We all anticipated that with the outbreak of the Gaza war, three files would ignite: the religious file, the moral or value-based file, and the international relations file. In the religious file, reformists, conservative Jews, and fundamentalists are in competition. Islamists see the attempts to seize Al-Aqsa Mosque and demolish mosques in many places as part of a Jewish conspiracy to destroy the mosque and rebuild the temple on its ruins. On the other hand, zealous religious Jews call for seizing the mosque or at least sharing it with Muslims! In any case, the war is religious or should be so, as both parties claim. This represents a new logic that is escalating on both sides, with each side deliberately making "mistakes" in words or actions, either to prove their religious legitimacy or to provoke the other party.
In the international relations file, after promising beginnings for Israel with Hamas starting the war, the file gradually shifted to the disadvantage of the Israeli entity due to the atrocities in Gaza. Of course, the Arabs were the first to advocate for a ceasefire, followed by the Europeans and then the Americans, who organized negotiations between the warring parties in meetings in Egypt, Qatar, France, and Rome. We referred to this as the international relations file because there was a division in the Security Council between the Chinese and the Russians on one side, and America and Britain at first, before they eventually united in the Security Council to call for a ceasefire. Humanitarian organizations and the International Criminal Court intervened, and statements rolled out.
In the moral file, things are different and take on divisive dimensions. The Arab public is deeply outraged by the ethics of the international community, where for several months the Security Council was unable to make a decision due to the opposition from America and Britain to a ceasefire (!). There is growing resentment over double standards and hatred of Islam and Arabs, escalating day by day. Recently, I was in Egypt and heard many university professors and media figures revisiting old topics concerning double standards and Western hypocrisy. A sociology professor mentioned to me that a friend of hers, the Foreign Minister of South Africa, converted to Islam with her family some time ago, prior to the Gaza war, because she and her father revisited the history of apartheid and how they had their home seized without reason for being Black! I was somewhat bothered that my interlocutor sought to use her conversion to Islam to justify South Africa's complaint against Israel before the International Court of Justice. The important thing is that there was a wave of cursing the West and predicting its collapse that drew in everyone on both the left and the right.
Among Western writers, moral decay does not play a role in decline or collapse—they are two different matters. I had previously written about the intellectual current of "the subaltern," which considers the West to be conspiring against itself and the world. It is a radical rejectionist current that justifies every campaign by continuing the culture of colonialism in anthropology, social sciences, and philosophy, and even ideas from the Renaissance and Enlightenment do not escape this critique!
I do not believe that the renewed harsh criticism of the West resembles what "the subaltern" current does or what Edward Said did and exploited by Islamists. Rather, it resembles what contemporary Arab intellectuals experienced after the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was issued in 1948, which coincided with the occupation of Palestine and the establishment of Israel, supported by the states and intellectuals who drafted the Declaration. Consequently, Arab intellectuals hurried to accuse them of double standards. The Palestinian issue is deeply rooted and significant in the souls of all Arabs. Therefore, they are returning today due to the Gaza war with a campaign against the West as a whole because it sided with Israel instead of rushing to cease the war, and Arab intellectuals are firmly convinced that they could have done so if they truly wanted!
I attributed this initially to what I termed a wave of solidarity around Gaza, which benefit Islamists this time as well, both combatants and non-combatants. However, the return of the terms East and West, Islam and the West, signifies a belief in contradictory values, not merely double standards. The issue for an Egyptian philosophy professor is that Westerners possess values that are different from ours; otherwise, how do we explain the position of German philosopher Habermas and his colleagues? Therefore, there must be examination and reconsideration of "their values" and "our values," or rather, what are our values that contradict their values?! Contemporary Westerners—philosophers, sociologists, and international relations scholars—have written about secular and religious standards and how they intermingle and disintegrate in the time or times of globalization. However, in our case, studies have been limited to critiquing classical ethical systems, and serious studies on contemporary Arab and Islamic ethical systems have not been written, unless we consider contemporary theories of Arab and Islamic rationality as theories of governing values?
