Nazis! The Fraught Politics of a Word and a People Besieged

[Pictured: Palestinian women cross an Israeli checkpoint, outside of the West Bank city of Ramallah, on April 15, 2022. (Flash90)]

By Gary Fields

Republished from Jadaliyya.

Like many highly-educated individuals in Palestine today, Mohammed Q. cannot find work in his field of computer engineering, despite a master’s degree in computer science from Birzeit University, and as a result, he relies on the tourist industry to earn a living, drawing on his fluent English and knowledge of the fraught politics of the region.  In the aftermath of October 7th he was working in Ramallah at the same hotel where, by fate, I found myself as the only guest on a sabbatical that began October 6th.  Over coffee, he recounted to me an experience leading a group of German tourists to Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem.  As a West Bank Palestinian, Mohammed would normally be barred from entry to the Israeli capital, but because of his role on this occasion in shepherding a German tour group through the Holy Land, he was able to obtain the mandatory permit from Israeli authorities to enter the Holy City.  While at Yad Vashem, the group had a tour from one of the Museum docents who explained in detail the suffering endured by Jews at the hands of the Nazis 

As Mohammed recalls the episode, the guide described how the Nazi regime forced Jews to wear a yellow badge as a mark of identification that enabled Nazi authorities not only to stigmatize them, but to monitor and control their movements.  Alongside this measure, Nazis eliminated the rights of Jews to German citizenship, insisting that only those with “pure” Aryan blood could be Germans.  Bolstered by mobs of fascist-supporting vigilantes, Nazi authorities orchestrated modern-day pogroms against Jews including the ransacking of Jewish businesses and the theft of Jewish property designed to force Jews out of Germany.  Those Jews who tried to remain, the guide explained, fell victim to the night raids of the Nazi SS in arresting Jews and sending them to concentration camps.  In areas outside Germany under Nazi rule, Nazi policy ghettoized Jews as a prelude to a genocidal campaign of eliminating them as a people, and the guide spoke admiringly of the heroism of Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto who resisted these measures.  “I did not know about all of this suffering,” Mohammed admitted to me, “and I felt sorry for these Jewish victims of Nazism.” At the same time, he could not help but reflect on the parallels with his own experience as a West Bank Palestinian living under Israeli military rule. 

Mohammed thanked the guide and admitted that he had not been fully aware of the suffering of Jews at the hands of the Nazis.  He then commented to the docent that many details in his story of the Jews resonated for him as a Palestinian living in the West Bank.  After Mohammed made this admission, however, the guide became angry and demanded to know how he was able to come to Jerusalem and gain entry to the Museum.  Mohammed explained that he had received the necessary permit from Israeli authorities to chaperone the German tour group at which point the guide became extremely irate and called Museum security.  “Security personnel from the Museum came,” he explains, “and took me to the exit of the Museum where they ousted me from the building.”  In this way, Yad Vashem evicted a Palestinian from its premises for sympathizing with Nazism’s Jewish victims while explaining how, in his own experience, Israeli rule over Palestinians resembled some of the same practices attributed by the Museum to those used by the Third Reich on European Jews.  Replete with irony, Mohammed’s eviction from Yad Vashem, in the context of the forced displacements and carnage unfolding in Gaza, recalls a traceable historical arc.

Nazis Among Us?

On December 4, 1948, the New York Times published an open letter penned by a group of Jewish luminaries including Hannah Arendt and Albert Einstein who were protesting a visit to the U.S. by Menachem Begin, founder of the Herut (Freedom) Party of Israel.  Herut would later emerge as the foundation of the ultra-nationalist Likud Party of current Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu.  Authors of the letter made note of “Fascist elements in Israel” and objected to Begin’s visit because, according to them, Herut was “a political party closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy, and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties.”  

In support of its claim, the letter referenced the massacre in the Palestinian village of Deir Yassin committed earlier in 1948 by the paramilitary predecessor to Herut, the Zionist Irgun, labeled even by many Zionists of the time a terrorist militia.  The Irgun had come into the village, which had harbored no animus toward its Jewish neighbors, and “killed most of its inhabitants—240 men, women, and children—and kept a few of them alive to parade as captives through the streets of Jerusalem,” revealing a practice of cruelty toward Palestinians eerily similar to what Nazis did to the Jews.  Arendt was already on record as warily critical of exclusionary tendencies in the Zionist project, writing in “Zionism Reconsidered” (1943) how the Zionist movement stood for a kind of ethno-state in which Palestinians would have only “the choice of voluntary emigration or second-class citizenship.” In the end, Arendt, Einstein and co-signers of the 1948 open letter proffered a warning about Herut and its Fascist roots: “from its past actions we can judge what it may be expected to do in the future.”

Apart from the reference to Deir Yassin, the letter did not specify what this kinship might portend but Fascism’s past practices highlight three themes.  First, Fascism is a mass movement animated by an extreme nationalist ethos whose adherents share a sense of collective victimhood caused by “outsiders” who are considered to have illegitimate claims of belonging to the nation and who emerge as the cause of collective national suffering. Second, Fascism channels this shared outlook of victimhood into collective hostility toward these outsiders whom Fascists consider as enemies seeking the nation’s demise.  Finally, Fascism enlists its backers to support liquidation of these enemies which drives it to untold levels of brutality and toward territorial expansion to ensure the completeness of the liquidation process, while keeping outsiders safely distant from the bounded space of the nation and those who belong to it. 

In the case of the Nazis, some of the signature behaviors that emerged from these contours and resonated so profoundly with Mohammed at Yad Vashem included Nazism’s exclusionary citizenship laws; its pogroms against Jewish businesses and property; night raids by the Nazi SS of Jewish homes along with arrests and deportations of Jews to concentration camps; and the ghettoization of Jews and their liquidation in these confined spaces. Although Mohammed recounts these practices as part of his own experience, it has become anathema, and in some places illegal even to raise the question suggested by his story:  How could heirs of those claiming to be Nazism’s most hapless victims assume the role of those who brutalized them, or in the words of Edward Said, how did Palestinians become “the victims of the victims”? 

It turns out that insight into this vexing puzzle beckons to two contemporaries from the nineteenth century with vastly different political persuasions. In his celebrated work, The Ancien Régime and the Revolution (1856), Alexis de Tocqueville asked how the luminaries of the French Revolution, with their “love of equality and the urge to freedom” ultimately crafted a system of authoritarian rule little different from the absolutism they so passionately set out to overturn.  In seeking to explain this paradox, de Tocqueville signaled a beguiling truth about these revolutionaries who he insists, “were men shaped by the old order.”  These individuals may have wanted to distance themselves from the ancien regime they so fervently wished to destroy, but years of conditioning under French absolutism had influenced their outlook and behavior.  Try as they might, these revolutionaries, “remained essentially the same, and in fact…never changed out of recognition.” Four years before de Tocqueville’s Ancien Regime, Karl Marx famously wrote how human beings make their own history, but they don’t make it as they please. They make it “under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past.”  In this way, both de Tocqueville and Marx emphasize how human actors emerge from the circumstances around them, and this history conditions and weighs upon them as they seek to remake the world of the present.  What kind of “dead weight” did the Nazi Holocaust cast on Zionism, Jews, and the State of Israel? 

