Joseph Massad
Middle East Eye / August 30, 2024
Western countries and Israel share the same values of settler-colonialism, racism, white supremacy and genocide – all of which are imperial tools to protect their interests.
The current genocidal war against the Palestinian people is not being waged by Israel alone.
It is a western genocide perpetrated by the US, UK, France, Germany, and the rest of the EU and NATO countries.
That Israel was established as a western imperial outpost to ensure its control and pillage of the Arab world is hardly news. Yet many today are confounded by the West’s colossal support for Israeli genocide, apparently believing that the western slaughter of Palestinians began only after 7 October.
The military and political effort to establish Israel as a western military station began in 1917 when Britain issued the Balfour Declaration with the support of other colonial and imperial powers.
Ever since, the western imperialist and racist war against the Palestinian people has not abated.
In the Arab world, most anti-imperialist intellectuals have always viewed Israel as a western imperialist station planted in the heart of the region.
Conversely, the pro-imperialist Arab elites today and the Arab technocracy that runs local western-funded non-governmental organisations see Israel as separate from, if related to, the West. They maintain that its lobby has an inordinate amount of influence in western capitals, which it has allegedly infiltrated.
These elites have expressed shock at recent western support of Israel’s genocide, as they trusted that the West stood for “human rights”.
Aping western liberal propaganda, they often misrepresent western commitment to human rights as “universal” rather than limited to white Europeans and Americans only.
The exceptions for non-white populations are those deemed victims of western-declared “enemies”. Only then do they deserve the sympathy of white European and American liberals – and only for as long as western interests require, until they are discarded and forgotten, like the people of Iraq, Syria and Libya, among others.
As Palestinians do not meet this western racist and imperial criterion, the West has supported their slaughter for more than seven decades.
Since 1948, it has unfailingly provided Israel with all the necessary weaponry to wipe out the Palestinians, steal and colonise their lands, expel them outright, and subdue the surviving population by subjecting them to apartheid administered by the Israeli state, and pogroms subcontracted to Jewish colonists.
The West has simultaneously provided legal and diplomatic cover to shield Israel from international (meaning non-western countries) opprobrium.
Imperial station
Since its establishment in 1948, Israel was entrusted to help protect the Suez Canal as well as the oil of the Middle East for the US, Britain, and France.
Proposals to establish a Zionist Jewish state in Palestine to serve imperial interests began as early as 1859, the beginning of the construction of the Suez Canal. Christian and Jewish Zionists and imperial officers from Britain and France viewed it as a permanent imperial station to protect the trade route against possible local resistance to their rule or threats from rival empires.
Moses Hess, a Franco-German Jewish proto-Zionist, made this argument in his book Rome and Jerusalem, 1862: “Do you still doubt that France will help the Jews to found colonies which may extend from Suez to Jerusalem and from the banks of the Jordan to the coast of the Mediterranean?”
The same pitch was made by the founder of the Zionist Organization, Theodor Herzl, when he travelled to Egypt in 1903 to negotiate with Lord Cromer for the Jewish colonization of the area between the Nile and the Suez Canal.
More than a decade later, British Prime Minister David Lloyd George further stressed that British control of Palestine was strategically necessary to defend the Suez Canal. It was a point that Joseph Chamberlain, the Christian Zionist British colonial secretary, had already emphasised to Herzl when he offered him the Sinai and el-Arish for Jewish colonisation.
Whereas the British sponsored the colonisation of Palestine, it was the western-controlled League of Nations that entrusted Britain with this pernicious western task in 1922.
It was also the League’s official offspring, the United Nations, that legitimised the theft of Palestinian land by Jewish colonists in the November 1947 partition resolution and recognised the Israeli settler-colony after its establishment.
As the imperial station, Israel invaded Egypt in 1956 to facilitate the British and French military takeover of the canal after Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalised it.
After becoming a veritable territorial extension of the US in 1967, Israel was entrusted with protecting the oil and the thrones of all Arab client regimes the US had installed or maintained in power.
