By Jeremy Salt
Families in Gaza bid farewell to their beloved ones, killed by Israel. (Photo: VIA QNN)
Palestine connects with all of them. The human cost does not matter and never has mattered. This is the answer to the question ‘why don’t they do something?’
The cry went up around the world for two years: “Why aren’t they doing something to stop it?” The ‘they’ is the governments of the ‘civilized’ west. The ‘it’ is the Gaza genocide, committed openly, flagrantly, and defiantly before all our eyes.
Surely nothing could be more civilized than for the ‘civilized’ west to stop genocide, instead of indulging it, enabling it, arming it, and receiving its architects as honoured guests in its capitals.
The estimated Gaza death toll of more than 70,000 has long since been overtaken. Francesca Albanese puts the deaths from war or war-related causes since October 2023 at 680,000. The lowest estimates hover around 200,000.
On the basis of the accepted ratio that 70 percent of Israel’s victims are women and children, the deaths of both in Albanese’s reckoning would be close to half a million.
As 70 percent of the women and children who have ‘died’ in Gaza are children, nearly 300,000 children would have been killed or would have died from war-related causes since October 2023.
Even half of this number would rank as one of the greatest atrocities in history, committed by one of the worst criminal states in history. The figures are monstrous, yet the civilized ‘west’ did nothing in the past two years to stop these massive crimes against humanity and is still doing nothing to restrain or punish the perpetrators.
The crime is extreme, but the indifference of governments to the mass of victims, not out of place in western history. Gaza stands as further evidence that behind the mask of civilization, when its interests are involved, and the victims have black or brown skin, the ‘west’, as represented by its governments, is not so civilized after all.
Deep racism is ingrained in its indifference to the slaughter, cruelty and sadism of the Gaza genocide. It certainly would certainly not be standing by with its arms folded if these hundreds of thousands of victims of a psychopathic, murderous, genocidal state had white skins.
Gaza is the latest but undoubtedly not the last victim of the military ‘expansion of the west’ into Muslim lands. It began when Pope Urban launched the first crusade in 1095. “God will it (deus vult),” he said. Palestine – the ‘holy land’ – was the target then. Other expeditions into other lands followed. They were not crusades by name, but conquest in the name of God, Christianity and civilization also drove them on.
By the late 19th century, all Muslim states and principalities had fallen into ‘western’ hands or were dominated by them. The final collapse of the Ottoman Empire in 1918 delivered what was remaining in the Near East (not yet ‘middle’) and North Africa. The human cost was immense. Millions died or were otherwise ‘ethnically cleansed’ from these conquered lands.
In 1878, the Scottish orientalist, Sir William Muir, wrote that “the sword of Mahomet and the Coran are the most stubborn enemies of Civilization, Liberty and Truth which the world has yet known.”
In fact, the most stubborn enemies of ‘civilization,’ with Britain, France, and Russia in the lead, were inside civilization itself. There was nothing civilized about their conquests, based on advances in military technology that ensured their success every time.
In the Balkans, the Russian army and Bulgarian Christian civilian bands were slaughtering Muslims even as Muir was writing. In the 1912-13 Balkan wars, the horrors of 1877-78 were repeated in Macedonia by Greek, Serbian, and Bulgarian armies, followed again by bands of civilian killers and looters.
“In the war of the Cross against the Crescent, of liberty against tyranny, forward!, ” declared Tsar Ferdinand of Bulgaria. The slaughter of Muslim civilians, the destruction of hundreds of villages, and the mass flight of hundreds of thousands of terrorized Muslims followed. The genocidal intent was clear, but it is still not included amongst the genocides listed in the ‘western’ cultural mainstream.
In 1914, soldiers were sent off to fight for God, king/kaiser/Tsar and country. In a secular age, God eventually had to be eased out of the equation, but civilization remained. As ‘Jerry’ Bremer, the head of the US ‘provisional authority’ in Iraq, told graduating police in 2004, their country was once again “the focal point of the clash between the forces of darkness and the light of civilization.”
