“We must form there, in Palestine, a part of the rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilisation as opposed to barbarism.”
Theodor Herzl, The Jewish State (1896)
With this rigid founding formulation, Theodor Herzl was not merely offering a negotiating tactic to attract European imperial powers to support his desired state. He was writing the genetic code of the West’s relationship with the very idea of Israel for more than a century.
Today, with every major military confrontation in the Middle East, Western capitals mobilise their full political and military machinery. This mobilisation forces the central question back into view: why does the West support Israel in such an absolute and unconditional manner?
The ready answer in journalism and academia usually reduces this support to the term “strategic alliance”. Yet the word “ally” is a flawed simplification of the nature of the West’s relationship with Israel. It prevents any serious understanding of the real nature of Israeli existence in the region.
Politically, when we use the term “alliance”, we implicitly assume the existence of two separate entities, each with its own independent historical and geographic context, whose interests temporarily overlap. Political alliances are contractual and utilitarian by nature. They are always subject to calculations of profit and loss. If an ally makes a mistake, becomes a strategic burden, or turns into a moral liability, the other ally applies pressure, reduces support, or may abandon it completely, as modern political history teaches us.
But Western behaviour towards Israel cannot be explained through the material logic of alliances. Israel is not treated inside decision making circles as a partner subject to continuous evaluation.
To understand how the West truly sees Israel, it is not enough to stop at shared interests. We must dismantle its real position inside Western consciousness. The West does not view Israel as an independent national state or a political partner. It treats Israel as a strategic and organic extension of its own system, an extension governed not by profit and loss, but by identity and survival.
The Myth of Taming the East
This perception is sharply visible in the language used to justify Israel’s very existence.
For a long time, Western discourse warmly adopted the classical Israeli narrative of adventurous “pioneers” who arrived from abroad to “make the desert bloom”. When citizens in America, Canada, Australia, or New Zealand hear this phrase, they subconsciously recall the story of the “white man” carrying the burden of enlightenment in order to tame harsh nature and “savage” native populations.
Israeli historian Ilan Pappe explains this dynamic with precision in The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, where he argues that Zionism was never merely a nationalist ideology. Rather, it was always closely intertwined with nineteenth century European colonialism.
This entanglement makes the West see Israel as an extension of its own expansionist history. Western powers are not supporting a foreign entity. They are supporting their own version of “taming the East”, giving this colonial base an emotional familiarity that makes it part of the Western story itself.
Western discourse adopted the classical Israeli narrative of adventurous pioneers who came from abroad to bring prosperity to the desert.
Edward Said explains this in his foundational critique Orientalism, where he argues that the West engineered its image as the centre of rationality by inventing a chaotic and emotional “East”. At the heart of this East, Israel was planted to perform the function of the modern “rational centre” surrounded by a sea of Arab chaos.
This identity alignment is what moves Israel from the category of an “ally” subject to evaluation and accountability into the category of the “self” that must be defended at any cost. It is the foundation upon which an arsenal of cultural and academic arguments was built to justify Israel’s existence and its absolute immunity.
A Villa in the Jungle
This supremacist view is crystallised in one of the most famous political metaphors coined by former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, and frequently echoed by Western politicians, when he described Israel as “a villa in the jungle”.
When this metaphor is dismantled, it summarises the entire geopolitics of colonialism. The “villa” represents an enclosed, modern, rational space, a piece of the West cut out and fenced off. The “jungle”, meanwhile, represents the Arab surroundings: chaotic, barbaric, and lacking law and order.
This metaphor goes beyond propaganda designed to justify Israel’s existence. At its core, it is a condensed expression of how the West sees itself and its position in the world. The European and American centre has always imagined itself as a rational “villa” besieged by a global jungle filled with inferior states and peoples who resist its domination and reject its draining of their resources.
When this metaphor emerged from Tel Aviv, the Western mind absorbed and identified with it immediately because it aligned perfectly with its historical conviction that it is the sole centre of modernity.
