by EDWARD SAID
“In theory and in practice, then, Zionism is a degraded repetition of European imperialism.”
BLACK AGENDA REPORT introdution
The zionist terrorist entity does not act alone. Over the 600 days of the genocide of the Palestinians, the United States has shipped 800 planeloads , carrying more than 90,000 tons of missiles, bombs, and military equipment, to the zionist entity. The Europeans have added to this repertoire of mass killing, sending thousands of shipments of armaments while providing military surveillance, targeting assistance, and political cover. This robust and unwavering support from the US and Europe reminds us that the ongoing genocide is the historical and geographical extension of the white western imperial project; zionism is imperialism’s incestuous spawn.
This is not a new claim. That the zionist entity is a western imperial proxy in West Asia operating as a settler colony against the indigenous Palestinian population is generally accepted. But what does it really mean to understand the contours of the intertwined legacy of zionism and imperialism? For legendary Palestinian scholar and activist Edward Said, this question was key. Said understood that until we understand the relationship of zionism and imperialism, “in their full historical richness,” we risk not only exceptionalizing the current instance of brutal violence, but also sequestering Palestine from the broader struggle for global liberation against the white west.
In “The Intellectual Origins of Imperialism and Zionism,” an essay published in Gazelle Review of Literature on the Middle East in 1977, Said argued that zionism is a “degraded repetition of European imperialism,” and that the zionist project for Palestine was formulated in the same terms as the Europeans used for territorial expansion. For Said, however, what is most significant about the white western imperial project is less its practice of territorial expansion than its intellectual apparatus of classification. This apparatus of classification serves as justification for savage practices of colonial control and extermination. Said writes: “Zionism and imperialism draw on each other; each in its own way, they sit at the very centre of Western intellectual and political culture… of a political and scientific will to domination over the so-called coloured, non-European peoples of the Third World.” It is precisely this western intellectual and political culture that created the space both for the european dehumanization of the rest of the world and for the current racist zionist rhetoric against Palestinians, a rhetoric that justifies genocide.
As one of the most recognizable Palestinian Americans writing on the “Palestine Question,” Said’s activism and scholarship is well known. But we argue that it is important to return to this remarkable essay because, as Said rightly argues, “the struggle against imperialism and racism is a civilizational struggle, and we cannot wage it successfully unless we understand its systems of ideas and where they originate.”
We reprint Edward Said’s “The Intellectual Origins of Imperialism and Zionism” below.
The Intellectual Origins of Imperialism and Zionism
by Edward Said
Both as a system of social, political, and cultural oppression, and as a vision of the world, imperialism has been common in all ages. Most cultures, at the moment of their dominance, have tried to impose their will upon other, weaker cultures. Invariably, imperialism promotes a peculiar and even an esoteric mythology. Some of its myths include the vows that a strong culture is a superior one, that reality itself can be altered at will in order to create ‘natural’ hierarchies, that the dominant nation belongs to a master race, and so forth. All of these ideas are to be found in one form or another during the zenith of all the great European and Asian and American empires.
Yet during the nineteenth century imperialism acquired a new and strong form, and it is during the history of nineteenth-century European intellectual culture that one will find the common origins of imperialism and Zionism, origins that precede [Theodor] Herzl and the colonization of Palestine in the 1880s. Very briefly, I should like to sketch the intellectual roots of imperialism and Zionism, because, I think, as victims of both, we have not taken enough note of the history, the methodology, and the epistemology of the great systems of oppression that still affect us today and that are the legacy of nineteenth-century political and cultural thought. For until we see them in their full historical richness, we will make the mistake of thinking that racism is a recent thing, or that it is a passing, relatively young phenomena which will go away. The fact is, as I hope to show, that Zionism and imperialism draw on each other; each in its own way, they sit at the very centre of Western intellectual and political culture; and they are facts, not of immorality of injustice, but of a political and scientific will to domination over the so-called coloured, non-European peoples of the Third World. The struggle against imperialism and racism is a civilizational struggle, and we cannot wage it successfully unless we understand its systems of ideas and where they originate. Only then can we struggle scientifically against them.
The period of the rise of modern imperialism, of which Zionism is a part, goes further back than 1870, which is when Hobson and Arendt said that it began. As a system of through, modern European imperialism is rooted in the early nineteenth century – its span of greatest influence coincides exactly with the period of vast territorial acquisition by the great European powers. We must remember that, between 1815 and 1918, Europe’s colonial empires in Asia and Africa and Latin America increased from 35% of the total surface of the earth to 85% of it. What we must ask now are the following questions: first, what were the principal characteristics of European imperialism? And, second, how did Zionism arise organically out of the system, and the very visions of, European imperialism?
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