Zionism’s brutal legacy

More than ten years ago, I wrote Israel’s Apartheid regime was a means to an end and not an end goal. Ten years later, that goal remains the same: to ethnically cleanse the Palestinians from their homeland.

75 years into the Ongoing Nakba, the world still chooses silence and complicity over meaningful interventions and the rule of law. The war in Ukraine has made it clear: it is the perpetrator, not the crime, that is judged. Israel is a friend and ally of the powerful, and in effect, Israel enjoys total impunity. In addition, anti-Zionism has become the new antisemitism, whereas any criticism, or even documentation of its systematic and structural abuses of international law and Palestinian lives, becomes cast as anti-Jewish discrimination. At best, Palestinians are a side note, a nuance in this story and Palestinian history, identity, and presence are simply and purposefully overlooked.

Just last week, the EU regurgitated the old Zionist myth of having made the desert bloom and praised Israel’s glorious achievements rather than highlighting its human rights record. Although it was meant to celebrate Israel, the EU’s statement actually highlighted and clarified Israel’s colonial rule over the land and its inhabitants. Zionist ideology leaves no possibility for ambiguity and was best distilled by Yosef Weitz, one of the early leaders of the Zionist movement and former director of the Land Department of the Jewish National Fund:

Between ourselves it must be clear that there is no room for both peoples together in this country… There is no other way than to transfer the Arabs from here to neighboring countries – all of them. Not one village, not one tribe should be left.

Zionist ideology is the underlying concept to understanding the last 75 years of the ongoing Nakba. Once this is understood, the urgent need for international accountability and intervention becomes clear.

Zionist ideology

Zionist ideology predated the creation of the state of Israel and set the scene for its establishment and vision of creating a Jewish state in Palestine, a predominantly non-Jewish country. This Zionist vision is based on the intentionally created myth that a people without land — the Jewish people — will get a land without people, namely Palestine. Palestine was inhabited by Palestinians and was a mandate class A-categorized country by its British occupiers and ruthless colonial aggressor, who in an “agreement” with France divided the Middle East among themselves and became the rulers of that region in the early twentieth century. The British agreed with the Zionist movement to support its vision. Therefore, unlike most Arab countries that became independent at that time, Palestine fell from one phase of colonial rule into another. 

The task of establishing and maintaining a Jewish state on a predominantly non-Jewish territory has been completed by continuously forcibly displacing the land’s non-Jewish majority population alongside implanting new Jewish settlers, thus by a form of settler-colonialism. Today, nearly seventy percent of the Palestinian people worldwide are themselves, or the descendants of, Palestinians who this regime has forcibly displaced. 

Separation and conquest

The Zionist movement, and later Israel, had no interest in simply creating a system of domination of one “racial” group over another. Instead, the intention is to establish a homogeneous Zionist-Jewish state predominantly for Jewish people. This colonial project has been implemented through:

1. Forcible displacement of the indigenous Palestinian population living in that area. 
2. Denying rights to and confiscating Palestinian property and land within that territory.
3. Facilitating privileged migration of Jewish people into that territory.

Working on these levels necessitated the creation of a legal and political system able to facilitate these goals. For this, the notion of separation and conquest became an integral part of the Zionist ideology. This concept was initially put into practice when the first Zionist colonists arrived in Palestine around the turn of the 20th century. Kibbutzim were the first strategy for seizing Palestinian land by creating these “little fortresses” in an unknown and hostile environment, as seen by the Zionist colonists. The kibbutz, a collective community, was formed by European Jews to take over Palestinian land and separate the conquered land from its indigenous Palestinian inhabitants to establish a territory for the Jewish people. In this regard, Kibbutzim even “rejected” the exploitation of cheap Arab labor and used Yemenite Jewish agricultural workers instead. 

This politics of separation and conquest is still visible today in various aspects and throughout all of Mandate Palestine. For example, in terms of architecture -more than 100 years later- Israeli colonies (often referred to as settlements) in the West Bank still resemble the outline of “fortresses.” Built on hilltops, completely fortified with only one or two streets leading to them, their surroundings resemble a moat in the form of trees, stones, or other impenetrable passages. The early Zionist ethos of separation and conquest remains.

Domination 

Furthermore, from the beginning, the colonists applied the classic colonial principle of “divide and conquer.” Political divisions were created and maintained through a geographical fragmentation facilitated by the Ongoing Nakba. As a result, the social fabric of Palestinian society was torn apart. Today, every Palestinian family is affected by the events of the Ongoing Nakba. After cutting off relationships between people and communities, Israel maintained the geographical dispersion of the Palestinians by prohibiting them from returning to their homes and inhibiting social continuity with Palestinians in the Diaspora. Slowly throughout the decades, social ties were lost. Maintaining such a geographical discontinuity ensured the creation of political divisions.

The overall aim is to comprehensively dominate and dispossess all Palestinians, including all Palestinian refugees, and Palestinians who remained in that territory through committing internationally sanctioned crimes such as apartheid, collective punishment, willful destruction, and persecution, as well as permanent occupation and annexation with the intent to driving the indigenous population out. 

Therefore, as in South Africa, the international community must adequately challenge this continuous and calculated strangulation of the Palestinian people. This should be done by codifying that state’s actions and policies as elements of an international crime against humanity.  As Aristotle said more than 2300 years ago, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts, thus Zionism deserves to be codified as a full-fledged international crime because it runs deeper than only employing elements of already established crimes. This codification should be designed using a holistic approach that bridges geopolitical boundaries and asserts that the struggle covers all of Mandate Palestine and includes all Palestinians, including those in exile. This conceptualization of the Ongoing Nakba is vital in dealing with the Palestinian quest for freedom, liberation, and self-determination. This step is long overdue and would finally and seriously challenge Israel’s colonial grip and notion of impunity.