There is something surprising in the way Western democracies have reacted to events in Israel since the start of the military operation in Gaza. I call it the end of hypocrisy. Take President Joe Biden. On two occasions he has publicly
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Why would Biden do this? Why not simply proclaim a number of high principles and then proceed to ignore them in practice? The late Henry Kissinger seemed to know better and to be concerned with the role of hypocrisy in world affairs, a balancing act between the need for norms and the equally important need to occasionally break them.
Biden, by contrast, says the quiet part out loud. His team, from Sullivan to Blinken and the ineffable John Kirby, has followed his example. They have consistently refused to even mention international law or universal principles, preferring to point out that Israel is a “close partner.” To a partner, much or all is allowed, including the deliberate destruction of hospitals and schools. When Russia did it in Ukraine, Blinken and Kirby called it barbaric. “Hitting playgrounds, schools, hospitals,” said Kirby, “is utter depravity.” He was talking about Russia, not Israel. When asked what the Biden Administration would do if Israel continued to commit war crimes, his
No one could accuse the U.S. of double standards. What it is vulnerable to is the accusation that it no longer has any standards at all.
But standards have their uses and not only for the sentimental. They give form to world politics and drive other states to follow rules decided and enforced by a higher power. With the right level of hypocrisy, they allow you to subject others to your rules while remaining somewhat above them. The challenge is to explain why the U.S. would be so willing to renounce the advantages of hypocrisy and its role as rule-maker. In the way it has addressed the political and humanitarian crisis in the Middle East, we see what it would mean for the existing world order to unravel, as American power gives up on the mission of every hegemon: to shape world politics according to its own plan and, as always happens, its own standards.
The reason for America’s capitulation is that rules are always a hindrance to free action. Even for those in charge of creating and enforcing them, or especially for them, since ordering the world is hard work and gets in the way of enjoying it. No great power has ever been founded on the subjectivity of desire or impulse, but those temptations are just as present in the life of nations as in the life of individuals.
Once upon a time, Washington still aspired to bring some kind of order to the Middle East. The task required discipline. It required at least the pretence of impartiality between all the different sides. At no point was this discipline better seen than in 1991 in Madrid, with the last genuine effort by Washington to bring the Israelis and the Palestinians together. Secretary of State James Baker understood the Middle East, which must entail having empathy for the different worldviews to be found in the region. “Those of us who met Baker,” Rashid Khalidi has written, “sensed that he had sympathy for the predicament of Palestinians under occupation and understood our frustration at the absurd restraints imposed by the Shamir government.” In 1992 James Baker decided to condition $10 billion in aid to Israel on its halting settlement construction. Bill Clinton, running in the Democratic primaries,
James Baker was, of course, able to do only so much, but today the role he attempted to play has been entirely jettisoned and if America cares about anything, it is less to create an idea of order than to pursue its private visions and to build a virtual playground where they can be pursued and fulfilled. What gets in the way of surplus enjoyment is less a problem to be addressed than an obstacle to be eliminated. Can anyone take seriously the traditional American aspiration to play the role of a mediator when President Joe Biden
In these private fantasies, the Palestinians are little more than disposable props, often forced to play certain roles that bear little resemblance to their real existence. As
Never mind that the history of the Arab world shares nothing with these narratives or that Jews lived peacefully with Muslims in Palestine under the Ottomans, with “no more friction than is commonly found amongst neighbours” (as Mahmoud Yazbak writes in his Haifa in the Late Ottoman Period). Palestinians must be assimilated under our favourite categories. For Germany, its commitment to Israel is offered as a test of whether the country has overcome its Nazi past. This is politics as psychology or, better, put, psychoanalysis. There are no limits of prudence or public reason. Reality is of no consequence, what matters is redemption. As Daniel Marwecki argues in his Germany and Israel, Israel serves “as displacement object onto which different ideas of German national identity can be articulated.” It serves as “a form of reconciliation that seeks to cleanse Germany of antisemitism, which time and again seems to creep back into view.” This catechism, as
Within the dreamscape of German return and redemption, and by extension much of the West, the Israeli dreamscape is like a smaller concentric circle, its fantasies speaking of final control over a sacred land. As
The Western narrative, valid and true in its context, becomes a ruinous myth when it replaces other stories and experiences. No single narrative can encompass the whole of human history. Those charged with building order must strive for a full picture.
In the debate over the past few months we have witnessed staggering levels of fabulation. One
In fantasies or dreams, other people have no real existence. They are just projections of the dreaming self, and the goal is to create a world where desires find no outside resistance. There is great danger in this temptation, which in Israel has already found expression in proposals to transfer two million Palestinians from Gaza to the Sinai. The Israeli government now finds it impossible to convince people to go back to their homes in Southern Israel because it has promised total defeat of Hamas. November 11, Agriculture Minister
We used to have fantasies; now we live them out. The effect is intoxicating. But in Gaza there is a reckoning, or a double reckoning. First, we now realise that a life of fantasy can easily become the source of the deepest horrors. Fantasy dehumanises. As Gilles Deleuze once observed, there is nothing more terrible and more terrifying than to be captured by the dreams of others. And indeed, to be captured in so many concentric dreams has become the Palestinian inescapable nightmare. Second, if those with power spend their time entertaining private fantasies, then the task of building order must in time devolve to someone else. In Gaza we are witnessing the pathologies of a quickly declining America, its role no longer that of an ordering power but of a demiurge building a world of private enjoyment.