Lords of the Landscape

As early as 1904, Zionists in Palestine associated with the Second Wave of Jewish immigration were already signaling the future character of the State of Israel when they promoted the idea of “Hebrew Land, Hebrew Labor.” Central to this slogan was an effort to build an exclusionary Jewish society by evicting Palestinian tenants from lands they purchased, and preventing Palestinian labor on Jewish-owned land. In this way, early Zionism was seeking to create a landscape of Jewish spaces free of Palestinians. What Zionism ultimately created to fulfill these exclusionary impulses, however, took shape after 1945 in the crucible of the long shadow cast upon world Jewry by the experience of the Holocaust when the State of Israel came into being. Its signature practices with respect to the Palestinians reveal a striking, if unsettling set of parallels with what was done to Jews by the Nazis. Two seminal moments in the evolution of the State of Israel are paramount in marking the development of these exclusionary behaviors.

The initial moment encompasses Israel’s early years, 1947-50 and focuses on three defining practices designed to create Jewish ascendancy on the land and render Palestinians a subjugated people. First, during this period, the “Jewish State”—a moniker that is something of a mischaracterization since that State contains a 20% Palestinian population—evicted 750,000 Palestinians from homes within its boundaries, and in a Cabinet decision of July 1948 declared that it would never allow these evictees to return. Second, was what the Israeli Government did to Bedouins from the Naqab desert who managed to remain in their ancestral homeland following the end of hostilities in 1949. The Israeli military rounded up the 13,000 remaining Bedouin and confined them in a prison-like encampment near Beersheva known as the Siyaj (Enclosure Zone) where they were without basic services, forced to obtain permits to enter and exit the Siyaj, and prevented from building permanent housing for themselves. Finally, in the early 1950s, the Israeli State passed a series of laws on property rights, notably, the Absentee Property Law (1950) that dispossessed refugees of their lands on the grounds that they were “absentees,” no longer living in their domains. This law, however, also confiscated the property of roughly 50% of Palestinians in the new state through a macabre legal designation for Palestinians temporarily displaced from their homes who were classified as “present absentees.” In effect, what the State of Israel did in its infancy in seeking to make the Jewish State free of Palestinians by evicting, dispossessing, and confining them, had an uncomfortable resonance with the aim of the Third Reich in making Germany and the Reich Judenrein, free of Jews.

The second historical moment focuses on the aftermath of the June War in 1967 in which the State of Israel sought to extend its domination over Palestinians into territories conquered in the 1967 campaign by settling those areas with Jewish Israelis – a clear violation of Article 49 of the 1949 Geneva Convention. This practice expanded Jewish presence within the conquered space while shrinking Palestinian presence by confiscating an ever-expanding inventory of Palestinian property for settlement-building and limiting the territorial spaces accessible to Palestinians in the occupied areas. In this way, the Jewish State created a constantly growing Hebrew landscape in the areas under its military control.

Not surprisingly, the State of Israel has taken draconian measures to fortify its project of land confiscation and settlement, and to this end has created a carceral-like regime for control over a population that it perceives as hostile to Jewish supremacy on the land. In pursuit of this aim, the Jewish State has not only intensified a system of actual incarceration in which thousands of Palestinians fill Israeli jails as political detainees. The State of Israel has created a massive prison-like environment on the Palestinian landscape dubbed a “Matrix of Control,” for the subjugation of Palestinians. This “Matrix” consists of an elaborate system of checkpoints, including several large checkpoint terminals, diffused throughout the West Bank to control Palestinian circulation; guard towers situated at major transport junctions to monitor Palestinians and their movements; and a massive Wall built along a 450-kilometer route across the West Bank where Palestinian circulation is pre-empted and the territory partitioned in much the same way that Michel Foucault has described the attributes of modern prisons. These features on the land have imbued the Palestinian landscape with the unenviable moniker of “The Biggest Prison on Earth.” More critically, as Palestinians encounter these elements in queues of regimented bodies under the gaze of armed soldiers, the echoes of Nazi landscapes seem inescapable.

Added to this carceral environment is the effort of the Jewish State to weaken Palestinian presence on the land by destroying one of the primary anchors affixing Palestinians to place, the Palestinian home. At any one moment, a Palestinian home is routinely demolished, usually on the pretext of being built “illegally,” without permission, but the State of Israel also destroys Palestinian homes as retribution against entire families of alleged perpetrators of “terror” against the Jewish State. Complementing this destruction is the longstanding practice of Israeli military “raids” into Palestinian homes, casting a pall of terror over the Palestinian landscape. These raids not only witness the arrests of Palestinians who disappear into Israeli jails as political prisoners, but also the ransacking and vandalism of the Palestinian home. Such destruction of Palestinian homes and property, along with the arrests of Palestinians in these actions find resonance in the way Jews were subjected to raids by the Nazi SS and sent to prison camps while their homes were ransacked and looted in Nazi versions of the pogrom. 

In February of last year, the world witnessed a particularly savage outbreak of this kind of violence in the Palestinian town of Huwara perpetrated by settlers from nearby Israeli settlements who set fire to cars, businesses, and homes of Huwara residents and killed one resident by gunfire as Israeli soldiers looked on and even assisted the perpetrators in this mayhem. So depraved was this rampage that the Israeli military commander in the West Bank, Yehuda Fuchs even used the word, “pogrom,” to label this carnage, a word choice by an Israeli official that was especially poignant. The implication was that the Jews who perpetrated this violence possessed the same kind of racist animus as perpetrators of Christian and Nazi pogroms against Jews, and enlisted similar types of brutality against Palestinian civilians. At the time of events in Huwara, however, the uprooting of Palestinian croplands and the destruction of rural homes, livestock pens, and farm equipment by Jewish settlers in an effort to evict and drive out Palestinians had already become commonplace on the Palestinian landscape—with nary a condemnation by Israeli officials, and virtually no effort by Israeli authorities to prevent and punish this criminality. As it turned out, Huwara was but a prelude to the much more sweeping campaign of carnage visited on Palestinians in the aftermath of October of the same year. 

Final Solution

In a riveting documentary, 1948: Creation and Catastrophe (2016), members of the Zionist Haganah militia interviewed in the film who were active in the military campaign of the period recounted their encounters with Palestinians during that critical time when the Jewish State came in to being. Hava Kellar, a Haganah veteran, spoke glowingly about her role in the expulsion of Palestinians from Bir-es Saba, seemingly oblivious to the expulsions of Jews during the Shoah. “I came to Beersheva, she recalls, and the commander said to me: ‘tomorrow we are going to throw out the Arabs from Beersheva.’ I said ‘wonderful, of course I’m going to help.’ Next day I got a gun, and we prepared 10-12 buses. We called all the Arabs from Beersheva to come to the buses and I was standing guard to make sure they went into the buses to go to Gaza—and they are still in Gaza today.” 

What we are witnessing in Gaza is another instance of, “Once Again,” only this time it is Zionist Jews who are wielding the guns and are the keepers of the camp, while it is Palestinians such as Mohammed who are being locked up, dispossessed, and face death.

Another Haganah veteran, Josef Ben-Eliezer, is even more explicit in admitting to the parallels of what he did as a solider and what he experienced as a boy at the hands of the Nazis. “I saw masses of people going through the checkpoint that we were ordered to oversee,” he says, “and they were searched for valuables. It reminded me of when I was a child. We were doing the same thing that people have done to us as Jews.” 

A common belief among defenders of Israel is that Jews, and all things associated with the Jewish people—including the State of Israel—could not possibly do what Josef Ben-Eliezer described as Jews imitating the Nazis. To even imagine such a possibility is to transgress into forbidden terrain. Nazism is invariably associated with humanity’s worst-ever atrocity—the elimination of the Jews as a people—a crime given the name in 1944 of genocide, and codified in the 1948 Genocide Convention. Among the stated goals of Nazism, for which some of its leaders were prosecuted under this law, was the idea of making Germany and the areas it occupied Judenrein, free of Jews. That Jews could be a party to such an idea is for many, completely blasphemous if not worse. Events after October 7, however, reveal this longstanding Zionist conceit to be problematic.

