Human Rights and Western Morals: From Inception to Abidcation and Inversion. The Case of Palestine and Gaza. By Stuart Booth.
By Stuart Booth
Human Rights and Western Morals: From Inception to Abidcation and Inversion.
The Case of Palestine and Gaza.
By Stuart Booth.
This essay will consider the path and history of the Western conception of Human Rights from creation through centuries of evolution to the present. The contradictions, debates and differing ideologies which influenced a positive attitude to the protection of
people from harm and cruelty from whatever quarters. A once noble enterprise which has become prey to insidious politics and ideologies which now question the very model of the reality of a moral compass within Western states. Whilst history shows that there has always been shortcomings, omissions, double standards and faults ; never has the whole enterprise been called into question as now with the destruction of Gaza and the whole attitude to the Palestinian Question. The genocide in Gaza after the holocaust and statements of ‘never again’ have shown that the Western powers are not only duplicitous and hypocritical , but also with proven complicity, have lost all moral highground in the questions of morality and ethics in international affairs. They have no credibility and certainly no right to criticize other nations such as Russia and China for instance when their own record is so abysmal and somewhat selective such as when overlooking the terrible record of allies such as Saudi Arabia. They have also shown that wars based upon Humanitarian intervention have been anything but; take the destruction of Iraq, Libya and Syria as examples, where the control of resources ,oil in those cases, has really been the priority cloaked in humanitarian concern. This essay focussing upon Palestine and Gaza , will argue that neo-colonial attitudes and downright racism as well as pure greed are the driving forces that have led to the very abdication and inversion of human rights that they have so very often proclaimed. Indeed it will be argued that the West has lost its very conscience and any semblance of humanity.
( This refers to the governments and elites not the populace many if not most who are showing civil disobedience against their respective governments sometimes at great cost to their own civil liberties )
The definition of Human Rights that will be employed here is according to Freeden as follows :
“ A human right is a conceptual device expressed in linguistic form, that assigns priority to certain human or social attributes regarded as essential to the adequate functioning of a human being , that is intended to serve as a protective capsule for those attributes ; and that appeals for deliberate action to ensure such protection. “
(Freeden 1991:7)
It is now necessary to consider the history and evolution of the contemporary notion of human rights.. The idea of human rights can be traced back (in Western Culture ) to the policy and philosophy of the Ancient Greeks. It was here that nature was first considered as objective and knowable. It was also held that human beings had a rational capacity. From these premises it was determined that it could be understood when humans were acting according to their natures and when they were not – this was to constitute natural law.
It developed further under the Roman juriconsuls of the second century (CE) They first developed the concepts of jus gentium,the law of nations, to account for what they found to be common to all the various tribal and national customary laws that they encountered in the Roman Empire. However it was under the influence of the Stoic philosophy particularly the ‘philosopher king’ Marcus Aurelius, that the empirical concept of the law of nations gave rise to the philosophical concept of natural law, not rules but principles derived from the nature of human society which ought to govern and delimit the making of law in a strict sense.
After the decline of Rome it fell upon the emergence of the power of the Church in Christendom to define natural law through the fathers as St. Jerome, and St. Augustine but reaching a pinnacle under St. Thomas Aquinas.
Here positive law ( that is posited or made by a legislator ) can be described as a set of enforceable rules , governing human social relationships . These rules are contingent, liable to change and repeal as circumstances change, but they must be rational and beneficent . Law, says Aquinas , is an ordination of reason, promulgated by the proper authority for the common good. (Summa Theologiae ) Thus all law (aside from laws considered to be made by God ) is subject to criticism, or testing to see if it is true. Law by the standard of what is reasonable and for the common good. Thus natural law obliges humans as ‘rational social animals’ to be reasonable and to promote the common or social good. In summary “ Good is to be done and evil is to be avoided “ ( Summa Theologiae)
This approach was to shift so that after the Reformation and Renaissance there was a move from the religious to the secular, from Holy Roman Empire to Nation State, from the collectivism of Catholicism to the Protestant Ethic of work and individual responsibility and finally from natural law to natural rights . From nature’s dictates to the individual’s entitlements . (As an aside both Eastern Orthodoxy and Islam remain collectivist civilisations as opposed to Western individualism ).
