The Garden after Gaza: Second Meditation
Gaza in Agony
“Europe is a garden,” Josep Borrell, then European Foreign Minister, told the graduating class of 2022 at the European Diplomatic Academy in Bruges. “We have built a garden,” the longtime European Union senior official continued. “The rest of the world,” Borrell explained, “is not exactly a garden. Most of the rest of the world is a jungle, and the jungle could invade the garden.”
In case the freshly minted diplomats didn’t quite get what he meant, Borrell went on: “the jungle has a strong growth capacity, and the wall will never be high enough in order to protect the garden.” In other words, Borrell seemed to be saying, the Africans and the Middle Easterners and the Asians trying to reach safety and survival in Europe are reproducing at a faster rate than Europeans are. A politician in ancient Rome talking about the barbarians massing on the edges of empire might have said the same thing. So today would many Hindu nationalists about Indian Muslims, Israelis about Palestinians, or Make-America-White-Again Americans about immigrants from anywhere other than Europe, unless they are Whites from South Africa.
Josep Borrell was slammed for these remarks. They neatly fit a time-worn racist trope that is integral to Europe’s image of itself. Borrell subsequently apologized, explaining that what people understood was not what he meant, that, for him, “jungle” referred to a state of lawlessness evident in, for example, Russia’s attack on Ukraine. Still, despite long-standing progressive positions on human rights and Borrel’s clear condemnation of Europe’s role in the Israeli genocide in Gaza, his words in 2022 about the European garden versus the jungle beyond its borders continue to shock.
I wrote immediately about Borrell’s 2022 speech in an extensive correspondence I engaged in that year with the Canadian novelist Anita Rau Badami on how our experiences gardening and with the gardens of our past intersected with our experiences as displaced South Asian women living in the West. I wrote about them again on Substack earlier this year. So, while walking home on a recent afternoon through the Latin Quarter in Paris, my eye immediately caught a small, green volume in the window of the office of the independent publisher La Découverte with the title Le jardin et la jungle, the garden and the jungle. “It’s Borrell’s speech!” I thought before entering and immediately buying the book. The author, Edwy Plenel, co-founder of the independent journalism site Médiapart, was well known to me. (Full disclosure: I have appeared on Médiapart’s video program L’Air libre.) My outrage at Borrell’s speech was puny in comparison with Edwy Plenel’s, who was inspired to write an entire book about the flagrantly colonial lens through which Europe continues to view itself in the world and the horrible violence and injustice that view perpetrates. The full title of his book is Le jardin et la jungle: adresse à l’Europe sur l’idée qu’elle se fait du monde, which can be translated into English as “The Garden and the Jungle: An Address to Europe on Its Idea of the World.”
Plenel’s book is a scathing indictment of the racist hypocrisies and delusions about who is civilized (Europeans and their offshoots in North America, Australia, New Zealand and Israel) and who is not (almost everyone else); what civilization is (institutions and credos with their foundations in the European Enlightenment) and what it isn’t (everything that isn’t Western).
What the European “garden” versus the “jungle” threatening to overrun Europe evokes for most Europeans is something like the collage I’ve created at the top of this post. On the left, the Temple of Love in the Jardin du Petit Trianon at Versailles, constructed for Marie Antoinette’s pleasure in 1778. On the right, African migrants trying to make their way to Europe in an inflatable dingy in the Mediterranean.
After reading Plenel, a very different set of contrasting images are conjured by the idea of the European garden versus the jungle. To give you a flavor, on the left of the photo collage below, I’ve placed a partial view of an early 19th-century depiction of slaves cutting sugar cane in Antigua, their simple clothing and dark skin contrasting with the mounted white plantation overseer in a top hat and jacket. Chattel slavery is how Europe got rich, how it grew its garden and even how it obtained many of the plants it cultivated. Europe dehumanized and brutally exploited non-white peoples around the world for centuries. Most people don’t know, for example, that the Élysée Palace in Paris, the opulent official residence of the French president, was built in 1720 by the slave trader, Antoine Crozat, at the time the richest man in France, for his aristocratic son-in-law. It is just one of the many architectural treasures that adorn the French capital, and other cities in France and across Europe, England and the United States, that were procured by the wealth made from the slave trade and from hard slave labor, as well as other forms of brutal exploitation.
