Our Genocide and its consequences
How does a human group assume the right to kill thousands and thousands of human beings, indeed the number of potential deaths seems, in the underlying mentalities of the perpetrators, to be without end? What kind of right is being summoned? The killing perpetrated by the Israeli state is being supported by the ruling classes of the ‘West’. The basis for this support is ostensibly the claim of self defence but it is obvious that this is not substantial. The actions of the Israeli state in Gaza and the West Bank are the exertion of repressive power over a population from whom the perpetrators are stealing land. How can this be justified? What is the underlying principle of this action? Before whom do these people need to explain and find approval? The participation in this massive crime must have consequences other than just material gain for the perpetrators. Are they really driven by the need for security and the maintenance of a ‘way of life’? The governing authorities in the UK are defining opposition to the action of mass slaughter as extremism. As the events unfold they will be shown to be morally disgraceful. They will be seen to be without true authority and they will be demeaned and defeated. Their participation in mass slaughter marks the decline of their rule. The justification for their holding the power of life and death over the subjected people in their domain will disintegrate. Their use of force – the power they exert over the bodies of their subjects, with police powers, powers of imprisonment, military force over life, violence against what is private, will be rendered inoperable. The fundamental power of the state is grounded in regalian power (1) – the power of the sovereign authority to enter property, to take charge of human bodies, alive or dead, and dispose of them as it sees fit, but it can only do so if it is embedded in moral right, shrouded in divine mystery and lived out as a basic assumption. This regalian power – the power over life and death – derives from that of the sovereign, rule of the monarch. The other structures of the state are built around this function in order to both disguise and protect it, to give it authority and to sanctify it. Our state is built on this assumption of power. This becomes more difficult to see because of the delegation and the organisation of relations and spaces that ritualise and mystify these fundamental processes. It is this abuse of state power which underlies the genocide. The genocide in Palestine has rendered our current state – UK but this applies also to the nation-states of the West – constitution discredited and morally negative because it has openly pledged its support to actions that are incompatible with its own stated beliefs in justice. It is only a matter of time before the moral consequences of this will appear before our eyes. Our current state is dead, it requires us to lay it to rest.
Consequences for the West
What are the consequences for the political entities of the West (2), those that are complicit with the Israeli state in its genocide? Growing authoritarianism and eventual disintegration are my quick answers. Their participation and complicity is suicidal. It is a self-imposed disaster from which they will never recover. Where do we start in order to understand the processes involved in this collusion? Why have the governments of the West programmatically failed to take action to prevent Israel’s genocide? Why have they brought upon themselves global isolation? Why have they so ostentatiously contravened the basic principles that they have declared to underly their dominance: humanism, human rights, international law and the recently vaunted rule-based order? Of course, at this late stage, they are taking remedial action. They are distancing themselves from the Israeli state and trying to mitigate the reputational and political damage. It is too late. They will be dragged down with the Zionist entity. If they were individuals their actions would appear to be compulsive and irrational. Why are they racing with such alacrity towards their doom?
The ‘West’?
I am using the word West as short-hand. What do I mean by this? This is not to do with the compass direction. It is a geographically dispersed phenomenon deriving originally from European imperialism. The foundations of the industrial imperialism that has been a powerful and dominating movement on earth for the past 300 years were laid on the Western seaboard of the Eurasian continent. Another way of describing what in common parlance is called the West is the G7. It is defined by modernity and by being economically ‘advanced’. So the West can be seen to include Japan and it can include Australia and New Zealand. The sign of European imperialism is the white supremacism that is not comprehensive but is underlying. I do not believe it is a culturally coherent entity and homogeneous and I resist defining it any further than the group of nation-states which has, up until the current crisis and since the wars of the twentieth century, been led by the United States of America.
War on Terror
The latest stage in the complicity between Israel and the West in the genocide in Palestine was initiated by the declaration of the War on Terror in 2001 (3). This strengthened the collusion between Israel and Western imperialism. In turn it may have increased the political coherence of all components of this alliance. The exceptional nature of this relationship meant that immunity continued to be granted to Israel for its egregious breaking of international law and contravention of United Nations Resolutions. This was the sign of problems to come.
