BLACK AGENDA REPORT
“The ever-scheming European imperialists wisely placed Israel where she could geographically divide the Arab world…and also divide the Africans against the Asians.”
In September 1964, during an extensive tour of Africa and West Asia, Malcolm X visited the Gaza Strip. Malcolm’s time in Gaza was brief. He arrived there from Egypt on September 5th and left the following day at noon, returning to Cairo. Yet the brevity of Malcolm’s visit to Gaza was countered by the fullness and intensity of his experience there. He visited the Khan Younis refugee camp, created in 1949 to hold Palestinian’s dispossessed from their land following the Nakba. He prayed at the mosque and broke bread with religious leaders, and visited Gaza’s parliamentary building and a local hospital. Malcolm also met with the Palestinian poet and librarian Harun Hashem Rashid, born in the Gaza Strip, whose firsthand accounts of the violence of zionism, and whose poem, “We Must Return,” on Palestinians returning to their lands deeply moved him. Malcolm transcribed Rashid’s poem in his diary and, less than days after his visit, Malcolm’s impressions of Gaza took shape in a remarkable essay indicting zionism and defending the Palestinian cause.
Titled “Zionist Logic,” Malcolm’s essay was one of a handful of essays (including “Racism: the cancer that is destroying America” and “The Negro’s Fight,”) that he published in the Cairo-based English-language newspaper, the Egyptian Gazette. This essay has been reprinted and cited extensively since it first appeared, including in the Militant and Socialist Viewpoint. For good reason. Malcolm describes the geopolitical and geo-economic rationales for zionism in scathingly precise fashion. He describes “Israeli Zionists” as those who “religiously believe their Jewish God has chosen them to replace the outdated European colonialism with a new form of colonialism.” He also makes the case for a Third World anti-imperialist alliance to defeat zionism.
“Zionist Logic” also demonstrates both Malcolm’s extraordinary intellectual gifts, and the degree to which he was developing an internationalist position near the end of his life. The question can now only be asked: where would that internationalism have led us if Malcolm hadn’t been assassinated on February 28, 1965, just months after his return from Africa and West Asia – and Gaza.
We reprint Malcolm X’s “Zionist Logic” below.
Zionist Logic
by MALCOLM X (1964)
The Zionist armies that now occupy Palestine claim their ancient Jewish prophets predicted that in the “last days of this world” their own God would raise them up a “messiah” who would lead them to their promised land, and they would set up their own “divine” government in this newly-gained land, this “divine” government would enable them to “rule all other nations with a rod of iron.”
If the Israeli Zionists believe their present occupation of Arab Palestine is the fulfillment of predictions made by their Jewish prophets, then they also religiously believe that Israel must fulfill its “divine” mission to rule all other nations with a rod of irons, which only means a different form of iron-like rule, more firmly entrenched even, than that of the former European Colonial Powers.
These Israeli Zionists religiously believe their Jewish God has chosen them to replace the outdated European colonialism with a new form of colonialism, so well disguised that it will enable them to deceive the African masses into submitting willingly to their “divine” authority and guidance, without the African masses being aware that they are still colonized.
Camouflage
The Israeli Zionists are convinced they have successfully camouflaged their new kind of colonialism. Their colonialism appears to be more “benevolent,” more “philanthropic,” a system with which they rule simply by getting their potential victims to accept their friendly offers of economic “aid,” and other tempting gifts, that they dangle in front of the newly-independent African nations, whose economies are experiencing great difficulties. During the 19th century, when the masses here in Africa were largely illiterate, it was easy for European imperialists to rule them with “force and fear,” but in this present era of enlightenment, the African masses are awakening, and it is impossible to hold them in check now with the antiquated methods of the 19th century.
The imperialists, therefore, have been compelled to devise new methods. Since they can no longer force or frighten the masses into submission, they must devise modern methods that will enable them to maneuver the African masses into willing submission.
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