I think Israel-Palestine, despite how tiny it is and how few people, relatively speaking, are involved, is and always has been the weak point in the fabric that holds the present Western-dominated rules-based order together.
The rules-based order did away with the right of conquest. For a while, that sort of held together. The Cold War kept this or that country in line. After the Cold War, American hegemony kept countries in line. But more and more, we have this fiction where the lines on the map drawn by the UN less and less reflect the realities on the ground. Does Libya actually exist? Does it matter that the UN map shows Crimea as part of Ukraine?
With Israel, the UN right at its own founding undermined the principles it espoused. There never was any real justification to create a Jewish state in Palestine. Why, because Britain promised one? What right did they have to allocate land that belonged to somebody else? I don’t listen to the propaganda about how there never was a Palestinian state. Land that had belonged to Arab families for centuries was placed under alien control because Britain needed to get out of a bind of its own creation.
Why should Arabs care that Anglo-American Protestant theology calls for a Jewish state in Palestine? How is that not aggression? How is that not colonialism?
The best justification for the existence of Israel is the reality that those 7.5 million Jews aren’t going anywhere.
The existence of Israel lays bare that the rules-based order is undermined by its own hypocrisy. The right of conquest is abolished by a hegemon in the United States that exists only because it conquered a continent. If under the present order Israel shouldn’t have a right to exist, then neither should the United States. But that is ridiculous. So the whole rules-based order is revealed as ridiculous, and so we revert back to might makes right and a new age of war under the ominous backdrop of nuclear weapons.
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