Seeing that he said it, let the ‘light of civilization’ shine on the truth. During the Iraq-Iran war (1989-1988), the US had helped Iraq to kill thousands of Iranian soldiers with poison and nerve gas: between 1990-2002, up to 1.5 million Iraqi civilians, including 500,000 children, were killed by western-imposed sanctions. The invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003/11 led to more war or ‘war-related’ civilian deaths, 500,000 to one million, according to estimates.
These deaths followed on from the mass of lies coming from the highest figures in the US administration, and from Tony Blair, that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. These lies are also what Bremer called the ‘light of civilization.’ There was no investigation, and no one responsible was punished.
In the 1960s, Bernard Lewis coined the phrase ‘clash of civilisation’ as if something as abstract as a civilization was the cause of war, not powerful states that had their eyes on someone else’s land and resources.
The phrase was later taken up with greater impact by Samuel Huntington. In fact, civilisations had always cross-fertilized each other, and the ‘clash’ was clearly intended by Lewis, a strong supporter of Zionism and Israel, to blur the real causes of war in the Middle East.
The ‘clash’ sets the victim up as the perpetrator. According to Lewis, the real causes of Muslim anger are not aggressive western wars but jealousy and resentment directed against the civilizational achievements of the ‘west.’ This is a complete fabrication, but the ‘clash’ was quickly built into what is wrong with them, when the question to be asked should have been what is wrong with us.
If western governments are not intervening to stop the genocide in Gaza, the reason is that this is their genocide as well. They live in vassalage to the US and thus Israel. These two wilful, lawless states have a plan for the Middle East, and their vassals are part of it.
The plan dates back to the rise of the ‘neocons’ more than 40 years ago and their campaign (call it another crusade of the true believers) to remove all obstacles standing in the way of US/Israeli hegemony across the Middle East.
The pre-positioning was first laid out in ‘A Clear Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm,’ a paper prepared by the necons for Netanyahu on “a new Israeli strategy towards 2000.”
This was followed in 1997 by the ‘Project for the New American Century.’ The refinement and extension of these plans for a ‘new’ Middle East accelerated after 9/11 and have since been built into national security doctrines. Their aims can only be accomplished by violating international law, which is why the US has openly rejected the 17th-century Westphalia treaty on the sovereign rights of states.
‘Regime change’ military operations followed, in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Syria, Yemen and Iran, and as of January 3, 2026, Venezuela, but only Palestine would have to be destroyed completely. Israel has been destroying it piecemeal for nearly 80 years, and, in partnership with the US, is now bent on finishing it off.
If they get away with it, there will be no Palestine on the US/Israeli map of the ‘new’ Middle East. Israel will not allow it and like Lola of the song, what Israel wants, Israel gets, even the genocide. The Palestinians will be dead or completely emptied from their homeland if Israel has its way. Palestine will be a receding name in history until it vanishes. This is what Israel wants and what the US will give it.
These government ‘allies’ (vassals) of the US know what the US and Israel are after, but as vassals, obviously, they are not going to do anything to stop it. This is the reality behind their refusal to intervene, their refusal to stand up for themselves, their duplicitous calls for restraint by an unhinged state that does not know the meaning of the word and their lip-service regret at the civilian casualties.
The genocide is necessary in the same way that genocides have always been necessary for an aggressive state to get what it wants. Palestine connects with all of them. The human cost does not matter and never has mattered. This is the answer to the question ‘why don’t they do something?’
– Jeremy Salt taught at the University of Melbourne, at Bosporus University in Istanbul and Bilkent University in Ankara for many years, specializing in the modern history of the Middle East. Among his recent publications is his 2008 book, The Unmaking of the Middle East. A History of Western Disorder in Arab Lands (University of California Press) and The Last Ottoman Wars. The Human Cost 1877-1923 (University of Utah Press, 2019). He contributed this article to The Palestine Chronicle.
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