaza and then tested on the U.S.-Mexico border, where migrants and indigenous peoples are treated as a threat to be monitored, controlled, and even killed.

Gudynas helps us see how extractivism works concretely through state-facilitated seizures of territory, nature, and life. Jason W. Moore takes us deeper, showing that the deprivation is not an aberration, but rather the legal foundation of capitalism’s own values. In this framework, the forests of Sumatra and the lives of Gazans are not two separate tragedies, but two forms of Cheap Nature and Cheap Life that are both appropriated so that the global capitalist system can continue to function.

From the lens given by Gudynas and Moore, we can see that global capitalism is not only extracting nature, but also extracting violence. Prolonged conflict is not a failure of the system, but a condition for its continuity. Asia, Africa, and Latin America are connected in this one chain. From the cleared forests of Sumatra, the burned Amazon, the mines in Central Africa, to the bombarded Gaza, the logic is the same. Transnational capital changes locations, replacing the object of extraction, but maintains identical mechanisms: profit over life, the state as a facilitator, and violence as an instrument.

Therefore, Palestine is the most naked mirror of how global capitalism works today. Supporting Palestine is not just humanitarian solidarity, but political action against the same system that drowned villages in Sumatra, burned the Amazon, and produced endless wars in the Global South. As long as the value laws of capitalism continue to work as the laws of Cheap Nature and Cheap Life, damage, whether ecological or humanity, will continue to be reproduced in many parts of the world.

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This article draft was written in Bahasa Indonesia and translated into English using Microsoft Word Translator.

Dina Y. Sulaeman is an assistant professor at International Relations Department, Universitas Padjadjaran, Indonesia. She is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Sources

Gudynas, Eduardo. (2019). Development And Nature: Modes of appropriation and Latin American extractivisms.  In: The Routledge Handbook of Latin American Development. Eds. Julie Cupples, Marcela Palomino-Schalscha & Manuel Prieto. Routledge.

Moore, Jason W. (2015). Capitalism in the Web of Life. London: Verso

Loewenstein, Antony. (2023). The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation around the World. London: Verso.

Ciputra, Bobby. (2025). Sumatra floods show the real impact of extractive capitalism. https://www.tehrantimes.com/news/521461/Sumatra-floods-show-the-real-impact-of-extractive-capitalism

Featured image is from Kim Seidl via Shutterstock/samdiesel via iStock/Salon

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