Zionism Colonialism Quotes

Actually—and this was where I began to feel seriously uncomfortable—some such divine claim underlay not just 'the occupation' but the whole idea of a separate state for Jews in Palestine. Take away the divine warrant for the Holy Land and where were you, and what were you? Just another land-thief like the Turks or the British, except that in this case you wanted the land without the people. And the original Zionist slogan—'a land without a people for a people without a land'—disclosed its own negation when I saw the densely populated Arab towns dwelling sullenly under Jewish tutelage. You want irony? How about Jews becoming colonizers at just the moment when other Europeans had given up on the idea?

I regard anti-Semitism as ineradicable and as one element of the toxin with which religion has infected us. Perhaps partly for this reason, I have never been able to see Zionism as a cure for it. American and British and French Jews have told me with perfect sincerity that they are always prepared for the day when 'it happens again' and the Jew-baiters take over. (And I don't pretend not to know what they are talking about: I have actually seen the rabid phenomenon at work in modern and sunny Argentina and am unable to forget it.) So then, they seem to think, they will take refuge in the Law of Return, and in Haifa, or for all I know in Hebron. Never mind for now that if all of world Jewry did settle in Palestine, this would actually necessitate further Israeli expansion, expulsion, and colonization, and that their departure under these apocalyptic conditions would leave the new brownshirts and blackshirts in possession of the French and British and American nuclear arsenals. This is ghetto thinking, hardly even fractionally updated to take into account what has changed. The important but delayed realization will have to come: Israeli Jews are a part of the diaspora, not a group that has escaped from it. Why else does Israel daily beseech the often-flourishing Jews of other lands, urging them to help the most endangered Jews of all: the ones who rule Palestine by force of arms? Why else, having supposedly escaped from the need to rely on Gentile goodwill, has Israel come to depend more and more upon it? On this reckoning, Zionism must constitute one of the greatest potential non sequiturs in human history.

Palestinian identity, much like Zionism, emerged in response to many stimuli, and at almost exactly the same time as did modern political Zionism.

The Zionists’ colonial enterprise, aimed at taking over the country, necessarily had to produce resistance. “If you wish to colonize a land in which people are already living,” Jabotinsky wrote in 1925, “you must find a garrison for the land, or find a benefactor who will provide a garrison on your behalf.… Zionism is a colonizing venture and, therefore, it stands or falls on the question of armed forces.”81 At least initially, only the armed forces provided by Britain could overcome the natural resistance of those being colonized.

If you wish to colonize a land in which people are already living,” Jabotinsky wrote in 1925, “you must find a garrison for the land, or find a benefactor who will provide a garrison on your behalf.… Zionism is a colonizing venture and, therefore, it stands or falls on the question of armed forces.

A late-nineteenth-century colonial-national movement thus adorned itself with a biblical coat that was powerfully attractive to Bible-reading Protestants in Great Britain and the United States, blinding them to the modernity of Zionism and to its colonial nature: for how could Jews be “colonizing” the land where their religion began?

Just like Zionism, Palestinian and other Arab national identities were modern and contingent, a product of late nineteenth- and twentieth-century circumstances, not eternal and immutable. The denial of an authentic, independent Palestinian identity is of a piece with Herzl’s colonialist views on the alleged benefits of Zionism to the indigenous population, and constitutes a crucial element in the erasure of their national rights and peoplehood by the Balfour Declaration and its sequels.

The doppelganger nature of the country’s identity is embedded in the dualistic language used to describe it, in which everything is double and never singular: Israel-Palestine, Arab and Jew, Two States, The Conflict. Based on a fantasy of symmetrical power, this suturing together of two peoples implies conjoined twins in a state of unending struggle, an irresolvable sibling rivalry between the two peoples, both descended from Abraham. For Rooney, Israel as doppelganger exists on two levels. First, it is a doppelganger of the forms of chauvinistic European nationalisms that turned Jews into pariahs on the continent since well before the Inquisition. That was Zionism’s win-win pitch to anti-Semitic European powers: you get rid of your “Jewish problem” (i.e., Jews, who will leave your countries and migrate to Palestine), and Jews get a state of their own to mimic/twin the very forms of militant nationalism that had oppressed them for centuries. (This is why Zionism was so fiercely opposed by the members of the Bund, who believed that nationalism itself was their enemy and the wellspring of race hatred.) Israel also became a doppelganger of the colonial project, specifically settler colonialism. Many of Zionism’s basic rationales were thinly veiled Judaizations of core Christian colonial conceptions: Terra Nullius, the claim that continents like Australia were effectively empty because their Indigenous inhabitants were categorized as less than fully human, became “A land without a people for a people without a land”—a phrase adopted by many Zionists and that originated with nineteenth-century Christians. Manifest Destiny became “land bequeathed to the Jews by divine right.” “Taming the wild frontier” became “making the desert bloom.

Balfour airily claimed that Zionism would not hurt the Arabs, yet he had no qualms about recognizing the bad faith and deceit that characterized British and Allied policy in Palestine.

behalf.… Zionism is a colonizing venture and, therefore, it stands or falls on the question of armed forces.”81 At least initially, only the armed forces provided by Britain could overcome the natural resistance of those being colonized.

The USSR indeed had nothing more to gain from Zionism—the British empire was dying—and everything to gain in terms of placating the new, post-colonial governments, securing its vulnerable southern border, and threatening the West’s oil supplies.

Very few Zionist Left intellectuals see Israel as a colonial settler state. They do not attribute its “internal” regime, laws, and political culture to this central characteristic of state and society (not to mention Israel’s Apartheid nature). The majority refuses to see the Zionist movement as an ongoing colonial project.

