Westernity

Soon after Israel began its onslaught against the people of Gaza, with thousands of civilians already dead, the Israeli tech firm Wix sacked a woman who was employed in its Irish office. Courtney Carey had described Israel in a social media post as a “terrorist state” that was engaged in “indiscriminate” bombing of Gaza. The company subsequently had to pay Carey €35,000 in compensation for unfair dismissal.

It soon became clear that Wix had no objection as such to political advocacy from its employees. In fact, managers had specifically encouraged Wix staff to “support Israel’s narrative” on social media. The internal memo explained how important it was to “show Westernity” and exploit the fact that “unlike the Gazans, we look and live like Europeans and Americans.” This was all the more vital since “the number of deaths and bombings in Gaza will be significantly higher” than those suffered by Israelis on October 7.

The term “Westernity” is one of the keys to anti-Palestinian racism, which is part of a much wider antipathy toward people from the postcolonial Global South. We can see this form of prejudice on display in every rancorous debate about strengthening borders to keep out immigrants, whether the border in question runs along the Rio Grande or through the Mediterranean. The subtitle of Niall Ferguson’s triumphalist potboiler Civilization divided the world into two categories, “the West and the Rest,” and the champions of “Westernity” are determined to keep that line of demarcation in place.

This prejudice certainly overlaps with the idea of white supremacy, but it is not identical to it. The cause of Western geopolitical chauvinism will happily accept non-white champions, from Ayaan Hirsi Ali to Suella Braverman, the former British home secretary who incited a mob of fascists to attack those demonstrating against the carnage in Gaza. What matters is their commitment to uphold the present-day inequalities of the world system.

The alternative to blaming the inhabitants of Africa, Asia, and Latin America for their own poverty and slamming the door aggressively in their faces is a clear-sighted acknowledgment of the West’s malign impact upon the Rest. This story does not end with the legacies of slavery and colonialism. It carries on through countless forms of interference during and after the Cold War, from the organization of coups to full-scale invasions, not to mention the imposition of structural adjustment programs by Western-dominated bodies like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

Today the carbon emissions that the West has been generating for the past two centuries are transforming the Earth’s climate, with the heaviest burdens falling upon the countries of the Global South. Naturally, those who have benefited most from this shameful history — descendants of slaveowners, arms companies, fossil fuel giants — are determined to avoid any reckoning, whether that means atoning for the past or transforming the world system to prevent future injustices.

Blaming the victims is far more appealing to them, especially at a time when there is constant pressure for social retrenchment, even in the richest economies of the West. After all, it is much easier for Western politicians to tell their citizens how lucky they are not to live in other parts of the world — while promising new measures to keep out those less fortunate — than it is to promise and deliver tangible improvements in their lives.

“Westernism” is the ideological expression of this preference. Although it comes decked out in cultural garb, it is ultimately a question of political and economic power. If we define the West as a culture or civilization, Mexico is obviously closer to that civilization than Japan, as a predominantly Catholic state where the main language of communication is a European tongue. But Japan qualifies for the US visa waiver program, while Mexico doesn’t, because of their respective places in the global pecking order.

The Spirit of ’92

The poisonous rhetoric that US conservatives direct toward immigrants from Central America shows that Christian heritage is no safeguard against demonization. However, anti-Palestinian racism certainly derives extra strength from the prevalence of Islamophobia and Orientalism in Western public culture. There are two main forms of politicized Islamophobia: a crude version peddled by the ultranationalist right, and a more sophisticated version that reaches much further into the liberal center.

The crude version promotes the idea of a trans-historic clash between the West and its Islamic adversary, both of which it presents as solid, unchanging cultural blocks. This, we are told, is a clash between good and evil, civilization and barbarism, modernity and backwardness. Its form may have altered since the century after the death of Muhammad, but its content remains fundamentally the same.

