avatarBenjamin Cain

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Israel as the Vanguard in a Clash of Civilizations

Islamic illiberalism and the West’s surpassing of medievalism

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Even staunch defenders of Israel’s treatment of Palestinians may have a hard time supporting how Israel has seemingly taken all of Gaza hostage, blockading the region in retaliation for Hamas’s slaughter and hostage-taking of Israelis in the Oct 7 pogrom.

Even in the most likely scenario, in which Israel doesn’t intend to target civilians with its bombing, Israel has evidently prioritized the unrealistic goal of “destroying” Hamas, even if this necessarily results in the killing of thousands of Gazan civilians since Israel knows that Hamas hides behind human shields.

Israel’s military issues warnings to evacuate areas that are about to be bombed, and Hamas is mainly to blame for the civilian deaths by endangering them with its embedded terroristic infrastructure. Moreover, Hamas instigated the war with its Oct 7 pogrom, and with its refusal to accept Israel’s right to exist.

But just by choosing to destroy Hamas with its military and with the blockade of Gaza that threatens to create a humanitarian disaster, Israel indicates that it’s made a Machiavellian calculation. And it’s that calculation, as much as the report of thousands of civilian deaths in Gaza, that’s evidently offended much of the planet, prompting anti-Jewish attacks everywhere from Russian airports to American colleges.

For example, the IDF (Israel’s military) launched airstrikes against the Jabalya refugee camp in northern Gaza, targeting a Hamas commander who was using the refugees as his human shields. The IDF knew, then, that these airstrikes would inevitably kill many civilians, and went ahead with them.

So, the calculation is plain: according to Prime Minister Netanyahu and the IDF, those many civilian casualties are worth the killing of a few, easily replenished Hamas members. Evidently, Israel doesn’t rank Palestinian civilians as highly as does the UN or international law, just as the US didn’t rank Iraqi civilians so highly in George W. Bush’s post-9/11 military campaign. Laser-guided missiles may be precise, but they’re still a superpower’s missiles being fired into the developing world.

Why has Israel made this calculation? Why is it trying to destroy Hamas when its brutal means of doing so are more likely to create another generation of Hamas-like terrorists, and when the leaders of Hamas are lounging in Qatar?

Observers who are inclined to condemn Israel and to laud Palestinians are likely to explain Israel’s military actions by positing that Israeli Jews are just racist and evil. But that would be mere reactionary demonization. Similarly, Palestinian civilians aren’t evil racists who agree with Hamas that Israel should be destroyed by any effective means, including savage acts of terrorism.

There are likely two unstated reasons for Israel’s harsh treatment of Palestinian civilians in Gaza.

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Israel’s hostile geopolitical environment

First, over the decades, Israel was turned into a callous, pragmatic military superpower because of certain structural asymmetries in the Middle East. Israel is a tiny, Jewish, relatively liberal or “modern” nation surrounded by large Arab states.

Moreover, since its founding, Israel has been prepared to tolerate the existence of those Muslim neighbours on liberal grounds, whereas the same tolerance was never extended to Israel. The breakup of the Ottoman Empire in WWI sparked a wave of nationalist movements, and after the Holocaust Jews just wanted to live somewhere in peace to practice their way of life. Thus, they accepted the UN’s partition plan in 1948. Jews weren’t interested in crusading against the Muslim world, expanding their territory by conquest to create a Jewish empire.

But Arabs in the region have always been opposed to Zionism, as far back as their rejection of the Balfour Declaration in 1917, in which the British Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs expressed sympathy for the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people on the understanding that “nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.”

As Britannica points out, in 1920 “delegates from Palestine attended a general Syrian congress at Damascus, which passed a resolution rejecting the Balfour Declaration…This resolution echoed one passed earlier in Jerusalem, in February 1919, by the first Palestinian Arab conference of Muslim-Christian associations, which had been founded by leading Palestinian Arab notables to oppose Zionist activities.”

And from that point a century ago till now, Arabs have not only rejected numerous peace deals with Israel but have resorted to violence to destroy the Jewish state, losing two major wars with Israel in specular, humiliating fashion, compounding their grievances against that tiny superpower.

Just as it looks as though Israel almost equates Palestinian civilians with Hamas terrorists, from Israel’s response to the Oct 7 pogrom, it looks as though Arabs are so illiberal (ungenerous, intolerant) that they’re unwilling to tolerate the existence even of a small Jewish state in their midst even though Arabs have all kinds of land in the Muslim world, from Lebanon, to Syria, to Jordan, to Iraq, to Saudi Arabia, to Egypt.

The point is that that impression of abiding hostility to the existence of a Jewish state has likely hardened Israel, forcing that country to be sometimes brutal and Machiavellian just to survive in such a hostile environment.

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“Medievalism” and modern progress

Second, although Israel itself has no ambition to conquer the Muslim world, Israel is allied with the United States, and the Western world is at odds with all forms of illiberalism — and thus with Islamic regimes.

Now, the repellent conspiracy theories about Jews’ role in world politics go back at least to The Protocols of the Elders of Zion in 1903, and to the prominent Sunni Islamic scholar Rashid Riḍā (1865–1935), who “considered the Zionist enterprise part of the wider British imperial scheme to consolidate their regional dominion and provoke civil strife amongst Muslims.”

