It’s clear what Israel’s western-facilitated genocide has done to Gaza. But what has it done to us? Palestinians are the “canaries in a coalmine”, the Palestinian analyst Muhammad Shehada tells me. “We’re screaming of a major warning of what’s about to come your way. When you have a media-political class that’s relishing, delighting in the murder of our children, do you think they’re going to care about yours?”
There is a warning from our recent, terrifying past that we should heed. Colonialism, warned Martinican author Aimé Césaire, “works to decivilise the coloniser, to brutalise him in the true sense of the word, to degrade him, to awaken him to buried instincts, to covetousness, violence, race hatred, and moral relativism”. The horrors of western imperialism – with its dehumanisation and violence – were, he argued, ultimately redirected into Europe in the form of fascism. This was the imperial “boomerang”, as the German-American philosopher Hannah Arendt agreed.
