by ROSALIND PETCHESKY
Fundamentals of Zionism: Settler Colonialism, Racism, Antisemitism, Patriarchy
…Zionism is the ideology that fuses creation of (ancient) Jewish collectivity with claims to (modern) sovereignty over land allegedly promised by God to Jews and their descendants. Its myth of a common ethnos (culture and blood ties) relies on the process of transforming the Old Testament into a literal historical reference book, certifying the Jewish people as an uprooted “race” and a “chosen people” by virtue of their unique covenant with God. God promised Jews their return to their biblical homeland, turning all others who resided in that land over the centuries into “strangers” or “infiltrators.”8 This elaborate fiction of racial unity and singularity contradicts the diasporic reality of Jews as persons who, for centuries, have practiced various religious customs and rituals in diverse cultures, languages, racial identities, and geographies across the globe. To convert this polyphony into “theological-colonial nationalism” required not only a race-ethnic construct but also a common land or territory and what German sociologist Max Weber called a “monopoly over the legitimate use of force.”9 And it required a concerted strategy to eliminate the “others” while recruiting Jews from across the globe into the colonizing enterprise. As renowned Jewish philosopher Martin Buber and others foresaw, Zionism was a project that would necessitate endless violence, injustice, and war.
Homogenizing Jews as a single national or racial identity inextricably bound to the State of Israel is itself a form of antisemitism with very old roots. From its origins in nineteenth-century Europe, Zionism has been an ideology and set of practices that constituted a racist system of settler colonialism. Like all racisms, it is double-sided, facing both outward toward its “others” and inward toward its own. Its early alignment with European assumptions about Western and white superiority produced, and was based on, the oppression and exclusion of Palestinian Arabs, North Africans, and Muslims, while its equation of Jewishness with allegiance to an exclusively Jewish Israeli state has entailed efforts to racialize, whiten, and nationalize Jews. This last has edged perilously toward antisemitism by internalizing stereotypes of Jews as a “race,” aliens in any location but the Israeli homeland. To be an anti-Zionist Jew thus invites the labels not only of “self-hating” but also of traitor.
Multiple sources attest to the ways that racism, antisemitism, and masculinism were intertwined among Zionism’s founders and early proponents. Theodore Herzl, long seen as the father of nineteenth-century Zionism, identified strongly in his youth with the Prussian aristocracy, as well as dueling, hyper-masculinity, and a disdain for East European and diasporic Jews as “weak.” His Die Judenstaat (The Jews’ State) in 1896 was an appeal to Europe’s Ashkenazi (West European) Jews to migrate to Palestine rather than try to assimilate in Europe—an expression of “strong” nationalism that may also have been an effort to reclaim Jewish masculinity in the eyes of white European Christian men.10 British Foreign Secretary Lord Balfour’s letter to Lord Rothschild, a Zionist and Britain’s most famous Jewish citizen, in 1917 promising British support for the “establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people” was motivated as much by Balfour’s eagerness to rid Britain of its Jews as it was by the British Empire’s colonial interests in having a stronghold in the Middle East. Above all, European and Zionist endorsement of Jewish settler colonialism was laced from the start with the white supremacist elimination or denigration of Palestinian Arabs in favor of honorable, civilized Jewish men.11
Precursors to the Nakba—From Balfour to 1947
The 1917 Balfour Declaration and the League of Nations Covenant that set up the British Mandate paid lip service to the civil and religious rights of “non-Jewish communities” but ignored their national rights to self-determination. In blatant contravention of the role of mandatory as laid out in the Covenant (Article 22), the Palestine Mandate entirely erased Palestinian or even Arab presence in historic Palestine in deference to prioritizing Jewish immigration and establishing “a national home for the Jewish people.” This blatant discrimination occurred even though indigenous Palestinian Arabs constituted 90 percent of the population of Palestine at the time, in contrast to the Jewish settlers’ 10 percent. In other words, the “wishes of the [indigenous] communities” cited in the League Covenant were subordinated to the World Zionist Organization’s dream.12
In the years immediately following the Balfour Declaration and the increased Jewish immigration to Palestine that it unleashed, Arab and Palestinian protests accelerated. In 1919, the first Palestinian Arab congress met in Jerusalem and framed a national charter demanding independence for Palestine, rejecting British rule, and denouncing the Balfour Declaration.13 In 1920, the annual Muslim Nebi Musa Festival grew into skirmishes between Muslims and Jews (who were led by right-wing Zionist leader Vladimir Jabotinsky). At anti-Zionist protests in Nablus, Muslim protesters sang, “We are the children of Jabal al-Nar (Nablus)/We are a thorn in the throat of the occupation.”14 In 1921, Palestinian women founded the Palestinian Women’s Union, which led organized demonstrations against Balfour and the British Mandate, and later formed the General Palestinian Women’s Congress in Jerusalem.15 In England, even the single Jewish member of the British cabinet, Edwin Montagu, publicly opposed the Balfour framework and Zionism.16 But in Europe after the First World War, power and racist settler colonialism were indivisible. Soon after the war, international Zionist organizations laid claim to Eretz Yisrael—a sovereign nation state based on exclusive Jewish ownership of the land—on behalf of Jews throughout the world.
