The Moral Narrative of Imperialism
Our Leaders Want You To Believe They Care About Civilians Killed on 7 October
It is becoming increasingly clear that what is going on is not a war between Israel and Hamas. It is not even that Israel is waging a war on Gaza. Rather, it is that we are dealing with the whole Western world's genocide of Palestinians. The West, in particular the US, arms Israel, attacks Yemen and starves Palestinians to death by withholding funds from the UNRWA (spell out here). Despite pleads from the UN, ICJ (spell out), ICC (spell out), WHO(spell out), Amnesty International and the Pope himself to stop Israel's war crimes, despite the UNICEF warnings on of imminent explosion in children’s malnutrition deaths in Gaza, despite reports that children have nothing to eat but leaves and nothing to drink but dirty rainwater.
Still, it continues.
Why?
During the past nine months, Western leaders have been telling us a story. It goes as follows: they are deeply concerned about the attacks on 7 October, in which around 700 civilians and 370 IDF soldiers were killed. Thus, Israel has a right to “defend itself,” the story goes. All political leaders in the West, without exception, have declared themselves personally affected and shocked by the brutality of what happened. Our media has followed suit.
What is most notable is that they are all using the exact same phrases. The attack is routinely referred to as “barbaric” in English, “bestialisk” in Swedish, “violence barbare” in French...1
Not a single time has the word barbaric been used to describe Israel's bombing of Gaza, which has now killed 30,035 civilians, mainly children, and maimed 70,000. They are referred to as “intense,” ”recurrent” or “large-scale.”
Barbaric, according to the Cambridge English dictionary, means ”savagely cruel, primitive; unsophisticated.”
The violence of the oppressed is thus called primitive, the violence of the oppressor is called large-scale: in other words, industrialised, and thereby modern.
In the same vein, Israelis are described as innocent victims of massacres, while Palestinians are routinely described as “found dead” without being awarded the term innocent—not even 6-year-olds.
The violence of the Palestinian resistance is regularly referred to as terrorism, fundamentalist, gruesome, heinous—while Israel's violence is written about in passive form, generally without adjectives or within quotation marks.
Condemning Hamas using terms like barbaric has quickly become something of a ritual that anybody wanting to comment on the situation, even to criticise Israel, has felt compelled to do not to be disqualified from further participation in public debate. We thus see leftwing politicians and alternative publications using that very same language, such as Bernie Sanders calling Hamas a “terrorist” organisation or Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez condemning Hamas “in the strongest possible terms” while not using the same strong wordings to describe Israel. What is being thrown around here like a hot potato that nobody wants to touch is the question of anti-colonial resistance, so hailed in struggles already won, but yet so contemporarily controversial.
One may wonder—why these double standards? How come the same leaders who have not only silently witnessed, but actively participated in the killing of more than 400,000 people in Jemen and 30,000 in Gaza, suddenly declare themselves deeply affected by the deaths of 700 people? How can the same leaders who never utter a word about rapes anywhere in the world, much less in their own countries, all of a sudden claim that alleged rapes merit an extra package of 14.5 billion dollars in military aid?
How can they care about a few, when they haven't cared about the many?
Some cite racism as the reason, and declare it to be a matter of grievable versus ungrievable lives, as in Judith Butler's oft-cited notion. US leaders would thus, according to this theory, pay out billions of dollars due to feelings—because they “care” about certain people. This explanation might seem radical but is, in fact, just as idealist as the notion that they are shocked by rapes and killings, since it implies that the leaders do care and are moved by psychology and empathy, albeit selective, instead of economic interests.
Let's keep in mind this simple notion: when imperialists say they care about people, it means one thing only. They are preparing for war.
Wars are about resources, power and geopolitical hegemony. Our leaders do not give a damn about civilians killed on 7 October, nor do they care about anti-Semitism on the rise, nor hostages, women being raped, Ukrainian lives or any other casus belli en vogue. Imperialism does not have a moral conscience. But its citizens do. And we could vote them out. That is why leaders in imperialist nations need to justify their invasions: they have to make us so upset about one crime, that we'll accept a much bigger one.
Every time an invasion is being planned, the exact same scenario plays out. We are being told that the leader in the country about to be invaded has weapons of mass destruction, is a dictator, has dragged babies out of incubators, plans to take over the world and that our leaders are deeply affected by this horror and need to act now.
These narratives have two functions. In the foreground, its basic function is to gain acceptance of war, with the old notion: those people are awful—we need to step in. In the background, its function is to shift the debate from the real reasons wars take place, to discuss the justifications themselves: was it true that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction or not, did Hamas really behead 40 babies and rape women, etc. The debunking itself takes up so much energy that few understand that even if all those claims were true, they are still not the reason for war. Nobody spends billions of dollars without expecting a return of investment.
