The devastation wrought by the Palestine/Israel conflict over the decades, and particularly since 7 October, has elicited two core responses from most Western policymakers and media. First, Western governments have little leverage over Israel. This makes it supposedly difficult to address the conflict’s root causes any other way than through the pursuit of peace processes which, however, systematically fail. Second, whether morally palatable or not, Israel, the US and European governments’ policies merely pursue their respective national interests.
Yet, Western governments have considerable leverage to pursue a ‘positive peace’ . If so, why do Western governments pursue negative peace alone? Moreover, even a basic reflection on whether Western states have a ‘national interest’ in aligning with increasingly supremacist and maximalist right-wing Israeli governments shows such arguments are simply indefensible.
Analyses of the alignment of Western governments along positions that avoid addressing the conflict’s root causes are plentiful and well-known. They include the perseverance of (neo)colonial material relations between US-led Western states and their Middle Eastern regional ‘subaltern’ counterparts; the resilience of imperialist and orientalist mindsets in Western elites and populations; and the complicity of and convergence of interests in core elites in so-called ‘semi-peripheral’ regional contexts.
Less frequently considered is the question of the effects of Western governments failing to oppose Israel’s massive use of violence. The manner and implications of how this alignment between Israel, the US and other Western governments is maintained in the wake of 7 October not only undermines the possibility of achieving a just, lasting resolution of the Palestine/Israel question, it also erodes the foundations of the modern state itself and thus the international institutional and political order which rests upon it.
What could be done?
Western policymakers and media commentators usually claim impotence when asked about leveraging Israeli governments towards peace negotiations. Yet there evidently are tools that can be used to pursue positive peace.
Above all, pressure could be placed on successive Israeli governments since they have appeared unwilling to consider substantive negotiations addressing the conflict’s root causes. The US could do this leveraging several billion dollars a year in aid, trade, and supplies of weapons and licenses to produce them. The EU is Israel’s largest trading partner, and the EU-Israel Association Agreement contains human rights conditionality clauses that, despite never having been implemented, do afford the EU leverage to reduce trade and cooperation.
The EU is one of the largest donors to the Palestinian National Authority. Arms exporters could freeze contracts and governments suspend arms export licenses, which like EU-Israel trade agreements are subject to human rights conditions. There are also a range of tools of ‘low politics’ which the US, the EU and its member states could use to signal their purpose to their Israeli counterparts – e.g. suspension from sporting competitions, exclusion from European cultural events, or suspension from EU-funded research programmes. These tools have recently been used in the Russian-Ukrainian case.
Moreover, together, the US, the UK and France could simply not exercise their veto power in the UN Security Council, insist on respect for international humanitarian law, push for the prosecution of war crimes and crimes against humanity at the International Criminal Court, support the investigation of violations of the Genocide Convention by the International Court of Justice (ICJ), place sanctions upon the Israeli state itself or target so-called ‘Magnitsky sanctions’ at specific leaders.
The ICJ’s recent provisional order accepting that reasonable grounds exist that Israel may be violating the Genocide Convention in its war on Gaza could have occasioned a review of Western stances towards the Israeli government. Yet, with the partial exception of Ireland, Belgium and Spain, Western governments have done none of the above. Indeed, in the wake of the ICJ’s order these governments are increasing economic and military aid to Israel, have suspended aid to UNRWA, and continue to repress internal dissent. Western governments may claim they have no leverage over Israel, yet they are patently not using the influence they have.
An objection: is alignment in the ‘national interest’?
Some object that Israel simply pursues its raison d’état, its own national interest, as do other Middle Eastern and Western states. International relations are a matter of Machtpolitik (power politics) and Realpolitik, pursuing one’s interests based on reality, not wishful thinking.
Scholarship helps us understand why such objections are wrong, starting with the definition of these terms. ‘Reason of state’ means doing whatever is necessary for a state to survive. The national interest is pursued by making choices which increase a state’s power in the interest of the community. Realpolitik is a policy or strategy based on reality such as it is and not as we would like it to be – in short, without wishful thinking.