Barak described Israel as a villa in the jungle, a metaphor the Western mind absorbed because it aligned perfectly with its historical belief that it is the sole centre of modernity.
The villa and jungle metaphor does not merely describe an existing geopolitical reality. It manufactures a carefully designed colonial reality. It links Israel, which sees itself as a society morally and culturally superior to its surroundings, with the West, which grants it legitimacy based on that connection.
In this way, defending the “villa” becomes defending civilisation against barbarism.
But what makes the “threatened villa” metaphor so dangerous and widespread is that it does not operate on its own inside Western consciousness. Behind the “threatened villa” stands a funded, organised apparatus working around the clock to produce and market it.
Here, hasbara emerges as a media front with massive budgets, designed to fix the image of Israel as a civilised and besieged base in the mind of the Western citizen. Western support for Israel may sometimes appear voluntary and spontaneous. But that impression only survives when the enormous institutional effort invested in manufacturing perception and directing public consciousness is ignored.
Yet this “villa” cannot survive on cultural ties or media marketing alone. It requires a military structure capable of exercising permanent violence to maintain its walls. Here, culture intersects with a purely military function.
In The Fateful Triangle, Noam Chomsky points to this core idea when he notes that Western elites view Israel as an effective Sparta, living in a permanent state of war with its enemies and continuing to exist based on the will of the United States.
Western elites view Israel as an effective Sparta, living in permanent war with its enemies and existing through the will of the United States.
This is how the Western imagination sees Israel: an armed “Sparta” defending itself in a hostile jungle, while simultaneously marketing it as a democratic “Athens” in a space of backwardness.
The relationship, therefore, was never built on pure democratic solidarity as much as it was built on a security architecture managed by a military minority.
The Monopoly on Victimhood
To keep this military machine operating without legal or moral accountability, Israel had to monopolise the role of the “sole victim” inside Western consciousness.
This monopoly was the result of a coordinated institutional effort that invested in the heaviest European guilt complex in history. Israeli propaganda used the tragedy of the Holocaust as a strategic starting point to engineer a historical darkness that transcends time, creating an absolute identification between the “Jew” as a historical victim of European persecution and “Israel” as an armed nation state.
Through this deliberate fusion, the tragedy was stripped from its European context and transformed into a political shield that crosses borders and time. Any criticism today of Israeli state violence or expansionist policies is immediately suppressed with the sword of “antisemitism”.
Israel did not merely harvest Western sympathy. It nationalised the concept of victimhood itself. It manufactured an exclusive narrative that requires the erasure of every other grievance, foremost among them the Palestinian grievance.
This systematic erasure is the only guarantee that this moral and symbolic capital remains protected and beyond accountability.
Israeli propaganda exploited the Holocaust to create absolute identification between the Jew as a victim of European persecution and Israel as an armed nation state.
To translate this symbolic capital politically, the Western mind relies on precise linguistic engineering that redefines the victim and the perpetrator. This is clearly visible in the consecration of the “permanent fragility” narrative.
In political and media discourse across Western capitals, Israel is always on the edge of catastrophe. The Western political and media machine deliberately portrays Israel as a weak entity, surrounded by enemies and standing one step away from annihilation.
This narrative erases the fact that Israel is the only nuclear power in the region, as well as the strongest and most heavily armed military actor. This erasure is deliberate and necessary. It goes beyond ordinary media bias.
Israel is certainly not this fragile. But the narrative of weakness is a constitutive part of its identity in the West. It is the political tool that grants it a permanent state of exception and justifies its use of overwhelming violence under the banner of “self defence”.
As long as you are framed as the weaker and more fragile party, every force you possess becomes justifiable in the name of defending yourself.
The narrative of weakness is part of Israel’s identity in the West. It is the political tool that grants it a permanent state of exception.
To understand how this historical grievance and engineered fragility are translated in practice, we can invoke Judith Butler’s concept of “grievability” in Frames of War. Butler explains how power decides which lives are considered valuable and worthy of mourning, and which lives are treated as invisible or erasable without sorrow.
