[News] Israel's genocide in Gaza encapsulates the entire history of European colonialism

[Anti-Imperialist News]

middleeasteye.net
<https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/israel-war-on-gaza-encapsulates-entire-history-european-colonialism>
Israel's genocide in Gaza encapsulates the entire history of European
colonialism
Hamid Dabashi
December 29, 2023
------------------------------

As millions of Palestinians
<https://www.middleeasteye.net/countries/palestine> trapped in Gaza
<https://www.middleeasteye.net/topics/gaza-under-attack> were facing
starvation and mass murder
<https://www.middleeasteye.net/topics/israel-palestine-war>, Israel's
<https://www.middleeasteye.net/countries/israel> invading army made sure to
film themselves
<https://www.businessinsider.com/idf-rejuvenation-center-israel-gaza-strip-soldiers-hamas-airstrikes-2023-11>
enjoying “rejuvenation complexes”, where they were lavished with “concerts,
massage chairs, buffet, and more”.

It is surreal to watch Israelis being pampered while slaughtering
Palestinians in their own homeland.

This is the genocidal practice of settler-colonialism, dating back at least
as far as Bartolome de las Casas in his *A Short Account of the Destruction
of the Indies
<https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/pds/amerbegin/contact/text7/casas_destruction.pdf>*
(1552). In it, he documented for posterity the vicious brutality of the
Spanish, butchering “savage Indians” in an orgy of violence. Israelis are
doing the same to the Palestinians.

In North and South America, Australia, Asia and Africa, European
settler-colonialists have left behind the evidence of their psychotic
genocidal practices.

The European transatlantic slave trade may have halved the population of
Africa, some historians believe. The US
<https://www.middleeasteye.net/countries/us>, Canada, Australia, New
Zealand and many African colonies were all built on the systematic
extermination, displacement and internment of the original inhabitants.

In the Israeli settler-colonialism now on violent display in Gaza and the
rest of Palestine, European colonialism is living up to its murderous
infamy and has returned to the global stage with a vengeance.

For decades, scholars of European colonialism
<https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/colonial-world-9781350092402/> have been
working hard to document, archive and connect these episodes of the
premeditated mass murder of native people around the globe.

But such painstaking scholarship has been unnecessary in Gaza and the West
Bank. For there, the barbarity of the Israeli army and the settlers has
been on full display on social media, and in the mainstream media in the
global south, for anyone who cares to look for themselves.

Israel has put the entire history of Euro-American settler-colonialism and
its genocidal instincts on full global display.

While the western media works tirelessly and shamelessly to whitewash
Israel's murderous activities - offering “alternative facts”, demonising
Palestinians, valorising Israelis, and sanitising Zionism to assure the
world that Israel is “the most moral army” the globe has ever seen -
the world at large has been liberated from their pernicious journalism.
Settler colonialism and genocide

While Israel goes about its genocide against the Palestinians, US Congress
has been busy persecuting those voicing opposition to Israel's actions
<https://www.middleeasteye.net/big-story/israel-palestine-war-us-universities-free-speech>
and prosecuting imaginary threats to Jews, supported by billionaires
frightening university presidents out of their wits.

For decades, critical thinking by leading anticolonial and postcolonial
thinkers had been radically altering our perceptions of the savageries
committed around the world by Europeans and Americans.

In the US, critical race theorists and intersectional feminists have staged
groundbreaking challenges against "established" world history.

Israel is a microcosm of that colonial history, all jammed inside a Zionist
nutshell.

“In a matter of weeks, a far greater number of children have been killed by
Israeli military operations in Gaza than the total number of children
killed during any individual year, by any party to a conflict since I have
been secretary-general,” said UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres
<https://www.globalissues.org/news/2023/11/30/35424#:~:text=According%20to%20the%20de%20facto,to%20be%20children%20and%20women>
on
30 November 2023.

<https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/israel-genocide-against-palestinians-colonial-tradition>

How Israel's genocidal war against Palestinians is a colonial tradition

Yet Palestinians have been consistently dehumanised, their fate
de-historicised, and Israelis cast as victims retaliating against an
unprovoked attack. The entire history of the Zionist conquest of Palestine
with the aid of their European and American benefactors is being
consistently erased. Palestinians have no history, no humanity, no culture.
Israelis have been in Palestine since the creation of heaven and earth.
Evangelical Zionism was the paramount story of the world at large.

