The west's fervent and uncritical support of Israel
even when Israel commits a genocide makes me think about human equality.
Is equality a mirage?
Given the persecution of the Jewish people in
Europe in the last 2000 years, I feel saddened by the fact that those who know
what means to be hated and persecuted by simply being who they are, now premise
peace and co-existence on bombs.
I teach young people. I do research on young people.
In these activities, my aim is to work toward a better world, a world in which
everyone would feel respected, a world in which what fails you is your
inability.
That is the world I want to leave behind for my
children and the youth I teach. This world is yet to be realized.
But there are conservative thinkers like Thomas
Sowell (see: Social Justice Fallacies, Intellectuals and Society,
Intellectuals and Race), John McWhorter (Woke Racism) and Coleman
Hughes (End of Race Politics) who think differently.
They either say such a world is already here, or
they believe it is an impossible world. A utopia of Saint Thomas More variety. Meaning a
search for a just and equal world is fantastical, a childish wish. They want us
to live according to what the world throws at us. In other words, we must live
in the real world and accept things as they are.
Violence. Military brutality. Military invasion.
Genocides. Murders of civilians. Wars. Economic equality.
Within this framework, Israel is said to be adapting
to a world it cannot change. Israeli genocidal destruction of Gaza is, by this
account, a response to a real world Israel did not create.
This is a world in which equality is a pipe dream.
For instance, equality is a natural impossibility
for Thomas Sowell. We shouldn't dream of a world that is not and has
never been. Pssst: Sowell uses history to make his point. He makes this
point in Black Rednecks and White Liberals and Conquest and Culture.
For Sowell, therefore, you must take cues from
history. If you cannot find a historical precedent, then stop looking for that
kind of a world.
As such, for the Sowells, the Hughes, and the
McWhorters of the world, racism is, largely, a passé.
To be realistic, they are right or wrong
based on one's ideological camp. You will find their supporters and haters in
boat loads. Sowell puts this well in Intellectuals and Society:
“The
coincidence of real world challenge and intellectual challenge, which [H. G] Wells
and others have tended to treat as almost axiomatic, depends on the initial
assumptions of one’s social vision.”
To
Sowell, the left forces their vision (as the anointed – McWhorter would call
them “The Elect” and Hughes would call them “Neo-racist”) on the rest of us. Conservative
intellectuals, according to Sowells, remain faithful to the facts of the real
world.
But here is where they seem naive. They think their
assessments are simply objective. That they write about facts, common
sense, and the real world.
Here is Sowell again:
“Like so many other nice-sounding notions,
the multicultural ideology does not distinguish between an arbitrary definition
and a verifiable proposition. That is, it does not distinguish between how one
chooses to use words within one’s own mind and the empirical validity of those
words outside in the real world. Yet consequences, for both individuals and
society, follow from mundane facts in the real world, not from definitions
inside people’s heads. Empirically, the question whether or not cultures are
equal becomes: Equal in what demonstrable way? That question is seldom, if ever,
asked, much less answered, by most of the intelligentsia.”
As an intellectual and a scholar, Sowell knows well
that definitions are the very way through which knowledge is organized to be effectively
and instrumentally organized. Empirical facts of the world do not come pre-organized
into self-explanatory, knowledge units. They must be studied in the real world,
defined in the heads, and operationalized.
Sowell and Sowellites equally write about a world that
is not. They also write from visions. They are the anointed objectivist. The
leftist intellectuals are the anointed idealists.
The world they think they live in, their so-called
real world, is a world that is in their heads. The social circles in
which they are accepted as mouth pieces of what European-Americans dare not say
makes them see these social circles as American (and the world) writ small.
Perhaps it is a world they would want to see
materialize. But who would not want a world in which people are judged by their
talents and values and not their skin color? Who would not want to live in a
world where racism and all forms of discriminatory practices are only talked
about as part of history classes?
While Sowell, McWhorter and Hughes make arguments
that make sense within a defined, limited ideological prism, it is important to
remind them that the western leaders’ response to Israeli attitude toward the
rest of the world makes nonsense of their conservative, racism free society.
