In the Shadow of Israel’s Prosperity: The Illiberal History of the Liberal International Order

Being a nation has been required to be part of the liberal international order. While the Jewish people, who had long lived as an ethnoreligious group were advantaged for being recognized as such, Arab residents in Palestine were ambiguous and ambivalent in this respect. The Oslo peace process presumed the existence of the two nations, and after its failure, the Palestinians were charged with their incoherence as a nation. With the developed technology of surveillance, Israel began to control daily lives of Palestinians in the occupied territory, and this technology began to be a basic component of the liberal international order in the era of “War on Terror.” Such a Zionist defense ethos is rooted in the dark history of anti-Jewish pogroms in Eastern Europe, the cradle of the Zionist movement. Well before the period of the Holocaust, the memory of these pogroms shaped Zionists’ reaction to Arabs’ uprisings against Zionism. Zionists tended to identify these events with pogroms in Eastern Europe where Jews were innocent victims, thus making it difficult to perceive Palestinian Arabs’ sufferings that were caused by Zionist settlements in Palestine. The history and memory of the international (dis)order has its consequences.