In Gaza, western colonialism has been unmasked

Through Israel and the ideology of Zionism, western elites reinvented their ugly, racist system of control and sold it as a ‘moral’ cause. Now the game is up

[First published by Middle East Eye]

Israel’s campaign to eradicate Gaza is about to enter its third year.

This is not just a symbolic moment. It is crunch time, both for those carrying out the enclave’s destruction, and for those who oppose it.

Two years in, western capitals still refuse to name as a genocide the mass slaughter carried out by Israel and the famine it has engineered. They are still blind to the tsunami of crimes against humanity committed by Israel over the past 23 months. Even identifying these atrocities as violations of international law has proved a step too far for most.

Western leaders are not about to reverse course.

Like Shakespeare’s Macbeth, they are "in blood stepped in so far" they dare not turn back. To do so would be to admit their guilt as co-conspirators in Israel’s genocide, for providing the arms, intelligence and diplomatic cover that made it possible.

But the difficulties they face denying a reality live-streamed to their domestic populations grow more acute by the day – and not just because emaciated children across Gaza are dying in ever larger numbers.

Last week, the international association that represents genocide scholars voted overwhelmingly that Israel’s actions in Gaza meet the legal definition of genocide.

The formal, scholarly consensus has now fully caught up with the popular one – even if western leaders and their compliant media prefer to ignore both.

This is undoubtedly a genocide.

The only verdict still awaited is that of the International Court of Justice (ICJ). Its wheels turn so slowly its final ruling – one that seems certain to confirm its judges’ early suspicions of genocide – will be of significance chiefly to historians.

Genocide 'accomplices'

The fall-out from the genocide cannot, of course, be contained in Gaza. The grand lie that Israel is carrying out a "war of self-defence" has to be actively and continually enforced by western elites.

William Schabas, a pre-eminent authority on genocide and international criminal law, observed last week that the legal case made against Israel at the ICJ in January 2024 is "arguably the strongest case of genocide ever brought before the Court".

The case was made 20 months ago.

Western states, especially the United States and Germany, he adds, have not hidden their role as "accomplices to genocide". Which means the western liberal order is in a moment of profound crisis. Schabas argues that the international system of justice now faces a "litmus test": can it stop the genocide and put these rogue states in the dock?

Failure does not just spell doom for the people of Gaza. It marks too the crumbling of the liberal order at home.

Western leaders have been unable to manufacture popular consent either for the genocide or for the West’s complicity in it. So instead, they have turned on those who go public with their dissent. They are being vilified, harried and arrested.

In the US, police have beaten students who established protest encampments on campus, while their universities have stripped many of their degrees. Federal immigration officials have begun hunting down anti-genocide activists to deport them.

Palestinians themselves, even children from Gaza in urgent need of medical treatment for injuries sustained from the explosions of US-supplied bombs, are now being denied visas to the US.

The picture is similar in the UK. Mass protests against the genocide are labelled "hate marches". Activists who target weapons factories supplying the Israeli genocide machine – and thereby threaten UK arms sales to Israel – are jailed as terrorists.

And those who speak up to defend these activists are being hounded and arrested under the same draconian terror legislation.

This weekend saw the second mass protest outside the British parliament against the proscription of Palestine Action. Almost 900 demonstrators were arrested for holding a placard expressing support for the direct-action group.

In the run-up to the event, "counter-terrorism" police launched a series of raids on the homes of organisers of Defend Our Juries, a legal group behind the mass protests.

Six were charged with terror offences that could result in jail sentences of up to 14 years, including Tim Crosland, a lawyer and former senior official in the Serious Organised Crime Agency and National Crime Agency.

Circular logic

There are echoes of the repressive mood of 1950s America, when Senator Joseph McCarthy led witch-hunts against left-wing activism, labelling it as "un-American", "communism" and a threat to national security.

He found ready bipartisan support from Congress, Hollywood, the media, universities, corporations and the courts. Careers were ended, and lives destroyed. Socialism in the US, tarred as a dangerous, subversive ideology, has never recovered.

Today, with the Soviet Union long gone, the pretext for authoritarianism and political repression is not "communism".

