Gaza, The Villa in the Apocalypse: Fire, Sword, and the Collapse of Western Morality
By Jeremy Salt
Israel has shattered whatever faith people have in their governments, their institutions and the laws accumulated over the centuries to make the world a safer place.
Israel is traumatizing millions of people around the world. Perhaps billions – the sociologists will get to work, one day, and they will find out. These millions or billions cannot believe what they are seeing – the daily slaughter in Gaza – but what they are seeing, they have to believe.
They cannot believe any people would be so cruel, so sadistic, so full of hatred and contempt that they would want to annihilate, not just the people, but their houses, hospitals, schools and universities, even the grass and the fields under their feet. Yes, even Palestinian soil is the enemy.
But this is what they are seeing and so they have to believe what they see. What they are also seeing is that these killers are enjoying themselves, are gleeful in their destruction, boast about it and even warn of more to come.
This is not some disturbed minority that maybe can be helped with psychiatric care, but the government and – as polls repeatedly show – the majority of the Israeli people.
Even the Nazis hid what they were doing, but these murderers of children, of the old, the frail, the sick and the disabled, people who are totally helpless against this violence, show the world upfront what they are doing.
They are proud of their handiwork. Not a quiver of shame as they turn their weapons on an unarmed people. They slap us in the face every day, as if to say, like the common back lane thug, ‘What are you going to do about it?’
They say this with confidence because they know they have many governments behind them. Instead of stopping the genocide, these governments are stopping people from opposing the genocide. Nearly 900 people were arrested in the UK just a few days ago and more than 400 only a few days before that.
We are not living in the third millennium BCE. We are living in the third millennium after the start of the Christian era. We are not living in an age when half-naked, starving people camped in caves and by fires, watchful for the predators that were going to destroy them. Or are we? It is not coincidental that this primitive predatory world is Gaza today because it is actually Netanyahu’s blueprint for genocide.
Israel has shattered whatever faith people have in their governments, their institutions and the laws accumulated over the centuries to make the world a safer place. Their ‘leaders’ have turned out not to be leaders, after all, but cowards and opportunists.
Their complete gutlessness is extraordinary. Not even genocide is enough for them to stand up straight. Not even the murder of 20,000 or more children. They cower before these killers instead of taking them on, confronting them with their own weapons, daring them to come on and do their worst.
They could end this tomorrow without needing to pick up one gun. A blanket ban on all dealings with Israel would do it. No arms, no money, no diplomatic relations and suspension from the UN but they do not dare reach out, even for one of these weapons.
Far from any kind of boycott, the UK is about to receive the ‘president’ of occupied Palestine, aka ‘Israel’, Isaac Herzog. His role is described as ‘largely ceremonial’, so it will be okay for Starmer to meet him if he dares go against hostile public and parliamentary opinion.
His job might be ‘largely ceremonial’ but Herzog speaks directly for the regime and, to this day, has not disowned the welter of blood and gore in Gaza. The genocide is certainly not ‘largely ceremonial.’ Herzog is described as a ‘moderate,’ as anyone would be described, compared to Netanyahu and his ghoulish chief ministers.
The ‘moderate’ Herzog holds all Palestinians responsible for October 7 and what has followed. He holds up photos of emaciated Israeli soldiers held captive in Gaza, but not one photo of emaciated Palestinian children or emaciated Palestinian civilians – not soldiers – locked up without charge in Israeli jails.
In the governments and institutions of the supposedly civilized ‘West’ there is hardly a man who dares to challenge Israel – but there is a woman, Francesca Albanese. At the high international level, she is almost alone in having the guts to stand up to this genocidal regime, despite death threats to herself and her family. In a UN steadily being ruined by Israel and Trump, she is a shining light, the hope that all is not yet lost.
Israel bulldozes onwards to a predetermined end. Of course, it has always won and, therefore, will win again. Winning before means, axiomatically, that it will win again and again and again. It wins by default, of course, because without American arms and money, it could not win anything.
At this utterly bleak and backwards stage of human history, infinitely worse than Hobbes’ jungle because of the technology that allows the powerful to slaughter the innocent without any danger to themselves, Israel is confident that nothing can stop it.
Iran’s successful missile attack is not read as the signal to step back and reconsider, but to step forward and attack Iran again, like some blind creature that knows nothing else but to kill.
Fire and sword gave Palestine to the Zionists, not morality and respect for human rights and international law. Actually, it was the ‘West’ that gave Palestine to the Zionists, and then let them get away with the Nakba but, in their self-inflating view, the Zionists did it all by themselves.
What has worked in the past – in this case, fire and sword – will apparently always work in the future. This is a delusion, of course, as the past is no guarantee for the present, let alone the future and because Israel’s fire and sword has always been heavily subsidized, first by the UK and France and, since the 1960s, largely outsourced from the US.
What happens if the day comes when the US is either not able or not willing to provide any more fire and sword?
It has to be assumed that Israel’s forward planners have taken this into account. In their view, ‘Greater Israel’ will eventually give them the territory and resources – oil, natural gas and water, in particular – that will enable Israel finally to do without a ‘special relationship’. But the US has to be kept on hand until it reaches this point, as Israel is unlikely to find another benefactor.
The symbiotic relationship between the US and Israel has served both well, but when the cracks in the ‘special relationship’ are already showing, will Israel have the US behind it until it is capable of standing on its own two feet?
The American people are routinely told that the US and Israel have shared values and interests, but no two states ever have permanently shared values and interests, and the US and Israel are no exception, despite the rhetoric.
The Gaza genocide is now turning the cracks in the ‘special relationship’ – exposed by Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer in their 2007 book on the Israeli lobby – into a widening divide.
More politicians are daring to speak out. Congress is still passing bills wholly supportive of Israel, but there was a chink of light in the vote by 27 Democratic senators for Bernie Sanders’ resolutions to block two arms sales to Israel. They did not win majority support but they are at least a breeze signifying greater change as more congressmen and women are encouraged to stand up to the lobby.
Israel is gambling that, with the involvement of the US, it can bludgeon its way to a fire and sword peace that suits it.
This will be the fulfillment of Barak’s ‘village in the jungle’ – split-level, all mod cons, a shining light in the middle of an apocalyptic landscape of annihilation, so the villa can be built. The recent GREAT (Gaza Reconstitution, Economic Acceleration and Transformation) plan is the latest apotheosis of this madness.
Israel acts without prudence and caution, as if ‘history’ will always be on its side. It will not be, of course, because history does not work like that.
The time when Israel was a favored child (of the ‘West’ and no one else) ended long ago.
Sympathy after the Nazi genocide was replaced by the hard power of the lobby and the ‘West’ is going to have trouble disentangling itself. Israel is already on the wrong side of history, and the slide in that direction will continue.
– Jeremy Salt taught at the University of Melbourne, at Bosporus University in Istanbul and Bilkent University in Ankara for many years, specializing in the modern history of the Middle East. Among his recent publications is his 2008 book, The Unmaking of the Middle East. A History of Western Disorder in Arab Lands (University of California Press) and The Last Ottoman Wars. The Human Cost 1877-1923 (University of Utah Press, 2019). He contributed this article to The Palestine Chronicle.
The views expressed in the article do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of The Palestine Chronicle.