The Colour of Shame
How and why the creation and undermining of Jewish security exists at the whim of white fragility.
“The colour of truth is grey.”
– Andre Gide.
December-January 2024
I am not surprised by the horror that has unfolded over the past three months in Israel and in Palestine. If you are surprised, and I mean this with respect, then I can only assume that you are at the very beginning of your journey here.
We all had to begin this journey at some point, and while I welcome you to the table and encourage your involvement, I do so warily and with thinning patience.
While some of us have been part of this conversation for years, most have not been. Most young westerners have been mobilised not by attention to detail, but by emotional reactions driven by decades of misinformation and ideological grooming.
Despite the rampant anti-western sentiments (of which many I am sympathetic to), the mobilisation of our youngest, least experienced, and most impressionable minds reeks of western arrogance.
One of many horrifying results of this centuries-long geopolitical event exploded onto our screens on October 7 2023. From the comfort of our homes, images of depravity were beamed up at our faces. Unlike many courses, certificates, or education programs, entry into the Arab-Israeli Conflict appears to have required no prior learning.
I am putting pen to paper in response to the influx of online opinions that, to my understanding, are saying a lot more about liberal Westerners’ conceptions of nation-building, oppressed-oppressor dynamics, and, for lack of a better term ‘whiteness’, than they do about anything going on in the Middle East.
While I’d never have considered myself qualified to speak on The Conflict, I now feel an obligation to grapple with its shockwaves. The Conflict itself is one thing. The commentary surrounding it is something else entirely.
I also can’t help but hold a very careful finger on the pulse of the White West’s relentless and insatiable need to self-represent online—a decade-long passion project that I have no control over.
If you’ve read my work before, you’ll be familiar with my distaste for fashion in all its incarnations. Where there is an unthinking adoption of some norm, or where there is an emotional need satiated by some form of group logic or adherence, we are dealing with fashion. Fashion is polished rot. Fashion is a worn or behaved testament to one’s own frailty. Fashion is the lost self, hiding from sight behind a safe and socially celebrated veneer.
This is not an attempt to delegitimise the liberal west’s very serious moral concerns. As I write, tens of thousands of Palestinians have been killed as the result of Israel’s retaliation to the October 7 attacks by Hamas.
In a past draft I wrote that ‘every single one of us should be appalled by Hamas and Israel’s abject disregard for human life’. But the more I consider this statement, the more I can’t help but wonder whether this paints too simplistic a picture.
It might just be that Hamas value human life less than Israel. They exist as an entity whose primary purpose is stuck in an obsession with refusing to share land and resources with Jews, cloaked in an easy-to-sympathise-with and in some ways true narrative about displacement and occupation. They repeatedly stress the importance of civilian sacrifice, and have removed the lines that would usually separate munitions depots, bunkers, tunnel entrances, schools, hospitals, and homes.
The blaming of one’s unwillingness to share a space with Jews on Jews, and the resulting disharmony, is nothing new to Jews. Our families continue to experience the Holocaust, and the Millenia of persecution preceding it.
The politics of Indigeneity
What is new to Jews is that we are the beneficiaries of the world’s only serious engagement with an Indigenous land-back operation. Sometimes I wonder whether the creation of Israel might be a cause championed by modern progressives should the Holocaust have occurred half a century later.
We must remember history, not re-write it. The Arabs of the British Mandate of Palestine would have a state if they had agreed to the creation of a Jewish state. All ensuing conflict occurs as the result of Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia’s pan-Arab vision of a middle east free from the foreign intervention that had seen so much of the Middle East carved up by European colonisation.
In a time and in a region void of any conversation pertaining to indigeneity or conceptions of land-back enterprises, the creation of Israel was viewed very differently to how we in the west, today, might consider the return of a people to their home.
I pray that, should the Indigenous Australians desire a part of their home back with which to rebuild—or at the very least a voice to parliament that they may use to self-advocate—that the Australian population doesn’t reject these wishes on the basis that the status-quo will do just fine. (Oh, wait.)
Just as the Jews languished through centuries of European persecution, pogroms, and eventually a Holocaust, the Indigenous Australian has, too, suffered his own slow and brutal torture.