After the renaissance among the new sciences of human enquiry two works that may be taken as milestones were the work of Galileo and its influence on the natural sciences especially physics; and a writer in ethics, Hugo Grotius. In 1625 he wrote The Law of War and Peace, which some claim offered to ethical science the same possibility Galileo had offered the physical sciences . Much of the political thought of the seventeenth century is seen as an attempt to vindicate and systematise Grotius’s ideas about a minimal but universal moral science.
Thomas Hobbes may be considered one of these first writers to develop the notion of rights. He had a pessimistic view of human nature and was to argue that life is ,
“ nasty,poor, solitary, brutish and short” ( Hobbes, Leviathan 1651)
His solution was for a strong government ( the Leviathan) to protect the individual from the tyranny of a ‘war of all against all’ This pessimism that Hobbes held for human nature led him to the conclusion that to avoid the anarchy of a war of all against all that humans should renounce some of their rights by entering into a social contract creating an artificial man , a commonwealth in which the sovereign is the some of these individuals – Leviathan. Thus for Hobbes individual liberty was not a priority as was for
John Locke .
It was Locke who really instigated a shift from natural law to natural rights from which there were derivatives and the formation of government was the protection of these natural rights. These inalienable rights are the right to life, liberty and property.
Rousseau was then to bring about a major shift in enlightenment writing, a shift away from intellectualism and determinism by arguing for feeling rather than reason as a basis for politics. He was to take issue with Hobbes and Locke on their views of human nature and the individual as central.
In answer to the question ‘ what is really natural and what’s artificial in human nature ?’ he would have answered as Sabine and Thorson claim :
“Over and above self interest, men have an innate revulsion against suffering in others. The common basis of sociability is not reason but feeling, except in the perverted man suffering anywhere is painful. In this sense men are naturally good. The calculating egoist of the theories exists not in nature but only in perverted society.”
(Sabine and Thorson 1973:536)
( One may argue here that ordinary folk have this revulsion against suffering but perverted governments do not)
Thus Rousseau had argued that the natural egoist is a fiction and that some kind of community is inevitable. The natural law thinkers of the seventeenth century had ascribed complex traits and institutions such as reason,language and a sense of justice – which could not be acquired except in society, all rights therefore were within the community and not against it; a return to collective thought. (1)
The notion of community logically and actually preceding the individual is also to be found in Hegel who likewise found cultures, practices and institutions as products of a progressively emerging historical process.
Hegel rejected previous contractualists with their stress on individual choice making the state accidental but he was careful not to make the individual an accident of history and determinism. This is to say that he recognised the role of agency in making the social world and that individual identity was not simply an end product. He was not dismissing individual identity as a misleading theoretical fiction but the atomised individual and disembodied self , thus self is a social product.
Karl Marx also considered the idea of the atomised individual coming into society as a contracting agent to be an ideological fiction. These premises of individualism which attempt to universalise and dehistoricise human nature were products of the market society which they served to justify. In the Grundrisse Marx condemned the notion of historically and isolated individuals as “ the unimaginative fancies of the eighteenth century” ( Marx 1993 )
He was therefore very critical of the very notion of rights as nothing more than the bourgeois rights of egoistic man, alienated from other men and community. This was not a crude objection but a rejection of the supposed egalitarianism of rights for failing to recognise the inequalities among individuals . Thus the legally ‘free’ individual under capitalism was free ,
“ like someone who has brought his own hide to the market and now has nothing else to expect but a tanning.”
( Marx 1993)
(This brings to mind the hypocrisy of the British Labour Party claiming socialist credentials demonstrably supporting the suffragette movement in Parliament but ignoring the plight of women in Gaza , indeed supporting an apartheid state and demeaning the Palestinians altogether.)
So far the notion of individual as neutral and natural has been criticised as abstract, atomised, ahistorical and as universalist in application as erroneous on the grounds of race and class. It is now necessary to consider the juxtaposition between collective and individual rights as previously discussed in practical terms since 1945.
Before World War 11, the notion of human rights from the Greek origin consisted of civil and political, which were further articulated in the American Declaration of Independence 1776 and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen 1789.
