Alon Mizrahi | without equality there’s no freedom
Millions of people are scratching their heads, not knowing what to make of America’s endless commitment to a mass extermination of people, an event that is nothing more than inflicting the most horrific punishment known to humanity on a defenseless group of people.
Together with the US stand many other Western countries, and the same question can be asked about Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Germany, France, the UK, and others. Why are they doing this? Why are they so desperate to support genocide? What drives them to this behavior that offers no apparent benefits? (If you’ve read my first two posts in the colonizer psyche series this will be a natural continuation; if you haven’t look at my pinned tweet) – I don’t think this is about minerals, or geopolitical advantage. I’m looking for answers in the realm of the psychopolitical.
Western powers are defending something. It is not Israel, because Israel is not in danger from Hamas. So what is it? – What do the US, Canada, and Israel have in common? We’re looking for something so deep and precious that it’s worth openly supporting a genocide for. It has to be fundamental, primary, or even primordial. Something that relates to the basic perception of self. All those countries have one big thing in common: they are colonial projects.
But does this help us? I think it does though we are not used to thinking this way. Colonial projects, colonial countries, and I wrote about this in the previous post, are not natural and organic developments of a society. They are external concepts superimposed on an existing society.
Colonial identities are to a large extent fake: someone came to a place and said: from now on we’re this and that. And that’s it. From that moment on, everyone is that colonial project has to abide by that set of completely random and made-up yada yada. If you see it this way (and it’s a leap for many people, but it nevertheless has a lot of intuitive power), it may help you to understand the behavior of Western powers today, and its psychological roots. All colonial powers work together to guarantee the supremacy of made-up identities over genuine, native ones. Because if this model breaks anywhere, it will collapse everywhere. It is a brotherhood of fake.
– How will America tell itself its own story, or Canada, if natives in Palestine get recognition? This is their greatest nightmare: their exposure as fake, made-up cultures, built on domination and theft. They would rather support genocide.
– Palestine is important both in terms of timeline and themes.
Chronologically, Palestine is the last possible direct effort of white colonialism. This is the end, or the edge of it. A Palestinian state would be a major, major moral blow to white, Western colonialism. It will have survived the most brutal and consistent attempts at disintegration and sabotage, meddling and intervening. It will be a major victory for brown and black people. A native group resurrecting from more than a century of this? Oh boy. All the textbooks in all classrooms around the world will have to be replaced.
– But Palestine is also important thematically. Because its colonization was based on an unusual story, with the Jews being represented as some kind of reconquistadores of the Levant, retaking their old land. A story not the first Australians or the white South Africans could reenact. And this story of Zionism was so successful as a political weapon, that it has become its own undoing. Unlike other colonial projects, Israel cannot pretend to respect the natives even a little bit: it believes its own story so fervently that it has to drive out or destroy all of them. And in doing so, instead of allowing former colonial projects a face-saving ending to centuries of horrors, it exposes them as what they really are, and what they really always were.
Stuck between allowing Palestine to succeed and exposing themselves to a major reckoning and becoming implicated in a par excellence colonial genocide, they chose the latter, but are going to have to face the former nonetheless, not before losing all credibility in claiming they have changes in the process.
– A free Palestine scares them because it is the ghost of their own sins, rediscovered as a living, breathing human. The current political structures of colonial projects cannot afford it, so they try to uproot it. Because it is a fight between all colonialists and their fake identities, and all natives and their experienced, documented truths. If you get that, it will be easier to understand why the US and its colonizing friends act the way they do. I don’t think the colonial camp is going to succeed. It has chewed on so much more than it can swallow, and its rivals are many, and they grow in strength and confidence every day. Even if they kill a million Palestinians, as I think they definitely, definitely intend to do, it won’t bring them final victory.
This last crazed effort will result not in the final destruction of Palestine. but In the collapse of the colonial system, under the weight of its own contradictions and its own unattainable, amoral aspirations.