On October 13 of last year, the Israeli Intelligence Ministry, an opaque governmental body that produces policy research for other Israeli Government agencies, authored a document in which it outlined three options for the Jewish State in response to the breach of the barrier confining the Gazan people, and the killing by Hamas and other allied groups of Israeli military personnel, law enforcement officials and roughly 700 civilians. In this document, the Ministry recommends the third option—transfer of the entire Gaza population to the Egyptian Sinai – which document authors point out is “executable,” and will yield “the most positive long-term benefits” for the Jewish State. These authors understood how transfer of the 2.3 million Gazans into the Egyptian Sinai would entail an untold level of brutality against the people of Gaza triggering violations of the laws of war and even more serious charges, and would likely elicit broad global condemnation if not indictments. Nevertheless, the document urges policymakers in Israel to forge ahead with emptying Gaza, despite these challenges, and count on its alliance with the U.S. for backing while waging the necessary public relations campaign of incessantly portraying the Jewish State as victim. 

If there was any ambiguity about what this campaign of depopulation would entail, such doubts were put to rest almost from the start of the violence by the Israeli Defense Minister, Yoav Gallant. On October 9 at a meeting of Israeli military commanders at the IDF Southern Command in Beersheva, Gallant, acknowledged: “I have ordered a complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed. We are fighting human animals, and we are acting accordingly.” An even more graphic specter of the motivation to eradicate the bare life of the Gazans came from Israeli Prime Minister, Benyamin Netanyahu himself at the end of October after the Israeli Military had already killed 8000 Gazans and had evicted 1.2 million Gazans from their homes in the North of the Strip and instructed them to move South. Likening the campaign in Gaza to an ancient Biblical struggle by the Jews in the time of the Exodus to eradicate the Amalakites, Netanyahu exhorts his military and the people of Israel to “Remember what Amalek did to you” and he continues: “Our heroic soldiers have one supreme goal: To destroy the murderous enemy.”

Two days after Netanyahu’s Biblical invocation, Israel’s Ambassador to the United Nations, Gilad Erdan, in a calculated performative spectacle, denounced the United Nations for supposedly failing to condemn Hamas and duly pinned a yellow star to his blazer, reenacting the Nazi practice of stigmatizing Jews with this disparaging emblem so that the Nazi regime could more easily monitor them and ordinary Germans could more easily harass them. But Erdan’s bizarre stunt, assuming the role of a Nazi himself in pinning the Yellow Star to his own clothing, had a more sinister propaganda aim. “Don’t forget, we are the victims”—was his unmistakable subtext. Such a message, however, is difficult to reconcile alongside images of some of the world’s most impoverished human beings, with no military, no planes, no navy, no tanks, no anti-aircraft batteries, being bombarded at will by one of the most powerful military forces in the world while trying to escape the carnage raining down on them in overcrowded wooden carts pulled by donkeys, or for those less fortunate simply walking disconsolately on bombed and destroyed roads in lines resembling Palestinian refugees of 1948. Indeed, the disconnect between what Israeli ambassador Erdan wants the world to believe, and what the world can see with its own eyes is starkly Orwellian.

In 1944, a Polish lawyer, Raphäel Lemkin coined the term, genocide to describe the campaign of the Nazis to exterminate the Jews, but he also intended the concept to be applicable to a range of other crimes against humanity committed prior to the Holocaust. Four years later Lemkin’s idea was codified in what is now known as the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. Despite the European bias of the Convention, however, with its almost singular point of reference being the experience of the Nazis and European Jewry, and the absence in it of specific kinds of acts such as the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, the International Court of Justice (ICJ), which adjucates the law with respect to countries, has repeatedly emphasized that the Convention embodies general principles. It is for this reason that the State of Israel, arguably born at least in part as reparations for the Nazi Genocide against European Jews, now finds itself on the opposite end not as victim but indeed as perpetrator. 

In January of this year, South Africa as a signatory to the Genocide Convention to prevent the commission of this crime, duly filed a complaint with the International Court of Justice charging the State of Israel with genocide against the Palestinians of Gaza. In broad outline, genocide is defined in Article 2 of the Genocide Convention as “acts committed with the intent to destroy in whole or in part a national, ethnic, racial or religious group” and the Statute goes on to specify five scenarios in which the crime can be identified. Section C of South Africa’s 84-page document describes in detail the various campaigns of the Israel military in Gaza that conform to the definition of destroying in whole or in part Palestinian as a group. Among what is summarized in this section is the forced eviction of close to 2 million of the 2.3 Gazans from their homes; the destruction of 60% of the housing stock in the Gaza Strip; the deliberate and almost complete destruction of the health care sector including most of the hospitals; the destruction of schools and universities; and the targeting of food-producing outlets including farms and bakeries. Part of what has made genocide so difficult to prosecute, especially with respect to sovereign states, is proving intent on the part of alleged state perperators. In its document, the South African legal team has diligently gathered the various statements of the Israeli Defense Minister, Prime Minister, and other high-ranking Israeli Government officials that admit in plain language, to the genocidal intent of the Israeli military campaign. Taken together, the deeds of the Israeli military, and the words of Israeli officials testify to the aim of eliminating the Gazans from Gaza, that is, rendering Gaza free of Palestinians.    

For the past 17 years, Israel has imposed a blockade on Gaza, controlling the movement of people and goods that could enter and exit the territory, imbuing the Gaza Strip with the odious label of “the world’s largest open-air prison." Three years prior to the blockade, however, the State of Israel had sufficiently confined the people of Gaza in a walled and fenced enclosure to the point where former Israeli National Security Council Director, Giora Eiland conceded the territory to be “a huge concentration camp.” The choice of this descriptor by Eiland seems especially appropriate for a population blockaded and unable to circulate beyond the closed confines of the Strip and who are reliant on the whim of Israel for access to virtually all essentials for bare life. International law, however, suggests that a blockade imposed on a territorial space is an act of war. Even former Israeli Foreign Minister, Abba Eban endorsed this view in reference to the June 1967 war. “The blockade is by definition an act of war,” Eban announced at the UN on June 19, 1967 in describing the actions of Egypt that supposedly provoked Israel into its surprise attack.  Israel is thus trying to argue to the world that it is defending itself in a war it did not want. In reality, the war did not begin October 7.  Israel has been waging war against Gaza with its blockade since 2007—not to mention four major military bombardments since 2006 killing thousands of Gazans—and the Jewish State presents itself as victim when the Gazans have attempted to break the siege and fight back. 

In December of last year, author Masha Gessen, in a courageous article for The New Yorker provided a different approach to framing the carceral spectacle in Gaza. For Gessen, the metaphor of the open-air prison was incomplete, if not inaccurate. In the context of the unmitigated carnage being visited upon the Gazans by Israeli military, what the Jewish State is undertaking, Gessen argued, is nothing less than a genocidal effort at “liquidating the ghetto” they have created in Gaza—much like the Nazis liquidating the Ghetto they had created in Warsaw. In this way, Gessen signaled an alternative way of seeing not only the savagery being visited on the 2.3 million Gazans, but also what Gaza had become under the Israeli blockade and bombardment—a ghetto that Israel is trying to eradicate as the Nazis did. How else is it possible to interpret a military campaign demanding Gazans evacuate their homes and move South where they have become more concentrated, and where they are still being incessantly bombed and killed?