When this concept is applied to Western coverage of Israel, the management of human sympathy becomes clear. Israel alone is placed inside the circle of recognisable grief. Its existential fears, and even its fabricated claims, are amplified into global concerns. Its security is prioritised. Its losses are narrated with deep intimacy.
The Western citizen knows the details of Israeli deaths because the knowledge system presents them as a familiar extension of the self.
By contrast, Arabs and Palestinians are pushed entirely outside the frame of human recognition. Whole peoples are framed as faceless masses, abstract numbers falling through cold news reports, or worse, as “demographic threats”.
Western editors reduce the destruction of entire neighbourhoods to cold military phrases such as “collateral damage”, or refer to victims as “human shields” in order to justify crushing them with a clean conscience.
In this discourse, the political hopes of these peoples, their demands for liberation, and their very lives become invisible and weightless.
Israel in the Mind of the News Editor
The language of numbers and quantitative analysis of Western journalism clearly exposes this bias.
In a survey published by The Intercept in early 2024, covering major American newspapers such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times, the figures showed that the term “massacre” was used to describe Israeli deaths compared with Palestinian deaths at a ratio of 60 to 1. The word “slaughter” was used for Israeli deaths 22 times more often than for Palestinian deaths, despite the enormous difference in the actual death toll.
This structural bias also extends to Europe. In a major report issued by the Centre for Media Monitoring in Britain after analysing more than 176,000 news clips, it found that media outlets used “emotive language” to describe Israelis as victims 11 times more often than Palestinians.
When an Israeli is killed, the verb appears in active form with a clear perpetrator: “killed by”. But the blood of thousands of Palestinians is passed through passive verbs or vague formulations that empty the event of its perpetrator and make it resemble a natural disaster: “lost their lives”, “died”, or “were killed”.
After analysing more than 176,000 European news clips, it was found that the media used emotive language to describe Israelis as victims 11 times more often than Palestinians.
These figures are not cited merely to prove bias. They reveal its nature.
This is not simply about “editorial policy” or instructions issued from the top of newsrooms. It goes deeper than that. The issue is a complete knowledge structure internalised by the Western mind.
The journalist often does not need direct instruction to make this linguistic distinction. The education, knowledge, and culture they received have already embedded the colonial and Orientalist view of the Palestinian, while producing spontaneous identification with the Israeli as a familiar extension of the self.
This systematic erasure of Arab grievance is essential to the colonial mind. For the West to continue seeing Israel as an oasis of modernity and a mirror of its moral progress, it must strip those standing outside the villa walls of both their political and human eligibility.
Their deaths can then become silent routine events, requiring no grief and demanding no accountability.
Western Academia in Service of the Villa
This stereotypical image of Israel, as an oasis of modernity in a sea of barbarism, could not have endured for so long if it relied only on media promotion or cultural ties.
For this bias to become stable truth, it required a cover that would grant it “scientific legitimacy”. Here, the role of the Western academic institution emerges. This is the space that is supposed to be the fortress of objectivity and rationality.
In reality, academia was never a neutral observer of the conflict. It was the factory that shaped Israel’s image and played the role of “guardian of the narrative”, turning colonial bias into trusted and acceptable knowledge.
This image is formed inside peer reviewed research papers before it reaches newsrooms.
In a survey study published in Arab Media and Society, researchers examined dozens of academic papers in major scientific databases such as Sage and JSTOR. The conclusion was clear: academia practises a blatant structural bias in favour of Israel.
For bias towards Israel to become stable truth, it needed a cover that granted it scientific legitimacy.
Israeli violence is presented in these studies as “justified self defence” and behaviour stemming from “state rationality”. By contrast, the Palestinian narrative is marginalised and excluded entirely, or studied as “radical phenomena” without political legitimacy.
This means the Western researcher, when writing, begins from a pre established conviction buried in the subconscious: Israel is an extension of their own modernity, while Arabs are merely objects of study and discipline.
This knowledge role extends beyond research papers and appears bluntly in the language of official statements issued by university administrations.
