[News] Israel's roots in European colonialism explain its genocidal ideology

[Anti-Imperialist News]

geopoliticaleconomy.substack.com
<https://geopoliticaleconomy.substack.com/p/israel-western-colonialism-genocide-ideology?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=457596&post_id=150252636&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=lvppb&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email>
Israel's roots in European colonialism explain its genocidal ideology
Ben Norton
October 15, 2024
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<https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F6123aa99-d34c-4a57-ba02-32a72ecbbf27_1920x1080.jpeg>

Israel is carrying out a genocide in Gaza. This is precisely what numerous
<https://www.ohchr.org/en/statements/2024/10/international-order-breaking-down-gaza-un-experts-mark-one-year-genocidal>
United Nations experts <https://news.un.org/en/story/2024/03/1147976> have
determined.

Several countries have joined South Africa in a case in the International
Court of Justice accusing Israel of committing genocide
<https://geopoliticaleconomy.com/2024/10/12/genocide-gaza-nicaragua-fascist-israel-latin-america/>
against the Palestinian people, and judges at the Hague have stated that it
is "plausible”
<https://geopoliticaleconomy.com/2024/01/27/icj-israel-genocide-palestinians/>
that Tel Aviv is violating the Genocide Convention.

Top Israeli officials have made genocidal calls for the elimination of the
Palestinian people, whom they demonize as “human animals”
<https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/israel-palestine-war-fighting-human-animals-defence-minister>.
Israel's far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich argued that it would
be “justified and moral” to starve to death all 2 million Palestinian
civilians in Gaza
<https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/smotrich-might-be-justified-and-moral-to-cause-2-million-gazans-to-die-of-hunger-but-world-wont-let-us/>.
(He however lamented that the international community would not permit
this.)

Some people who do not closely follow geopolitics are utterly confused how
a state that claims to represent the Jewish people (although many Jewish
people around the world oppose it) could commit such heinous crimes, after
European Jews suffered through a horrific genocide at the hands of Nazi
Germany and its fascist allies.

To understand the blatant genocide that Israel is carrying out today in
Gaza, with the full support of the US government
<https://geopoliticaleconomy.com/2024/09/04/israel-war-gaza-possible-us-support/>
and most of Europe, it is important to study the history of Zionism - the
movement that sought to establish a Jewish ethnostate - and to recognize
Zionism's roots in Western colonialism.

Contrary to popular belief, Israel was not founded in response to the
barbarism of the Nazi Holocaust. The British empire had already endorsed
the creation of an Israeli colonial regime in historic Palestine three
decades before, in the Balfour Declaration of 1917, at a time when Europe
was colonizing West Asia (a better term for the Middle East).

It is not a coincidence that the Balfour Declaration came immediately after
the 1916 Sykes–Picot Agreement, in which the British and French empires
carved up the Ottoman empire's territory and established their own colonies
in West Asia.
[image: Sykes Picot agreement map 1916]
<https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F9c0e02c5-cbfa-4a15-88de-b5c45b086f97_677x876.jpeg>A
map of territories that the British and French empires would control
according to the Sykes–Picot Agreement of 1916

Zionism was directly modeled after 19th-century European colonialist
movements.

The "founding father" of the political Zionist movement, Theodor Herzl,
wrote a letter to Cecil Rhodes, the genocidal colonizer of Africa (after
whom Rhodesia was named), asking for help to colonize Palestine. In the
letter, Herzl boasted that Zionism was "something colonial”
<https://www.jstor.org/stable/2535975>.

Reassuring his European colonial sponsors, Herzl insisted that Israel
(which he called “Der Judenstaat”) would “form a part of a wall of defense
for Europe in Asia
<https://theintercept.com/2020/02/01/hundred-years-war-palestine-book-rashid-khalidi/>,
an outpost of civilization against barbarism".

This is the same colonial language still used today by Israel's longest
ever serving leader, far-right Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. "We're
protecting you", Netanyahu told the US Congress
<https://www.timesofisrael.com/were-protecting-you-full-text-of-netanyahus-address-to-congress/>
in an address in July 2024. "This is not a clash of civilizations. It’s a
clash between barbarism and civilization".

While Israel's supporters in the 21st century usually downplay the state's
colonial roots, the original Zionist leaders were proud of their
colonialist ideology; they didn't hide it. An influential early Zionist
group called itself the Palestine Jewish Colonization Association.

One of Herzl's major political allies was British Secretary of State for
the Colonies Joseph Chamberlain, a blood-soaked, ideologically committed
colonialist who violently opposed sovereignty for Ireland and terrorized
the peoples living under British colonial rule in Africa.

In fact, the British empire initially considered creating a Zionist regime
in Uganda <https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/the-uganda-proposal-1903>,
which it had also colonized in east Africa, before later settling on
Palestine. The UK's 1917 Balfour Declaration was the green light for
creating Israel by colonizing Palestine -- again, decades before World War
II and the Nazi Holocaust.

The Israeli regime's fascist frenzy today makes more sense when one
understands that both Zionism and Nazism originated in European colonialism.