After the fall of the Soviets and 9/11, Israel remained an important imperial station, becoming a senior partner in a new alliance between the Arab client regimes and the US. It was tasked, along with its junior Arab allies, with the mission of warding off any new enemies the US empire had conjured up in the region and globally.
Western complicity
As the world has been witnessing a live-streamed genocide against the Palestinian people since October, western governments had no choice but to support the genocide openly in every possible way – militarily and financially – as well as in official propaganda disseminated verbatim by the racist and pro-imperialist western mainstream media.
To aid in Israel’s efforts, western governments have also unleashed draconian repressive police measures against western populations who deign to support the Palestinians.
The criminal British, who led the pack historically in dispossessing the Palestinians, rushed to send in weapons and troops on 8 October to aid the settler-colony they established and dedicated their military bases in the region for the defence of Israel.
They have since voted to shield Israel from UN condemnation, pressured the International Criminal Court (ICC) not to indict Israel’s criminal leaders for their atrocities, opposed the International Court of Justice (ICJ) investigation of the Israeli occupation and genocide, unleashed their police agencies to harass British activists who defend the Palestinians, and launched a major propaganda campaign with the assistance of the BBC in support of Israeli crimes. British universities contributed to this pro-genocide effort by enacting repressive measures against their own students.
The French, whose state racism against Arabs and Muslims has reached appalling levels in the last two decades, also dispatched ships, arms and personnel to aid Israel in its genocidal war and ordered French military bases in the region to defend Israel.
It has also shielded Israel at the UN, justified Israeli occupation to the ICJ, and disseminated pro-Israeli propaganda by labelling opposition to Israel’s ongoing genocide a form of antisemitism, which ironically spurred massive French demonstrations, not against the genocide but rather against alleged antisemitism, while banning all pro-Palestinian demonstrations.
This is hardly new, as France was the principal supplier of arms to Israel throughout the 1950s and until 1967 and was the architect of Israel’s nuclear programme.
Israel’s ‘right to kill’
Despite the stiff competition from other European countries and the US, Germany’s anti-Palestinian measures are perhaps the worst of all.
It has also banned and repressed all pro-Palestinian demonstrations, provided arms, funds and diplomatic support, rushed to stand with Israel at the ICJ to defend its genocidal crimes as not genocidal, criticized the ICC’s prosecutor for requesting arrest warrants of Israeli war criminal leaders, and unleashed intense pro-Israel and anti-Palestinian propaganda to its own much-propagandized population and even foreign audiences.
The Berlin government has continued to suppress freedom of expression and silence any media critics of German support for the genocidal state.
None of this is new, of course, as Germany has been a main weapons supplier of Israel for decades and has provided Israel with submarines capable of carrying nuclear-tipped cruise missiles.
State officials have even supported Israel’s right to kill the Palestinian people in the name of self-defence against a captive population.
Not to be outdone, the UN has also gone to great lengths to support Israel’s slaughter. In June 2023, mere months before the genocide, it refused to list Israel as a violator of children’s rights.
It later issued a shoddy report on the rape allegations that Israel and its western propagandists unleashed after 7 October while admitting that its team “was unable to establish the prevalence of sexual violence and concludes that the overall magnitude, scope, and specific attribution of these violations would require a fully-fledged investigation.”
More recently, the UN had Sigrid Kaag, the Dutch senior humanitarian and reconstruction coordinator for Gaza, coordinate with the enemies of the Palestinian resistance, including Israel, the United Arab Emirates, Jordan, and the collaborating Palestinian Authority, on a proposal for an “international, transitional, and temporary custodianship” over Gaza, which she believes will be authorised through a UN Security Council resolution.
Kaag attended meetings which included the Palestinian Authority intelligence chief Majed Faraj, who collaborates with the Israelis to repress Palestinian resistance, and with Israeli army Major-General, Ghassan Alyan, to help them unravel the knots of “Rafah and Netzarim,” which she wants the UN to take over.
