Palestine or the Contradictions of Western Liberalism

Originally published: Manuel Sanjuán, Círculo Cultural Juan Vázquez de Mella.

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The conflict between the so-called State of Israel and Palestine is the paradigm of the contradictions of Western liberalism. All of them converge there and, like the waves of the raging sea, they crash violently against the dike of a reality inaccessible to ideology. An ideology that has been fertilized for decades with lies and manipulation.

The average conservative, intoxicated by propaganda, truly believes that behind the borders unjustly and criminally guarded by the Israelis lies a hell of barbarians whose only objective is to put an end to our civilization (if we still have such a thing). And although he seems to be somewhat right in this, as in so many other questions of international politics, the progressive left is usually more right than the conservative right, albeit by laudable contradiction: it knows that this hell is the direct or indirect cause of the criminal neo-colonialism practiced by the same people who claim to defend us from it.

However, the average conservative does not listen to reason on this issue: the video of this or that atrocity committed by jihadists, even if they are not Palestinians, will serve to morally justify a colonial process that perpetuates the original injustice that led us to disaster. It ignores the even more heinous atrocities perpetrated on the other side. It does not ask where and when the jihadists who today attack what they call Israel came from, nor who finances them, nor who are their rivals in Palestine and throughout the Middle East. He does not realize, or does not want to realize, that the entire foreign policy of the Atlanticist bloc with regard to the Arab world, which goes to the heart of the problem, has favored the client networks of international jihadism, on which Hamas feeds, and has overthrown all the warlords and tyrants who hindered it – who protected the Christians, and then left them defenseless against the Mohammedan hordes – under the pretext of promoting a “democratization process” that is reckless, if not impossible, and at the same time a pretext for other darker and more obscure interests.

The average conservative, in short, has lost even the slightest sense of justice about the particular conditions in which it must necessarily be carried out, abstracting from the contingent and accidental excesses that may occur; that minimal sense of justice that a part of the left still maintains in this matter (and not in others), however inconsistent and denaturalized by the ideology of human rights and postmodernism. For the average conservative, liberal democracy is a blank check for the colonization of an entire people. Or more than one.

Paradoxically, when it comes to Palestine, the conservative right is more consistent with liberal ideology than the progressive left, whose policies in the West are more consistent than those of the conservative right. That is why Palestine is a mirror of the contradictions of liberalism.

And in the midst of these contradictions, jihadism continues to grow, Christians continue to die, and Palestinians continue to be criminally colonized. Until the powder keg explodes. “And the culprit – as Juan Manuel de Prada masterfully put it in his ABC [Spanish newspaper] column – will be the West, which has tolerated the Palestinians being treated like mangy dogs by a state artificially created to appease its bad conscience, which for decades has exerted an omnipotent and brutal power outside the law.

Manuel Sanjuán, Círculo Cultural Juan Vázquez de Mella

Translation by the Gremio San Jerónimo