Deconstructing and debunking Zionism
The state of Israel is among the most divisive topics in the realms of politics. Its supporters frequently bestow upon it a mystified image of legitimacy, of an ancient claim to the land. Israel is not the product of a modern context to them; it is something which has existed in the realm of potentiality and “justice” for centuries, and has now been realized.
With this view, they attack Israel’s critics as enemies to this grand destiny, as opposing the fulfillment of a centuries old claim to glory.
Our purpose here will be to challenge this view, and to demystify the state of Israel.
To take on this task, we must first begin with the history of Zionism, the aspect of Israel which is most obscured by the fog of ideology.
The history and nature of Zionism and the state of Israel:
What are the origins of Zionism?
Israel was founded by the Zionist movement, which originated in Europe. Theodor Herzl and the WZO (World Zionist Organization) are most often identified as the movement’s founders, but the idea of establishing a Jewish state did not, in fact, originate with them. Before it was adopted by the Jewish Zionist movement, it was a goal held by many European Christian thinkers.
In the 16th century, Thomas Brightman, an influential English clergyman, spoke of the fate of Jewish people as such, “Shall they return to Jerusalem again? There is nothing more certain: the prophets do everywhere confirm it and beat about it.” This view was not his alone. The 16th century was the era of the beginning of the bourgeois national revolutions for the establishment of nation-states. The development of such nations demanded homogenizing projects, which targeted Jewish people as the most obvious embodiment of heterogeneity in Europe at the time.
Indeed, the Christian European preoccupation with confining Jewish people to Jerusalem persisted far beyond the 16th century. Charles-Joseph of Ligne, an Austro-Hungarian field marshal in the late 18th century, said, “I believe that the Jew is not able to assimilate, and that he will constantly constitute a nation within a nation, wherever he may be. The simplest thing to do would in my opinion be returning to them their homeland, from which they were driven.”
For Christian Zionists, either Jewish people were to be converted to Christianity, and thus assimilated, or they were to be removed from Europe. Where they would be placed otherwise was not certain, and would not be certain even as the Jewish Zionist movement began to form in the 19th century.
Zionism among Jewish people began as a rather abstract expression of a desire for the establishment of a Jewish state, not yet necessarily in Palestine. Some other sites initially intended to become a Jewish state were in British East Africa, Ararat City in the US (among many others), and British Guiana. It was also a desire expressed by the religious who saw the establishment of a homeland as divine fate and by secular people, particularly socialists.
The early Jewish Zionist movement largely held popularity primarily among the intelligentsia, while sectors of the petite-bourgeoisie and proletariat also offered nominal support. Its popularity among Jewish people would grow in the 19th century as antisemitism in Europe became more intense, such as with antisemitic laws in the Russian Empire, pogroms throughout Central and Eastern Europe (largely sparked by the assassination of Tsar Alexander II by Narodnaya Volya, which his son and successor, Tsar Alexander III, blamed on Jewish people), and, most importantly, the Dreyfus Affair in France.
The latter-most incident convinced Theodor Herzl, the intellectual known as the creator of modern Zionism and the founder of the World Zionist Organization, that Jewish people had no future in Europe, and that the establishment of a Jewish state needed to be accomplished urgently.
Herzl was a journalist and playwright by trade, falling within the intelligentsia class. He grew up in a bourgeois family in Austro-Hungary, who were highly assimilated. His background, status as an intellectual, and internalized antisemitism taught to him by his assimilated family bore a clear influence on the manner in which he molded Zionism.
Herzl’s WZO was created in 1897, and identified Palestine as the site of the future Jewish state. With its support, Zionist settlers began to migrate to Palestine. The WZO attempted to gain support for their project from the Ottoman Empire, but their efforts were in vain, and they began to search for another power to sponsor the settler-colonial project of Zionism.
With the outbreak of WWI, the imperialist powers of Europe began to devour themselves, and Zionists found official support for their project from the British Empire. The British, then fighting the Ottomans, sought to colonize whatever territories they could seize from the evidently decaying empire. In 1916, they held talks with France, which led to the Sykes-Picot agreement, wherein they decided which formerly Ottomon-held regions would go to whom after the conclusion of the war.
In 1917, near the close of the war, the British issued the Balfour Declaration. Supporting the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine was clearly a component of the aim of claiming the formerly Ottoman-held territories, and would have world-historic consequences. Much of the supplementary support behind the Declaration from British gentiles was motivated by Evangelical Protestantism, which viewed it as the fulfillment of Biblical prophecy, and, significantly, an antisemitic desire to solve the so-called “Jewish Question” by encouraging Jewish people to leave Europe. Settler migration into Palestine grew significantly following WWI, and Israel as a settler-colonial nation began to emerge.