On the right of the same collage, I offer a glimpse of Line Nicolas Tasia’s Creole Garden, created using native plants, in Rémire-Mont Joly in French Guyana. The creole garden, the fruit of a mix of the descendants of Africans imported as slaves to grow sugar and cayenne peppers, indigenous peoples, and laborers brought in from China and India, is a dynamic, diverse ecosystem that is at once an agro-forest, a potager and an ornamental garden. It expresses a radically different horticultural creation from the gardens at Versailles, or the less rigidly formal yet carefully planned gardens in England, or even a typical suburban garden on the outskirts of any city in Europe or North America.
I’ll have more to say in a future post in this series about the idea of la créolisation, or “creolization,” as developed by the French Caribbean poet (and my former colleague many years ago at Louisana State University), Édouard Glissant. It offers a way of thinking beyond the dichotomy of civilized versus uncivilized imposed by the West; a way of thinking about the garden, and our societies, as interconnected ecosystems rather than as curated spaces of exclusion.
The hypocrisy of the European garden
In his book, Edwy Plenel traces the origins of the hypocrisy in the trope garden-versus-jungle at the heart of the West’s idea of itself to the German Enlightenment philosopher, Emmanuel Kant. Though he lived his entire life in a remote province of the Prussian empire, now located in Russia, Kant introduced the teaching of geography in the European university, delivering forty-nine series of lectures on the topic between 1756 and 1796. Kant’s Geography, a collection of these lectures, makes for sickening reading. Skipping the most nauseating bits, suffice it to say that, for Kant, humanity attains perfection in the White race. “Indians have less talent. Negros are the lowest.” And yet, it was Kant who states near the end of his 1795 Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch: “The rights of human beings must be held sacred, no matter how great the sacrifice to the ruling power.”
As Kant’s ideas illustrate, the idea of universal human rights that emerged during the European Enlightenment was never, in fact, universal. In other words, not all human beings were equally human. The preamble to the United States Declaration of Independence, signed on July 4, 1776, during the same period as Emmanuel Kant’s musings on geography, morality and political rights, boldly asserts:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
This was put forth at a time when the founders of the new American republic did not believe that all men, not to mention women, were created equal. They did not believe that the basic rights to Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness were inalienable for all human beings. These men owned slaves trafficked from Africa who served at their tables, cultivated their private estates with backbreaking physical labor, satisfied their sexual desires with no choice in the matter. America is a country colonized by people who believed in the divine right of the White man to ethnically cleanse and seize the vast lands of the North American continent from the indigenous peoples who had lived there for tens of thousands of years. This belief would lead in 1845, with Western expansion of the United States into Texas and Oregon, to the coinage of the term “Manifest Destiny,” the idea that it was God’s will that the territories of North America be conquered by White men and for them to prosper from it, an idea now back in unabashed vogue with Donald Trump’s racist regime. This idea of White supremacy had its origins in the early 17th century with the arrival of the first Anglo pilgrims to Massachusetts who believed that their mission was to heed the biblical injunction: “Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it.” (Italics mine.)
Another product of the European Enlightenment cited by Plenel is the 1789 French revolutionary Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. Here are the first two articles
Article first
Men are born and remain free and equal in rights. Social distinctions may be based only on considerations of the common good.
Article 2
The aim of every political association is the preservation of the natural and imprescriptible rights of Man. These rights are Liberty, Property, Safety and Resistance to Oppression.
These “universal” rights were not universal. They were not extended to women nor to non-White peoples in the lands France was already colonizing at the time of the French Revolution, and they would not be universally given to the people in the lands France would conquer over the coming decades in Africa and Asia. The French papered over the violence of France’s conquests by what they called their “civilizing mission,” based on the assumption of conquered people’s inferiority.
