Palestine, Empire, Civilization and the West’s Savage Darling

Imperialism, Empire and the Rhetoric of the West

Settler-Colonial Savage

The past two years has seen a turning upside down of international laws, codes and regulations. Legal frameworks have been disregarded and discarded, and we have seen clearly how empty platitudes and pointless rhetoric at the highest level have been utilized as mere smokescreens for allowing the continuation of a genocide.

Justice and accountability structures, internationally agreed upon, have been revealed as just empire’s mechanisms for feigning responsibility whilst allowing the perpetuation of that which made empire great in the first place. Nowhere is this seen more clearly than in the Palestine issue.

“Israel” began as a colonial project; and Western imperialism’s survival is intimately tied up with the existence of this settler-colonial entity. No matter how vicious, unethical and brutal its actions, no matter how violent its appetite for death and destruction, the West will cover its tracks, lie for it and construct colonial narratives to shield its savage darling.

The Sun Sets in the West

Western Liberalism. Democracy. The Western Age of Enlightenment. All of these terminologies implicitly lay claim to superior understanding and cultural progression. Although it may be true to say that the “rational” tradition is partly Western in origin, rationalism itself is a claim to superior understanding when what it actually signifies in its essence is often a reductive intellectual process of causative reasoning.

Rationalism is nothing without aeons of rich cultural tradition and discovery to inform it. The Renaissance itself, often seen as a pinnacle of Western achievement and located within Italian culture, arose very much within the flow of knowledge and discovery from trade between Asia and Europe.

It is salient that the West has reinscribed West Asia as the “Middle East”, a Eurocentric terminology that not only situates everything relative to the West, but also lumps together regions East of Europe into one diffuse mass. The recent conceptual construction of a “global South” again places the rest of the world politically and economically as opposite in polarity to the superior and affluent global North, a somewhat crude categorization.

Either way there is an endemic lack of attribution of the sources of Western progression, whether it is the acknowledgement of foundational elements of Western philosophy to Egyptian and Mesopotamian influences or the many ideas traceable to Arabic and Islamic Science and Culture which thrived in places such as Persia and China, cradles of civilization, while Europe struggled through its medieval dark ages.

It took colonialism’s looting, both physical and ideological, to bring civilization to the West, to infuse its pallid drabness with the richness (both literally and figuratively) of spice, chocolate and silk, and to colour its intellectual tradition with Eastern knowledge in areas like algebra, astronomy, geometry and cartography among others.

The Sun’s rising in the East where the cradles of civilization are situated, is apt and symbolic; Prometheus with his hubris attempted to steal the sun just as the West has attempted to appropriate the term civilization to itself and to attribute to itself the “light”, through terms such as “Enlightenment” and through pathways of learning we are subject to at school, that eclipse the critical role of the East in shaping civilization.

It is now such myths of civilization that inform the casting of the Palestine-“Israel” situation as some clash of civilizations where the West must win out in order for the light to prevail; such grand epic narratives conceal the sordid reality of settler-colonial apartheid states that continue the Western tradition of stealing by force.

“Israels” Dining off the Wests Exploitative Myths

These cultural myths and tropes are deployed to great effect in the Wests “Israel” supporting Hasbara, of a small liberal democracy surrounded by a sea of hostile Arab and Muslim “terrorists”.

It is this hasbara that has been instrumental in justifying the genocide, in its utilization by Western institutions in implicit and underhand ways. Words like “savage” and “barbaric” have been applied to the Arabs who insist on fighting for their rights, and ideologically placed in opposition to the “enlightened” West – whose little darling offshoot “Israel” struggles to survive in such darkness – these are the untruths that are forced onto us through disingenuous narratives that are then knowingly peddled by right wing pseudo-historians like Douglas Murray.

The victor writes history – and the school of right-wing British historians like Niall Ferguson and Simon Schama represent a colonial longing to cling to former glory, revive empire and claim superior status through imposition of their colonial framing and romanticisation of violence and exploitation over other peoples. It is therefore no surprise at all that figures such as these fully support “Israel’s” position and “right to defend itself” by whatever violent means; the colonizers narratives and version of reality are about domination and exploitation.

Furthermore it is also unsurprising that the people who stand with “Israel” are also the entitled and supremacist bigots among us who wish to claim glory merely by virtue of being white or Western. We can already predict who will support “Israel” – it is the same types of people who support any form of racism and superiority, whether those Indians enamoured of the caste system or those ignorant Westerners who believe in hierarchies over humanism.

The David and Go-lie-ath Tale: Western Democratic Hero in a Sea of Oppression

The problem with buzzwords like “terrorist”, “savage” and “civilization” is that they frequently carry a weight of lies and propaganda that does not need explanation, merely acquiescence by our uncritical brains, with emotional thinking that relies on associations and vague ideas that are perpetuated by those institutions that control and shape the narrative.

Language referencing violent acts by “Israel” and the West is sanitized and made to seem as if these are logical and necessary outcomes; how often do we hear the realities of terms such as “Occupied Palestinian Territories”, “Indigenous people” or the “Right to Resistance”? Instead, we are assailed with falsehoods that foreground the supposed rights of the Jewish people to Palestinian land, that have no substantive logical basis and are pure fabrication.

