At the same time as the Israeli attack on Gaza, a bitter war of ideas and memories has broken out in Europe and North America. Entertainers, athletes and artists as well as journalists and executives are caught up in what looks like a clash of cultures, if not civilizations. The consequences have hit various institutions: not only Harvard University, Hollywood, Bayern Munich and ArtForum magazine, whose director was fired for publishing a letter, but also Kylie Jenner’s Instagram account, which lost almost a million followers after it announced his support for Israel.
In this new culture war, the dominant narrative in the West, with which the Shoah grants Israel unqualified moral legitimacy, is now confronted with a different narrative that is much more attractive from a moral and emotional perspective, both internally and outside the West: How did it come about after centuries of white supremacy to decolonization, the still ongoing process of liberating the vast majority of the world’s population from the political, economic and cultural domination of the West?
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A month after launching their war on Gaza, Israel’s unpopular far-right leaders are struggling to win the loyalty of Israeli citizens, Jews and Israel supporters around the world. They compare Hamas to the Nazis; Israeli diplomats wear yellow stars at the United Nations. These attempts to denounce unprecedented European crimes against Jews could influence a Western generation born not long after 1945. Many white Western citizens of a certain age support Israel’s chosen identity as a country because, with its wealth and strength, it represents the redemption of Jewish victims of the Holocaust. Germany views Israel’s security as nothing less than a “reason of state,” which is why German politicians and journalists are hostile to any expression of pro-Palestinian sentiment.
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But it now seems shockingly clear that the Shoah narrative remains compelling only to a small and dwindling minority and is now confronted with a much more powerful, rival narrative of historical victimhood. The majority of the population of non-Western countries and immigrants of Asian and African origin were never sufficiently informed about the extent and horror of the Nazi crimes. They were unable to bear the burden of European guilt for the Shoah and recognize Israel as a moral necessity. In its own historical narrative, the world’s only Jewish state is another brutal and racist colonialist enterprise, imposing apartheid and regular massacres on Palestinians while enjoying the support of politicians and journalists in white-majority Western countries.
Nor is it an entirely new perception evoked by representatives of the Israeli far right, who today openly invoke the Bible to justify the massacre of Palestinian civilians. Among the communities that African-American thinker WEB Du Bois called “the darkest peoples,” the argument against Israel has always been: Why should Palestinians be dispossessed and punished for crimes in which only Europeans were involved? As early as 1945, three years before the founding of the State of Israel, George Orwell noted that “the question of Palestine is partly a question of color” in which “an Indian nationalist, for example, would probably be on the side of the Arabs.” In fact, Mahatma Gandhi wrote in 1938 that although he would prefer the Arabs to use nonviolent methods, he could not criticize “the Arab resistance against all odds” given British support for the Zionist settlers.
Despite their bitter hostility, the new states of India and Pakistan voted at the United Nations in late 1947, along with almost all Asian countries, against the partition of Palestine and the establishment of a Jewish state. As decolonization gained momentum, almost all Asian and African countries refused to establish diplomatic relations with the new state. African-American civil rights activists such as Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm Israel himself did not let the “color question” fade away by supporting France against the Algerian anti-colonialists, occupying the West Bank in 1967 and building close relations with the apartheid regime in South Africa.
It can come as no surprise to anyone that the South African Foreign Ministry criticized Israel for “the illegal occupation of Palestinian land, the continued expansion of settlements and the desecration of the Al-Aqsa Mosque”, while Germany banned pro-Palestinian demonstrations and Christian ones from October 7th Holy places and the incessant oppression of the Palestinian people.” Even the famous French-Algerian football player Karim Benzema or the African-American writer Ta-Nahisi Coates do not openly support the Palestinians.
History is always a conflict between stories in which people want to recognize themselves. Our preferred story about the past orients us to the world as it is, offers us a place and an identity, and broadly explains our feelings of possibility. The narrative of decolonization is becoming increasingly seductive because its ideal of justice and dignity for non-white peoples is not being realized in the United States and Europe or in the far corners of Asia and Africa. Proof of its success is that the repressive governments of Saudi Arabia and Turkey, which until the day before yesterday were eager to do business with Israel, had no choice but to rejoin the Palestinian cause.
Last year, Russian President Vladimir Putin extensively condemned the West’s historic depredations in India, China and other parts of Asia and Africa, and (absurdly) portrayed Russia as the leader of a global anti-colonial alliance against a “racist” and “neo-colonialist” nation. China has also taken an opportunistic anti-Western stance. Both Putin and Xi Jinping recognize the extent to which the catastrophically failed Western wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Yemen and the “vaccine apartheid” carried out by rich Western countries during Covid-19 in recent years have undermined the moral credibility of the United States USA have diminished West. The fact that the West offers generous hospitality to Ukrainian refugees while building walls and fences and bribing despots to keep out the darker-skinned victims of its own wars is further confirmation of its hypocrisy.
The grand narrative of decolonization is based on the historical experience of helplessness and humiliation experienced by a large part of the world’s population. In comparison, the Shoah narrative seems much weaker: after all, Israel is the most important military power in the Middle East and enjoys solid support among the world’s richest and most powerful countries. The other major weakness of the story that Israel uses to legitimize itself is that the commemoration of the Shoah is a relatively recent event and is limited to a geographical area. As Tony Judt argued in Postwar, it was only after the founding of the EU that the Shoah became a founding narrative of Europe, enabling it to invalidate multiple competing and unreliable national narratives.