From these definitions, it is clear that pursuing negative peace and suggesting it presents a solution to the conflict while knowing very well it will likely fail and worsen that conflict, is wishful thinking at best. It certainly cannot be Realpolitik. Indeed, both the pursuit of negative peace and alignment with the current Israeli government are choices which avoid facing the reality of the conflict’s roots and the obstacles to its resolution. Secondly, alignment with Israel’s use of violence cannot be dictated by ‘reason of state’ since Western states do not face an existential danger.
Nor can Western governments’ choices be explained by invoking ‘national interest’ since the power of Western states is not augmented by this alignment – rather, it is eroded. Pursuing negative peace alone and/or supporting Israel’s use of devastating violence aggravates the roots of the conflict and damages Western countries’ national interests, including costs to their reputation, ‘normative power’ and ‘soft power’. This alignment makes conflict ‘spillover’ more likely, not less, it destabilizes the Middle East and the Mediterranean, but it also destabilizes the internal politics of Western states themselves by playing into already significant political cleavages like immigration, discrimination against minorities, or the return of the far right.
By contrast, if Western governments effectively pursued the resolution of the conflict’s root causes – i.e. if they sought a ‘positive peace’ – they could expect Palestine/Israel, the Middle East and the Mediterranean to become proportionally more stable, secure, and prosperous. This would be in their national interests and would be based on a realistic assessment of the costs and benefits of available policy options.
In short, alignment with the current Israeli government is at best a form of bandwagoning after the ‘politics of the strongest’ (the US) which has chosen this position, however far from its national interest this choice might be.
The price of alignment
Last but not least, Western governments’ choice to align with the current Israeli government’s use of violence, their reiterated choice to not use leverage for positive peace, and the specific ways those governments justify these choices erodes several important principles and cornerstones of the modern state and of the international order it rests upon, including the universality of human rights, equality before the law, and the rule of law itself.
If human rights are universal, then anyone who violates them must be condemned and anyone who has had their rights violated must be defended. The rights, for example, to demonstrate and protest peacefully, or to organize, cannot be guaranteed to some but denied to others. But Germany, France and the UK among many others have seen disciplinary actions or dismissals by employers – including in academia – because legitimate and lawful political positions were expressed.
People merely wearing a Palestinian keffiyeh are often stopped by police, questioned and sometimes arrested. The phrase ‘from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free’ has been branded ‘genocidal’. This is serious in itself, as for the vast majority of those using it, the (English) phrase is an expression of freedom from oppression, not the elimination of Israeli Jews. But this position is made grotesque since virtually the same turn of phrase with ‘Israel’ replacing ‘Palestine’ is found in the founding statute of Likud (13/09/1973), Netanyahu’s nationalist right-wing party now in a government and which the ICJ has found may plausibly be violating the Genocide Convention.
It is important to emphasise that protests by both Western Jews and by Jewish Israelis in Israel itself who are anti-Zionist, anti-Occupation, or simply anti-Netanyahu have also been denied precisely these human rights, treated like other protesters who affirm the equal rights and dignity of Israeli Jews, Israeli Palestinians, and Palestinians and the innocence of civilians and non-combatants everywhere.
If Western governments claim they are founded on democracy, human rights, and the rule of law, they cannot selectively recognize some rights for some human beings depending on whether their political alignment matches the government of the day.
Beyond even this, the principles of universal human rights and of equality before the law – the Rechtsstaat itself – are foundational to the ‘modern state’. Denying these is not simply morally problematic or politically myopic: it actively undermines the foundation of both the ideal-typical modern state, the international legal and institutional order it rests upon, and the legitimacy/credibility of their underlying ideals.
It is extraordinarily serious that these foundational norms should be sacrificed. Western governments’ choices are undermining the very principles and values they claim to be built upon: universal human rights, equality before the law, and the Westphalian modern state itself.
The question of Palestine reveals the limits of Western governments’ commitment to their own Enlightenment values: in sacrificing Palestine, the West betrays itself.
