The collective West’s inability to respond to the deepening genocide in Gaza, now replete with mass executions and the deliberate killing of aid workers, is deeply troubling. It betrays a stunning moral degeneration that the British government, supported by His Majesty’s Loyal Opposition, cannot even propose stopping arms sales to the Israeli regime.
But this is not just a moral collapse, it is also a political and strategic one. This will not end well. Part of the West’s legitimacy, however much honoured in the breach, relied on projecting ‘soft power’ based on human rights and ‘a rules-based international order’. This is being shredded in real time. It is an insult to our intelligence to insist that Israel is merely trying to release the hostages as it blows up hospitals, universities, and apartment buildings and kills thousands of children.
It is frequently pointed out, with validity, that the US and Britain don’t support Israel because of the malign influence of the Israeli lobby, but because Israel is a strategic ally. It is the ‘unsinkable aircraft carrier’, in the description of ’80s secretary of state Alexander Haig, and a nuclear armed US surrogate in a vital region of the world. According to current president Joe Biden, if Israel didn’t exist, it would have to be invented by the US. Hence the mind boggling weapons sales (from mainly the US but also Britain and Germany).
But I can’t be the first to notice that unconditional support for Israel as it commits genocide in full view of the world is not a very clever strategy. Long-term, or even short-term, the result will not be a ‘Greater Israel’ but a moral, and subsequently physical, collapse of the Zionist project. Already, the normalisation agreement with Saudi Arabia – the Islamist but pro-Western power in the region – based on erasing Palestine from the map (as Netanyahu showed the UN), has been scuppered because of Gaza.
If Israel is left unhindered, more unbelievable Palestinian suffering will happen. But after that, all bets are off. According to the Israeli historian Ilan Pappé, “the more oppressive the eliminatory policies are (and it’s terrible to say but it’s true) the less they are able to be covered up as a ‘response’ or ‘retaliation’ and the more they are seen as a brutal genocide policy. Thus, it is less likely that the immunity that Israel enjoys today would continue in the future.”
“On the basis of sober professional examination,” he says. “I am stating that we are witnessing the end of the Zionist project, there’s no doubt about it.
In the past, the US was able to see Israel as a strategic ally but one that occasionally needed to be restrained. In 1957, threatening behind the scenes the withdrawal of aid and the imposition of sanctions, the US (in the person of Dwight Eisenhower) persuaded Israel to withdraw from the Sinai Peninsula it had occupied during the invasion of Egypt. In 1982, Reagan demanded, and got, a ceasefire after Israel had invaded Lebanon. Both these inhibiting actions were carried out by Republican presidents by the way.
But now, beyond bleating and transparent PR exercises, the US government appears powerless to do anything. Despite the presence of legions of strategists, it seems totally beholden to a regime that traces its ideological lineage back to Benito Mussolini, shoots 5 year old children with sniper bullets, and is unable to see the fatal long-term consequences of its actions.
Even if I was a thoroughly amoral Kissingerian national security strategist, I’d see the looming disaster ahead and rationally take steps to avert it.
But maybe the world isn’t rational anymore.
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