Afrasianet - Ayad Abelal - There is no doubt that the luster of Western modernity blinds the eyes from the excessive preoccupation that happened to modern man with its shining "lights" in culture, politics and economy, and despite the horror of the fall that resulted from the separation of man from the values of goodness and beauty from the reality of contemporary life, because of the separation on which modernity in the West was founded between politics and religion, between body and soul, and between science and ethics, which was represented in the two world wars, colonialism and genocide of indigenous peoples in a number of countries. In the Americas, New Zealand, Australia... etc.
In the wars that came after the Cold War and are still in ruins, not to mention the exploitation of peoples and their capabilities for the benefit of the imperialist West, as required by monopoly capitalism, and despite all this, we have not been able to discern the decline of modernity and the fall of its illusions.
Despite the criticism of contemporary philosophy, which gave rise to postmodern currents in art, architecture, technology, science and ethics, we have not been able to discern the depth of the imbalance of postmodernism in its Western applications, and we know that it is a desperate attempt to breathe life into a dead body in the first place.
The spiral that we found ourselves victimized, especially in the Arab and Islamic world, as a result of cultural alienation that we have not yet gotten rid of, and which is one of the manifestations of cultural, intellectual and political dependence, before economic, was like an exion wheel, in which we rotated without hope of coming out alive, according to Greek myth.
However, the events of the Al-Aqsa flood on the seventh of October 2023 were the greatest shock, which dropped from our eyes the clouds of deceptive lights and modernity that, thanks to the media and globalization machine, was able to renew its masks, thanks to the orbits of fascination with the luster of consumption in which modern man fell by an active action, led by pleasure, pleasure and lusts, where there is no room for morals, values and ideals.
Man thus became a mere machine operated by monopoly capitalism with a remote control, by amplifying his instinct levels, including the instinct for violence and murder, and thus triumphed his inherent desire for dominance, possession and power.
The flood of Al-Aqsa was an emotional and spiritual reminder before it was cultural and political for the world community, which united in marches and demonstrations, and its voices rejecting injustice and evil in the Middle East were formed as a torrent that dropped the masks of falsehood and deception, and the world discovered that there is a people who are still suffering under the yoke of colonialism and replacement settlement, and live and die thousands of times a day, as a result of racial and ethnic genocide unparalleled in the history of mankind. After the West, through its media and globalization, was able to blind our sight, paralyze our vision and erase Palestine is part of our collective memory, just as it erased the history of its bloody colonialism and made the victim in us imprint with the executioner, and even adore him.
The world has discovered that the ugliness of the murder, displacement and extermination practiced by an expansionist and monopolistic imperialist entity called Israel is unparalleled compared to the totality of previous wars, starting with the First and Second World Wars, and before that the genocide practiced by the Western white race against Indians in the Americas, the Oberojeans in Australia, the Maori in New Zealand, and the sum of the medieval wars and religious wars in Europe.
While the Holocaust exceeded the ugliness of the above, it was not limited to the burning and killing of Jews, because it included Jews, Slavs, Roma, people with disabilities, mental illnesses and madmen, as required by the Aryan race, despite the fact that Zionism as a colonial tendency and an ideological vision used Judaism and anti-Semitism as a pretext to nationalize the Holocaust and make it a commercial asset for Jews and not other victims.
From this commercial origin, Israel has come to justify its false right to exist through the barbaric and systematic killing of an unarmed people in the name of modernity and lights, being the legitimate representative of modernity in the Middle East, including its claim to defend the lights and Western civilization on behalf of the West itself against the forces of evil, which are nothing but resistance in Palestine and the Middle East, since the axis of resistance has become in the American and European Zionist lexicon an objective equivalent of evil and terrorism.
Thus, the active forces became reactive, and the reactive forces became active if we may borrow the concepts of Friedrich Nietzsche, who proclaimed the death of God, triumphing over the superman, or the supreme man, who is none other than the most powerful man, and announcing the resumption of modernity in its postmodern Darwinian revival cycle, oblivious that the death of God heralded the death of man.
Postmodernism is nothing but a genuine return to absurdity and nihilism, a return paved by monopoly capitalism led by the United States of America in the world, and in the Middle East in particular, and the deal of the century in reformulating the map of the new Middle East is only an example of the renewal of the masks of modernity that negates truth, justice, reason and morals, after it triumphed over the rationality of murder and extermination, which is the rationality of separating essence and presentation, between cause and effect, between body and spirit, between God and man.
