A very important essay from The Guardian by Moustafa Bayoumi
Some excerpts:
What is it about Israel that enables it to get away with murder? The United States has long shielded Israel from international criticism and supported it militarily. The reasons offered for that support usually range from the “unbreakable” bond shared between the two countries to the power of the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac) in Washington. One could reasonably argue that the only thing different about this current war is the scale.
But it’s not just Washington. Israel and the question of Palestine produce incredibly fraught divisions throughout much of the western world. Denmark recently banned children gearing up to vote in a nationwide youth election from debating Palestinian sovereignty. Why?
In a conversation with the New York Times’ Ezra Klein, professor of international human rights law Aslı Bâli offered one explanation for what’s different about Palestine. In 1948, she notes, Palestine was “the only territory that had been slated to be decolonized at the creation of the United Nations … that has [still] not been decolonized”.
South Africa was once in that category. For decades, Palestine and South Africa were “understood as ongoing examples of incomplete decolonization that continued long after the rest of the world had been fully decolonized”. Today, Palestine is the last exception to that historical process – a holdover plainly clear to the people who were once subject to colonization, but that the western world refuses to acknowledge as an aberration.
In other words, for many in the US and much of the western world, the creation of the state of Israel is understood as the fulfillment of Jewish national aspirations. For the rest of the world, the same fulfillment of Jewish national aspirations has rendered the decolonization of Palestine incomplete.
In 2003, the historian Tony Judt wrote that the “problem with Israel [is] … that it arrived too late. It has imported a characteristically late-19th-century separatist project 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. Israel, in short, is an anachronism.”