Settler colonialism, Israel, and history

Note that this post was originally written in 2021, though I have made numerous small refinements and additions since then

Because of the current horrors undertaken by the state of Israel, a friend recently said something characteristic of a lot of American lefties who have had to un-learn both pro-Israel propaganda and US propaganda about our own history:

Israel is exactly a parallel of the US. It’s a settler-colonial state that displaces and claims the territory of the people who were there before […] That’s also why the US supports Israeli actions so much.

I got long-winded in my frustrated reply, and that led to this short history of the Israel-Palestine conflict.

US support for Israel

First I must dispense with this obvious canard. No, the US does not support Israel out of some weird settler colonialist solidarity.

The US military is very interested in being able to intervene in a lot of places in Israel’s neighborhood and it helps to have an ally who will let US planes land and refuel on their airbases. Republicans support Israel’s policies because they are in the grip of Evangelicals who believe that Israel is an integral part of realizing Biblical prophecy. (I would think that one would want to devote our foreign policy to preventing Armageddon, but what do I know?) Democrats support Israel’s policies because they are in the grip of the hardline Israel lobby whom liberal Jews have been too feckless to purge from the coalition.

The USA is different

The other part — the question of Israel’s settler colonialism — requires unfolding a lot of history. At the bottom line, Israel is the result of a settler colonial project and that project is ongoing in the present crisis, but analogizing it to the history of the US is irresponsibly misleading.

Prior to the founding of the USA in the Revolutionary War and its aftermath, the British colonies in North America starting even at Plymouth Rock were engaged in settler colonialism: seizing land with the intention to make it their own for every following generation, with total disregard for the indigenous people of the continent. By the time of the Revolution what would become the US had more than a century of expansionist settler colonialism with an overt program of total genocide to establish British sovereignty over territory; the program of genocide continued through the closing of the frontier, a legacy which is alive in the present day.

Israel’s history is bloody and ugly but it is very different.

Zionism before Israel

The Zionist project can be seen as beginning with the First Zionist Conference in 1897, when what is now Israel was still part of the vast, weak Ottoman Empire. It is important to understand that the Zionism conceived then did not seek to establish the state of Israel as we now have it. The Conference in 1897 defined their project thus:

Zionism aims at establishing for the Jewish people a publicly and legally assured home in Palestine.

In this we can see how Zionism is indeed an ethnic nationalism but not quite what one might naïvely imagine from the succinct description “Jewish nationalism”.

First, the 1897 statement explicitly rejects conceiving of Zionism as a religious project. “The Jewish people” are framed in secular terms, as an ethnic people. (The Magen-David ✡︎ emerges as a symbol of ethnic Jewish identity at this time, as distinct from the seven-branch menorah which was the predominant symbol of Judaism as a religion in Europe. The use of this symbol on the flag of Israel underlines that Israel is a secular state, not a theocracy.)

Second, the pointed use of the word “home” deliberately avoids identifying a sovereign Westphalian nation-state like Israel as it exists today as the defining goal of Zionism. Yes, that was the dream of many Zionists, but not all, and it was not the plan. It is neither accidental nor incidental that this definition of Zionism identifies it as at least compatible with a pluralistic Palestine, because that was what many in the Zionist coalition most wanted. (More on that in an earlier post on the origins and consequent meaning of “Zionism”.)

Palestine before Israel

Again, in 1897 Palestine was a region, not a country. It was a small part of the Ottoman Empire, which was approaching collapse and would not survive the First World War. There were already significant populations of Jews in the region. Communities of diaspora Ashkenazi & Sephardic European Jews had origins in centuries of waves of immigration. Indigenous Mizrahi Jews were present all over the Middle East.

Between 1897 and WWI, Zionism was in no way the work of an imperial power; it was an independent ethnic nationalist movement. Many of these early Zionists were undertaking a project a bit like the Pennsylvania Dutch — buying and homesteading land with the intent of developing ethnic enclaves. But it would be absurd to imagine these Zionists as just like the Amish. By the 1920s there were Zionist settlements on land purchased fair and square this way, protected from hostile neighbors by Jewish militias … which were hard to distinguish from other settlement militias seizing territory by force of arms, even terrorism.