Thus, the modern state, which was founded politically in the tradition of modernity on human rights, equality and fraternity, as represented by the enlightened slogans of the French Revolution of 1789, became a state of racial discrimination and cultural-ethnic preference, and the West became the origin of progress, civilization and lights, and it has a lofty moral mission represented in transferring primitive peoples who are only the rest of the world to civilization and progress, which is what Zionism has been claiming since its first conference led by Herzl in 1897, and is still led by Netanyahu and the entire Israeli right until today.
Netanyahu's speech to members of the US Congress on July 25, 2024, and his speech to the United Nations General Assembly on September 27, 2024, are among many examples of the rhetoric of the ethnic and cultural superiority of Israel, representing the West in the Middle East.
The egalitarianism that formed the social and cultural core of the discourse of modernity was transformed into an ethnic centrality represented in Israel, God's chosen people, and secularism, which implies the separation of religion from politics, has turned into a religious centrality above religions, and above politics itself, and Israel was founded on an artificial religious identity.
If the modern state in the tradition of modernity and its lights is a neutral state that has no religion, then Israel has a Jewish religion and political essence with Western recognition and recognition, and on the other hand, the cultural identity of resistance has turned into a hateful religious identity, Islam has turned into terrorism, the owners of the land and its original and legitimate inhabitants have turned into terrorists and militias that threaten world peace and Western civilization, and brotherhood in humanity has turned into a biological scalpel according to which race has turned into a separation between brother and enemy, so that everyone who falls outside the white race has become an enemy and must be killed. And his displacement and the abuse of his land, his money, his honor and his family.
Like the world, we have discovered through the Al-Aqsa flood and the bloody events that followed, the latent and hidden worlds of the Israeli entity, which establishes the rationality described by modernity as the basis for the system of knowledge, science and civil life on a bureaucracy of racial discrimination between the Jewish ethnicities of Israel itself, between the Ashkenazi, the Jews of Western Europe, which is the high ethnicity that controls Israel's joints politically, economically and culturally, the Sephardim, the Jews of Eastern Europe, the Haredim, the Jews of Eastern Europe, the Mizrahis, the Jews of the Maghreb region in North Africa, and the Jews of The Falasha, the Jews of Ethiopia and neighboring countries. etc. of ethnic formations with which the Israeli bureaucracy has turned into racial discrimination among the Jews themselves, which is appallingly true of the Arabs of 1948, or the so-called Israeli Arabs, who at the political level are Israeli citizens.
Founded on abstraction and categorization, on report rather than interpretation, and on equality before the law, this bureaucracy has turned into authoritarian totalitarianism in an entity that claims to be the only democracy in the Middle East.
On the basis of the absence of a written constitution for this entity, the control of the religious and economic lobby over Israel's internal and external political system, not to mention the government's failure to comply with the decisions of the Constitutional Court inside Israel or its compliance with the resolutions of international legitimacy, this entity is far from the modern state, which, as modernity requires, is based on the separation of powers.
If rationality in the tradition of modernity triumphs for the truth, then rationality in its Western and Israeli manifestations has triumphed for power, peace is the peace of the powerful, as Benjamin Netanyahu said in his speech before the Israeli Knesset on October 30, 2024, and it is the same discourse of power that has been circulating in fact since 1948, the date of the birth of the Israeli entity by an unjust decision of the United Nations, which formed the essence of the speeches of David Ben-Gurion, Moshe Sharett, Golda Meir, Yitzhak Rabin, Mines Begin, Yitzhak Shamir, and Ehud Park. Ariel Sharon, Ehud Olmert... etc. of the prime ministers of Israel, where the Mapai Party, the Labor Party, the Kadima Party, the Likud Party... etc., where differences and differences do not hide the settler occupation, since Zionism is the basis of Israel.
Thus, peace became surrender, and resistance became terrorism, after Palestine became "a land without a people for a people without a land."
Rationality thus turned into a ceremonial glorification of power and might, which explains the falsification work on the Torah and its transformation from a literary-religious-moral text to a historical and ideological text that glorifies the power of God's "chosen" people and justifies the Zionist killing machine for the Promised Land.