These seen by many as expressions of Western culture and individualism were known as first generation rights . The second generation of rights through the UNiversal Declaration of Human Rights 1948, added economic and social rights. The adoption of international covenants in 1966 added cultural collective and developmental rights laid the basis for the third generation of rights.
Sometimes this could lead to clashes of interests as in a crude polarity between civil/political/individual and economic/social/and collective rights.
Attempts have been made to overcome such antagonisms such as Shue (1980) to establish a core of ‘basic rights’ which recognises the priority of certain rights within the three generations of rights without allocating preference to any one set. Shue (1980) identified the guaranteed fight to physical security and the guaranteed right to subsistence as ‘inherent necessities’ for the exercise of any right. The former is further defined as ‘ a right that is basic not to be subjected to murder, torture, mayhem, rape or assault’. The latter is the right to adequate food, clothing, shelter and minimal preventative health care. The right to life of the person is the basic right and represents ‘everyone’s’ minimal demands upon the rest of humanity.’ It also asserts the equal value of civil/political and social economic rights : it is both a positive right requiring action by some and a negative right , requiring non-interference by others.
A similar model by Yougindra Khushlani (1984) involves the same concept but draws the distinction between the ‘right to life’ as the lowest common denominator and the ‘right to live’ as the highest common denominator. The right to live presupposes the basic right to live as given but goes beyond and allows for the progressive expansion of economic and social rights.
The essay will now show that whatever type, or generation of human rights the Palestinians , especially in Gaza, have been denied all of these rights starting with the limitation of civil/political, economic, and social rights to the very denial of basic rights including life itself.
Before doing so there is a need to consider the events of October the 7th Operation al-Aqsa Flood. The actions of Hamas on that day have been characterised by the West as a crime against humanity , the greatest antisemetic act since World War 11 .
Yet the very same acts of violence that day give rise to alternative , contradictory statements and controversy.
“ Thus, after being repeated for weeks in the media and political circles including the US president (Biden saw it with his own eyes – and he was lying) accounts reporting 40 babies beheaded and a pregnant woman ripped open……….. Have been officially invalidated “
( Fassin 2024 :10)
Indeed the overall destruction at the site is now claimed to be the result of the IDF itself since Hamas would not have had the firepower to enable such destruction. This is often done under operation Hannibal to ensure no more hostages are taken as bargaining counters.
The West also takes this action as the start of the present conflict (Genocide) yet this is an ahistorical position, for the Palestinians have been repressed since 1948; the inhabitant of Gaza are already refugees uprooted from their homes in what is now called Israel in the original Nakba of 1948 and furthermore have been subjected to constant attacks over the decades.
Yet in the UN charter the right is given to groups to resist an oppressor and some would say it was a legitimate guerrilla attack on an occupying power; a viewpoint frequently accepted by most in the Global South (Mandella in South Africa being a case in point)
So what is Genocide ?
“Genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy , in whole or in part, a national, ethnical or racial or religious group, as such as : (a) killingmembers of the group; (b) causing bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) delberatelyinflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; (d) imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; (e) forcibly transferring children of the group to another group. Punishment for one or more of these acts applies to those involved on any of the following grounds : (a) genocide; (b) conspiracy to commit genocide; (c ) direct and public incitement to commit genocide; (d) attempt to commit genocide; (e) complicity in genocide. “ (2)
The following will now adumbrate some of the evidence that Israel is committing genocide and further that the West is assisting and therefore complicit in genocide.
“ Throughout their existence , the experience of many Palestinians in their relationship with Israel is one of exclusion, discrimination, belittlement , obstruction, destruction of their fields, houses, subjection to the violence and arbitrariness of authority…………they can be arrested at any time without a reason being given , imprisoned without charge and where applicable used as an exchange currency in negotiations.”
(Fassin 2024: 58)
“ ..they can be killed, mutilated , generally with impunity because the Israeli government threatens the Palestinian Authority with reprisals should it bring complaints before the International Criminal Court.”
( Fassin 2024:59)
Indeed the Israeli government knows no bounds since it has threatened members of the ICC and their families ; threats from the Head of the Israeli Secret Service himself.