After WWI and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, Palestine became a colonial holding of the British Empire. Zionism in the interval between WWI & WWII cannot be understood simply as European or British imperialism, though: Zionist settlements in Palestine were tolerated by the British Empire rather than sponsored by them. The Balfour Declaration of 1917 was issued by the British government but did not have any compelling legal power, and again we can see that it does not imply any plans for a sovereign Jewish state:

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.

In the immediate wake of the First World War, or before that, a map of “Palestine” would often include not just what is now Israel but also most of what is now Jordan; you can see an example at the top of this post. Shortly after WWI, the region was organized into the Emirate of Transjordan (nominally independent but a “British protectorate”, which would eventually become independent Jordan) and Mandatory Palestine (subject to direct British rule, which included a bit more than what is now Israel and its occupied territories).

Arab Palestinian nationalist movements comparable to other anti-colonial movements around the world grew in strength, fueled by frustration with accelerating Jewish immigration and British colonial rule. Some understood themselves as part of a broader pan-Arab movement; others sought an Arab state forged from the Palestinian territory under British rule. In the late ’30s their armed revolt suffered British suppression with their characteristic colonial brutality.

Then in the wake of WWII, Holocaust survivors found that the Eastern Europeans who helped Nazis ship Jews to concentration camps were equally dangerous as administrators of Soviet domination; for many, Zionists taking them to Palestine to join their cause were their only option for survival.

Founding Israel

By 1948, there were an array of different Jewish populations in Palestine. There were Jews whose grandparents were born in houses which Zionists purchased fair and square … who might live in other houses seized from Arab Palestinians by force of arms before they were born. There were non-Zionist Mizrahi Jews who looked just like their Arab neighbors, living in the same houses their great-great-grandparents had been born in under the reign of Sultan Abdul Hamid II in the 19^th century. There were non-Zionist Ashkenazi & Sephardic Jews whose ancestors had migrated to Palestine centuries before Zionism. There were Eastern Europeans freshly arrived from the horrors of the Holocaust filling Zionist militias.

Plus, of course, Arabs, with their own ambitions for independence from British colonial rule.

That at that moment it was in the hands of the US and Europeans to decide what the shape of the geopolitical order would become as their empires crumbled in the wake of WWII was, of course, reflective of the greater process of European colonialism in the Middle East and around the world. And that it would primarily be Britian among those powers who would adjudicate the competing claims of Mizrahim, European Zionists, and Arabs inside of Palestine and out, again reflects that same colonialism.

Given that there were both Jewish and Arab populations with legitimate claims at the end of the Second World War, one might ask why they would grant all of Palestine to Jews rather than attempt a partition as in India & Pakistan. But Israel apologists will remind you that if you look at a map from 1910 or 1920, much of “Palestine” on that map would likely be territory which did later fall under Arab rule in the form of Jordan.

In 1947 & 1948, there were a series of partition proposals sponsored by the then-new United Nations and others, drawing upon earlier proposals (which both Jews and Arabs had both generally rejected) framing an Israel much like what Israel would come to actually hold over the decades to come, plus a sovereign Arab Palestine comprised of something close to what we now call the West Bank of the Jordan, the Gaza Strip, and the Golan Heights.

Those would-be sovereign Arab Palestinian territories would not get even a moment as nation-states, as they were claimed by Jordan, Egypt, and Syria in a tumultuous and bloody process between 1947-9. Here as in much of the world, the chaos of the immediate post-WWII era meant conflict between various players trying to lay claim to territory so they would not be left without a chair when the music stopped. I don’t have the expertise to untangle or summarize well how that took place, not least because important elements of this history remain vigorously disputed by good faith scholars.

Thus salty Israel apologists say that we already have a two-state solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict with Jordan & Israel, and salty critics of pro-Palestinian movements will ask why we hear so much about the oppression of Palestinian Arabs by Israel but not by Jordan, Egypt, and Syria. Such arguments are whataboutism … but not entirely bullshit.

Early Israel

The result of the founding of Israel does roughly resemble the partition of South Asia into India & Pakistan in some important ways: population transfers, local atrocities on all sides, and border disputes. Mizrahi Jews all over the Middle East and Sephardic & Ashkenazi Jews all over Europe migrated to Israel, often though not always escaping severe oppression and efforts to displace them. In 1948 the majority of Jews in Israel were Ashkenazim; migration of Mizrahim from all over the Middle East would make them the majority of Israelis within a few decades.

