For more than four months now, the United States, the United Kingdom and other Western countries have been strongly supporting Israel's war against Gaza. So far, the Israeli army has killed more than 28,000 Palestinians, including more than 12,000 children.
On January 26, the International Court of Justice ruled that “at least some of the acts and omissions that South Africa alleges Israel committed in Gaza appear to fall within the provisions of the Convention.” [Genocide] Convention,” and that South Africa’s claim that Israel is committing genocidal acts is “plausible.” However, the West continued to support Israel.
Then, when Israel alleged that employees of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) were linked to Hamas, the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany and more than a dozen Other countries suspended their funding as Palestinians in Gaza faced hunger.
Despite Western complicity in actions that the world's highest court recognizes as genocidal, the West still claims all kinds of superiority in civilized social behavior. Western countries still honor themselves as “the good ones.”
“I got in trouble many times for saying that you don't have to be Jewish to be a Zionist, and I am a Zionist. I don't apologize for that. That is a reality,” President Joe Biden said in a speech at a private campaign reception in Massachusetts in early December, when the death toll in Gaza already reached 16,200. “We have [Americans] I never thought anything was beyond our ability, from curing cancer this time to everything we have done. “I mean it,” he added.
It takes a special kind of narcissism for a world leader to declare himself a supporter for 50 years of a white supremacist ideology that excuses apartheid, colonialism and genocide and then appeal to the greatness of the United States and all its countries. possibilities,” as if the United States had just been spreading fairy dust around the world and had not intervened with brutal military and economic power for the last 130 years.
But the American president is not alone in his self-deception. At the Conservative Friends of Israel meeting in London last month, UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak showed unwavering support for Israeli attacks on Gaza and the West Bank. “There is a horrible irony in Israel, in every country being accused of genocide,” Sunak said, calling South Africa's case against Israel “completely unjustified.”
The “horrible irony” is that Israel, as a Western ally, cannot be accused of genocide because it is one of “the good guys.” The “bad guys” can only be non-Western (actually non-white) nations, like South Africa.
Biden, Sunak and others still believe that, as leaders of the developed world, they are making understandable rational decisions when they wage wars and kill people in the name of self-defense or under the guise of fighting “terrorism.”
Despite the protests of tens of millions of people around the world and the death of tens of thousands of Palestinians, the destruction of Gaza and other crimes against humanity, the disregard for the ongoing war in Sudan and the conflict in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Western leaders still believe that capitalism and Western democratic institutions will save the world.
In his book The Clash of Civilizations (1996), the late political scientist Samuel Huntington warned of the dangers of the Western delusion that the rest of the world should embrace its supposed values. “The survival of the West depends on Americans reaffirming their Western identity and Westerners accepting their civilization as unique, not universal,” he wrote.
But what Huntington failed to understand about the West's quest for a world civilization is that current resentments toward it did not begin in the post-Cold War era of the 1990s. They are a response to the trail of death, destruction and devouring. of resources that Westerners have left behind since Christopher Columbus arrived in the Western Hemisphere and Vasco da Gama found a route around Africa to South Asia, both in the 1490s.
The rest of the world has been the source of the plunder of the West, first through the plundering of gold, silver and gems from recently invaded lands, then through the enslavement of millions of indigenous peoples, Africans and Asians, and finally through the conquest of Los old empires of the East.
This belief in Western civilization as superior and just because of its whiteness is so ingrained in their culture that young Westerners grow up without anyone in their lives questioning it. That is, until someone like me, a history teacher, comes along and confronts this fundamental belief.
In my many years of teaching history, my own students have often fought with me over my assumption that “Western civilization” is a contradictory term.
“But the Aztecs practiced human sacrifice!” one student shouted, while a calmer student, with his hand raised, said, “It's unfortunate that atrocities happened to the natives, but it's insulting to compare what the Spanish did to what happened to Rome.”
That was the strong pushback I received from some students in one of my world history courses a few years ago when I talked about the barbarity of the Spanish conquests of the Aztecs and Incas in the 16th century and the similarities between those invasions and the Vandal Tribes. and Visigoths who helped put an end to the Western Roman Empire.
I pointed out the achievements of the destroyed civilizations and the Spanish conquistadors and priests burned almost all the Mayan writings, desecrated the Mexica, Mayan and Inca temples and forced the population into slavery and Christianity.
I have also endured vitriol from students who were unwilling to even consider the possibility that the United States and the West, having engaged in barbaric behavior with their own populations and around the world, might do so in the near future.
“It's not possible because… no civilized society wants it to happen to them,” one student said years ago. “Americans would never take up arms against the government, especially against our military, it is not rational. We wouldn't be stupid enough to make this mistake again. Our military would crush any insurrection,” is what another student blurted out last year, even though the insurrection at the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, proved otherwise.
Some students were too convinced that the West was a positive force to consider the apocalypse that struck 60 million indigenous people, wiping out up to 90 percent of the population within 100 years of Columbus's first contact.
We couldn't even talk about the other genocides perpetrated in the name of empire, colonialism and capitalism: the 165 million South Asians the British starved, murdered or worked to death between 1880 and 1920; or the 10 million Congolese that the Belgians are estimated to have exterminated; or the genocide of up to 100,000 Herero and Nama by German forces in Namibia between 1904 and 1908.
My students' belief in Western rationality remained strong even when the carnage of World Wars I and II was mentioned. In those conflicts, up to 90 million civilians and military personnel died, including more than 200,000 annihilated in the US nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Western narcissism is exactly why my students have a hard time accepting that Western civilization contradicts itself at every turn. As the late postcolonial scholar Edward Said wrote in Orientalism (1978): “It can be argued that the main component of European culture is precisely what made it [Western civilisation] hegemonic both within and outside Europe: the idea of European identity as superior in comparison to all non-European peoples and cultures.”
This belief in Western superiority means always being on the right side of history, although there are many examples of Western irrationality, barbarism and brutality in their interventions in the Middle East and the rest of the world. Western narcissism means that the United States and the West will only lift a finger to support the Palestinians if the world and its own citizens force them to do so.
That about half of Americans ages 18 to 29 believe Israel is committing genocide in Gaza is encouraging, but alone it is not enough to end US and Western complicity in Israel's crimes.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Al Jazeera.