More important than British motivations for issuing the Balfour Declaration is what this undertaking meant in practice for the crystal-clear aims of the Zionist movement—sovereignty and complete control of Palestine. With Britain’s unstinting support, these aims suddenly became plausible. Some leading British politicians extended backing to Zionism that went well beyond the carefully phrased text of the declaration. At a dinner at Balfour’s home in 1922, three of the most prominent British statesmen of the era—Lloyd George, Balfour, and Secretary of State for the Colonies Winston Churchill—assured Weizmann that by the term “Jewish national home” they “always meant an eventual Jewish state.” Lloyd George convinced the Zionist leader that for this reason Britain would never allow representative government in Palestine. Nor did it.25

ففي الوقت الذي كان الاستعمار الكبير والصغير ينحسر ويتصدع عالميا، كان استعمار جديد - و دنئ- قد بدأ في فلسطين هو الاستعمار الصهيوني حيث حرر قرصنة القرن التاسع عشر، وجمع بين اسوأ وأسود ما في دموية النازية وعنصرية جنوب أفريقيا. غير أنه إذا كان هذا الاتجاه التعس يدل على شئ فإنما يدل على أن الاستعمار الصهيوني القمئ يأتي ضد كل تيار التاريخ - حتى التاريخ الرجعي، حتى تاريخ الاستعمار نفسه- وأنه من ثم محكوم عليه قبلا وبحتميه التاريخ بأنه قد ولد ليموت

Truman bluntly revealed the motivations behind this major shift when a group of American diplomats presciently warned him that an overtly pro-Zionist policy would harm US interests in the Arab world. “I am sorry, gentlemen,” he said, “but I have to answer to hundreds of thousands who are anxious for the success of Zionism. I do not have hundreds of thousands of Arabs among my constituents.”48 Initially, the State Department, the Pentagon, and the CIA—what would become the permanent foreign-policy establishment of the new global American imperium—were opposed to Truman’s and his advisors’ determined partisanship for Zionism and the new state of Israel. Yet Truman, who did not come from a patrician background, had no higher education (he was the last US president without a college degree), and was inexperienced in foreign affairs, was not intimidated by the foreign policy establishment he had inherited.

Thus, the Jewish people could restore the honor lost to the Nazis by warring against Arabs in the breach. But better than substitute Nazis, the Palestinians gave Israel savage Nazis, third-world barbarians embodying the depraved native in the colonial mind. The Aztec. The Indian. The Zulu. The Arab. In Exodus, the image of marauding Arabs, cowardly and prone to rape, will be familiar to anyone who has seen the depiction of Black people in Griffith’s Birth of a Nation. For just as the vulgar caricature of Black people served the cause of white Redemption, so too did the Arabs in Exodus serve the cause of Zionism.

Certainly, blame for all this [turmoil in the Middle East] doesn't rest solely with the terrible decisions that were made at the end of World War I, but it was then that one particularly toxic seed was planted. Ever since, Arab society has tended to define itself less by what it aspires to become than by what it is opposed to: colonialism, Zionism, Western imperialism in its many forms. This culture of opposition has been manipulated—indeed, feverishly nurtured—by generations of Arab dictators intent on channeling their people's anger away from their own misrule in favor of the external threat, whether it is "the great Satan" or the "illegitimate Zionist entity" or Western music playing on the streets of Cairo.

Planet Palestine (Sonnet 1503) Whole world is my promised land, Which part will you invade! When the entire planet is Palestine, It is Israel that will fade. Gone are the days of unchallenged tyranny, Gone are the days of exploiting native trust. In the past you got away with many Rushmores; Try it today, you'll end up another Liz Truss. You can have your puny guns and bombs, I have an arsenal far mightier than thee. Colonial apes may fund your homicidalism, I have the entire humankind backing me. When governments are on one side, and humankind on the other, that's the first sign of democracy, and curtain call for the occupier. We the people promise our planet to Palestine. What'll you do now - call us all anti-semite!

Everything changed in 1933 with the rise to power in Germany of the Nazis, who immediately began to persecute and drive out the well-established Jewish community. With discriminatory immigration laws in place in the United States, the United Kingdom, and other countries, many German Jews had nowhere to go but Palestine. Hitler’s ascendancy proved to be one of the most important events in the modern histories of both Palestine and Zionism. In 1935 alone, more than sixty thousand Jewish immigrants came to Palestine, a number greater than the entire Jewish population of the country in 1917. Most of these refugees, mainly from Germany but also from neighboring countries where anti-Semitic persecution was intensifying, were skilled and educated. German Jews were allowed to bring assets worth a total of $100 million, thanks to the Transfer Agreement reached between the Nazi government and the Zionist movement, concluded in exchange for lifting a Jewish boycott of Germany.

The Palestinian uprising, or intifada, which broke out in December 1987 was a perfect example of the law of unintended consequences.2 Ariel Sharon and Menachem Begin had launched the invasion of Lebanon to quash the power of the PLO, and thereby end Palestinian nationalist opposition in the occupied West Bank and Gaza to the absorption of those territories into Israel. This would complete the colonial task of historic Zionism, creating a Jewish state in all of Palestine. The 1982 war did succeed in weakening the PLO, but the paradoxical effect was to strengthen the Palestinian national movement in Palestine itself, shifting the focus of action from outside to inside the country. After two decades of a relatively manageable occupation, Begin and Sharon, two fervent partisans of the Greater Israel ideal, had inadvertently sparked a new level of resistance to the process of colonization. Opposition to Israel’s landgrab and military rule has erupted within Palestine repeatedly and in different forms ever since.