If you think nobody could actually believe something so flagrantly unhistorical, just consider the remark made by Viktor Orbán in 2015 as he rejected a proposal to admit refugees from the Middle East: “When it comes to living together with Muslim communities, we are the only ones who have experience because we had the possibility to go through that experience for 150 years.”

Orbán was referring to the period of Ottoman rule in Hungary. He sees (or claims to see) no meaningful difference between an early-modern invasion force and Muslim immigrants living in European cities today. In similar vein, the French far-right politician Éric Zemmour called his party “Reconquest,” in reference to the wars waged by Christian armies in medieval Spain to roll back, and eventually destroy, the Muslim-ruled area known as Al-Andalus.

This impressionistic line of argument relies upon a sleight-of-hand trick. It exalts supposed “Western values” like democracy, secularism, or the rights of women that clearly had no purchase in the time of Charles Martel or Ferdinand and Isabella, as if they were somehow always part of the Western cultural inheritance.

In reality, of course, these “values” only became hegemonic in Europe and North America (insofar as they are hegemonic at all) over the last couple of centuries, after long, bitter, and still incomplete struggles against the political ancestors of men like Orbán and Zemmour. Accepting the reality that the most important clashes are those that take place within rather than between civilizations would sink the crude version of Islamophobia below the waterline, so its advocates prefer to falsify the historical record.

The term “Judeo-Christian civilization,” another catchphrase of the Euro-American right, also relies upon ignorance of (or indifference to) history on the part of its intended audience. Needless to say, the relationship between Judaism and Christianity over the centuries has been anything but harmonious, and self-satisfied talk of “Judeo-Christian civilization” glosses over the long record of European antisemitism.

Israeli politicians seem to be very keen to apply this coat of whitewash to their political brethren in the West. When Spain announced its recognition of Palestinian statehood in May 2024, Israeli foreign minister Israel Katz launched a bilious attack on Yolanda Díaz, the deputy prime minister in Madrid: “If this ignorant, hate-filled individual wants to understand what radical Islam truly seeks, she should study the 700 years of Islamic rule in Al-Andalus.”

As anyone familiar with Iberian history could tell you, Spanish Jews enjoyed much greater toleration under Muslim rule, and the Catholic monarchs celebrated the final destruction of Al-Andalus in 1492 by ordering the expulsion of Jews from the country. Some of the refugees went to Salonika, which still had a large Jewish population speaking an archaic form of Spanish in the early twentieth century, before another product of Western civilization invaded Greece and began sending them to its death camps.

There is only one way of interpreting the comments made by Katz — he considers 1492 to have been a moment of liberation for the people of Spain. The trauma suffered by Spanish Jews who were forced from their homes at the point of a sword does not concern him in the slightest. This is a message that will go down very well with the right-wing forces in Spain and other Western countries that Katz understandably considers to be his natural allies.

Imperial Evasions

Crude Islamophobia feeds off the more sophisticated version that is standard currency among centrist political forces in Europe and the United States. Adherents of this school of thought will usually deny that they are hostile to Muslims. We can often hear them insisting that Islam is a “religion of peace” and stressing that they only have a problem with “violent extremists.” But they categorically refuse to discuss the destructive record of Western intervention in Muslim-majority states, especially those of the Middle East.

The most concise expression of this viewpoint came in a notorious tweet from David Frum, speechwriter for George W. Bush, which claimed that the US-led invasion “offered Iraq a better future” before its ungrateful people ruined this high-minded enterprise: “Sectarian war was a choice Iraqis made for themselves.” Frum is no doubt well aware that the US occupation forces organized sectarian death squads responsible for gruesome atrocities, but he will carry on blaming Iraqis for the horrors they endured after 2003 until he draws his last breath.

More recently, Hillary Clinton used an appearance on MSNBC’s Morning Joe to accuse students protesting against Israel’s genocidal rampage of knowing nothing about history. She specifically reproached the students for not pointing the finger of blame at Yasir Arafat, claiming that her husband Bill would have long since delivered a Palestinian state were it not for Arafat’s unreasonable obstruction during the Camp David talks in 2000.

