Gaza: The End of Western Pretence

Foreign Policy

I, and much of the citizenry of the US as well as many around the world, have been shocked by the savagery of what Israel is doing in Gaza, a walled-in, occupied Palestinian enclave filled with people, many of whom were pushed off their land by the formation of Israel in 1948.  All this retributive fury is in retaliation for a Palestinian resistance attack on Israel on October 7, 2023.  The Israeli response is like attacking an imprisoned population and exacting revenge out of all proportion to the Israeli deaths and hostage taking of October 7.  The known death toll in Gaza is now over 32,000 Palestinians, a third of them being children, with over 75,000 others wounded.  There are likely thousands more, uncounted, under the rubble.  The dead account for approximately 5% of the population of Gaza and would be equivalent to Israel losing 5% of its population to such slaughter or over 490,000 Israeli deaths, one third of those being children and the rest cut off from food, medicine or humanitarian assistance.  How would the western world deal with that?

To watch as the leaders of our nation, and the leadership of the nations in Europe not just stand by to watch the slaughter, but actively support arming this Israeli onslaught, is shocking and incredibly disillusioning for many people.   Not only is the West arming Israel, but the US is also actively blocking all international efforts to stop the onslaught or to even provide humanitarian assistance.  It has even gone so far as to actively stifle support for the Palestinian people.  The US even bombed nations that were actively supportive of the Palestinians.  Did the rhetoric of the humanizing influence of Western Civilization ultimately mean nothing?  Did our structure of rules and laws only apply to others? Apparently so.

It must be clarified that those decisions were made by the leadership and many of the citizens of those nations were opposed to such decisions and continue to show that such decisions do not necessarily reflect the will of the people.

Pretense

The pretense of the goodness of Western civilization is exposed.  The mask of compassionate Christianity has been torn off.  Those western nations are basically the US and the white European nations who created and subsidized Israel as an extension of European civilization in the Middle East.

These are the nations who have, under the banner of bringing civilization and modernization to the underdeveloped world, practiced a harsh colonialism for centuries, often justified by a strange version of Christianity, in order to displace, and often slaughter indigenous populations and then, to despoil what had been an unspoiled environment.  All of this in the name of progress and civilizing forces, but really only a cover for economic exploitation.

All of this was erected on a structure labelled “Western Civilization”.  A humanizing structure of rules and laws to produce a well-regulated society, regulated by the dominating economic elites, who were often foreign elites.  And that structure of rules and laws was then used to control and punish those who do not abide by those rules.  Although often unspoken, those rules and laws, did not apply to ruling elites, who saw themselves as entitled to special treatment, meaning they were above the rules and laws.

In addition, most of those colonized nations were not white and therefore were seen as inferior, unable to really comprehend what civilization really afforded them, much less ever being able to understand it in all its complexity.  The job of bringing civilization to those people was seen as “the white man’s burden”, with the understanding that those benighted souls were probably lost forever in a kind of permanent childhood.

Just as the US, increasingly exported free-market capitalism under the pretense that free-market capitalism was the only way forward toward democracy, just as the US supported such a projection with it military presence and the heavy hand of its economic clout to often bludgeon other countries into compliance,  just as the US has used black ops to influence local politics and even used coups, and sometimes wars, to install friendly governments in nations, we have exposed the pretense of the values of Western Civilization.  We have spied on friends and foes and used all the tools of propaganda to influence both domestic and world opinion.  We have used legal and extra-legal methods to achieve our goals even including torture and unending imprisonment, i.e. Guantanamo still is operational.  How does any of this fit within the rules and laws of any humanizing society?

Exposed

In the process, the moral emptiness of Western Civilization was exposed, the humanizing influences were exposed as empty rhetoric.  And apparently, Western Civilization finally showed its true face, the face of violence, domination and exploitation, a face hiding, not so well recently, behind the pretense of a beneficent Western Civilization of rules and laws, or a pretense of a benign Christianity.  And all of this in an attempt to create a world in its image, only to realize that the world has come to see the inhumanity behind the mask, an inhumanity willing to sacrifice the Palestinians in Gaza to its goals.

If we do not want that image of Western Civilization to continue to reign in the hearts and minds of most of the world, we need to mend our ways and quickly find our way back to a sense of basic humanity and of what many of us thought was the real heart of our Western Civilization.

Time now for action and redemption.

---