After the attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon, the US president, G W Bush announced a new ‘coalition’ to the world: whoever you were, you were either ‘for or against’ the US and the coalition that was forming around it. If you were against, you were on the side of ‘terror’.
This powerful message, the declaration of global war, was intended to dynamise relations between nation-states and relations of coherence within them. The borders of nation-states could only be guaranteed by the coalition if the composition of the population within them were moving in the direction of alliance with the coalition. If the ‘nation-state’ regime was moving in another direction, the coalition arrogated to itself the right to invade or interfere. All human beings were called on to defy their nation-states (if they had one) if that state was on the side of ‘terrorism’. Loyalty to any nation-state was subordinate to loyalty to the anti-terrorist (anti-Axis of Evil) coalition. This meant that the edicts of the coalition of global superpowers had force over individuals. This was a new form of allegiance that trumped nation-state-derived identities. It was as if all human and social organisms and organisations were, more or less, pervaded by a kind of atomic capsule, a ‘for or against’ agent, a polarising micro-entity that determined the key orientation of the body in which it lodged. This was a new kind of subjection. Since the spread of this catalytic spoor was global, emitted by the world’s most powerful political-military entity, it was as if everybody in the world would eventually have to decide which side they were on. Global fear was summoned and operationalised.
This was an attempt to reform subjectivity on a global scale. It was not necessarily completely successful. It cracked national identities, shattering composite bodies into fragments and tied these fragments to new global determinants. These processes were energised by electronic social media, financialisation and were embedded in notions of modernity and civilisation.
After the Cold War
The adoption of the policy of which this ‘idea’ was an instrument was the effect of the export and dispersal of Israeli foreign policy to the West in the post-‘Cold War’ period. To some extent this was triggered by the second ‘intifada’ in Palestine in 2000. To make this policy turn effective, the ‘neo-conservatives’ had gained influential strategic positions in the US state administration and government. A well-resourced communications strategy operationalised through multiple commercial and financial links between Israel and the West, mainly in the US, was put in place. The period between the First Gulf War/Desert Storm in 1991 and the attack on 11th September 2001 saw the preparations for this initiative. This was effective because of the ideological vacuum caused by the success of the West in the Cold War. The West no longer had an imminent threat through which it could attain political coherence. It needed to supplement the ‘free market ideology’ that it had connected to anti-communism and anti-big state/collectivism. A new ideological boost to the vitality, individualism, democracy and freedom of capitalism was required. After 1989 socialism and communism could no longer be presented as an imminent danger. There was a need for a new, more convincing ‘enemy’. The adoption of the ‘war on terror’ policy strategy was drilled deeper and secured into core civilisational values. It connected up to secularism, modernity and the notion of economic advancement. It was also a regression to primal forms of identity connected to spirituality and rationality that lay at the basis of the idea of christendom and European racial superiority.
Our ‘way of life’.
‘Our’ way of life’ had prevailed with the dismantling of Soviet communism. At that point a blind eye was turned towards China. The generation of a set of values, beliefs and assumptions that could be formulated or spun as ‘a way of life’ could have more grip if it could be considered to be special and exclusive. It was an exclusionary political creation. It must be capable of making the people who were the beneficiaries of it feel special and it must excite envy in those that were excluded. Something could only be ‘ours’ if it was not ‘theirs’. I have written about this exclusionary mechanism elsewhere. (4) Thus the pre-occupation with borders. It is in the nature of the ‘nation-state’ form of social organisation that this tension is required to hold it together, to give it cohesion. It is connected to the myth that the nation-state needed to be ideologically and ethnically uniform. The structures of sovereignty and integrity in the development of the ‘nation-state’ were, and are, energised by envy and desire. These emotional processes operate at an individual and collective level. They are interactive, shared and are propelled by mimetic ‘movements’. This is enacted by the modern nation-state in being based in and on the interlinked principles of private property and individual freedom. These are the fundamental principles of its organisation. Social relations embodied and habituated in institutions are co-created simultaneously with subjectivities. These are the interactions between how people behave, how social spaces are realised and transformed by them, how they are lived, and how individuals see themselves, attain identities, recognise each other and thus mutually create each other.