Is it ignorance or just antisemitism that insists upon a new false history in which the Jews of the Levant were not forced into exile by Romans, Assyrians, and Babylonians, but instead decided to leave the Holy Land for sunny Poland on a long and rewarding working holiday? And what of their expulsions from the lands in which they had been expelled to? There are too many to list here.
Antizionism and Orientalism
Palestinian refugees have swelled in numbers over the generations as the result of Antizionism. [For further reading, The War of Return.]
There are more Palestinian refugees in Chile than in Lebanon, and there are three times as many Palestinian refugees in Israel than in Chile. The creation of a refugee crisis, as opposed to the creation of a Palestinian state, acts as a holding space or limbo-by-design for a broader vision of a future without Israel. As the plight of the Palestinian only worsens, the burden of responsibility is lumped not with those unwilling to allow the state of Israel to exist peacefully, but rather on Israel itself for daring to have existed.
We must understand: in a context with less antisemitism and more indigenous rights recognition, Israel and Palestine would have been created and co-existed from 1947.
Antizionism provides the logic behind the Palestinians’ Arab neighbours’ refusal to accept or negotiate on terms that accept the continued existence of the state of Israel.
It is within Israel’s Arab neighbours’ interests to keep the Palestinians stateless—for by creating the Palestinian state before destroying the Jewish state, they by-proxy accept accept what was originally presented to them in 1947/48. And then what? Admit shameful defeat? Accept responsibility for the hundreds of thousands of lives ruined by this antisemitic gambit?
The Israelis as malevolent occupiers
Yet even if the blame for the plight of the Palestinian rests largely on Arab nations, what about Israel’s current conduct? When a country kills 30,000 people, as I’ve just seen happen, we might also be forced to consider that it, like Hamas, does not value human life.
And still, I could very much make the case that both ‘Global North’ and ‘Global South’, East and West, have done more than enough to beggar the question: does anyone actually value human life the way we say we do?
Is the valuing of human life an objective that is impossible to uphold indiscriminately, justly, and fairly?
The concept of the state entitles state bodies to a responsibility to place the safety of its own citizens above others’, creating a life-value-hierarchy that shifts as one steps across a border.
And given the countless other examples of violence, genocide, inequality and modern-day-slavery, I can’t help but wonder: is the outcry over this conflict really about valuing human life at all?
If so, why have I seen next to nothing on social media about the ten-times-as-many civilians murdered by Assad in Syria over the past decade? What is it that compels these young western reactionaries to select certain peoples’ plights over others’, ranking and valuing dead Arabs based not on the degree of violence itself or the reasons for it, but by narratives that speak more fully to their own prejudices and fragile senses of self?
Antizionism as a response to Antisemitism
I only wish that I had written this essay before October 7. All that has changed between then and now is the significant loss of ‘moral capital’—to borrow a phrase from my friend, academic and Palestinian activist Fahad Ali—that Israel has now lost.
Nothing has changed for Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis—whose motto is "God Is Great, Death to America, Death to Israel, Curse on the Jews, Victory to Islam", a motto modelled on revolutionary Iran’s motto: "Death to U.S., and death to Israel".
Liberal Westerners treat terrorist organisations like Hamas with a large degree of orientalist infantilisation—whereby an absurd and Borat-esque hatred of the Jews must be either disregarded or rationalised away to protect one’s attachment to one’s own outrage. One must wilfully ignore much of the evidence that this antisemitism is the same antisemitism that drove the Jews from the land in the first place, and has much less to do with the displacement of Palestinians than it does bigotry.
To take these states and these organisations at their word—"God Is Great, Death to America, Death to Israel, Curse on the Jews, Victory to Islam"—would be to reckon with one’s own antisemitism, and this is something that liberal Westerners are by all measures not ready to do.
The Shame-Body Politic
Eckhart Tolle refers to an individual’s trauma as their ‘pain-body’. While I don’t love Tolle, I do find this metaphor useful. The concept of a pain-body is designed to separate our physical selves from our negative experiences (and their repercussions). Separating our concept of self from our pain helps us to take agency over our own feelings and reactions and further allows us to exist as more than mere victims of circumstance and suffering. The pain can be regarded from a vantage point less obscured by the pain itself, and the introspecting individual may be able to make causal connections between their pain and their own personalities and behaviours that they might otherwise have been unable to make.
