The conflict in Gaza, like everything else these days, has been dragged into our culture wars. Tell me where you stand on Black Lives Matter, transgender rights, and immigration, and I’ll tell you, with around 80% accuracy, whether you favor the Palestinians or the Israelis.
Our affiliations are more arbitrary than we like to think. Indeed, when the Jewish state came into existence, they were largely the other way around. Zionism was seen as an anti-colonialist force, and the USSR was an early supporter of Israel. The new country’s chief supporters in the United States were Democrats and, in Britain, Labor MPs.
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Conservatives, if anything, tended to sympathize with the Bedouins, viewed as ascetic religious traditionalists. The reason that Israel is shaped a bit like a telephone is that while the Jewish militia was victorious in 1948 in the north and south, it was less successful in the center against the Arab Legion, commanded by Glubb Pasha and other British officers in the service of Jordan’s Hashemite dynasty.
Why did the poles switch? Partly because of later Cold War alignments and partly because the conflict has become a proxy battle over Muslim immigration to the West. Indeed, religious minorities are the main exceptions to the Left/Right division, with left-wing Jews backing Israelis and right-wing Muslims backing Palestinians.
These tribal factors are much stronger than the more commonly stated reason, namely that “Israel is a Western ally.” Israel is conspicuously not an ally in Ukraine. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government went out of its way to avoid even the weakly worded defenses of sovereignty issued by other neutrals — a strategy, incidentally, that yielded no dividends, for Russia has since strengthened its ties to Iran and Hamas. But Israel, if not a Western ally, is a Western society, which makes Western conservatives applaud it and decolonizers resent it.
This is not the first time a foreign war has split the West. A generation ago, it was Iraq; a generation before that, Vietnam; and a generation before that, Spain. What is new is the intensity, the anger, the sense that opponents are a danger to you, personally. Our media landscape is more fragmented than ever and more prone to propaganda. Two sets of people follow two separate narratives, weep over two sets of children, and wonder incredulously how anyone can be so inhuman as not to share their preoccupations.
“How is what Israel is doing any different from what Russia is doing?” one side asks. “Why is the West backing genocide?”
“How come you don’t care about dead children in Yemen or Syria?” the other side asks. “Do you think we have forgotten the way you cheered after the murders on Oct. 7?”
I am more worried about community relations in Britain than at any point in my life. Suppose there is a domestic terrorist atrocity. Maybe some disturbed young man drives a car into a crowded place. We have had such attacks before. But in the current polarized atmosphere, it would be followed by people claiming on the airwaves that Britain had had it coming because of its support for Israel. What would be the impact on civil peace?
We have, until now, been good at encouraging settlers to leave their quarrels at the door. The communal violence that accompanied the partition of India in 1947 saw abominations every bit as horrific as those in Israel and Gaza. Women and children were tortured, mutilated, burned alive, blinded with chili powder, and boiled in cauldrons. Refugee trains would pull in at their destinations with gore dripping from every aperture and not a single passenger still breathing. Sometimes, a message would have been chalked on the carriages’ side: “A present from India” or “A present from Pakistan.”
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Unsurprisingly, India and Pakistan have never fully gotten over those horrors. They have fought 3 1/2 subsequent wars, and their border is the most militarized on Earth. But in Britain, Muslims, Sikhs, and Hindus from the worst-affected regions settled in the same towns without animosity. The same was true of Turks and Kurds, Serbs and Croats, and Greek and Turkish Cypriots.
Why? Because our culture elevated the person, insisting that no one was defined by birth or caste. That culture has changed radically as a result of identity politics. In an atmosphere in which it is considered acceptable to blame people because, say, one of their ancestors owned slaves, many have returned to the logic of vendetta. If they can’t find the perpetrator of some crime in the Middle East, then they’ll take it out on any Jew, any Muslim. No open society can survive such thinking.
The Gaza conflict threatens the West
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28.11.2023
The conflict in Gaza, like everything else these days, has been dragged into our culture wars. Tell me where you stand on Black Lives Matter, transgender rights, and immigration, and I’ll tell you, with around 80% accuracy, whether you favor the Palestinians or the Israelis.
Our affiliations are more arbitrary than we like to think. Indeed, when the Jewish state came into existence, they were largely the other way around. Zionism was seen as an anti-colonialist force, and the USSR was an early supporter of Israel. The new country’s chief supporters in the United States were Democrats and, in Britain, Labor MPs.
TEXAS SUPREME COURT TO HEAR CASE CHALLENGING STATE'S ABORTION LAW
Conservatives, if anything, tended to sympathize with the Bedouins, viewed as ascetic religious traditionalists. The reason that Israel is shaped a bit like a telephone is that while the Jewish militia was victorious in 1948 in the north and south, it was less successful in the center against the Arab Legion, commanded by Glubb Pasha and other British officers in the service of Jordan’s Hashemite dynasty.
Why did the poles switch? Partly........
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