It would be funny if it weren’t so deadly serious. The same liberal politicians in the US and Europe who focus exclusively on the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack when anyone speaks of justice in Gaza are now chorusing “but Russia started it” when there is talk of a ceasefire in the Ukraine war. In both instances, there is a wilful shunning of historical facts and how, in each instance, a series of wrongs led to one overwhelming event. But for a West that has long thrived on imperialism, old and neo, and has long taken for granted that it can carve up the globe to feed its bottomless greed, any action outside its sanctioned playbook is only seen as astonishing impertinence.
The West does not probe the root causes because in both conflicts it is itself the primary agent provocateur. In an act of colossal racist arrogance, it gave away land it did not own to the Zionists for the creation of Israel. Likewise, in gross violation of the assurance given by Western leaders to Russia after the reunification of Germany—that NATO would not expand eastwards—it continued to blatantly inch east until, by 2004, NATO was on Russia’s border.
It pursued Ukraine next, first by including it in the EU’s Free Trade and Association Agreements, then by offering to make it part of the EU’s Common Security and Defence Policy. These agreements were not innocent—their clauses severely curtailed Ukraine’s contracts with Russia. When the latter extended a large loan to Ukraine to resume relations, a series of riots (no prizes for guessing who engineered them) forced the Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych out of office. Under his successors Petro Poroshenko and Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Ukraine’s NATO membership was made to look imminent. To expect that Russia would not react to this provocation was unreal at best and adventurism at worst.
A little scrutiny would reveal that US President Donald Trump’s vulgar transactionalism is a logical progression in the long history of Western irresponsibility and expediency that preceded Trump and, indeed, continues to animate its policies. In 2018, the Israeli journalist Ronen Bergman wrote: “Since World War II, Israel has assassinated more people than any other country in the Western world.” Take a moment to absorb that. Ask who made it possible.
Europe and America have over decades refused to hold Israel accountable for its worst excesses, willingly nurturing the monster that it is today. Knowing this makes Trump’s Riviera-in-Gaza proposal only another, if cruder, detail in an overall blueprint of extraordinary duplicity.
The conflicts in Gaza and Ukraine have, in many ways, brought some unpleasant truths to the fore. Recall how Europe’s “democratic” leaders, who decry the dictatorship in Russia, ruthlessly shut down demonstrations, editorials, even university lectures that called for an end to the genocide in Gaza. It was not an edifying moment.
Francis Fukuyama famously saw the 21st century as “the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution” and called Western liberal democracy “the final form of human government”. He has been proven very wrong. We seem to be in a liminal space today: where the post–Cold War dream of liberal democracy, with capitalism as its enabling force, has been exposed as a sad, ramshackle thing. It is into this vacuum that the opportunists, punters, and swashbucklers are rushing in.
If the uneasy ceasefire in Gaza today was brokered by a businessman with realty dreams, it is because the politicians who preceded him failed to do so. Without processing that political failure, we cannot hope to create a more just, more accountable model of global governance. Nor ensure that the Palestinians get the homeland that is theirs by right.
Vaishna Roy is Editor, Frontline. The article was first published in the Frontline
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