In its racism and its dreams of racially superior masculinity, Zionism is in no way exceptional; it is simply appropriating the European settler-colonialist dogma, found in texts going back to John Locke.17 At the core of this dogma is the claim that the settlers would bring superior intellectual and technological capacity and thus improvement to lands they portrayed as barren and neglected—a spurious claim used to justify indigenous dispossession in Palestine, India, the Americas, and elsewhere. In the early-to mid-twentieth century, Zionist rabbis disseminated this racist-colonialist trope in local synagogues in towns and cities across America, building allegiance to the Zionist movement among their congregations.
This ideological campaign was only in part a defense against European antisemitism; it was also a direct reaction to the robust but ultimately overpowered resistance movement by Palestinian Arabs against British mandatory rule and British-sponsored Zionist colonialism in Palestine. Historian Rashid Khalidi writes:
The 1936 Palestinian general strike and the armed revolt that followed were momentous events for the Palestinians, the region, and the British Empire. The six-month general strike, which ran from April until October and involved work stoppages and boycotts of the British- and Zionist-controlled parts of the economy, was the longest anticolonial strike of its kind until that point in history, and perhaps the longest ever.18
A stunning example of the Zionist propaganda efforts in mid-century Middle America appeared in research that I conducted in the archives of my family’s reform synagogue in Tulsa, Oklahoma. A June 1936 issue of the Tulsa Jewish Review, a publication of the Tulsa Council of Jewish Women (of which my grandmother was a member), featured an article by the local rabbi reassuring its readers that “the recent disturbances in Palestine”—clearly referring to the gen-eral strike—did not reflect hostility to Jewish settlers among the Palestinians or endanger “Anglo-Jewish friendship.” In addition to characterizing the Palestinian resistance of that momentous year as “acts of terrorism” and urging the British to stand fast, the rabbi denigrates the rebels as victims of “propaganda and threats” whose “earthly happiness” could only come from Jewish colonialism.19 It is important to understand that the settler colonial project to “de-Arabise Palestine” and bring all of historic Palestine under Zionist sovereignty long pre-dated both the Nakba and worldwide knowledge of the Nazi holocaust. The 1929 constitution of the Jewish National Fund (JNF), the para-statal agency that basically manages distribution of land throughout all Israeli-controlled territory to this day, declared JNF land to be “the inalienable property of the Jewish people” and that “[the JNF] is not obliged to act for the good of all its citizens [but] for the good of the Jewish people only.”20 Israel’s first Prime Minister and longtime Zionist leader, David Ben-Gurion, was obsessed with the idea of “demographic balance” as a means to maintain Zionist hegemony over Palestine. As early as 1937, he observed that establishing what he considered an optimal balance between Arabs and Jews might necessitate the use of force, and in a 1947 speech he affirmed that “only a state with at least 80 percent Jews is a viable and stable state.”21
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