[News] Israel cannot lose a ‘humanity’ it never had

[Anti-Imperialist News]

mondoweiss.net
<https://mondoweiss.net/2025/01/israel-cannot-lose-a-humanity-it-never-had/?ml_recipient=142511208223737713&ml_link=142511164591441639&utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_term=2025-01-03&utm_campaign=Daily+Headlines+RSS+Automation>
Israel cannot lose a ‘humanity’ it never had
James Ray
January 2, 2025
------------------------------
[image: Man_see_school_nakba.jpg]

On December 22, only days before Christmas, *Haaretz*’s Editorial Board
issued an editorial titled, “Israel Is Losing Its Humanity in Gaza”
<https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/editorial/2024-12-22/ty-article/.premium/israel-is-losing-its-humanity-in-gaza/00000193-eae4-d17a-a193-fbe53a040000>.
The short article outlined a fear that has for years been pervasive amongst
Liberal Zionists: that the crimes being perpetrated in Gaza are betraying
the values of an otherwise upstanding and moral settler colony. The Zionist
project, to them, is something of a legitimate state that is only now
failing to live up to the standards of conduct it is expected to commit to.

A piece intended to be both an admission of guilt and a call to do better
was ultimately nothing more than a fictitious accounting of the colony’s
history – one that called upon a better, more moral time. By detracting
from the history of violence resulting from the colony and painting a
revisionist picture of a morally upstanding (though sometimes problematic)
and ultimately legitimate, maybe even reformable, project, they did what
many Liberal Zionists have attempted to do for decades: avoid an
uncomfortable and inescapable truth about the project they so desperately
cling to and support.

There has never been a “good” Israel.

The Zionist movement, and the horrors associated with it, predate the
Zionist project itself. The roots of the colonization of Palestine by those
who would call themselves Zionists go as far back as the 1880s, with the
first settlements being planted in the land before the First Zionist
Congress would even meet in 1897. These early efforts
<https://sites.rutgers.edu/jewish-agriculture/a-world-of-jewish-farming/early-zionist-settlement-in-palestine/>,
though an abject failure in many senses, laid the foundations for what
would soon come.

With the creation and ratification of the Basel Program
<https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/first-zionist-congress-and-basel-program-1897>,
the Zionist movement found itself coalescing around a concrete goal: to
“establish a home in Palestine for the Jewish people, secured under public
law.” Though the proposed location of the project would be challenged
somewhat at the Sixth World Zionist Congress in Basel in 1903 with the
proposal of the Uganda Scheme, in which a plan to colonize Uganda was
assessed and ultimately ruled out, the colonial ambitions of the Zionist
movement were always clear.

Over the next years, the presence of Zionists would continue to increase in
Palestine as settlers continued to flow into the project. Thousands upon
thousands would join burgeoning settlements, acquiring land through
unscrupulous purchases negotiated with absentee landlords and subsequently
pushing Palestinians off of land their families had called their own for
sometimes generations. Palestinian society continued to be challenged as
the adherents of the Zionist project worked toward their ultimate
territorial and national goals.

The colonial nature of these goals was never truly hidden. In a
now-infamous letter
<https://mondoweiss.net/2010/09/actually-herzl-was-a-colonialist/> to Cecil
Rhodes written by Theodore Herzl. This letter, which flaunted the true
nature of the project, stated clearly: “You are being invited to help make
history. It doesn’t involve Africa, but a piece of Asia Minor; not
Englishmen but Jews… How, then, do I happen to turn to you since this is an
out-of-the-way matter for you? How indeed? Because it is something
colonial.”

Herzl was not alone in this analysis. Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the founder of
Revisionist Zionism, spoke of this very colonial nature in his 1923 Iron
Wall speech <https://en.jabotinsky.org/media/9747/the-iron-wall.pdf>,
comparing Palestinians to the Aztecs and Sioux – who had found themselves
colonized by outside powers. He went so far as to state:

Every native population in the world resists colonists as long as it has
the slightest hope of being able to rid itself of the danger of being
colonised. That is what the Arabs in Palestine are doing, and what they
will persist in doing as long as there remains a solitary spark of hope
that they will be able to prevent the transformation of “Palestine” into
the “Land of Israel.”