The war against Palestine in particular is being justified by appealing to both humanism and racism at the same time, both being examples of moral narratives of good and evil. Empathy for the women, racism for the men. Empathy, perhaps the finest sentiment of humanity, is exploited to prepare the women for war. Racism, perhaps the lowest of sentiments, is used to prepare the men. 7 October does both—the focus on rapes tries to make the war a feminist issue and the usage of terms like barbaric tries to evoke our fear of the Other. Notably, the narrative on what occurred on 7 October is so explicitly sadist in its perverse attention to detail that we are to understand it as pure evil, nothing less. The story on baking babies in ovens resembles the adjacent story of babies being torn from incubators. Why anybody would do such a thing defies even the logic of war, as if one would have time in the midst of a tightly-organised military operation to turn on the oven and put people in it.
If those stories do not suffice, 7 October is rhetorically tied to the Holocaust, as if the anti-colonial struggle in the Middle East would somehow be related to the European genocide in the 1940's. Through the phrase “the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust” we are encouraged to view a military superpower as if it were a concentration camp victim. Not only is this an insidious tactic, it is also untrue. The biggest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust took place in Argentina during the junta, when 30 000 people were killed or disappeared—12% of the victims were Jews despite only representing 1% of the population.2
Time is a crucial concept in this discourse. On the one hand, time is reset to 7 October as a kind of “Ground Zero,” regarding the Palestinians. Anything before that “doesn't matter” as the Swedish Author's Union says in a statement on Gaza: “It is not our task to analyse all the causes and aspects of the ongoing war.”3 On the other hand, regarding the Israeli’s, history is constantly evoked: both the Holocaust and the Bible are part and parcel of any debate on the subject.
Racism is, however, not the reason for imperialist war, but their excuse. Imperialist leaders use racism since they know that it a type of moral narrative that can be imbibed in the population. Imperialism has a magic wand able to turn a people from “Eastern Slavs” to “White Europeans” in a matter of days (Ukraine) and vice versa. Imperialism constantly shifts the “us” and the “them,” so that Kuwaitis were us while Iraqis were them, Kurds are always on the fence depending on the current state of things, and Jews became white the day they moved to the Middle East. Imperialism, mind you, does not love any people, not even its own. Imperialism is a system that guarantees— the Us in particular and capitalism in general—geopolitical hegemony and worldwide reign. As Norman Finkelstein has shown, for many years the Holocaust was a leftwing issue, until 1967 when the memory of it became a pillar in the defence of Israel and the Right took it on.4
Islamophobia, or more specifically hatred of Arabs, overtook Anti-Communism as the dominant discourse of imperialism after the fall of the Soviet Union. At the same time, the Oslo Accords were implemented, pushed by the US, as a way to neutralise any resistance to the US-led world order and to avoid a South African-style solution in Palestine. The PLO was thus disarmed in exchange for a promise of a (minimal) state which never materialised. After this, Israel has been eating up more and more of Palestinian territory, step by step, while the world has looked away and resigned itself to voting for toothless resolutions in the UN without demanding compliance or introducing a single sanction.
Israel thought it had won—relations with its neighbours were normalising and despite sporadic uprisings and attacks, the cost of occupation remained low.
The real reason imperialism has reacted so viciously to 7 October is not the death of civilians, but that Empire was dealt a tremendous blow. Israel and the US were completely unprepared. That an oppressed, colonised, imprisoned, infiltrated, super-surveilled people could prepare something of this magnitude while neither Mossad, the Shin Bet nor the CIA had the slightest clue, shook the imperialist world order in its foundation.
The impact of the blow is greater than 9/11—that 9/11 was an isolated event which would not lead to a coup anywhere became clear quite fast, but here we are dealing with an organised people in a region that Israel and the US thought they controlled. In reality, Gaza turned out to be the one area in the Middle East that they did not control.
What Israel and the US are doing now is not ”hunting Hamas” but setting a precedent. The punishment is made to be as brutal and inhuman as possible in order to ensure that no uprising will happen again for generations. Any Palestinian—or any oppressed people—thinking of resisting in the future will be deterred by the memory of this genocide. “There will be no electricity and no water (in Gaza), there will only be destruction. You wanted hell, you will get hell” Maj. Gen. Ghassan Alian, who heads the Israeli army’s Coordination of Government Activities in the Palestinian Territories (COGAT), declared.5 As the US generals announced 1967: ”We will bomb Vietnam back to Stone Age.”
