The Invisible Armada

2024/08/27

The transplant of Western democracy hardly took place until the last decades of the 20th century in Latin America, due in particular to the constant and brutal interference of the United States inclined to support military regimes and dictatorships under their control, it did not take place in sub-Saharan Africa where the conditions imposed by chaotic decolonization prevail, it did not take hold in South-East Asia where, once again, the fight against international communism leads the United States and the Western powers to support the most corrupt regimes (Philippines), the most authoritarian (Thailand, Burma), the bloodiest (Indonesia), without forgetting their puppets in South Vietnam during the Second Indochina War.

But it took hold in the Middle East, in the form of the State of Israel which, since its foundation in 1948, has continued to be praised crescendo , in the Western-centric discourse, as a model democracy, especially more remarkable that it finds itself surrounded by authoritarian regimes long bent on its destruction – the Arab States of the region.

The question here is not only that Israel has, over time and the wars won against the coalitions formed by its hostile neighbors, become ever more obviously a bastion and a lock of the West in the Middle East, - a strategic position and role in all respects, in a world where, in particular, access to oil resources conditions the maintenance of the status quo resulting from the Second World War and placed under the hegemony of the United States and its Western allies.

The question is, more substantially, if one wishes, beyond the geopolitical, geo-strategic issues which mark this period, that the Jews have become in the eyes of Westerners and, more generally of the whole world, full-fledged Whites only when and after  they accessed a state constitution (Israel understood as the state of the Jews of the entire planet, including the diaspora). It is, of course, and in an infinitely sinister way, the genocide, the Shoah, which gave them access to this condition, but it is undoubtedly also and above all the fact that their name as a “species”  has now found itself associated with that of a state, a powerful state and, moreover, a democracy modeled on the pattern of Western democracies.

Until the Second World War, Jews in general remained, in the eyes of the so-called Christian and white West, a variable, contrasting “species”, but generally intermediate or indeterminable, often labeled as "oriental" and, more or less pejoratively as “metique”. These discursive procedures (labelling, categorizing...)  extend well beyond anti-Semitic propaganda and its effects. Even those among the Jews who have been assimilated for a long time, in Western Europe, were not, until the Nazi catastrophe, completely white . Even after the Second World War, and not only in the Poland of post-Nazi pogroms, endemic anti-Semitism persists, in France too, in the United States, which thrives on the suspicion of an otherness, of a difference (with the 'intrinsic' white species) based as much on religion as on the alleged disturbing « difference » of the (supposed) Jewish people.

In truth, the Jews only became, in Western discursivity as in the strategic calculations of hegemony, completely white , that is to say full members of the white species, in the era when the power of Israel as a state asserted itself, in the Middle East and, more generally, in international relations.

This is what makes Israel an exemplary white democracy, from now on, that is to say an enclave of the West, an island of “civilized life” and immediately identifiable by the Western subject as placed under the same regime as its own– in contrast to everything that surrounds it and which obviously comes under another regime: that of division, unpredictability, lost wars and civil wars, perpetual crises, bad government and questionable morals – the Arab-Muslim Middle East, another world, another History, another species. The more Jews and, in particular, Israelis are included in the field of white history and civilization, the more, by contrast, those who are in conflict with them are estranged from it. The struggle to the death, understood as a war of species, which pits the expansionist and supremacist state of Israel against the Palestinians resisting their reduction to a residual condition, is placed here under the distinct sign of division between West and East, Whites and non -Whites. The maintained efficiency (effectiveness) of this sharing is never more obvious than in the conditions where it is apartheid which is its marker and  operator. In Hebron and Jenin, the race war is exposed – and white democracy is involved up to its neck: the Israeli soldiers who are hunting down Palestinian activists there are citizens of the exemplary Israeli democracy, called to participate in free elections with the same constancy and regularity that they are led to shoot on sight at everything that moves in the towns, villages and refugee camps in the occupied West Bank.

If there is a region of the world where, persistently, the separation between democratic regimes, democratic order, democratic civilization and what would be the opposite and the antagonistic has a distinct color (however fantastical and resistible it may be) , it is indeed the Middle East; for, ipso facto, it amounts to sending Arabs and Muslims, and not only those from this region, to the other side of the color divide, that of irreversible non-whiteness.

The imagination of color comes here to merge with another phantasmagorical register – that of religion. Arabs cannot be White as long as, as Muslims (of all kinds or assimilated), they are not compatible with Western-style democracy. Repeatedly, all attempts at “democratization” of these societies (even very recently: Tunisia) fail on the pitfall of their worrying and rogue otherness . Clearly, the acclimatization of democracy which now sees itself as the only civilized political constitution to these other spaces is proving to be an impossible mission – we are sparing no effort to export democracy to them – and see what they do with it... ( Iraq, after the two American wars, for example). The misery of the tattered universalism that supports this type of reasoning and the philosophy of history that goes with it is glaring here - and if it were not the "others" who did not pass the test of adopting democratic norms (and morals) but rather Western-style democracy frozen in its uses and presumptions which regularly failed to withstand the test of its transposition into other worlds, other cultural spaces, other historical environments ?

We therefore see it: Democracy in capital and as ideality, just as democracy as power, only manages to redeploy and reterritorialize itself by re-separating itself, by redrawing its borders and by raising the barriers which separate it from the "rest" - by constantly inventing new lines of separation and sharing, fractures and oppositions – rigorous conditions of incompatibility. The factory of new whites functions just as much and even more as a factory of non-whites.