Under British rule in Mandatory Palestine, native Palestinians began to be displaced by the settlers, being excluded from the labor force and the purchase of land and property, which Zionist settlers confined to other settlers (a practice of segregation which continues, albeit in a different form, under the Israeli state). In response, outbreaks of violence erupted between settlers and natives. From 1936 to 1939, Arabs revolted against British rule and Zionist settler-colonialism. In response, the British empire attempted to establish separate territories for Jewish and Arab populations, which failed.
The British then issued the 1939 White Paper, restricting further Jewish immigration into Palestine. After WWII and the devastation of the Holocaust, Europe was convinced that their “Jewish Question” could only be answered by pushing Jewish people out of Europe and into a colonial outpost. And significant sections of the Jewish population were convinced the same; that they could find no home in Europe, by the brutality they had experienced at European hands.
Zionists began to migrate into the settlements in even higher numbers, in defiance of the White Paper. Zionists even began to revolt against British rule, seeking to establish Israel as a state. By 1947, the UN created a plan to partition Palestine into two independent states and a neutral Jerusalem, though it failed to implement it. In response to the passage of the plan, the 1947–1948 civil war broke out between Zionists and Palestinians. By 1948, the state of Israel was established.
What makes Israel a settler-colonial project?
We must first understand what settler-colonialism is. Settler-colonialism must be clearly distinguished from franchise-colonialism, wherein the goal is to subjugate and exploit indigenous populations, and the method is the use of colonial officials who either serve a temporary post in the colony and then return to the mother country, or, less frequently, live as a minority in the colony with no goal of significant expansion or replacement of the natives.
Settler-colonialism’s distinction is that it seeks the replacement, displacement, and even extermination of indigenous populations so that the settlers, who are in the colony to stay and make a life for themselves, can thrive in indigenous homelands. Settler-colonialism is not merely the policy of a single reactionary party in power, as liberals claim of Republicans in the US or Likud in Israel. Settler-colonialism is a trans-partisan social relation. It is not the settler parties that birth settler-colonialism, it is settler-colonialism that births the settler parties.
An example of a settler-colonial nation would be the United States, wherein the settlers — unlike the Spanish colonizers of, for example, the Aztec empire, who sought to subjugate the indigenous nations — sought to replace the indigenous nations. The settlers of what is now the U.S.A. did not make significant efforts to change native modes or relations of production, religion, culture, or gendered divisions of labor, as the Spanish colonizers did. Rather, they merely sought to live off the homelands that indigenous peoples had been the stewards of for centuries, and do whatever they had to to wrench those homelands from indigenous nations.
Israel’s history as a settler-colonial nation much resembles the United States, with the British Empire which established it seeking to relatively temper acts toward natives that would represent war or elimination, due to franchise-colonial ambitions in the heart of empire, while the settlers sought independence from the empire in order to exploit the indigenous homelands to their heart’s content.
It also resembles another, more well-recognized settler-colonial project: the South African apartheid regime. South Africa also existed as an outpost of a primarily franchise-colonial empire (in this case the Dutch and later the English); its settlers also came into conflict with said franchise-colonial desires, and its settlers also fought and won a war of independence to satisfy their thirsts.
When the historical contexts of the birth of these three nations are compared as such, one can easily see why both the US and Israel held in solidarity with the apartheid South African regime even as the rest of the world condemned it: they both were recognizing a sibling nation.
Israeli settlers are not somehow connected to Palestine as their homeland because of a solely ancient historic connection of European Jewish people to the region. Native Palestinians of all ethnicities hold a claim to Palestine as their homeland because they have a common recent history in the region; a true connection within their memory. They have labored on Palestinian soil for centuries as its indigenous people.
One must remember that European Jewish settlers cannot be divorced of their being European or of their character as outsiders entering Palestine to displace and replace natives, including native Jewish people. They could very well have entered Palestine as non-settlers, merely by accepting native Palestinian claims to their homeland and thus their rule. Instead they came as settlers, to destroy the Palestinian nation and establish their own Euro-colonial nation and claim to power.
As Ilan Pappé describes in Ten Myths About Israel,
Patrick Wolfe argues that settler colonial projects were motivated by what he calls ‘the logic of elimination.’ This meant that the settlers developed the necessary moral justifications and practical means to remove the natives. As Wolfe indicates, at times this logic entailed actual genocide, at other times, ethnic cleansing or an oppressive regime that denied the natives any rights.3 I would add that there was another logic permeating the logic of elimination: the logic of dehumanization. As a victim yourself of persecution in Europe, you needed first to dehumanize a whole native nation or society, before being willing to do the same, or worse, to fellow humans.
As a result of these twin logics, whole nations and civilizations were wiped out by the settler colonialist movement in the Americas. Native Americans, south and north, were massacred, converted by force to Christianity, and finally confined to reservations. A similar fate awaited the aboriginals in Australia and to a lesser extent the Maoris in New Zealand. In South Africa, such processes ended with the imposition of the apartheid system upon the local people, while a more complex system was imposed on the Algerians for about a century.