Instead, progressive politics of the kind that recoils from genocide is smeared as "antisemitism" – itself a slur against Jews, implying that slaughtering Palestinians inherently accords with some kind of "Jewish" worldview.

The real purpose has been to crush opposition to the political ideology of Zionism.

It was western establishments – drawing on a centuries-old, western Christian Zionism – that sponsored Israel’s creation as an apartheid state, one that privileged recent Jewish immigrants over native Palestinians and sanctioned the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from their lands.

Zionism, in both its Christian and Jewish formats, is the ideology now driving genocide. But Zionism stands for more than this narrow kind of Jewish supremacy. Which is why western capitals are determined at all costs to support Israel and the ideology it embodies, even if that requires tearing apart their own societies.

Modern Zionism is a continuation of western colonialism – the use of violence to subdue and dominate other populations, chiefly to control their resources – but with the benefit of a "moral" cover story.

Traditional colonialism fell out of favour after the Second World War, at the very moment – in the wake of the Holocaust – when its reincarnation as Zionism could be sold as the righteous cause of our time.

The West’s sponsorship of a highly militarised Israeli state in the oil-rich Middle East would supposedly liberate the Jewish people – liberate them, let’s note, from a genocidal Europe – but at a cost.

It would require the destruction of the Palestinian people whose homeland was needed for a so-called "Jewish state". And it would create a western-armed outpost whose rationale was to bully and attack its Arab neighbours – a divide-and-rule foreign policy that just so happened to accord with western interests.

If the West had done any of this directly – rather than through its proxy – it would have been obvious that a brutish western colonialism had never vacated the Middle East. Instead Israel, and the ideology of Zionism on which it was founded, offered a disguise.

And better still, the cover story had a wonderful circular logic that has played out over decades.

The more the West armed Israel to violently abuse the Palestinian people under its rule and invade and bomb its Arab neighbours, the more it spawned regional resistance. And the more resistance Israel faced, the more the West could arm Israel on the grounds it had to be protected from irrational, savage, Jew-hating Arabs.

The eruption of political Islam – the chief reactive symptom of the region’s domination and colonisation by Zionism – could be cited as the cause of the Middle East’s troubles. Israel provoked the very problems of "terrorism" it was supposedly there to fix.

Insurance policy

But Zionism was more than a cover story for western establishments. It was also an insurance policy.

Zionism’s role was to normalise atrocities against brown people – even to imbue those crimes with a moral purpose – while breathing life into colonialism’s favourite narrative: a "clash of civilisations" between western progress and Oriental barbarism.

The measure of Zionism’s success was in engendering a politics of fear – the "war on terror" – that could be used to manipulate public sentiment in ways that benefited the western ruling class.

For decades western establishments have been corralling opposition at home to Israel’s destruction of the Palestinian people and its continuing domination of the Middle East into the political margins, smearing it as "antisemitism".

The so-called mainstream – whether in formal politics or the establishment media – never paid more than lip service to the question of justice for the Palestinian people.

Anything more, anything exerting real pressure on Israel to make concessions, such as the popular grassroots BDS movement to boycott Israel, was automatically demonised as Jew hatred.

Zionism’s role as insurance policy was forced out into the open in the UK following the surprise election of Jeremy Corbyn, a democratic socialist, as leader of the Labour Party.

Corbyn harnessed a wave of support for left-wing policies, embracing not just a fairer, less militaristic, less colonial foreign policy that risked exposing Israel as an anachronism, but also an end to austerity policies at home that had hollowed out public services and left voters feeling powerless and impoverished.

The British establishment, including the right-wing faction in Labour now led by Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, quickly settled on weaponising antisemitism against Corbyn and his political base.

During the Corbyn years, the left was painted as inherently antisemitic. Starmer made it his first priority to purge the left from the party as soon as he took charge.

Notably, the antisemitism smears focused not just on Corbyn’s pro-Palestinian activism but on his redistributive policies too. Critics maliciously suggested that his criticisms of financial elites, who had plundered the country’s wealth and squirrelled it away in offshore tax havens, were really coded references to "Jewish bankers".