If we were to appropriate Tolle’s pain-body metaphor to shame, we might well be able to approach an individual’s—or even a collective’s—shame-body similarly.
I would like to propose that white liberal reactions to Israel are based more on a shame-body-politic than anything else. I would like to pose the question: what if a post-colonial western body of shame has coalesced into a certain type of body politic that has more to do with a shared emotional disposition regarding past indiscretions than any collective, event-based, fact-based memory? What if the white liberal West’s collective shame-body has replaced what only decades ago delineated ‘left’ from ‘right’—conceptions of liberty, for example. What would the world look like if the historical record were to be replaced with an hysterical record—a history told through a glass, darkly?
I think we’re living in it. History and truth-telling have been replaced by an infographic, feeling-oriented politic born not of understanding but from its corrosive antithetical: shame. And from this dynamic is born yet another Western proxy war.
I believe that White Liberal Westerners see Israel in the mirror; a modern incarnation of all the things they resent about themselves; a nation-building enterprise that exists at the expense of someone else; a USA-backed puppet state armed to the teeth; as no more than a cynical western outpost in the Middle East; as a country of white people (false, of course) dispossessing an indigenous population (misleading, of course); as an island of perceived privilege and security poking out from a river of blood.
I will save the diatribe about the Soviets’ very deliberate and ultimately successful propaganda campaign for another time. Until then, here is someone else’s work on the matter. And here is some more, and some more, and some more. Think about Israel as the Soviets’ Vietnam. Think about the loud, liberal West’s obsession with Israel’s illegitimacy as the demarcation of a very successful Soviet anti-Zionist propaganda campaign born of a fear of western influence in the Middle East. Again, all very well-documented and extremely difficult to argue against without resting on anti-vaxx levels of conspiratorial paranoia dressed up as educated scepticism.
White liberal Westerners have attached their egos to a calling for the destruction of Israel to make themselves feel better about the privilege that most of them have done nothing with but complain about. Many of us in the West live lives of great privilege, and believe that this privilege needs atoning for. We atone on social media, we atone with the way we spend our money, we atone with false humility and self-deprecation in the hope that some karmic entity might not see through the whole charade. We atone with keffiyehs and watermelon emojis and beers on the way home from The Rally.
By attacking Israel—by insisting that Israel has no right to exist, etc—the white liberal Westerner lets himself off the hook: I might be a living breathing testament to a problematic historical dynamic, but I’m doing everything I can to right the wrongs of the past by shovelling centuries' worth of white shame onto a country full of Jews.
It’s nothing other than convenience and opportunism that has seen the volume of this narrative raised recently—Israel has after all just killed 30,000 Palestinians.
An ignorant Western conception of Israel is that it is a state full of privileged white people. When the West thinks Jews, we think Larry David, Jerry Seinfeld, Barbara Streisand… we think Ashkenazi (European) Jews. Less than a third of Israel’s population are Ashkenazi Jews. An Ashkenazi Jew is a member of the European Jewish Diaspora. An Ashkenazi Jew is a type of Jew born from displacement. A little-known fact among Western liberals is that Arab nations—I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again— were still expelling Jews after the Holocaust. Before it, too. And where do you think they all went?
They went to Israel—the country that many of these Arab nations would then subsequently invade repeatedly while insisting on ‘driving the Jews into the sea’.
The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem’s Amin al-Husseini and the Iraqi Prime Minister Rashid Ali al-Gaylani’s attempted to convince Hitler to extend his Holocaust into the Middle East.
Countries like Yemen, Syria, Morocco, Iraq, Egypt, Libya, Lebanon and Egypt all gave Jews more than enough reasons to leave their homes and travel to Israel. Young Westerners seems to have a very limited understanding of the circumstances that drove so many Jews to seek refuge in Israel. This omission from the narrative conveniently absolves Israel’s neighbours of their participation in the circumstances that ensured the very need for the state of Israel.
