{"id":315760,"date":"2026-05-04T12:00:21","date_gmt":"2026-05-04T11:00:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=315760"},"modified":"2026-05-04T11:57:09","modified_gmt":"2026-05-04T10:57:09","slug":"the-wests-bubble-of-illusion-about-israel-and-about-itself-is-finally-being-burst","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2026\/05\/the-wests-bubble-of-illusion-about-israel-and-about-itself-is-finally-being-burst\/","title":{"rendered":"The West\u2019s Bubble of Illusion about Israel–and about Itself–Is Finally Being Burst"},"content":{"rendered":"

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The genocide in Gaza and ethnic cleansing in Lebanon exhausted the West\u2019s moral legitimacy. Now Iran is slowly exhausting the West\u2019s military primacy.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

1 May 2026 – <\/em>For decades, two irreconciliable narratives about Israel and its motivations have existed in parallel.<\/p>\n

On the one side, an official western narrative portrays a plucky, besieged \u201cJewish\u201d state of Israel, desperate to make peace with its hostile Arab neighbours. Even to this day, that story dominates the political, media and academic landscape.<\/p>\n

Time and again, or so we are told, Israel has held out an olive branch to \u201cthe Arabs\u201d, seeking acceptance, but is always rebuffed.<\/p>\n

A largely unspoken subtext suggests that supposedly irrational, bloodthirsty, Jew-hating regimes across the region would have completed the Nazis\u2019 exterminationist agenda but for the West\u2019s humane protection of a vulnerable minority.<\/p>\n

A Palestinian counter-narrative, accepted across much of the rest of the world, is choked into silence in the West as an antisemitic \u201cblood libel\u201d.<\/p>\n

It presents Israel as an ethnic supremacist, highly militaristic state \u2013 armed by the United States and Europe \u2013 bent on expansion, mass expulsions and land theft.<\/p>\n

On this view, the West implanted Israel as a colonial military outpost, there to subdue the native Palestinian population, and terrorise neighbouring states into submission through relentless and overwhelming displays of force.<\/p>\n

Palestinians cannot make peace, or reach any kind of accommodation, because Israel pursues only conquest, domination and erasure. No middle ground is possible.<\/p>\n

The proof, note Palestinians, is Israel\u2019s long-standing refusal to define its borders. As its military power has grown decade after decade, ever more extreme political agendas have surfaced, demanding not just Israel\u2019s takeover of the last remnants of the Palestinian territories it illegally occupies but expansion into neighbouring states<\/a> like Lebanon and Syria.<\/p>\n

Drunk on power<\/h3>\n

Here are two conflicting narratives in which each side presents itself as the victim of the other.<\/p>\n

Two and a half years into a series of Israeli wars against the peoples of Gaza, Iran and Lebanon, how are these two perspectives holding up?<\/p>\n

Does Israel look like the frustrated peacemaker facing off with barbaric opponents, or a rogue state whose decades-long aggression has provoked the very retaliatory violence exploited to excuse its constant war-making?<\/p>\n

Is Israel a small, reluctant fortress state defending itself, or a western military client so drunk on its own power that it can no more limit its territorial ambitions than a great white shark can stop swimming?<\/p>\n

The truth is that the past 30 months have graphically exposed not only what Israel always was but, by extension, what our own western states aspired to achieve through their most favoured Middle East client.<\/p>\n

In a moment of imprudence last month, Christian Turner, Peter Mandelson\u2019s replacement as British ambassador to the US, let slip the reality. Washington, the West\u2019s imperial hub, he said, had no deep loyalty to its allies \u2013 apart from one.<\/p>\n

Unaware his words were being recorded, he told a group of visiting students<\/a>: \u201cI think there is probably one country that has a special relationship with the United States, and that is probably Israel.\u201d<\/p>\n

That special relationship requires that the political and media class in Washington\u2019s other client states, such as Britain, shield the West\u2019s Sparta in the Middle East from critical scrutiny.<\/p>\n

So glaring have Israel\u2019s atrocities become that the British government announced last month that it was shuttering its Foreign Office unit tracking war crimes<\/a> \u2013 citing the need for cuts \u2013 rather than face further exposure of its collusion in those crimes.<\/p>\n

If the British government refuses to monitor Israel\u2019s war crimes, don\u2019t expect more from the establishment media.<\/p>\n

For months, Israel has been blowing up village after village<\/a> in south Lebanon, driving millions of inhabitants from lands lived on for millennia by their ancestors, and it barely registers with our politicians and media.<\/p>\n