Zionism is therefore not sui generis but an example of a wider process. This is important not just for how we understand the machinations of the colonial project, but also for our interpretation of the Palestinian resistance to it. If one asserts that Palestine was a land without people waiting for the people without a land, then the Palestinians are robbed of any argument for protecting themselves. All their efforts to hold onto their land become baseless violent acts against the rightful owners. As such, it is difficult to separate the discussion of Zionism as colonialism from the question of the Palestinians as a colonized native people. The two are linked together in the same analysis.
Persecution and oppression of Palestinians
The apartheid regime Palestinians have been living under utilizes several tools to expel and colonize Palestinian areas. Starting from what’s referred to in Arabic as the “nakba” or “catastrophe”, approximately 700,000 Palestinians were immediately expelled from their lands following the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, with more to flee over the following decades.
The Deir Yassin massacre had Zionist forces kill between 100–250 civilians,
“Two days after the massacre, Jacques de Reynier, head of the International Committee of the Red Cross delegation in Palestine, visited Deir Yassin. In his personal memoirs, published in 1950, he recalled seeing the bodies of over 200 dead men, women and children: “[One body was] a woman who must have been eight months pregnant, hit in the stomach, with powder burns on her dress indicating she’d been shot point-blank.”
The famed Israeli military chief Moshe Dayan said, “We are a generation of settlement and without the steel helmet and the gun’s muzzle we will not be able to plant a tree and build a house”.
This sums up the early establishment and consolidation of the state of Israel. But the tragedies for Palestinians didn’t end there.
Israel set up a system that effectively reduces Palestinians to second class citizens. Despite the Palestinian Liberation Organisation’s acceptance of the 1967 borders, Israel has established several settlements inside the block of land that was to be allotted to a future Palestinian state.
These settlements are created in a similar fashion to the ones that were used to create Israel in the first place. Expulsion of the native Palestinians, followed by the arrival of settlers. These settlements are separated out from Palestinian areas with roads made specifically for Israelis and forbidden for Palestinians to use.
A wall has been constructed to isolate the West Bank. Palestinians often require permits just to go from one area to another, and have to be herded through a web of military checkpoints. These settlements have effectively killed the often touted “two-state solution”, as they have established far too many Israeli towns and villages for any viable Palestinian state to ever be created with what little was left to Palestinians.
Israel is also in control over Palestine’s water and electricity,
“Palestinians consume on average around 70 liters a day, while settlers consume 300 liters a day. Furthermore, settlers use the water resources to irrigate and produce agricultural goods for export while families in the West Bank are finding it hard to feed their own families from their own agriculture.”
Israel often gets called the “only democracy in the Middle East”. Like most of the claims made by its supporters, it is counterfactual. Palestinians, whose existence and futures are fundamentally undermined by the Israeli government, are forbidden from taking part in Israeli elections.
Moreover, Israeli elections are the spectacle of bigotry and racism that one would expect to find in a settler state. Candidates running for high office, such as Naftali Bennett, have boasted, “I’ve killed lots of Arabs in my life — and there’s no problem with that.” Ayelet Shaked once called all Palestinian people “the enemy”. Benjamin Netanyahu himself took the opportunity to boast that Israel is, “the nation-state not of all its citizens, but only of the Jewish people.”
Even more egregious is the besieging and slaughtering of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip by the Israeli army (IDF). In 2014, Israel launched an offensive siege on Gaza between July and August, killing over 2,100 Palestinians, including almost 500 children.
The Gaza Strip is blockaded, with Israel controlling all supplies that go in and out of the strip, the water and electricity resources, and the routes out of Gaza.
Acknowledging oppression towards Christian Palestinians
Many Zionists or those otherwise reflexively defensive of Israel do not acknowledge the existence of Christian and other non-Muslim Palestinians who are also suffering under Zionist occupation. This is done to purposely push the idea that this is merely a religious conflict between Muslims and Jews, and not that of Israeli settlers and indigenous people,
“Christians, too, are caught up in the strife, but typically overlooked. But even when conservative Christians are aware that Palestinian Christians face difficulty, they tend to believe it is exclusively the result of Islamic extremism. As Baboun told me, when she travels abroad, the question she fields most frequently is about the relationship between Muslims and Christians in Bethlehem. But, she says, ‘I always tell them this is the wrong question. Because we are Palestinians. As Christians and Muslims, we are living under the same pressure to keep on our daily bread, the education of our children, our daily life.’”
In a similar manner, when President Trump declared moving the US Embassy to Jerusalem, Christians of the region expressed outrage, which fell on deaf ears,
“The pope of the Egyptian Coptic Church, who leads the largest Christian denomination in the Middle East, has called off a scheduled meeting with Pence in Cairo. The Chaldean Church in Iraq warned this week that the White House move on Jerusalem risks sparking regional violence and extremism and demanded that the Trump administration respect U.N. resolutions on the city.”