In the immediate aftermath of the extermination of 6 million Jews, like vermin, in Europe—Jews living in exile, mind you—the stateless Jewish population were granted return to their historical homeland by the establishment of the state of Israel in the hope that it could be divided and shared with Palestine’s Arab population.
Yes, Israel was created within what the West had been referring to as the British Mandate of Palestine. Yes, this was considered an Indigenous land-back operation decades ahead of its time. Yes, it culminated in Israel’s immediate invasion by its neighbours, and one can’t help but wonder if Israel’s neighbours’ implacable position on its right to exist is as much to blame for the plight of the Palestinian as the Jews’ return to the land.
Arabs in the British Mandate began adopting a national identity and referring to themselves as Palestinian after the Zionist movement was underway. In the meantime, generations of Jews identified as ‘Palestinians’. If this conflict was simply a conflict predicated on the legality of states’ respective ‘legitimacies’ then it would have been over long ago.
Up until the creation of Israel in 1948, Palestine was a region, and subsequently to the creation of Israel, Palestinian became a national identity. This, again, is well documented and not really in contention among anyone other than the social media warriors. This is not to say that the Palestinian national identity is any less of a national identity than any other national identity. It is just an attempt to clarify the changing meaning of the word and the ways in which it has been shaped by displacement and conflict, as opposed to a unifying love for scarves and watermelons. The trope repeated over the Christmas period that ‘Jesus was a Palestinian’ is why this paragraph found its unfortunate place in this piece. It started off funny, but became concerning incredibly quickly. And then, to be honest, it got funny again.
There were Jews of Palestine and there were Arabs of Palestine. There are Jews of Maroubra and there are Christians of Maroubra. They are all Maroubrans. What happens next between these Maroubrans should not be used to re-write a history in which Jews are not Maroubrans, but instead now cast as an invading force of colonial oppressors.
More to the point—why did Israel’s Arab neighbours do everything they could to poison the possibility of a two-state solution from day one? The answer that the White Liberal West is unable to reckon with is that unlike in Europe, antisemitism in the Middle East was and still in many ways is nothing to be ashamed of. Without antisemitism there would be no conflict, because without antisemitism how could anyone argue against the return of a decimated indigenous population to its homeland? It is the Jews’ Jewishness that makes Israel ‘illegitimate’.
Much of this information has, up until the recent rise of the TikTok academic, been readily available to anyone curious as to how and why we are where we are today.
The issue in question has never been whether or not Israel sits on the land that Jews were dispossessed from. The issue is that, in allowing the Jews passage home and a legal framework with which they may have real security—a state—the details with which this land ought to be shared with the Arab population of the British mandate of Palestine have never been agreed wholly agreed to. The truth is that both of these ethnic groups have the right to live on this land, but have been unable to negotiate the terms by which this should happen.
The content we post is far more often a mirror into ourselves than it is a source of valuable or educational information. I’m not convinced that I’m in any position to sit down and write in a way that attempts to convince people what to think. I am however convinced that the nature of the conversation surrounding the Israel-Palestine conflict has presented us with an opportunity that we must not miss: the opportunity take solemn and searching inventory of our own praxis; the opportunity to ask ourselves why it is that we feel so compelled to join and bolster certain narratives through our various online platforms—why it is so important to feel and to be a part of dynamics that even the best minds of our generation have struggled to turn into viable outcomes.
The simple answer is that through mass engagement and education dissemination, we can work together to raise a certain collective consciousness about ‘genocide’ or ‘terrorist rapes’; that perhaps with enough sharing of important information we can be part of a moral front against an ‘apartheid state’ that ‘doesn’t have the right to exist anyway’.
But this leaves too many questions un-answered.
What about all the other atrocities going on? Bashar al-Assad has murdered and tortured more than 300,000 Syrian civilians over the past decade.
When Arabs kill each other in the same area, where are our social media campaigns and rallies and letters to our MPs?
What about all the other states that have emerged as a result of colonialism?
Does Australia have the ‘right to exist’?
Why must we feel as though we have to choose the tragedies of one people over another?
