Tony Judt was right about Israel, wrong about the West. Bob Marley did warn us

As long as we rely on the existing constellations of nation states, decolonization will remains a fleeting illusion, to be pursued but never attained

First, some benedictions and brief sermons:

“One should look at reality with analytical coldness, but act as if everything is possible” — Molly Crabapple, translating Gramsci’s pessimism/optimism maxim

“Until the philosophy which holds one race superior and another inferior is finally and permanently discredited and abandoned, everywhere is war. And until there are no longer first-class and second-class citizens of any nation… And until the basic human rights are equally guaranteed to all without regard to race, there is war. And until that day, the dream of lasting peace, world citizenship, rule of international morality, will remain but a fleeting illusion to be pursued, but never attained... now everywhere is war.” — Haile Selassie as channeled by Bob Marley

“The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion (to which few members of other civilizations were converted) but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.” – Samuel P. Huntington

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The late Tony Judt wrote in 2003 that Israel was an “historical anachronism” — as a settler colony founded by force and privileging a single, arriviste European population over an indigenous majority, its creation would have been unremarkable up to around a century ago, alongside other settler colonies like Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Canada and, of course, the United States, all created through the violent subjugation and displacement of the indigenous populations. But Israel came too late to be sustainable, he warned, because it was a “characteristically late-nineteenth-century separatist project [born] into a world that has moved on, a world of individual rights, open frontiers, and international law. The very idea of a ‘Jewish state’—a state in which Jews and the Jewish religion have exclusive privileges from which non-Jewish citizens are forever excluded—is rooted in another time and place.”

Perhaps, but not necessarily. No question Israel was a settler colonial project made possible by British colonialism having supplanted the Ottomans as rulers of Palestine, and then codified at the very moment when the European colonial powers, exhausted by World War 2, were being forced by the peoples they had shackled and ruthlessly exploited to accept decolonization. The colonization of Palestine came as decolonization began to loom large everywhere else.

Israel hasn’t changed, of course, but the Western world has: The liberal order of individual rights, open borders and international law that made Israel seem such an anachronism to Judt has, itself, been steadily eclipsed: Indeed, the long view of history now tells us that the liberal dimensions of that order may, in fact, have been rooted in the Cold War and the post-Cold War, an ideology uniting Western allies in their confrontation with a vastly over-imagined Soviet threat, and a set of practices centered on entrenching colonialism’s epic pillaging of the Global South in a system of “property rights” and using “the market” to maintain and expanding the power and wealth of Western capitalism at the expense of most of humanity.

Stealthily — or perhaps we failed to take sufficient notice of the signs — the postwar liberal order in the 21^st century became a set of empty catechisms as the United States itself set about degrading and dismantling the very rules, norms and even narratives it had built after World War 2, stripping the attendant institutions of their meaning and power. And the spirit of colonialism — the subordination by white power centers of recalcitrant brown people through the unleashing of epic organized violence — came back into fashion. The invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq by the U.S. and its Western satraps demonstrated that the essence of Western power and domination, as understood by Huntington, were once again normalized.

Should it really shock us that the former colonial powers of the West, now grouped in the G7, essentially lined up behind Israel as it unleashed genocide in Gaza, ethnic cleansing across Palestine, bombed Lebanon, Syria, Yemen and now Iran? Does the Holocaust guilt Israel cynically brandishes account for this complicity? I think the connection runs deeper; a recognition of themselves and the sources of their own power in what Israel is – a coarse and arrogant garrison state whose condition of existence (as noted by some of its iconic founders such as Jabotinsky and Moshe Dayan) was the brutish suppression of the indigenous peoples of the Arab region.

Rather than an outlier in the era of economically liberal and (self-styled) humanitarian globalization cited by Judt, Israel is in fact on point with a West whose conduct invites us to abandon any illusions about its hegemony being good for the rest — though, like their Western counterparts, they’re happy to reassure their own publics that they’re waging war on brown people for their own good.