The myth that has proliferated in some leftist circles that 7 October would be an “inside job” or that “Israel created Hamas” does the same thing but metaphorically: eliminates the resistance. It is not only erroneous but harmful. Just like the myth of 9/11 being an inside job, it does not allot any agency to the oppressed. Oppressed people can, according to the inside job trope, per definition not resist—any major resistance that occurs is created by the superpowers. They know it all, are behind it all, and anything that happens is their doing. A couple of guys in Afghanistan's mountains or in a Gazan tunnel—they couldn't possibly outsmart the CIA or Mossad, could they?
Yes they can, and history provides us example after example of this; in fact, the entire colonised world gained independence through wars, despite inferior resources.
As colonialism was defeated, the former colonial powers, now US-led, shifted to ruling through another system: imperialism. The difference between colonialism and imperialism is that while the former rules in situ and often moves its own population to the colonies, the latter rules from a distance through puppets and emails. Roughly speaking, colonialism is about taking land, and imperialism about getting mining contracts.
Imperialism is not simply when one country invades another, as many like to believe regarding Russia/Ukraine. That is, simply put, an invasion. Countries have invaded each other throughout history without it being a matter of “imperialism.” Rather, what constitutes imperialism is that capital takes up arms, as Andreas Malm has put it.6
The US, as the world's greatest economy as well as the world's military superpower, has the role of imperialist hegemon, to secure the world for capitalism in general and US interests in particular. Using economic institutions designed for the purpose: the World Bank, IMF and WTO, a country can be pressured to sell its oil to US companies, privatise copper mines and abolish import customs for Western goods. When this fails, sanctions can be applied to thus starve the people who oppose US dictates.
Finally, should all this fail, there is always the last resort: a military invasion. The US prides itself on over 800 military bases worldwide. In Israel, for instance.
This is why Israel is such a particularly dangerous state: it is both colonial and imperialist at the same time. On the one hand, a settler colonialist project whose initial goal stays the same; moving to a country and gradually taking it over by ethnically cleansing the indigenous population, on the other hand, an imperialist post and the US’ most important ally in the Middle East. On the one hand, an apartheid state built on the notion of ethnic purity—paranoid as they come—where the memory of the Holocaust and the idea that only the constant war can prevent a repetition has become national ideology—on the other hand, this is an absolute guarantee for continued US hegemony in the region.
Imperialism has thus preserved a colony, where it can practice colonialism the same old way using modern weaponry.
It is thus a mistake to believe that Israel is controlling the US. As if the USA, the world's unrivalled economic and military superpower, would for some strange reason have been tricked by the Israelis or by an obstinate “lobby” into just giving them billions against its own national interest. This myth is being perpetuated by isolationist thinkers in vogue, such as John Mearsheimer. But as researcher Max Ajl notes in Ebb magazine: Israel is the best investment the US has ever made, writing: “From 1970 onwards, US military aid into Israel turned the country into a unique asset: an offshore arms factory; a regional irritant to Arab peace, stability, and popular regional development; a destructive gyro of world-wide counterinsurgency; a black hole drawing in regional surpluses and devoting them to endless defensive and offensive armament, away from social-popular welfare spending and non-military development.”7
Ever since the 50's, colonial powers have seen the value of Israel. When President Nasser of Egypt was about to nationalise the Suez Canal in 1956, Israel offered the Western powers an invasion of Egypt and an assassination of Nasser. (Who, by the way, was referred to as the “Hitler on the Nile” by Ben-Gurion—the Holocaust metaphors were already around) whereupon France contributed tanks and artillery for 100 million dollars. Great Britain joined, but Nasser survived.8
Every time the Middle East is heading towards unity, stability and independence, Israel is used by the US as a tool to prevent this, either by sowing split, such as in the Iraq-Iran war, or by sabotaging their defence systems by bombing and assassinating scientists, be they Iranian, French or German.9 The US dream scenario in the region is stable allies, but next best is chaos and underdevelopment. They succeeded in Iraq, Libya and to some extent Syria despite not being able to topple the regime.