Arab Palestinians in what was now Israel became citizens of Israel theoretically with the same rights as Jewish Israelis, but in practice they suffered (and still suffer) various forms of oppression and disenfranchisement … including that many of them were displaced from their homes by Zionist militias which would develop into the foundation of Israel’s army.

During its first two decades, Israel fought a series of wars and border skirmishes with all of its neighbors. Partly this reflected the oddness and arbirariness of the Green Line border of Israel inherited from the attempted partition in 1947; the British Empire had a long habit of setting administrative borders which produced local conflicts, in order to keep the upper hand as a colonial power. Israel hardliners will tell you that Israel was simply an innocent sovereign nation under siege from conquerer neighbors; historians have demonstrated that Israel was often spoiling for a fight, hoping to seize more territory. (Israel eventually succeeded in changing those borders; we’ll get to that in a moment.)

The Israeli story of dread of their threatening neighbors is not entirely bullshit. The entire Arab world understandably read the creation of Israel as nothing other than one last imposition of overt European imperialism and colonialism, right at the moment when former colonial possessions were starting to lay claim to liberation and sovereignty. So they refused to recognize Israel’s legitimacy at all, declaring their plans to literally wipe the country from the map, as did the nationalist terrorists of the Palestine Liberation Organization, founded in 1964.

One can imagine what success for these antagonists of Israel would have meant for the Jews who had never known any place other than Israel as home — or who had migrated from neighboring Arab countries to Israel after 1948 — and had no place else to go.

These many decades later, Arabs generally still see Israel as nothing other than the most galling face of the legacy of European colonialism. In turn, many Israelis still see their conflict with Arab Palestinians as only the most proximate part of an ongoing larger conflict with hostile neighboring Arab nations.

The Six Day War, and occupation

In 1967, Israel fought the Six Day War with Jordan, Syria, and Egypt. By this time it should be evident why it is hard to say Who Started It in any simple way.

Remember the West Bank of the Jordan River, the Gaza Strip, and the Golan Heights from British Mandate Palestine, which Jordan, Syria, and Egypt seized? Israeli military planners had always wanted to capture these territories for strategic reasons; they faced ongoing shelling and rocket attacks from them. At the end of the 1967 war, these were now all in Israel’s hands.

Israel also seized the Sinai Peninsula from Egypt, which was more directly a territorial seizure of land for settlers; it had more than twice the area of all of pre-1967 Israel.

In violation of international law and UN resolutions, Israel then engaged in a military occupation of those territories and began building settlements for Jewish Israelis in all of them. Israel would have one last major war with its neighbors in 1973, leaving that status quo unchanged. After that Israel started denying having nuclear weapons … in a way that meant that they wanted everyone to know that they really had them. Border conflict never really stopped, but the stand-up wars ended.

The occupation of the Sinai would not last. Under the Camp David Accords signed in 1979, Israel returned the Sinai to Egypt, a fact somehow forgotten by critics who insist that Israelis refuse to even consider any real sacrifices in pursuit of peace.

Israel continues to lay claim to the Golan Heights to this day and is still building new settlements. The history of the fighting over the territory is complicated and entangled with the shifting situations in Syria and Lebanon.

Wthin the pre-1967 borders Palestinian Arabs who are citizens of the state of Israel still have rights protections under the law, democratic representation in government, and all that … and still are unmistakably oppressed by countless systemic and institutional injustices, with things arguably getting worse for them in recent years.

The situation in Gaza and the West Bank is complicated by later developments ….

Oslo and afterward

(Updated and expanded a bit in late 2023, to help contextualize the Hamas attack and Israel’s bloody response)

Israel kept Gaza and the West Bank under military occupation, building settlements for Israeli citizens. But in the late 1980s, Palestinian protest & resistance known as the First Intifada made it clear that this was not sustainable.

In the early 1990s, “peace process” negotiations between Israeli and Palestinian leaders resulted in the Oslo Accords. This created the Palestinian Authority to govern Gaza and an archipelago of territory in the West Bank. The PA is elected by Palestinian citizens of those territories, but the PA’s sovereignty is limited, with countless intrusions large and small by Israel.

