The Big Picture: How Israel Won the West examines how Israel has come to occupy such a privileged and protected place in the Western world. It traces the journey of the Jewish people from biblical stories of origin through centuries of persecution and the advent of Zionism, all the way to the creation of Israel and its ensuing occupation of the Palestinian territory. Along the way, what is revealed is a process of transformation, of how Jews went from being despised by early Christians as “Christ killers” – seeding a vile anti-Judaism that would mutate into anti-Semitism – to being considered part of the white Western world, sharing a common Judeo-Christian heritage.
The film lays bare the alignment of Zionism with “Western civilisation”, deliberately putting it in opposition to the people of the east – Arabs, Muslims. This would lay the foundations for an Israel where Arab Jews would be marginalised and European Ashkenazi Jews would dominate and go on to become the bedrock of support for right-wing governments and ultra-right nationalists.
What becomes apparent is the century-old policy, first outlined by Ze’ev Jabotinsky, that only force could impose Zionism and beat Palestinians into accepting the reality of colonisation.
Maintaining the imposition of this settler-colonial reality would require a “special relationship” between Israel and the United States. It would be fostered not just by US geostrategic interests in the Middle East but also facilitated by the “whitening” of Jews in the American and Western imagination, folding them into an opportunistic Judeo-Christian identity that excluded Arabs. This deliberate positioning of an “us” and a “them” has served to legitimise Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territory and the massacre of Palestinian people, all under the umbrella and support of the Western world order.
The horror of Israel’s war on Gaza is clear for all the world to see. More than 40,000 people are dead, the majority of them women and children, killed in the name of “self-defence” by Israeli forces on a mission to “destroy” Hamas after the attacks of October 7, 2023. We are witnessing, in plain sight, an unfolding genocide. And yet Israel continues its war. Its mission creeping into Lebanon, where more civilians are killed as Israel targets Hezbollah. All this is playing out with the full support of the West as Israel claims to be fighting on behalf of Western civilisation and against “human animals” in a battle between the Judeo-Christian world and “barbarians” – a contrived narrative long in the making.
Featuring:
Shaul Magid – visiting professor of modern Jewish studies, Harvard University’s Divinity School
David Freidenreich – professor of Jewish studies, Colby College
Omer Bartov – professor of Holocaust and genocide studies, Brown University
Raz Segal – author, Genocide in the Carpathians
Michelle Mart – associate professor, Pennsylvania State University
Arie M Dubnov – associate professor, George Washington University