How Palestine became the graveyard of Western liberalism
Western liberalism is dead. No tears will be shed on its demise.
Israel’s atrocities against the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank since October 7 have laid bare the dark heart of Western liberalism and shown it for what it really is once its rhetorical facade, which very tenuously holds its myriad contradictions, drops: an unethical, immoral paradigm that is devoid of anything other than self-referential guiding principles, which, by their very nature, are ever-changing, motivated only by expediency.
And why wouldn’t it be the case when John Stuart Mill, one of the leading lights of liberalism himself, gave the barbarism and depravity of the Israeli variety — which has been live-streamed 24/7 since October 7 — his sanction over a century ago when he wrote: “Despotism is a legitimate mode of government in dealing with barbarians.” Mill, of course, wasn’t alone in sanctioning barbarism over the non-whites. Alexis de Tocqueville, the classical liberal from France, euphemised the French depravity in North Africa as “unfortunate necessities,” writing: “I have often heard men in France whom I respect, but with whom I do not agree, find it wrong that we burn harvests, that we empty silos, and finally that we seize unarmed men, women, and children. These, in my view, are unfortunate necessities, but ones to which any people who want to wage war on the Arabs are obliged to submit.”
Israel, the physical manifestation of Western liberalism in the Middle East, is, after all, dealing with enemies who, in their framing, are worse than barbarians. The Zionists — uprooted from Europe and transplanted in the heart of the Arab world — have variously described the Palestinians as “human animals,” “Amalek,” “beasts walking on two legs,” “drugged roaches in a bottle,” and “cancer.” Not even barbarians. Anything but human.
What, then, is to stop the Israelis? Who, then, will come in their way as they go about their extermination campaign against the “beasts” and the “roaches”?
The barbarism perpetuated by the West’s liberal project is, of course, nothing new. The post-Enlightenment philosophies guiding Western liberalism turned out to be death sentences for the indigenous populations of Africa, Asia, Australia, and the Americas. In the 21st century, the direct colonisation of Palestinians — and its attendant mass extermination campaign of the natives — may appear anachronistic; still, it is just another chapter in the long history of, to quote Pankaj Mishra, “civilised Europeans [bringing] progress to uncivilised societies, using violence and coercion whenever necessary.”
As the age of direct colonialism became untenable, the West changed tack. The age of neocolonialism has seen it send its values to the third world through covert operations, orchestrated coups, mass manipulation campaigns, and downright interventions. Nevertheless, Western liberalism, propped and shielded by its own propaganda as well as by the active muzzling and defamation of contrarian systems and worldviews, managed to keep the charade of being a force for good for a lot longer than it should have.
Democracy, one of the core tenets of liberalism, even if exercised well, will only ever be acceptable to the Western liberal if it gets at the helm who it wants. As Henry Kissinger, the then-US National Security Advisor declared in the aftermath of Salvador Allende’s 1973 electoral win in Chile: “I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its people. The issues are much too important for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves.” Kissinger foisted upon the Chileans 17 years of brutal dictatorship for their crime of exercising liberal-mandated democratic rights.
In the age of growing access to information, liberal hypocrisies have become harder to shield from the wider public. The liberal world’s depravities in Afghanistan and vast swathes of other Muslim lands in the 2000s and beyond have played out in front of an increasingly horrified audience, especially in the erstwhile Western colonies.
Enter Palestine. The Israelis, carrying what the British imperialism apologist Rudyard Kipling would call “The White Man's Burden,” have fast-tracked liberalism’s hitherto slow march to its grave with their shameless and utterly depraved behaviour in historic Palestine, especially since October 7. As philosopher Hasan Spiker recently wrote: “Following on from a long chain of painful shocks, chief amongst them the War on Terror, the October 7th War constitutes the final deathblow to any vain hope of saving this flagship moral claim of liberalism from ultimate and intrinsic failure; it has, like no event before it, fully exposed liberal secular society’s much-vaunted ‘diversity’ of cultural and intellectual expression, as no more than appearance.”