At the moment of this writing, the Israeli military has delivered what is perhaps a final ultimatum to the Gazans. Concentrated now in the southernmost enclave in the Gaza Strip, the city of Rafah, where they have been ordered to move after a series of orders that has essentially cleared most of Gaza of its inhabitants since October, the Israeli military has now ordered the Gazans to leave—but there is no place left for them to go. Israel, in effect, appears poised on the precipice of implementing the aim of the Intelligence Ministry Report by forcing the Gazans into Egypt, or alternatively if Egypt continues to deny Israel’s request to let the Gazans into the Sinai, Israel will continue liquidating them. This is indeed an effort on the part of Israel to empty the ghetto!

What the world is witnessing in this effort to liquidate the ghetto of Gaza is shocking in the degree of violence that the State of Israel has unleashed on a defenseless group of people, but at the same time, it is explainable. Although the idea of the Jewish State committing genocide is blasphemy to those who hold that it was born as the supposed antithesis of genocide and the Holocaust, both Alexis de Tocqueville and Edward Said remind us that there is at times a cunning aspect in historical outcomes in which the oppressed somehow take on the attributes of their oppressors. In an interview of 2011, the celebrated physicist and Holocaust survivor, Hajo Meyer made this connection between Zionism and Nazism explicit when he said: “I saw in Auschwitz that if a dominant group wants to dehumanize others, as the Nazis wanted to dehumanize me, these dominant groups must first be dehumanized themselves…They [Zionists] have given up everything which has to do with humanity, for one thing: the state, the blood and the soil – just like the Nazis.” To those who naively proclaim the idea of “Never Again,” sadly what is upon us is that Palestinians have become the Jews, along with all of the other groups from the Namibians to the Rohingya that have suffered genocide. In this sense, what we are witnessing in Gaza is another instance of, “Once Again,” only this time it is Zionist Jews who are wielding the guns and are the keepers of the camp, while it is Palestinians such as Mohammed who are being locked up, dispossessed, and face death. 

The History Behind the So-called "Israel-Hamas War"

(Photo by Ahmad Hasaballah/Getty Images)

By Dylan Jones

Where we start a narrative makes a big difference. If we start the narrative on October 7th, when Palestinian resistance launched rockets into Israel, then it’s easier to justify a military response from Israel. However, is this an honest place to start telling the story from? What different conclusions would we draw if we started the story from 75 years ago? Or thousands of years ago? Starting the narrative in a different place by adding historical context allows us to understand the obstacles to everyone's liberation in this situation.

First, I would like to acknowledge that there is no doubt important Jewish cultural and spiritual ties to Palestine. And indeed, before Israel was founded there were many Jews living peacefully alongside Muslims and Christians in Palestine. Palestinians have lived there since time immemorial, with genetic ties going back to the Canaanites[1]; they have social, cultural, and spiritual ties to the land. In this way, Palestinians are indigenous to the land. This is not to say that non-Palestinian Jews are not also Indigenous to Palestine, a question which I will show has absolutely no bearing on the current situation. An Indigenous person from a given area can also act as a colonizer/settler under the conditions of a settler colonial nation state such as Israel. This becomes clear when we analyze the last 75 years— since Israel’s founding.

The modern state of Israel has its roots in Western colonialism. Theodore Herzl in the 1800s defined the goal of today’s zionism, to create a home for white Ashkenazi Jews from Europe. He decided it could be in Argentina, Uganda, or Palestine. At this time, Britain controlled Palestine as a colony and, under the Balfour Declaration (1917), it promised an area of Palestine to the zionists in order to quell anti-semitism in Europe. Palestinians had no say in this decision. As tensions heightened due to Israeli settlers converging in Palestine and inevitably seizing property from its inhabitants, the U.N. announced a partition plan in 1947 which would designate over half of Palestine to establish the nation state of Israel. When Palestinians rejected the plan, Israel committed genocide to take it by force. In what is called the Nakba, Israeli military forces and vigilante settlers murdered 15,000 Palestinians overnight, displaced 850,000 people, and destroyed 550 villages. After this initial genocidal campaign, Israel took even more land than it was promised in the UN partition plan. To this day, Israel actively prevents those it displaced from returning. Israel meets protests asserting the right to return with violence.

Since the Nakba, over the course of decades, Israel has consistently evicted more Palestinians from their land, forcefully displacing families and entire communities. It arbitrarily imprisons Palestinians, including children. It has developed an apartheid system that denies basic human rights to Palestinians. There are policies of environmental racism such as not allowing Palestinians to drill for well water and spraying herbicide on Palestinian farms to destroy their sources of food and economic livelihood. This is state terrorism. This is a settler colonial state in operation. Israel is displacing, invading, ethnically cleansing Palestinians, and occupying more and more of Palestine in order to replace the existing society with its own.

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Israel regularly bombs Palestine, hardly warranting a few articles in mainstream news. But when the rockets launched on October 7th, mainstream news immediately stated condemnation. When a white Israeli citizen dies, it is news. When an Israeli bomb severs a Palestinian child’s head from their body, it is normal; we can immediately jump to justifications. Similar to its response to other Palestinian resistance, Israel is using October 7th to justify a second genocide, a second Nakba. Since October 7th, Israel has murdered more than 15,000 Palestinians, over 6,000 children, and over 4,000 women. They have blocked water and food. They have bombed schools, hospitals, and refugee camps. Israel has hundreds of child hostages but has the power to define them as prisoners. There are around 10,000 Palestinian hostages in Israel. Every hour, Israel drops 42 bombs and half of the population of Gaza is children.

According to Israeli officials themselves, the goal is not to hunt down Hamas but rather to seize this opportunity to murder and displace Palestinians living on the land Israel would like for its own. Netanyahu himself says “you must remember what Amalek has done to you, says our holy bible, we do remember,” referring to the ancient enemy of the Israelites in scripture. This references a call to exterminate the entire population of Amalekites—every man, woman, child, and piece of property.[2] A former Israeli intelligence chief, Rami Igra on CNN said, “the non-combatant population in the Gaza strip is really a nonexistent term. All of Gaza voted for Hamas and as we have seen on the 7th of October most of the population in Gaza strip are Hamas”.[3] Imagine if the same outrageous claim were made about Israelis having voted for Netanyahu. The Israeli Minister of Agriculture, Avi Dichter announces, “we are now rolling out the Gaza Nakba,” “Gaza Nakba 2023”.[4] In this way, Israeli officials are clear that the intention is not to hunt down Hamas, it is a campaign of ethnic cleansing and genocide. Despite how clearly Israeli officials admit genocide and ethnic cleansing, western media still focuses on the “hunt for Hamas” narrative. We must reject this narrative and when we are asked to condemn Hamas, we should say instead…

Israel—as a terrorist, settler colonial nation state—is dependent on violence against Palestinians and it thereby jeopardizes the health and safety of its own inhabitants, rather than protecting them. It supposes that one people’s self-determination, rights, and lives have to come at the expense of others. Among Zionists goals are creating a safe space for Jewish people and creating a relationship with an important spiritual place to Jewish people living around the world. There are peaceful ways to do this that respect the existing Palestinian society. Establishing the theocratic settler colonial ethnostate of Israel erases Palestinian society. Therefore, the dismantling of zionism is the only truly just and safe path for Palestinians and Jews. If the Palestinian resistance stops its resistance, Israel will only continue its occupation, annexing more land, extra-judicially imprisoning Palestinians—including children (read: taking as hostages), and bombing Gaza. This characterizes life under the boot of Israel since it was founded. This does not advocate violent resistance as the only option, but points out that the root of all the violence rests clearly with the settler colonial state of Israel. Free Palestine is not a cry for retribution. It does not advocate violence against Israelis. Free Palestine means dismantling the social and political project of zionism and moving toward liberation for everyone.