The beautiful European garden is built, in fact, upon the ruins of a world the West has decimated for its profit and pleasure. The true ‘law of the jungle,’ where the victor takes the spoils and might makes right is the one exercised by the same people who claim allegiance to equality and liberty for all. Climate change and other forms of irremediable environmental destruction that directly threaten all of our gardens, and our very survival, go hand in hand with the ethnic cleansing and exploitation of people. They, and every living thing, and all that can be extracted from this earth for profit exist to be subdued by the West’s profiteers.
The Culture of Death: Israel and Palestine
Edwy Plenel argues in his book Le jardin et la jungle that the most egregious manifestation of the contradiction at the heart of the idea of Europe is the apartheid state of Israel. Israel conceives of itself as a fundamentally Western, and therefore superior, society. It is “the only democracy in the Middle East.” It was founded by a people who made “the desert bloom.” Israel perversely uses its self-designated superiority as a Western nation to justify its savage, utterly immoral behavior toward the Palestinian people, whom it does not consider to be fully human, and certainly not deserving of equal rights. Israel’s superiority as an offshoot of Europe should elicit, according to Benjamin Netanyahu, the unquestioning support by Europe for any atrocities or human rights’ violations Israel may commit.
At a 2017 meeting of eastern European leaders in Budapest (think Viktor Orban and, with the reference to Brazil, right-wing politician Jair Bolsonaro), Netanyahu said, and Plenel partially quotes in his book:
“We are part of the European culture,” Netanyahu continued. “Europe ends in Israel. East of Israel, there is no more Europe. We have no greater friends than the Christians who support Israel around the world. Not only the evangelists. If I go to Brazil, I’ll be greeted there with more enthusiasm than at the Likud party.”
It seems that, despite all that has happened in Gaza for the past year and a half, the European Union, which regularly opposes its politics to those of Viktor Orban, agrees with Netanyahu, declining to suspend the European Union Israel Association Agreement on July 15, 2025 despite ovewhelming evidence of Israel’s crimes against the principles that are supposed to be the moral bedrock of the European Union. With that decision, the E.U. destroyed any shred of moral credibility it might have still had.
Business is the name of the game, and it’s business as usual for Europe, one of Israel’s biggest trading partners, as Israel proceeds to implement the final phase of the liquidation of the population of Gaza and the obliteration of any remaining vestige of the home that was theirs.
After watching Israel’s genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza by bombing, assassination, endless relocation, the utter obliteration of their land and all of their institutions and architecture for a year and half; carrying a permanent sickening feeling in the pit of our stomachs, reeling from our disbelief at the bold lies our leaders spew in support of this mass slaughter in real time, watching Palestinians now literally starve to death before our eyes — after all of this — we are still being told that the morally superior position of civilized Western democracies is to claim that Israel has a right to exterminate the Palestinians, by any means it chooses, with no objection from us, and that our leaders and major corporations are right to support the genocide with strong words and lethal arms, and to profit from it.
And if we don’t like it, we are anti-Semites and deserve to be abducted, deported, stripped of our citizenship, banned from speaking, expelled from university, forced to resign from our jobs and generally erased from public view, even if we are Jewish, even if we are Israeli. This is true in the United States. It is true in Germany. It is increasingly true in the United Kingdom.
How not to think of Gaza now, all of the time? It is difficult for any of us with a heart to feel and eyes to see to find respite anywhere, though we need some to protect our sanity. My pretty garden in France is connected to this history. I find it difficult to take refuge within its walls. Yet, I do.
My garden demands a lot of care, especially in high summer. I force myself to go out and weed and water and harvest. Gardens, like children, like the elderly, like all people at some point in their lives, have always demanded care, for thousands of years, everywhere in the world. As I tend my garden, I wish I could give the summer bounty of my potager to a starving family in Gaza. As I pick bouquets of headily fragrant roses and spiky bright dahlias to fill vases in my beautiful old house in the French countryside, a house built before the French Revolution, a house that was here when America declared its independence, I think about how nearly every house and every living green thing has been destroyed in what was, for thousands of years, the oasis of Gaza. The bouquets of fresh flowers from the garden are balms to my soul, balms I wish were available to everyone.