Other leaders of the Zionist movement put these words into practice, not
only displacing Palestinians en masse but also training and arming
themselves in preparation and eventual execution of military operations
that would seek to create what some like Ben Gurion considered more
favorable demographic compositions on the ground. By Ben Gurion’s own
estimates, the land of Palestine would only be successfully colonized
should the demographic breakdown of the land be 70% Zionist settlers and
30% colonized peoples (with later planners revising this figure to a 60:40
split). It is no surprise then that by 1929, around a fifth of Palestinian
peasants had been made landless as a result of colonial activity that would
advance the interests of the project and those supporting it.

Palestinians would, as time went on, continue to organize and become
increasingly militant in their defense of their land, culminating with a
general strike turned Great Revolt in 1936 – one that was brutally put down
by imperial British forces and their Zionist partners. As the national
movement continued beyond the failure of the revolt in 1939, Palestinians
struggled against an increasingly militant, organized Zionist movement –
one that would move to realize its goals in the 1940s.

The Nakba, or “the catastrophe
<https://decolonizepalestine.com/intro/the-mandate-years-and-the-nakba/>”,
entailed the mass ethnic cleansing of more than 750,000 Palestinians from
upwards of 530 cities, towns, and villages. Cities like Jaffa were besieged
and depopulated under Zionist sniper fire and bombardment. Villages like
Deir Yassin were invaded and burned to the ground, with countless
atrocities being committed against the people who called those villages
home. Beyond being a campaign of ethnic cleansing, the Nakba was also a
campaign of annihilation, culminating in the deaths of at least
10,000-15,000 Palestinians. This period is what Israelis celebrate every
year as the foundational period for the official establishment of the
colony.

As we now know, the ethnic cleansing and subjugation of Palestinians would
not stop in 1948 with the official formation of the Zionist colony – the
one Haaretz’s editorial board claims lost its ‘humanity’ only in the past
year. In the wake of the Nakba, thousands would live under Zionist military
occupation, finding themselves brutalized, exploited, and attacked by their
occupiers. Zionists would expel hundreds of thousands more Palestinians in
1967 <https://decolonizepalestine.com/intro/from-nakba-to-naksa/> as they
attempted to put the final nail in the coffin of the Palestinian liberation
movement, as well as more than 100,000 Syrians, who found themselves
occupied in the Golan Heights. The project would later go on to occupy
Lebanon as well until their forced eviction by Lebanese resistance fighters
– fighters who have continued their resistance to Zionism up to today.

Today, as millions live in refugee camps across the region, barred by the
colony from ever returning to their homelands, and millions more suffer
under apartheid, genocide, and continued invasion, Liberal Zionists find
themselves unable to defend it. Their condemnation of the project’s current
actions cannot let them get away with a revisionist history in which the
colony they wish to preserve ever had moral legitimacy, let alone a right
to exist at all. There can be no “good” or “moral” colonialism, no matter
how desperately they might wish otherwise, nor can there be a “good” or
“moral” government at the helm of such a project – whether Likud or Labor.

The end of the Haaretz piece itself summed up the feelings of the board –
finishing with what was meant to be a definitive statement of condemnation
of the actions of the project and those who have been supposedly leading it
down the path of no return:

The more evidence emerges from Gaza, the clearer the nauseating picture of
our loss of humanity becomes. The fact that many Israelis try to deny the
testimony about what is being done there not only doesn’t help Israel in
the international arena but also continues to legitimize crimes and
injustices that tarnish the entire country’s moral and human character.

We must ask ourselves what evidence today is different from the decades of
evidence Palestinians have always flaunted, and why the core problem in
this genocide is, to Zionists such as these, the state of the moral and
human character of a project that should not and cannot exist in a just
world. Liberal Zionists, as they wrestle with the continued loss of
legitimacy their project is facing, will continue to propagate the same
tale of a colony that can be, and at one point was, morally upstanding, but
those of us who know the history will always know better than to seriously
engage with such fantasy.

The genocide and occupation of Palestinians today cannot be separated from
the history of the Zionist colonization of Palestine. Those victims today
are tied to those victims of decades past – victims of a Nakba that never
truly ended, no matter how desperately supporters of the project may wish
otherwise. We should not be looking back to an imagined past where
colonists were somehow more “moral” than today, but be looking to a future
without Zionist occupation – a future where the millions under the boot of
Zionist colonialism can be free.

The Zionist project did not lose its humanity in Gaza, because it never had
humanity to lose.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://freedomarchives.org/pipermail/news_freedomarchives.org/attachments/20250103/a80236ac/attachment-0001.htm>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: Man_see_school_nakba.jpg
Type: image/jpeg
Size: 78958 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://freedomarchives.org/pipermail/news_freedomarchives.org/attachments/20250103/a80236ac/attachment-0001.jpg>