I believe most people have wondered what they would have done during the holocaust when Nazi Germany slaughtered millions of Jews, Romanis, Sintis, people with disabilities, and others. I say emphatically you do not have to wonder what you would have done. What you would have done is what you’re doing right now for Palestinians living in Israel’s death camps. Attend and/or uplift: rallies for a permanent ceasefire, vigils, assembly meetings, sit-ins, and shutdowns. Call legislators and demand a ceasefire. Advocate for Palestine among your friends and family. Whether we would like to be activists or not, our tax dollars are funding the bombs eviscerating Palestinian people. At a moral bare minimum, we are called to be activists now. I do not believe I would have come to support Palestine if it were not for the values for love and kindness that my family and friends taught me. Now I call on all my friends and family to live out these values. Long live Palestine! Long live Gaza! From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!

Notes

[1] https://www.brown.uk.com/teaching/HEST5001/Palestinians.pdf

[2]https://www.npr.org/2023/11/07/1211133201/netanyahus-references-to-violent-biblical-passages-raise-alarm-among-critics

[3]https://www.cnn.com/audio/podcasts/anderson-cooper-360/episodes/d61ee373-605b-4ec4-82dd-b0a9001d97a9

[4]https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/gaza-nakba-israels-far-right-palestinian-fears-hamas-war-rcna123909

Palestinian Resistance and the Crisis of Liberal Humanism

By Yanis Iqbal

Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, launched by Hamas on October 7, 2023, was a huge blow to the settler-colonial state of Israel: Al-Qassam Brigades captured 20 settlements and 11 military sites in merely a few hours. The attacks on Israeli civilian and military outposts destroyed the narcissistic sense of security associated with the carefully orchestrated narratives of Zionist dominance, surveillance and intelligence. In the words of Saree Makdisi, the breakout “smashed, hopefully once and for all, the very idea that the Palestinians can just be ignored, talked to, or talked about rather than talking for and representing themselves, their interests and their rights.” Earlier, it was Palestinians who had to explain their presence and prove their humanity. Now, it is they are setting the contours of the narrative. That’s why Zionists are terrified.

Unqualified solidarity with the anti-colonial violence of the Palestinian resistance has been hindered by liberal humanism, a bourgeois ideology that uses abstract slogans of peace to accelerate the genocide of Palestinians. There are two components in this ideology. First, the supreme value of human life is proclaimed as an unproblematic moral statement, which everyone has to support. While liberal humanists may admit that the Israeli occupation has given rise to Palestinian violence, they remain adamant that the death of individuals can never be justified. Judith Butler, for instance, criticizes those who blame Zionist apartheid for contemporary violence, saying that “nothing should exonerate Hamas from responsibility for the hideous killings they have perpetrated”.

In the above conception, violence is conceived as an infringement of the individual human body, whose sanctity is guaranteed by an unquestionable morality. The physiological and juridical body is innately exposed to physical, psychological and moral persecution. This kind of body has no positive project; it is entirely defined by its vulnerability to attacks, which requires protection. Christopher Caudwell traces this ethical ideology to the systemic logic of the capitalist economy. In the struggle against feudal fetters, the bourgeoisie saw freedom as the abolition of social organization, as the ability of every individual to pursue his own affairs and interests. This is articulated “in the absolute character of bourgeois property together with its complete alienability.”

On the ideological terrain, this gives rise to the “bourgeois dream – freedom as the absolute elimination of social relations,” by which is meant the absence of any restraint on the ownership, acquisition and alienation of private property. Here, private property isn’t considered as a social restraint that should be abolished, as the bourgeois project is inevitably bound to its particularistic interests. When assembled into ethics, the bourgeois dream translates into ultra-individualist pacifism, wherein the purity of the soul has to be guarded from the “heinous guilt” of the “sin” that is violence. Caudwell calls this “spiritual laissez-faire,” which uses the commercial mentality of capitalists – its concern with economic status – to proclaim the right of remaining preoccupied with one’s own soul.

When liberal humanists talk about mushy-mushy sentiments of individual human life, it is crucial to ask whether such an abstraction even exists in the horrors of Israeli barbarism. On one side, we have settlers, whose material security is guaranteed by an authoritarian state apparatus. On the other side, we have natives, whose wretchedness is maintained through incessant violence. In this scenario, I ask you: where is the pristine divinity that you label as “human life”? I can only see the all-too onerous divides constructed by Zionist settler-colonialism. Preaching a higher moral reconciliation beyond these divides, trying to organize a peaceful dialogue between two completely antagonistic camps, is a pathetic attempt that is bound to fail. In the open-air concentration camp that is Gaza, it is criminal to think that there is an ever-present and ready-at-hand reserve of morality that can calm the clamor of reality. We have to dive into reality, into its thundering materiality, if we want to shoulder the global responsibility of solidarity that has been forced upon us by the Palestinian resistance.

When an interviewer told Ghassan Kanafani that it would be better for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) “to stop the war to stop the death,” Kanafani said, “Maybe to you, not to us. To us, to liberate our country, to have dignity, to have respect, to have our mere human rights; these are something as essential as life itself.” By absolutizing life, liberal humanists ignore how such a life doesn’t exist in a settler-colonial society. The boundary between life and death is not clear-cut. Huey P. Newton said, “I tell the comrades you can only die once, so do not die a thousand times worrying about it.” Liberal humanists ignore how death already walks among the Palestinians. This allows them to construe life as a personal capacity, as a possibility, that can be realized through a dialogue between the colonizer and the colonized. For the colonized, life is never a possibility. Colonialism is the violent closure of possibilities for the colonized. In the words of Mehdi Amel: “It…became impossible to define the structure of the colonized countries’ specific trajectories of becoming except within the colonial relation. What was possible before this relation became impossible after. This is what is novel in the structure of these countries’ history.”

Kanafani dispels the naive hope of humanistic possibility in the colonial context, starkly portraying the inhuman impossibility of peace talks between Israel and Palestine as “a conversation between the sword and the neck”. There is no mention here of the personal, biographical details of an abstract human life; they are replaced by impersonal metaphors. Why so? Because the liberal focus on human life conveys an ambience of integrity and security in a situation that is marked by disorder and destruction. By preserving the edifice of individual, non-violent agency, liberal humanism says that violence is optional, it is a matter of condonation or denunciation. Kanafani explodes this pious optimism by depicting Zionism as a structurally violent tool that is indifferent to our subjective feelings. Between the sword and the neck, there lies no other possibility than death.

The elision of the historical depth of Zionist violence is a core component of liberal humanism. Slavoj Žižek denounced the “barbarism” of Hamas by writing that the choice is not between Palestinian anti-colonial violence and Zionist settler-colonial violence but “between fundamentalists and all those who still believe in the possibility of peaceful coexistence”. The ruse of humanist possibility allows him to frame violence as a simplistic choice, whereas the toothless policy of dialogue comes off as the superior, more complex option. According to Joseph Stalin: “the Communists regard the substitution of one social system for another, not simply as a spontaneous and peaceful process, but as a complicated, long and violent process.” Here, the order of valuation is reversed. It is violence which is accorded the dignity of historical complexity. It is liberal humanism which is faulted for uncritically regarding the peacefulness of human life as an immediate, incontrovertible fact.