Society-making and mimesis
What are the functional requirements of the institutions that are constructed to make mass murder possible and acceptable? In order to unpick this and understand it better, go back to the origins of these forms of power and see how they have played out as institutions and practices. They have been shaped by specific needs of the ruling group. The assertion of the right to take human life and the institutionalisation and organisation of the practices that surround the operationalisation of this right, must be accompanied by ideological and spiritual justification. You must be technically able to do it and you must be able spiritually to justify it. The justification must be coherent and ritualised. How do political structures enable these processes?
The operation of any form of rule or of any society-making process is the ignition of desire through mimesis. We want what the other wants; we want, what is desirable not simply what we desire. (5) We are engaged in material and sensory appropriation simultaneously with symbolic articulation. There is no kudos in property or ownership, no value, if the envy of the other is not ignited. Since this describes a particular micro instance as well as a general condition, it is evidence of the organic, fractal character of human social organisation. The totality of the human population – maybe those who have died and those not yet born – are engaged, consciously or not, in society-making. These mimetic structures operate in individual interactions and also they bind and insinuate themselves into the body of the society and the structures of the state. The nation-state structure is not unique from this point of view. Its historical development has made it an effective instrument of rule. The creation of a viable ‘other’ is essential for the maintenance of the cohesion and coherence of the nation-state. Inclusion, even security, can only be realised on the basis of exclusion, on the maintenance of borders. The significant development of this political form, the nation-state, took place in the Western part of the Eurasian continent. It was a long development that was seeded in the organisational dynamics of the human groups that migrated into the European territory and succeeded the Roman Empire as it declined. (6) These populations both superseded and inherited the land and structures – institutional and architectural – of the Roman Empire. They conquered and occupied the land territorially as they inhabited and were incorporated into the remains of the Empire. This organisational dynamic was based on Christian ideology and the invention of a particular form of kingship. The creation of a sovereign with absolute right over all life in a particular territory was powered by the semi-divine figure of Christ. As well as crystallising patriarchal power it sacralised the brute power of possession. De facto power, facts on the ground, were complemented by de jure divine intercession. The idea that God has authorised expropriation through military force has always appealed to big gang leaders and warlords. A central symbolic practice amongst the early holders of ‘divine’ power in the European territories was that of ‘christo-mimesis’, the deliberate imitation by monarchs of the ‘Christ the King’ figure. (7) This was elaborated processionally and iconographically. The iconography is there to see, though it may now have less mesmeric charm. So the political solution to the problem of territorialising sovereignty and establishing domains of authority and right was discovered and established. If the formation of the state arises from a definition of kingship that constructs a ‘body’ or ‘figure’ that has both human and divine aspects, this enables it to authorise ‘regalian’ (power of life and death, power to break down the division between public and private) powers. These are forms of control based on access to bodies and spaces which can countermand private property and individual freedom. In other words in the later development of the nation-state as it adapted itself to the capitalist system of rule it embodied and assured private property and individual freedom. This happened through a strange double structural movement which appears at first sight contradictory. The state and the groups that control it assume powers of life and death over bodies and spaces both as a right of contravention, and an enforcement of the sanctity, of private property and individual freedom.