After 1945, everyone knew that the German Nazi regime and its European collaborators had murdered six million Jews, but for many years it had little political and intellectual resonance. It is well known that Primo Levi’s If This Is a Man, the most powerful memoir ever written about life in a Nazi concentration camp, was rejected by Natalia Ginzburg, then working at the left-wing publishing house Einaudi. It was not until the late 1950s that it became a widely read book in Italy. and in the United States it did not become truly widespread until twenty years later.
Of course, many European peoples had good reasons not to think about the Shoah: not just the Germans, who initially focused on their own trauma caused by the Allied bombing and occupation and their mass expulsion from Eastern Europe. France, Poland, Austria and the Netherlands, which had been very cooperative with the Nazis, preferred to build their own national identity on the basis of their “resistance” to Hitler.
However, long after the war ended, there were still too many unpleasant realities. Germany had two former Nazis as chancellors and presidents. French President François Mitterrand worked in the Vichy regime. In 1992, Kurt Waldheim was the president of Austria, the country that today is the most fiercely defensive of Israel, despite evidence that he was complicit in Nazi atrocities. (Spain is an exception to this European dialectic of comfortable forgetting and obsessive commemoration of the Shoah, having been isolated by the civil war and later absorbed by Francoism and the transition to democracy. And along with Ireland, another exception is the European country that sympathizes the most with the Palestinians).
Israel’s permanent representative, Gilad Erdan, during a Security Council meeting on the situation in the Middle East this Friday at the organization’s headquarters in New York. Evan Schneider (UN/EFE)
In the United States, where Israel is supported by a strange mix of apocalyptic Christian evangelists and secular Democrats, most of the population got their first glimpse of the atrocities committed in Europe thanks to a maudlin television series aired in the late 1990s. Holocaust. Even in Israel, the Shoah only became known outside the small community of survivors after the trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1961. Saul Friedländer, the leading historian of the Shoah, recalls in his memoirs that academics treated the subject negatively and it fell into the hands of the Yad Vashem Memorial and Documentation Center. The country had been built on myths of Jewish heroism, and stories of helplessness and surrender in the face of annihilation were not part of that picture.
The fear of losing what Israel stole from the Palestinians, as well as the hatred and revenge of the dispossessed, have led its residents to increasingly turn to the story of the Shoah in recent decades. The imperative of national security in the face of the hatred and revenge of the dispossessed takes precedence over everything: not just the blatant financial and sexual corruption of almost all of its major leaders, from Shimon Peres and Ariel Sharon to Moshe Katsav, Ehud Olmert and Benjamin Netanyahu , but also about Israel’s ever-closer alliances with far-right and even anti-Semitic parties and movements in various countries, from Hungary to the United States.
Friedlander left Israel, among other things, because he could not bear that the Shoah was being used “as a pretext for harsh treatment of the Palestinians.” Many other survivors and witnesses of the Shoah have continually warned of Israel’s descent from the embodiment of moral virtue to a ruthless colonial power. In 1982, when the Israeli army observed massacres in several Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon, Primo Levi warned: “Israel is rapidly falling into complete isolation. …We must suppress the impulse of emotional solidarity with Israel to reflect coldly on the failings of Israel’s current ruling class. Get rid of this ruling class.”
There is no doubt that Western solidarity with Israel will weaken as Netanyahu’s religious-fanatic regime, citing the Old Testament, kills more children in Gaza and terrorism erupts again on the streets of the West, disrupting racial and ethnic coexistence Religion poisoned in irredeemably different societies. Then the story of the Shoah will have fewer followers. The young generation entering intellectual and political life worldwide has already begun to judge Israel by its actions rather than its historic mission of Jewish redemption. And China and Russia are nearing victory in their global propaganda war that presents Western countries as racist and hypocritical brutes to the rest of the world.
It is tragic that the first Jewish state, founded for the safety of Jews, is now on the wrong side of the “color question” and is therefore more isolated and insecure than ever. Of course, neither increasing the persecution of dark-skinned people within its borders nor building alliances with white supremacists abroad will help secure Israel’s future. For the fundamental event of our time remains the defeat of Western colonialism, accompanied by increasing political and intellectual affirmation of peoples long exploited, marginalized and silenced by racist regimes.
It may be hard to imagine today, but Israel can only guarantee peace and stability by making good on the promise of decolonization: by dismantling the last outposts of racist colonialism in the West Bank and Gaza and by facilitating the development of a Palestinian one State there It is no longer possible for nihilistic organizations to exploit misery and despair.
The alternative is too dark: Israel insists on portraying itself as a victim even as it commits genocide with the help of American weapons and money, while Jews and Muslims around the world are subject to murderous prejudice.
Pankaj Mishra. (Jhansi, India, 1969) is an essayist. His most recent two books are Of the ruins of Empires: the rebellion against the West and the metamorphosis of Asia (2019) and Bland Fanatics (2020), both with Galaxy Gutenberg.
Translation by María Luísa Rodríguez Tapia
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