It should be added that the only other nation to threaten the Court and its members ,should it or any of its armed services be brought before it , the USA. (One has images of the US invading the Hague in the Netherlands; perhaps not so fantastic as Trump has laid claims to Greenland and Canada as well as Gaza itself.)
In the West bank settlers attack farms and villages in racial rampages more often protected by the IDF. Olive trees are uprooted, farm animals stolen, and often settlers march into peoples’ homes and declare them as theirs given by God !
Thus are Palestinians deprived of the right of their own property ( John Locke)
The IDF make claim to be the most moral army in the world, yet:
“ As for the ethics of Israeli soldiers, ample evidence,including from dozens of videos taken by military personnel themselves, reveal the forms of violence, humiliation and dehumanisation they inflict on civilians who they have captured. Examples are stripping women and cutting their hair; undressing men and making them repeat at gunpoint, chants against Hamas, praise of the Israelis, and sentences where they declare themselves their slaves: chaining a hospital medical director by the neck to walk him like a dog and make him eat from a bowl; broadcasting on social media the emaciated portrait of a child dead from malnutrition as the announcement of a sequel to the film E.T.. The discovery around the main hospitals of several mass graves containing hundreds of bodies revealed not only the presence of elderly persons , women and children still dressed in their hospital gowns, but also naked bodies, some of which showed signs of torture, while others had their hands tied. “
(Fassin 2024: 40-41)
These were not random deviant acts but authorised by commanders. Presently July/August 2025 there is evidence that the IDF and American mercenaries are shooting people as sport at the food aid locations under the jurisdiction of the US so called Gaza humanitarian project. (Thus the very basic right to life has been taken)
The Western world or more correctly its leaders have given unconditional support to Israel ; take for instance Keir Starmer who from the start gave support to the removal of food and electricity to beige Gaza and he and his Foreign Secretary both refuse to use the term Genocide, though both proudly are confessed Zionists .
Not only have western leaders given support to the elimination of a large portion of the Palestinian population, particularly the young ;
“ …but also the erasure of everything that constitutes the soul of a people: schools, libraries , museums , cemeteries, religious buildings, historical monuments and cultural centres.”
( Fassin 2024 :70)
Israel also destroyed Gaza’s universities , killing their presidents (Vice Chancellors), their teachers , their students and their administrative and technical staff. Thus to create generations of illiterates in a society where education and culture were and are so important.
( Again the denial of the right to culture and education ; third generation rights.)
Israel has also destroyed the Health sector killing doctors, nurses, paramedics and the famous case of the paramedic ambulance men murdered and buried but a recovered mobile phone gave testament to the outrage.This was in order to destroy all health sectors denying aid to the injured as shown on 23 June 2025 in the Channel 4 documentary “ Doctors Under Attack” proof again of war crimes (yet the BBC cowardly chose not to show it, no doubt under orders of the government)
Starvation and the withholding of food is causing malnutrition and famine in the population of Gaza and the denial of babymilk is also ensuring the death and preventing birth of children.
It would be impossible to carry on listing the war crimes that have been and are currently being committed; most people are aware and many do now demonstrate in the cities across the world even where prohibited. Hundreds of thousands in Australia, and Japan, in the US, the UK and Europe as well as Indonesia, Jordan and Turkey.
Yet many states in the West try to persecute such support for Palestine.
The West has been :
“…..endeavouring to silence , through intimidation, stigmatisation and sanctions, researchers, intellectuals, students, artists, activists , politicians and more broadly citizens who refused to be associated with this abiding crime, while for its part , the Israeli army was silencing Palestinian academics, journalists writers poets, doctors and humanitarian workers by eliminating them.”
( Fassin 2024:71)
The West is certainly complicit in the fact that it supplies armaments, weapons and missiles that Israel is using in its genocide particularly the US, UK and Germany, other states too such as France and Canada. The UK has also been using the RAF from Cyprus in reconnaissance missions supplying information for Israeli targeting.
However it is the silencing of dissent and disingenuous use of language that is also equally a factor in complicity.
