This weekend there’s another protest at the defence firm with an office in my town, as Israel is one of their clients. There have been multiple protests there since 7 October, and yet nothing prior when UK defence firms sold arms to the Saudis to murder civilians in Yemen. Wonder why.
This past week it was revealed in +972 Magazine that the IDF employs AI in its target selection process, in a programme codenamed Lavender. A horrible development – but hardly new. BAE Systems first began developing its Taranis drone in 2007, and it’s designed to be ‘fully autonomous’ for most of its mission. I remember reading about it in 2013, around the time of the Snowden revelations. Nobody’s mentioned Taranis this past week (or Snowden for some time before that). Wonder why.
Israel mistakenly targeted and killed 7 aid workers a couple weeks ago. Amid international outrage, the IDF quickly conducted an initial investigation and fired or disciplined all officers involved. Could it have opened to an external investigation? Perhaps, but what would the external investigation achieve that hasn’t already been achieved by the internal one?
Meanwhile criticism included the claim that this was the worst targeted killing of aid workers ever. I seem to recall that nearly ten years ago, in October 2015, the United States called in an airstrike on a field hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan, killing dozens of doctors working for Médecins Sans Frontières. The Department of Defense took 6 months to release its findings, and there’s never been an external investigation. People seem to have conveniently forgotten about this.
Wonder why.
I can only conclude that much of what is being protested about Israel and its conduct is simply stuff that other Western powers, who have more successfully exported their violence to Elsewhere, have been doing for the past decade or more. It is indeed a feature of Western policy to export violence, usually in service to the key trade routes which bolster Pax Americana, and which buttressed Pax Britannica previously, possibly even back to the time of Pax Romana, the West’s original sin. If the violence is Elsewhere, reasons the West, then it isn’t Here.
Like so many other things, this falls apart in the case of Israel, which since 1967 has been obliged to ally itself with the West. Violence has come to Israel since its inception as a modern state, setting it apart from countries such as the United States or the UK – but it is only in its ability to fight back that Israel is scrutinised as a Western power. Israel therefore represents the vulnerable frontier of the West, its killing knife edge far more visible than the invisible violence that is the West’s trademark.
This makes Israel a lightning rod for anti-Western sentiment, from protesters within the West who can’t see the violence Elsewhere which directly affects them.
Last month I saw a poem circulated that completely exemplified this – ‘There’s laundry to do and a genocide to stop’. In this poem, the author makes clear that Israel stands in as a metaphor for everything the author cannot control in his own life – from rent rises, to Covid, to climate change. As though any and all of these things aren’t inextricably linked, in little and large ways, to the Western exportation of violence in service of securing resources.
Rent rises? Inflation – I mean ‘cost of living’ – has skyrocketed since Ukraine.
Covid? We still don’t know whether the gain-of-function research in Wuhan was bioweapons research, and likely won’t know for at least 50 years.
Climate change? Petrol exchange has been dominated by dollars for the past 50 years, and threats to that status quo are met with – yes – more violence.
But sure, fixate on Israel whilst you do your laundry.
Perhaps this focus on Israel is by design. It’s not especially hard to envisage that the former strongholds of Christendom would be more than happy to let the sole Jewish state take the fall for their violence. Israel thus becomes the hypervisible scapegoat for all Western violence, despite being no more or less violent than any other Western state – albeit about 10 years behind in its implementation.
We can only hope that, as begun by the Abraham Accords, Israel is fully folded into the Near East’s Sunni faction as a result of this war. This would have the effect of elevating other Middle Eastern countries – notably Saudi Arabia – to Western status, thus increasing scrutiny of the violence they inflict within the region and potentially decreasing the false regard of Israel as a novel outlier. But I won’t hold my breath.
Sonya Blanck writings 