What the Israelis are doing in Palestine is what the French did in Algeria,
the British did in India, the Belgians in the Congo, the Americans in
Vietnam, the Spaniards in Latin America, the Italians in Africa and the
Germans in Namibia, another chapter of European genocidal history.

In his essay, *Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native*
(2006), Patrick Wolfe demonstrated how
<https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14623520601056240>, “as
practised by Europeans, both genocide and settler colonialism have
typically employed the organising grammar of race”.

Even more poignantly, the Martinique author and politician Aime Cesaire, in
his 1950 seminal work *Discourse on Colonialism*
<https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt9qfkrm>, described the pernicious drive
of colonists to enslave the natives and dehumanise them, while stealing
their land, exploiting their labour and vandalising their resources.
Manifest destiny

How dare a people do this to another people - unless, of course, they think
of themselves as destined by divinity.

Zionism is the Jewish version of the racist US doctrine of “manifest destiny
<https://www.history.com/topics/19th-century/manifest-destiny>”, a belief
in the racial superiority of white people and definitive to the American
colonial conquest of the Native Americans and other groups they
exterminated.

Like the American version, Zionists believe Palestine was their promised
land, that it was destined and promised to them by their God, and that the
native inhabitants were a nuisance that must be brutally eliminated.

What the Israeli army is doing in Gaza is the Zionist version of “the great
replacement”
<https://immigrationforum.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Replacement-Theory-Explainer-1122.pdf>
 theory,
<https://immigrationforum.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Replacement-Theory-Explainer-1122.pdf>
which
holds that people of colour are replacing white people and that the process
must be reversed.

When such sentiments are uttered in the US, serious newspaper columnists
ridicule it and dismiss it as a conspiracy theory. But when such views are
expressed in Israel, they support, endorse and ideologically arm and
weaponise them.

A Christian zealotry was at the roots of the American manifest destiny
ideology, which has now morphed into evangelical Zionism, with its drive to
conquer “the Holy Land” and prepare for the second coming of their messiah.
(This figure has nothing to do with the Palestinian Jesus Christ or Latin
American liberation theology and is an entirely fictitious construct of
America's imperialist imagination.)
'Exterminate all the brutes'

In his classical 1893 essay, *The Significance of the Frontier in American
History*,
<https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/pds/gilded/empire/text1/turner.pdf>
historian
Frederick Jackson Turner theorised that American settler colonialists saw
their destiny framed by the European civilisation they had left behind and
the barbarism they faced in the "new world".

Turner believed that the American character was shaped by those beliefs.
Through evangelical Zionism, that frontier, that fight against "barbarism",
is what drives the Israeli settler-colonial project against Palestinian
resistance.

<https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/israel-palestine-war-racist-discourse-settler-colonial-genocide-fuels-how>

Israel-Palestine war: How racist discourse fuels Israel's settler colonial
genocide

“Exterminate all the brutes,” whispers the character Kurtz, an ivory
trader sent by a shadowy Belgian company into the heart of an unnamed place
in Africa, believed to be the Congo Free State, in Joseph Conrad's 1899
novella *Heart of Darkness*.

Swedish author Sven Lindqvist
<https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/jun/03/sven-lindqvist-obituary>
borrowed that phrase for the title of his 1992 book, a moral meditation on
the roots of European colonialism, racism and genocide in Africa.

When the Haitian documentary filmmaker Raoul Peck made his 2021 HBO
miniseries *Exterminate All the Brutes
<https://www.hbo.com/exterminate-all-the-brutes>*, in part based on
Lindqvist’s book, he went around the globe documenting the barbarity of
European colonialism, but dared not go near Palestine, except for a quick
liberal Zionist cliche reference to how things there were “complicated”.

Things are not complicated in Palestine. In fact, things there are very
simple: a pernicious European settler-colonial madness of conquest,
colonisation and genocide is unfolding right in front of our eyes.

Zionists have the loyal and unreserved support of other settler colonists
from Europe, the US, Canada and Australia behind them.

For that reason, the entire world, long brutalised historically by European
savagery, has become Palestinian.

*The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not
necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.*
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