We can also look to various forms of persecutions Palestinian Christians face as a result of Zionism,
“‘I’ve been applying for permits over the past three years, but nothing has come out of it,’ said Samir Abu Daoud, 65, from Gaza, who has a son and grandchildren in Ramallah. Although he meets Israel’s criteria for travel, he has yet to hear back regarding his permit request.”
Acknowledging the various abuses towards Palestinian Christians, or acknowledging that this is about Israel’s occupation of Palestine as opposed to a solely religious conflict, relies on admittance of fault.
Israel’s continued discrimination towards Palestinian Christians, as well as its role in the region — that of aiding Western imperialism, thus often disproportionately resulting in the targeting of the region’s Christians — is one often ignored or dismissed in favor of a more simple narrative.
How and why are Zionism and Israel antisemitic?
Zionism is not a movement for the liberation of Jewish people. Zionism is also not only a Euro-colonial project in West Asia. Zionism is Euro-America’s solution to their so-called antisemitic “Jewish Question”: The transformation of Jewish people into canon fodder for the struggle inherent in the reproduction of Euro-American hegemony in West Asia.
This situation has a notable, historical antecedent. In the early settling of North America, it is well known that small-time farmers and paupers tended to be forced to the outskirts of settler society, in the westernmost borders of the regions occupied by settlers. They served as cannon fodder for the indigenous people struggling to defend their nations and their homelands.
Today, the settlers of Israel play the same role. They still, however, reap benefit from the displacement and destruction of indigenous Palestinians, just as the small-time farmer and pauper white settlers of America did. Europe has not encouraged their role as settlers out of a love for Jewish people, but out of a desire to simply push the problem of their colonial nation-building with its homogenizing character, and its antagonism with Jewish people out of Europe, to force Jewish people into their own homogenized identity, to force them into identification with colonial symbolism. Europe is just as antisemitic as ever.
The only Jewish identification that is deemed acceptable to the Euro-American colonial order is that which serves its purposes and does not conflict with the reproduction of its colonial national identities, one which it can recuperate. When Jewish people seek identification for themselves, in a manner which Euro-America cannot recuperate, the colonial order reacts brutally; its antisemitism bubbles to the surface, and its mask as the “protector” of Jewish people is cast aside.
Israel is not a so-called “Jewish state”. It is a Euro-colonial state that does not care about Jewish people outside of those it can recuperate for its colonial tasks. If Israel truly cared about the defense of Jewish people, it would not displace indigenous Palestinian Jewish people, Zionists would not have suppressed Yiddish culture, and it would not terrorize Jewish people of color, such as by deporting Ethiopian Jews. It would not deport or ban those who question its settler-colonial violence, it would not support reactionary enemies of Jewish people, such as the Ukrainian Neo-Nazi Azov batallion, which was photographed with Israeli IWI tavor rifles, it would not encourage the immigration of Soviet Jews in order to maintain a European Jewish majority over Palestinians and then exploit them to the extreme and it would not fully fall into line with the Euro-colonial order which has “found” an “answer” to its “Jewish Question” by casting Jewish people into the front lines.
Conflating Jewish people and Judaism with Israel is an antisemitic act because Jewish people are a diasporic people as varied as the places they hail from. Antisemites want Jewish people to be a homogenous, racialized people to both recuperate them into cannon fodder for imperialism, and to more easily exclude them from Euro-American nationality.
Why are many Jewish people opposed to Zionism?
Along with the settler-colonial nature of Israel, there is Israel’s overt cooperation with fascists, its displacement of Jewish Palestinians, and the attempt to racialize European Jewish people while erasing those in the rest of the world. Zionism works alongside the institution of European racism, and functions as a way to erase or recuperate other Jewish people in the world. If one takes note of how Ashkenazim have contemporarily been racialized as white, then compares and contrasts this to earlier depictions of the Jewish community, we can find the glaring inconsistency in the last 60 years of history between Israel and the West.
The West only allows Jewish people to be considered white as far as it can recuperate them; if it cannot, then it bares its hatred openly with no illusions of being their “protector”. This litmus test for whiteness is reminiscent of the “bleaching” of Southern and Eastern European immigrants in the US, who began to be considered more white as the strong socialist elements among them were destroyed and the remaining people were indoctrinated into Americanization, transformed into loyal American settler citizens.
Many Jewish opponents of Zionism are also opposed for religious reasons, such as the Orthodox Haridim, who reject Israel’s attempts at constructing a secular Jewish identity, while many Jewish radicals have more secular reasons. They assert that Jewish people cannot truly find solace from European antisemitism by merely creating their own state, and that they must confront it head-on, alongside all of the oppressed peoples of the world.