In their turn, since 2005 the settlers have become even more brutal and barbarous in their treatment of the people of the West Bank, culminating in the burning alive of a teenager and an entire family. The Palestinians’ steadfastness in the West Bank continues. Popular resistance is a daily occurrence but with limited resources it is easily quashed by the Israeli occupation. However, in its tenacity it suggests that the final chapter to what began in 1967 has yet to be written. Today there are nearly three million Palestinians in the West Bank and almost 400,000 settlers. Zionism as a settler colonial movement was able to colonize Palestine almost in its entirety regardless of its demographic minority. These settlers, however, are much more powerful than the early Zionists and it is unlikely that anyone will prevent them from taking over the rest of the West Bank, by one way or another. During that same period, Israel subjected the Gaza Strip to even harsher oppression and the most callous version of the maximum security prison to date.

If elimination of the native population is not a likely outcome in Palestine, then what of dismantling the supremacy of the colonizer in order to make possible a true reconciliation? The advantage that Israel has enjoyed in continuing its project rests on the fact that the basically colonial nature of the encounter in Palestine has not been visible to most Americans and many Europeans. Israel appears to them to be a normal, natural nation-state like any other, faced by the irrational hostility of intransigent and often anti-Semitic Muslims (which is how Palestinians, even the Christians among them, are seen by many). The propagation of this image is one of the greatest achievements of Zionism and is vital to its survival. As Edward Said put it, Zionism triumphed in part because it “won the political battle for Palestine in the international world in which ideas, representation, rhetoric and images were at issue.”5 This is still largely true today. Dismantling this fallacy and making the true nature of the conflict evident is a necessary step if Palestinians and Israelis are to transition to a postcolonial future in which one people does not use external support to oppress and supplant the other.

The imperialist found it useful to incorporate the credible and seemingly unimpeachable wisdom of science to create a racial classification to be used in the appropriation and organization of lesser cultures. The works of Carolus Linnaeus, Georges Buffon, and Georges Cuvier, organized races in terms of a civilized us and a paradigmatic other. The other was uncivilized, barbaric, and wholly lower than the advanced races of Europe. This paradigm of imaginatively constructing a world predicated upon race was grounded in science, and expressed as philosophical axioms by John Locke and David Hume, offered compelling justification that Europe always ought to rule non-Europeans. This doctrine of cultural superiority had a direct bearing on Zionist practice and vision in Palestine. A civilized man, it was believed, could cultivate the land because it meant something to him; on it, accordingly, he produced useful arts and crafts, he created, he accomplished, he built. For uncivilized people, land was either farmed badly or it was left to rot. This was imperialism as theory and colonialism was the practice of changing the uselessly unoccupied territories of the world into useful new versions of Europe. It was this epistemic framework that shaped and informed Zionist attitudes towards the Arab Palestinian natives. This is the intellectual background that Zionism emerged from. Zionism saw Palestine through the same prism as the European did, as an empty territory paradoxically filled with ignoble or, better yet, dispensable natives. It allied itself, as Chaim Weizmann said, with the imperial powers in carrying out its plans for establishing a Jewish state in Palestine. The so-called natives did not take well to the idea of Jewish colonizers in Palestine. As the Zionist historians, Yehoshua Porath and Neville Mandel, have empirically shown, the ideas of Jewish colonizers in Palestine, this was well before World War I, were always met with resistance, not because the natives thought Jews were evil, but because most natives do not take kindly to having their territory settled by foreigners. Zionism not only accepted the unflattering and generic concepts of European culture, it also banked on the fact that Palestine was actually populated not by an advanced civilization, but by a backward people, over which it ought to be dominated. Zionism, therefore, developed with a unique consciousness of itself, but with little or nothing left over for the unfortunate natives. In fact, I would go so far as to say that if Palestine had been occupied by one of the well-established industrialized nations that ruled the world, then the problem of displacing German, French, or English inhabitants and introducing a new, nationally coherent element into the middle of their homeland would have been in the forefront of the consciousness of even the most ignorant and destitute Zionists. In short, all the constitutive energies of Zionism were premised on the excluded presence, that is, the functional absence of native people in Palestine; institutions were built deliberately shutting out the natives, laws were drafted when Israel came into being that made sure the natives would remain in their non-place, Jews in theirs, and so on. It is no wonder that today the one issue that electrifies Israel as a society is the problem of the Palestinians, whose negation is the consistent thread running through Zionism. And it is this perhaps unfortunate aspect of Zionism that ties it ineluctably to imperialism- at least so far as the Palestinian is concerned. In conclusion, I cannot affirm that Zionism is colonialism, but I can tell you the process by which Zionism flourished; the dialectic under which it became a reality was heavily influenced by the imperialist mindset of Europe. Thank you. -Fictional debate between Edward Said and Abba Eban.

He was romantic about Islam. He told me, and probably was right, that I didn’t understand. Though he once wrote me a letter saying that he wanted to join the Mississippi civil-rights marchers, he had no sympathy whatever with Zionism. After the war of 1967 he cried out, “You have no business in Arab lands, you Jews!” In the heat of argument he then said many rash things. Of course few people do understand the complexities of Arab history, and it made Marshall frantic when he saw a pattern of Western political ideas being imposed ignorantly on the Middle East. But he knew as little about Jews as I did about Arabs. Nation-states have seldom if ever been created without violence and injustice. Hodgson believed that the Jews had behaved as though the Arabs were an inferior, colonial sort of people and not the heirs of a great civilization. Of course the Arabs had themselves come as conquerors, many centuries ago. But one didn’t present such arguments to Marshall. The Arabs were his people. He failed to understand what Israel meant to the Jews. It wasn’t that the Jews didn’t matter—he was a Quaker and a liberal, a man of humane sentiments—but that he didn’t know quite how they mattered. Some years ago, Hodgson went out to jog on a boiling Chicago afternoon and died of heart failure.