In a recent study by Ibrahim Al Samiri and others, statements from leading universities such as Columbia and Oxford were analysed following the escalation of student protests after Israel’s genocidal war against Gaza. The study revealed how academic institutions deploy bureaucratic language to protect the Israeli “villa”.
These statements emptied the Palestinian grievance of its political and moral content. They condemned the losses of 7 October in sharp and clear language, while diluting the systematic extermination in Gaza through neutral terms such as “humanitarian crisis”, as if what was happening were a natural disaster or an earthquake with no known military actor.
More importantly, these universities engineered their statements to strip anti war protests of their nature as a moral movement, reframing them instead as a “threat to academic order” and a source of a “hostile environment”.
This formulation takes us directly back to the myth of the jungle and the villa.
The university, as a representative of the rational Western centre, views support for Palestinian rights as barbaric chaos threatening its internal stability. For that reason, it volunteers administratively and linguistically to protect Israel, not as a foreign state, but as a solid part of its value system and identity, one that must not be questioned.
Israel in the Language of Western Politicians
When we move from academia and newsrooms to Western centres of decision making, the political vocabulary of the West becomes home to some of the most blatant expressions of this colonial structure.
Western politicians do not hide this view. On the contrary, they publicly reinforce a strict duality: Israel represents civilisation, reason, and enlightenment, while its Arab surroundings represent chaos, barbarism, and darkness.
Instead of relying on the language of political realism and power balances, Western decision makers invoke the language of identity through “shared values” and “cultural bonds”. This discourse exceeds the logic of bilateral relations between two parties. It clearly expresses a “self” speaking about its own extension.
In the Western mind, defending Israel is not merely a foreign policy file. It is an explicit defence of the Western self and its place in the world.
When Western decision makers look towards Israel, they are effectively staring into a mirror that reflects their own history and strips Israel of any quality of a foreign entity. This is what robs the phrase “the only democracy in the Middle East” of its alleged neutrality as a political description, transforming it instead into a pure tool for reproducing deeply rooted Orientalist discourse.
Western discourse raises Israel above political and legal accountability by funding and arming it as a non negotiable national security doctrine.
This is visible in former US President Joe Biden’s citation of Tom Lantos, known as the only Holocaust survivor to serve in the US Congress, who said: “The veneer of civilisation is paper thin. We are its guardians, and we can never rest.”
It is also visible in Biden’s explicit admission: “If Israel did not exist, we would have to invent it.”
This “strategic invention” is always marketed as part of the intimate identity of the West. In 2013, Barack Obama linked Israel’s survival to the fate of the entire Western project, citing Harry Truman’s 1948 statement: “I believe Israel has a glorious future before it, not just as another sovereign nation, but as an embodiment of the great ideals of our civilisation.”
In parallel, Israeli discourse directed at the West links the defence of Israel to religious and civilisational dimensions that the West readily embraces.
This appeared, for example, in Benjamin Netanyahu’s 2017 speech before the United Nations, where he used biblical language to declare Israel “a light unto the nations” and a bearer of salvation to the ends of the earth.
This discourse aligns with the “civilising mission” narrative of older empires. Israel moves beyond the narrow square of defending interests and assumes the role of bearer of a universal mission charged with dispelling the surrounding “darkness”.
This colonial path necessarily ends in an “ironclad commitment” to Israeli interests.
In practice, this formulation places Israel above political and legal accountability by funding and arming it as a non negotiable national security doctrine.
Across different time periods and officials, the main driver remains one inherited since Herzl: Israel is order and reason, while the surroundings are chaos and barbarism.
This condition reproduces daily and precisely the mechanisms of cultural domination established by the West through colonialism. It exceeds any simplistic explanation that reduces it to a passing political or emotional bias.
Because the West Will Not Put Itself on Trial
Once we reach this point, understanding Israel as an organic extension of the West resolves another puzzle that has long burdened political analysis: why does international law become completely paralysed before Israel’s crimes?
Usually, Arab discourse explains absolute Western support for Israel in institutions such as the Security Council as Western “hypocrisy” or “double standards”.
But such descriptions are misleading.