Robert Malley was part of the US team at Camp David and later served as Barack Obama’s chief negotiator for the 2015 Iran nuclear deal. A 2001 essay on the failure of the talks by Malley and the Palestinian academic Hussein Agha might as well have been addressed to Clinton and her fatuous claim to superior understanding:

For a process of such complexity, the diagnosis is remarkably shallow. It ignores history, the dynamics of the negotiations, and the relationships among the three parties. In so doing, it fails to capture why what so many viewed as a generous Israeli offer, the Palestinians viewed as neither generous, nor Israeli, nor, indeed, as an offer. Worse, it acts as a harmful constraint on American policy by offering up a single, convenient culprit — Arafat — rather than a more nuanced and realistic analysis.

This denial of Western culpability makes it impossible to explain the rise of political actors generally referred to as “Islamists” or “Islamic fundamentalists” (terms that can obscure as much as they illuminate) in the contemporary Middle East. If we take the case of Iran as an example, the United States and its allies have their fingerprints all over the course of Iranian history since the 1950s, when an Anglo-American coup ousted the government of Mohammad Mosaddegh.

Mosaddegh was a secular nationalist, flanked by the communist Tudeh Party. By the time the US-backed dictatorship of the Shah was overthrown in 1978–79, there was a new force in the Iranian opposition grouped around the leadership of Ruhollah Khomeini that wanted to establish a system based on their interpretation of Shia Islam. Although left-wing and liberal currents were also very much present during the Iranian revolution, it was Khomeini’s faction that was able to take power and suppress its rivals.

We can find variations on this story everywhere from Lebanon to Oman. Western states and their local allies have waged war on secular nationalist and left-wing forces, creating a vacuum that was subsequently filled by varieties of political Islam. In the case of Palestine, as late as the first intifada of the 1980s, the main challenge to Fatah’s leadership of the national movement came from left-wing organizations rather than Hamas, which was only founded in 1987. It was the enervating co-option of Fatah through the Oslo agreements and the marginalization of the Left after the fall of the Soviet Union that made it possible for Hamas to become a serious rival to Fatah.

While these facts are well known to anyone who has studied the history of the Middle East, figures like Hillary Clinton must ignore them because they cannot accept the systematically harmful nature of Western intervention in the region. This means they cannot provide a response to the arguments of crude Islamophobia, which lumps together all forms of political Islam, from Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood to al-Qaeda and ISIS, before presenting them as the true face of Islam.

Tony Blair’s trajectory since 9/11 is a revealing study of liberal Islamophobia steadily losing ground to the cruder version, in this case within Blair’s own head. An academic who was enlisted to give Blair a crash course on Iraqi history before the invasion found him to be “someone with a very shallow mind, who’s not interested in issues other than the personalities of the top people.” As he grappled with the unfolding catastrophe in Iraq, Blair needed an explanation for the problems of the Middle East that would fit comfortably into his puddle of a mind, ideally one that could be summarized in a single word. Since there was no place in his worldview for the term “imperialism,” Islam would have to do instead.

Obama’s understanding of the region, set out at length in his conversations with Jeffrey Goldberg for the Atlantic, is more refined in its mode of expression, but ultimately just as superficial and self-serving. At one point, Obama told Goldberg that young people from the Middle East could learn a thing or two from their counterparts in Southeast Asia, who were “not thinking about how to kill Americans.” The fact that the occupation of Vietnam ended when Obama was still a child, while the occupation of Iraq was still ongoing during his presidency, did not feature in his analysis — nor could it have done so, if he wanted to perform his role as manager of the US foreign policy apparatus.

