That worked for a while. Israel was protected because its “army”
was essentially a western militia against potential robbers coveting the oil further
afield in the Arabian Peninsula.
Now the price for continuing to use the Jewish colony in
Palestine as an outpost to protect access to oil is rising steeply, along with
serious doubts about its utility. To continue supporting five million western
settlers in Palestine, the West is discovering it has been antagonizing hundreds
of millions of Arabs and billions of Muslims.
Geographically, the collective position of the Near East,
the Arabian Peninsula, and farther inland into the Middle East (Iran,
Afghanistan, Pakistan...), PLUS the arc of Muslim central Asian countries that
used to be in the Soviet Union (Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kirghizstan, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan)
represent a global strategic choke point against Chinese penetration
toward the West.
None of these countries had any significant strategic
interest for the West after the end of WWI and the beginning of the decolonization
process, except as mentioned earlier for "potential" oil reserves.
Nowadays, these countries and their region have been decolonized, affluent,
more or less democratized, with access to information, and with significant
deposits of not only oil and gas but more critical metals and rare earth
minerals. Except for maritime routes, China's modern silk roads will have to go
through this region.
Alienating all these peoples and their countries just to
support five million foreign western settlers with dual nationalities in
Palestine no longer makes business or political sense. That is why Israel
represents the last and obsolete bastion of western colonialism anywhere around
the globe. Israel has become an expensive anomaly to maintain, expensive in both
money and strategic interests.
When it was founded in the late 19th, early 20th century,
traditional barbarian colonialism was still in vogue, and implanting a colony in
Palestine seemed like a great idea that was camouflaged under a so-called
"homeland" for Jews who were persecuted by the same westerners who
came up with the idea of such a homeland. Antisemitism is a purely western concept
and practice that took flight when early Christians (themselves rebel
progressive Jews) got into a conflict with traditionalist conservative Judaism
that rejected the claim of Jesus as the Messiah. At the turn from the 19th
to the 20th centuries, the wave of antisemitism was growing in Europe
and the European-settled Americas: The Dreyfus Affair in France, the rise of
Fascism in Spain and Italy, of Nazism in Germany and to some extent in the US itself,
and the climax of it all with the Holocaust ... all were couched in profound antisemitism.
Thus, it made sense for the Westerners to rid themselves of the Jews by sending
them to settle Palestine AND use these fellow westerners as a mercenary militarized
outpost in the heart of the Middle East to protect western access to the nascent
oil fields in the region.
That formula worked for the most part through the 20th
century. All the exactions and barbarity displayed by the western Jewish
settlers against the indigenous Palestinians were ignored and forgiven. After
all, the colonized are also “lesser” Semites for whom the West didn’t care much,
if at all. The utility of Israel for the West was first tested when France and
Britain used Israel’s military in the 1950s to prevent Egypt from nationalizing
the Suez Canal. Israel failed that test, Egypt nationalized the Suez
Canal, and it was downhill from there despite the appearances.
But now, this formula, this paradigm, is beginning to show
cracks. For one thing, several wars have been waged with little gains. Generations
have passed and western guilt at the Holocaust is fading. I can well imagine
today’s generation of Europeans (not only Germans, but French, Poles and
others) telling themselves, “We had nothing to do with the Holocaust. Why should
we continue to feel pity and sympathy for a barbarian ultra-religious fundamentalist
colonizer? And why should we let that
pity stand in the way of justice for other more deserving peoples and for our
own interests? The ‘colonized’ are no longer colonized and are not the savages
we thought they were. At the very least, they are no more savages than the
Zionist settlers themselves. They are free, independent, sovereign and
self-sufficient nations, many with wealth and oil and gas. They can no longer
be ignored as backward savages that our ancestors believed them to be.”
Israel is now a burden on the West which can no longer
support it blindly. Supporting Israel against the rights, wishes and aspirations
of Arab and Muslim peoples, with an independent and free Palestine being at the
top of the list such rights, wishes and aspirations, jeopardizes much bigger
interests that did not exist 100 years ago.
Those who advised Arabs, who were emerging from 400 years of
abysmal Turkish Ottoman occupation, to initially bend a little with the
wind and accept Israel until such a time as they have developed their nations
and brought into the modern world, now see their advice becoming reality. In
the past, in fact in the very recent past, someone like Netanyahu could
bamboozle the world at the UN by declaring that his puny pathetic and violent colony
is a vanguard of western civilization in an otherwise savage and barbaric east.