Reading Žižek, one is reminded of people whom Vladimir Lenin called the “spineless hangers-on of the bourgeoisie with intellectualist pretensions”. These “tyrannized, shocked and scared” intellectuals “have been flung into consternation at the sight of this unprecedentedly acute class struggle, have burst into tears, forgotten all their premises and demand that we perform the impossible, that we socialists achieve complete victory without fighting against the exploiters and without suppressing their resistance.” Decolonization is imagined as a peaceful project that can be “introduced” into the settler-colonial society. Liberal humanists forget how decolonization is forged in the intensity of national liberation, in “the struggles, the exploiters’ gnashing of teeth, or their diverse attempts to preserve the old order, or smuggle it back through the window”. What accounts for this ignorance? It can be traced to the liberal humanist delusion that a higher unity might emerge from the Zionist machine, that there is an element that might immediately unify the colonial compartments, that there is a humanist sensibility that lies hidden beneath colonialism. There is no such sensibility. Colonial violence has to be broken.

Instead of framing resistance in terms of the individual metric of human life, we have to take recourse to discourses that stress the concrete realities of colonized society. By inflating human life into a mythical capacity, liberal humanism paradoxically reveals a fundamental disregard for the human realities present in concrete societies. In order to avoid this extra-human concept, we must begin from the anti-colonial struggle. Liberal humanists begin with spiritual wishes for peace, attempting to convince people of an ideal method of resistance that will involve the least amount of death and suffering. Marxism doesn’t have any place for such a higher level of reconciliation. Lenin notes that Marxists appraise resistance “according to the class antagonisms and the class struggle which find expression in millions of facts of daily life.” Freedom is not a ready-made skill that can be invoked “in an atmosphere of cajoling and persuasion, in a school of mealy sermons or didactic declamations”. Rather, it is formed in the “school of life and struggle,” wherein the interests of the colonizers are exposed to the counter-interests of the colonized. Lenin puts it expressively:

“The proletariat must do its learning in the struggle, and stubborn, desperate struggle in earnest is the only real teacher. The greater the extremes of the exploiters’ resistance, the more vigorously, firmly, ruthlessly and successfully will they be suppressed by the exploited. The more varied the exploiters’ attempts to uphold the old, the sooner will the proletariat learn to ferret out its enemies from their last nook and corner, to pull up the roots of their domination, and cut the very ground which could (and had to) breed wage-slavery, mass poverty and the profiteering and effrontery of the money-bags.”

In a colonial situation, resistance is evaluated not according to the ethical ideology of human life but according to the contribution it makes to the opening of historical possibilities. Amilcar Cabral notes, “Resistance is the following: to destroy one thing for the sake of constructing another thing.” This terse statement is instructive because liberal humanists think of colonialism as a malleable arrangement that can be re-jigged to allow for a better outcome. Cabral brooks none of this. He identifies the inertia of colonialism that has to be destroyed, not merely reformed, to emancipate the colonized. It is because liberal humanists think that the possibility for life remains intact under colonialism that they are unable to appreciate the fight for such a life waged by the colonized. That’s why it is so clarifying to read Cabral’s searing words on the objective of national liberation:

“At the end of the day, we want the following: concrete and equal possibilities for any child of our land, man or woman, to advance as a human being, to give all of his or her capacity, to develop his or her body and spirit, in order to be a man or a woman at the height of his or her actual ability. We have to destroy everything that would be against this in our land, comrades. Step by step, one by one if it be necessary – but we have to destroy in order to construct a new life…our work is to destroy, in our resistance, whatever makes dogs of our people – men or women – so as to allow us to advance, to grow, to rise up like the flowers of our land, whatever can make our people valued human beings.”

The New Frontier of Settler Colonialism

By Nathaniel Ibrahim

Republished from Michigan Specter.

In early June, a video went viral of a Palestinian woman arguing with an Israeli man. “Yakub, you know this is not your house,” says Muna El-Kurd, a resident of Sheik Jarrah, to a man who has been living in some part of her family’s property for years.

“Yes, but if I go, you don’t go back,” he replies, in a Brooklyn accent, “So what’s the problem? Why are you yelling at me?” He throws his arms in the air in an expression of ostensible innocence and confusion. “I didn’t do this. I didn’t do this. It’s easy to yell at me, but I didn’t do this.”

“You are stealing my house,” she insists.

“And if I don’t steal it,” he replies, “someone else is going to steal it.”

How Did We Get Here?

Settler colonialism is often seen as a thing of the past. The United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and many other places around the world are populated primarily by the descendants of people who took that land by force, drove out or slaughtered the natives, and claimed it as their God-given right. It is generally accepted that the world was shaped by these forces, but we are rarely willing to see this process as continuous. Even the left, critical of power and skeptical of narratives that ignore the modern implications of past atrocities, tends to frame the continuation of imperialism primarily as neocolonialism, or unequal relationships between countries maintained by debt, corruption, regime change, threats, and cultural hegemony by which developed governments and corporations drain money and resources from the third world without resorting to the older methods of colonization. This framework, while useful, places the world of colonial annexation, direct governance, and settler colonialism firmly in the past.

White European settler colonialism, specifically from the western European countries, has been by far the dominant form of settler colonialism in recent centuries, and arguably in all of human history. Europe, led by the British Empire, carried out settler colonial projects in the Americas, Africa, Asia, and Oceania. Nearly all settler colonial territories eventually became independent of the Empire, but imperialism continued. The United States was the leader in this, securing most of its territory after independence, but it was not the only one. Apartheid in South Africa and Canadian sterilization of Indigenous women, to give just two examples, existed long after British control, but no one could deny the shared origin of this oppression and the continued cooperation and connections between these states, especially in the military and intelligence fields, but also culturally, linguistically, and economically. In all of these countries, settler colonialism is not a process that is completed or one that has ended. Indigenous people are still marginalized and oppressed, and they are forced to exist in a system set up by the colonizing forces. It would be a mistake, however, to view internal repression as the only descendent of settler colonialism. Settler colonialism continues to find new frontiers, most notably in the state of Israel.

Historical Parallels

Israeli settler colonialism is really a continuation of the same process that European settlers started in the Americas hundreds of years ago. White settlers, marginalized in their homelands, but generally viewed as superior to the natives by the great powers of their day, invaded new territory and drove the native peoples out. They stole the land and the resources on it, exploited the native inhabitants while destroying their economy, culture, resources, and way of life.

The process of Israeli settler colonialism is much the same as American settler colonialism. Both the United States and Israel began as important projects of the British Empire. Violence and ethnic cleansing against Native Americans and Palestinians, in the bloody so-called Indian Wars fought by European powers and later the United States and Canada and events in Israel like the Nakba, forced Native people to flee their homes, relegated to locations the colonial power had no need of yet, west in America, east in Palestine. Once a region is conquered and integrated, the frontier moves. Palestinian self-governance, legally at least, exists only in a group of physically divided areas, places in the West Bank labeled as “Area A” and “Area B”, and of course, the Gaza strip. (In reality, Israel controls security in Area B, and completely surrounds these areas and Gaza, controlling emigration, immigration, and trade, making actual Palestinian self-governance a fantasy). Native Americans were deported to lands far away from their homeland, and the US government has even attempted to send Palestinians out of Israel and Palestine altogether, like when U.S. Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice suggested that Palestinians could be resettled in Argentina and Chile in a meeting with Israeli and Palestinian negotiators in 2008.

On the other side of the colonial state, the direction they came from, things look similar as well. Israel does the majority of its trade with Europe and North America, including the profitable weapons trade. Early America traded heavily with Europe as well, and its cotton plantations, maintained by slave labor and existing on stolen land, shipped massive amounts of cotton to Europe to help fuel the textile industry and industrialization. Both countries may be considered “Nations of Immigrants,” but both are quite discriminatory in the type of immigrant they populate their territory with. For America, it was blatantly white supremacist, prioritizing a small group of peoples seen as the most advanced, and gradually growing to include other people considered white.