Redefining Antisemitism

Anti-Palestinian racism thus falls within these wider circles of prejudice, but it also has a life and a logic of its own that makes it especially potent. To make sense of this, we have to discuss the concept of the “new antisemitism” that Israel and its supporters have promoted so tirelessly since the beginning of the century. This shift in the focus of pro-Israel advocacy came at a time when Israeli government officials were abandoning the pretense that they would ever allow the formation of a Palestinian state, making it vital to change the terms of discussion.

According to the “new antisemitism” theory, hostility to Jews in the modern world predominantly expresses itself through attitudes toward Israel. It is impossible to respond to this line of argument without being presented with concrete examples of what is supposed to be unacceptable. Nobody is reckless enough to claim that all criticism of Israel is antisemitic, so there must be a point at which such criticism becomes illegitimate. The Israeli state and the groups that support it in the West claim the exclusive right to determine where we should draw the line.

Organizations like the Anti-Defamation League in the United States can articulate this theory in the language of modern social justice activism, talking about the right of ethnic minorities to define their own oppression. However, their true goal is to deny one particular group the ability to discuss their own oppression, let alone define it. The history of the Palestinian people for the last century has been inseparable from the history of Israel and Zionism, so every statement about Israel is also a statement about the Palestinians, even (or especially) if it does not mention them at all.

This is one of the key distinguishing features of anti-Palestinian racism. It can certainly take the form of hateful, dehumanizing rhetoric and support for the mass killing of Palestinians in the name of “Israel’s right to defend itself.” Yet it can also reveal itself through rhetorical jiu-jitsu exercises, branding people as antisemites because they accurately describe what Israel and its Western backers are doing.

The cynical misuse of antisemitism charges to smear Palestinians and those who defend their rights is well known and well documented, so we will limit our survey to a couple of recent instances. On October 6, the Observer, a British liberal newspaper, published a column by the novelist Howard Jacobson. Jacobson claimed that it was a “blood libel” to state that Israeli soldiers were deliberately killing children in Gaza, on a par with the fables used to justify medieval pogroms. In a follow-up interview, Jacobson made it clear that he had no intention of engaging with the evidence — so far as he was concerned, it was inherently antisemitic to accuse Israel of trying to kill children, so the conversation could stop there.

The Observer’s sister paper, the Guardian, published a very different kind of article on October 24. Based on careful reporting rather than reckless innuendo, it showed that the University of Michigan had enlisted the state’s attorney-general, Dana Nessel, to bring criminal charges against Gaza solidarity protesters when local prosecutors were reluctant to do so. As the Guardian’s Tom Perkins explained:

The revelations raise new questions about potential conflicts of interest. Six of eight [university] regents contributed more than $33,000 combined to Nessel’s campaigns, her office hired a regent’s law firm to handle major state cases, the same regent co-chaired her 2018 campaign, and she has personal relationships with some regents. Meanwhile, Nessel received significant campaign donations from pro-Israel state politicians, organizations and university donors who over the last year have vocally criticized Gaza protests, records show.

Rashida Tlaib, the only Palestinian American in Congress, had previously criticized Nessel, accusing her of singling out the campus protesters for unusually harsh treatment: “I think people at the University of Michigan put pressure on her to do this, and she fell for it.” Tlaib was right, of course, although she erred on the side of generosity by presenting Nessel as a gullible dupe. This no doubt explains why Nessel decided to launch a cynical diversionary campaign, ably assisted by CNN anchors Jake Tapper and Dana Bash, slandering Tlaib as an antisemite.

Return of the Repressed

Jacobson and Nessel did not invent this debating tactic, they merely borrowed it, and we could cite any number of similar outbursts, delivered from the commanding heights of the Western public sphere. The redefinition of antisemitism by Israel and its supporters has created an upside-down world where staunch opponents of racism can be depicted as genocidal bigots while obnoxious demagogues pose as champions of the oppressed. This inversion has proved to be immensely valuable for the two blocs of right-wing and centrist forces that together dominate the political terrain in Europe and North America.

