The West’s Illusory Bubble About Israel – and About Itself – is Finally Bursting
The genocide in Gaza and the ethnic cleansing in Lebanon have exhausted the moral legitimacy of the West. Now Iran is slowly undermining the military supremacy of the West.
On the one hand, an official Western narrative paints a picture of a brave, besieged ‘Jewish’ state of Israel, desperately seeking to make peace with its hostile Arab neighbors. To this day, that narrative dominates the political, media, and academic landscape.
Time and again, we are told, Israel has offered “the Arabs” an olive branch in search of acceptance, but is always rejected, writes Jonathan Cook .
A largely unspoken subtext suggests that supposedly irrational, bloodthirsty, Jew-hating regimes in the region would have completed the Nazis’ extermination agenda had the West not humanely protected a vulnerable minority.
A Palestinian counter-narrative, which is accepted in a large part of the rest of the world, is silenced in the West as an antisemitic ‘blood slander’.
It portrays Israel as an ethnically supremacist, highly militaristic state – armed by the United States and Europe – bent on expansion, mass expulsions, and land grabbing.
According to this view, the West has implanted Israel as a colonial military outpost to subjugate the indigenous Palestinian population and force neighboring countries into submission through ruthless and overwhelming displays of power.
Palestinians cannot make peace or reach any agreement, because Israel is solely bent on conquest, domination, and extermination. There is no middle ground possible.
The proof, Palestinians note, is Israel’s long-standing refusal to establish its borders. As its military power has grown decade after decade, increasingly extreme political agendas have emerged, demanding not only that Israel take over the last remnants of the Palestinian territories it illegally occupies, but also expansion into neighboring countries such as Lebanon and Syria.
Drunk with power
Here are two conflicting narratives in which each party presents itself as the victim of the other.
How do these two perspectives hold up now that two and a half years have passed since the start of a series of Israeli wars against the peoples of Gaza, Iran, and Lebanon?
Does Israel look like the frustrated peacemaker taking on barbaric opponents, or like a rogue state whose decades-long aggression has actually provoked the retaliatory violence that is exploited to justify its continued warfare?
Is Israel a small, reluctant fortress state defending itself, or a Western military ally so intoxicated with its own power that it can no more curb its territorial ambitions than a great white shark can stop swimming?
The truth is that the past 30 months have not only incisively exposed what Israel always was, but, by extension, also what our own Western states hoped to achieve through their most beloved ally in the Middle East.
In a moment of carelessness last month, Christian Turner, Peter Mandelson’s successor as British ambassador to the US, let the truth slip. Washington, the imperial center of the West, he said, had no deep loyalty to its allies – except for one.
Unaware that his words were being recorded, he told a group of visiting students : “I think there is probably one country that has a special relationship with the United States, and that is probably Israel.”
That special relationship requires the political and media elite in Washington’s other vassal states, such as Great Britain, to protect the ‘Sparta of the West’ in the Middle East from critical eyes.
Israel’s atrocities have become so harrowing that the British government announced last month that it would close its Foreign Office department that investigates war crimes – citing the need for budget cuts – rather than risk further exposure of its complicity in those crimes.
If the British government refuses to monitor Israel’s war crimes, expect nothing more from the mainstream media.
For months, Israel has blown up one village after another in South Lebanon, displacing millions of inhabitants from areas where their ancestors have lived for millennia, and our politicians and media have paid barely any attention to it.
Israel is destroying Gaza’s water supply , just as it previously destroyed the hospitals and the healthcare system of the small enclave, thereby promoting the spread of disease, and our politicians and media have hardly anything to say about it.
Israel kills journalists and aid workers in Gaza and Lebanon week after week , month after month, and the political and media elite hardly bat an eye.
Israel declares “yellow lines ” in Gaza and Lebanon, thereby delineating extensive borders that formalize the theft of other people’s land, and this immediately becomes the new normal.
Israel continually violates the ceasefires in Gaza and Lebanon , sows misery , and fuels even more anger and bitterness , and once again our politicians and media look the other way.
Which Western media point to a harrowing fact: that Israel now occupies more of Lebanon than Russia does of Ukraine ?
Media bias
An analysis by the Newscord media monitoring group last month confirmed earlier research: that the British media carefully avoid mentioning ethnic cleansing and genocide when it is Israel – rather than Russia – that is carrying them out.
By comparing the reporting of the most “serious” established British news media – the BBC, The Guardian, and Sky – with that of Al Jazeera, the research revealed that British media consistently choose to obscure Israel’s responsibility for its crimes.
In only about half of the British news reports was Israel named as the perpetrator of attacks in Gaza, compared to nearly 90 percent at Al Jazeera. As Newscord noted : “In half of the cases, BBC readers are not told who killed the person in the story.”
That was strikingly illustrated in a notorious BBC headline : “Hind Rajab, 6, found dead in Gaza a few days after calls for help”.