That Kaag’s proposal will make the UN not only complicit with, but an active party in, the Israeli occupation seems not to perturb Kaag or her UN bosses, as the Lebanese newspaper Al-Akhbar recently revealed.
Active participation
Meanwhile, the opportunities for profiting in post-genocide Gaza seem too tantalising to pass up.
The Jordanians are reportedly coordinating with the Americans and the American University in Beirut for a planned takeover of all health facilities in Gaza, while Egyptian companies are reportedly preparing to become the only source of construction material in the aftermath of the genocide.
In contrast with the Jordanians, who seem interested in lucrative deals, the Algerians have offered to dispatch medical facilities and build multiple hospitals in Gaza for free once the border is open to aid the Palestinians.
And yet, all this assistance to the genocidal regime is just complementary to the major and active military participation of the US in Israeli crimes.
While this began decades before 7 October, the US has since dispatched more personnel, weaponry, submarines, and aircraft carriers to defend Israel, with more ships and submarines dispatched in recent weeks.
It continues to supply Israel with one-ton bombs and other deadly weapons to exterminate the Palestinian people, and just last week approved a $20bn sale package of more Palestinian-killing weapons to Israel.
This is in addition to official US propaganda supplemented by a virulently anti-Palestinian American mainstream press and the massive police repression of university protests, ordered by university presidents to suppress their own students for daring to oppose the genocide.
Washington’s shielding of Israel at the UN and international fora is unrelenting, as is its dismissal of the ICJ investigation into Israel’s monstrous crimes against the Palestinian people and its sanctioning of the ICC over its arrest warrants for those carrying out the genocide.
The Americans have beefed up their imperial military presence in the region to upwards of 40,000 troops to defend their settler-colonial station from any attempt to stop its genocidal war.
A western crime
Israel may not be exceptional in receiving western support for its wars and atrocities (South Africa prominently received much western support, even if at less astronomical levels).
But these gargantuan levels of support demonstrate unequivocally that Israel is not a foreign policy or external issue to the western imperialist countries.
As I have argued in various articles, it is indeed an internal issue, just as much as it has always been an extension of the US empire and its subsidiary European partners.
That some leftist western critics of Israel claim that pro-Israel American Zionists are “Zionist infiltrators” or “Zionist assets”, which they deem external to the US political system rather than an intrinsic part of it, reverses the actual order of the relationship.
Namely, in the global game of imperial control, Israel and its defenders are agents of the US empire and its European minions, and not the other way around.
That more than half a million Israeli Jews have left Israel since the genocide started, and that 40 percent of Israeli Jewish citizens – according to pre-October 2023 polls – contemplated emigrating even then, shows that the Israeli state has lost substantial support from its own citizenry.
Yet the country’s imperial masters will defend it to the death precisely because they are defending their own interests, which consider Israel an official internal part of the West, yet a part that is located at a territorial remove from it.
We must also bear in mind that France, Britain, Germany, and the US have large contingents of their own citizens who live in Israel as Jewish colonists and serve in the Israeli army.
This is a western war and a western genocide against the Palestinian people carried out in defence of the West, and not only in defence of Israel.
The shared values that western countries and Israel brandish are indeed the same – those of settler-colonialism, racism, white supremacy and genocide – all of which have been and continue to be part of the imperial toolbox used to ward off threats to imperial interests.
Opposition to the Gaza genocide and the defence of Palestinians are finally becoming internal issues in US and Western European politics.
This means that pro-Palestinian forces in the West have also come to understand that the extermination of the Palestinian people is principally a western crime and not exclusively an Israeli one.
Joseph Massad is professor of modern Arab politics and intellectual history at Columbia University, New York; he is the author of among others Colonial Effects: The Making of National Identity in Jordan; Desiring Arabs; The Persistence of the Palestinian Question: Essays on Zionism and the Palestinians, and most recently Islam in Liberalism