Jewish immigrants to the United States, so long as they came from white, European countries, were tolerated much more than immigrants considered racially inferior. Though they faced violence, discrimination, and marginalization in a conservative country dominated by Christians, Jewish immigrants received recognition as valued members of society by people such as George Washington and equal political rights. The tolerance of Jewish institutions was not the same reality for other ethnic groups living in America at the time. Again, because it needs to be made absolutely clear, this does not erase the reality of antisemitism, especially in institutions and from individuals that promote white supremacy. Rather, Jewish identity and whiteness are intersecting identities, not mutually exclusive ones.

Israel has faced accusations of racism from its Jewish citizens of non-European origin, including accusations of police brutality, discrimination in school enrollment, and even forced sterilization. This is compounded by the fact that Jews living in the so-called “developed” world, typically meaning white-majority countries in Europe and North America, simply have greater opportunities to move to Israel. The advantages of living in the “developed” world (their greater wealth, higher levels of education, easier transportation to Israel) allow Jews living there to move to Israel more easily than Jews living in poorer countries. This reality, while it is a result of global capitalism and white supremacy and not any aspect of the Zionist movement, effectively privileges white immigrants to Israel.

Race, Religion, and Civilization

There are also important parallels to draw between the settler colonial ideologies of Israel and America. Israelis claim that the land is theirs due to their ancestry, but ignore the fact that many Palestinians have descended from the ancient Jewish residents of Palestine. Zionists like Ber Borochov and David Ben-Gurion accepted this and saw the Palestinians as descendants of the Israelites who had stayed on the land. This is not to say that Palestinians have some special status over other people because of their ancestry, or that any Jews are somehow “not real Jews,” or that race is a metric that dictates a particular allocation of power or land. It does show, however, the inherent failures of relying on abstract and contradictory concepts like race and descendancy over thousands of years. Israeli ideology relies on the idea that Israelis are somehow more tied to the land than the people who live on it now, and who have lived there in recent history. Israeli ideology relies on claiming a difference in ancestry between the Palestinians and Israelis. The only difference that can be reasonably discerned is the European ancestry of the Israeli colonizers.

An important clarifier is the distinction between the Zionist movement of Jews, mainly from Europe and the Americas, and the historical existence of Jews in the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. Jews have always lived there, but their simple existence is not Zionism. Zionists may seek to tie these Jews to their cause, but the core of Zionism is the movement of Jews from outside of this territory, with the backing of Europe and America, into Palestinian territory. That is a settler colonial project. Zionist ideology appropriated the right of Palestinian Jews to keep living where they were to justify a larger project of colonialism, ethnic cleansing, and apartheid.

Americans also steal a component identity of those they colonized, even as they sought to replace that identity. Individual white Americans from the participants in the Boston Tea Party to Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren have dressed up as Native Americans or claimed Native American identity without evidence or any cultural link. We took the name Apache for a helicopter, we took the Powhatan word tamahaac for a missile, we took the word Ojibwe word mishigami for our state, our university, and the Michigamua club here at the University (renamed in 2007 and disbanded in 2021), where members would disrespectfully appropriate Native dress, custom, and names. These identity thefts are key to settler colonialism. As the connections native peoples have to the land are severed, the land must be reconnected, even if sloppily and artificially, to the new inhabitants.

Both colonizers claimed to be more civilized than the colonized, sometimes in explicitly racist language, sometimes not. We hear over and over how Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East despite it having near-total control over millions of people with no say in their own governance. The early United States claimed to be more civilized in its day too, promising “liberty and justice for all” while maintaining slavery and calling itself a republic, “by the people, for the people,” even when voting rights were restricted to a small elite of wealthy white men. We hear the same narratives of development, that Israel is “making the desert bloom,” and that America tamed a vast, uncivilized and unpopulated wilderness, and that the wealth of both is a sign of their superior industry, talent, and work ethic, or even of God’s favor.

God’s favor is actually tied with civilization in other interesting ways. According to many Jews and Christians who use God as a justification for colonization and expansion, Israel was promised to the Jewish people by God in the Bible. The ideology of Manifest Destiny also relied on God allowing his chosen (white) people to conquer the world and convert the natives from their religions, which were represented as uncivilized, savage, and infantile, into members of the Christain religion, which was seen as the religion of the civilized, developed world. The Pope himself would proclaim the rights of European colonizers to the land they conquered. Mormons, like the Puritans before them and the Jews after them, were an oppressed religious minority who led the charge of expansion, believing God wanted them to.

In much the same way as Ashkenazi Jews (along with Italians, Irish, and others before them) have gained some degree of “whiteness” and integration into structures of white supremacy, the Jewish religion has gained some degree of legitimacy in the eyes of American Christians. Some conservatives will talk about “Judeo-Christain Values,” a confusing term that ultimately serves to drive a wedge between Jews, Christians, and “enlightened” western Atheists who allegedly hold these values, and Muslims, who allegedly do not and are therefore deemed to have an inferior civilization. Exclusionary ideologies are anything but consistent, and as they lose power, they can expand the in-group to unite against a new outgroup. This has led to bizarre political alliances and support, such as American white nationalist Richard Spencer praising Israel’s political system, or Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu calling Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who has praised Nazi collaborators and used antisemitic language to refer to his enemies, a “true friend to Israel.” Many early American settlers were marginalized in Europe for their religion, but that did not stop the Christians from uniting themselves against some other, more distinct religion or group of religions.

The Frontier

The creation of Israel is not just a copy of the United States but an extension of the United States. Its colonial efforts are also American colonial efforts. The United States provides $3 billion to Israel annually in military aid, as well as billions more in loan guarantees. The US State Department changed its position on settlements under Mike Pompeo, supporting the obviously illegal project. In the private sector, an entire network of American nonprofits support Israeli settlers in Palestine, and many American and European corporations are closely intertwined with settlements and do business with the Israeli government. Jared Kushner, Senior Advisor and son-in-law to President Donald Trump, previously ran one such foundation funding the settlements. The Israeli Land Fund, funded by American donors, has assisted in the eviction of a Palestinian family in Sheikh Jarrah. Its founder, the deputy Mayor of Jerusalem, and a settler living in a Palestinian neighborhood, Aryeh King, has worked hard to increase Jewish settlement in East Jerusalem. King, while on his visit to Sheikh Jarrah on May 6, even wished for the death of a Palestinian activist who was shot by police.

The recent forced evictions and other police violence are not unique to East Jerusalem. King is also supporting the eviction of residents in Silwan, another Palestinian neighborhood in East Jerusalem. The land from which Israel clears the houses may actually be used to expand a biblical theme park called City of David National Park, run by a settler group called the Ir David Foundation. Nothing exemplifies the Israeli colonial project more than the destruction of Palestinian homes and neighborhoods to make room for a park named after a king who lived some 3,000 years ago where settlers and tourists can look at ancient artifacts. Tourists to Israel are predominantly Christian, and a plurality of them travel from America to visit Israel.

It is not just American money, but American people who help drive settler colonialism. US Citizens make up 15% of the settlers in the West Bank. It’s a familiar phenomenon: Americans, on the frontier, traveling inland and claiming new land for themselves and their people, building a homestead, and arming themselves to fight the people who lived there before. America didn’t stop when it got to California, or even Hawaii, it just sought out new avenues for colonial expansion.