Arab Jews have always lived and co-existed in Palestine in peaceful times, but it was the Zionist act of importing Ashkenazi Jews from Europe to make the Zionist project thrive, that created this discord and bloodshed, this division and apartheid; and is now responsible for the Jewish supremacist entity committing a genocide – its original aim as embodied in its slogan: “A land without a people for a people without a land”.

This slogan of victimhood and dispossession conceals the malignity of the underlying claim – it was never empty. It conceals the intent to thievery and the cunning colonial long game of one day emptying this land to seal the claim – by whatever means necessary. This is what we are seeing unfold today.

Palestinians have the right to resist colonization, and this does not make them terrorists; the terrorists here are the Jewish supremacists who have piecemeal stolen the land, continue to do so both in Gaza and the West Bank and are supported, funded and propped up by the Wests imperial ambition and dollars, sustained by its weapons.

“Israel”, commonly positioned by the West as a tiny democracy bravely fighting for its freedom, is actually a malignant settler colonial project with ever expanding borders that together with the West sees no degree of violence too much to subjugate the “natives”. If the West wasn’t fully on board with this it would have seriously intervened in the past 2 years with some kind of international protection force.

It is the Palestinians who are the “David” against the Wests Goliath machine of multi-billion “sophisticated” weaponry, AI and banned criminal weapons.

Rather than the exception that European Jews like to claim – “no country is subject to the scrutiny that “Israel” is, they whine, implying and stating that this is due to it being the Jewish homeland - the truth is that no other “country” gets the license and impunity “Israel” does, no other “country” gets to keep expanding its borders, no other “country” gets away with murder and is supported in this murder by a coalition of all the Western entities huddling to protect it within their scheming embrace.

Bloody Apartheid Killing Ground Masquerading as Jewish Homeland

But the West cannot see the possibility of retreat from Palestine: “Israel” has always been its savage darling, and to acknowledge “Israel’s” brutality and wrongness would be to collapse the myth of Western superiority and demolish its carefully crafted narratives of white European assistance to the civilized Jews of Europe.

That is the Jews that the West has persistently persecuted and whose existence on their supposed homeland, it now claims to be supporting, as evidence of its civilized liberal values.

The correct part is that what we see in “Israel” – the rape, the sniping of children, the bombing of refugee tents – is indeed the perfect evidence of Western colonial values, and the manifestation of Western “democracy” in action, a democracy brought at the expense of dominating others.

Killing the indigenous population and installing your own fabricated country atop their remains while appropriating aspects of their culture and claiming them as your own, is true Christopher Columbus style Western colonialism in action.

The myth of “Israel” defending itself and the brandishing of the term “security” is typical colonial misappropriation of language to justify stealing and genocide; attack is reframed as “defence” and the word “security” is used as a perpetual lie – to disseminate the idea of the little democracy perpetually under attack rather than the poisonous pustule grown fat on Western support and encouragement.

“Israel’s” obsession with “security” could be perfectly solved by its ending its decades long apartheid system and getting out of Palestine, restoring rights to the Palestinian people, allowing them to return to their land and their homeland and adopting a resolution that is grounded in international law and respectful of human rights.

“Israel’s” problems with security, their supposed existential fears and their hair trigger paranoia can be resolved by being human instead of behaving like a rabid attack dog.

“Israel’s” Right to Leave; Palestine’s Right to Exist, Resist and Return

This framing of the situation as one where affording basic human rights to Palestinians means the dissolution of “Israel” and the compromising of Jewish identity must be turned on its head.

Where we are frequently asked, Does “Israel” have a right to exist, we must instead ask ourselves whether a state whose existence depends on perpetual war with its neighbours, that can only “exist” through asserting a reality of apartheid on the indigenous people of the land, that maintains its rights through ongoing genocide and is perpetually on the attack, has any right to exist in the Middle East, let alone at all.

The truth is that the right to exist is not an incontrovertible and unalienable right and definitely not if it comes at the brutal expense of others. We should have the right to exist only if we can do so respectfully and without denying others their existence.

Until then, Palestinians, who have suffered a string of October 7ths both before and after the date that provided fresh new excuses for violent and brutal occupation, have the right to resistance by any means possible.

Zionists perpetually ask if we condemn October 7^th – only if they condemn a reality of October 7^th’s many times more brutal that the Palestinians have suffered; only if they condemn racism, occupation, apartheid, settler-colonialism.

October 7^th came at a heavy price for the Palestinians, but it woke up the world to the truths of “Israel’s” apartheid and criminal occupation of Palestine. And although the clamping down on free speech that is the outcome of Western institutions now in thrall to Zionism, has ramped up massively, at the same time the concept of resistance as a legitimate right for the Palestinians has been universally acknowledged by millions of people who previously knew little of the situation.

The truth is that if “Israel” cannot respect human rights and the dignity of the Palestinians, then it has every right to leave; it is the Palestinians who have the right to exist on their own land with dignity and self-determination; and the Wests right to acknowledge its own historical persecution of the Jews, as well as to formulate a solution where it can perhaps welcome them back into Europe with open arms rather than to persecute people on the other side of the world, for its own historical crimes.