The Crocodile Tears of Liberalism in Its Death Throes

The Crocodile Tears of Liberalism in Its Death Throes

Gilbert Achcar

The leaders of Western liberal governments—Germany, Britain, France, and Canada—waited for a year and a half into the Zionist army’s genocidal war against the martyred people of Gaza before they began, with noticeable timorousness, to voice some protest against the State of Israel’s zeal in committing the heinous massacre. Yet, their behavior only served to highlight their previous silence, a silence of graveyards, and even their blatant complicity with the Zionist government. Indeed, they had all sided with the Biden administration, not only in justifying that government’s re-invasion of the Gaza Strip, but also in rejecting any call for a “ceasefire”—in this case, a cessation of the genocide.

This pattern continued for several months, until shame began to overtake them from this disgraceful stance in the face of popular outrage over the massacre, which continued to expand with the passage of time and the increasing number of victims of the Israeli killing machine. Even then, their position did not differ from that of the Biden administration in that they refrained from publicly criticizing Benjamin Netanyahu’s government or exerting any real pressure on it. Instead, they accepted the various arguments advanced by that government to justify its continued genocide, until they were forced to differentiate themselves from the new US administration, the Trump administration, when it became clear that it was even more complicit with Netanyahu than its predecessor.

This sickening scene is one of the most striking expressions, if not the most striking, of what I called ten months ago “the fall of Atlanticist liberalism” (see “Anti-Fascism and the Fall of Atlanticist Liberalism”, 13 August 2024). The fact is that the genocidal war waged by the Zionist state has surpassed in brutality and sadism anything we have known since the end of World War II. That is because brutality and sadism in the present case are not of the kind practiced by frenzied gangs in “backward” countries, such as the genocides witnessed in Rwanda and the Congo before the end of the last century, or that witnessed in Darfur at the beginning of the new, or that perpetrated by the “Islamic State” organization in Iraq about ten years ago. Nor are they of the kind practiced by governments classified as “barbaric”, such as the official armed forces in Bangladesh or the “Khmer Rouge” government in Cambodia in the 1970s. Rather, brutality and sadism are practiced in Gaza by the government of an industrially advanced country belonging to the global club of the rich that claims to represent “civilization” in the face of barbarism, as Netanyahu constantly emphasizes in the speeches he addresses to Western public opinion, when describing the war he is waging.

In other words, we are dealing with one of the many instances of genocide perpetrated in the name of “civilization”, of which history has known many, whether carried out in the name of civilization in general, or Western or “Aryan” civilization. Examples include the genocide perpetrated by Belgian colonialism in the Congo in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the genocide perpetrated by the German Empire in Namibia, that perpetrated by the Young Turks against the Armenians and other minorities during World War I, or the genocide perpetrated by Nazi Germany during World War II. There is, however, a significant difference between all the previously mentioned genocidal wars and that waged by the Zionist state in the Gaza Strip: the latter is being televised for the entire world to see. Whereas the Nazis concealed the genocide they were perpetrating against Jews and other minorities behind the fences of their extermination camps, due to its conflict with their civilizational claims (unlike the various genocides that accompanied their invasion of Poland and then Russia, which were shrouded and concealed by the fog of war), the Zionist government is today carrying on its genocide of Gazans, knowing that it is exposed to the eyes of the world.

It is true that the Zionist army has deliberately killed a record number of journalists inside the Gaza Strip, but it knows full well that nothing can conceal the brutality and sadism of its armed forces, evidenced in the disgusting daily shooting of dozens of distressed Gazans who are panting after the meager aid that the Netanyahu government and its US ally “generously” dispense to them. Indeed, we have seen Israeli soldiers themselves contribute to the promotion of images of the sadistic practices they commit, in most cases out of pride, rather than out of a desire to expose them for stigmatization.

The Zionist state’s genocidal war in Gaza and Western liberal governments’ complicity with it hugely contributed to stimulating the rise of neofascism on the global level, leading to its dominance at the head of the most powerful of global superpowers, the superpower that has always claimed to represent the civilizational legacy of Atlanticist liberalism as it resulted from the antifascist struggle in World War II. Before the triumph of neofascism, and on the way leading to it, those war and complicity had already brought to completion the disgrace of the (always hypocritical) Atlanticist liberal legacy, such that they stripped it of any credibility that had remained attached to it, thus stimulating the dominance of its neofascist opponent.

Translated from the Arabic original published in Al-Quds al-Arabi on 10 June 2025. Feel free to republish or publish in other languages, with mention of the source.