In the West Bank, Israel continues to build settlements on the major portion of it which they control under the terms of Oslo; Israelis living there are generally rightwing hardliner assholes prone to confronting their Palestinian neighbors with harassment and worse, under the protection of Israel’s military.

In Gaza, Israel withdrew their soldiers and settlers in 2005 but Gaza reamined subject to brutal military policing including a blockade of goods entering or leaving, a “buffer zone” which prevents cultivating much of the arable land, and shelling in response to terrorist & rocket attacks on Israel. In a 2006 election the theocratic, authoritarian Hamas party defeated the corrupt, kleptocratic, secular Fatah party; they have not permitted an election there since. If the common refrain that these conditions have made Gaza into “an open-air prision” is an exaggeration, it is not much of one.

In this era, radicals on both sides repeatedly sabotaged any political viability for peaceful and just resolution. Optimism that relations might improve after Oslo was dashed by an Israeli hardliner assassinating prime minister Yitzhak Rabin for signing the accords, followed by Palestinian terrorist attacks killing hundreds of Israeli civilians during the Second Intifada in the early 2000s. To advocates for Palestinian liberation, the Second Intifada was an inevitable if not justified escalation of resistance to ongoing oppression. To many Israelis, this demonstrated that concessions to Palestinians did not make them safer, which built support for the Likud political coalition which has tried since then to keep Israel “secure” through the brutal repression of Palestinians … which drives Palestinian support for violent resistance. Any softening of the conflict during this era has been cut short by provocations by one side or the other. Round and round it has gone, until the horrifying Hamas attack on 7 October 2023 and Israel responding with a bloody-unto-genocidal attack in Gaza.

The bottom line

Roughly a couple of million Arab Palestinians are brutally repressed by Israel in Gaza & the West Bank; this includes ongoing displacement of Palestinians to build new settlements. Israel holds the unmistakable upper hand in an endless cycle of violence.

This is settler colonialism. This is military occupation & policing. This is an apartheid state. But students of American history should understand how different the particulars are from our horrors.

If you have read this far, and come to wonder what “Zionism” means in a post-1948 and post-1967 world, I have an open letter to an anti-Zionist which may interest you. In short, “Zionism” means not support for Israel’s current border, political order, and policies but rather support for the continued existence of the State Of Israel — the only home which millions of people have ever known — in some form.

---

Related

I find this pair of commentaries useful in thinking about the implications of “settler colonialism”:

Tzvi Bisk’s liberal Zionist novel The Suicide of the Jews offers a tidy summation of how Zionists tend to rationalize their project as distinct from the history of colonialism. Each of these points offers apologetics neither simply true nor simply false. Criticisms of Israel & Zionism should grapple with these peculiarities.

1. Every colonial enterprise represented or derived from an existing mother country or group of countries — Zionism did not.
2. No other colonial enterprise viewed itself as returning to its homeland — Zionism did.
3. No other modern colonial enterprise was driven by the desire of the colonizers to escape persecution and discrimination — Zionism was.
4. No other colonial enterprise viewed its colonial ambition as being part and parcel of their national cultural, psychological and moral renewal — Zionism did
5. No other colonial enterprise satisfied itself with only one colony — Zionism did.
6. No other colonial enterprise desired so passionately to settle a land devoid of natural resources — Zionism did.
7. No other colonial enterprise desired to create an independent state (all the others saw themselves as dependent colonies of the mother country) — Zionism did.
8. No other colonial enterprise desired to create an entirely new society — Zionism did.

Israel Is a Settler Colonial State - and That's OK at HaAretz addresses some of the deceits of Bisk’s list and defends the framework of “settler colonialism” as a goad to a more just future for Israel.

In fact, rigorous scholars who study the applicability of the settler colonial framework for the history of Israel/Palestine need not subscribe to a political agenda committed to the end of the State of Israel. Moreover, claiming that structurally, Zionist settlers are comparable to American pioneers or South African Voortrekkers, does not necessitate the denial of a historical connection between Jews and the Holy Land, the unique nature of European anti-Semitism, or even requires having sympathy for the Palestinian armed struggle against Zionism. As a matter of fact, even prominent Zionists made explicit comparisons between their own political movement and those of settlers around the world.