This whole complex evolutionary process of the nation-state produced the forms still current in the modern capitalist nation-state. The core energies function unchanged. In this respect the crucial development of patriarchy, capitalism or patriarchal commodity production, in its secularised form appears as Western modernity, ‘our’ way of life. Because of the exclusionary nature of these components the processes of conformity and belonging that hold the entity together are almost secretly connected to power over life and death. One can understand why the most astute contemporary analyst of genocide asserted that ‘genocide is endemic to modernity’. (8) (cf Daniel Feierstein GENOCIDE AS SOCIAL PRACTICE)
Exclusion and patriarchy
The forms of organisation on which the modern nation-state are built are rooted in archaic patriarchy and are essentially exclusionary. This aspect of group organisation was organically linked to securing of territory through expansionism. This laid the basis for European imperialism, especially and primarily in the maritime nation-states of the Western seaboard of Europe. The seed of empire is planted in the soil of the nation state. The exclusionary energies that were summoned by the military basis of rule were not just a vital source of coherence, they were essential. As the developmental accumulative process of mercantile and maritime domination received further power through industrialisation, the nadir of this movement of the ‘West’, was embodied in the USA. As this imperialist project became linked to modernity and civilisational pretensions, its racist and genocidal core permeated it and energised it. These processes became the basic assumptions of its operation. This is what made settler colonialism a key formational process in its political development. The imprint of the Norman invasion of England (1066) and the formation of a predatory ruling elite further integrated this tendency. The first coherent practice of settler colonialism was of Wales by the English ‘crown’ culminating in the later part of the 13th century. (9) These ideologies of expansionism and exclusion were disavowed and hidden in the postcolonial (post 1945) process where the overt domination of the empire was replaced by economic structures that created client states and submission to resource exploitation. This was effected through the proliferation of nation-states. The basic assumption is the ingestion and proliferation of the values of modernity, rationality, and civilisational bias. The signs of this global process can be seen in the history of indigenous people all over the world but particularly in the North of the American continent and in the slave trade. However Its generative foundations were in European antisemitism and the ‘Crusades’. These foundations were laid in the ‘nation-state’ forming period of the centuries that followed the transformation of the structures of imperial Rome.
Western Imperialism and Israel
The formation of the ‘nation-state’ of Israel, its attempt at ethnic homogeneity and its rooting in a sacred divine mission, is characteristically European. It is in this respect that Israel was formed out of the West, an amalgam of guilt, anti-semitism, political opportunism and imperial assumption. It engaged at its birth in land expropriation, sacralised by divine intercession. It reenacted generative European historical processes on the shores of the Levant. It was and still is the ‘modern’ project par excellence. The Israeli colonists are ‘the West’s’ colonists. This is one strong ligament, a kind of tentacle of complicity that binds the populations of the West, to the genocide in Palestine.
The crystallisation of the ‘War on Terror’ deriving directly from the dramatic situation of this latest (perhaps last) ‘Western’ colonial adventure gave a political and technological resource to the West. It offered a pertinent and adaptable narrative, based around the ‘figure’ of the muslim-islamic, migrant, terrorist. It gave a simultaneous coherence to home policy and foreign policy. Even creating internal bordering by a policy of ‘hostile environment’ against migrant communities. It was capable of implying connections in a confusion of fear that offered the basis for policy positions on migration, islamism, extremism and political disaffection. It played on popular racism. The West was offered a model of an imminent danger to its ‘way of life’ to which it could ascribe envy. The political alchemy of anti-migrant, anti-terrorist, anti-muslim sentiments were given a rich and high-sounding nourishment in the pronouncements of the theories of the ‘clash of civilisations’ and the ‘end of history’ (10).
The ‘War on Terror’ has been a political instrument that has secured the complicity of the West in the genocide being carried out in Palestine. Adherence to the alliance with Israel is presented as a matter of loyalty to the home state and of submission to resistance to extremism. The Western states’ reliance on this gambit is a sign of their deterioration. This genocide originates in the West. It is the outcome of the West’s decline.
Genocide and perpetrator group imperatives
The nature of genocide as a process of social organisation can be obscured by legal and judicial definitions. The legal definition is different from the practice-based social science description (8). That is looking at the genocide as a series of interconnected practices that develop as a way of re-organising society. If genocide is viewed as a means of social re-organisation then it becomes clear that the impulses behind this process are impelled by the perpetrator group’s needs. The genocide process is also entangled with military processes. The escalatory movements of genocidal processes are determined by risks and dangers of incoherence in the perpetrator group. This might be felt as a deep fear of splitting and loss on a mass scale. As the danger of splitting or division or incoherence in the group becomes more acute, the genocide escalates and moves on to a more overt stage of its development. Genocide can lie dormant or only relatively active and the antagonisms between the perpetrator group (in) and the victim group (out) can be suppressed or kept at a containable level. At the earliest stage of its development it takes the form of the stigmatisation of the ‘out-group’. The escalation of the genocide can be ascribed to the actions of the victim group and the attribution of blame is a significant feature of this process. However it is always driven and determined by the ‘needs’ of the perpetrator group. Very often the genocidal process is deeply linked to expropriation and theft by the perpetrator group. Mass killing is a late stage in the process but it might only be at this point that the destruction and effacement of the victim group becomes evident.