Israel serves as an example of how the west will never entertain human equality. Not all Israelis regard themselves as superior human beings. Journalist Gideon Levy and historian Ilan Pappe come to mind.
But the Israelis who make economic and political decisions see themselves as almost superhuman.
Here’s Israeli minister of national security, Mr. Ben Gvir, exemplifying this superiority claim against Palestinians: “My right, my wife's, my children's, to roam the roads of Judea and Samaria are more important than the right of movement of the Arabs.”
Gvir then underscores the Sowellian real world: “Sorry Mohammad, but this is the reality, that's the truth. My right for life comes before their right to movement.”
On May 20, 2011, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu brazenly told President Obama in the Oval office that “we all agree that peace based on illusions will crash eventually on the rocks of Middle Eastern reality.”
What
Netanyahu does not tell the world is that he is one of the architects of that
Middle Eastern reality. That reality is a geopolitical construction not a cosmological
reality.
And to make it worse, Europeans and their diasporas
do not see themselves as equals. They therefore see Israel as combating those
who are trying to temper with Europeans superiority and civilization.
Instead of advising Israel to act as a conventional
democratic state that respects international law and live peacefully with its
neighbors, Europeans take sides.
They cheer Israel on. Bomb on!
Even talking to Israel about cease fire or peace has
become an anathema. Transparency and accountability that are the cornerstones
of liberal democracies are considered anti-Semitic when it comes to Israel. Imagine.
What kind of a liberal democracy is too infallible for accountability?
Hannah Arendt has reminded us in The Origins
of Totalitarianism of such confusing, problematic operationalization of history
in trying times. And no one understood antisemitism and the Jewish Question
more than her.
She writes: “Never has our future been more
unpredictable, never have we depended so much on political forces that cannot
be trusted to follow the rules of common sense and self-interest —forces that
look like sheer insanity, if judged by the standards of other centuries. It is
as though mankind had divided itself between those who believe in human
omnipotence (who think that everything is possible if one knows how to organize
masses for it) and those for whom powerlessness has become the major experience
of their lives.”
As such, Europe and its diasporas are supporting
Israel in the destruction of the image of a state that has become the only
Jewish homeland.
Instead of making Israel the abode of global peace,
they have turned it into a state that premises its survival on targeted
assassinations, invasions, occupations, expropriation of a great human tragedy
(holocaust) for short-term political gains not long-term state-to-state
peaceful coexistence, etc.
Not criticizing or condemning Israeli atrocities is
another form of antisemitism. It increases enemies of Israel, making the
existence of Israel dependent on guarantees of foreign powers such as the US
and EU. Imagine.
For how long will the US and EU guarantee Israeli
security militarily when the rest of the world is technologically advancing?
How can people who have seen so much historical
loss put themselves in such a state?
As someone whose world view on human equality and
intellectual integrity was shaped by Jewish thinkers, I see what Israel is
doing as an insult to the essence of Jewishness. Who would I be intellectually
without the likes of Herbert Marcuse, Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, etc.?
The west has developed technologically. No doubt. Israel
has also done well for itself technologically in less than a century.
What the west has not developed, and which will
lead to its possible destruction, or overtaking by Asians, and Africans in the
future, is its inability (or refusal) to accept as equals people who do not
look like Europeans.
Israel bombs Iran. But Iran is the aggressor! Iran
bombs an Israeli hospital by mistake. The west condemns Iran. Superior westerners
have been bombed. Israel bombs Iranian hospital. The west ignores it…the less equal have been
bombed.
For the west, even when they no longer say it out
loud, human equality is impossible. By Europeans here I mean the people we call
"white" globally.
Of
course, there are true angels among Europeans who can be better than our family
members. We know those few ones. They can walk through fire for us. But they
don't make political and economic decision, do they? The world would be a
better place if they did.
We need a better world. We need a socio-cultural revolution. We need the world to achieve genuine civilization. We shouldn't be savages driving escalades and BMWs.
The
so-called real world is a world that was built by someone for a purpose.
What is called idealistic naïve on the left is a scare tactic to protect status
quos.