Netanyahu and Trump have launched a savage and illegal war on Iran, based on a shameless lie about that country representing a nuclear weapons threat (and somehow casting the genocidal colonial regime of Israel as “acting in self-defense” – you know, like the Germans did in Namibia, or the French in Haiti and Algeria, or the British at Amritsar). They get behind another enforced regime change in the Middle East that can only end in catastrophe, and none of the Western powers as much as objects to these blatant violations of everything they supposedly stand for.

It's left to China’s President Xi Jinping to point out the obvious:

“The world can move on without the United States. 100 years ago, the British Empire dominated global commerce, commanding more than 20% of the world’s wealth. Many believed its sun would never set. 200 years ago, France bestrode Europe’s stage, its armies feared, its culture envied. Napoleon declared himself immortal. 400 years ago, the Spanish crown reigned from Manila to Mexico, its treasure fleets groaning with silver and silk. The kings thought their glory would last eternal. Each empire proclaimed itself indispensable. Each was ultimately eclipsed. Power wanes, influence migrates, and legitimacy dies the moment it’s assumed rather than earned. Should America forfeit the world’s respect, it will discover what every fallen empire learned too late: The world moves on. Always.”

Israel has, more than any other actor in the current global setting, recognized the morbid vacuum created by the U.S. largely abandoning the rules, norms and even strategic priorities it had enforced in through the Cold War and post-Cold War eras. Israel has moved into the vacuum created by U.S. strategic retrenchment, while the Western and Arab powers long schooled in the post-Cold War expectations watch, aghast and yet paralyzed because of their grounding in obsolete assumptions, hoping this is all a nightmare, staring wide-eyed at the ceiling as they await the dawn. It’s not coming; the global order in which the U.S. remains the most powerful single entity will not snap back to any kind of morally, humanly tolerable default setting: That much ought to have been made clear after almost two years of genocide in Gaza with no restraint by the erstwhile self-appointed global sheriff, and even the feckless pearl-clutching of some European powers easily batted away by launching an aggression against Iran and insisting, and automatically acquiring, full Western backing.

War criminals like Netanyahu and Gallant remain welcome in much of the West despite the ICC warrants for their arrest; they strut their stuff on Western TV channels lecturing the West on its obligations to support them, restating versions of the sort of ‘mission civilatrise’ colonial dissembling that most Western leaders (well, France exempted) would have been embarrassed to entertain, much less express, before the U.S. brought that discourse back into fashion for its “liberation” of Afghanistan and Iraq. We should have paid more attention to the revival of those narratives, and even more so to the U.S. negation of the frameworks of international law regulated by multilateral institutions of the “rules-based international order” (of which trade rules appear to have been the only element that survived into the 21^st century, though even those now appear to be under review).

The U.S. had effectively given up on even the pretense of balancing its fealty to Israel (a product of domestic politics rather than any grand strategy) with Arab concerns and interests by the time Barack Obama was in the White House. Nowadays, U.S. leaders don’t bother with virtuous language to camouflage their racist, colonial contempt for Palestinians.

Today’s top-level U.S. officials mouth what would have been unthinkable outrages about the future of the Palestinians a few years ago, making clear that the expectations of the post-Cold War era are null and void. It’s a new world order in which America has scant regard for the Arab region beyond transactional economic wins. It simply doesn’t care about justice, fairness, humanitarian decency or even stability in that region. U.S. domestic politics dictates a pro-Israel default, domestic priorities like inflation and wealth-creation dictate keeping the Saudis onside. But there’s no grand strategy here designed to accommodate the interests of anyone outside of the Western elites. The U.S. and most of Europe is turning on Black and brown people within their borders, restoring a xenophobic white supremacy most immediately and violently expressed on the many of tens of thousands of people fleeing hostile climes in the Global South whose social and ecological ruin is in no small part a result of the Western colonial legacy.

