In Altneuland, the Austro-Hungarian journalist and Zionist pioneer Theodor Herzl, swept up by the romantic nationalism and ethnic rivalries of the late Habsburg empire, painted a portrait of the promised land to come, where Jews and Arabs would join together in the mutually beneficial development of what was then Ottoman Palestine. Needless to say, this fantasy did not transpire. Correctly foreseeing that Europe would soon become a hostile place to its Jews, Herzl glossed over, in his reverie, the conflicts to come in their new place of refuge. Just as in the Habsburg realm itself, reshaped into a constellation of successor ethnostates throughout the 20th century, the course of events in historic Palestine reflected what almost always happens when two distinct peoples are forced to share the same territory.
Both will press their claims to mastery of the land, citing historical precedents both real and fictive, both will rely on demography to strengthen their sword-hand, and the stronger of the two will either subjugate, expel or destroy the weaker. After just over a century, from the emergence of the modern Palestine conflict during the British Mandate, this process is drawing towards its conclusion, with the total reduction of the Palestinian population of Gaza through bombing, starvation, military occupation and forced exile.
Against the public opposition of the IDF’s chief of staff, General Eyal Zamir, Netanyahu’s cabinet has now settled on the full occupation of Gaza. As Western states now slowly turn against Israel’s ever-expanding war aims, and conservative outlets, previously supportive of Israel’s war, belatedly discover the horrors the war has wrought on Gaza’s civilian population, the only wonder is how long it took them to perceive what was always inevitable. Writing in UnHerd at the beginning of the war, two years ago, I observed that “when Israel eventually conquers the ruins of Gaza, it has no exit plan for how to extract itself.” Therefore, I suggested, the “logic of the war” would ultimately ensure the final expulsion of the Palestinians from Gaza.
And now we are here. For all the domestic drama over “hate marches”, radicalised students and media bias, nothing has changed. What was always going to happen, and what those protesting always said would happen, is now happening. The IDF itself does not think that its new-found mission of ruling Gaza is possible. Nor does the current Israeli government, eager to expand Israel’s borders in every direction, see the presence, or even existence, of the territory’s population as desirable. The war is ending as it was always going to end, in the ruin of Gaza’s population, even if Netanyahu continues to insist that Israel’s occupation will only be temporary.
Yet for no benefit at all, Western conservatives squandered domestic political capital on a foreign war that was always going to result in their shocked protestations of horror, too late, at the results of the actions they for years supported. After two years of discussing Palestinians as something akin to the marauding bugs in Starship Troopers, some have lately discovered they are humans after all. Others are yet to reach this conclusion, and perhaps never will. Clouded by a combination of domestic anxieties and tribal loyalties, the magic spell cast by Israel over the Western centre-right has scrambled both its sense of morality and of self-interest.
Instead of fleeing to the West, the Palestinians, in the most brutal circumstances imaginable, are making every effort to stay in their ancestral homeland. They are doing precisely what critics of mass immigration demand of refugee populations, in a situation far worse than that faced by most who reach Britain’s shores. Western Leftists, mocked by conservative commentators for their reworking of the Palestine catastrophe into the “omnicause”, have throughout this period shown clearer moral and political judgment than our own tribe. Of what value was it hitching ourselves to this slow-motion atrocity? Unable, due to our place in America’s imperial system, to prevent the carnage, it would have been better to have washed our hands of its blood entirely.
Simply, Gaza displays the vast gulf between the self-aggrandising myths underlying our current political regime, and the harder, eternal truths of human nature. The founding myth of what adherents of the post-1991 liberal order like to call the “1945 order” is that the dynamics of ethnic rivalry, taken to their very extremes in Gaza, are not, in fact, inherent to human societies: that tribal passions are whipped up in otherwise sensible populations by cynical politicians acting as provocateurs, and that rival populations, in Bosnia, Kosovo and elsewhere, can be compelled by muscular liberal governance to live together when they would prefer not to.
“Gaza displays the vast gulf between the self-aggrandising myths underlying our current political regime, and the harder, eternal truths of human nature.”
This can be termed the governing ideology of the Western world between the rise of American hegemony and the Right-wing populist revolt across the West in the 2010s. Indeed, in its counterintuitive and unevidenced belief that cultural diversity would dampen rather than provoke such conflicts, this quasi-religious dogma, often under American tutelage, is responsible for much of the dysfunction and political volatility of present-day Europe, which had already answered these questions, through bloody experience, time and time again over the preceding centuries — before then exporting them to Palestine.
Yet what is most galling, perhaps, is that the advocates of this dogma routinely cite the horrors of the Second World War as justification for their millenarian scheme, in which every Right-wing adversary is a second Hitler barring the road to the cosmopolitan paradise. When it comes to Gaza, however, where a civilian population has been herded into ghettos, bombed and shelled to oblivion, starved as a matter of policy, and now await a military occupation, administered by local puppets, geared at their expulsion — only now have the champions of the liberal order deigned to notice wrongdoing. While the politics of ethnic self-interest is forbidden in the West, Israel is permitted to carry it to its murderous extremes: this is the incoherence at the heart of the liberal order, and it is not only Leftists who notice it.
Adherents of the liberal order, which is to say the American empire, must now own the catastrophe in Gaza as their own, just as the bloody conquests, massacres and expulsions of Nazi Germany have been laid for decades at the door of the political Right by liberals in defence of their millenarian visions. Without Israel’s unequivocal backing over decades by the liberal hegemon, none of what has transpired in Gaza over the past two years could have occurred. It does not matter which party sits on Washington’s throne: the alliance with Israel is a more foundational pillar of American politics than its ring of Nato client states, to the chagrin of America’s European satraps, torn between their professed values and the realities of their subordinate imperial position.
Equally, Netanyahu may be a self-interested demagogue, but the war in Gaza has taken place with the firm backing of the majority of the population of what is undeniably a democracy, and which loudly flaunts this status, wrapped in rainbow flags and all the other accoutrements of the liberal West, in advance of its own ends. It is Israel’s security elites currently appealing to Trump’s conscience, urging the emperor towards mercy on the conquered, and not its voters. If Gaza is a genocide, it is a firmly democratic one, for which liberal democracy must shoulder the blame.
As even the august journal of Washington diplomacy, Foreign Affairs notes, “What is truly shocking about events in Gaza is both the scale of the devastation and that the government of Israel can genuinely say that its policies reflect the will of most Israelis.” How can America condemn Russia for its drone and missile strikes on Ukraine, compared to the far vaster destruction wrought by American armaments and diplomatic cover in Gaza? How can Washington condemn the revision of borders by force and the expulsion of whole populations, when at its terminus its own empire has abandoned the moral rationale it chose, for some decades, to justify its existence?
For a quarter-century, and with much moral grandstanding, advocates of America’s right to global domination, from DC thinktanks down to Washington’s global constellation of proxy NGOs, cited the Holocaust as its justification for global empire. “Never Again” would be written across the global skies in the contrails of Washington’s F16s. What evolved into the Responsibility to Protect doctrine, through which the United States declared the right and duty to intervene in foreign wars — though only when the governments committing atrocities were foes of its imperial system — has now been shown for what it always was.
The war in Gaza is not an affront to liberal democracy: it is the logical outcome of its actually-existing power structures, directly effected by the donated weapons and munitions of the liberal hegemon. The end-state of all this moralising rhetoric is the destruction of an entire people in their own land: the moral grandstanding of the liberal hawks now lies buried, rotting with them, in the rubble of Gaza. The rest of the world will hear no more of America’s guiding moral purpose. In a world guided by naked self-interest, and the malign workings of our imperial overlord, us Europeans would do well to follow our own path too.
