December
30, 2023
There
is nothing humanitarian about bombing trapped civilians in Gaza, turning their
tiny prison enclave into rubble, reminiscent of earthquake disaster zones but
this time an entirely man-made catastrophe.
In
a popular British comedy sketch set during the Second World War, a Nazi officer
near the front lines turns to a fellow officer and, in a moment of sudden—and
comic—self-doubt, asks: “Are we the baddies?”
For
many of us, it has felt like we are living through the same moment, extended
for nearly three months—though there has been nothing to laugh about.
Western
leaders have not only backed rhetorically a genocidal war by Israel on Gaza,
but they have provided diplomatic cover, weapons, and other military
assistance.
The
West is fully complicit in the ethnic cleansing of some 2 million Palestinians
from their homes, as well as the killing of more than 20,000 and the injuring
of many tens of thousands more, a majority of them women and children.
Western
politicians have insisted on Israel’s “right to defend itself” as it has
leveled critical infrastructure in Gaza, including government buildings, and
collapsed the health sector. Starvation and disease are starting to pick off
the rest of the population.
The
Palestinians of Gaza have nowhere to run, nowhere to hide from Israel’s
U.S.-supplied bombs. If they are ultimately allowed to escape, it will be into
neighboring Egypt. After decades of displacement, they will be finally exiled
permanently from their homeland.
And
as Western capitals try to justify these obscenities by blaming Hamas, Israeli
leaders allow their soldiers and settler militias, backed by the state, to
rampage across the West Bank, where there is no Hamas, attacking and killing
Palestinians.
In
defending Gaza’s destruction, Israeli leaders have reached readily for an
analogy with the allies’ firebombing of German cities like Dresden—apparently
unembarrassed by the fact that these were long ago acknowledged as some of the
worst crimes of the Second World War.
Israel
is waging an old-style, unabashed colonial war against the native population—of
the kind that predates international humanitarian law. And Western leaders are
cheering them on.
Are
we sure we are not the baddies?
Slave
Revolt
Israel’s
attack on Gaza provokes revulsion from so many because it seems impossible to
rationalize it. It feels like a reversion. It lays bare something primitive and
ugly about the West’s behavior that has been obscured for more than 70 years by
a veneer of “progress,” by talk about the primacy of human rights, by the
development of international institutions, by the rules of war, by claims of
humanitarianism.
Yes,
these claims were invariably bogus. Vietnam, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya,
and Ukraine were all sold based on lies. The true goal of the U.S., and its
NATO sidekicks, was plundering the resources of others, maintaining Washington
as the global top dog, and enriching a Western elite.
But
importantly, the deception was sustained by an overarching narrative that
dragged along many Westerners in its wake. Wars were to counter the threat of
Soviet communism, or Islamic "terror," or a renewed Russian
imperialism. And as a positive corollary, these wars claimed to be liberating
oppressed women, protecting human rights, and fostering democracy.
None
of that narrative overlay works this time.
There
is nothing humanitarian about bombing trapped civilians in Gaza, turning their
tiny prison enclave into rubble, reminiscent of earthquake disaster zones but
this time an entirely man-made catastrophe.
Even
Israel does not have the gall to claim to be liberating the women and girls of
Gaza from Hamas as it kills and starves them. Nor does it pretend to be
interested in democracy promotion. Rather, Gaza is full of “human animals” and
must be “flattened.”
And
it has been all but impossible to make Hamas, a group of a few thousand
fighters penned into Gaza, appear a credible threat to the West’s way of life.
Hamas
cannot send any kind of warhead into Europe, let alone in 45 minutes. Their
prison camp, even before its destruction, was never the plausible heart of some
Islamist empire ready to overrun the West and subject it to "Sharia
law."
In
fact, it has been barely feasible to refer to these past weeks as a war. Gaza
is not a state, it has no army. It has been under occupation for decades and
under siege for 16 years—a blockade in which Israel has counted the calories
allowed in to maintain low-level malnutrition among Palestinians.
As
the American Jewish scholar Norman Finkelstein has noted, Hamas’ breakout on 7
October is better understood not as a war but as a slave revolt. And like slave
rebellions throughout history—from Spartacus’ against the Romans to Nat
Turner’s in Virginia in 1831—it was inevitably going to turn brutal and bloody.
Are
we on the side of the murderous prison guards? Are we arming the plantation
owners?
Mass
Gaslighting
In
the absence of a persuasive justification for assisting Israel in its genocidal
campaign in Gaza, our leaders are having to wage a parallel war on the Western
public—or at least on their minds.
To
question Israel’s right to exterminate Palestinians in Gaza, to chant a slogan
calling for Palestinians to be free of occupation and siege, to want equal
rights for all in the region—these are now all treated as the equivalent of
antisemitism.
To
demand a cease-fire to stop Palestinians dying under the bombs is to hate Jews.
The
extent to which these narrative manipulations are not only abhorrent but
themselves constitute antisemitism should be obvious, were we not being so
relentlessly and thoroughly gaslit by our ruling class.
Those
defending Israel’s genocide suggest that it is not just Israel’s ultra-right
government and military but all Jews who will the destruction of Gaza, the
ethnic cleansing of its population, and the murder of thousands of Palestinian
children.
That
is the real Jew hatred.
But
the path to this mass gaslighting operation has been paved for a while. It
began long before Israel’s levelling of Gaza.
When
Jeremy Corbyn was elected Labour leader in 2015, he brought for the first time
a meaningful anti-imperialist agenda to the heart of British politics. And as a
staunch supporter of Palestinian rights, he was viewed by the establishment as
a threat to Israel, a critically important U.S. client state and the lynchpin
of the West’s projection of military might into the oil-rich Middle East.