Palestinian poet and activist Mohammed El-Kurd, the twin brother of Muna El-Kurd, went on Democracy Now! and explained the altercation between his sister and the settler that began this article and how it represents a broader settler colonial project.

“Can you explain this scene? And talk more specifically about what’s happening in Sheikh Jarrah right now,” asked Amy Goodman, the host of Democracy Now!.

“Absolutely. The scene that you saw, Amy, is a scene of colonialism. People often think that colonialism is this archaic concept or a concept of recent memory, but in fact, it’s alive and well in Palestine. And this is a colonizer that happens to be from Brooklyn, as you can hear by the accent, who decided to find a home in my backyard. This happens because we, as a community of refugees in Sheikh Jarrah, have been battling billionaire-backed, often U.S.-registered settler organizations that employ these people to come and live in our homes and harass us and intimidate us…What’s happening in Sheikh Jarrah today is nothing short of ethnic cleansing.

“…You know, I know it sounds bizarre that an Israeli settler is taking over half of my home, and likely they will be taking over the entirety of the neighborhood should no international action be taken. But it’s not as absurd when you put it in the context [of] how the state of Israel came about. It came about by destroying and burning hundreds and hundreds of Palestinian cities and villages and taking over Palestinians’ homes. Today, all over historic Palestine, there are settlers who are living in homes that were once Palestinian.”

Sheikh Jarrah Is Not a New Event! It is Our Relived Generational Trauma

By Nazek Jawad

Growing up in Damascus, I didn’t realize the occupied Palestinian territories were a separate political entity from Syria, until I was in fourth grade. Up until then, I thought it was a part of Syria. This is how present the Palestinian cause has been in our daily lives. The shadows of generations of Palestinians, who were forced out of their homes, followed us in schools, in the streets, and in our homes. The shadows of the Palestinian “Children of the Stones” shared our desks with us in the classrooms. We grew up with the open wound of Palestine. We grew up with the pain of women protecting their olive trees from being uprooted by military tanks. With the agony of the stolen childhood of Palestinian kids, who looked like us, but had to become men at ten years old to defend their livelihood, their homes, and their families. 

In 1993, while the usual images of the Israeli destruction of Arab land in Palestine were on the front page of one of the daily newspapers, on the back page was an image of Hillary Clinton with Big Bird. I remember gazing at that image, staring at Big Bird’s fluffy yellow feathers and rounded big eyes. I felt sunnier just by looking at Big Bird. I stared at Clinton’s cheerful smile and in my eight years old mind I gushed to myself: It must feel lighter to exist on the other side of the world, without the weight of all what’s happening here- life tastes differently there, it is not as salty! That brightness of the image illuminated how life feels like, without the weight of an existential threat looming in the background.

Every night when the clock hits 8:30pm, it was the time for the news segment, a time for another Palestinian tragedy. In my child mind I would think to myself: Is this the one? Is this the tragedy that would finally get the world moving to help us end this misery? Does the world know what’s happening? Is everyone around the world watching the news? 

Silence. Silence was the answer to all my questions. Silence was the world’s answer to all what was happening.

You see, in a child’s mind the sense of humanity remains untouched and pure, from all man-made divisive concepts. You don’t know nationalities nor borders. All what you know is humanity. You understand people around the world as a continuum of individuals around you-you imagine them like your neighbors. When a suffering happens, it doesn’t matter on which side of which border it took place-in your mind, the world exists in one stretch. What matters is the world’s response, and its absence has always aggravated me, and later when I grew up, it pained me, as I understood the world is choosing to stand still while we bleed.

In geography classes, we practiced the map of the Arab land with all its pieces intact. Where the world map outlines Israel, we wrote Palestine! That was our form of defiance. It was our small way of claiming our agency, and resisting the injustice of land dispossession. That small dose of self-made justice felt very empowering. It helped ease the frustration at times, especially on days when the American UN ambassadors raised their hands to veto a UNSC resolution condemning an Israeli aggression. So, there you go! For each one of your vetoes, we will draw a map. We will mark Palestine with capital letters. We will hang the map on every wall. On every door. On the sun! That land is Palestine, and all the millions of dollars sent in aid to Israel will never be enough to erase Palestine from our consciousness, from our being. 

You see, a child’s mind does not understand politics, but can feel hostility. We didn’t understand the political calculation behind the imperialist aggression against our region, but we felt the animosity against us. To be denied a mere condemnation, we knew our suffering is not seen. We knew the wailing of Palestinian mothers over the dead bodies of their children and the ruins of their homes is not heard. We felt the rejection. We are not wanted, not even to exist on our own land. But, what does a child do when they are rejected? They fight back claiming the very identity that has been taken away from them by force! It simply did not matter what all American Foreign Affairs Secretaries planned and negotiated and announced with Israeli and Arab leaders. For us, these borders that we practiced and perfected, are the borders of Palestine.

In history classes we learned about the Israeli occupation, the failed Arab revolution to free Palestine, and all the UN resolutions. We memorized the dates of every peace treaty, the names of the towns of every massacre, the numbers of deaths, and the names of all the Arab martyrs. We gazed at images of the Golan, the occupied part of the Syrian land, which we knew we will never see, not even in our dreams. A land that is only a couple-hours’ drive from Damascus, but seemed impossible to reach. It’s beautiful, I always thought. I could almost smell its scent out of the page of my book, but I could never touch it. This wound grows to be another extension of you. The loss becomes your shadow. Your land is who you are. As you grow older, you move around the world knowing your existence is simply incomplete. 

After every history lesson, we had so many pressing questions for our teacher: Where is the world from what’s happening? How is this massive generational injustice even allowed to continue in an advanced world? Isn’t this the same world that preaches to us about international law and human rights? Well, what about our rights? 

Once again. Silence. Silence was the answer to all our questions. 

But there’s no such thing as silence in a child’s mind. A child’s mind will always find answers. We realized then that our human value is not equal to others. We learned at an early age that it didn’t matter whether our cause is a just cause, our human suffering is insignificant to the rest of the world because we are weaker. Only those who are strong can move the world when they are touched. 

I always thought, how unfortunate for us that the world doesn’t measure our strength by the thousands of years of our civilization. It doesn’t measure our strength by the hospitality of our homes, the tastefulness of our food, the craftiness of our people. Somehow, by some arbitrary measures, which we didn’t decide, we ended up on the weaker side, while our survival over that land, and the creativity and endurance it takes to continuously inhabit a place for thousands of years, measured up to nothing. 

When you are a victim on the weaker side, the world sits in silence watching, desensitized to your bloodshed, and when you resist, the world roars pointing at you calling you a villain. When all liberation movements around the world are celebrated, while you don’t even have the right to resist-you realize then that you don’t matter. It’s that simple. It’s that painful. 

For seventy-three years we have been reliving the same devastating images, hearing the same condemnation statements, frustrated with the same inaction. For seventy-three years, the only thing human race has been successful in recycling is human misery, and an agonizing inaction to this misery.

This relived trauma in our region has been passed down generation after generation, because no one can wash away the daily lived sense of loss. We simply don’t have the privilege to forget. We don’t have a choice but to feel the pain of our missing pieces. How can you forget when all you feel is the pain of that void?

Today, with all what’s happening in Sheikh Jarrah, I am thinking about the entirety of the region where I come from, that has been subject to injustice that feels as ancient as time. When the world is celebrating technology that reduces physical distance, this region feels more isolated than ever. I will never understand such cruelty. How could a place that has given so much to the world, a place that has been a safe haven to so many civilizations, be faced with such harshness? What could be worth of unconceivable amount of human suffering?

I will never understand.