The Imperialists Return as Moral Tutors

Spare us.

I oppose the settlement project. I oppose settler violence, creeping annexation, and permanent Israeli rule over millions of Palestinians without political rights. A prohibition on settlement goods is not inherently antisemitic, nor is every criticism of Israel an attack on the Jewish people.

But Britain and France are not innocent bystanders who have arrived to impose order upon a conflict created by the primitive natives. They were among the principal architects of the modern Middle East. They carved up the region according to their imperial interests, drew borders across peoples and communities, installed and discarded rulers, issued incompatible promises, and then left the inhabitants to kill one another over the consequences.

Britain governed Palestine as an imperial possession. It encouraged incompatible national expectations, suppressed both Jews and Arabs when they became inconvenient, and restricted Jewish immigration while European Jews were desperately trying to escape extermination. Having helped create an insoluble political situation, Britain withdrew and left the people living there to fight the war it knew would follow.

France’s record is no cleaner. France subjected North Africa to conquest, expropriation, torture, collective punishment, and mass killing. Its war in Algeria was conducted with a brutality that should have permanently cured the French state of its taste for moral instruction. France also secretly helped Israel construct the Dimona nuclear facility, then sold Saddam Hussein a nuclear reactor and highly enriched uranium. French foreign policy has repeatedly made sensitive military technology available whenever money or strategic advantage made the transaction attractive.

More recently, Britain and France helped overthrow the Libyan government without accepting responsibility for what would follow. Libya collapsed into civil war, trafficking, jihadism, and regional destabilization. Once again, Europeans intervened, congratulated themselves on their principles, and left other people to inhabit the ruins.

This history does not excuse Israeli misconduct. Other people’s crimes do not make ours permissible. Israel must confront settler terrorism, abandon fantasies of permanent annexation, and offer Palestinians a credible political future. But the histories of Britain and France matter because the imperial posture has survived the empires themselves.

They still regard the peoples of this region as lesser humans to be instructed, pressured, rearranged, and punished for their own good. They still imagine that European governments possess a wisdom and moral authority that their records have never justified. They still treat intervention as an expression of virtue while leaving its consequences to everyone else.

And they are preparing to do it again.

Punishing settlement activity may satisfy European consciences. It may also strengthen the Israeli right, validate its claim that Europe is implacably hostile, weaken the Israelis fighting annexation from within, and turn the West Bank into another theater of escalating retaliation. Closing the British consulate and ending British support for Palestinian Authority forces are already among Israel’s responses. None of this advances coexistence. All of it makes the politics of coexistence harder.

Perhaps Britain and France have calculated these consequences carefully. Their history suggests otherwise.

Criticize Israel. Condemn settler violence. Sanction violent individuals. Oppose annexation. But stop presenting yourselves as the morally immaculate adults disciplining a savage and recalcitrant people. You are not the neutral referees of this catastrophe. Your fingerprints are all over it.

If you continue treating Israelis and Palestinians as lesser beings upon whom Europe may conduct another righteous geopolitical experiment, you will fuck up the Middle East even more thoroughly than you have over the past century.

So consider your imperial history. Consider your barbarism.

Consider your breathtaking and consistent hypocrisy.

And, for now, do kindly get stuffed.