Glaring liberal double standards on Palestine and Ukraine

Europe in general, and Germany in particular, owes a huge debt to the Jewish people.

The mass murder of Jewish and Romani people in the Nazi extermination camps was a crime against humanity. But, as with the great crimes of African enslavement and the indigenous genocides in the Americas and Australia, Europe has never tried to pay its debt.

Instead of trying to make amends for its crimes, Europe and the wider West, led by Britain, forced the Palestinians to pay the price for a European crime. The Nakba in 1948 was a direct result of the crimes committed by the fascist forces, led by Germany, in Europe during World War II. 

The violence against Palestinians has never stopped, and has often included people in neighbouring countries, such as Lebanon. The violence that began in the second world war never stopped. It continues, today, in Palestine, Lebanon, Iran and Yemen.

We cannot forget the racism that led the British to force the Palestinians to pay the price for Europe’s crimes. We must remember that racism has always been at the heart of the West’s claims to moral, political and economic supremacy.

Winston Churchill made it plain for all to see when he said: “I do not admit that the dog in the manger has the final right to the manger, though he may have been there for a very long time. 

“I do not admit that right. I do not admit for instance that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to those people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race or at any rate a more worldly-wise race, to put it that way, has come in and taken their place.”

It’s true that people of colour can now be residents of the White House and 10 Downing Street. It is not impossible that, a year from now, the US could be ruled by Kamala Harris and the UK by Kemi Badenoch. The Western world has moved past Jim Crow but its cultural claim to superiority is as arrogant as ever. 

Anyone can be president or prime minister if they are loyal to Western supremacism, if they keep funding, arming and supporting Israel to commit genocide in Gaza and war crimes across the region.

Jeremy Corbyn was deemed to be unacceptable by the Western elites. The problem for them was that Corbyn’s anti-racism went well beyond letting people of colour into positions of power in the West. 

Corbyn opposed the idea that the West should rule the world. He was as committed to justice for the people of Palestine as he had been for the people of South Africa under apartheid. This meant that his reputation had to be destroyed, and it was destroyed, and viciously, in the liberal media as much as in the right-wing media.

The Western elites are as comfortable with liberals like Harris and Keir Starmer as they are with conservatives like Badenoch and Rishi Sunak because they know that they will all be loyal soldiers for the West, that they will all keep supporting the genocide in Gaza. 

The Western elites will not, however, stand for someone like Corbyn who, if he had been elected prime minister, would have withdrawn the support of the UK from Israel and opposed its mass killing of civilians. 

We have seen similar dynamics in our own public life. A sort of extreme pro-West intoxication took hold in English-speaking white liberal circles after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Conspiracy theories were touted as fact.

People who had been critical of the West were said to be patsies for Russia or China or dupes of Russian and Chinese propaganda. In some of the English-speaking white liberal media this intoxication became hysterical in tone.

It was unable to understand that one could, and in fact should, be critical of both the West and authoritarian non-Western regimes. The West was declared the home of freedom and justice, a moral beacon for the world, and its critics smeared as patsies for odious figures such as Vladimir Putin.

The fevered self-righteousness and assumption of moral superiority on the part of the West, and its English-speaking white liberal representatives here at home, was intense and relentless.

We would go to our phones to read the morning news and be bombarded with frenzied article after frenzied article declaring the invasion of Ukraine to be the great moral issue of our times and demanding that we all line up behind the West as it sought to isolate Russia. There was no space to be appalled at Putin and at his invasion and to be critical of the West at the same time.

Now, as Gaza continues to suffer genocide, and the killing moves into Lebanon, the same people, organisations and publications that drove the hysterical response to the invasion of Ukraine are silent. There is no moral fervour. If they do have to say anything, they say it quickly, make sure it’s qualified, and move on. 

We don’t find three or four articles thunderously condemning Benjamin Netanyahu when we read the news in the morning. We are not told that the mass killing of civilians in Gaza, and now Lebanon, is the great moral issue of our times. 

The double standard is sickening. The lives of white people in a country that is backed by the West, and under attack by an enemy of the West, are precious. The lives of brown people under attack by a state backed by the West mean nothing. In this double standard the racism at the heart of English-speaking white liberalism is laid bare. 

The same media organisations that won much of the country to their side when they exposed the corruption of Jacob Zuma and the Guptas suddenly lost credibility in the eyes of ordinary people. It could not be denied that some media projects had become little more than mouthpieces for the West.

The ANC, its reputation in tatters after years of corruption, took a stand against the West and for the people of Palestine and suddenly recovered some of its standing among the majority. It is no longer fashionable to simply reject the ANC, as a whole, with contempt. Now one must draw a distinction between the corrupt and incompetent and those who still carry the old anti-colonial vision. 

The tragedy of our political life is that we don’t have a figure like Corbyn in electoral politics, a figure who could stand for justice at home and abroad. The tragedy of civil society is that, during the worst time in the state capture period, it aligned itself too strongly with a white English-speaking liberal establishment that now stands exposed as racist to the core.

Will we ever have a politics committed to justice for our people and around the world? Will we ever have a media that is as concerned for the lives of brown people in Palestine and Lebanon as it is for the lives of white people in Ukraine? Will we ever have a civil society that can be simultaneously critical of the ANC and the racism of the English-speaking liberal establishment?

Right now, there are no easy answers to any of these questions. What we do know, though, is that, as I write this and as you read it, ordinary people, ordinary families, are being killed by Israel with the backing of the West while our compatriots at home who were driven into frenzied outrage by the invasion of Ukraine say nothing. It’s heartbreaking.

Dr Imraan Buccus is research fellow at ASRI and at Durban University of Technology.