The society that is being re-organised by the genocide is defined by it. The genocide gives the society its coherence in the face of its decline, defeat or struggle for survival. In the case of the genocide in Palestine, the direct perpetrator group is the Israeli zionist state but the society that it is being re-organised by it is the society, or societies, in which this process is rooted and from which it seeks and receives its sustenance. The range and scale of the relationships of complicity, the feigned ignorance, the justifications, the ‘turning to look the other way’ as much as the more overt support – supplying arms and media backing – are composite aspects of the process. The genocide is effective and active as a re-organisational practice in all these social entities.
Complicity in genocide
The statement that ‘the genocide in Palestine is the West’s genocide’ at first seems to contradict what appears to be happening. Tracing back how exclusionary processes and the core importance of settler colonialism have operated in the European nation-state’s history can help to reveal why this might not be so difficult to believe.
All genocidal projects are suicidal, essentially self destructive, since if the only basis for cohesion of the perpetrator group (‘in’ group) is the destruction of the other (‘out’ group), the final success of the project will be its ultimate defeat. The disappearance of the ‘out’ group will deprive the ‘in’ group of its means of cohesion. It is auto-cannibalistic and compulsive. The perpetrator group cannot by, and in, itself stop the process. It is a slave of the process that promotes its domination. As the genocidal process reaches more and more intense stages of its realisation, it is only military defeat or collapse that can stop it. The action of the genocide is the enactment of the ‘for or against’ mechanism taken to a general and final intensity.
The question routinely asked by the operatives of the Western media at the outset of the escalated genocide: Do you condemn Hamas? is an attempt to test the loyalty of the interviewee. The significance of this ‘test’ question with its inquisitorial tenor relies on the conflation of ‘Hamas’ into ‘terrorist’ and ‘Palestinian’. But it is the same question: ‘are you for or against?’ This question could be rephrased as: ‘Are you or are you not complicit with the genocide?’
In order to see more clearly what the impacts and consequences of the escalation of the genocide of Palestinians it is necessary to look at the fabric of the political organisation in which the killing is embedded. The consequences for the Palestinian people in Gaza and for those living on the West Bank, who are subject to genocide at a different stage of its development, are clearer than the political consequences for the complicit political entities in the ‘West’. It is a proxy genocide.
Social division is intrinsic to genocide. In the ‘West’, as in Israel, the grip of the political elites on popular sentiment is loosened. Desperate measures are adopted. The state apparatus is mobilised and police powers are sharpened and refocused. The ruling elites, operating through the state and through the adjoined public relations networks of corporate capitalism, are pressurising all institutions, especially sectors who work for media and cultural sectors to conform to its messaging. This is happening particularly in sectors such as education and the arts that have state funding. The strictures on public expression of solidarity with Palestinians are tightening. In the retail sector employees have been called into line. The control of the public face of the commodity exchange process is being tightened through silencing, victimisation, cancelling. They are being called to order despite the hypocrisy of the ostentatious partisan displays that the elites adopted and encouraged for Ukraine. In policy terms, descriptions of actions taken by the police force internally against signs of overt support for the resistance in Palestine quickly link into foreign policy actions taken by the state. The creation of a new normalcy is an urgent task. An indication of their outlook is the name of the alliance that the US have put together against Ansarallah in Yemen: ’Prosperity Guardian’. This should give more than a clue about the underlying values they are attempting to defend. Their success is not certain.