According to the anti-Zionist historian Ilan Pappe, Riḍā and his disciple Haj Amin took as a first principle that Muslim society should “regard the encounter with Western culture…as an existential threat.” Amin’s

second principle related to the way [the Islamic Arab world] needed to deal with this encounter — a return to [implementing] a pure version of the Islamic commandments, all the while strenuously filtering out western influences…A third principle touched on the need to link religious activity to political and nationalist actions. The struggle against the British occupation of Egypt, for example, was nothing but the struggle of Islam against the West. Rida spoke explicitly also about Zionism and the need to fight it within the framework of the overall struggle against the West’s takeover of the Arab, Islamic Middle East [my emphasis].

Judging from the history of European colonialism and from the US’s promotion of Western interests in the Middle East, such as in the American-British coup d’état in Iran in 1953, it seems there’s a kernel of truth in some of those Islamist conspiracy theories.

It’s not that Jews are demonic and secretly in control of the planet. But modern (liberal, free-thinking, capitalistic, technoscientifically advancing) cultures are inherently in conflict with regressive, medieval, illiberal ones, and the latter arguably include those of the Arab world. “Medieval” in this pejorative sense means “primitive,” and this sense derives from the Enlightenment’s positivistic view of history, according to which the revolutions of secular “modernity” were progressive and for the good of humankind.

That view of history is ideological, of course, but the point is that this culture of Western secular liberalism is just as imperialistic and totalizing as evangelical monotheism. Militant Islamists think the whole world needs to be converted to Islam to please God. Liberals think the world needs to be liberated from dogmatism, superstition, and ignorance. Science, capitalism, democracy, and enlightened secular thinking are supposed to liberate us from medieval squalor.

As a Western-style superpower, then, Israel represents a giant threat to the Muslim cultures in so far as the latter are hostile to “modernization,” that is, to the separation of politics and religion, and to the unleashing of amoral technoscience, neoliberal capitalism, and materialistic consumerism. Whereas Christendom was forcibly modernized by the Protestant Reformation, the French and Russian revolutions, and Napoleon’s Revolutionary Wars, the Muslim world hasn’t yet fully reckoned with what the West calls “modernity.”

On the contrary, much of the Middle East explicitly rejects liberalism as sinful folly. Sayyid Qutb, an early leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, visited America in 1948 and when he returned to Egypt, he lamented America’s potential impact on Muslim cultures.

According to one journalist, Qutb’s problem wasn’t just that America was “a land of pleasures without limit. In America, unlike in Egypt, dreams could come true. Qutb understood the danger this posed: America’s dazzle had the power to blind people to the real zenith of civilization, which for Qutb began with Muhammad in the seventh century and reached its apex in the Middle Ages, carried triumphantly by Muslim armies.”

Moreover,

The modern obsession with science and invention was a moral regression to the primitive condition of the first toolmakers. Qutb’s America was bursting with raw energy and appetite, but utterly without higher virtues. In his eyes, its “interminable, incalculable expanses of virgin land” were settled by “groups of adventurers and groups of criminals” who lacked the time and reflection required for a civilized life. Qutb’s Americans “faced the uncharted forests, the tortuous mountain mazes, the fields of ice, the thundering hurricanes, and the beasts, serpents and vermin of the forest” in a struggle that left them numb to “faith in religion, faith in art and faith in spiritual values altogether.”

Now, that suggestion that the New World’s harsh frontier restricted Americans to a kind of Philistine pragmatism can be turned around on the traditional monotheist since, as I argue elsewhere, it may just as well be no accident that the simplicity of monotheism developed in desert regions in the Middle East. Desert heat promotes another kind of life-or-death rigidity, as opposed to political compromises, intellectual flexibility, or tolerance of gray areas in life.

Photo by jean wimmerlin on Unsplash

A clash of civilizations

In any case, here we have an epic clash of civilizations, and George W. Bush may indeed have given the game away when he spoke of the “war on terror” as a “crusade.” “This crusade,” he said, “this war on terrorism is going to take a while. And the American people must be patient.” Now, Bush was likely only signalling to his Evangelical Christian supporters, and Christendom’s sense of a crusade is itself old-fashioned.

But the crusade that threatens the Muslim world is rather the march of “modernity,” and Bush’s neoconservative war cabinet was closer to the political philosopher Leo Strauss’s cynicism and realism than to outdated Christian creeds.

But let’s return to Israel and Gaza. The second, perhaps unconscious reason for Israel’s brutal treatment of Palestinian civilians is that as representatives of liberal modernity, most Israeli Jews implicitly take their culture to be better for humankind than Islamism. Whether liberals are right or wrong here isn’t the point. The point is that while Judaism itself isn’t an imperial ideology, modernism is, and Israel is a bastion of modernity in the Muslim world.

However effective sharia may be in curbing freedom of thought along with crime in places like Saudi Arabia, the draconian punishment of cutting off a thief’s hand, for instance, is barbaric according to liberal sensibilities.

Thus, just as the European colonialists dismissed the human rights of indigenous Americans and Africans, conquering their lands and slaughtering or enslaving them, Israel may implicitly demote Palestinian civilians to a lower status than Jews, by linking those civilians not necessarily to terrorism but to “medievalism.”I collect my Medium writings in paperback and eBook forms, and I put them up on Amazon. Check them out if you’d like to have them handy and to support my writing in that way. The newest one is Questing for Epiphanies in a Haunted House, and its 600 pages include 99 recent, wide-ranging articles of mine.

I collect my Medium writings in paperback and eBook forms, and I put them up on Amazon. Check them out if you’d like to have them handy and to support my writing in that way. The newest one is Questing for Epiphanies in a Haunted House, and its 600 pages include 99 recent, wide-ranging articles of mine.

Israel
Palestine
Politics
History
War
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