Israel’s war exposes West’s hatred of Palestinians
The ongoing Palestinian-Israeli war has galvanised massive Western support for Israeli Jews coupled with genocidal calls to “finish” off the Palestinians from across the Western political spectrum.
Indeed, even voices sympathetic to the Palestinians condemned the breakout against their Israeli prison guards on 7 October. They also rushed to adopt Israeli propaganda, including the outlandish claims of decapitated babies and rapes, which were later quietly retracted by the very same Western outlets like CNN and the Los Angeles Times that initially helped spread these fabrications.
This fanatical Western hatred of the Palestinians and adoration of Israel have shocked most Arabs, even those who already considered the West the main enemy of the Palestinian people. Over the last four decades, there has been a prevailing misconception by liberal and pro-Western Arab intellectuals, businesspeople, and political elites that Western liberals, and even some conservatives, had changed their views of Palestinians and become less hostile.
However, this change in the Western perception of Palestinians is limited to their being no more than victims of massacres. But this has not translated into Western support for their right to resist their sadistic colonisers, and any sympathy they receive always co-exists with the undying Western support for Israel regardless of how many Palestinians it kills.
While some Westerners may sympathise with Palestinians as victims of Israeli oppression, they do not sympathise with any form of resistance the Palestinians adopt.
The underlying convictions governing where Palestinians fit in Western morality are derived not from what Palestinians do or do not do, but from how they relate to European Jews. Whereas in the West, European Jews are depicted as refugees fleeing the Nazis and the subsequent horrors of post-Holocaust Europe, survivors of a war of annihilation, and victims of British commitments to the Arabs, Palestinians view European Jews from their own direct experiences.
For Palestinians, European Jews did not arrive as refugees but as invaders whose sole purpose was to appropriate Palestine by any possible means to realise Zionist colonial aspirations, which began half a century before the rise of Hitler to power. This is why Palestinians view European Jews not as helpless refugees, but as armed colonists committing massacres. It is this perspective that Edward Said wanted to convey in his classic essay “Zionism from the Standpoint of its Victims”.
While much of Israel’s violence is therefore “explained” in the West by the pre-Israel status of European Jews, Palestinian resistance is also viewed through the same status of those same Jews, and not through the history of the Zionist colonial conquest of the land of the Palestinians.
Israel’s actions are presented in the West as stemming from the status of those Jews who arrived on the shores of Palestine after fleeing the Nazi regime, only to be confronted by yet another violent “antisemitic” campaign, this time by Palestinian Arabs and Arabs from neighbouring countries intent on expelling them from their last and only haven. Thus, Israel’s violence, regrettable as it may be on occasion, is in effect viewed as always self-defensive in
nature.
In the same vein, Palestinian resistance, peaceful or violent, which has always been and remains in self-defence against foreign invading colonists, is explained as part of an “antisemitic” campaign against Jewish refugees rather than resistance to Zionist colonists. This means that while some Westerners may sympathise with Palestinians as victims of Israeli oppression, they do not sympathise with any form of resistance the Palestinians adopt that could succeed in overthrowing the Israeli colonial and racist regime.
The moment Palestinians did on 7 October, all the sympathy disappeared.
This is part of an opinion that first appeared on Middle East Eye.