We are all witnessing horrors of carnage that is going on in the tiny landmass called Gaza – a land squeezed between Egypt and Israel where 2.3 million people were living before the beginning of the butchery. Since 2005 when Gaza became a semi- independent entity, this is the sixth time that Israel has been conducting direct military aggression into the territory. It has led Operation Summer Rains in 2006, Operation Cast Lead in 2008-2009, Operation Pillar Defense in 2012, Operation Protective Edge in 2014, and Operation Black Belt in 2019: every time declaring the total annihilation of Hamas as the objective. Will Israel succeed this time? The US administration has already declared unqualified support for Israel’s war strategy against the advice of prominent intellectuals. Richard Haass, President Emeritus of the Council of Foreign Relations, has warned in a friendly advice in the Foreign Affairs that, “Hamas is as much a network, a movement, and an ideology as it is an organization. Its leadership can be killed, but the entity or something like it will survive.” In a separate article a week after the October 7 Hamas attack, Marc Lynch has cautioned that, “An Invasion of Gaza Would Be a Disaster for Israel.” Yet the Administration does not seem to have reflected on the overall situation. Why is this happening? Is this development unprecedented in history?
These developments remind me of the British historian Arnold Toynbee’s prediction, who is reported to have said in 1945 that, “if a new war broke out, the Americans would be the aggressor.”[2]Are we really moving to demonstrate that Toynbee was right? Little over two decades later he counted the United States as “one of the two malign imperialist powers in the postwar world; the other was the state of Israel.” He justified his claim saying, “must be today the two most dangerous of the 125 sovereign states among which the land-surface of this planet is at present partitioned.”[3]
Arnold Toynbee on the possibility of the Third World War
He also suggested that, “Israel’s occupation of Arab territory constituted as vicious and inhuman an act as Germany’s occupation of Czechoslovakia and Poland.” Was
Toynbee anti-Semitic? Have we even considered the question why the historian after studying twenty-one different civilizations in history developed such a negative view about Israel and the United States? One must note that Toynbee had earlier
Let us remember some events during the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948. As soon as the State of Israel declared its independence, President Truman recognized the new state within eleven minutes of the declaration against the advice of George Marshall, the great American hero who had initiated the famous economic reconstruction program for Europe following the Second World War. As a student of history, I must recall that Marshall was the most knowledgeable person on international affairs in the administration at the time. Marshall resigned in protest. Have we really examined why Marshall was opposed to recognizing Israel?
The current situation also reminds me of the assassination of the Swedish diplomat and the Red Cross Chief Count Bernadotte. The newly created United Nations appointed him to negotiate peace between the Israelis and Palestinians, but the Israeli paramilitary group Lehi, also known as Stern Gang, murdered him in Jerusalem on September 17, 1948. Bernadotte had the reputation of saving of more than 30,000 lives from Hitler’s concentration camps. The US condemned the assassination, demanded full investigation, and sought surety to bring the perpetrators to justice. However, the whole issue died down slowly and one of Bernadotte’s assassins later became Israel’s prime minister. This seems to have encouraged Israel to mock international law and all international mediation efforts in conflicts with the Palestinians and other neighboring states since then.
This also reminds me of how the policy makers have ignored prominent academics John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt’s valuable contributionThe Israel Lobby and the US Foreign Policy. After failing to publish their initial findings in the US, they first published their article in London Review of Books. This only indicates the influence of money – the money that has corrupted our democracy.
We do not realize how much we have degenerated over the decades and now we express our horror at the murder of a six year old in the hands of an elderly man. American politicians, the mainstream media, a powerful segment of academia – all have marginalized the faculty of critical thinking. The paradox is that modern academic disciplines claim to follow Socratic Method of inquiry but in reality, they blatantly follow Sophistic relativistic philosophy. I became familiar with comparative civilizational studies at the University of Michigan under the guidance of Professor Stephen Tonsor, a practicing Catholic who had served at the Nixon Administration.
The United States and Israel
President Biden has now claimed that, “American leadership is what holds the world together.” “American alliances are what keep us, America, safe. American values are what make us a partner that other nations want to work with,” he insisted. Is he not mocking the dreams of America’s founding fathers? We have witnessed mockery and lies in framing the clash of civilizations thesis, in carpet- bombing Afghanistan in 2001, in justifying the invasion of Iraq in 2003, and during the two decades of occupation of Afghanistan.