While there are differences among the opponents, the vast majority share reasoning in their opposition to Zionism in that they hold solidarity with Palestinians and reject Israel, Europe, and North America’s efforts to force Jewish identity into the box of colonial identification.
Anti-Zionist antisemites
There are plenty of anti-Zionists whose beliefs are such solely out of antisemitism. They can and must be called out, as antisemitism has no place anywhere. There are many traps people will fall into in regards to criticizing Israel that is ultimately antisemitic. Conflating all Jewish people with Israel, calling Jewish anti-Zionists self-hating (often, Zionists say this as well), thinking everything wrong with the world is just a Zionist conspiracy, calling the US “Israel’s puppet”, using the term “Zio”, and similar tactics.
Jewdas, a radical Jewish diaspora organization, has an important resource for this, “How to criticise Israel without being anti-semitic”.
Most antisemitism does come from the far-right. However, many leftists who dismiss all accusations of antisemitism towards them as “smears” ultimately serve to ignore an urgent need for self-reflection and self-criticism. There is antisemitism, as well as other forms of bigotry and reactionary attitudes, among leftists. And that might often take the forms of antisemitic anti-Zionist remarks as mentioned previously.
Having reactionary positions is not ultimately limited to one ideology or another. In fact, Eugen Dühring, now known primarily for Friedrich Engels’ scathing critique of his ideas, was in his time better known for being infamously antisemitic. And he led many Jewish radicals, such as Theodor Herzl himself, to become further convinced that there was an urgent need for a Jewish state.
What Zionists unfortunately do is say that most or all criticism of Israel is antisemitic, to silence Palestinian resistance to occupation and persecution and to whitewash the abuses committed by Israel. This ironically relies on antisemitic simplification of Jewish identity, as it ignores the many Jewish people of color and indigenous people in Israel who are suffering due to the genocidal policies of Israel, and further perpetuates the Israeli occupation of Palestine as “the Israel-Palestine conflict”, or reducing it to that of Arab Muslims vs Jews, when there are plenty of non-Muslim and non-Arab Palestinians, as well as non-Jewish Israelis and Zionists.
There are also many predominantly Jewish progressive organizations such as Jewish Voice for Peace, Jewish Solidarity, Jewdas, and (the) Jewish Worker, along with individuals like Eli Valley and Norman Finkelstein, who are all critical of Zionism. Their voices are purposely dismissed by Zionists because they are inconvenient for their narrative.
In response to common arguments made by Zionists:
“Israel is surrounded by enemies and is just defending itself”
Even if one ignores the character of Israel as settler-colonial, and thus inherently threatening to indigenous peoples across the region, these arguments are invalid. Israel borders four countries: Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria. Egypt signed peace treaties with Israel and have a formal arrangement with Tel Aviv, which ensures they cannot attack Israel by surprise because of monitors and stipulations regarding troop movements along the border.
Syria hasn’t signed a peace treaty. But it has abided by the 1974 disengagement agreement which is monitored by UN forces. Syria hasn’t attempted to take back territory or launch an attack on Israel since the 1973 war and, especially given the war going on inside the country, could not do so for the foreseeable future.
Lebanon has UN monitors on its border with Israel as well. Its army is poorly equipped and doesn’t have the capability to undertake a war of any kind. Hezbollah is a well equipped and trained force that operates in Lebanon independently of the army. Regardless of one’s views on Hezbollah itself, the organization was created during the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon and bases itself as a resistance group to defend Lebanon from an Israeli attack.
As for Israel, it has routinely violated the borders of its neighbours and launched unprovoked attacks. It participated in the 1956 Suez Crisis, joining the UK and France in attacking Egypt over its nationalisation of the Suez Canal. It launched the 1967 Six Day War after causing a border dispute with Syria. It invaded Lebanon in 1978 and 1982, and besieged Beirut, its capital city. Israel supported, armed and ultimately helped the Lebanese fascist militia, the Kataeb, carry out the Sabra and Shatila massacres, where up to 3500 Palestinians were slaughtered in refugee camps in Lebanon during Israel’s occupation.
More recently and supported by the admission of the former Israeli army chief of Staff Gadi EisenkotIt, Israel armed and backed jihadist rebels groups operating in southern Syria.
To call Israel’s actions “defensive” is a lie. None of the countries surrounding it, nor Iran, have the capability to launch an all-out war on Israel. The only country in the region which is receiving a $38 billion dollar military aid package over ten years from the US is Israel. The Saudis and Emiratis express no interest whatsoever in opposing Israel. They wish to join it in opposition to Iran, which is facing a siege of its own led by the US. Iran provides a limited amount of support to groups like Hezbollah and other Palestinian factions as a way of countering Israel. But it by no means possesses the capability to launch an offensive war against Israel. Defensive is being confused for offensive, and vice versa.