While, indeed, October 7 will be a watershed moment, Palestine has long been the litmus test for Western liberalism. “I do not think we should have pushed for an election in the Palestinian territories,” declared Hilary Clinton in the aftermath of the Palestinian elections in 2006 that brought Hamas to power. “I think that was a big mistake. And if we were going to push for an election, then we should have made sure that we did something to determine who was going to win.” Palestinians’ mistake of electing the leaders of their choice, just like the Chileans in 1973, saw them pay a heavy price. They had their cage tightened, their food rationed, and their fundamental rights denied. Worse, they continued to get mowed down at the whim of the Zionists at the helm in Tel Aviv.
Non-violent resistance, another favourite of the liberals — that has seen the American state lionise Martin Luther King Jr. in contrast to his contemporary revolutionary Malcolm X, who remains a comparatively marginal, if not a reviled, figure (needless to say, it’s a faulty reading of their movements; nevertheless, both Martin and Malcolm were ultimately murdered with the complicity of the liberal state) — has also not been an option for the besieged Palestinians. The peaceful protests during the 2018-19 Great March of Return saw the Zionists murder over 200 protesters and render hundreds more handicapped for life.
The sanctions regime, which the liberal West brandishes at the states that won’t yield to its diktats, will also not be accepted — will, in fact, be criminalised — if the Palestinians adopt it. While a representative of the West can declare on TV that the active abetment of the deaths of 500,000 Iraqi children through punishing sanctions is “worth it” in its bid to bring down the leader of Iraq, the Palestinians cannot even advocate for boycotting, divesting, and sanctioning of the produce from their colonised land that effectively funds their oppression.
In effect, nothing short of Palestinians lying down and dying in the service of the settler colonial apartheid state that lords over them, oppresses them, brutalises them, and routinely kills them, will suffice in the eyes of the liberal West.
The Palestinians will be accorded no form of resistance.
What is it about Israel that sees the West drop even its pretense? To appear starkly naked in front of the whole world without displaying an iota of shame? To veto and abstain from ceasefire resolutions, as their former colonies — whom they want to adopt their secular, liberal, and democratic values — watch in horror? Spiker answers: “[I]t is precisely in constituting one of the central pillars of this hidden authoritarian foundation that the importance of Israel lies, as the aggressive emblem and bulwark of the ‘neutral’ liberal order. By ‘supporting’ Israel, the liberal order mean to say that the existence of that Nietzschean Nihilistan, that Great Secular Nothing called Israel, is a key article of their creed: Created in the heart of the Holy Land in 1948, in the aftermath of the Allies’ precious World War Two, in which they so bravely firebombed Germany into oblivion from thirty thousand feet, while more easily expendable Slavic lives finally overcame the Nazis on the ground: That War which stamped and sealed our entrance into the very anti-ethical world of post-morality that has now culminated in the October 7th War [emphasis his.]”
He continues: “Since Israel’s whole constructed existence depends upon a lie, it will fight to the death to defend that lie; and it is an ‘existential’ and hence ‘moral’ exigency for it to annihilate anyone and anything that calls out the lie. And since the United States and Britain have founded their self-definitional moral leadership of the world upon ‘saving’ the Jews from the Nazi death camps, the survival of their own moral narrative also rests upon propping up the lie, at all costs.”
Nearly 20,000 people have been brutally murdered in Gaza — and around 300 in the occupied West Bank — in just over 2 months, but Western liberalism’s bloodlust is yet to be satiated. It remains to be seen how many more Palestinian lives the West will sacrifice on the altar of its liberal deities, who, once and for all, lie buried deep in the Palestinian soil.
Make no mistake: Palestine has ripped the mask clean off the face of Western liberalism and revealed it for the barbarity that it is. How will the West recover from this unmasking? How will it sell its hypocrisy to the rest of the world again? Who will buy it?
Western liberalism is dead. No tears will be shed on its demise.
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Kudos to the way you unveil different perspectives to the issue . Keep up the good work !
Good piece here 💯