The history revealed by even a cursory examination of the press, memoirs, and similar sources generated by Palestinians flies in the face of the popular mythology of the conflict, which is premised on their nonexistence or lack of a collective consciousness. In fact, Palestinian identity and nationalism are all too often seen to be no more than recent expressions of an unreasoning (if not fanatical) opposition to Jewish national self-determination. But Palestinian identity, much like Zionism, emerged in response to many stimuli, and at almost exactly the same time as did modern political Zionism. The threat of Zionism was only one of these stimuli, just as anti-Semitism was only one of the factors fueling Zionism. As newspapers like Filastin and al-Karmil reveal, this identity included love of country, a desire to improve society, religious attachment to Palestine, and opposition to European control. After the war, the focus on Palestine as a central locus of identity drew strength from widespread frustration at the blocking of Arab aspirations in Syria and elsewhere as the Middle East became suffocatingly dominated by the European colonial powers. This identity is thus comparable to the other Arab nation-state identities that emerged around the same time in Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq.

My identity as Jewish cannot be reduced to a religious affiliation. Professor Said quoted Gramsci, an author that I’m familiar with, that, and I quote, ‘to know thyself is to understand that we are a product of the historical process to date which has deposited an infinity of traces, without leaving an inventory’. Let’s apply this pithy observation to Jewish identity. While it is tempting to equate Judaism with Jewishness, I submit to you that my identity as someone who is Jewish is far more complex than my religious affiliation. The collective inventory of the Jewish people rests on my shoulders. This inventory shapes and defines my understanding of what it means to be Jewish. The narrative of my people is a story of extraordinary achievement as well as unimaginable horror. For millennia, the Jewish people have left their fate in the hands of others. Our history is filled with extraordinary achievements as well as unimaginable violence. Our centuries-long Diaspora defined our existential identity in ways that cannot be reduced to simple labels. It was the portability of our religion that bound us together as a people, but it was our struggle to fit in; to be accepted that identified us as unique. Despite the fact that we excelled academically, professionally, industrially, we were never looked upon as anything other than Jewish. Professor Said in his book, Orientalism, examined how Europe looked upon the Orient as a dehumanized sea of amorphous otherness. If we accept this point of view, then my question is: How do you explain Western attitudes towards the Jews? We have always been a convenient object of hatred and violent retribution whenever it became convenient. If Europe reduced the Orient to an essentialist other, to borrow Professor Said’s eloquent language, then how do we explain the dehumanizing treatment of Jews who lived in the heart of Europe? We did not live in a distant, exotic land where the West had discursive power over us. We thought of ourselves as assimilated. We studied Western philosophy, literature, music, and internalized the same culture as our dominant Christian brethren. Despite our contribution to every conceivable field of human endeavor, we were never fully accepted as equals. On the contrary, we were always the first to be blamed for the ills of Western Europe. Two hundred thousand Jews were forcibly removed from Spain in 1492 and thousands more were forcibly converted to Christianity in Portugal four years later. By the time we get to the Holocaust, our worst fears were realized. Jewish history and consciousness will be dominated by the traumatic memories of this unspeakable event. No people in history have undergone an experience of such violence and depth. Israel’s obsession with physical security; the sharp Jewish reaction to movements of discrimination and prejudice; an intoxicated awareness of life, not as something to be taken for granted but as a treasure to be fostered and nourished with eager vitality, a residual distrust of what lies beyond the Jewish wall, a mystical belief in the undying forces of Jewish history, which ensure survival when all appears lost; all these, together with the intimacy of more personal pains and agonies, are the legacy which the Holocaust transmits to the generation of Jews who have grown up under its shadow. -Fictional debate between Edward Said and Abba Eban.

Throughout the 1970s, Soviet and Arab leaders falsely linked Zionism to racism and imperialism by arguing that Zionism was “an imperialistic militant ideology of racial hatred which should be universally condemned.”35 That language had a powerful impact on nations that had only recently been under colonial rule and were still struggling with the consequences of racism and imperialism.

Zionism was a hothouse flower grown from European nationalism, anti-Semitism and colonialism,

Zionism offered itself as the solution to anti-Semitism, but became the main reason for its continued presence. The “deal” also failed to uproot the racism and xenophobia that still lies at the heart of Europe, and which produced Nazism on the continent and a brutal colonialism outside of it. That racism and xenophobia is now turned against Muslims and Islam; since it is intimately connected to the Israel–Palestinian question, it could be reduced once a genuine answer to that question is found.

The most important item to go six feet under is the dictionary of illusion and deception with its famous entries such as “the peace process,” “the only democracy in the Middle East,” “a peace-loving nation,” “parity and reciprocity,” and “a humane solution to the refugee problem.” A replacement dictionary has been in the making for many years, redefining Zionism as colonialism, Israel as an apartheid state, and the Nakbah as ethnic cleansing.

Zionism was a settler colonial movement, similar to the movements of Europeans who had colonized the two Americas, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand.

Refugees carry culture, Colonizers carry infection. Colonizers are the virus, Refugees are civilization.

Refugees are practicing healers, living testament of wounds to ointment. Colonizers are proof of darwinism, that from monkeys comes the human race.

