“Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine,” the conference in London on March 5-6 noted here last Saturday, looks like the greatest concentration of anti-Zionist brainpower in the western world since, well, since a conference in Boston two years ago entitled “One State for Palestine/Israel: A Country for All Its Citizens” featuring several of the same speakers (link).
The conference organizers are surely correct to stress that “for Zionism, like other settler colonial projects such as the British colonization of Ireland or European settlement of North America, South Africa or Australia, the imperative is to control the land and its resources — and to displace the original inhabitants.”
“The conference thus asks where and why the settler colonial paradigm was lost, both in scholarship on Palestine and in politics; how do current analyses and theoretical trends that have arisen in its place address present and historical realities? While acknowledging the creativity of these new interpretations, we must nonetheless ask: when exactly did Palestinian natives find themselves in a ‘post-colonial’ condition? When did the ongoing struggle over land become a ‘post-conflict’ situation? When did Israel become a ‘post-Zionist’ society? And when did the fortification of Palestinian ghettos and reservations become ‘state-building’?”
Important and ever-more relevant as these questions are, they only begin, do not exhaust, the historical questions and the political questions. Colonial lobbies also exist in the different types of colonialism; the East India companies were one type, purely commercial. The US colonies were a settler as well as commercial enterprise, had
their London lobby, including sympathetic political supporters of the colonists. That is, in addition to colonies of different types, there were colonial lobbies of different types, and different types of relations with the colonies. There is another domain of comparative
history to be explored, comparative colonial lobbies and their effects on metropolitan politics and metropolitan relations with the colony and its region.
And the Zionist case is distinguished by the overwhelming strength of the settler lobby, its power to determine metropolitan policy. The Balfour Declaration would not have happened without the assiduous cultivation by Weizmann and the London Zionists of the British government. The London Zionist lobby intervened at crucial junctures, e.g. against Britain’s reconsideration of its support for Zionism after the 1929 Arab uprising over a dispute about a religious site. The British investigations recognized the injustice of Zionism in Arab eyes, and Britain decided not to support the Jewish National Home.
This was reversed by intense Zionist pressure, resulting in what the Arabs called Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald’s “Black Letter”, after a favorable “White Paper”. The Zionist lobby could not prevail in 1939, but it has prevailed overwhelmingly in the US.
The nascent “Israel lobby” overwhelmed the US government after 1945, securing official support for a Jewish state, against the opposition of the US military and diplomatic establishments, and continues to exercise a quasi-sovereign influence today. There are two main obstacles to the left’s inability to confront this extraordinary usurpation. The first is the default Marxist critique; Marxism has never dealt effectively with nationalism. The colonial-settler framework overlooks the settler lobby and its consequences, and usually fixes on the “strategic asset” view of the colony-metropole relationship. In the Zionist case this has been highly misleading. The SOAS conference has one panel on British policy, “Playing the Zionist Card”, which sounds like the “strategic asset” argument, which is part of the dogma of the US left.
This dogma is the Arab-Jewish two-state solution, the strategic asset view of the US-Israel relationship, and the anti-occupation critique. These ideas are not the exclusive property of the left, but its influential proponents have turned them into an orthodoxy whose purpose is to conceal Jewish agency and Zionism. This orthodoxy has taken heavy blows over the past decade, in the “neo-universalist” one-state critique; in the renewed discussion of the “Israel lobby” after the critique by Profs Mearsheimer and Walt; in the “apartheid” critique, which the SOAS conference will revive and refine; and above all in Israel’s crimes; but it still staggers on, confusing and
inhibiting in its spectral longevity.
The Zionist settler lobby has transformed a colonial-settler framework and colony-metropole relation into supercharged ideological warfare, like the Crusades, or the Thirty Years War in the 17th c, or the period 1914-45, which is sometimes called the Thirty Years War of the 20th c. Obviously, Zionism has achieved this because its influence has been exerted on the leading imperial power, with its gargantuan military establishment, and militarized polity and foreign policy, and their ghastly history.
But there is no doubting Zionism’s distinct radicalizing contribution. The 9/11 terrorist attacks were mainly against US support of Israel, but instead of inducing a reconsideration of the US-Israel relationship, the attacks were exploited by an alliance of gentile radicals and Jewish neoconservatives, to invade Iraq in 2003, and create a neo-fascist climate at home. The US-Iran animus would not exist in its present form without the Zionist lobby. The US would not have invaded Afghanistan but for 9/11.
Today the Arab world is experiencing an awakening comparable to that before and during World War I, when Arab nationalism became a popular movement, as described by George Antonius in his classic 1938 work “The Arab Awakening”. The current awakening has overthrown two dictators, including that of Egypt, the most populous Arab state and a pillar of US (pro-Israel) strategy, and threatens others. A
disenfranchised people are aspiring to freedom, life and dignity, which will inevitably challenge Israel’s oppression and belligerence.
Israel is deciding that the Egyptian revolution as “bad for the Jews”, as Ilan Pappe noted recently (at Electronic Intifada). US military aid has reached a new high of $3 billion, and the US has just vetoed a UN Security Council resolution against Israeli settlements. While the “Israel lobby” is more visible and more criticized than ever, and
while the Jewish debate is growing, there is no sign whatever that the lobby’s grip on power is slackening, raising the prospect of a collision between an irresistible force and the immovable object of US-Israel relations.
In reexamining the colonial-settler view of Zionism, the SOAS conferees should also review the usual view of the colony as benefiting or extending metropolitan power, and consider the colonial lobby and its radicalizing effects on metropolitan politics and
metropolitan policy toward the colonial region. Their review will be assisted by anti-colonial ideas, in this case, anti-Zionism, the Jewish approaches to universal values, including what is called Classical Reform Judaism, as exemplified by the late Rabbi Elmer Berger; the Marxist internationalism in which Jews were prominent, shown by Isaac Deutscher, who died in August, 1967, and by the late Maxime Rodinson, who wrote an early version of the colonial-settler critique; and what the late Israel Shahak called the “modern secular Jewish tradition”, which he dated from Spinoza, the most rigorous of the 17th c rationalist philosophers. These outlooks rejected Zionism;this rejection is the moral antipode to Israel and its deeds, not a dogma which attempts to conceal Jewish agency and Zionism itself.
