Rights are Born Out of Rebellion

One of the consequences of Israel’s genocidal war in the Gaza Strip has been the absolute collapse of any moral authority among the developed countries. Spencer Ackerman writes scathingly in his blog about Jared Kushner’s bizarre comment to the Israelis, “You chose to stand for the values that you stand for.” These “values” involved, “Forced starvation, forced expulsion, the firebombing of children in tents, the destruction of Gaza's health and education infrastructure, the babies dead in their incubators, the quadcopter drones now capable of stable gunfire, the artificial intelligence used to target people at scale, the soldiers gleefully looting the lingerie drawers of Palestinian women, the rape of Palestinian detainees, the endless justifications presented in Israeli media – this is a barbarism that will never be forgotten.”

This itself is only part of the larger horror that Israel has visited upon the Palestinians, assisted by the US, the UK, most of Europe, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Argentina, India, and other allies. If there is truly an ‘Axis of Evil,’ this is it.

We have been here before. At the end of World War II, the moral bankruptcy of the European powers was complete, its horrors on show at Auschwitz. The war not only destroyed the economic and infrastructure of Europe, but also any idea that the imperial and colonial states had any moral authority, certainly not the type that they claimed allowed them to rule over others.

Justice Radhabinod Pal’s famous dissent in the Japan war crimes tribunal pulled no punches when he argued that all the crimes that the Japanese were being accused of had already been pioneered by the colonial states. Even the victors were hugely flawed, exemplified in the person of Winston Churchill, a racist warmonger in love with imperialism.

A more sinister and longer lasting damage was done by the self-justifications of empire, which would be brought out by Edward Said in his classic book, Orientalism. To justify their moral right to rule, Europeans exemplified themselves as rational, mature, hard-working, and ‘manly’, while painting subject people as lazy, stupid, venal, and effeminate. This led to the globalisation of hideous misogyny and homophobia that was European – and particularly Victorian British – in origin that had no correspondence in colonised cultures, but which has now been so deeply baked in that most colonial countries continue to pursue it.

The United States, which had come to the war late, and would rise to become a superpower in its aftermath, was hardly better. It was, after all, American racist laws that the Nazi state had studied and built upon for its own race laws. The denial of equal rights to the descendant of enslaved people, and their segregation from wider society, was just another attempt to maintain the impacts of enslavement.

The two world wars revealed that the colonial powers were far from being a civilising influence, rather that they were its exact opposite: the root and cause of much of global suffering. The dominant picture that emerges from the late Tony Judt’s Postwar is that of Jewish survivors of the Holocaust returning to their homes only to find that their houses had been taken over, and that their neighbours were complicit, apathetic, or resentful of their return.

One aspect of the rejection of the horrible past was the creation of social welfare states, based on Keynesian economics leading to employment and a remarkable flourishing of postwar Europe, but it was not enough. As the postwar generation reckoned with the failures of its past, it rose up in a series of rebellions that were marked as the 1968 movement. These included feminism, anti-colonialism, and generally humanistic principles – a demand for democracy and accountability from a generation that had failed them.

While many drew from European Enlightenment principles, those principles had not restrained Europe and the industrialised countries from committing the grossest crimes in history. Neither the high culture or the dominance in science – much of the great community of modern physicists were German – proved any insulation from moral failure.

On the global stage these were accompanied by the UN Declaration of Human Rights as well as a remarkable effort to implement some of the great principles of international law. Much of it, though, was bogged down in the politics of the Cold War, where the US played a complex role. It had supported the independence of India against the wishes of people like Churchill, and in the 1956 Suez Crisis, came down heavily against British and Israeli warmongering.

At the same time, it instituted a coup in Iran and stepped in to help the French in Vietnam leading to its first great wartime defeat. At home, this failure as well as the deep problems of its racist past led to the rise of the civil rights movement and champions such as Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr.

The results of this churn, this accounting with their own horrid past (and much of their horrid present), pushed Europe, the US, and its allies to create some of the most open, prosperous, and welcoming societies in the world. As such, the same countries that had committed some of the grossest abuses around the world became, over time, champions of open societies, liberal thought, and democracy.

They did so under pressure from their own citizens and from a wider world – particularly the former colonised countries – that demanded that they be better. It was a remarkable and remarkably good transformation, even if it bred again the racist idea that European and European-led societies were somehow ‘superior.’

In the shadow of Gaza, we see once again that claims of superiority are so much nonsense. We are also witnessing a profound disenchantment with Israel within Europe, the US, and globally, as people are appalled by not just what the Israeli government has done and continues to do, but that their tax money has been used by morally bankrupt governments to facilitate these atrocities.

Given the reality of Israeli politics – as evidenced by the testimony of Greta Thunberg of her and a group of activists trying to deliver baby food and medicines to Gaza – it is extremely unlikely that the murders and atrocities will stop. Even if the very horrific reality of continuing high intensity operations recedes, the reality of apartheid, colonialism, and violence is likely to continue. Across the US, Europe, and much of the world this is leading to a rejection of the policies and politicians that facilitate the status quo.

It is hard, though, to tell how much difference this will make, or how long it will take. It is important, too, to note the differences. The devastation is Gaza (and Syria, Lebanon, Iran, Yemen) not in Europe, so the identification with the disaster is distant. Secondly, the other major driver of change was the rest of the world, and while South Africa has stated that its case of genocide will continue in the International Court of Justice, major ex-colonial countries such as Egypt and India no longer uphold moral positions.

The Indian invitation to the Taliban is in line with its invitation of the Israeli finance minister Bezalel Smotrich, morally abhorrent. Lastly, unlike the Cold War in which the US and USSR at least claimed to stand for better values when it came to each other, pushing the other and their allies to at least pretend to care about these things, no such international framework remains. The Chinese challenge is seen as a technological and economic challenge, not a moral one, as the Communist one was.

To sum up, though, there are things that history teaches: no country or people are inherently good or bad, and even those responsible for the worst atrocities can change. Positive changes are not because of a glorious past, but often a rejection of a horrific one.

Rights are born out of rebellion, not acquiescence.  Such changes take time, even a generation or two, and can easily be lost as societies become complacent, taking the good life they have for granted, something that they have inherited rather than earned. And lastly, most importantly, the story is nowhere near over yet.

Omair Ahmad is an author. His last novel, Jimmy the Terrorist, was shortlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize, and won the Crossword Award.

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