On 2 November 1917, five weeks before Allenby walked through the Jaffa Gate, the government in London had issued a document that was to have a fateful and lasting impact on the Holy Land, the Middle East and the world. The foreign secretary, Lord Balfour, wrote to Lord Rothschild, representing the World Zionist Organization, to inform him that: His Majesty’s government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country. The sixty-seven typewritten words of the Balfour Declaration combined considerations of imperial planning, wartime propaganda, biblical resonances and a colonial mindset, as well as evident sympathy for the Zionist idea. With them, as the writer Arthur Koestler was to quip memorably – neatly encapsulating the attendant and continuing controversy – ‘one nation solemnly promised to a second nation the country of a third’.8 Lloyd George highlighted sympathy for the Jews as his principal motivation. But the decisive calculations were political, primarily the wish to outsmart the French in post-war arrangements in the Levant9 and the impulse to use Palestine’s strategic location – its ‘fatal geography’ – to protect Egypt, the Suez Canal and the route to India.10 Other judgements have placed greater emphasis on the need to mobilize Jewish public opinion behind the then flagging Allied war effort. As Balfour told the war cabinet at its final discussion of the issue on 31 October: ‘If we could make a declaration favourable to such an ideal [Zionism], we should be able to carry on extremely useful propaganda both in Russia and in America.’11 Historians have spent decades debating the connections and contradictions between Balfour’s public pledge to the Zionists, the secret 1916 Sykes–Picot agreement between Britain, France and Russia about post-war spheres of influence in the Middle East, and pledges about Arab independence made by the British in 1915 to encourage Sharif Hussein of Mecca to launch his ‘revolt in the desert’ against the Turks. The truth, buried in imprecise definitions, misunderstandings and duplicity, remains elusive.

the identities involved in the colonial conflict should be launched to build the conceptual foundations

Israeli law does not recognize an Israeli nationality. Thus, while Jewish citizens are classified as having “Jewish nationality,” Israeli law methodically strips Palestinian citizens of their national identity and reduces them to mere ethnicity or religious affiliation (like Muslims, Christians, Druze, etc.).6 As a result, Israel is not just another nation-state in which minority communities lack some secondary rights owned by the majority. Instead, it is a settler-colonial state established by the Zionist movement for advancing and expanding its colonialist project for the benefit of the Jews alone.

Hence, the consistent expectation of the Zionist Left, that the Palestinian citizens will legitimize the Zionist colonial project embodied in the Jewish state, is doomed to fail. This was exemplified in a series of dialogue meetings between Israeli and Palestinian intellectuals from January 1999 to January 2001. The meetings were hosted by the Israel Democracy Institute and aimed “to formulate an agreement that would define the relationship between the majority and minority in the state and their mutual concerns.” However, the intellectuals failed to reach this goal because the Palestinian participants refused to declare their recognition of the Jewish state, a condition demanded by the Israelis.

The expulsion of the Palestinians was Zionism’s main goal from the outset. All settler colonial projects, writes Machover, involve the dispossession of indigenous people and brutal measures to suppress resistance. But the projects differ, broadly speaking, in terms of whether the colonizers exploit the indigenous population as a labor force, or whether the indigenous population is to be excluded from the settlers’ economy, exterminated, or expelled.

As noted, the depiction of Zionism as a colonial project signified, albeit partially, a revival of the long-silenced analysis of Matzpen.36 Shafir’s work confirmed Zionist colonialism’s relationship to the indigenous population—a relationship that Matzpen identified over three decades earlier.

Lyndon Johnson, on the other hand, came from a much more modest background and his primary interests had revolved around domestic politics. His strong affinity with Zionism and Israel was reflected in his circle of close friends and advisors,

By 1955, the Soviet Union had developed close links with several Arab states, while Israel had secretly aligned itself with the old colonial powers, Britain and France, against one of the USSR’s new Arab allies, Egypt. Thus the Soviet honeymoon with Zionism and Israel proved to be ephemeral.

Many Israelis then and now viewed their country as a liberation struggle akin to being freed from colonial bondage. They had no time for the view that Zionism was tinged with colonialism.

Al-Shams to Alpha Centauri, All occupied lands will be free. Till there is smile on every face, All happiness is blasphemy.

Many cannot accept the contradiction inherent in the idea that although Zionism undoubtedly succeeded in creating a thriving national entity in Israel, its roots are as a colonial settler project (as are those of other modern countries: the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand). Nor can they accept that it would not have succeeded but for the support of the great imperial powers, Britain and later the United States. Zionism, therefore, could be and was both a national and a colonial settler movement at one and the same time.

Israel also became a doppelganger of the colonial project, specifically settler colonialism. Many of Zionism’s basic rationales were thinly veiled Judaizations of core Christian colonial conceptions: Terra Nullius, the claim that continents like Australia were effectively empty because their Indigenous inhabitants were categorized as less than fully human, became “A land without a people for a people without a land”—a phrase adopted by many Zionists and that originated with nineteenth-century Christians. Manifest Destiny became “land bequeathed to the Jews by divine right.” “Taming the wild frontier” became “making the desert bloom.

The King (A Sonnet) Today I salute you, For today you are king, Ruler of the entire earth, One without a living being. My congratulations, your majesty, On your glorious accomplishment! Fate worse than a defeated king is a king without subjects. I got buried in the wreck, So did my friends and family. But still I salute you my king, On your unparalleled victory. I salute you from my grave, For today you are king, Ruler of a million lands, Yet still, ruler of nothing!

Zionism was not the same as the classic colonialist enterprises of European states in Africa and Asia. There are many differences—mainly that Zionism really is the story of a people returning to their historic land. Those who call Zionism Western colonialization refuse to recognize the legitimacy of Zionism and reject the notion that Jews are a people, asserting that Judaism is solely a status of religion. Ironically, while they demand the right of self-determination for the Palestinian people, they reject the idea that Jews too have that very same right—to determine their identity and to fulfill a territorial expression of their identity in their ancient homeland.

