Gaza Was the Last Nail in the Coffin of Liberal Atlanticism
Since the end of the Cold War, European and US liberals have claimed to defend a “rules-based international order.” Often a fiction, even the pretense has now vanished under the rubble of Gaza.
The liberal international order didn’t die when Donald Trump returned to the White House. In his support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza, Joe Biden had already struck a fatal blow. (Omar Al-Qataa / AFP via Getty Images)
Trümmer auf Trümmer is a German-language collection gathering critical perspectives on so-called Staatsräson, which has served to justify the German state’s continued support for Israel as well as its repression of the pro-Palestinian movement.
Among other topics, it deals with the racist weaponization of Holocaust memory, the history of German-Israeli relations, and the role played by the German left in this context. In this interview with the book’s editors, international relations scholar Gilbert Achcar explains why Israel’s genocide in Gaza represents a historical watershed, killing off illusions in liberal Atlanticism.
Trümmer auf Trümmer
In Israel and most Western countries, Palestinians and critics of Israeli policy are frequently subjected to Nazi comparisons. Since October 2023, these comparisons have increasingly been used to justify Israel’s genocidal actions, for example by Benjamin Netanyahu, when he described Hamas as “the new Nazis” at a press conference with former German Chancellor Olaf Scholz. Already in 2019, the German Bundestag employed this rhetorical maneuver in an anti–Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) resolution, proclaiming the boycott of Israeli products reminiscent “of the darkest phase of German history.” What is the historical lineage of this narrative? To what extent is it the result of what you call the “Arab-Israeli war of narratives”?
Gilbert Achcar
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