For the Right, the attraction of this mode of discourse is clear. It allows them to revive the crudest forms of bigotry that have been progressively delegitimized by the success of movements against racism and colonialism since the early twentieth century. Before those advances, it was considered perfectly respectable to deride the very notion of human equality.

Just consider a remark made by Winston Churchill about the Palestinian people in 1937 that has become deservedly notorious:

I do not agree that the dog in a manger has the final right to the manger even though he may have lain there for a very long time. I do not admit that right. I do not admit for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia.

Churchill deemed it entirely natural for “a stronger race, a higher-grade race” to supplant those he viewed as inferior beings. This is a more blatant and unvarnished expression of racial prejudice than you will hear from modern-day politicians like Donald Trump or Boris Johnson, but Churchill would not have thought twice about delivering it.

Anti-Palestinian racism is a gateway through which old-fashioned Churchillian bigotry can enter the mainstream once again. Right-wing politicians and media commentators show all the signs of exhilaration at being able to use the standard tropes of colonial racism against the Palestinians, depicting them as primitive savages against whom Israel must wage a ruthless war in defense of Western civilization. The British pundit Douglas Murray, smirking and gloating his way through a genocide while publishing lachrymose tributes to the moral integrity of the Waffen SS, is a representative figure.

European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen is another morbid symptom of this regressive tendency. As Adrian Daub has pointed out, it would be quite wrong to speak about German backing for Israel in terms of misplaced historical guilt, when there is far more evidence of glee: “For all the apocalyptic rhetoric, this has been a moment of liberation rather than repression for many German writers and politicians.” Few people have been more gleeful than von der Leyen over the past year. Her stance harmonizes neatly with the growing rapprochement between Europe’s Christian Democratic parties and the far right.

The Euro-American right combines support for mass murder in Gaza with hostility to democratic rights at home. Murray’s champion Suella Braverman and her Tory colleagues have demanded a police clampdown on British protests against the slaughter, which they cynically defame as antisemitic “hate marches.”

In reality, they see the protesters as the most visible manifestation of a treacherous fifth column, comprised of those who consider all human lives to be of equal value. The right-wing effort to present solidarity with Gaza as an exclusively Muslim cause, in Britain and other countries, is a threadbare exercise in projection, designed to conceal their own chauvinism.

The Anti-Palestinian Front

The right-wing bloc would not have the same impact without the complicity of the political center, from the Democratic Party in the United States to the German Greens. The motivation of the centrists is a little more complex than that of their right-wing counterparts. These political actors have made a strictly circumscribed, representational form of anti-racism into part of their brand, regularly deployed at election time to heighten the contrast with their right-wing opponents. At the same time, they are staunchly committed to maintaining the alliances of their respective states with Israel.

With the fig-leaf of notional progress toward a “two-state solution” no longer available to them, amidst the total collapse of Labor Zionism into the arms of its Likudnik rivals, it was becoming increasingly difficult for avowed liberals and social democrats to rationalize their support for Israel without coming clean about their contempt for Palestinians. In this context, the “new antisemitism” discourse came as a blessing to them, and they were delighted to embrace it, since it allowed them to express an objectively racist position with the verbal trappings of anti-racism.

This rhetorical maneuver, which presents meaningful solidarity with the Palestinians as a sinister threat to Jews, also proved to be extremely useful in the fight between centrists and their left-wing challengers. We have seen it deployed again and again over the last decade — against Jeremy Corbyn in Britain, Jean-Luc Mélenchon in France, and Rashida Tlaib and other left-wing Democrats in the United States. It is much easier to demonize politicians like Corbyn, Mélenchon, and Tlaib with false allegations of antisemitism than it is to openly state the grounds on which centrists deem them unacceptable: namely, their support for popular redistributive policies that would previously have been the common coin of social democracy.

The attacks on the Left and the Palestine solidarity movement would be much less effective if they only came from the Right. Centrist politicians and their media outriders, from CNN to the Guardian, play a crucial role in legitimizing anti-Palestinian racism and punishing those who take a stand against it.

