Since the war on Gaza started, the defining dynamic has been of unprecedented anger, panic and alarm from the public, swirling around an eerily placid political center. The feeble response from mainstream liberal parties is entirely dissonant with the gravity of the moment. As the US joins Israel in attacking Iran, and the Middle East heads toward a calamitous unraveling, their inertness is more disorienting than ever. They are passengers in Israel’s war, either resigned to the consequences or fundamentally unwilling to even question its wisdom. As reality screams at politicians across the West, they shuffle papers and reheat old rhetoric, all while deferring to an Israel and a White House that have long taken leave of their senses.
At a time of extreme geopolitical risk the center presents itself as the wise party in the fracas, making appeals for cool heads and diplomacy, but is entirely incapable of addressing or challenging the root cause. Some are afraid to even name it. Israel has disappeared from the account, leaving only a regrettable crisis and a menacing Iran.
British Prime Minister Keir Starmer called for de-escalation. However, he referred to the very escalation he wishes to avoid — the US’ involvement — as an alleviation of the “grave threat” posed by Iran, all the while building up UK forces in the Middle East. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, underlined the importance of diplomacy while making sure to assert that Iran is the “principal source” of instability in the region. French President Emmanuel Macron had seemed to be inhabiting the real world, warning against the inevitable chaos that would be triggered by regime change in Iran and in repeating the mistakes of the past. However, by Sunday France had fallen into line, joining the chorus calling for de-escalation and restraint in vague general terms, and reiterating “firm opposition” to Iran’s nuclear program.
If this seems maddeningly complacent to you, let me reassure you that you are not, in fact, missing something. The war with Iran is very bad news, and introduces a number of profoundly destabilizing scenarios: regime change with no day-after plan, leaving a large cadre of armed military and security forces in play; the amassing in the region of Western military forces that could become targets and flash points; or simply a prolonged war of attrition that would seize up the region and open a large festering wound of anger and militarization. It is also — and this is something Israel’s assaults have inured us to — killing hundreds of innocent people. To say nothing of the fact that it is, above all the extant risks, illegal.
However, most Western leaders continue to treat it as just another chapter of unfortunate, but ultimately fixed realities of the world to manage. And here is the sinkhole at the heart of the entire response to Israel over the past year and a half — a vacant center. US President Donald Trump is Trump. No one is expecting him to have a coherent, brave and stabilizing response to Israel. However, the problem predates him: a political establishment of ostensibly liberal, reliable custodians of stability that has no moral compass and no care for the norms it constantly claims to uphold. Under its watch, international and human rights law has been contravened again and again in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria and now Iran. Its answer has been to get out of Israel’s way at best, and arm it and provide it with diplomatic cover at worst. Former US president Joe Biden’s administration set the tone, and European governments followed. Collectively, they have clung on to a “status quo” of unconditional support for Israel and, in doing so, shattered the legal and moral conventions that imbued them with any measure of integrity or authority.
And yet they still carry on amid the wreckage. Their pronouncements about the importance of diplomacy sound like echoes from an era that has long passed — one before a livestreamed genocide demolished any semblance of a coherent system of international law. What the current moment has revealed is a cohort of regimes fundamentally unsuited to crisis, fit only for management; a crop of politicians whose very role is not to rethink or challenge the way things are, but simply to shepherd geopolitical traffic. Their mandate is indeed to stabilize, but only in the sense of locking in a world order of failing assumptions and hierarchies. It is not to make the world a better place, but to cast a veneer of credibility over why it is necessary that we live in this worse one.
This is not to be confused with “pragmatism.” Pragmatism implies a lack of position or vested interest. What is obscured by the language of reluctant engagement is that it is underpinned by beliefs that are defined not by values, but by tribal supremacy. Iran is a country which, in the eyes of a liberal establishment, is never fully sovereign, because it has diverged from Western interests. It has no right of response when attacked (and in fact, must show restraint when it is). Its people have no right to expect a careful consideration of their future, or indeed the entire region’s. Israel, on the other hand, is a super sovereign and never culpable.
This default position is so naked in its hypocrisy, so ignorant and parochial in its worldview, so clear in its disregard for human life, that it represents a colossal erosion of sophistication in political discourse, and a new low in contempt for the public. Support for Israel can only be defended by facile, logic-defying references to its right to defend itself even when it is the aggressor, and Iran’s threat to the free world. Forgive me, but is that the same free world that backed unilateral attacks on four Middle East territories by Israel, a country whose leader is wanted by the International Criminal Court? At this point, the biggest threat to the free world is itself, which would sacrifice everything to ensure that not a single challenge to its power is allowed to pass.
The end result is that such leaders are not only irresponsible, they are unrepresentative, unable and unwilling even to manufacture consent any more. An accelerating nihilism has taken hold. Mandates fray as centrist governments and political parties stray further and further from the public, which in Europe declares a historically low level of support for Israel. In the US (including Trump supporters), a majority opposes involvement in the war with Iran.
And so the gap between a detached politics and bloody reality widens even further. The managers of Western hegemony hurtle into the void, taking all of us with them.
Nesrine Malik is a Guardian columnist.
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