In reality, an Israeli tank had opened fire on a stationary car, even though the Israeli army had known for hours that a Palestinian girl was inside—the only survivor of an earlier attack—whom emergency services were desperately trying to reach. Israel also killed the rescue team.
In another revealing finding, Newscord notes that four out of five BBC reports on casualties resulting from Israeli attacks used the complex passive—rather than the active—form, clearly with the intention of downplaying Israel’s guilt and cruelty.
The British media have also actively undermined the enormous scale of the Palestinian death toll in Gaza by regularly attributing the figures to a “Hamas-affiliated” Ministry of Health – even though the figures, which currently stand well above 70,000 Palestinians, are almost certainly a massive underestimate, given Israel’s early destruction of the enclave’s government and its ability to count the dead.
The fact that the United Nations found the figures for Gaza credible was mentioned in only 0.6 percent of the reports.
Genocidal intent
Similarly, the BBC and The Guardian decided to humanize Israeli prisoners of Hamas twice as often as Palestinian prisoners of the Israeli state.
The inappropriateness of that double standard is underscored by continued insinuations from politicians and the media that Hamas “beheaded babies” and committed systematic rapes on October 7, 2023 – more than two years after those claims had been completely discredited .
Just compare that to the de facto concealment by the media of last month’s Euro Med Monitor report on the abhorrent practice of the Israeli army raping Palestinian prisoners with dogs specially trained for that purpose.
There has been a stream of stories from Palestinians held captive by Israel about their systematic rape and sexual abuse, corroborated by human rights organizations and by the testimonies of whistleblowing Israeli soldiersand medical personnel. Little of this is covered in the Western media.
Newscord points out another, hidden problem that distorts Western reporting: the omission of established but uncomfortable facts that would cast Israel in a corrupt – that is, a correct – light.
Newscord, for example, notes that the BBC has completely failed to report all but one of the hundreds of clearly genocidal statements by Israeli officials, from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to the lowest ranks.
It is easy to understand why. Legal authorities generally struggle to make a definitive determination of genocide because, crucially enough, this depends on fathoming the intent, which is usually kept hidden by those who commit the atrocities.
It is shocking that in the case of Israel, not only do the actions in Gaza resemble genocide, but the leaders have also made it crystal clear that those actions are intended as genocide. That is behavior displayed only by people intoxicated by a sense of their own impunity.
Once again, the British media have taken it upon themselves to protect Israel from any legal danger – all in the interest of objective reporting, you understand.
An old story
This is nothing new. It has been this way since before the violent establishment of Israel on the Palestinian homeland in 1948, when 80 percent of the indigenous population was ethnically cleansed by Israel from the new, self-proclaimed “Jewish” state. Or when, in the continuing deceptive language used by Western political, media, and academic elites, some 750,000 Palestinians “fled.”
The goal has always been to create and maintain an illusion for the Western public, a world in which our own crimes – and those of our allies – remain invisible to us.
Note in this connection the resolute exclusion by the British government of Israel from a recent “independent” inquiry , led by former Whitehall official Philip Rycroft, into malicious foreign financial influence on British politics. It was, of course, Russia that was primarily placed in the spotlight.
As was to be expected, the government of Keir Starmer rejected in April a petition signed by more than 114,000 people calling for a similar public inquiry into the influence of the powerful Israel lobby.
That was no surprise, since such an investigation would have entailed the risk that the many hundreds of thousands of pounds that Starmer and his ministers received from pro-Israel lobbyists would have come to the forefront.
The same British political and media elite that is so averse to investigating the malicious influence of the pro-Israel lobby also ignores the current, systematic destruction by Israel of villages and infrastructure throughout South Lebanon – in flagrant violation of a so-called ceasefire.
Israeli soldiers have told local media that it is their task to attack all buildings indiscriminately, whether civilian or “terrorist,” with the aim of preventing the Lebanese residents from returning to their villages.
This aligns with Israel’s announcement that it does not intend to withdraw after the fighting has ended, and with the widespread plans to colonize the occupied territories in Lebanon with Jewish settlers.
Had videos not penetrated social media – despite algorithmic suppression – showing Israel blowing up Lebanese communities , we might know nothing of Israel’s large-scale efforts to ethnically cleanse South Lebanon.
In response to these videos containing a rare ‘mainstream’ account of the destruction campaign, The Guardian glossed over the horror faced by Lebanese families when they discovered their homes had vanished, along with priceless memories and heirlooms. This experience was described by the newspaper—absurdly enough—as ‘ bittersweet ‘.
Critics point to a consistent pattern. Israel is not only leveling South Lebanon; in the past 30 months, it has also leveled almost every building in Gaza.
But the framework for both is of much earlier origin, as every Palestinian learns from a young age.
