Controversy: does Romania have a “servile” voice regarding the war between Israel and the Palestinians?

The political scientist Vladimir Borțun claimed, in an article, that the “servitude” of the Romanian state to the official perspective of Israel, but also the “silence” of the Romanian press and civil society come as part of a “deep provincialism in the obsessive orientation towards the West, which runs through the entire history of Romanian culture”. Literary critic Mihai Iovănel replied, asking “what remains if we extract the western influence from the history of Romanian culture? Babel?”.

The Romanian political scientist Vladimir Borțun, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Oxford, recently published an extensive article, entitled “Unimportant people”, published by the left-wing website Critic Atac. Borțun argues that the West largely relates to the conflict in the Gaza Strip through the lens of the rhetoric promoted by the Israeli government. And that, in Romania, the same unidirectional mimicry is practiced.

“Human Shields”

One of the examples given by Borțun in this sense is the label of “human shields” which he states is “imposed in the public debate by the state propaganda of Israel” and that it “normalized the killing of children”.

“Because ‘human shields’ are still shields, right? They are enemy shields, and enemy shields can be destroyed to destroy the enemy. If Hamas had, however, used Israeli children as ‘human shields’, they would have been named and seen as hostages, and the bombs of the Israeli army would not have fallen so nonchalantly. Other, more surgical methods would have been found to hit Hamas,” he writes.

“There is a deep provincialism in the obsessive orientation towards the West, which runs through the entire history of Romanian culture. The need to be seen, legitimized and adopted by the West is doubled by the more objective need to be financed by the West”, says the researcher from Oxford.

Borțun: “servile” and “silent” attitudes

He argues that in Romania the state and the political class have a “servile” attitude, even compared to the United States, regarding what he describes as the war crimes committed by Israel in the Gaza Strip, while the press and civil society here are rather “silent”.

“I suspect that on the right it’s more about the pro-American dogmatism that unconditionally supports the foreign policy of the White House (sometimes more pro-American than America itself). On the left, we are probably dealing – on a smaller scale but similar to what is happening on the German left – with an overcompensation for the shameful pages of anti-Semitism in the country’s history. Basically, it’s about the historical indifference of the native civil and intellectual elites to what is happening to the east or south of us”, says Vladimir Borțun.

Iovănel: Let’s not wake up with empty pockets, “drinking from the leaf”

On Facebook, literary critic Mihai Iovănel responded to Vladimir Borțun’s point of view, without mentioning him by name, but quoting Borțun exactly.

“Someone from the left writes: There is a deep provincialism in the obsessive orientation towards the West, which runs through the entire history of Romanian culture,” says Mihai Iovănel in a public post on his Facebook page.

“Someone from the left writes: ‘There is a deep provincialism in the obsessive orientation towards the West, which runs through the entire history of Romanian culture.’ Of course, there is nothing new in such lamentation so typical of a part of the left. But the fundamental problem in a country like Romania is not new either: in short, what remains if we extract the western influence from the history of Romanian culture? What are we left with? With the Dacians (although it is problematic that we are in any way their descendants), with the Sphinx, with Babel?”, Iovănel asks.

Iovănel recalls that another left-wing author, G. Ibrăileanu, wrote over 100 years ago: “The Romanians, who created almost nothing, borrowed almost everything. The entire history of Romanian culture, from the end of the Middle Ages until today, is the history of the introduction of foreign culture into the Romanian Countries; and the whole history of Romanian culture from the 16th century until today is nothing but the history of the introduction of Western culture into the Romanian Countries and its assimilation by the Romanians”.

The critic continues:

“Basically, as Ștefan Baghiu says, who wanted to write an article on this topic, the most decolonial philosophy in Ro is protochronism. Protochronism (which is not a communist invention, but older) decolonizes Western influence by simply changing the sense in which the movement of influence occurred: we did not take from them, but they took from us (Latin, Impressionism, the theory of relativity etc.)”

The conclusion of Mihai Iovănel, historian and literary critic is:

“At the end of the day, after fighting the western influence, we still wake up with empty pockets, eating from the leaf.”