Janelle’s Reviews > The World After Gaza: A Short History > Status Update

In a 1993 speech, Nelson Mandela expressed an enduring public sentiment: ‘the people of South Africa will never forget the support of the state of Israel to the apartheid regime’.

As mobs mouthing the xenophobic slogans of mainstream politicians rampage through the streets of the US, UK and Germany, and Muslims protesting the Western-assisted slaughter in Gaza are denounced as traitors, the old affinities between the West’s war-making abroad and race-making at home become too garishly apparent

…..tried to persuade its Western European friends to insert a racial equality clause in the Covenant of the League of Nations. The proposal was squashed by A. J. Balfour, one of the leaders of the British delegation, and the godfather of the State of Israel, who said he could not believe ‘that a man in Central Africa was created equal to a European’.”

“At the Paris Peace Conference of 1919,a range of Asians, Africans, Americans&Europeans came together to identify and critique white supremacism.Japan,which had fought with the Allied powers,tried to persuade its Western European friends to insert a racial equality clause in the Covenant of the League of Nations.The proposal……

In their master narrative, increasingly threadbare after Donald Trump’s twin victories but still being recycled by anti-communist historians such as Timothy Snyder and Anne Applebaum, Western democracies were/are permanently ranged against totalitarian or authoritarian enemies.

The OAU resolution was quickly reformulated that same year by a majority in the United Nations General Assembly that equated Zionism with racism.

These relations deteriorated rapidly after Israel became,explicitly& anachronistically,a Westernstyle colonial power in 1967.They achieved their nadir in 1975 when the Organisation of African Unity declared that ‘the racist regime in occupied Palestine& the racist regimes in Zimbabwe&South Africa have a common imperialist origin’ with policies ‘aimed at [the] repression of the dignity&integrity of the human being’.

White nationalists, who long felt inhibited by the norms of social liberalism in the West, naturally feel a deep affinity with Israel, a state that has unabashedly repudiated political and cultural pluralism and now violates international legal, diplomatic and ethical protocols with ever-increasing impunity, even frank gratification.

‘Since World War II,’ the Israeli journalist Ronen Bergman notes in Rise and Kill First (2018), ‘Israel has assassinated more people than any other country in the Western world’ – a mode of continuous warfare whose conspicuous record of failure (and tendency to feed on failure) has not thwarted the US from taking ‘assassination techniques developed in Israel as a model’: ‘the same kind of extrajudicial killing…

America’s immigration laws continued to prevent the entry of a large number of East European Jews long after the war.The British permitted the entry of more than 200,000 Eastern Europeans,&15,000 German&8,000 Ukrainian POWs,while asserting that large-scale immigration‘could only be welcomed without reserve if the immigrants were of good human stock’–a category that excluded Jewish DPs as well as black immigrants….