In the United States it has been enacted by attacks on the universities such as deregistering students, depriving professors from teaching, compelling presidents of academia to resign most usually after pressure from Israeli lobbies and conservative politicians. At Columbia and the University of California actual bodily violence was used resulting in the hospitalisation of some students. Harvard University has been singled out by Trump for allowing hate speech ( ie free speech in support of Palestine)
The same has been applied to universities in the UK though not as harshly ( Yet – though Professor David Miller was sacked for antisemitism by advocating for Palestine, at Bristol University)
This has also led to self censorship where many academics have claimed in surveys that they are fearful of speaking out or for Palestine for fear of being accused of antisemitism and losing their livelihoods.
Trump has also denied federal assistance in emergencies to states who enact boycotts of Israeli goods in occupied territories.
In Germany the police have instituted vicious and violent attacks upon demonstrators particularly in Berlin.
Thus it is that Western states have done more than give consent to Israel’s actions; they have prevented those who defend the rights of Palestinians to live in dignity, or simply to live, from expressing their views , accusing them of inciting hatred and apologising for terrorism.
In the UK both Priti Patel and Suella Braverman under the previous Tory administrations wanted the pro Palestinian demonstrations banned as hate marches
The present Labour government has already arrested 6 journalists (subsequently released; these included Richard Medhurst and ASA Winstanley, see endnores) who were advocating for Palestinian Rights. It also banned a peaceful activist group ‘Action for Palestine’ as a terrorist group ( it had thrown paint over fighter jets ) with the possibility of 14 years imprisonment (life). This was voted for by Parliament with only 26 against, proving what a whorehouse that institution is. This resulted in small demonstrations by mainly elderly protestors with placards defending the aforementioned group; resulting in the arrest of 80 year olds, such as a retired vicar and pacifist Quakers . One retired headmaster was even arrested by police for holding up a placard with a cut out from the satirical magazine Private Eye who subsequently had to be released. The ordinary bobby not really knowing what they were supposed to do. At the time of writing it is expected that thousands will hold up such placards at future marches causing real problems for policing . There is a judicial review considering the validity of the law (as an ass) which has already been criticised as an over reaction by the UN Human Rights commission. This could mean the law has to be revoked with the possibility of the resignation of the Home Secretary, or further authoritarian crackdowns on the populace.
Western Media has no better record ; the mainstream media has only shown bias for the Israeli viewpoint and very little for the Palestinians.They have given reports on freed Israeli hostages who complained of growing hungry during their confinement without recourse as to the origin of those food resources. They have not covered the release of Palestinian hostages released from Israeli prisons looking emaciated and their stories of humiliation rape and torture there some breaking down in tears and some suffering obvious mental trauma. They have related the fears of Israeli children near the border with Lebanon, obliged to take refuge in shelters , yet ignoring the anguish of Palestinian children who have nowhere to seek refuge in Gaza to escape the bombs (many will have lifelong trauma and mental health issues afterwards). This is not new, it was mentioned that in a BBC report in 2014 a previous assault on Gaza resulted in 1000 deaths (plus) 4 minutes given to the upset experienced by Israelis in tears when their gardens had been damaged by the crude Hamas rockets, only seconds to mention the deaths of so many Palestinians.
“ Most broadcast media outlets have thus opted to humanise the Israelis, rather than the Palestinians. Thus, they reported at length on the ‘success’ of the military operation to free four Israelis held in a refugee camp on 8th. June, and on the demonstration of ‘joy’ when they were welcomed in Tel Aviv, mentioning only in passing the human cost of the rescue for Palestinians : 274 dead including 64 children and 57 women, and 700 injured. On radio and television the story was ‘the liberation of the hostages’; in the independent media, the episode became known as the ‘Nuseirat massacre’.”
( Fassin 2024:61)
With regard to demographic losses ; among civilians 185 times more Palestinians than Israelis have been killed. The mortality rate for children is 1,850 times higher among Palestinians and the ratio is increasing daily. The Western media emphasises the names of the names of the hostages and interviews the families of those released or the anguish of those with relatives still held hostage. The same cannot be said for the Palestinians.