The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) might have shelled out nearly $30 million to unseat Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush, but it would still have been a waste of money if the group could only put MAGA Republicans in the ring against them. Without politicians like Bowman’s challenger George Latimer offering their services, the anti-Palestinian front would be a strong yet minoritarian presence in the United States and other Western countries. In turn, the centrist political establishment is very happy to accept support from the Israel lobby, whether that means campaign donations or a steady supply of bogus talking points with which to condemn the Left.

The idea, recently expressed in the Atlantic, that the Western left suffers from an unhealthy and disproportionate “obsession with Israel” turns reality on its head. It is the forces of the center that have become increasingly obsessed with demonstrating fealty to Israel so they can denounce their left-wing rivals. This has been one of the defining themes for Starmer’s leadership of the British Labour Party.

In France, it was center-left figurehead Raphaël Glucksmann who broke up an alliance with La France Insoumise (LFI) last autumn because he didn’t like Mélenchon’s views on Palestine. The Nouveau Front Populaire that bested the far right in this summer’s French parliamentary election had to be cobbled together at short notice because of Glucksmann’s divisive, sectarian gambit — one that he would dearly like to repeat in the near future.

Knocking on the Doors

As with the two varieties of Islamophobia, the centrist version of anti-Palestinian racism has a built-in tendency to drift further and further to the right, growing ever shriller in its stigmatization of those who will not accept that Palestinian lives don’t matter. This puts centrist politicians out of step with their electoral base.

In the United States, Democratic voters are much less sympathetic to Israel than their Republican counterparts, and the same distinction holds true for Labour and Conservative supporters in Britain. The Biden administration has sought to conceal its ongoing support for mass killing in Gaza behind a Potemkin facade of cease-fire talks, but there is a limit to how long you can maintain such deceptions. Under these circumstances, Western power elites are more likely to escalate repression than they are to respond to pressure from below.

Punitive measures against Palestine solidarity have coincided with a wider crackdown on climate activism. Right-wing political actors and their centrist enablers despise those involved in such work for much the same reason that the apartheid regime in South Africa detested and harassed white members of the African National Congress. They are affirming the basic humanism that most people in the West still subscribe to, judging by the polls that show how limited support for Israel’s genocidal massacre actually is, once we get beyond the stifling conformism of political and media elites.

The Colombian president Gustavo Petro has repeatedly noted the connection between slaughter in Gaza and the worsening climate crisis. At last December’s COP28 summit, Petro reminded his listeners that maintaining or expanding the current level of carbon emissions would inevitably lead to climate breakdown, forcing millions or even billions of refugees to flee the worst affected regions:

This immense exodus will evoke a response in the North. We can already see it in the anti-immigration policies of rich countries and the rise of the extreme right within them. Hitler is knocking on the doors of European and American middle-class homes, and many of them have already let him come in. The exodus will be responded to with tremendous violence and with the same barbarism we are seeing in Gaza, which is the rehearsal of the future.

Petro’s nightmare is Benjamin Netanyahu’s dream. Over the last year, opponents of Netanyahu’s butchery have repeatedly invoked the judgement of history, telling his accomplices and apologists that they will be remembered in the same light as those who once carried water for apartheid. Netanyahu is making a very different calculation: he clearly hopes that the global egalitarian tide is going out, having reached its high point with the liberation of South Africa, giving way to a new era in which the unequal valuation of human life can be defended without any euphemisms, just as it was during the heyday of European imperialism.

From the current standpoint, it would be foolhardy to predict which of these two scenarios is more likely to be realized. There was a time when it seemed like apartheid in South Africa would never end; there was a time when it seemed like apartheid in the West Bank would never last for as long as it now has, with no apparent end in sight. But we should be absolutely clear about what is at stake, and how disastrous it will be for humanity if Netanyahu’s vision comes to pass.