“What about WANA Jewish people?”
Jewish people from WANA (West Asia and North Africa) are often cited as a reason why supporting Israel is crucial. Firstly, the people who founded Israel were not WANA Jewish folk, as the Zionist movement is primarily a European phenomena. Moreover, the reasons for creating the state of Israel had nothing to do with rescuing WANA Jewish people.
Whilst antisemitism did already exist in WANA, the creation of Israel largely expanded it. After Zionism came, there were mass expulsions of Jewish people from several states across the region, most notable of which was Iraq. This process began after the creation of Israel, and as such, cannot be cited as a justification for the existence of Israel which predated it.
The suffering of Jews and other non-Arab or non-Muslim people under Arab nationalism and Islamism must be discussed and condemned, and not whitewashed. However, these issues have been used to justify Zionism and have been seized on by Zionists as a way of silencing opponents of Zionism by portraying them as all antisemites who support the expulsion of WANA Jewish people from their native countries.
The irony of this dynamic is that antisemites and Zionists often mimic each other. Antisemites seize on the expulsion of Palestinians to justify their mentality the same way Zionists seize on the expulsion of WANA Jewish people to justify theirs. Both Zionists and antisemites point to each other as justifications for their racism and histories of exiling others.
You can and should oppose both Zionism and antisemitism. You can and should oppose both the expulsion of Jewish people and the expulsion of Palestinians. Using Jewish people against Palestinians betrays a cynical approach by those who wish to avert attention from the millions languishing in refugee camps or those whose blood is being spilled.
“What About Hamas?”
The Gaza Strip is presently controlled by Hamas, an organisation that grew out of the Muslim Brotherhood, and presents an inherently Islamist ideology. Their existence is often touted by Zionists as a gotcha and to also suggest that most Palestinians hold theocratic views with the intention of marginalizing non-Muslims.
What is left out of this discussion is the origins of Hamas. In the 1970s, the Israeli government began supporting and backing Palestinian leaders who were Islamist. The reason for doing this was simple. The Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), led by Yasser Arafat, commanded a large degree of support amongst Palestinians. The PLO is secular and nationalist. It has a group of parties in it, with the major two being the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) — a secular, Marxist-Leninist organisation — and Fatah, a left-wing nationalist party.
The leftist and secular nature of the PLO meant that religious conservatives were the perfect candidates for Israel to back to undermine the organisation,
“Listen to former Israeli officials such as Brig. Gen. Yitzhak Segev, who was the Israeli military governor in Gaza in the early 1980s. Segev later told a New York Times reporter that he had helped finance the Palestinian Islamist movement as a “counterweight” to the secularists and leftists of the Palestine Liberation Organization and the Fatah party, led by Yasser Arafat (who himself referred to Hamas as ‘a creature of Israel.’”
Avner Cohen, an Israeli official, worked in Gaza as part of religious affairs. He admitted, “Hamas, to my great regret, is Israel’s creation.”
Hamas would go on to militarily displace the PLO in Gaza, and win elections held in the strip in 2006. This fulfilled the goal the Israeli government had of defeating an enemy only to create another.
Hamas became a thorn in Israel’s side as it found support from Iran, acquiring weapons — mostly missiles — with which they use against Israel’s attacks on the Gaza Strip. Much is often made of the capabilities of Hamas. And whilst they are not minuscule, they’re also far from being the kind of powerhouse Israel often portrays them as. There is no genuine comparison between the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) and Hamas. Israel possesses a large standing army, fleets of tanks, an air force, missiles, and nuclear weapons. By contrast, Hamas possess missiles and mortar shells, which are mostly acquired by smuggling due to the blockade imposed on Gaza.
The reactionary nature of Hamas, including its treatment of non-Muslims and Shiite Muslims, are all abhorrent. No self-respecting anti-Zionist waves the flag of Hamas. Anti-Zionists wave the flag of Palestine to stand with Palestinians. The existence of Hamas — which as previously mentioned rose to power largely thanks to Israel itself — does not give justification for Israel’s decades of settler-colonialism, offensive wars, displacement, and apartheid.
It’s also necessary to emphasize the hypocrisy of people who use Hamas as an argument, considering they didn’t like the PLO running the Gaza Strip either. For Zionists, there is no legitimate Palestinian cause, so Hamas is immaterial to the issue here.
If anything, Zionists who profess their hatred of Hamas must actually appreciate its existence. Hamas and Hezbollah are often invoked in discussions regarding Palestine. In the case of the former, Israel actively contributed to its rise to power in the Gaza Strip. In the case of the latter, Israel created the conditions with which it would form by invading Lebanon. The responsibility falls much more squarely on Israeli shoulders than anyone else’s for the existence of these groups.
