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.[1]
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)[2]
|
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.[4]
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.
[1] Covenant of the League of Nations, from Samuel Shih-Tsai Chen, Basic Documents of International Organization, Dubuque, Iowa: Kendall-Hunt Publishing Company, 1979, pp. 369.
[2] 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.
