The West Is The Real Culprit In The Israeli-Palestine Conflict

Part 1: Anti-Semitism, Guilt and Colonialism

M. D. Kwak

WESTERN MEDIA HEADLINES WOULD HAVE YOU BELIEVE that the current war raging in Gaza and the West Bank is just another regrettable yet intractable conflict over ‘land and religion’ in the Middle East – an unfortunate crisis that is conveniently far-removed from our domestic concerns at home. Many gleefully play the blame game of ‘which side has the moral high ground’, and either champion the Israeli right to self-defence or lambast Netanyahu’s violent and disproportionate retaliation against Palestinian civilians.

This is farcical.

Western colonial empires birthed this conflict with its vile anti-Semitism and facilitation of Israeli settlement. Our governments have continuously failed to respond in ways that protect the human dignity of both sides facing atrocity. Politicians and media outlets have fuelled the scorching blaze of war with their dehumanising and inflammatory rhetoric. The biggest culprits in this conflict are those watching from the sidelines.

Zionism’s call for the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine didn’t come out of thin air. It was created (or at least certainly accelerated) in reaction to anti-Semitic and exclusionary European nationalism that told Jews they did not have a place in Europe. In 1881-84, there were anti-Jewish pogroms in the Russian empire; for decades, all European nations debated the ‘Jewish problem’; the Holocaust may have been the most evil manifestation of anti-Semitism, but it certainly wasn’t the first.  

The slaughter of six million Jewish people cemented the perceived necessity of a Jewish state – outside of a European continent which had pillaged and murdered them. And Europe, as if to absolve themselves of the guilt of genocide, was willing to support them. This guilt is well-placed not just for German Nazis but also Hungarian Nazis, French collaborators, complicit European governments and in varying degrees, the entire European collective for either perpetrating or allowing a uniquely evil event in human history to metastasise.

However, Europe’s lingering Holocaust guilt – exemplified no better than Germany’s fierce intolerance for Nazi iconography – still informs their hesitance to condemn Israel. Instead of calling for a ceasefire or providing meaningful humanitarian aid to starving civilians subject to Israeli blockades in Gaza, Europe’s response has been confused, disunified and substantially unhelpful in reducing human suffering. Some leaders have called for Israel to abide by its legal obligations. Others are fierce in their support for Israel’s right to defend itself. Many still ‘discuss’ a two-state solution without ever taking steps to progress it. The West’s failure to clean up its own mess is damning. Their guilt-induced, ambivalent support for Israel is akin to washing the blood of the Holocaust off their hands with the blood of Palestinians who face ethnic cleansing. Europe’s guilt may be justified, but not at the cost of Palestinian lives.

Guilt is only a fraction of our moral culpability in creating this conflict; there’s also the West’s solipsism. From the onset, Israel’s creation was justified with a particularly Western settler-colonialism mindset, not to mention, a conveniently-placed geopolitical advantage for the West to maintain. Britain’s 1917 Balfour declaration supported a “national home” for the Jewish people in Ottoman-occupied Palestine. This was a declaration which explicitly assumed that Palestine was an empty land without a people which the British Empire could bestow upon a people without a land. It was this settler colonialist mindset of ‘terra nullius’ (sound familiar?) which created this conflict, and it’s the same colonial mindset that Israel inherited from the West. Despite the illegality of Israel’s West Bank settlement, the number of settlers has increased from 270,000 to 700,000 in the past 30 years. In retaliation to Hamas’ October 7 attacks, Israel has encroached even further and threatened the displacement of millions from their homes whilst settler violence and civilian and journalist deaths have increased rapidly. That’s not to say that the Hamas attack wasn’t deeply wrong; it was a barbaric raid for slaughter and human trophies. Yet, the fundamental system which underpins the region’s persistent instability and ethnic conflict was inherited from the West and sustained by our shameful inaction.

Perhaps the most glaring failure of Europe and the international community is their UN attempt to partition the region – causing civil war to break out and eventually the 1948 Arab-Israeli conflict. The British authority which had ruled for decades and had the obligation to maintain order, simply organised their own withdrawal, packed up and left Palestine to avoid handling the ethnic conflict which had spiralled out of control – conveniently leaving the region embroiled in conflict that has continued to this day. This is quite similar to European decolonisation, which left Africa under the knife of instability, causing millions of deaths due to post-colonial conflict and economic impoverishment. It is not good enough for the West to simply walk away from the geopolitical and humanitarian havoc they have wreaked – they have a responsibility to repair it.

Biden and Netanyahu in a bilateral conference