However, this is not the first time in history that we witness a decaying power is making hollow claims. Decaying powers throughout history have gone crazy in their killing spree. How terrifying is going to be this time? I am not a military expert and cannot even conceive such a scenario, but I am afraid, Israel does not seem to go a ground invasion: Israel seems to force Gazans starve to death. We are already witnessing mockery in the name of allowing some trucks of humanitarian assistance to Gaza. What will happen to more than two million Gazans when every necessary item runs out?
We have no idea what is happening to most families now, but most analysts are predicting the worse to come. If that happens, how will the rest of the world respond? President Biden is already claiming that America is holding the world together. But holding together for what? To force Gazans to starve? Arnold Toynbee prophesized America’s future based on his studies of major world civilizations.
The Gaza crisis has exposed bankruptcy of the American political elite. Secretary Blinken invoked his Jewish ancestry while declaring US’ unconditional support for Israel following Hamas’ October 7 attack. Was it a manifestation of good diplomacy? Was he then surprised when he had to wait several hours for a simple meeting in Riyadh with the Saudi Crown Prince? He is now facing a ‘revolt’ in the State Department. According to reports, the director of congressional and public affairs at the State Department’s Bureau of Political-Military Affairs, which handles arms transfers, resigned, but he seems to have been more worried about “Some of our colleagues in the region, especially among our locally employed staff, have been directly affected by the violence, including by losing loved ones and friends.”
After retracting his claim of Hamas decapitating forty Israeli babies,
Bankruptcy of Western Elites
A culture of fear and intimidation dominates the atmosphere today. Is the Gaza crisis a symbol of civilizational predicament? Along with the climate crisis, the current situation has become even more complex. Are we very close to witness our
My humble understanding of historical change does not endorse this pessimism. How is the current crisis different from earlier ones, however? Well, the main difference from classical Greece and now is that, while Socrates failed to motivate most youth of his time, today we witness a great awakening among the youth. They are pointing out to double standards of their leaders – not only leaders in the Western world, but in the Muslim world as well. The Gaza crisis has brought millions, not only Muslims but also many Jewish and other groups to streets opposing official positions of most countries. This did not happen in Socratic Greece.
Besides, there has been a revolutionary change in means of communication since Socrates and therefore, now it would be impossible to isolate and subjugate any determined population in this age of information. In fact, latest polls are indicating fast and significant changes of opinion in the US. Even the corporate controlled social media outlets are failing to manipulate and suppress information. More people are inclined to subscribe to critical thinking. All these are indications of the triumph of Socratic moral values. Does this mean that we will be able to avoid a civilizational collapse?
This is the burning question today. Can we take advantage of the two factors that differentiate us from classical Greeks? Many Muslims seem to look for a miracle – the kind of divine intervention that saved the Ka’ba from the invading army of elephants overlooking the fact that there was no believer to defend the sacred house at the time. Again, in my humble view, with the presence of two billion Muslims around the world such miracles are not going to happen. How do they overcome the impeding challenge then? Many Muslims and non-Muslim observers have come forward to express their unequivocal sympathy for the people of Gaza; they have gathered hundreds and thousands of truckloads of relief goods around the borders of Gaza, millions are demonstrating in cities around the world, yet there is no secession of bombing of Gaza. Israel is clearly trying to force Gazans starve to death. This simply means that the response is not adequate to match the challenge.
Muslim elites seem to be worried about the economic and military power of Israel and its allies. My understanding of ancient Egyptian history and Biblical history is that Pharaonic Egypt was very powerful as opposed to Moses. Today the pyramids and sphinx are standing there only as symbols of a defeated power. Muslims must look Moses as their model, not Haman or Qarun (Biblical Korah).
Lessons from History
Could We Escape the Civilizational Collapse?
[1] An earlier version of this article was published in https://www.juancole.com/
People around the world, particularly in neighboring countries must do more to save the Gazans from the Israeli onslaught. Of course, this is a difficult job, but one must remember the Qur’anic verse “Surely with hardship comes ease (94:5).”This serves the source of hope. The faster the rest of the world wakes up to take care of the