Israel is destroying Gaza\u2019s water supplies<\/a>, as it earlier did the tiny enclave\u2019s hospitals and health system, ensuring the further spread of disease, and our politicians and media have barely a word to say about it.<\/p>\n

Israel kills journalists<\/a> and emergency crews<\/a> in Gaza and Lebanon week after week<\/a>, month after month, and it raises barely an eyebrow from the political and media class.<\/p>\n

Israel declares \u201cyellow lines<\/a>\u201c in Gaza and Lebanon, demarcating expanded borders that formalise its theft of other peoples\u2019 lands, and this instantly becomes the new normal.<\/p>\n

Israel continuously violates ceasefires<\/a> in Gaza and Lebanon<\/a>, spreading misery<\/a> and inflaming yet more anger and bitterness<\/a>, and once again, our politicians and media turn a blind eye.<\/p>\n

Which western media outlets are pointing out a starkly revealing fact: that Israel now occupies more of Lebanon than Russia does of Ukraine<\/a>?<\/p>\n

Media bias<\/h3>\n

An analysis by the Newscord media monitoring group<\/a> last month confirmed earlier research: that the British media studiously avoid<\/a> naming ethnic cleansing and genocide when it is Israel \u2013 rather than Russia \u2013 carrying them out.<\/p>\n

Comparing the coverage of the most \u201cserious\u201d establishment British news outlets \u2013 the BBC, the Guardian and Sky \u2013 with that of Al Jazeera, the study found that UK media consistently choose to obscure Israel\u2019s responsibility for its crimes.<\/p>\n

Israel was identified as conducting attacks in Gaza in only around half of British news reports, in contrast to nearly 90 per cent of Al Jazeera\u2019s. As Newscord noted<\/a>: \u201cHalf the time, BBC readers aren\u2019t told who killed the person in the story.\u201d<\/p>\n

That was graphically illustrated in a notorious BBC headline<\/a>: \u201cHind Rajab, 6, found dead in Gaza days after phone calls for help\u201d.<\/p>\n

In fact, an Israeli tank had sprayed a stationary car with gunfire even though the Israeli military had known for hours that it contained a Palestinian girl \u2013 the sole survivor of an earlier attack \u2013 who emergency crews were desperately trying to reach. Israel killed the rescue team, too.<\/p>\n

In another revealing finding, Newscord notes that four out of every five BBC reports on casualties caused by Israel\u2019s attacks used the convoluted passive \u2013 rather than active \u2013 voice, clearly with the intent to downplay Israel\u2019s culpability and savagery.<\/p>\n

The British media also actively undermined the enormity of the Palestinian death toll in Gaza by regularly attributing the figures to a \u201cHamas-affiliated\u201d health ministry \u2013 even though the numbers, currently at well over 70,000 Palestinians, are almost certainly a massive undercount, given Israel\u2019s early destruction of the enclave\u2019s government and its capacity to count the dead.<\/p>\n

The fact that the United Nations has found the Gaza figures to be credible was mentioned in only 0.6 percent of reports.<\/p>\n

Genocidal intent<\/h3>\n

Similarly, the BBC and the Guardian made the decision to humanise Israeli captives of Hamas twice as often as they did Palestinian captives of the Israeli state.<\/p>\n

The inappropriateness of that double standard is underscored by continuing insinuations from politicians and the media that Hamas \u201cbeheaded babies\u201d and carried out systematic rapes on 7 October 2023 \u2013 more than two years after those claims were utterly discredited<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Contrast that with the media\u2019s effective burial of Euro Med Monitor\u2019s report last month on the sickening practice by the Israeli military of raping Palestinian prisoners with dogs<\/a>trained for that very purpose.<\/p>\n

There has been a flood of accounts<\/a> from Palestinians held captive<\/a> by Israel of their systematic rape<\/a> and sexual abuse, confirmed by human rights groups and by the testimonies of whistleblowing Israeli soldiers <\/a>and medics. Little of this is making headway in the western media.<\/p>\n

Newscord points to a further, veiled problem that skews western coverage: the omission of established but inconvenient facts that would present Israel in a depraved \u2013 that is, an accurate \u2013 light.<\/p>\n

For example, observes Newscord, the BBC has entirely failed to report all but one of the hundreds of clearly genocidal statements<\/a> made by Israeli officials, from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu down.<\/p>\n

It is easy to understand why. Legal authorities usually struggle to make a conclusive determination of genocide because, crucially, it depends on divining intent, which is typically hidden by those committing atrocities.<\/p>\n