So, Tony Judt was right about Israel, but in the end, wrong about the Western-dominated world order around it. Today’s global order is hardly one in which Israel appears out of place. On the contrary; Israel is the 21^st century vogue in which the West has rediscovered its colonial self.

So, all stakeholders need to understand that they’re not dealing with the America they knew 30 or 20 or even 10 years ago. The crumbling edifice has entirely collapsed, and is unlikely to return. There will be no Pax Americana, because Washington no longer sees any incentive to taking that level of responsibility for anything. As the President sounds off like a cartoon gangster from an ancient Hollywood movie threatening to murder Iran’s leader and to devastate its capital. The only sure bet here is that even if it did manage to topple Iran’s regime, the U.S. of today has no interest in sticking around to manage the chaos that would follow. As Trump made clear in a recent speech in Saudi Arabia, the U.S. is done with “nation-building”. (And as it has proven in Iraq and Afghanistan, its unmatched ability to destroy things is paralleled by epic failure to build anything of use to it on the ruins.)

For all governments who seek a political settlement in Palestine, it’s clear that there’s no rational basis to hope the U.S. will play any positive role in the region beyond enabling Israel’s rampage and making self-serving business deals. For those states who imagine their own long-term security requires political solutions to conflicts involving Israel, they’d best be decentering America (which has made itself an intractable part of the problem) and talking to one another about acting independently in ways they have not done since Washington took charge of the Palestine file in the early 1990s.

If Arab and European states hoping for political solutions that stabilize the region are paralyzed by being chained to obsolete assumptions about the United States, many in Arab civil society may have suffered from their attachment to chimeric ones – particularly the idea of Israel and the US being restrained or pushed back by an “Axis of Resistance”. Whether it was ever realistic to imagine regimes like Syria or Iran would sacrifice the priority of regime-survival on the altar of anti-imperialist internationalism — obviously I don’t believe it was — there’s no basis for imagining the future of resistance will be centered on any nation states in the region or beyond.

As Amal Saad writes, resistance is inevitable — colonized people will never accept their lot — but if the Iranian regime is degraded to the extent that it may be by this war, the inevitable region-wide reconstituting of resistance will assume more fluid, networked, unpredictable and underground forms independent of the influence of any of the states in the region.

The old order is dead, and its rules and norms clearly no longer apply. But nobody can predict what comes next. If history was a train, then it has completely derailed because the Americans blew up the tracks — which had already been rotting from disuse. Either way, the wreckage of the train lies smoldering on its side, leaving its survivors now on foot, in a dense forest with no clear pathways forward. Yet.

Still, humanity will have no choice but to proceed, abandoning the idea of the train tracks and train cars they have known (i.e. the nation states of our post-colonial/neo colonial world order) and finding ways to move forward. Resistance and struggle are born not of abstract ideologies, but of historical necessity. It may take a generation to figure out the pathways to a sustainable future, but that generation has no choice but to make its own way forward, despite the obstacles posed by the U.S., by Israel, and by the system of nation states that sustain the status quo.

Gramsci might have called it a morbid interregnum in which the old is dying but the new is unable to be born. But as the late, great Mike Davis wrote in what turned out to be his farewell missive, “Everyone is quoting Gramsci on the interregnum, but that assumes that something new will be or could be born. I doubt it. I think what we must diagnose instead is a ruling class brain tumour: a growing inability to achieve any coherent understanding of global change as a basis for defining common interests and formulating large-scale strategies… Unlike the high Cold War when politburos, parliaments, presidential cabinets and general staffs to some extent countervailed megalomania at the top, there are few safety switches between today’s maximum leaders and Armageddon. Never has so much fused economic, mediatic and military power been put into so few hands.”

Which means humanity only has a future to the extent that it can take power from those destructive hands, and collectively chart a different course independent of the tumor-stricken ruling classes called out by Davis.