Western
elites were bound to respond with unprecedented hostility to this challenge to
their forever war machine. This appears to have been duly noted by Corbyn's
successor, Keir Starmer, who has since made sure to present Labour as NATO’s
number one cheerleader.
During
Corbyn’s tenure, little time was lost by the establishment in working out the
best strategy for putting the Labour leader permanently on the back foot and
undermining his well-established anti-racist credentials. He was recast as an
antisemite.
The
campaign of smears not only damaged Corbyn personally but tore the Labour Party
apart, turning it into a rabble of feuding factions, eating up all the party’s
energy and making it unelectable.
Smear
Campaign
That
same playbook has now been rolled out against much of the British and U.S.
public.
This
month the House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed a resolution equating
anti-Zionism—in this case, opposition to Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza—with
antisemitism.
Protesters
who have turned out to demand a cease-fire to end the massacres in Gaza are
characterised as “rioters,” while their chant of “from the river to the sea”
calling for equal rights between Israeli Jews and Palestinians is denounced as
a “rallying cry for the eradication of the state of Israel and the Jewish
people.”
Tellingly
again, this is an inadvertent admission by the Western ruling class that
Israel—constituted as a Jewish chauvinist, settler-colonial state—can never
allow Palestinians equality or meaningful freedoms any more than apartheid
South Africa could for the native Black population.
In
a complete inversion of reality, opposition to genocide has been reframed by
U.S. politicians as genocidal.
This
mass smear campaign is so unmoored that Western elites are even turning on
their own to shut down freedoms of speech and thought in the institutions where
they are supposed to be heavily protected.
The
heads of three top U.S. universities—from which the next members of the ruling
class will emerge—were grilled by Congress about the threat of antisemitism to
Jewish students from campus protests calling for an end to the killing in Gaza.
The
West’s order of priorities was laid bare: Protecting the ideological
sensitivities of a section of Jewish students who fervently support Israel’s
right to kill Palestinians was more important than either protecting
Palestinians from genocide or defending basic democratic freedoms in the West
to oppose genocide.
The
reticence of the three university presidents to cave in to the politicians’
demands for the snuffing out of free speech and thought on campus led to a
campaign to defund their colleges as well as calls for their heads.
One,
Elizabeth Magill of the University of Pennsylvania, has already been forced out
of office.
Crisis
on All Fronts
These
developments are not the outcome of some strange, temporary, collective
psychosis overtaking Western establishments. They are yet more evidence of a
desperate failure to stop the West’s long-term trajectory towards crises on
multiple fronts.
They
are a sign, first, that the ruling class understands it is again visible to the
public as a ruling class, and that its interests are beginning to be seen as
completely divorced from those of ordinary people. The scales are falling from
our eyes.
The
simple fact that one can again use the language of “establishments,” a “ruling
class,” and “class war” without sounding unhinged or like a throwback to the
1950s is an indication of how perception management—and narrative
manipulation—so central to upholding the Western political project since the
end of the Second World War is failing. Claims about the triumph of the liberal
democratic order declared so loudly in the late 1980s by intellectuals such as
Francis Fukuyama—or “the end of history,” as he grandly termed it—now look
patently absurd.
And
that is because, second, Western elites clearly have no answers for the biggest
challenges of our era. They are floundering around trying to deal with the
inherent paradoxes in the capitalist order that liberal democracy was there to
obscure.
Reality
is breaking through the ideological cladding.
The
most catastrophic is the climate crisis. Capitalism’s model of mass consumption
and competition for the sake of competition is proving suicidal.
Limited
resources—especially in our oil-addicted economies—mean growth is proving an
ever-more costly extravagance. Those raised from birth to aspire to a better
standard of living than their parents are growing not richer, but more
disillusioned and bitter.
And
the promise of progress—of kinder, more nurturing, and equal societies—now
sounds like a sick joke to most Westerners under the age of 45.
Brew
of Lies
The
claim that the West is best is starting to look like it rests on shaky
foundations, even to Western audiences.
But
that idea crumbled long ago abroad, in the countries either devastated by the
West’s war machine or waiting for their turn. The liberal democratic order
offers them nothing except threats: It demands fealty or punishment.
Which
is the context for the current genocide in Gaza.
As
it claims, Israel is on the front lines—but not of a clash of civilizations. It
is an exposed, precarious outpost of the liberal democratic order, where the
brew of lies about democracy and liberalism are at their most toxic and
unconvincing.
Israel
is an apartheid state masquerading as “the only democracy in the Middle East.”
Its brutal occupation forces masquerade as “the most moral army in the world.”
And now Israel’s genocide in Gaza masquerades as “the elimination of Hamas.”
Israel
has always had to obscure these lies through intimidation. Anyone daring to
call out the deceptions is smeared as an antisemite.
But
that playbook has sounded grossly offensive—inhuman even—when the matter at
hand is stopping genocide in Gaza.
Where
does this ultimately lead?
Nearly
a decade ago, the Israeli scholar and peace activist Jeff Halper wrote a book,
War Against the People, warning: “In an endless war on terror, we are all
doomed to become Palestinians.”
Not
just the West’s “enemies,” but its populations would come to be seen as a
threat to the interests of a capitalist ruling class bent on its permanent
privilege and enrichment, whatever the costs to the rest of us.
That
argument—which sounded hyperbolic when he first aired it—is beginning to seem
prescient.
Gaza
is not just the front line of Israel’s genocidal war on the Palestinian people.
It is also a front line in the Western elite’s war on our ability to think
critically, to develop sustainable ways to live, and to demand that others be
treated with the dignity and humanity we expect for ourselves.
Yes,
the battle lines are drawn. And anyone who refuses to side with the baddies is
the enemy.
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