Surely if we were directed by a mere humanitarian ethic then there would be no need to cast doubt over the rape and torture of Israelis? Surely a real humanitarian gesture would be to acknowledge that a horrible thing was done to Israel on October 7th, and Israel’s response has in turn created another tragedy of unspeakable scale.
Right?
The Shame-Body’s Humanitarian Disguise
Perhaps many of us are not the humanitarians that we think we are. Much of our online noise (or ‘engagement’) is more about helping us to generate moralistic personality billboards designed to pave over the cracks in our own white, western fragility than to help the powers that be negotiate geopolitical complexities.
White western liberals wrongly assume that where Jews are involved—or on matters pertaining to Israel—that they have skin in the game. That they are somehow responsible for the conflict as co-conspiring colonising entities; an abhorrently twisted interpretation of events. The White Western Liberal feels as though he gave the Jews a gift that he can take away when it’s no longer convenient.
We in the West feel that, as we can’t undo our own genocidal and colonial atrocities, that we can shift them onto Israel’s narrative and seek retribution for our sins accordingly. We feel a white-guilt-founded urge to intervene in a way that never manifests when China forces Uighurs into slavery, or when Syrians kill hundreds of thousands of their own. Between 400,000 and 600,000 Ethiopians died as a result of the Tigray War over the past two years. Where are our infographics?
A western liberal epistemology, under-girded by ‘privilege shame’, insists that morality and justice are achieved by first breaking all conflicts down into an oppressed-oppressor binary, and then retroactively justifying all behaviour of the perceived oppressed as mere reaction to an oppressor.
The perceived oppressor can do no right. The perceived oppressor in this case has been referred to as a genocidal, apartheid colonial power long before the recent decimation of Gaza. I was at the rallies and I was hash-tagging the hashtags and I was refusing to buy Israeli products in my early 20s, too. I’m told it’s a ‘rite of passage’ for a young left-wing Jew to toe the party line against Israel, which is a very generous way of excusing my youthful ignorance and un-treated shame complex.
I’ve been listening to calls to ‘erase Israel’ for years. A fellow student and now lecturer at RMIT’s Professional Writing and Editing degree (who I have decided not to name) told me that Israel needed to be destroyed and returned to its ‘rightful owners’—something I’ve heard a lot of for many years now.
This attitude creates a self-fulfilling ‘damned if you do, damned if you don’t’ prophecy. If people think you’ve no right to exist regardless of whether you’re using missiles to intercept missiles coming at you, or missiles to eliminate your enemy, then one can understand the chilling calculus behind Israel’s decision to finally wage its full-scale assault on Gaza. Sparing civilian casualties has afforded Israel nothing but a claim to a moral high ground that goes unseen and unheard.
Western liberal shame has compelled us to hold highly emotionally charged perspectives on matters we know nothing about, not because we have the capacity to affect real change in these matters, but rather to self-soothe in an age that rightfully identifies white society as the beneficiaries of centuries worth of conquest and subjugation.
I’d like to suggest that there is a little Union Jack at the centre of every angry white liberal yelling ‘from the river to the sea’, desperately reaching for a banner with which we might hide our own privilege shame behind. I’d like to suggest that the innumerable interactions I’ve had with young liberals justifying Hamas’s behaviour is not necessarily mere ignorance or psychopathy, but instead arises as a result of the ego’s need to move one’s internal shame onto an external object. A shame-body is created, and so too is manifested a shame-body-politic.
And the result? Look around. Bin Laden’s letter to America is being celebrated on TikTok, Jews are being targeted worldwide for apparently embodying colonialism—the word at the centre of white guilt—and terrorist organisations are celebrated as freedom fighters. ‘Believe all women’ has been abandoned by those who insisted upon its importance because it doesn’t cater to the oppressed-oppressor dynamic, and the families of raped teenagers are now forced to endure another trauma. And the most troubling part? That almost every person I speak to about this conflict, no matter how strong their opinions, seems to know nothing about how we got here.
Icebergs
I was recently asked, ‘whose side are you on?’.