The nation-state crisis
The genocidal crisis may accurately be described as a crisis of the nation-state. The solution the ‘international community’ are constantly trying to impose on the Palestinians is the formation of its own ‘nation-state’. State formation is obsessively proposed along with a ‘revitalised’ and subordinate ‘governing authority’. The creation of ‘postcolonial nation-states’ in the post 1939-45 war period has been the main instrument of neo-imperialist hegemony. At the same time, on a global scale, we are witnessing the disintegration of the relationship between populations and governing structures. This gap is significant. In Dabashi’s book THE EMPEROR IS NAKED (11) he describes this as a break-down of the relationship between ‘nations’ and ‘states’. The gap that has opened up between the governors and the governed is of a variable scale in each instance. Possibly it is most intense in the Arab states. How much of a danger does this represent for the regimes complicit in the genocide? The West may realise too late what their support of Israel might lead to. There is a risk that the failure and isolation of Israel will drag them down with it. They are at this late stage (late March 2024) asking for restraint and making feeble efforts to appear to be countering the Israelis’ worst excesses. The size and vigour of the pro-Palestinian movement has destabilised political life. It is endangering the continuation of Biden’s presidency. In the UK the election victory of George Galloway in Rochdale sent shock waves through the political establishment. The ruling elites were relying on a supine Labour Party to take over government and this is now no longer assured. In a disastrous move the Tory government is reaching for more repressive measures with new definitions of ‘extremism’ and attempts to malign the pro-Palestinian demonstrations. Their reliance on ‘war on terror’ rhetoric will be ineffective. The basis of the consensus on which they rely is crumbling and their support is hardening only in the sectors associated with the far right. It is predictable that, as in the 2019 election period, they will connive with the intelligence community to stage events designed to show the imminent threat of terrorism. Gunpowder plots have always played a part of the organisation of the popular masses. These are not guaranteed to work. In this respect the political rhetoric of the West and Israel are in tune. However, the discrediting of these regimes in the eyes of the global and domestic populations could prove to be irreversible. The depth of the crisis is unclear but it may not be just a superficial public relations problem.
I have described genocide according to the observations set out in Daniel Feierstein’s book, GENOCIDE AS SOCIAL PRACTICE where, in accord with the originating work of Raphael Lemkin, he looks beyond legal definitions and explores the process of genocide, its genealogy and its phased development. He says the effacement of the ‘out-group’ is driven by the social reorganisational needs of the ‘in-group’. He gives a taxonomy of genocidal processes and talks specifically about the significance of what he describes as ‘reorganising genocides’. Since his view is a comprehensive one, examining the widespread consequences and implications of these processes he asks wide-ranging questions. For example:
‘What happens, then, to a society that remains silent while people are beaten in the streets and disappear? What happens to a society in which some denounce their neighbours and others steal their jobs or businesses, their homes or other assets? All these forms of ‘moral participation’ in genocide must inevitably lead to a blurring of moral distinctions, an inability to distinguish between right and wrong, fair and unfair. This is true not only for those who live in a time of genocide , but for subsequent generations as well’ (p127 Feierstein, Genocide as Social Practice)
The scope and scale of this question suggests that the moral consequences and the deterioration of functional and operative ideas of truth and justice can have a devastating and long-lasting effect on social structures and on human relations. Credibility and trust can irremediably degenerate. This can go deeper than a danger to the political effectiveness of the ruling elites. They will be seen to have transgressed and betrayed key principles on which their ‘regalian’ powers rely.
Roots of genocide
The genocidal processes lie deep in the social structures of the perpetrator group. In the ‘West’ the preparation for this genocide can be seen, as I suggest above, from the beginning of the ‘war on terror’. This was an attempt to shape the mentalities and consensual submission of the populations of the West. In the UK it built on the genocidal processes already initiated during the Thatcher regime where the working class and its trade union organisation were stigmatised as ‘the enemy within’. This was accompanied by a mediatised public relations campaign that is described in CHAVS by Owen Jones (12). What Feierstein points out is that the genocidal drive is prior to the precise determination of the victim/out-group. So for example, the National Socialist regime in Germany sought out the victim group over a period of years: the mentally ill, communists, gypsies as well as the jewish communities, on whom the last stage of the process focused. Similarly in Argentina, during the military dictatorship (1976-1983), the definition of ‘subversive’ took time to develop and was engineered to include indigenous people and working class activists and communists. These ‘fascistic’ processes vary from place to place and the historical circumstances determine their currency. With sufficient destabilisation, deprivation and fear the scapegoating of ‘extremists’ in the UK may or may not prove to be the salvation of the ruling elites.
