RAMONA VASSALLO
Another aim would be to divert focus away from the fact that citizens of any country have more in common with minorities than with the governments ruling their country.
The political spectrum has ceased to exist, except in theory. What remains of political jargon are words such as allies and enemies which are applied consistently within a mainstream narrative that calls Israel’s colonial presence in Palestine a democracy.
Right-wing groups have endorsed and disseminated this line of thinking, despite their contention with governments on other issues. Fear has been evoked from the imaginary and projected upon vulnerable minorities as a shield for governments behind which it is also possible to manipulate the meaning and implications of accountability.
There is more than one narrative at play, yet the collusion between right-wing groups and governments is bound by the assimilation to fear, which overrules any contention such groups might have with political leaders. As a result, it is even possible now for the right-wing to claim it is not right-wing, despite the exclusionary ideology.
A more accurate assessment would be to state that the majority of governments are right-wing and politics have normalised different strands of such an ideology for various reasons. One is to differentiate between the right-wing and the far-right within one’s country. Such a strategy promotes further discord between citizens. Another aim would be to divert focus away from the fact that citizens of any country have more in common with minorities than with the governments ruling their country. Again, this leads back to the blurring of political lines to the point that everything can be given different values and meanings depending on what exploitative measures are undertaken by the government.
The other reason is to perpetuate illusions in order to have the public contribute to the government’s foreign policy. It is little wonder that among so-called right-wing activists, or far-right wing activists, Israel has become something akin to a cause. The narrative is reversed because such groups, despite disagreeing with their governments on other political issues, have no problem with aligning themselves to the prevailing discourse disseminated by Israel and promoted by the international community, that Israel is “the only democracy in the Middle East”. That is, besides such groups portraying themselves as beholden to the earlier colonial myths that Israel had always existed, even though history and archaeological studies by respected historians have dispelled such claims. In any case, Israel’s inception started in the aftermath of the 1948 Nakba, which does not translate to “always”.
It is important to state that Israel is directly involved in the dissemination of such fabricated narratives, which right-wing groups are endorsing and thus, through ideological or financial association with Zionist adherents, help to propagate. Once again, the blurring of lines between anti-Semitism and Zionism do not matter when the aim is to promote Israel’s colonialism as democratic.
In Europe and Latin America, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is forming allegiances with right-wing governments which promote anti-immigrant and anti-indigenous sentiment respectively. Endorsement of such governments by the right-wing is an automatic endorsement of Israel and there is no shard of apology forthcoming, or at the very least, an attempt to decipher between right-wing democratically elected governments and Israel’s colonial government elected by a settler-colonial population.
If Israel calls itself a democracy and the rest of the international community fails to point out that Israel is a Zionist settler-colonial state, the failure goes beyond the simplified notions of right-wing and far-right. Perpetuating the lie that colonialism and democracy are synonymous is not a recent endeavour; it has roots in the earlier colonial history which world powers refuse to address.
Approval of Israel and the perpetuation of its fabricated rights and security must be traced back to the source. It means going back and unravelling the lies which now make no distinction between colonialism and democracy. Furthermore, it also requires scrutiny of the proclaimed democracies which approved the existence of colonial Israel in historic Palestine.
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