Much like McCarthyism before it, the antisemitism witch-hunt against Corbyn was about sabotaging the left and its ideas of a fairer society. It was about preserving militarised colonialism abroad and protecting neoliberal elites at home.

Imaginary threat

But Israel’s genocide in Gaza is stress-testing to ruin this way of doing politics.

Just as under McCarthyism, western publics are being told that the liberal order can be protected only through grossly illiberal means.

In the 1950s, the establishment imposed ideological conformity tests, backed by legal force and social exclusion, to silence opponents, all of it rationalised as a war against the threat of communist takeover.

Now 70 years later, Zionism is seen as so central to the western "liberal order" that its opponents – those who stand against starving children to death – must be demonised and outlawed.

As with McCarthyism, this is about our leaders claiming to uphold liberal and humanitarian values as they do the very opposite – on this occasion by supporting genocidal mass murder in Gaza and driving dissent off the streets by criminalising it as "terrorism".

The cover story is in tatters. Which is why western capitals – though not Donald Trump’s Washington – are desperately trying to revive it with talk of recognising a Palestinian state this month at the UN.

Belgium, the latest recruit, illustrates the contortions western leaders are going through to prevent meaningful change.

Brussels is conditioning its recognition on the last Israeli captive being released by Hamas and the group having no future role in Gaza. In other words, it has given Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who shows no signs of seeking a ceasefire, a veto on Palestinian statehood.

None of the other states lining up to recognise Palestine – France, the UK, Australia and Canada among them – intend for that state to have material sovereignty. It will be "demilitarised" – that is, have no army or air force to protect its borders – and continue to be entirely dependent on Israeli goodwill for trade and freedom of movement.

The symbolism of this kind of recognition is for their benefit, not the Palestinians’.

Late last month France’s Emmanuel Macron let slip the quiet part in a grovelling letter to Netanyahu. He boasted of undermining anti-Zionism – opposition to Israel’s apartheid, genocidal rule over Palestinians – by conflating it with antisemitism.

And he explained that the goal of recognising a "demilitarised", pretend Palestinian state was "to turn Israel's military gains at a regional level [its attacks on, and carpet-bombing of, its neighbours] into a sustainable political victory, benefiting its security and prosperity".

Other supposed benefits would be Israel’s "normalisation", having terrorised its neighbours into submission, by arm-twisting them into signing on to Trump’s Abraham Accords, designed to further integrate Israel economically into the region.

For the West, recognising Palestine is not about advancing Palestinian sovereignty, or even ending genocide. It is about preserving western colonialism in the Middle East in Zionist clothing.

UN protection force?

The hypocrisy is glaring.

David Lammy, Britain’s former foreign secretary, has kept, on the one hand, tweeting his outrage at the "humanitarian crisis" caused by Israel engineering a famine in Gaza, while, on the other, doing absolutely nothing to bring it to an end. His successor, Yvette Cooper, seems sure to maintain the same two-faced approach.

European leaders agonise about how to respond to the double whammy of an Israel poised to both invade Gaza City, expelling or culling its starving population, and then annex the West Bank. Even Israeli military chiefs admit that the official pretext for invading Gaza City – "defeating" Hamas – is pie in the sky.

Meanwhile, Israel’s annexation of the West Bank will rip away any pretence of even a "demilitarised" Palestinian state emerging.

Last week Lammy once again dissembled, saying: "The UK is doing all we can to improve the situation."

But there are plenty of real actions he and other western leaders could take if Palestinian lives mattered more to them than the maintenance of western colonialism disguised as Zionism.

Britain could stop selling arms to Israel’s genocidal war machine. And it could stop running spy flights from RAF base Akrotiri on Cyprus, supplying intelligence to an Israeli military that bombs hospitals, assassinates journalists and starves children.

There are positive moves the West can make to intervene too. The British government could send naval ships, laden with food and medicine, to break Israel’s siege of Gaza and help UN agencies feed the population there.

The UK could dare Israel to stop it.

Or better still, Britain and other European states could back a "Uniting for Peace" mechanism at the UN General Assembly to override an inevitable US veto and send a UN Protection Force to Gaza.