I’m not interested in sides. I know this sounds arrogant, but it’s the sentence that keeps running itself behind my eyes, and it is too succinct and too true to me to ignore. It goes a little something like this: I know too much to be able to pick a side. I used to see this kind of fence-sitting or agnosticism as weakness. But the truth is in the grey, and the truth doesn’t care about how I feel. Not seeing things in an oppressed-oppressor binary offers me the opportunity to see the world as it is, and not a world shaped by reductive categories designed to help me cope with my own fragility.
We live in an age where it has become more celebrated to have a strong opinion than it is to reserve the right to humility, agnosticism, or at the very least, the patience to learn. It’s also important to note that the strength of an opinion is measured in its prosecution, and not in its merit.
If you are indeed surprised by the unfolding events it would indicate that you have not been across the situation long enough to be in a position to meaningfully contribute to the conversation. Or you’re incredibly optimistic—which, again, suggests you probably haven’t had much of an eye on Middle Eastern politics…
Today I can’t help but feel far more fascinated by the mechanisms behind how and why we develop the opinions we develop, pick the sides we pick, and in turn share wherever it is we have landed. To hold an opinion and to share that opinion without being curious as to what individual internal mechanisms undergird the entire motion is a perfectly reasonable place for a person in their teens or twenties to be. To lead an examined life is to have lived enough examinable life. It is absolutely unreasonable to expect a 25-year-old to understand the extent to which their childhood wounds are informing the way in which they curate their social media profile.
That said, we do live in an age that desperately encourages self-reflection, so much so that 10 minutes on any dating app will see you inundated with people requesting that their potential matches have ‘done therapy’. It is within this context that I feel comfortable to—instead of picking a side and writing a diatribe—write about the rest of the iceberg. My social media feeds at the moment are just a sea of jagged and bloody iceberg tips.
But while the tips of icebergs might float detached and solitary, their vast and gaping bodies clunk and graze against each other in uniform movements along shared currents. All of these iceberg tips—which can be mostly separated into two ‘sides’ that say stuff like ‘stop the genocide’ or ‘we must do whatever is necessary to kill all the terrorists’—sit atop actual icebergs that are very easy to recognise. Nationalism, racism, antisemitism, loneliness, ignorance, fashion… There are many more. And the currents that pull them together? That bind these icebergs into impenetrable hive-minds of hatred? Fear. It’s always fear.
I’d like to spend less time on the flags planted on the tips of icebergs, and more time on what’s going on below; on the supporting frameworks beneath these sides, and the currents that band these frameworks together so invisibly. It will be impossible to do this honestly without giving actual examples and passing criticism on both ‘sides’.
If you are someone who will interpret a criticism of an aspect of your ‘side’ as a support for the ‘other’ side, or if you’re someone who is not emotionally capable of reckoning with the possibility that your ‘side’ is capable of producing the types of monstrosities and atrocities that the ‘other side’ is guilty of, then you might have some soul searching to do.
Ideology and Self-Soothing (an optimistic conclusion)
We all have the right to self-soothe. Furthermore, many of us develop means of self-soothing that deliver a short-term relief at the cost of our broader goals. It would be lazy to accuse people of being bad or ignorant or mean-spirited simply because they derive a certain subconscious relief from attaching themselves to the plight of a perceived underdog in a faraway land. It would be no less lazy than blaming a person’s drug and alcohol problems on their moral character. Like I’ve said, many of us retroactively fit our political praxes to accommodate our emotional needs.
But I do believe that we all have the opportunity to self-reflect and sharpen our spears given the right circumstance. I do believe that the more time we spend thinking about the way that we think, the more agency we will be able to wrestle away from fear-based or shame-based thinking, and the more objective and effective we can be as political citizens.
While I have no desire to change anyone’s opinions, I am passionately attached to a desperately optimistic vision of a type of introspection that extends itself out of the therapist’s room and into our political lives. This more recently politicised, younger generation, is encouraged to introspect in ways that previous generations were not. I have a little bit of hope that a societal focus on emotional maturity will manifest in more honest, introspective, and empathetic political dialogue. If there’s any possibility of leaving things here on a positive note, let it be that.