Why do you hate us this much?

The level of Western hypocrisy when dealing with our issues has become very high, along with the inflammatory exposure of the shaken standards and values and the lack of respect for the humanity of “others”, even reaching the level of them being treated as another species that is undeserving of freedom or respect.

This definitely isn’t something new, but it is on the rise and has reached, in terms of what is happening in Gaza, not only to the level of lies and fabrication regarding what actually happened on 7 October, but to the level of contempt and disregard by Western governments and their politicians for the suffering of Palestinian civilians, the killing of children and women by the Israeli war machine, the demolition of homes over the heads of their inhabitants, as well as warnings of bombing hospitals, targeting ambulances, displacing the residents in a new Nakba, killing journalists and the Western media blacking out all of this. It is as if the people of Gaza are not human, and this was blatantly said by the Israeli defence minister a few days ago.

Even what Western countries were saying previously about the need to protect civilians on both sides, and the need for self-restraint, with arbitrary equality between the occupier and the occupied people; between the aggressor and the victim who has been trapped for 16 years in the largest open-air prison in the world, was completely absent and has now turned into a complete, open and unconditional justification for everything Israel is doing, on the other hand, any Palestinian losses, whatever they may be, have been belittled and disregarded, reaching the point that the prime minister of the UK said that he refuses to see Israeli civilian victims and Palestinian civilian victims as equals.

On the American side, the insistence on lying and misleading became more clearly evident. After President Biden spoke about images of Israeli children being beheaded, the White House retracted the statement to say that this had not yet been verified and that the claim was based on the Israeli narrative. US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken said he saw the photos of this, but the world saw nothing. This was then followed by White House National Security spokesperson John Kirby saying that he sees no reason to doubt what Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said. It was that simple.

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Matters did not stop there. Instead, countries with longstanding democracies tried in various ways to prevent the organisation of demonstrations in solidarity with the Palestinians and the raising of Palestinian flags. Others dispersed the demonstrations and arrested the participants, as happened in France and Germany. When a huge demonstration took place, like that in London, the British media, including the BBC, ironically, tried to downplay them and misleadingly portray them as being in support of Hamas. It was later forced to apologise.

This was accompanied by a fierce media campaign in almost all Western media outlets that know nothing but solidarity with Israel and disregard for what it is doing in Gaza. They refused to put the current war into context, framing it as if it was launched as a treacherous attack by the “state of Gaza” against the “state of Israel” without any warning, after years of calm and good neighbourliness. This is in addition to punishing or dismissing those who express opposing opinions, which happened at several international media outlets, as was the case with a presenter on the American television channel MSNBC or the cartoonist in the British newspaper The Guardian.

Even Arabs residing in the US, Canada and Europe have begun to feel fear of merely expressing solidarity with the Palestinians, with the situation reaching the point of a six-year-old child being brutally stabbed and killed in the US in a violent hate crime simply because he was Palestinian. Expressing solidarity on social media has also become fraught with dangers in countries that say they respect freedom of opinion and expression, but this solidarity is generally met with censorship and is even immediately dismissed as anti-Semitism.

READ: Netanyahu and Biden lie to justify their crimes against the Palestinians

There has been an enormous uproar against the Palestinians, accompanied by a colonial mindset and hateful white supremacy, and this blind sympathy for the Israelis without insight – with the exception only of the courageous statements by the Norwegian prime minister, his foreign minister, and a Spanish minister – has led in the past, is leading this time, and will lead in the future, inevitably and in a stronger and final way, to the Arab and Muslim public shaking off the West, its values and its claims for many decades of respecting human rights that they say are universal. The West was exposed by the double standards when it came to the Ukraine war and the Gaza war came to completely expose it. The moral reference of the West has almost completely collapsed, except for a few of its live community forces. The West has made the international human rights system almost worthless, which will permanently expand the gap between Arabs and the West, the gap that was no longer a gap of misunderstanding, and will inevitably lead to the dominance of a new, completely different generation. This generation has already begun to emerge, abandoning the political settlement in favour of force that imposes itself on everyone. The current official Palestinian and Arab leaders will leave one day, and Washington and its allies will no longer find anyone to negotiate with, tame, or intimidate.

Neither the Americans nor anyone else has the right to ask, “Why do they hate us?” Instead, we now have our right to forcefully pose the question, “Why do you hate us this much?”

This article first appeared in Arabic in Al-Quds Al-Arabi on 17 October 2023

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.