Tag: BRITISH MANDATE

Genocide Syndrome by Proxy?

~ The Koboi Project

Many critics and commentators have characterized Ukraine as a proxy for the collective West in a geopolitical strategy against Russia. As Ramesh Thakur puts it, “Ukraine’s territory is the battleground for a proxy war between Russia and the West … that reflects the unsettled questions since the end of the Cold War.” Perhaps Israel’s position vis-a-vis Palestine and the wider Middle East belies an analogous imperative of great power politics. Israel was created under the auspices of a declining British empire, whose mantle was assumed by the United States which remains the greatest power in the world today. While Israel appears to have co-opted the United States polity in its Genocide of Palestinians and must, of course, be held responsible for its actions, it is the Americans who are ultimately answerable, as Israel is wholly dependent on their enablement.

In fact, Alexander Haig, a four-star general in the US Army who served as its vice chief of staff, as Supreme Allied Commander Europe, as United States Secretary of State, and as White House Chief of Staff under two presidents is reported to have said that Israel is “America’s largest aircraft carrier which never could be sunk.” Indeed, the United States is a great power and, as such, must be held responsible for its actions within its expansive sphere of influence on the world stage. In this light, the idea that the Israeli lobby determines US policy towards Palestine is, regardless of this lobby’s enormous influence, a profound misconception. At best it is a misunderstanding of the machinations of the United States military-industrial complex; at worst, it is yet another expression, albeit a subliminal one, of an underlying anti-semitism! 

To restate this argument as a counter-idiomatic interrogative – can the tail really wag its dog?

The image above is adapted from the perspicacious and prescient 2014 cartoon by Rob Rogers pictured below.


Note: There is a mental health disorder, that involves a behavioral pattern between a caregiver (perpetrator) and a person cared for (victim), called ‘Munchausen syndrome by proxy,’ in which a caregiver makes up fake symptoms or causes real symptoms in a victim to make it appear that the victim has a true physical or mental health issue.

https://www.dailycartoonist.com/index.php/2014/08/11/rob-rogers-makes-the-mistake-of-expressing-an-opinion-on-israel-and-gaza/

https://www.jpost.com/International/Haig-had-a-special-feeling-for-Israel

https://brownstone.org/articles/ukraine-as-a-proxy-war-conflicts-issues-parties-and-outcomes/

https://www.verywellmind.com/munchausen-by-proxy-5071840

After Gaza?

~ The Koboi Project

Historian Rashid Khalidi explains how early Zionism was a self-identified Colonial project, a European colonial project backed by British imperialism (see Democracy Now interview below). He points out that up until 1958, an official Jewish Colonization Agency was tasked with the settler colonial transformation of the British Mandate by a systematic dispossession of the Palestinian population. Khalidi claims that the formation of Israel is a unique phenomenon in the annals of Colonialism in that is paradoxically a Nationalist project and a settler Colonial project at the same time. Europeans forcibly settled Arab lands while Jews established an indigenous nation-state, the Europeanness of the settlers being subsumed in their Jewish nationalism.

Today, while Gaza is being decimated and depopulated in what Khalidi has called the ‘last colonial war of the modern age’, the settlement of the West Bank continues at an accelerated pace. While I agree with Khalidi that Israel is a settler-colonial nation and that the assault on Gaza is a colonial war, I wonder if he is right about it being the last such war in the modern age – remember Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, Libya, etc. There is nothing to suggest that more colonial incursions are not forthcoming. Perhaps Khalidi meant to say ‘the last settler-colonial war of the Modern Age’, which I think is a more apt characterization, on the basis of his own premises. Given the extent of Israel’s ongoing aggression in Palestine, and given the history of colonial and neo-colonial incursions in the Middle East, I am surprised at the lack of meaningful opposition and intervention by the other Arab nations.


https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2023-12-02/israel-gaza-palestinian-american-history