After Israel had expelled most Palestinians from their homes in 1948, it spent years successively blowing up some 500 villages – even while Israeli leaders publicly claimed to beg the refugees to return and Western leaders praised Israel as the “only democracy” in the Middle East .
Displacements that the West still pretends never took place eight decades ago are now being live-streamed. This time, they are impossible to deny, as is the colonial, supremacist agenda behind them.
To blacken the messenger
If the message contained in Israel’s atrocities can no longer be erased, whitewashed, or normalized—as was the case in an era before 24-hour news and social media—then a different strategy is needed: blackening the messenger.
This is the political task of our time.
The anti-racist movement is demonized as Jew-hating fanatics because it attempts to shatter the long-standing illusion of the West by loudly pointing out both the atrocities committed by Israel, supposedly in the name of the Jews, and the complicity of their own governments in those atrocities.
Last month, the Starmer government pushed through a bill in the House of Commons allowing the police to ban protests that cause “ cumulative disturbance ”—that is, repeated protests such as those against Israel’s genocide in Gaza. The media barely batted an eye.
This week’s attack on two Jewish men in Golders Green, reportedly by a mentally ill man with a long history of violence, is being quickly exploited by the major parties to prepare for even stricter restrictions on the right to protest.
Watch how Fiona Bruce from Question Time immediately silences the vice-chair of the Green Party as soon as she challenges the other panelists for linking the marches against the genocide in Gaza to antisemitic attacks.
Britons attempting to stop Israeli war crimes, whether by targeting Israeli death factories in the UK or demonstrating with banners in support of this type of direct action, are still treated as “terrorists” , even following a court ruling that the ban on Palestine Action is unlawful.
Because juries are often reluctant to convict, the British state has begun openly manipulating the trials. Juries are prevented from hearing the reasons why Israeli arms factories are targeted – the defendants’ main defense. Judges instruct juries to convict.
Members of the public holding signs in silence outside the courthouse are arrested because they remind juries of a long-standing legal right to disregard such instructions, follow their conscience, and acquit—a form of police violence that violates hundreds of years of legal precedents, and one that the courts seem increasingly willing to condone .
There are gag orders, dutifully observed by the media, regarding other secret abuses intended to help the British government obtain the verdicts it needs to stop activism against the genocide. We only know this because Zarah Sultana, a Member of Parliament for Your Party , used her parliamentary immunity to draw attention to this.
It was telling this week that, in the current retrial against six defendants from Palestine Action, five of them waived their lawyers for the closing arguments. They noted somberly that their legal representatives could not properly represent them due to “decisions by the court”.
Meanwhile, the Starmer government is pressing ahead with its plans to finally rid itself of troublesome juries and have these political show trials decided only by more reliable judges.
Welcome to the rapid unraveling of Britain’s most cherished constitutional rights – which are apparently needed primarily to protect a distant country that, according to the International Court of Justice , is guilty of apartheid against Palestinians and possibly committing genocide in Gaza.
Painful lesson
But of course, the British government – just like the American, German, and French governments – is not hollowing out its liberal democracy solely to protect Israel. It is forced to such extremes out of desperation.
The West can no longer maintain the illusion—of its moral or civilizational superiority—in a world of dwindling resources, a world in which Western elites are willing to sacrifice the planet to protect the profits from fossil fuels, from which they themselves have become so fat.
The agenda of the Epstein class is becoming increasingly transparent at home and increasingly contested abroad. The genocide in Gaza and the ethnic cleansing in Lebanon have exhausted the moral legitimacy of the West. Now Iran is slowly exhausting the military supremacy of the West.
It is no surprise that an American empire on its last legs—an empire built on control of fossil fuels—has chosen the Strait of Hormuz, the world’s largest oil tap, as the hill to die on.
Israel was indeed implanted in the region eight decades ago as a heavily militarized vassal state whose primary task was to project Western—that is, American—power in the oil-rich Middle East.
The US protected Israel against criticism of the oppression of the Palestinians and the theft of their homeland.
In return, “brave” Israel helped the US build a self-interested narrative that required the containment and overthrow of secular nationalist governments in the Middle East, while protecting outdated monarchies that pretended to be against Israel, while secretly colluding with the country.
The resulting states in the region, besieged and divided, were ripe for control. They lacked the kind of responsible governments that would respond to their populations and could unite to protect the region’s interests against Western colonial interference.
Now Iran is subjecting this decades-old system to a stress test that will lead to destruction. It forces the Gulf states to choose: do they continue to serve the US, even though it has shown that it cannot protect them, or do they form an alliance with Iran, which is emerging as a new superpower and levying a toll for passing through the strait?
The West is quickly learning that cheap drones can evade even the most advanced detection systems, and that a few mines and gunboats can cut off a large portion of the fuel on which the global economy depends.
The illusory bubble has finally burst. The West is facing a harsh and long-awaited disillusionment. The lesson will indeed be painful.