“ In a letter to their management, BBC reporters deplored this partiality, the unbalanced way a human dimension was conferred on the mourning of Israeli but not Palestinian, families. Elsewhere it was revealed that in a memorandum sent to New York time journalists at the start of the war, the editors asked them to restrict employment of the words,’genocide’, and ‘ethnic cleansing’, to avoid speaking of ‘refugee camps’ and ‘occupied territories and to mention ‘Palestine’ itself as infrequently as possible . They further indicated that unduly emotive words such as ‘slaughter ‘massacre’ and ‘carnage’ should be replaced by factual descriptions – a recommendation that did not , however apply to characterising the 7 October attack.”
(Fassin 2024:62)
The BBC, which has the audacity to highlight that it has a verify department, nevertheless remains one of the most biased media organisations and still uses terms like ‘died’ rather than killed , suffered from malnutrition rather than strived to death.
Hardly ever does it report on the deaths of Palestinians killed by settlers in the West Bank, or the general suffering of those attacked , or robbed by settlers but a knifing of a settler in reprisal will give rise to indignation.
It is strange that a rapper groups openly saying Free Palestine or calling out the IDF ( Kneecap and Bob Vylan) gets taken off the BBC iplayer and leads politicians to show such indignation at this as did British culture minister Lisa Nandy in Parliament, indeed actually showing sympathy for ‘poor old IDF’ yet none for its victims to the applause of the whorehouse of Parliament.
With regard to the reported death rate amongst the people of Gaza it relies on reports from the Gaza Health Ministry and was queried by Biden as probably suspiciously high.
Such questioning of statistics is especially cynical since the reality is that the fact is that they are very heavily underestimated. It only includes those found and identified not those still under the rubble subsequently removed away by Israeli bulldovers, the vulnerable like infants and elderly who have died of malnutrition, dehydration,lack of medication, diseases like cholera, those who were vapourized by bombs, those who are in hidden mass graves and others simply ‘disappeared’Respected journals such as the lancet puts the numbers much higher in the range of 200,000, one estimate is as high as 400,000. The numbers may never be truly known until the war is over and by an epidemiological survey to assess the excess mortality , or unless the whole population is exterminated . The Palestinians are very often now unable to mourn or bring closure, so many have been bulldozed away as so much rubbish or as the foundations for roads and other infrastructures, they lie in unmarked mass graves or seemingly never existed Thus the final human right has also been denied dignity in death !
So why do the Western powers show such support to the oppressor and little sympathy to its victims ?
Some will say it is over a collective guilt by Europe for allowing or doing nothing about the holocaust during the last world war, though this seems a lame excuse except for Germany.
For some it is a neo-colonial mindset and a subsequent racism especially from the US, the UK and France which certainly has an element of truth .
For others it is the power of Israeli and proIsraeli lobbies such as AIPAC in the United States which has practically bought the House of Representatives and many senators.
In the UK the major parties have lobby groups such as the Conservative Friends of Israel and the Labour Friends of Israel. These groups provide money (bribes)to start with £5000) and free trips to Israel, they also seem to be career paths with more financial incentives as they progress . (Starmer received £50,000 , Yvette Cooper £250,000 over time) Whether it’s the money or honey traps the results are very favourable to Israel especially in the formulation of Foreign Policy. One deputy Foreign Minister in a previous Tory government Alan Duncan was nearly undermined by an Israeli Lobby for daring to announce his sympathy for the Palestinians , the lobby group called for his sacking as he was they claimed anti-semetic. He survived to tell the tale. Jeremy Corbyn was destroyed as leader of the Labour Party after falsely being called out as an anti-semite , assassinated by the press and media; the BBC even made a documentary on this subsequently found to be fraudulent, but the damage was done . (3)
The US has also got the issue of peculiar religious beliefs especially among the evangelical and pentecostal churches and the outlandish christian zionists (an oxymoron if there was ever one). They believe in the second coming of Christ, the rapture and conversion of Israel ; they actually pray for an armageddon to bring this about. Unfortunately this millenarian belief may lead to a self-fulfilling prophecy of destruction.
Another very plausible reason is tied into the military-industrial complex; many of the western states have, and some rely on their armament exports, war is a very profitable business for some .