Starkly, in Israel\u2019s case, not only do its actions in Gaza look like genocide, but its leaders have been crystal clear that those actions are intended to be genocidal. That is behaviour only seen in those intoxicated by a sense of their own impunity.<\/p>\n

Once again, the British media have obligingly taken it upon themselves to shield Israel from any legal jeopardy \u2013 all in the interests of objective reporting, you understand.<\/p>\n

An old story<\/h3>\n

This is nothing new. It has been the same story since before Israel\u2019s violent creation on the Palestinians\u2019 homeland in 1948, when 80 percent of the native population were ethnically cleansed by Israel from the new, self-declared \u201cJewish\u201d state. Or when, in the continuing language of deceit employed by western political, media and academic elites, some 750,000 Palestinians \u201cfled\u201d.<\/p>\n

The aim has been to manufacture and maintain a bubble of illusion for western publics, one where our own crimes \u2013 and those of our allies \u2013 remain invisible to us.<\/p>\n

Note in this regard the UK government\u2019s determined exclusion of Israel from a recent \u201cindependent\u201d inquiry<\/a>, under former Whitehall bureaucrat Philip Rycroft, into malign foreign financial influence on British politics. It was, of course, Russia that was put chiefly under the spotlight.<\/p>\n

Predictably, Keir Starmer\u2019s government rejected in April<\/a> a petition signed by more than 114,000 people calling for a similar public inquiry into the influence of the powerful Israel lobby.<\/p>\n

That came as no surprise, given that any such investigation would have risked foregrounding the many hundreds of thousands of pounds known to have been received by Starmer and his ministers<\/a> from pro-Israel lobbyists.<\/p>\n

The same British political and media class so averse to investigating the malign influence of the pro-Israel lobby is also ignoring Israel\u2019s current, systematic destruction of villages and infrastructure across south Lebanon \u2013 in flagrant violation of a supposed ceasefire.<\/p>\n

Israeli soldiers have told local media<\/a> that their job is to target all structures indiscriminately, whether civilian or \u201cterrorist\u201d, with the goal of preventing the Lebanese inhabitants from returning to their villages.<\/p>\n

That fits with Israel\u2019s announcement that it does not intend to withdraw<\/a> after the fighting ends, and widespread plans to colonise the occupied lands<\/a> in Lebanon with Jewish settlers.<\/p>\n

Were it not for videos of Israel blowing up Lebanese communities<\/a> breaking through on social media, despite algorithmic suppression, we might not know about Israel\u2019s wholesale efforts to ethnically cleanse south Lebanon.<\/p>\n

Responding to these videos with a rare \u201cmainstream\u201d report on the campaign of destruction, the Guardian sugar-coated the horror faced by Lebanese families discovering their homes gone, along with priceless memories and heirlooms. This experience was described \u2013 absurdly \u2013 by the paper as \u201cbittersweet<\/a>\u201d.<\/p>\n

Critics note a consistent pattern. Israel is not only levelling south Lebanon; over the past 30 months, it has levelled almost every building in Gaza, too.<\/p>\n

But the template for both is of much earlier origin, as every Palestinian learns from a tender age.<\/p>\n

Having expelled most Palestinians from their homes in 1948, Israel spent years blowing up some 500 villages one after another \u2013 even as Israeli leaders publicly claimed to be begging the refugees to return and western leaders were extolling Israel as the \u201conly democracy\u201d in the Middle East<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Expulsions that the West still pretends did not take place eight decades ago are now being live-streamed. This time, they are impossible to deny, as well as the colonial, supremacist agenda behind them.<\/p>\n

Vilify the messenger<\/h3>\n

If the message inhering in Israel\u2019s atrocities can no longer be disappeared, laundered or normalised \u2013 as it was in an age before 24-hour rolling news and social media \u2013 then a different strategy is required: villify the messenger.<\/p>\n

This is the political task of our times.<\/p>\n

The anti-racist left are demonised as Jew-hating bigots for trying to burst the West\u2019s long-established bubble of illusion by noisily flagging both the atrocities committed by Israel, supposedly in the name of Jews, and the complicity of their own governments in those atrocities.<\/p>\n

Last month, Starmer\u2019s government forced through the Commons a law allowing the police to outlaw protests causing \u201ccumulative disruption<\/a>\u201d \u2013 that is, repeat protests like those against Israel\u2019s genocide in Gaza. The media barely blinked.<\/p>\n

This week\u2019s attack on two Jewish men in Golders Green, allegedly by a mentally ill man with a long history of violence, is being quickly exploited by the main parties to prepare for even tighter restrictions on the right to protest.<\/p>\n