What can make this political strategy potentially effective? The construction of the ‘islamic terrorist’ was made possible by the historical circumstances: the fall of the Soviet Union, the end of the war in Afghanistan, the development of radical political islam by Al Qaeda and others, the dispersal of the mujahideen army from Afghanistan, the encouragement of islam as an ideology of resistance replacing socialist/marxist organisation/values. But it also had deep resonance with other more historical determinants. These determinants ‘rhymed’ with the early movements of European identity-formation. The organisational processes that created the Crusades were based on the need for European early ‘nation-state’ formation, affirming their definition as ‘Christian’. The function of the Crusades as early genocidal movements was to ‘conform’ and give coherence to ‘Christian Europe’ and to clear out other remaining ideologies from the European territories. This process carried on through the period from the first Crusade in 1100 to the expulsion of the Jews and the ‘Reconquista’ in Spain in the 1490s. This was accompanied, for example in France by the eradication of the Cathars and the use of the Inquisition. The inquisition later transferred its activities from the European homeland to the colonies.
The basic ground-work for the development of the ‘war on terror’ already existed in the social ‘soil’ of Europe and, by association, of Western Imperialism. It was as if the ‘war on terror’ revived ancient and deeply rooted fears and antagonisms. The spoors of this xenophobia were already there in the air and earth. The other factor that made this construct potent was the later development of secularisation in the nation-state transformations post-English, American and French revolutions (1640, 1776 and 1789). The demystification of kingship – the constitutionalisation of the monarchy and the mitigation of divine right in the Protestant revolution in England were pushed further in the secularisation of the French state in the revolutionary period and as it moved towards its current form in 1870, the establishment of the Third Republic. The separation of the Church and the State or a reorganisation of the relationship between them is significant in disguising the political theology of the states as they emerged from revolutionary processes of the late 18th century. This is especially important in the characterisation of terrorism’s association with islam, stigmatised as a kind of religious fanaticism.
Splitting and divisions
The xenophobic racist ‘war on terror’ political strategy even when its iterated in its current form of ‘war on extremism’ is divisive. The job of government is to ensure that the divisions created in the course of corralling the population are manageable and the ‘out-group’ is capable of being isolated and stigmatised. However the growth of the pro-Palestinian movement may have popular consent. It could be a unique convergence of popular sentiment and action. (13) The government, the political elites, the powers that be, may well fail. Looking at the UK state and considering the impact of the solidarity movement is instructive. For example, the cracks that have already appeared in the ‘union’ are repeated in the distribution of support for Palestinians. In this respect, the contrast between England and Ireland (of course not or only partly a part of the UK state) is marked and Scotland and Wales may share this bias. It is indicative of the legacy of the institutions of the Roman Empire mentioned earlier that the borders of England are those established by Rome and were adopted by the migration from Europe in the post-Imperial period and were reconfirmed by the Norman invasion. The foundations of this state are now unstable. Characteristically, endangered regimes regress and attempt to revive the mythic roots of their coming into being. Whereas exclusionary processes may be invigorating at an early stage of state formation and regime consolidation, in a terminal crisis, they may make the predicament worse. Divide and rule can backfire.
The processes of disintegration and division are emerging in Israel. It has conducted the military violence against Gaza without visible success and has accomplished none of its declared objectives. Its army has lost its way. It has programmatically and intentionally failed to identify the military enemy and its actions are becoming more and more degraded and ostentatiously genocidal. There could be a suspicion that they never sought Hamas’ military defeat since an undefeated Hamas is a pretext for the main genocidal purpose. It is failing without even having faced its most powerful enemy on its northern border. Divisions within the population and its governing institutions are becoming more inflamed and intense. Its actions will have led to mass recruitment for the Palestinian armed resistance and support for this resistance amongst the population. Exhausted by the pressure of the attritional attacks by the axis of resistance, blighted by the increasing isolation due to global disgust, beset with military failure, weakened by the deterioration of its international alliances, forestalled by economic damage, the break-up of the zionist entity is impending. All of these significant circumstances could lead to the emergence of a break-away more right-wing statelet, highly armed and based on the settler community. The main rump of the entity may compromise on the more overtly genocidal – displacement and mass killing – actions and attempt to ameliorate the relationship with the West. There is a territorial basis for this splitting, the ‘liberal’ camp being based in Tel Aviv and the right-wing more openly fascist domain being centred around Jerusalem. These divisions were tearing at the fabric of this society before October 7th. Neither of these sectors or constituencies will be pro-Palestinian but the ‘Tel Aviv liberals’ will be working more assiduously for the two-state solution and the formation of a ‘revitalised’ Palestinian Authority. All of these processes are at an early stage of development.
