My interlocutor said, “I have withdrawn from reading and writing after all the studies, degrees, research, and after all the years I spent in the halls of universities studying, teaching, dissecting concepts and ideas, and evaluating different narratives. I thought I was making significant accomplishments in shaping the minds of the students, believing that in time, they would carry the message and make a significant difference in the world we live in.
However, today, after more than a year of living through reality from different perspectives and witnessing a brutal, multifaceted, racist war of extermination, and after the disappointing intellectual narratives that once championed human, children, and women’s rights, and after making thorough comparisons to sift through the noise and grasp the essence of what is truly happening, I have come to the conclusion that everything we sought to achieve in various languages was nothing but a mirage in comparison with the savage, ferocious colonial reality, whose calculations and considerations completely contradict the principles of civilization and humanity and are fundamentally at variance what we have learned and taught.”
I tried to dissuade my interlocutor from her decision, recalling the importance of words, texts, narratives, beliefs, and actions, transcending the darkness of today’s brutal events, and aspiring to outcomes that honor good intentions and noble efforts. I thought I had done well until I read an article in The National Interest on October 15, 2024, titled “Just and Unjust Wars in Palestine,” by Professor Jeremy Slater, author of “Mythologies Without End: The US, Israel, and the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1917-2020”. As soon as I finished reading this engaging article, I was reminded of what my interlocutor said thinking that perhaps she was right, perhaps I needed to reconsider what I had said and convinced her of.
Professor Slater begins his article by emphasizing that “Michael Walzer is the preeminent explicator of just war moral philosophy”, and that “no serious analysis of this topic can fail to acknowledge Walzer’s classic 1977 book, Just and Unjust Wars.” Slater says, “However, unfortunately as many serious philosophers have noted, Walzer is also unwilling to fully apply his own analysis to Israeli behavior, especially towards the Palestinians.”
Prof. Slater discusses Walzer’s column in The New York Times, titled, “Israel’s Pager Bombs Have No Place in a Just War” and categorizes Walzer’s statements on “Israel’s” war on Hamas in Gaza, and the place of civilians in this war, to reach Walzer’s key statement, “alleged war crimes”. There is no shadow of a doubt that “Israel” has been perpetrating massive genocide in Gaza, killing, displacing, and deliberately starving innocent civilians, and yet Walzer describes all these brutal Israeli crimes as “alleged”!
After a detailed, serious, and thorough discussion, Prof. Slater reaches the following conclusion, “In short, Walzer’s excessively mild criticism of the Israeli attack on Gaza effectively amounts to, at a minimum, obscurantism about the massive Israeli criminality. Those of us who admire Walzer’s moral philosophy are aghast at his long and repeated refusal to judge Israeli behavior in terms of that philosophy.”
“This was precisely the subject of the collective book in which a select group of Arab intellectuals participated, titled: ‘Western Intellectuals and Gaza Events: Readings into the Western Intelligentsia’s Position on the Palestinian Cause,’ published by Dar Al-Kutub Al-Ilmiyyah in 2024.” These writers, most of whom are Western-educated and who have deeply engaged in the study of Western philosophers and thinkers, expressed their disappointment at the stark contrast between what is stated in the books and publications of their professors and peers and their positions regarding the absolute crimes and acts of genocide perpetrated by “Israel” against the Palestinian people. The positions of Western writers, philosophers, and thinkers aligned with the pro-Zionist stances of their governments, completely failed to reflect the theoretical frameworks and narratives they have worked to disseminate and establish in the minds of Arab and other scholars over decades.
I pause to reflect on the views expressed by Western intellectuals, thinkers, and philosophers regarding the worst genocide witnessed in the 21st century, as their opinions are crucial in a multifaceted war where media, ideology, narratives, and concepts play a significant role in shaping public opinion and even influencing the positions of nations and Western organizations towards this war.
The Israeli propaganda on the idea of eliminating Hamas and Hezbollah, along with the present attempt to take October 7th events out of their historical context is part of the psychological, intellectual, and conceptual warfare, not only against Palestine but against the entire Arab nation, its history, civilization and future. For example, I have never once read that those being targeted by Israeli-American-made bombs and aircraft in Gaza and the Strip are the 1948 refugees, displaced by Zionist terrorist gangs from Akka, Haifa, Yaffa, Areeha, and all other Palestinian cities and towns. These refugees established camps in Gaza, where they have lived for 75 years, besieged by land, sea, and air, under the oppressive yoke of a humiliating, unjust Western-backed occupation.
The camps of Jenin, Jabalia, Tulkarm, Rafah, and all other camps that the Israelis have been bombing daily for over a year are inhabited by people who were forcibly displaced from other parts of Palestine in 1948 and made to take refuge in these camps. And now, after being pursued, killed, and starved, there is no place left for them to flee to again. This is why they are bombed daily, in an attempt to exterminate them in the same way the white man did to the indigenous peoples of the United States, Australia, and Canada.
In the entire history of occupied nations, one cannot focus on extinguishing the idea of resistance before ending the occupation that weighs heavily on people’s lives, making death seem easier than displacement, forced migration, and the destruction of homes over the heads of children and women. When “Israel” occupied Beirut and part of southern Lebanon in 1982, Hezbollah did not yet exist; however, it was formed afterward to defend Lebanon’s freedom and dignity and to confront the humiliating Israeli occupation. Indeed, the Resistance succeeded in ending the occupation of southern Lebanon and liberating Lebanese land in 2000.
The conflation of Resistance with terrorism by the Zionists is deliberate, aiming at stripping Resistance movements of their legitimacy. Terrorism is what Western intelligence agencies exported to both Syria and Iraq, for which Islamist terrorists issued justifications through fatwas in order to distort the image of Islam and the image of resistance, while resistance has historically and geographically been a legitimate right for any people suffering under occupation to reclaim their sovereignty over their land and live free and dignified.
The positions of the Western elite, who refrain from applying their own theories to what is happening in Palestine, are a byproduct of Zionist intimidation directed at anyone who dares speak the truth. However, history records, without any doubt, that the responsibility for the genocide endured by the Palestinian people over the past year, which today also extends to the Lebanese people, falls on all the thinkers, philosophers, and leaders of the world, and it is a collective and humanitarian responsibility.
Every child killed in Palestine represents the loss of a future world leader, thinker, or philosopher. How can the West as a whole accept silence in the face of daily massacres that constitute a blatant assault on the purest and most sacred of God’s creations? It is a true test of Western culture and the so-called “civilization” as well as of Western positions. Every life and soul lost is the responsibility of the criminals, their supporters, and those who remain silent about these atrocities.
Once again, the West is robbing humanity of invaluable human, cultural, and civilizational treasures that cannot be compensated in order to maintain its dominance and tighten its grip on the fortunes of nations and peoples. However, it will not succeed this time, as the people have decided to regain their freedom and integrity regardless of the immense price they have to pay.