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/feb/27/israeli-settler-violence-in-west-bank-escalates-huwara

https://historyguy.com/list_of_wars_middle_east.html

From the River to the Sea

~ The Koboi Project

The national motto of Canada, “A Mari Usque Ad Mare,” which translates to “From sea to sea,” marks the occupation of a land which the prior occupants still call Turtle Island. While this proprietary geographical imagery derives from the Biblical Psalm 72:8, “He shall have dominion from sea to sea and from the river unto the ends of the earth,” its eschatological sense of “dominion” has been repeatedly transposed into an imperial one throughout the Common Era. The territorial imagery of “A mari Usque Ad Mare,” is evoked again in ‘America the Beautiful’, a popular patriotic song often confused with the American National anthem,

America! America!
God shed his grace on thee
And crown thy good with brotherhood
From sea to shining sea!

This proprietary boundary symbolism seems to be an identifiable feature of European settler colonial imagery and lore. Indeed, European settler colonialism can be said to have been inaugurated in 1452, when Roman Catholic Pope Nicholas V issued the bull Dum Diversas, authorizing King Afonso V of Portugal to subjugate the lands and the lives of non-Christians. While Zionism does not derive from this Christian ‘doctrine of discovery’, the founding of Israel in the violent displacement of native Palestinians by non-native European Jews, can be seen as the last significant instantiation of such an ethnopolitical ‘dominion’.

Given both the history of settlement and erasure of Palestinians from their lands and the fact that in the past month, 10,733 Palestinians have been killed (10,569 in Gaza and 164 in the West Bank, November 8, 10:50 GMT Update) with the complicity of the collective West, I wonder if it is a guilty self-projection that underpins the interpretation that the freedom slogan, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” as a call for genocide (mass killing or other form of eradication with intent)? In fact, as Israeli historian Avi Shlaim has recently explained, this is not a call for the destruction of the state of Israel, but “a call for freedom ‘from the river to the sea’ for everybody.

Image: https://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/from-sea-to-shining-sea.html

https://doctrineofdiscovery.org/dum-diversas/

https://jewishstudies.washington.edu/israel-hebrew/why-israel-isnt-a-settler-colonial-state/

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/longform/2023/10/9/israel-hamas-war-in-maps-and-charts-live-tracker

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/11/2/from-the-river-to-the-sea-what-does-the-palestinian-slogan-really-mean

The Shame of the Sunaks

~ The Koboi Project

European settler colonialism was initiated in the 15th century, on the premise of a divinely ordained white supremacy1, and the founding of Israel in the land of the Palestinians during the British Mandate in the 20th Century was the last significant instantiation of this mode of ethnopolitical domination, albeit it might be seen as a species of settler colonialism all of its own.2 The current British Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, removed Parliamentary Private Secretary at the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, Paul Bristow from his post for rebelling against the government’s position on the ongoing war in Gaza. Bristow had expressed his support for a ceasefire and called on the PM to push for an end to fighting between Israel and Hamas. That Sunak, who rose to his high station in the British polity from Indian origins, and who should, therefore, be alert to the inhumanity of subjugation, would be complicit in Israel’s genocidal colonial expansion in the 21st century, is a shame unto him, his family, and their origins.

  1. This theocratic doctrine was initiated 1452, when Pope Nicholas V issued a bull Dum Diversas which authorized King Afonso V of Portugal, to subjugate the lands of non-Christians. 
  2. While, it can be argued that Zionism does not derive directly from the Christian ‘doctrine of discovery’, the ethos of populating lands of non-Jews with European Jewish settlers under the auspices and geo-political designs of the British Empire, in my opinion, within the bounds of a broad notion of settler colonialism.

Image: https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/world/rishi-sunak-piles-pressure-on-spineless-keir-starmer-as-he-sacks-parliamentary-aide-paul-bristow-for-defying-him-with-demand-for-a-permanent-ceasefire-in-gaza/ar-AA1j6jnu

https://jewishstudies.washington.edu/israel-hebrew/why-israel-isnt-a-settler-colonial-state/

https://doctrineofdiscovery.org/dum-diversas/