Jewish
and Arab Nationalism and Settler Colonialism
Prominent in the accusations being made on both sides
regarding the current war in Gaza are two claims. Zionists charge those
supporting the Palestinian cause with anti-Semitism and the desire to
annihilate the Jewish state and the Jewish people. Palestinians declare that Israel
has systematically sought to deny them self-determination in their own state in
the West Bank and Gaza. Here
I’ll discuss how each side emerged out of broad popular historical forces calling
for the self-determination of nations beginning in the mid-Nineteenth Century.
The Zionist Movement began in Eastern Europe in the
1880s in the midst of anti-Jewish pogroms in Russia and Poland. Realizing that
Jews could never assimilate in Russia and doubting that they could in Western
Europe, approximately 25,000 mostly Eastern European Jews immigrated to Israel,
their ancestral home of Biblical times, between 1880 and 1914. They were added
to a population of approximately 25,000 Jews native to the territory. At the
end of the19th century that region was a province of the Ottoman Empire: Palestine.
Around 550,000 Arabs Muslims lived in Palestine in the
early 20th century. There were also several thousand Arab Christians in the
territory.
The Zionist idea was built from the template of European
nationalism emerging from the revolutions of 1848 when the popular masses began
to demand the “Rights of Man” from the aristocratic classes (we would say rights
of humanity rights today). Zionism is an example of ethnic nationalism, the
idea that membership in the nation and the human rights associated with
citizenship are conferred upon those of a particular ethno-cultural-genetic
stock.
Deciding that European nations seemed incapable of
allowing full citizenship rights to Jews who had been in many countries for a
millennium or more, European Jews in the late 19th century opted for
a European-styled ethnic nationalism for themselves. That would eventually mean
a theocratic Jewish state of Israel by 1948. Thus, in the case of Israel, Jews were operating in
concert with the historical forces of nationalism emanant in European history
after 1848.
From the rubble of
World War One the Wilsonian idea that the human right of national
self-determination should become an global norm was declared. In 1917 with the
war still raging British foreign minister Arthur Balfour promised that Great
Britain would use all of its good offices to establish “a national home” for the Jewish
people in what was then the Ottoman province of Palestine.
At the peace talks
for the Treaty of Versailles which settled the outcomes of World War One, the
Legue of Nations was established. With the demise of the Ottoman Empire Britain
gained control over Palestine through the League’s Mandate system. As a Class A
Mandate Palestine was designated to achieve self-determination when its
inhabitants were deemed ready.
In the next
generation two processes unfolded. First, Jewish settlers from Europe,
already trickling into Palestine, would grow more rapidly under the auspices of
the British mandate, and the ascension of the Nazis in Germany.
Secondly, Palestinian
Arab national sentiments, unformed in 1918, were given breath by World War Two
as they witnessed other former Ottoman territories that were Class A mandates
gaining self-determination, or on a trajectory promising it by then.[2]
Palestinian Arabs desired a majoritarian-based self-determination across the
interwar period, but were systematically denied, even following Arab uprisings
in 1929 and 1939.
There is much more to
that story, but in essence European Jewish settlers continued to pour into
Palestine throughout World War Two and the post-war period. Great Britain
turned responsibility for Palestine over to the United Nations in 1947. In
November of that year the General Assembly recommended partition of Palestine
into two states: one Jewish and one Arab.
In the midst of
warfare between Jewish and Arab militias Britain ended its legal presence on
May 14, 1948 and withdrew its military forces in short order.
Fighting continued
between Arab and Jewish forces until the end of the year with Israelis gaining
much territory beyond the partition lines. In mid-1949 a U.N. brokered
armistice was struck with the borders of Israel remaining what they would be
until the 1967 war. That meant the West Bank of the Jordan River was part of
Jordan and the Gaza Strip went to Egypt.
By the end of the war
in 1948 approximately 700,000 Arabs had left Palestine either in flight from
the fighting or via outright expulsion by Zionist forces. Of the Jewish population
of 630,000 in 1947 more than 500,00 had immigrated from parts of Europe since
the 1880s. Those emigres were European settlers. By 1948 they dwarfed
the indigenous Sephardic Jewish population descendant from those who had been
there before 1880 (see Table)
Table:
Population in Palestine (thousands)
|
YEAR
|
Jewish
|
Christian
|
Muslim
|
Total
|
|
1890
|
43
|
57
|
432
|
532
|
|
1922
|
84
|
71
|
589
|
752
|
|
1947
|
630
|
143
|
1,181
|
1,970
|
Thus, the state of
Israel as constructed by 1948 was a European settler colony. Those
Jewish people did two things that European settlers did elsewhere. 1) They
employed the muscle of an imperial power (in this case Great Britain) to
advance their political project. And, 2) They systematically pushed previously
resident peoples off their lands.
