Pankaj Mishra’s interventions on global politics and culture are always worth a read, and his latest in the London Review of Books looking at the history of Israeli and American thinking about the Holocaust and its impact on Israeli policy towards Palestinians is no different.
Among the interesting responses it has generated so far are Cambridge academic Priyamvada Gopal’s point that many colonial genocides have failed to attract similar attention, yet they could provide better comparisons for understanding the underlying drives of Israeli policy. Sami Jiries commented that the essay ignores how Palestinian intellectuals have contemplated the Holocaust, in a form of erasure and marginalization that is typical in Western public discourse.
However, an important avenue Mishra doesn’t explore in his article is a very specific hatred for the Palestinian among the US policy elite and where it comes from. This contempt was most obvious after 9/11 when the neoconservative circle shifted US debate towards invading Iraq, although it palpably had nothing to do with the operation organized by Osama bin Laden. These writers were more focused on Iraq’s nuclear programme and the threat it could pose to Israel specifically.
More broadly the neoconservative group had a problem with the notion of resistance itself during the unipolar moment: ‘Arab resistance’ to US dictates, to resisting integration in the post-Soviet US-dominated economic order, refusing to accept the border template imposed originally by Britain and France. A whole discourse kicked off about the economic and cultural collapse of the Arab world, bolstered by UN development reports that provided the requisite detail supposedly proving a festering rejection of modernity itself. The anti-modern Arabs didn't even read, one infamous statistic claimed. The Arabs were out of time, a danger to human progress.
This was the high noon of globalization, the era of Beltway ‘thought leaders’ like Thomas Friedman of the New York Times, Fareed Zakaria, Kanan Makiya and Fouad Ajami, who all told you there was something uniquely, pathologically wrong with the Arabs. This message was even more acceptable among metropolitan intellectuals if one could claim an origin in Arabness, which made Ajami and co. heroes for a day.
The great question their historians chimed in with was, as Bernard Lewis put it, “What went wrong?” — Lewis, whose arrogance even extended to suggesting that Arab-Muslim inferiority manifested itself in failing to develop contrapuntal classical music (Umm Kulthum? All centred on one voice = autocracy). Lewis sounded little different to Ernest Renan in his infamous 1883 lecture in the Sorbonne on Islam and science, in which he made the grand argument that civilizational failures of “the Arabs” were the reason why the former couldn’t have the latter.
This new American obsession with the Arab world frightened some countries in the region to spin off on a long policy of appeasement, and the Arab uprisings only confirmed their view that criticism of Western interventions and domestic dissent were intimately linked: both have been shut down. But that’s another discussion.
For its ideological champions, the Iraq war was about Hating Arabs, even the ones who were nominally long-standing American friends (we forget the fear back then that after Baghdad, to misquote Leonard Cohen, “Then we take Riyadh”). Hating Arabs as the bête noire of supremacist American exceptionalism for still summoning the will to say no. In the narrative of the time, Iran was functionally Arab, until the dissidence of the Green Movement, in which case it could become Persian.
With Gaza now, US political elites and their hangers-on (Dougie Murray, anyone?) seem to feel tantalizingly close to finally crushing the ground zero of Arab resistance: Palestinians. You can sense it not just in Biden’s smirk but the Goebbels-lite gall of Kirby, Miller and the rest of them in their daily sneering before the press. The hatred of these people for Palestinians specifically has been compounded by the sudden emergence of a new constellation of global rivals, top of the list being China. What better time to demonstrate US determination to remain primus inter pares by smashing the original rejectionists of US diktat.
I would go further than Mishra: it is not just that within Zionism a trend has emerged that sees a historic opportunity to further the work of 1948 and 1973. Ideologues influencing and embedded within the US administration are driven by a subliminal if not overt desire to complete the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, from the river to the sea — the blood-soaked baptism that would renew hope for another American century.