How do we envision the Occident and how does Israel do?

If its link with the West is among the most robust sources of Israel’s power, it could potentially become among the weakest. In the face of the West’s intense military, political, and financial support, there is a Western paradigm that the Jewish state favors and gravitates towards. What is this paradigm?

It is true that the settler colonialism that has been part of its history since its inception is not unique to Israel. Settlers established many of the world’s countries, the United States, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, South Africa, and Zimbabwe (formerly Rhodesia)... Nonetheless, an important distinction remains. 

Those processes unfolded earlier on, before the values of our contemporary world went into circulation. As for Israel, which was established as a political entity later on, the arrival of its settlers coincided with the end of Western settler colonialism and the democratic West’s denouncement or disavowal of that practice. 

This reflected itself in the discrepancy between the direction taken by the West following World War II, with decolonization and the retreat of Europeans from their former colonies, and the arrival of Europeans (and non-Europeans) to Palestine and their establishment of a state alien to the region - a process that required expelling the Palestinian population and replacing them. Both this and that indicate that the Westerness that has characterized Israel is old and colonial; it has been rusted by time and its changes, with its descendants disavowing the actions of their ancestors.

As for the Jewish state, it remained stuck there. When the Cold War broke out shortly after its establishment in 1948, very few countries were more rigidly and closely aligned with the NATO camp: from its support for dictatorial military regimes loyal to the West, to the affection it shared with countries and hotbeds of racism in Africa. 

Nasserist Egypt’s (and Baathist Syria) siding with the Soviet camp deepened this Israeli inclination and widened the distance separating the Israelis from their socialist and kibbutz origins. Year after year, Israel's closest friends changed: from the United States’ Democrats to its Republicans, from Britain’s Labor to its Conservatives, and here it is today, reconciling with some extreme right-wing movements and overlooking the anti-Semitism of their recent past. 

With the end of the Cold War, Israel’s position stood out starkly. Indeed, Western countries abandoned the awkward ties to dictators and racists that their global competition with the Soviets had imposed, while Tel Aviv neither walked away nor felt awkward. One thing that mitigates the obsolete colonial character of the Israelis’ Westness is their parliamentary democracy, which is also Western - even if only Jewish citizens fully enjoy this democracy, while others live under a flawed democracy, and things have gone further in this direction over the past few years.

The Israeli image of the West thus encompasses three elements: the colonial past, military and technological progress, and parliamentary democracy. Were it not for the last element, the combination of the first two would have left us with a disastrous recipe for fully-fledged modern barbarism. It is correct, in any case, to assume that this blemished image of the West in the Jewish state will continue to be governed by the struggle between these elements for a long time. On the other hand, it remains difficult to argue that there is an image of and about the West in mainstream Arab culture. 

It is true that satire dominates this non-image, but this satire says more about the frailty of the coherence of satirists than it does about the coherence of the satirized. After that old, self-contradictory, formula claiming that Zionism and Israel were created by the West and that, at the same time, Israel controls the West (and the second half is not free of anti-Semitism), we are now faced with formulas that do make not much sense: the narrative that Zionism and Israel are product the West should have spared us our immense astonishment at the extent of the West’s bias in favor of the Jewish state in its war on Gaza; makers do not abandon what they have made.

The same could be said about our claims that the West is morally and ethically dead and that its democracy is a lie and a ruse, at a time when we only see protests, petitions, and debates over there. As for some among us claiming that the West is weak and that its influence is diminishing in favor of China, Russia and others, while at the same time addressing and appealing to it and not other global powers, that is another flagrant indication that we are drawing our image of the West with the brush of riddles, behaving like a blind man running in the dark. Of course, our denunciation of the West in the name of democracy lacks any credibility. We are not well placed to present ourselves as eminent democracy professors, we who have a terrible record in dealing with the extremely vicious repression that our region has witnessed and that has befallen our peoples or ethnic and religious minorities. Here, our condemnation of our oppression of one another remained timid, to say nothing about our efforts to push back against it.

Both this and that should make us question whether our strong appetite for what is known as the “critique of Orientalism” is a response to a deep and unhidden desire to avoid critiquing our “Occidentalism” or our failures to understand the West and the world, and by extension, to understand ourselves.

The fact is that the image of the West in Israel will not emerge as a weakness until the West goes further and further in breaking with its colonial past - a rupture that has been weakest in our region for several reasons, one of the most important of which is Israel itself. Thus, our changing, at least on the consciousness front, could push the West to change how it operates in our region as it changed in the West itself and in other parts of the world that have demonstrated levels of understanding that we have not. We would be better off with something to do and say in this regard.

Source: Alsharq Alawsat