The genocide in Gaza and ethnic cleansing in The Lebanon exhausted the West’s
moral legitimacy. Now Iran is slowly exhausting the West’s military
primacy
By Jonathan Cook: For decades, two irreconciliable narratives about Israel and its motivations have existed in parallel.
On the one side, an official western narrative portrays a plucky,
besieged “Jewish” state of Israel, desperate to make peace with its
hostile Arab neighbours. Even to this day, that story dominates the
political, media and academic landscape.
Time and again, or so we are told, Israel has held out an olive
branch to “the Arabs”, seeking acceptance, but is always rebuffed.
A largely unspoken subtext suggests that supposedly irrational,
bloodthirsty, Jew-hating regimes across the region would have completed
the Nazis’ exterminationist agenda but for the West’s humane protection
of a vulnerable minority.
A Palestinian counter-narrative, accepted across much of the rest of
the world, is choked into silence in the West as an antisemitic “blood
libel”.
It presents Israel as an ethnic supremacist, highly militaristic
state – armed by the United States and Europe – bent on expansion, mass
expulsions and land theft.