A good article by Ussama Maqdisi, the author of Age of Coexistence: The Ecumenical Frame and the Making of the Modern Arab World
“Philo-Zionism relies on two pillars. These include a generalised western view that Israel’s creation is a just and moral recompense for the history of European antisemitism that culminated with the Holocaust; and the consistent racist demonisation of Israel’s opponents as non-western barbarians of a peculiar antisemitic type.
The entire ethical edifice of an inward-looking, Eurocentric, post-war western humanism - its museums of remembrance, its discourse of tolerance and reflection, and its obsessive grappling with its own antisemitic past - is ultimately built on the backs of native Palestinians, who were chased out of their homes and also out of history.
Palestinian resistance - including “terrorism” - has consistently been decontextualised, and depicted as irrational and immoral by western powers and mainstream media.
This representation of Palestinian anti-colonial resistance as barbarism draws on a much older western colonial tradition of demonising any form of indigenous or slave revolt against oppression.
In every case, whether that of the Algerians, Kenyans, South Africans, Syrians, Palestinians, Iraqis or Vietnamese - and the list is of course much longer - the constant, ubiquitous refrain in the West was horror at native savagery, barbarism and terrorism.”
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