Liberalism's Death Rattle

The September deadline set by France, the UK, Australia and Canada for Israel to stop its genocide and commit to a two-state solution is fast approaching. And looming alongside this deadline is a final crisis of legitimacy for western liberalism.

Firstly, let’s just reflect on how utterly absurd these conditions are: we’ll recognise your right to your own independent state ONLY IF YOUR HOLOCAUSTERS KEEP HOLOCAUSTING YOU. They are making the creation of an entity which, legally, according to the 1948 partition agreement should have existed for the last seventy seven years anyway, contingent on more slaughter.

The pitiful centrist impulse to triangulate every issue has never been more pathetically, tragically and infuriatingly on show. The belief that you can carrot-and-stick your way to a liberal sweet-spot solution on every issue, even an actual holocaust, is such an odious reflex.

Gaza should, and I believe will, mark the end of liberalism. You can't support an openly declared final solution, announce two years later that recognition for the victims is literally contingent on the final solution proceeding, while continuing to trade on the same old lines about human rights, equality, justice.

Gaza has shown it all up as a sham. The events of the last nearly two years have driven a stake through the dank, rotten heart of this liberal ideology.

The truth is that (neo) liberalism encases supremacist attitudes in pro-social language and symbols despite being, today, an inherently and aggressively anti-social, racist and violent ideology. I don’t particularly want to get into history, definitions and changing use here. You can argue that classical liberal thinkers like Thomas Paine or John Locke would be horrified by genocide, permanent war and the surveillance state.

But what is inarguable is that liberalism in the twentieth century, particularly the second half of the twentieth century, has been dominated by violent centre-right and centre-left liberals. These groupings and their acolytes broadly agree on free markets, freedom of suffrage (what they call democracy), some forms of social justice and equal rights, and they agree on a geopolitical story of the world. They both identify the same good guys and the same bad guys and also believe in the need to forever expand the military and surveillance state to defeat the bad guys. And both these parties, from those in western Europe to those in North America, believe that to do this, killing lots and lots of people is frequently justified.

No one with any understanding of recent history could deny this.

Over the last eighty years, liberals of the centre-right and centre-left, Democrats and Republicans, Labour and Conservative parties, have dropped nuclear bombs on Japanese cities, sanctioned the murder of one million civilians in Indonesia, and from Vietnam to Korea to Libya to Iraq have invaded, raped and pillaged.

And while Gaza is of a piece with recent liberal history, I don’t think we can see it as simply another mass murderous episode in western imperialism. Because what has emerged over the past two years is something unique.

Gaza breaks what was already an ultra violent mould.

Never in the modern era have we seen two million people be cut off from the outside world, trapped, unable to leave, starved and systematically murdered while made homeless and living in tents. Never in the modern era have we seen everything be taken from a people, every university, bakery, school, cafe, office, park, restaurant. Every standing home. We’ve not seen a state destroy so much infrastructure that it has ended the ability of an entire society to function as such. No running water, no sewage systems, no grid electricity. Almost everything in Gaza has been turned to dust and rubble. Never have we seen a starving people trapped in a tiny patch of eviscerated land and watched as their holocausters baited them with food, only to gun them down for fun. Guns supplied by our governments, with our money. Never have we seen so many doctors, nurses and journalists torn apart by jets from the sky while holding nothing but the tools of their work, their stethoscopes and cameras. Jets supplied by our governments with our money. Never have we seen people with Down’s Syndrome ripped apart by attack dogs or teenagers assassinated by drones while in wheelchairs.

No, this is heinous and new, even by western imperialism's barbarous standards.

You have to go back to ancient Greece or the crusades and the sacking of cities to find something comparable.

The fact that the resistance continues to inflict casualties on the invaders under these conditions is a marvel of the human spirit and should be celebrated as such.

And we certainly haven’t seen violence, war crimes and unspeakable atrocities on this scale captured so frequently on camera in such fine-grained graphic detail.

On top of this, every single stage of this genocide was openly declared by Israel. Israeli politicians said there were no civilians in Gaza, that everyone was guilty, that they’d starve them, burn them and destroy everything. They said the goal was to drive them out of Gaza, to ethnically cleanse Gaza. They said it brazenly, week after week. And then they did it. And they did it with the support of liberals. Trump has overseen eight months of genocide. Biden and Harris oversaw fifteen months. The Conservative party oversaw nine months of genocide. Starmer’s Labour Party has supported Israel through thirteen months of slaughter. The liberals in Australia and Canada don’t even have the excuse that it started on someone else’s watch. They’ve backed this genocide from the start.

Then a few weeks ago, when this dishonest threat to recognise Palestine was made, Israel’s finance minister said they’d step up the holocaust in response and make sure there was nothing left to recognise. Knowing they wouldn’t be stopped, they proceeded to do just that, with zero reaction from the complicit liberal cowards in London, Ontario, Canberra and Paris.

Liberalism doesn’t have a future after this. Not an energised one, at least. Gaza signals the final crisis of legitimacy for liberalism and its supposed international order. Spiritually, it’s over. It will take time for pro-genocide liberals to face the consequences, time for their political groupings to be defeated and made irrelevant. International institutions ruled by liberals will not evaporate over night. But no one will now take their orders from liberals. No one will be lectured to about democracy, human rights, and freedom. The global multilateral institutions run by pro-genocide western liberals will find it increasingly difficult to maintain their legitimacy in the post-Gaza holocaust era. The global south has been watching, and through the expansion of BRICS and the formalisation of new agreements, is now organising. Domestically, as we saw in the US last November, liberal bases in the west will no longer come out in sufficient numbers to keep reanimating the corpse of liberal technocratic management.

The centre could never hold. Among the dead of Gaza lies the liberal project, the only deserved victim of this genocide.

We are left then with two possible futures: a radically pro-social and communitarian one, focused on justice and equity for all, or an authoritarian cesspit of racism, war, and eugenics, administered by the tools of the outsourced surveillance state. We know these are the choices, because we’ve already seen it play out. Trump’s victory was in fact the first sign that Gaza heralded these binary futures. The causes of Harris’s loss were contested by liberals, but the polls in the weeks after were clear: her support for genocide was a priority issue for enough people who otherwise would have voted for her, and Trump snuck through.

Without viable pro-social, anti-imperial alternatives, expect this pattern of pro-genocide liberals losing to proto-fascists to be repeated throughout the west.

The answer in the face of these frightening dynamics is, obviously, not to run back to the genocidal warmongering liberals who landed us here.

The answer is to help shape those radical alternatives.

The stakes couldn’t be clearer, the lines sharper than ever.