This essay has provided evidence of Genocide against the Palestinians, so far in Gaza though the West Bank will surely be next. It has shown that all human rights in whatever form and generation have been denied to this unfortunate people , who are the victims but blamed by western governments and media as the perpetrators of terrorism totally overlooking the far worse state terrorism of Israel.
It has also shown the complicity of the West and its attacks upon those who oppose genocide.
As Fassin points out, this consent to the obliteration of Gaza has created an enormous gulf in the global moral order. The western media repeats the version of events from the standpoint of the occupier. State institutions and universities silence those who speak up for the victims. They have assisted in the denial of human rights to the Palestinians, rights that were originally formulated in the West as demonstrated by the first part of this essay. They have inverted the very values they once advocated, even Orwellian like inverted the very language,;
“Language is damaged when demands to stop killing civilians are ‘antisemitic’ when ann army that dehumanises its enemies is ‘moral’, when an enterprise of obliteration is a ‘riposte’, when a military operation openly conducted against Palestinian civilians is the ‘Israel -Hamas war’. Thinking is suffocated when debates are prevented, lectures banned and exhibitions cancelled, when the police enter institutions of higher education and prosecutors are imposed to ensure orthodoxy. An oppressive atmosphere of suspicion and accusation has endangered freedom of speech. An attempt to misuse words and invert values has put political understanding and moral discernment to the test.”
(Fassin 2024:87)
As Fassin also writes:
“Such an inversion of the values proclaimed by Western societies, such a political dereliction, such an intellectual collapse demand examination”
(Fassin 2024:3)
But as Marx correctly observed that philosophers had so far only interpreted the world the point is to change it. Thus with regard to the last quote this essay has examined , but the issue is to challenge the said inversion, dereliction and collapse.
The tide is turning, many have marched and demonstrated , yet more action is needed. The nations of the South should challenge, boycott and disinvest in trade with Israel. It should be isolated and made the pariah state that it is . Nations need to challenge the hegemony of the United States rightly called by some as the ‘Great Satan’. Europe needs to stop being the vassal of the USA and Britain needs to realise at long last that there is no ‘special relationship. US hegemony needs to subside as a multipolar world arises and reclaims human rights for all.
On a local level people need to challenge their MPs and representatives and indeed all institutions.
Progress can only come through social antagonism, not necessarily violence ( though may be an ultimate option) but contestation, dialogue, debate and discourse. A need for civil resistance and to exercise civic virtue. As Randle put it :
“ Civil resistance on the one hand and community building on the other hold the promise of creating new institutions of self government and breathing life into those that already exist. Indeed, if this promise is not fulfilled, there is a danger that the democratic impulse will be frustrated by the huge disparities of wealth and power created by the prevailing economic system and suffocated by the alienating and disempowering force of the modern bureaucratic state.”
( Randle. 1994:212)
(Unfortunately it may be the case that the Western liberal democracies are already too corrupt to save as they become evermore financial oligarchies pursuing only more wealth and power for western elites and no longer anything even resembling true democracies )
To take one institution in the west worth lobbying is religion.
In Europe the Churches need to be criticised , true some individual priests speak out, some of the non conformist churches as the Methodists hold educational talks. But over all the churches do little that is effective. It is so easy to express sorrow, but more like Christ in the temple with the Money lenders challenge and condemn not only Israel for its actions but western politicians for their hypocrisy and complicity. All the western leaders are nominally christian , some in Europe , as was Biden, catholic .
Go as far as threatening excommunication, outright condemnation not mealy mouthed words of sorrow, and stop cosying up and challenge.
The Christian religion in Europe is in decline, and seen as irrelevant by many, to do something positive may change that. Otherwise the decline will continue and possibly die along with the conscience and humanity of the West. The South is already awakening and political, social and economic change with it, as a new multipolar world develops . The West is also in decline but its negation of human values will only hasten that decline.
End Notes.
(1)In an article in the New Internationalist Sheper-Hughes (1993) pointed out that much evidence taken from anthropological studies demonstrated that the Western notion of a separate self is peculiar within the context of world cultures.
(2) Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, Convention on the prevention
and punishment of the crime of Genocide. United Nations 9 December 1948.
(3) See Asa Winstanley , Weaponising Antisemitism: How the Israel Lobby Brought Down Jeremy Corbyn (2022)
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