Much time is devoted to talking about those organizations, with the deliberate purpose of distracting people from the cause for Palestinian liberation. The issue of Palestine predates Hamas and Hezbollah by multiple decades.
The liberation of Palestine is not a single party or an ideology, it’s a cause.
“The UN partition created two states in 1948. But the Arabs refused.”
The UN partition created a Palestinian and Israeli state in 1948, with Jerusalem to be an international zone. What’s usually left out of this history is how such a decision was made without any consent by Palestinians.
With the partition effectively ceding over half of Palestinian land to Israel, as well as breaking up the Palestinian state into three, the UN partition plan was dead the moment it came into effect. It was the finishing touch on Zionist colonization, giving it an international framework with which to establish itself. This was not a peace plan. It did not address the hundreds of thousands who were killed and expelled. It only provided legal cover for genocide and colonization.
States who declared war on Israel did so for a variety of reasons. The refugee crisis caused by the newly created state of Israel put enormous pressure on those countries to act. For the states surrounding Israel, this was a very clear threat. Their crushing defeat, however, reveals where the power dynamics are — and they haven’t changed since then.
Proponents of the 1948 argument who like to point to the “Arab refusal” generally don’t realize the absurdity of their position. Israel wasn’t even content with the 1967 borders and went on to seize the rest of Palestine and a part of Syria. It is not as if the 1948 partition was a “good deal” or that Israel and the West were acting out of good faith.
The 1948 borders were never seen as the final borders of Israel. And there’s been no indication of returning to them. Settler-colonial nations can never be satisfied with what they have, and in this lies the falsehood of the two-state solution.
“Why don’t you criticize other countries that commit atrocities?”
The reality is that other states come under criticism all the time, and that it’s possible to criticize multiple at the same time. South Africa came under enormous pressure to end its apartheid system. Myanmar has been scrutinized for its genocide of the Rohingya people, and India for its treatment of the Kashmiris. The US is often criticized for its settler-colonialism and imperialism. And Brazil, under the fascist government of Jair Bolsanaro, has displaced indigenous people and caused irreparable harm to the ecology of the Amazon.
Ironically, those who use this argument have essentially watered down their defense of Israel to positing that it is criticized “too much”. If your argument is “other countries are bad too”, you have lost the argument.
This has been a decades long occupation. With each passing day, Palestinians are killed and evicted from their homeland, while Israel receives billions of dollars in money and resources from Western countries. It haunts and has haunted the region as an outpost of US imperialism.
Criticizing the state of Israel and its apartheid system is not a singular obsession like many want to think. Israel’s oppression of Palestinians is not an isolated institution, it is one part in the whole of the global imperialist and colonial order.
“But Jews now have a homeland, and aren’t facing genocide.”
The choice is not between Palestinians living and Jewish people dying. Palestinian resistance leader George Habash never made their plight about exacting revenge against Jewish people. Calls by leaders such as Habash for one democratic state with equal rights for Arabs and Jews are as clear as possible, and render this argument null and void. As for Hamas, their existence and socially reactionary views were previously addressed in this essay.
This is also a common, disingenuous argument thrown at indigenous people worldwide: the idea that decolonization for them must equal extinction of others. It is a horrific way of manipulating the issue to make the victims out to be the aggressors.
There is no reverse genocide or reverse colonialism at play when speaking of liberation for the oppressed. The right of return means the right of Palestinians to their homeland. WANA Jews have the right to seek recognition and justice for the crimes exacted upon them by various states in the region. Decolonization means the rule of indigenous people over colonizers, and the elimination of the social category of colonizer. The goal is not to eliminate Jewish people in Palestine. It is to eliminate the social relations of settler-colonialism.
Israel does not embody security for Jewish people whatsoever. The Zionist colonization of Palestine endangered WANA Jews and has been met with pronounced reaction from antisemites both within and outside of the region. It must be stressed that this is not and should not be used as a justification for antisemitism. Antisemites are expressing an immature, bigoted, and reactionary version of national consciousness, one which fails to take account of the nuances of the situation. They do not properly contextualize Israel and Zionism within Euro-colonialism and the European solution to the so-called “Jewish Question”.
This is unfortunately another result of Euro-colonialism and its outpost of Israel seeking to take ownership of Judaism and Jewish identity and claiming it acts as the sole representative of Jewish people across the world. Zionists see in Israel the face of Judaism, and antisemites agree. This only poses danger, not liberation, for Jewish people.
Zionists who profess to be concerned about the safety of Jews seem to think Israel is the only answer, and that all Jews everywhere can and should only feel safe inside Israel. Jewish people have multiple homelands; they are not a monolith, and they have different cultures depending on where they come from. They have struggled across the world to survive and attain rights.
Ignoring that history and suggesting they belong only to Israel, or that their survival is only guaranteed by Israel, completely dismisses the historical and present efforts of Jewish people across the world to stay and thrive in their rightful homelands.