The Gaza Sonnet, 1264 (All Free or None Free) Al-Shams to Alpha Centauri, All occupied lands will be free. Till there is smile on every face, All happiness is blasphemy. Happiness is not an imperial merch, Freedom is no colonizer's heirloom. Joy is no bigot's ancestral bequest, Earth is not a zionist hand-me-down. Divide and rule is the law of animals, Unite and integrate is law of humanity. One human life is worth more, than all the gas reserves underneath. Gaza is not a place, Gaza is a wake up call, to the peace-crying humanity. Awake, Arise, O Citizens of Earth - Till all of us are free, none of us are free!

Happiness is not an imperial merch, Freedom is no colonizer's heirloom. Joy is no bigot's ancestral bequest, Earth is not a zionist hand-me-down.

There are varying degrees of evil in the world. The distinction between levels of evil is perhaps the primary moral responsibility incumbent upon each of us. Every child knows that cruelty is bad and contemptible, while its opposite, compassion, is commendable. That is an easy and simple moral distinction. The more essential and far more difficult distinction is the one between different shades of gray, between degrees of evil. Aggressive environmental activists, for example, or the furious opponents of globalization, may sometimes emerge as violent fanatics. But the evil they cause is immeasurably smaller than that caused by a fanatic who commits a large-scale terrorist attack. Nor are the crimes of the terrorist fanatic comparable to those of fanatics who commit ethnic cleansing or genocide. Those who are unwilling or unable to rank evil may thereby become the servants of evil. Those who make no distinction between such disparate phenomena as apartheid, colonialism, ISIS, Zionism, political incorrectness, the gas chambers, sexism, the 1 percent's wealth, and air pollution serve evil with their very refusal to grade it.

The leading post-Zionists’ lack of solidarity with Palestinian citizens results from their reticence to confront the core nature of Israel as a settler colonial state and society.

In this context, a critique of the Zionist colonial project that brought about the 1948 Nakba is essential; it targets the very identity of the state and those committed to it. Yet post-Zionists have been cautious to address the pre-state Zionist colonization period and the Nakba.

But this model was not derived from any affinity to socialist values; rather, it proved to be the only practical model for the creation of functional settler colonies.

Ein-Gil and Machover’s analysis concludes that framing Palestinians in Israel as another identity group fighting marginalization empties the Palestinian national struggle of its true essence: the democratization of the Zionist state and the dismantlement of its colonial-Zionist nature

The tendency of multiculturalism and identity politics to ignore the strengthened nationalist consciousness of Palestinian citizens of Israel and their challenge to the Jewish Zionist state is consistent with avoiding the fact that Israel is the vehicle implementing the Zionist colonial project, and not just another Western nation.

However, while the discourse of postcolonial studies may describe the situation of third world immigrant groups in Europe in some respects, its application to the case of Palestinians in Israel is totally misleading. One cannot label Palestinians as an “ethnic identity group” (as is the case with immigrants), because it is they who are the original inhabitants of the land and whose national homeland was occupied by a colonial force.

Silencing the use of the concept ‘colonialism,’” they emphasize, “means silencing history as well.

Instead, they hesitate to define Zionism as a colonial project and when it is mentioned they refrain from elaborating on it.

Why they explicitly avoid the notion that Israel is a vehicle for advancing the Zionist colonial project is found in an answer to a question they raise: “What is the relevance of the concept ‘colonialism’ for the discussion on the society and culture in Israel today?

The contradiction between the letter of the Covenant and the policy of the Allies is even more flagrant in the case of the “independent nation” of Palestine than in that of the “independent nation” of Syria. For in Palestine we do not propose even to go through the form of consulting the wishes of the present inhabitants of the country.… The four Great Powers are committed to Zionism. And Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age-long traditions, in present needs, in future hopes, of far profounder import than the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land. In my opinion that is right. What I have never been able to understand is how it can be harmonised with the declaration, the Covenant, or the instructions to the Commission of Enquiry. I do not think that Zionism will hurt the Arabs; but they will never say they want it. Whatever be the future of Palestine it is not now an “independent nation,” nor is it yet on the way to become one. Whatever deference should be paid to the views of those who live there, the Powers in their selection of a mandatory do not propose, as I understand the matter, to consult them. In short, so far as Palestine is concerned, the Powers have made no statement of fact which is not admittedly wrong, and no declaration of policy which, at least in the letter, they have not always intended to violate.

Unlike South Africa’s Apartheid, which exploited the vital labor power of the Blacks,46 Zionists rejected the Palestinians outright. Consciously and deliberately, Zionists adopted the model of pure settler colonies, following colonialist precedents set in North America, New Zealand, and Australia, where native populations were exterminated or expelled instead of used for cheap labor.

As the overarching organization of workers’ trade unions, the Histadrut controlled key areas that were needed to accomplish the primary tasks of the Zionist colonial enterprise. These included economic production and marketing, defense, and control of the labor force, as well as creating jobs outside the free market so as to avoid competition with abundant and cheap Arab labor. The Histadrut thus introduced the irregular phenomenon of a “trade union” that established its own industrial, financial, construction, transport, and service enterprises.41

Freedom is no colonizer's heirloom. Earth is not a zionist hand-me-down.

Happiness is not an imperial merch, freedom is no colonizer's heirloom.