The disintegration of the zionist state will be reflected in the internal divisions within the key states of ‘the West’- the Anglo-American core, the UK and the USA. The components will be ideologically similar. This is because the basic fabric of the regimes – it might be more accurate to call it ‘the regime’ – is constitutionally similar. They are patriarchal, white supremacist regimes. The genocidal process will fail to provide cohesion in all these faulty assemblages. The current UK government’s blandishments about extremism will be ineffective. Of course the fascistic tendency that this policy ploy emanates from may gain ground in the short term and even become dominant just as might the right-wing settler statelet in Palestine. It will be this process of disintegration and global isolation – look at the voting patterns at the UN to get some idea of this – that will lay the basis for the democratic revolution that the dismantling of the state structures of the West urgently need. Democratic transformation is synchronous with the disassembling and opening up of the state structures. For the UK it requires intense democratic engagement, a diversification and localisation of democratic forms, more direct democratic participation in public affairs, a de-monarchalisation of the state, a de-hierarchisation of public institutions, an abolition of inherited privileges, making public administration and political structures and processes transparent, an abolition of secrecy. Clearing away the duplicitous contraptions and rituals and influence of the royal court and all the corrupt quasi-aristocratic ‘orders’ will have to happen at the same time as the growth of public participation in social life and the vital functions of learning and healing that properly lie at its core. The failure of the ‘nation-state’ model of human organisation is imminent. The idea that our society needs a mystical ideological or religious coherence and the myth of the state being ethnically monolithic will be surpassed. The racist tenets of imperialism are meeting their deserved fate on the shores of the levant. They are exposed as sheer violence. The liberation of our societies from this imperial yoke are inextricably linked with the Palestinians’ struggle for justice and freedom.
References and Notes:
(1) For a good historical description of regalian powers and how this power was retained by the ruling elites in the transition from the trilateral to the bilateral state. See Thomas Picketty’s CAPITAL & IDEOLOGY (Harvard University Press 2020)
(2) I am not referring to the ‘West’ as if it is a cultural homogeneous entity, a kind of ‘civilisation’ in the way that Oswald Spengler describes it in The Decline of the West (Alfred A. Knopf 1926). I mean as a historical set of alliances a factor of political organisation.
(3) President George W. Bush, in an address to a joint session of Congress on 20 September 2001 said, “Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.”
(4) Exclusion Processes by Jonathan Chadwick blog article
(5) Rene Girard Violence and the Scared (The Athlone Press 1988)
(6) Guy Halsall Barbarian Migrations and the Roman West 376-568 (Cambridge University Press 2007)
(7) Erwin H. Kantorowicz The King’s Two Bodies, A Study In Medieval Political Theology (Princeton University Press 1997)
(8) Daniel Feierstein Genocide as Social Practice, Reorganising Society under the Nazis and Argentina’s Military Juntas. (Rutgers University Press 2014)
(9) The first ‘Prince of Wales’ (later Edward II) was born in Caernarvon Castle in 1284. The title was stolen from the Welsh. The Welsh King David III was executed in 1283 by order of Edward I of England, father of the above, after his conquest of Wales. In 1290 the English state undertook the first wholesale expulsion of a Jewish population in 1290. Edward I was a crusader. His first born Joan of Acre was named after the city in which she was born.
(10) Samuel P. Huntingdon, The Clash of Civilisations and the Remaking of World Order (Simon & Schuster 1996) republished as a paperback in 2002.
Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (Free Press 1992)
(11) Hamad Dabashi, The Emperor is Naked: On the Inevitable Demise of the Nation-State (Zed Books 2020)
(12) Owen Jones, Chavs, the Demonisation of the Working Class (Verso 2011)
(13) Richard Seymour, The pro-Palestinian movement has exposed the cynicism of the political elites. Where will that energy go next? https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/mar/19/palestine-movement-politics-gaza-war-protest (viewed online 27/03/24)