The Nazis wanted to colonize Eastern Europe to have "Lebensraum" (living
space), and tried to kill and ethnically cleanse the region's inhabitants
to steal their land; just like Zionists want to colonize historic Palestine
and other parts of West Asia to expand the “living space” of their own
supremacist ethnostate, by killing and ethnically cleansing the indigenous
inhabitants to steal their land.

Zionism's similarities with fascism were made strikingly clear the very
year Israel was founded, in 1948, through the murderous mass ethnic
cleansing of Palestinians (known as the *Nakba* - the Arabic word for
"catastrophe").

None other than Albert Einstein compared Israel to Nazi Germany at the
time. In December 1948, Einstein (who in addition to being a renowned
physicist was a committed socialist
<https://monthlyreview.org/2009/05/01/why-socialism/>) co-authored a letter
in the New York Times
<https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/einstein/1948/12/02.htm>
alongside other prominent left-wing Jewish intellectuals. They issued an
eerily prescient warning (emphasis added):

Among the most disturbing political phenomena of our times is *the
emergence in the newly created state of Israel of the "Freedom Party"
(Tnuat Haherut), a political party closely akin in its organization,
methods, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist
parties*. It was formed out of the membership and following of the former
Irgun Zvai Leumi, a terrorist, right-wing, chauvinist organization in
Palestine.

The current visit of Menachem Begin, leader of this party, to the United
States is obviously calculated to give the impression of American support
for his party in the coming Israeli elections, and to cement political ties
with conservative Zionist elements in the United States. Several Americans
of national repute have lent their names to welcome his visit. It is
inconceivable that those who oppose fascism throughout the world, if
correctly informed as to Mr. Begin's political record and perspectives,
could add their names and support to the movement he represents.

Before irreparable damage is done by way of financial contributions, public
manifestations in Begin's behalf, and the *creation in Palestine of the
impression that a large segment of America supports Fascist elements in
Israel*, the American public must be informed as to the record and
objectives of Mr. Begin and his movement.

The public avowals of Begin's party are no guide whatever to its actual
character. Today they speak of freedom, democracy and anti-imperialism,
whereas *until recently they openly preached the doctrine of the Fascist
state*. It is in its actions that the terrorist party betrays its real
character; *from its past actions we can judge what it may be expected to
do in the future.*

Menachem Begin, whom Einstein et al. characterized as a fascist, went on to
serve as Israel's prime minister from 1977 to 1983. The far-right political
party that Begin led, Herut, transformed into the most powerful political
organization in Israel in the 21st century: Likud, the party of Netanyahu.

In short, the campaign of genocidal destruction that US-backed Israeli
forces are unleashing in Palestine in 2024 is far from new; it is a
continuation of a centuries-long process of Western colonialism.

What Israel is doing is what the US and Canada did to the Native peoples of
North America, what Australia did to the Aboriginal peoples, what Belgium
did to Congo, what France did to Algeria, what the UK did to Ireland, and
what Germany did to Namibia.

Zionism is colonialism, which is why it is no surprise at all that the
Western imperial powers continue to back Israel so strongly. They do not
need an Israel lobby to convince them to support colonialism; this is what
imperial powers do. The US did not need a lobby to convince it to wage
savage imperial wars of aggression against the peoples of Korea, Vietnam,
Cuba, Nicaragua, Yugoslavia, Iraq, Libya, etc.
[image: nakba palestinians expelled israel 1948 jordan]
<https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fe377e217-c05d-47a2-8e9c-72d3c1d78a88_1000x668.jpeg>Indigenous
Palestinians being expelled by Zionist militias in the Nakba of 1948

After being established in the bloody massacres of the 1948 Nakba, Israel's
colonial regime initially acted as an outpost of the British empire. This
was clear when the UK (and France) intervened to help Israel fight against
Egypt's revolutionary anti-colonialist pan-Arab leader Gamal Abdel Nasser,
after he nationalized the Suez canal in the so-called "Suez crisis" of 1956
(which was really a crisis of colonialism, in which a formerly colonized
nation asserted sovereign, popular control over its territory and
infrastructure, so the colonial powers that had profited from that
infrastructure invaded to try to stop it).

The United States subsequently overtook Great Britain, and, since 1967, Israel
has been an outpost of the US empire
<https://geopoliticaleconomy.com/2023/11/12/why-us-support-israel-geopolitics-michael-hudson/>.
Washington has used the colonialist Zionist regime as a vicious attack dog
to try to liquidate all anti-imperialist opposition forces in West Asia,
first targeting communists, then Arab nationalists, and now Islamic-nationalist
groups fighting for national liberation
<https://geopoliticaleconomy.com/2024/09/29/hezbollah-nasrallah-lebanon-israel-colonialism/>
.

As former US Secretary of State and NATO commander Alexander Haig
boasted, "Israel
is the largest American aircraft carrier in the world that cannot be sunk
<https://geopoliticaleconomy.com/2024/09/04/israel-war-gaza-possible-us-support/>
”.
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