Palestine is the new Poland (The Controversial Sonnet) Życie jest jednym wielkim uprzedzeniem, chyba że kwestionujesz wszystko. Dobroć jest odważniejsza niż okrucieństwo, Wszędzie jest dom, każdy jest rodziną. Płoń tak jasno, świat ożywa, Służba to najwyższa mądrość. Obudź się, powstań i śmiało ogłoś: mój świat, moja odpowiedzialność. You should be more disgusted at Churchill and Columbus than Hitler, the fact that you are not, shows how ludicrously little you're aware of humanitarian disasters. Palestine is the new Poland, yet hypocrites only shout for Ukraine. Tears must fit liberty's narrative, if not, they're thrusted terrorist blame. Mein Kampf ist nicht vorbei, bis alle frei sind, Surrender not to the narrative of fake freedom. Greatest freedom is freedom from selfishness, a capacity mastered only by the living human.

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.

force. Another quarter of a million Palestinians from the West Bank became refugees, some of them for the second time. Once again, as in the aftermath of the 1948 war, Israel refused to allow the Palestinian civilians to return to their homes. The occupation, said to be temporary, pending a political resolution of the conflict, became permanent. Formal annexation of the Palestinian territories was eschewed but creeping, de facto annexation never stopped. Prolonging the occupation, slowly but surely, turned Israel into an apartheid state. Some of Israel’s apologists maintain that the Zionist movement was derailed from its proper course by the military victory of 1967, that the Zionism of values was replaced by the Zionism of territory. But since Zionism was an avowedly settler-colonial movement from the outset, the building of civilian settlements on occupied land was only a new stage in the long march.

force. Another quarter of a million Palestinians from the West Bank became refugees, some of them for the second time. Once again, as in the aftermath of the 1948 war, Israel refused to allow the Palestinian civilians to return to their homes. The occupation, said to be temporary, pending a political resolution of the conflict, became permanent. Formal annexation of the Palestinian territories was eschewed but creeping, de facto annexation never stopped. Prolonging the occupation, slowly but surely, turned Israel into an apartheid state. Some of Israel’s apologists maintain that the Zionist movement was derailed from its proper course by the military victory of 1967, that the Zionism of values was replaced by the Zionism of territory. But since Zionism was an avowedly settler-colonial movement from the outset, the building of civilian settlements on occupied land was only a new stage in the long march. Either way, there could be no doubt that the Palestinians were and continue to be the victims of the ongoing Zionist project. What

Settler colonialism differs from classical colonialism in three respects. The first is that settler colonies rely only initially and temporarily on the empire for their survival. In fact, in many cases, as in Palestine and South Africa, the settlers do not belong to the same nation as the imperial power that initially supports them. More often than not they ceded from the empire, redefining themselves as a new nation, sometimes through a liberation struggle against the very empire that supported them (as happened during the American Revolution for instance). The second difference is that settler colonialism is motivated by a desire to take over land in a foreign country, while classical colonialism covets the natural resources in its new geographical possessions. The third difference concerns the way they treat the new destination of settlement. Unlike conventional colonial projects conducted in the service of an empire or a mother country, settler colonialists were refugees of a kind seeking not just a home, but a homeland. The problem was that the new “homelands” were already inhabited by other people. In response, the settler communities argued that the new land was theirs by divine or moral right, even if, in cases other than Zionism, they did not claim to have lived there thousands of years ago. In many cases, the accepted method for overcoming such obstacles was the genocide of the indigenous locals.

With respect to pure military considerations, there is no doubt that the presence of settlements, even if 'civilian,' of the occupying power in the occupied territory, substantially contributes to the security in that area and facilitates the execution of the duties of the military," noted Israeli High Court justice Alfred Vitkon, while arguing in favor of the legality of the settlement enterprise against the repeated indictments of international law.

The premise of this plan, as the Palestinian historians Samih Farsoun and Naseer Aruri point out," is that the nearly forty-year-old impasse is not caused by an abnormal and illegal occupation but by the Palestinian resistance to that occupation. Progress was thus linked to ending the intifada and all acts of resistance rather than ending the occupation or reversing decades of colonial impoverishment of land, resources, and institutions.

The Israeli government publicly claims that this extraordinary violence - its army fired over a million bullets in the first few days of the intifada alone - was directed against what it called "the terrorist Infrastructure." But, again, various Israeli officials privately acknowledged what was really at stake in dealing with the intifada, and that Israel's response to the uprising was directed not at armed groups but rather against the entire population.

Privately, however, various Israeli officials acknowledged that the uprising, with all of its attendant violence, was the inevitable outcome not only of the lopsided nature of the conflict, but also of the stifling of Palestinian aspirations that was essential to the Oslo process. "Under conditions of an asymmetric confrontation, one in which Israel is many times stronger than the Palestinians, we have decisive influence on the course of events," warned Mati Steinberg of the Shin Bet. The Israeli approach, he argued, "dictates just one choice to the Palestinians: either they surrender to Israel's dictates, or they rise up against all the dictates at all costs.

It was when the terms discussed at Camp David became clear, and when it seemed obvious to the Palestinians that years of negotiation had only resulted in greater restriction, as well as the immiseration produced by the collapse of the Palestinian economy (first made dependent on the Israeli economy, then suddenly separated from it during the Oslo years), that the second intifada erupted in the summer and fall of 2000.

The Middle East peace process may well be the most spectacular deception in modern diplomatic history, writes Henry Siegman, the former head of the American Jewish Congress. "Since the failed Camp David summit of 2000, and actually well before it, Israel's interest in a peace process--other than for the purpose of obtaining Palestinian and international acceptance of the status quo--has been a fiction that has served primarily to provide cover for its systematic confiscation of Palestinian land.