But nowadays, people around the world are wondering who is the real barbarian
colonial rapist that allows itself, regardless of whatever affront it might have
suffered at the hands of downtrodden abused ghettoized people trying to
liberate themselves from its barbaric occupation, to kill hundreds of thousands
of people, starve and displace millions, and condescendingly think of millions
of people as disposable vermin and human animals. These people were invaded,
occupied, raped and their land taken away from them, and millions of them were summarily
evicted into refugee concentration camps without any right to return to their
places of origin. What do you expect them to do? What would you do if you faced
such an existential abomination?
This is no longer the 18th and 19th centuries. Israel may
have started as a homeland for Jewish refugees, but 100 years later it has
become a savage colonial rapist. And suddenly the West is assessing the balance
sheet of the creation of the Zionist colony in Palestine, and is coming to
terms with the fact that Israel is now more of an embarrassing burden that
costs a lot and offers comparatively little.
Europe and the Americas have to worry about their interests
in the Near East, in the Arabian Peninsula and beyond, all the way to the
borders of rising behemoths like India and China. For a century, the West could
afford to alienate these nations in order to maintain its Jewish Zionist colony
in Palestine. But now the math doesn’t add up anymore. There is so much more to
gain, and perhaps to fear, from all these Arab and Muslim nations who were
powerless up until the recent past. The cost to the West of preserving Israel
against the wishes and aspirations of these peoples and nations is becoming too
expensive strategically and geopolitically.
The question of Palestine is now central. It is not true
that the Zionist colony has managed to erase the Palestinian tragedy from the world’s
conscience. To the contrary, Palestine has seen a monumental return onto the
global stage and keeps requiring a solution. If Israel continues on its path of
ethnic cleansing and genocide just to ensure it is a cutesy little exclusive
Jewish vacation resort on the Mediterranean, it will lose the little sympathy
and support it has left from its former colonial creators and breast feeders. Countries like Spain, Ireland, France, the
UK.... are all moving to ostracize Israel and are demanding a free and
independent state of Palestine, both for justice’s sake and for strategic objectives.
Even the US is growing tired and exhausted from having to be the only country
on earth to still defend Israel’s illegality and refusal to abide by
international law at the UN. Even Israel's best friend, Donald Trump, the dumb idiot
who was led by the nose by Netanyahu into a failing war, has reacted violently
to the Israelis refusing to abide by his directives and help him secure a
ceasefire, and for generally countering US interests in the region.
As I have argued previously in posts, colonial enterprises
generally fail after a while. Algeria, Indochina (Vietnam, Indonesia, Malaysia….),
China, Africa, India, the Arab Moors in Spain, the Crusaders in Palestine,
and many other instances where a colonizer had to pack up and leave one day. Colonizers
succeed only when the numbers of colonial invading settlers reach a critical
mass and overwhelm the colonized natives (e.g. the Ottoman invasion and seizure
of former Greco-Roman territories to form modern Turkey; the European invasion
and seizure of the Americas...). But when the colonizer is a minority diving insolently
and arrogantly into a sea of colonized, and regardless of its momentary power
and might, it ends up losing and leaving even after a while. Israel as a
colonial enterprise has seen its apogee but is now beginning to wear and tear
and depreciate in the eyes of those who created it and supported it. Instead of
supporting five million barbarian foreign Semitic settlers, the West will
likely, in due course, prefer to support hundreds of millions of indigenous
Semites.
Israel might still have a chance to survive if it knows how to
make friends and provide justice for those it is killing and maiming. In its
growing confrontation with the rising superpowers of India and China, the West might
have to sacrifice puny and insignificant Israel for greater interests. The West
already went through such a metamorphosis when, in the wake of two Israeli-Arab
wars (1967 and 1973) and the Arab oil embargo (1973) that followed them, the
West invited Yasser Arafat in 1974 to the UN where he told the world that “there
is such a thing as a Palestinian people”, contrary to what the ugliest female
prime minister that ever existed, Israeli PM Golda Meir, declared one day, “There
is no such thing as a Palestinian people”. The West responded to the oil embargo
by recognizing the existence of a Palestinian people. I wouldn’t be surprised
if the West caved once more in the face of similar threats and declared the
creation of a free, independent and sovereign Palestinian state.