Israel plays a crucial role in maintaining the imperialist world order as a test laboratory for military technology and as a hired assassin.10 Mossad, the Israeli secret service, has killed over 3000 people—many of them in Europe, as Israeli author Ronan Bergman writes in his bestseller (and Mossad eulogy) Rise and Kill First.11
No other state has assassinated this many people abroad. These assassinations are carried out with impunity, despite the fact that they repeatedly target European citizens and often slip up—we remember the waiter in Lillehammer, Norway, who was gunned down because the Mossad kidon thought he looked like their target. Mossad has trained secret police all over the world, from Pinochet's DINA to the Shah's Savak, the Portuguese colonial regime in Mozambique, both sides in Sri Lanka's civil war, and has also been used by regimes to exterminate political dissidents in exchange for favours.12
The number of Palestinian leaders executed by Mossad is so many that it is not a question of if, but when, a leader will be killed. The interpretation that the Mossad thus is a “super-intelligent” organisation is being touted by Mossad itself—however, they often find themselves confronting a new and more radical enemy for every person they kill, as when they killed Yasser Arafat and found themselves eye to eye with Hamas, or when they killed Hizbollah leader Abbas Mussawi and instead were faced with Nasrallah.13
By killing every person with whom they could negotiate, Israel is undermining the possibility of any solution other than permanent war. Thus Zionism has taken Judaism hostage, perverted the soul of its own population and risked its life—when Israel could have chosen a different path, that of living in relative peace and security in a multi-ethnic, democratic state according to the principle one person, one vote. But the US will do anything to prevent a one-state solution even if it means risking Israeli lives, as such as state would no longer be the guaranteed ally the US wants, but would perhaps rather join forces with its neighbours.
When an Israeli soldier was killed by Palestinian fedayeen 1956, Moshe Dayan, then IDF general and later Minister of Defence, uttered the following words at his funeral and thereby laid down the basic tenet of Israeli militarism:
Let us not cast the blame on the murderers today. Why should we declare their burning hatred for us? For eight years they have been sitting in the refugee camps in Gaza, and before their eyes, we have been transforming the lands and the villages, where they and their fathers dwelt, into our estate.… We will make our reckoning with ourselves today; we are a generation that settles the land and without the steel helmet and the canon's maw, we will not be able to plant a tree and build a home.14
Already the ground had been laid for the genocide now unfolding.
Suhonen, Daniel.“Vad Tobias Billström borde ha mod att säga.” Aftonbladet, 30 December 2023; “Ledare: Israel förtjänar säkerhet—men bomberna ger inte det.”Dagens Nyheter, 30 December 2023; “Det är Iran som är kruxet.” Sydsvenskan, 14 January 2024; “Nu skäms de inte längre över sitt judehat” Expressen, 10 October 2023; Johansson, Morgan. “Två stater enda lösningen.” Aktuellt i Politiken; Svensson, Mattias. “Vänstern som varit våldets ständiga apologeter.” Svenska Dagbladet, 23 November 2023; Nerbrand, Sofia. “Vänstern och tyranniet.” Kristianstadsbladet, 12 October 2023; “Antisemitism är en skamfläck för vårt land.” Regeringskansliet, 9 November 2023; “Över 500 döda när ett sjukhus i Gaza bombades ikväll. Det måste till en vapenvila nu. Stoppa bombningarna, släpp gisslan, upprätta en…” Instagram; Jalalian, Henrik. “Sverige ger dödandet i Gaza politisk legitimitet.” Expressen, 25 November 2023; “Varför säger regeringen inget om att svenska barn dödats i Gaza?” Dagens ETC; Arpi, Ivar. “Israel drabbas av ren ondska.” Rak höger, 8 October 2023.
Uki Go-i. “Jews targeted in Argentina's dirty war.” The Guardian. 24 Mar 1999. https://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/1999/mar/24/guardianweekly.guardianweekly1
Arbetsutskottet (AU) i Författarförbundets styrelse, “Om kriget i Gaza”, utskick 6/2 2024
Finkelstein, Norman G., The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering, Verso 2000, s. 16
Buxbaum, Jessica. “Erase Gaza’: How genocidal rhetoric is normalised in Israel.” 30 November, 2023. (newarab.com)
Malm, Andreas, När kapitalet tar till vapen, Agora fšrlag, 2004
Ajl, Max. “Misreading Palestine” Ebb, 29 November 2023.
Tyler, Patrick, “Fortress Israel: The Inside Story of the Military Elite Who Run the Country And Why They Can’t Make Peace,” Portobello 2013, s. 79.
See both Ostrovsky and Bergman, e.g. the cases of Butrus Eben Halim, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh and Heinz Krug (Operation Damocles)
Loewenstein, Anthony, The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World. Verso, 2023.
Bergman, Ronen, Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel’s Targeted Assassinations, Random House. 2019
Ostrovsky, Victor and Hoy, Claire, By Way of Deception: The Making and Unmaking of a Mossad Officer. St Martin’s Paperbacks, 1990. See also Ajl, Max, “Palestine’s Great Flood: Part I,” Agrarian South Journal of Political Economy, February 2024.
The murder of Arafat has never been admitted publicly, yet Uri Dan shows in his book Ariel Sharon: An Intimate Portrait, that Sharon shortly prior to his death came as close to admitting it as possible.
Bergman, s. 49
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