NPP Government’s shamelessness over Gaza

What is glaring, however, is just how completely the NPP has capitulated

By Swasthika Arulingam and Pasan Jayasinghe

Among the hopes many had for the NPP Government when it was elected one year ago was that it would move Sri Lanka to actually opposing the devastating genocide Israel was carrying out against the Palestinian people in Gaza. What the NPP Government has gone on to do since then has been the opposite. A look at its positions on Palestine, its actions while in Government and its own past unearths a shamelessness which all Sri Lankans must contend with.

Dashed hopes

During his pestilent, unelected presidency, Ranil Wickremesinghe had folded Sri Lanka over completely for Israel, signing agreements to ‘export’ Sri Lankan workers, opening new consulates in Israel, and embarrassingly, supporting US Red Sea naval operations against the Houthis. The newly elected Government, however, was comprised of some of the most vocal supporters of Palestine in Sri Lanka. The JVP, the NPP’s main constituent party, had consistently condemned Israeli aggression against Palestinians, including after this latest phase of genocide began in October 2023. It was not false hope to believe that they would reverse Sri Lanka’s position, even slightly.

Instead, what has transpired since then has been an appalling doubling down. Since September 2024, the Government has expanded its agreements with Israel to send over even more Sri Lankans to fill the labour shortages created by Israel’s expulsion of Palestinian workers. The Government also continues to promote Sri Lanka as a tourist destination to Israelis, including by waiving visa fees, when many of them arrive here after serving in the Israeli Defence Forces and having likely committed war crimes in Gaza. 

Jarring dissonances

The Government and its supporters argue that Sri Lanka has no choice as an economically struggling country, and that the foreign exchange generated from remittances and tourists is essential. It is sad and repugnant to sacrifice any shred of morality for the sake of ‘the economy’. But this economic logic comes at a significant cost to Sri Lankans, too: those sent to Israel face imminent danger due to Israel’s unhinged belligerence against its neighbours, seen for example with the counter-fire from Iran. Those here are harassed and even attacked by the Israelis who have transplanted themselves in tourist centres. 

Instead of protecting them, the State rather provides security to the business establishments and supposed houses of worship these Israelis have set up, often illegally. It has gone even further to prosecute multiple people under the Prevention of Terrorism Act for protesting Israel, while setting the security forces to intimidate and harass pro-Palestine protest organisers.

At the same time, the Government seems to believe that these actions are compatible with appearing to support Palestine. It has officially affirmed its support for Palestinian statehood multiple times. Senior Government Minister Bimal Ratnayake continues to serve as co-chair of the Sri Lanka Committee for Solidarity with Palestine. Other members of the Government publicly express solidarity with Palestine, some with rousing public speeches, seemingly without dissonance. It’s hard to call this position – of materially supporting a state annihilating a people while expressing tepid support for those people – anything other than shameless.

Total capitulation

The NPP Government’s position on Gaza is almost identical to its position on the IMF program, another Wickremesinghe legacy it has fully embraced. The Government and its supporters make strikingly similar arguments to defend its strict adherence to the IMF program: that its hands are tied and that a small, indebted country like ours is not in a position to bargain. The alignment of these two positions, unquestioningly following the IMF and supporting Israel, is not a coincidence. 

While this may be blasphemous to the Sri Lankan establishment, the IMF is not some politically neutral organisation that cares for Sri Lanka but one run by the US and Western countries to further their own interests. Accepting an IMF program, however reluctantly, means buying into the Western world order and all its logics. In this arrangement, to be a good citizen, or rather, a good beggar, means not only dutifully following the West’s economic rules, by inflicting austerity on people and maintaining economic subservience to the West, but also supporting its wanton militarism and destruction of people, represented most acutely by the Israeli project. Because the NPP Government has decided to accept the IMF program wholesale, it follows that it must also support the West’s geopolitical objectives, including propping up a genocidal rogue state. 

What is glaring, however, is just how completely the NPP has capitulated. It could at least not persecute its own citizens on Israel’s behalf, just as it could have attempted to renegotiate at least some basic elements of the IMF agreement, such as the Debt Sustainability Analysis. The fact that it chooses not to tells us simply that it has given up on Sri Lanka being a non-aligned state, let alone an anti-imperialist one, just as it has given up on developing a productive economy and any economic sovereignty, without even trying. 

After signalling this surrender, to then turn around and pretend to support Palestine is what makes the NPP’s stance truly shameless. Perhaps as an indebted and powerless third world country, we really cannot have any dignity – to have any economic independence and to oppose imperialist, genocidal violence – and must instead endanger and persecute our own citizens to signal our submission. That we had to learn this lesson from the JVP is ironic on so many levels. 

The silences that speak

In the end, that the Government is this shameless should perhaps not be too surprising given its past. The JVP loudly beat the drums of war during the last stages of the war in Sri Lanka, pressing for a “military solution”. For years after, its members boasted about pushing the Mahinda Rajapaksa government to not halt using heavy weapons and aerial shelling. The brutalities the Sri Lankan Government inflicted on Tamils in the Vanni 16 years ago under these auspices, including bombing hospitals and herding people into ‘safe zones’ before shelling them, are not at all dissimilar to what Israel is inflicting on Palestinians in Gaza today. This is also not to ignore the wider dynamics of occupation, colonisation and discrimination Sri Lanka practices as a State in parallel with and emulation of Israel. 

The Government’s position about the JVP’s role in the war has been to not speak of it and hope it goes away, just as it no doubt hopes Israel would wrap up its genocide of Palestinians quickly. But its actions speak beyond its silence, in both Sri Lanka and in Palestine. For two years, we have watched the most horrifying, barbaric violences being inflicted on Palestinians, a relentless series of atrocities each more unimaginable than the last. Every day, images of lifeless, destroyed Palestinian bodies fill our screens as emaciated others beg for help to survive. It should fill us all with deep shame that we have not been able to stop any of this. It should fill all Sri Lankans with as deep a shame to have a Government as shameless as this.