A similar law had been passed in South Africa at the peak of apartheid in 1980 and had been summarily rejected by that country's (white) supreme court, as an inappropriate and illegal interference with black people's right to marry and establish families. The Israeli law was extended in 2004, 2005, 2006, and 2007, and formally endorsed by Israel's High Court in May 2006.

According to Colonel Shaul Arieli of the Israeli army reserves, the point of making life so difficult for Palestinians in the gap between the border and the wall is to push them to leave for good.

He added: "I got a real kick out of every house that was demolished, because I knew that dying means nothing to them, while the loss of their house means more to them. You destroy a house and you destroy forty or fifty people for generations. If one thing does bother me about all this, it is that we didn't wipe out the whole camp.

Jaffa will become a Jewish city," declared David Ben-Gurion, Israel's first prime minister, a month after the city had been cleared of its Arab inhabitants; "to allow the return of the Arabs to Jaffa would be," he added, "foolish." Ben-Gurion had had it out for Jaffa long before 1948. "Jaffa's destruction, the town and the port, will happen, and it is good that it will happen," he had noted in his diary a dozen years previously; "if Jaffa goes to hell, I will not participate in its grief.

In other words, the principle of Jewishness has priority over the principle of equality in Israel.

What is true of the JNF is true of Israeli law in general. More than twenty seperate Basic Laws (the closest documents Israel has to a written constitution) and other forms of legislation explicitly discriminate between Jews and non-Jews.

The inhabitants of the villages in the "seam zone" have had to apply for a document that the Israeli army calls a permanent resident permit. As its name suggests, this document is something like a U.S. Green Card, except that in this case the person applying for the permit only wants to stay where he already is, on the land where he has been living all his life.

By the end of that day, between 2,000 and 5,000 of Jaffa's original 70,000 inhabitants remained in their homes. All the others were gone. They would never be allowed to return. As had happened at Haifa a month previously, the city's Palestinian population was forced down to the port by the Zionist forces; there they were crammed onto boats, skiffs, and trawlers--and driven out to sea, to make their way to Gaza, el- Arish, even as far away as Beirut, leaving behind everything: homes, furniture, clothing, family papers, heirlooms, photographs, libraries. Much of the city was systematically demolished after the fighting. Its souks and commercial districts were entirely flattened. The famous orange groves surrounding the city were cleared away. All that remained of Jaffa after 1948 was the central district, whose homes were parceled out to new Jewish residents: European Jewish immigrants got the pick of the choicest residences in Jaffa; Sephardim and Mizrahim-Arab Jews-got the rest.

What black greed, what unwitting hatred, has turned Israeli Jews into torturers of the innocent? The Settlers come first, violent and cruel--but above them is a vast, rabid system, official Israel, that sustains them and protects them, that corrupts our minds and our language, God's language, with vile rationalizations.

Much of what the Israelis do in the West Bank and Gaza has to do with the projection of power: to remind people every day not only that their smallest actions are subject to Israeli control, but that at any given moment--even in the middle of the night--the Israeli army can break down the doors to their homes and come in looking for suspects or suspicious possessions.

For its part, the Gush Emunim regards the very idea of Arab residence in Palestine as a form of theft.

For Israel, the Oslo negotiations offered a mechanism to repackage the principles of the Allon Plan in a way that, geographically speaking, looked remarkably like the original.

The international legal requirement is simple: it is that Israel withdraw from the occupied territories, end its abrogation of Palestinian human and political rights, and cease and dismantle its illegal settlement enterprise.

As far as the Israelis were concerned, then, the limited implementation of the Oslo Accords amounted, essentially, to little more than a new form of occupation, enabling the perpetual deferral of the core issues of the conflict.

At heart, the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians is actually very simple. It is not about religion. It is not about security. It is not about terrorism. It is about land. Or, to be more precise, it is a struggle that, as the late Israeli sociologist Baruch Kimmerling put it, is driven by two mutually exclusive impulses within Zionism, with "one Zionist imperative--to possess the largest possible amount of sacred land--contradicting the other Zionist imperative--to ensure a massive Jewish majority inhabiting a land that was preferably free of all Arabs." The problem for Zionists is--and has always been--that the land that they want comes with non-Jews already on it.

Allon resolved the conundrum facing Israel: it wanted the land, but it did not want the people. The Allon Plan would allow Israel to accomplish both ends: controlling, and ultimately settling, Palestinian land without granting citizenship to Palestinians living under Israeli control after 1967.

Amir Cheshin, former Israeli advisor on Arab affairs to the mayor of Jerusalem, explains: "The planning and building laws in East Jerusalem rest on a policy that calls for placing obstacles in the way of planning in the Arab sector--this is done more to preserve the demographic balance between Jews and Arabs in the city, which is presently in a ratio of 72 percent Jews against 28 percent non-Jews.

Palestinian identity and nationalism are all too often seen to be no more than recent expressions of an unreasoning (if not fanatical) opposition to Jewish national self-determination. But Palestinian identity, much like Zionism, emerged in response to many stimuli, and at almost exactly the same time as did modern political Zionism. The threat of Zionism was only one of these stimuli, just as anti-Semitism was only one of the factors fueling Zionism.

The advantage that Israel has enjoyed in continuing its project rests on the fact that the basically colonial nature of the encounter in Palestine has not been visible to most Americans and many Europeans. Israel appears to them to be a normal, natural nation-state like any other, faced by the irrational hostility of instrasigent and often anti-Semitic Muslims (which is how Palestinians, even the Christians among them, are seen by many). the propagation of this image is one of the greatest achievements of Zionism and is vital to its survival.