“The Clash of Civilisations” in the war on Gaza
Not the clerics, but the politicians, are who have always claimed secularism, democracy, liberalism, or even leftism and conservatism, have devoted themselves to blatant and overt discourses, which they do not seek to hide or conceal. Is it a process of “employing religion” only, to serve politics and politicians and their various agendas, or a return and new revival of faith and religion in political conflicts, especially in this region, which represents the cradle of most of the worlds greatest religions?
Whatever the answer is, it is clear that religious feelings and sentiments are prevailing today, not only on the side of the Hamas movement, which Israel is working to label as ISIS (to justify the current extermination of all the residents of Gaza), but rather in the speech of Democratic US President Joseph Biden himself, who recalled his story with the Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir five decades ago (during the 1973 war) and did not hesitate to declare that Israel is a Jewish land and that he is a Zionist. While US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken came to Israel after the Al-Aqsa Flood operation as “the son of a family that survived the Holocaust” before he became America’s Secretary of State!
This is the tip of the iceberg of Western emotions, sympathy, and fever resulting from the Al-Aqsa Flood operation, as a religious sentiment against “Muslims,” or a political sentiment linked to the colonial West, which fears for its pampered settlement in the Arab world. A “west” that wants not only those who dared to stand against it, but the entire Gaza strip, so that everyone can learn the lesson. As Western and American officials are racing to provide support for Israel, while only a small number of politicians, officials, and groups of ineffective citizens are excluded from this context.
Netanyahu himself does not hesitate to use religious rhetoric in his political speech. In a televised speech addressed to the Israelis, he promised to fulfill the prophecy of Isaiah, using biblical descriptions, while the head of the Hamas political bureau, Ismail Haniyeh, when he spoke, described “Hamas” as a national liberation movement that uses its right to resistance and self-defense.
This discourse, the Western attack, and the policies that contain unavoidable racism bring us back to an old-new scenario, which is the “clash of civilizations” (or religions, more precisely, because Huntington considers religion to be the essence of civilization), and it is something that not only the Islamists in the Arab and Islamic world talk about but even the most stubborn secularists on the far right or left. I was astonished as I listened to a Jordanian political and media analyst of the blatantly secular ideological leftist style, describing what is happening today, on “The Kingdom TV” (a semi-official news channel), as a “new crusade.” Then came the song of Lotfi Bishnak, the committed Tunisian artist, which he dedicated to the people of Gaza, entitled Al-Aqsa Flood, to present sharp, clear words in condemnation of the West and its claims of human rights and democracy, and its lies and conspiracy against the Palestinians and Gaza (that killing an Arab is not a crime… justice for them is to kill us more… but a drop of his western blood equals tons of our blood).
The picture that the West was trying to paint over the decades so that the Arabs would forget the period of colonialism and the mandate, the call for democracy, freedoms and human rights, and the talk of “civil society” about the necessity of distinguishing between the West and American foreign policies and support for Israel. All of these concepts and ideas dissipated from the first hours in which the politicians scrambled. Westerners came to the region, and the Western media abandoned any professional neutrality (they told us about it previously), and all global discourse on human rights disappeared when images of genocide began in Gaza.
The “condemnation discourse” of the West and its racist standards is no longer linked to Islamists, nationalists, or leftists. Moderate political regimes and figures open to the West, as well as extremist secularists against religion, were unable to move away from these shocking facts within days, and we can clearly see this in the Jordanian political discourse, which is not precedented; King Abdullah II’s speech at the Cairo Conference, in which he spoke clearly about these dangerous policies that will explode the region, and Queen Rania’s interview with CNN, which was very strong in pointing out these Western biases, and the speech of Jordanian Foreign Minister Ayman Al-Safadi at the United Nations, in which He exceeded all the usual official Arab ceilings, when he asked whether Adam (the infant who was killed by the bombing in Gaza; who is the grandson of Wael Al-Dahdouh, the Al-Jazeera broadcaster) was, by Western standards, innocent and a human being like others (Safadi had previously compared Western standards to the dealings between Ukrainians and Palestinians).
Today, the region has officially been hijacked, not by Islamic religious fundamentalism as they claim, but by Israeli religious fundamentalism and the Western spirit that has awakened religious and historical dimensions hidden behind previously fabricated discourses about democracy and human rights. This “image” (renewed) will be a dangerous dynamic, not regionally. Rather, globally during the coming period.