Double standards assume there is one law applicable to everyone, but that the West makes an exception for Israel. What actually happens is different. The West does not break international law for Israel. It considers Israel above it from the outset.
The West does not break international law for Israel. It considers Israel above it from the beginning.
With some abstraction, we can read the Western engineered “rules based international order” as a tool for disciplining the periphery and managing the “jungle”. This system was designed from the beginning to hold states that rebel against Western interests to account, from Venezuela to Cuba to Iran and beyond, not to hold the owners and residents of the “villa” accountable.
Since Israel is a piece of this West, it automatically enjoys the immunity granted to it.
Since 1970, the United States alone has used its veto power in the Security Council more than 50 times to block resolutions criticising Israel or demanding a ceasefire.
This is not the normal use of a diplomatic tool to assist a troubled ally. It is a sovereign practice through which the West openly declares: we are protecting our extension, and the laws designed to discipline the periphery do not apply to us.
The matter goes deeper than diplomatic protection.
When Israel is taken to the International Court of Justice or the International Criminal Court, Western capitals do not see this as the trial of a state accused of war crimes. They see their entire colonial history standing in the dock.
Condemning what Israel does today, from replacement and settlement to the crushing of indigenous populations, would simply mean criminalising the founding tools through which the West built its empires and dominance over the world.
Condemning Israel would simply mean criminalising the founding tools through which the West built its empires and global dominance.
For that reason, the breakdown of international law at Israel’s borders is not a defect in the global system. Nor is it a betrayal of Western values, as some may imagine.
It is the system itself functioning efficiently and consistently with its own nature.
The West does not possess two standards here. It possesses one law, designed from the beginning to protect its colonial bases, foremost among them Israel, from accountability.
Putting this base on trial would necessarily mean putting the centre that created it on trial, and the West will never permit that.
But if Israel is an extension of the West, which face of the West did it inherit?
The West has a dual history. It raises the banners of modernity and enlightenment on one side, while hiding a long history of genocide and organised violence on the other.
In reality, Israel has reproduced the worst of this inheritance.
Israel did not inherit liberal values as much as it inherited the colonial machine of extermination.
What it practises today in the form of systematic erasure is structurally no different from what European settlers did to indigenous peoples. When Tel Aviv uses internationally banned weapons to crush entire cities, it invokes the same imperial mind that dropped the nuclear bomb on Japan: a mind that sees horrific extermination as a legitimate and even rational tool to impose domination and discipline rebels.
Not Merely an Ally
This is how the relationship between Israel and the West is built upon a complex matrix where raw material interests intersect with a shared sense of identity.
The West uses Israel as an advanced base to discipline the region and secure its domination. Israel, in turn, invests in the language of identity and the legacy of European colonialism to blackmail Western capitals and, more importantly, consolidate its image as an organic extension and authentic part of the Western centre.
Therefore, dismantling Israel’s image in Western consciousness is not about begging Western capitals for sympathy or asking them to correct their political and moral course.
The real purpose is to stop imagining Israel as merely a “strategic ally” of America and Europe. That idea reproduces the illusion and separates this colonial entity from its roots and central engine.
Israel cannot, and should not, be treated as a normal state with which disagreements are limited to borders or political settlements, detached from the Western centre that engineered it and continues to provide it daily with life and exceptional immunity.
If we understand that Israel is merely a villa built by the West to discipline the jungle, we will automatically abandon the illusion of seeking justice through tools designed by the villa’s owners themselves.
Freedom from the illusion of “alliance” places us face to face with a heavier question.
The question is not how to convince the West to change its position, but how to deal with an entity originally designed to be an extension of the colonial centre.
Israel is not a classical occupation state that can be negotiated with over border demarcation. It is the final realisation of settler colonialism in its most lethal form.
Once we understand that Israel is merely a “villa” built by the West to discipline the “jungle”, the illusion of seeking justice through tools designed by the villa’s owners collapses automatically.
Settlement processes and international appeals were never created to deliver justice to us. They were designed exclusively to manage the conflict and guard the walls of the villa.
