One day, everyone will have been against this
Israel is being mythologised as exceptional rather than inevitable
A few years ago, I was invited to speak at a three day conference in the Swiss Alps. Attendees were corporate executives, financiers, and government advisers. After my panel, in which I spoke rather aggressively about greenwashing and had an argument with a former economics Minister for France, I was invited to give a speech at the closing panel. One of the other speakers was a famous French economist and political theorist who was instrumental in Europe’s neoliberal transformation, and the kingmaker behind Emmanuel Macron. The Summit was under Chatham House rules, meaning I cannot identify him, but he was there to promote his latest book about how to save the world from climate change. To get a feel for the philosophy of some of his past books, know that Henry Kissinger was a big fan.
The man spoke, at length, about the dangerous state of the world, diagnosing the problem with an air of expertise, and suggesting there may not be very much we can do about it unless we act fast. What struck me while he was speaking was how he positioned himself: an advocate and an expert looking on from on high. At no point did he refer to his role in engendering this crisis. At no point did he offer any insight into how this crisis came about, nor the manifest political greed which sold off Earth to the highest bidder. At no point did he offer any concessions as to his responsibility. He spoke like an oracle, as if the future had very little to do with the past. He spoke like a man whose wealth depends on his being in charge.
I’ve been thinking about this man over the past few days as the political and media pundits of the world have finally come out against the slaughter in Gaza. “For Pity’s Sake End This Now” read the front page of the Daily Express. Piers Morgan has finally conceded Israel is committing war crimes. American news anchors are finally challenging Israeli ministers parroting the regime’s propaganda about aid. France’s Prime Minister last week announced that France would recognise a Palestinian state. Many of the activists, scholars and average citizens around the world who have had the decency to call a spade a spade since first witnessing Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians have been quick to point out that this is the first wave of the eventuality that one day everyone will have been against this.
If these pundits do not acknowledge their part in manufacturing consent for genocide, they will erase history before our very eyes. Doing so perpetuates the dangerous assertion that genocides are aberrations in our political word order rather than historical evidence of the violence seeded in regimes which depend on growth. Obscuring the propaganda which facilitated Israel’s illegal and horrific assault on a sovereign people denies the mythologies upon which power is built, casting Israel as an exceptional villain rather than an inevitability. As the exceptional journalist Hamza Yusuf wrote on Twitter: “It’s no doubt a good thing to see this categorical, raw Daily Express front page tomorrow. But when it mattered most, it manufactured consent for the very horrors it is now condemning. This is cause and effect.”
Israel’s violence is only made exceptional by its visibility. Not only are there coinciding genocides taking place in Sudan and West Papua, the invisible violence of the growth regime takes millions of lives every year, billions if you include the more-than-human world. Every single victim is a sacrifice of rapacious greed and supremacist beliefs. Our culture of domination, extraction and consumption needs to be put on trial alongside Netanyahu. If the powerful are allowed to erase their original condoning of violence, and if the history books pathologise Netanyahu as a mad man, that culture will once again slip through the cracks and escape judgement.
Israel’s allies supported its right to exterminate 60,000 Palestinians because their own regimes depend on the right to murder. Now, every additional Palestinian body is an excuse to distance themselves from Israel’s violence. They are using the flesh of children to build a wall behind which their own violence hides.
One day, everyone will have been against this—even as they continue to enjoy the fruits of violence everywhere.
Outstanding piece of writing!💯 I agree this insane abomination; crime against humanity must stop. It can be labeled in anyway you like; apartheid, Ethnic cleansing, genocide. It has taken the media outlets far too long to acknowledge the atrocities. The lust for power and eternal greed has to stop.
Right on, Rachel! Where you write, “ Our culture of domination, extraction and consumption needs to be put on trial alongside Netanyahu,” I agree 💯 with Kristine’s comments below. As a restorative practitioner, one of the things that upsets me most is the way institutions, governments, and communities fail to take responsibility and engage in accountability while punishing individuals for failing to do so. Friday I sat in a United States District Court, where a portrait of Donald Trump hangs in the entryway, and I watched a federal court judge sentence my friend to 12 years in prison, even after the judge noted that my friend’s actions were totally motivated by his severe drug addiction that resulted from a traumatic childhood—because the judge said he had to deter others. And all I could think of is, how can you look yourself in the mirror when you walk by the portrait of a man convicted of dozens of felonies including sexual assault and not see the hypocrisy?
I just saw We Are Guardians, the documentary about forest guardians in the Amazon and I understood I am complicit in the deforestation because I know the food chain and the lumber industry and the financial system driving the destruction also reaches me.
Accountability is painful. I devote my life to cultivating the conditions that foster it. Sadly, my friend going to prison is far more courageous and honest than the many systems that failed him.
Even when most people finally agree the genocide in Gaza is an irreparable stain on humanity and just as heinous as the machinations of the Third Reich, far fewer will dare the ask, in what way was I even tangentially responsible? As Abraham Joshua Heschel said, when a moral wrong occurs, not all are guilty but we are all responsible.