Further thoughts and going forward:
Why should other persecuted people not look to Israel as an inspiration?
People who have been victimized, oppressed, and displaced like Assyrians and Yazidis have actually been through an experience almost identical to that of Palestinians. So it is cause for alarm to find attempts at creating links between Israel and its founding with such marginalized and persecuted groups. Unfortunately, reactionaries periodically attempt to illicit support from these groups for Israel, trying to claim a similarity between them, and those who are ignorant often fall for such myths.
Assyrians have constantly been on the receiving end of Arab nationalism and Islamism, so it is then deemed that Israel must be a suitable ally. Lyn Julius of HuffPost went so far as to ask the question, “Where is the Assyrian Theodor Herzl?”
The issue is Israel exacts onto the Palestinians the same kind of persecution and horror that people like Assyrians have been through. Assyrians and Yazidis, then, shouldn’t ally with or support Israel. And Israel actually props up reactionary forces — including various Islamist groups — that attack minorities like them. Israel has had a close relationship with Turkey going back decades, ultimately exchanging arms with a country that bombs Assyrian and Kurdish villages. It refuses to recognize the Armenian/Assyrian/Greek genocide. Israel destabilizes countries across the region, which severely and disproportionately targets minoritized people like Assyrians and Yazidis.
Whether it’s by aiding jihadists in Syria, or supporting the KRG in Iraq — which colonizes Assyrian lands — Israel has had a hand in the persecution and genocide of indigenous, minoritized WANA people.
There is also the case of many Assyrian Palestinians who are often forgotten in this discussion. Their being Assyrian and their Christianity has not “saved them”, and they are conveniently dismissed for the sake of the fake narrative that “Christianity is thriving in Israel”. The rise of Assyrian Palestinian singer Yacoub Shaheen helped further bring to light this subject,
“The creation of Israel in 1948 involved targeted attacks on Palestinians and the mass expulsion of 750,000, among them many Syriacs. In 1967, when Israel occupied the West Bank, they demolished the majority of Jerusalem’s Syriac Quarter to expand the Jewish Quarter, expelling hundreds if not thousands of Syriacs. Those that remained live under Israeli occupation, their rights tightly restricted and their lives threatened just like all other Palestinians.”
In essence, there can be no justifiable case for other oppressed and colonized groups — of WANA or elsewhere — to look to Israel “for inspiration”. It is a dangerous, self-destructive route to take.
National Liberation and imperial chauvinism
Many left-liberals express opposition to the principle of nationalism in itself, regarding Israel as a good example of nationalism being inherently oppressive and reactionary. They often have difficulty differentiating between imperialist chauvinism and national liberation, and disregard both.
Usually, they rely on the inaccurate definition of all nationalism as “perceiving one’s nation as superior to all others’’. So they conclude that the concept of nations is in itself unjustified because of this misconception. This is plainly a very universalizing definition which takes no account of contextualization. This viewpoint should be combated as it is not the basis on which Israel’s existence is invalid.
Nations are rooted in material reality and cannot be easily suppressed. Nations do not merely arise because people delude themselves into believing they exist. Existence precedes essence. A nation is not defined by a “mindset” alone, or by a nation-state alone. A nation does not need to have a state to be a nation.
Nations exist and will continue to exist long into the future until the modern global division of labor and corresponding state of global production and distribution are totally rectified — a task that cannot be done in a few years.
A Eurocentric liberal view that wants to look away from the issue and resolve it through utopian, moral opposition to nationhood does not rectify the material conditions and relations which lead to the rise of nations akin to Israel.
So what is the solution to settler-colonialism in Palestine?
Broadly, Marxists advocate national liberation against imperialism, franchise-colonialism, and settler-colonialism, which represent antagonistic national contradictions.
National liberation means first to cast the foreign oppressors out of political domination of the nation, and then to wage a struggle to keep them out from domination over the economic system through national development. Essentially, the undoing of the base and superstructure consequences of national oppression.
For settler-colonial nations, this comes with the character of asserting the rule of indigenous people over settlers, with the aid of those settlers who support their revolutionary efforts, and the redistribution of land and capital from settlers to indigenous people to rectify the distribution caused by their exploitation.
In Palestine, national liberation, as described by the PFLP, must be a one-state solution. A socialist secular state for Palestine, with the settlers under indigenous rule. The social category of settlers is removed, and Europeans of the area begin to live in the region on the terms of the indigenous people.
Westerners must support Palestinian national liberation efforts by engaging with pro-Palestine campaigns, such as BDS, to disempower the state of Israel and empower Palestinians. Living in the imperial core, we must support the peoples oppressed by the countries we live within. We must apply this to the issue of Palestine.
All content produced and published under ‘Line Struggle Collective’ is the collaborative effort of a team of people who have contributed to research, writing, and editing.