But why so much
animus toward the Israeli settler colonial project today? Is it simply another case
of ani-Semitism? No it isn’t! Palestinians and their allies across the Muslim
world don’t oppose the Israeli project because its founders are Jewish. Muslims
and others around the world object to the continuing occupation of West Bank
and the denial of Palestinian self-determination in both the West Bank and
Gaza, which flows out of the settler colonial mission.
The historical force
that I mentioned at the outset was the unleashing of nationalist passions for
self-determination given breath by the Wilsonian call for self-determination
during World War One and the Versailles Peace Talks. The contradictory element
inhered in the fact that Wilson and the Western powers intended that discursive
framework only for audiences in the North Atlantic world. Its purpose was to
chart a course for eventual national self-determination for territories
formerly controlled by the defeated powers during the war. That included lands
in Central and Eastern Europe and the Middle East.
But nations under
colonial rule elsewhere followed the Wilsonian discourse and the proceedings at
Versailles, and movements for decolonization and self-determination arose
across what we today call the Global South. In that setting national
self-determination for European Jewish settlers in Palestine came face-to-face
with emergent nationalist aspirations of Arabs in the region.
Europeans had
colonized over three quarters of the planet and its peoples by the outset of
World War One. The idealistic Wilsonian language of self-determination became a
classic case of “unintended consequences of public policy” or shifts in
normative patterns in policy. Once that idealistic discursive genie of
self-determination was let out of the bottle, it could not be controlled by the
North Atlantic world from which it issued.
After World War Two
nationalists movements for decolonization emerged across Africa, Asia and the
Caribbean. In most places Great Britain and France, the largest remaining
colonizers, extended independence to their colonies without much resistance.
In settler colonies
things went differently. That was because European settlers, whether it was the
French in Algeria, the British in Southern Rhodesia and South Africa, or the
Portuguese in their African holdings, refused to submit to majority rule. Wars
of national liberation ensued in all those places. And the global community
from the 1950s with Algeria to the 1990s in South Africa increasingly,
supported the self-determination of lands based on the Wilsonian verdict of
1918.
What to
do about Israel settler colonialism
Governance based upon
settler colonial principles was eventually defeated in country after country.
Yet it persisted in Palestine. After the 1967 war in which Israel emerged
victorious, the distribution of power in the region became what it is
today. The West Bank and the Gaza Strip were
occupied by Israel. Continuing Israeli occupation in the West Bank and
suzerainty in Gaza is the cause of lingering Palestinian trauma and Arab
humiliation. Israel is a European settler colony and an occupying power. So
what are we going to do about it?
Let’s think about
this! I used to define my academic field as “post-settler colonialism,” because
my research focus is on countries like the United States, Canada and South
Africa which are no longer legally colonies of Great Britain. So I thought they
entered the “post” settler colonial period. However, over the last decade I
have attended a growing number of public events that open with acknowledgements
that we are on the lands of particular native peoples of North America. They
usually go on to make some kind of statement of gratitude for allowing us to
share the land with them.
These land
acknowledgements strongly suggest that from the perspective of the natives the
land is still colonized by settlers. I shifted my own thinking to believe that the
United States is still a European settler colony. If one was a fly in the wall
at a gathering of Native Americans, my guess is that you might hear some
Natives say they wish White folks would all go away. But they don’t do that in
mixed company, because it wouldn’t work. White folks have been here for over
300 years. It’s impractical to imagine a society, economy and polity without
them or their influence. They’re not going anywhere! The best any of us can
hope for is reconciliation, healing and the creation of a hybrid civilization
affirming the humanity of us all.
Likewise, in South
Africa the White population has declined from around 20% a century ago to about
7% today, but White corporate interests still dominate the economy. In my
recent travels there I’ve observed a gritty, yet optimistic young White
population that has no plans to leave. It remains for the Black politicians who
run the country to forge a viable path for people of all races.
So Jewish people
don’t have to leave the lands between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean
Sea, nor can it be cleansed of Palestinian presence. But yes! Israel is a
settler colony: just like the United States and just like South Africa. And
just as is the case in other settler colonies, the question now is how we all
live together well going forward.
In the case of
Israel/Palestine we have two historically traumatized people. We need an
international effort to impose the two-state solution with international
peacekeeping forces on the ground to insure that extremist on both sides can’t
upend the process. There is more to that story, but I suggest the demilitarized
zone between North and South Korea, and the peace process in Northern Ireland
as examples of what could be done.
Egypt from British
Protectorate, 1922. Saudi Arabia
– via civil war, 1932; Jordan from British Mandate, 1946; Iraq from British
Mandate, 1932; Lebanon and Syria from
French Mandate; 1945.
[[3]“Timeline
of the Demographics of Palestine” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_demographics_of_Palestine_(region)
[4] Those were territories formerly part of the German, Russian,
Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires.