Such a peacekeeping force could secure emergency humanitarian aid in Gaza, and respond militarily to any Israeli attempts to interfere.

If that sounds laughably implausible, that is only because we implicitly accept the idea that the West will never hold its most pampered client state to account using international law.

The issue we won’t acknowledge is why.

UK precedent

Once again, it falls to western publics to take the place of their failing governments.

Last week a flotilla of dozens of aid ships left Spain for Gaza. Passengers include environmental activist Greta Thunberg, Game of Thrones actor Liam Cunningham and Nelson Mandela’s grandson, Mandla Mandela.

Israel has attacked previous flotillas in international waters and kidnapped their passengers and crew, taking them to Israel and deporting them. The lead ship appeared to be hit by a drone while in port in Tunisia on Monday night.

Meanwhile, Israel’s ultra-right Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir has threatened to lock up the participants in prisons he describes as reserved for "terrorists", denying them basic rights. Those prisons are where Palestinians, often held without charge, have been systematically beaten, tortured and sexually abused.

"After several weeks these terror supporters spend in prison,” he said, “they won't feel like organising another flotilla."

Ben Gvir may have taken inspiration from the precedent set by Starmer’s government in designating direct action to stop genocide as a terrorist offence.

What is certain is that Britain and other European states will do nothing to protect their citizens when they are illegally seized in international waters, or when they are dragged off to Israeli prisons as terrorists for trying to feed starving children by the very state starving those children.

When asked at Prime Minister’s Question Time what protections the UK would offer its citizens aboard the flotilla, Starmer pointedly refused to respond.

Moment of truth

The crunch time is upon us. Two years into the genocide, as Israel prepares for a final push into Gaza City to purge starving Palestinians from their last redoubt, western publics are starting to acknowledge a horrifying truth: their leaders are not coming to the rescue.

This is a moment of searing truth. It is not just Israel and its genocidal "war" that must defeated. It is the ugly colonial system that has long hidden behind the "moral" facade of Zionism.

Signs of the breakdown are everywhere.

They are visible in the more than 1,600 people who have been arrested so far in the UK on trumped-up terrorism charges.

They are visible in the expressions of shame from police officers sent to arrest them, and the government lawyers who must charge them.

They are visible in popular actor Hugh Bonneville – star of the Paddington movies – interrupting a live TV interview about his latest film to demand his government act to stop the attack on Gaza City.

They are visible in people lining the route of the Spanish Grand Tour to hold mock dead babies out towards the cyclists, including a team from Israel.

They are visible in a protest at a Proms concert, broadcast live on the BBC, in which Jewish demonstrators accused the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra of having "blood on its hands".

They are visible in the Royal Opera House being forced on to the defensive by its own members after its director tussled on stage with a performer holding a Palestinian flag during a curtain call.

They are visible in the Italian dock workers threatening to "shut down" all European trade if the aid flotilla to Gaza is stopped.

They are visible in the 23-minute standing ovation – the longest ever – after the press screening at the Venice Film Festival of a film about Israel’s slow murder of five-year-old Hind Rajab in Gaza and the ambulance crew that tried to rescue her.

They are visible in two US military veterans disrupting a Senate foreign affairs hearing and being dragged off as they call out: "You are complicit in a genocide!"

They are visible in last week’s independent Gaza tribunal in London, chaired by Corbyn, which amassed shocking testimony from expert witnesses of Israel’s genocide in Gaza and British complicity.

These acts of defiance – both small and large – are signs that the centre cannot hold much longer. They are signs that the authority of the West’s political and legal systems of rule is quickly degrading, to be replaced by authoritarianism.

We are at a moment of truth. And Gaza is the clarion call.

[Many thanks to Matthew Alford for the audio reading of this article.]

---

All my posts are freely accessible, but my journalism is possible only because of the support of readers. If you liked this article or any of the others, please consider sharing it with friends and making a donation to support my work. You can do so by becoming a paid Substack subscriber, or donate via Paypal or my bank account, or alternatively set up a monthly direct debit mandate with GoCardless. A complete archive of my writings is available on my website. I’m on Twitter and Facebook.