The real concern behind the intellectual revolutions of modernity was to devote the lights and apply them in the daily lives of people as a victory for freedom, from which came the slogans of modernity with the right to self-determination, and civil, political and cultural freedoms, which in their coverage are branched off from freedom as a central value in modernity.
However, the Al-Aqsa flood and the oppression and deprivation it revealed have been experienced by the Palestinians and are still since 1948 until today according to the strategy of the geography of the catastrophe in the words of Abraham Melissar in his book "The Anti-Semitic Industry", where Israel turned the West Bank and Gaza after their separation into kibbutzim, settlements and cantons, through the apartheid wall near the Green Line, and turned Tel Aviv and other occupied cities into orbits of residential and spatial separation between the various ethnic Jewish formations on the one hand, and the Palestinian Arabs of Israel on the other. Freedom for Israelis is objectively equivalent to the imprisonment and enslavement of Palestinians, as the Israeli is free by birth, the Palestinian is imprisoned by birth, and every demand for freedom by the Palestinian is considered terrorism and a rejection of Western modernity that is Israeli in practice.
Modernity, founded on freedom in the West, has become the prescription written by the American and Western doctor for the rest of the world, as long as this remnant is sick in the eyes of Western civilization, and if freedom is the essence of man at all times and places, freedom as required by the Western doctor is only possible by accepting his prescription for life, and thus freedom of expression, freedom of belief, freedom of thought, freedom of travel and movement, and other liquid freedoms in the time of liquid modernity, in the words of Sichmund Baumann, are determined by During the lexicon of the Western doctor.
Therefore, every match is required in itself, and every difference is rejected in itself. Therefore, when the peoples of the world, including the West itself, united in shocking with one voice, no to Israeli evil and genocide against the Palestinians, the machine of oppression moved in America, France, Germany, Britain and other countries, which now sees in the victory of the right not of force, and of the oppressed not of the oppressor an attack on the concept of freedom and civilization, as long as Western modernity describes those who have the right to terrorists in resisting them and demanding their right to freedom.
Just as justice and the judiciary were bureaucratic institutions that triumph for equality before the law regardless of gender, religion and race, after the Al-Aqsa flood, they became institutions for harassment and judicial and criminal prosecutions of civil activists, intellectuals and students on charges of anti-Semitism and praising terrorism, and in that intellectuals in France, Britain and America were not excluded, and criticism of Christian Zionism, Judaism and Israel became anti-Semitic, and Semitism was reduced only to Judaism, but even within Israel, the criticism of pacifists and a large number of the world's Jews turned into hostility. For Semitism, and even self-contempt, as the Israeli right likes to characterize, a number of intellectuals who are on the rise are critics of Israel's Zionist settler-substitution policy, from Noam Chomsky to Hanna Arendt, Abraham Melliser, Sikhmund Baumann, Pape Ilan and many others who continue to live in harassment even in America, Germany, Britain and France... etc.
Western regimes have not only done that, but have also harassed international judicial institutions whose tasks include putting an end to war crimes and genocide, as is the case with the International Criminal Court, as is the case with the United States, through a law enacted by the House of Representatives, on the International Criminal Court in response to its issuance of an arrest warrant against Netanyahu and Yoav Galant on charges of war crimes and genocide practiced by Israel against Palestinian residents of Gaza.
Of course, this was not limited to Western regimes, but included intellectuals and intellectuals in parentheses, and just as Hegel triumphed for colonialism at the end of the nineteenth century after the French occupation of Algeria, heralding the victory of the European Enlightenment, driven by the desire to spread Western civilization at the expense of vulnerable peoples, Habermas, Klaus Günther, Nicolas Dittlhof and Rainer Forrest applauded Israel as it destroyed Gaza and annihilated it, passing through a large number of media professionals, journalists and writers engaged in propaganda for the extreme right, and theorists of monopoly capitalism and imperialism in its form. Democracy, where democracy is transported on the back of tanks, as has happened bitterly in the Middle East.
The liberation of the world from imperialism and monopoly capitalism inevitably passes through the liberation of Palestine, and the liberation of Palestine inevitably passes through liberation from the illusions of modernity and the false lights of the West.