The December 14 killing of 15 Jews by two ISIS-inspired gunmen at Sydney’s Bondi Beach has given rise to calls for a ban on the use of the phrase “globalize the intifada,” on the grounds that it is a call for the killing of Jews around the world.
The New York Times reported that “Two of Britain’s largest police forces announced that they would arrest protesters for using the phrase ‘globalize the intifada,’ saying in a joint statement that a ‘more assertive’ approach was needed after the terrorist attack in Australia and a previous assault on a synagogue in England.”
In Canada, the editorial board of the country’s largest newspaper, The Globe and Mail, argued—with not a shred of evidence—that the Bondi Beach killers were driven to their murderous spree by a desire to globalize the intifada. The board harrumphed, “And if anyone was still unclear as to what the chants heard in countless rallies in Canada and elsewhere to ‘globalize the intifada’ mean, the answer is to be found in the carnage at Bondi Beach. The two gunmen heard and heeded the call to intifada.”
British authorities, court journalists, Zionists, and defenders of Israel misrepresent “globalize the intifada” as a call to kill Jews everywhere, falsely citing the slogan as the inspiration for the Bondi Beach killings.
There are two problems with their argument.
Globalize the intifada is a call to bring global pressure to bear on Israel to end its occupation of Palestinian territories, not a call to kill Jews.
The Bondi Beach killings were not inspired by either the true meaning of the slogan or the false meaning that has been attributed to it by Israel’s supporters.
Globalize the intifada is a call to bring global pressure to bear on Israel to end its occupation of Palestinian territories
Intifada is an Arabic word meaning “to shake off.” It was used by Palestinians to describe two of their efforts to bring an end to, or shake off, the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian Territories of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip. One of those efforts lasted from 1987-1993; another from 2000-2005.
At the heart of the word “intifada”, as Palestinians have used this term, is a political goal: an end to the occupation. However, Zionists and their supports misinterpret the word to mean violence against Jews. To be sure, violence is one way that Palestinians might try, and have tried, to achieve this goal. But calling for intifada—shaking off Israeli oppression—is a call for a campaign to achieve a political aim, not a specification of how the aim is to be achieved.
Still, political violence was part of the intifadas, but it was aimed, not at Jews qua Jews, but at Israelis. So even if the call for intifada was specifically a call for political violence—and it isn’t—it wouldn’t be a call for violence against Jews as such, but against Jewish supremacist settlers in the Palestinians’ homeland.
To say, then, that “globalize the intifada” is a call to kill Jews everywhere is false. First, there is no inherent reference to violence in the word intifada. Second, even if there was, the violence would be directed not at Jews everywhere, but at Israelis specifically, and not for reasons of blind hatred of Jews but in pursuit of a legitimate Palestinian political objective.
I say the Palestinian political objective is legitimate for two reasons.
The Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories is illegal under international law. This statement isn’t even remotely controversial.
A people’s redressing its dispossession and oppression is, on moral grounds, axiomatically legitimate.
The Palestinians’ pursuit of the goal embodied in the word intifada is, thus, a legitimate political project. To globalize the intifada is to internationalize the pursuit of this legitimate political objective; it is a call for people around the world to enter the fight, in whatever way they can, to help an oppressed people achieve their legitimate political aim.
In sum, the slogan:
Is not based in the psychopathology of Judeophobia, but in a legitimate political objective.
Is not a call for violence (nor at the same time a call for non-violence; it is a call for the achievement of a political objective, not a specification of how the objective is to be achieved).
Makes no allusion to Jews as such but only to Israelis who support and enforce the denial of the Palestinians’ legitimate aims.
The slogan is not, therefore, necessarily a call for violence against Israelis, and it is most especially not a call for violence against Jews outside Israel.
The Bondi Beach killings were not inspired by either the false or true meanings of the slogan
The killers, according to Australian officials, appear to have been motivated by Islamic State ideology. Islamic State thinking is pretty simple: kill the infidel—Yazidis, Christians, Shia Muslims, Alawi Muslims, Jews, and even non-fundamentalist Sunni Muslims. ISIS militants are not choosy. If you don’t believe what they believe, you’re fair game.
In June “a suicide bomber who was a member of the Islamic State opened fire before blowing himself up during the Sunday service at the Greek Orthodox church of Prophet Elias in Damascus, killing at least 30 and wounding more than 60 Greek Orthodox Christians.”
For every Jew killed at Bondi Beach two Christians were killed at Damascus, by killers inspired by the same Islamic State ideology. Significantly, the killing of 30 Christians was a non-story, barely noticed anywhere, but the massacre of half as many Jews has widely reported and is now known by much of the world.
No one has cited the Damascus slaughter of Christians as evidence of a spike in anti-Christian hatred, or called for Christians to have their own ethno-state where they can feel safe, or demanded measures to combat a growing scourge of anti-Christian animus.
It would appear that the Bondi Beach killers did not target Jews to show solidarity with Palestinians. It is more likely that they slaughtered Jews for the reason ISIS militants slaughter anyone, including Christians and Shia Muslims: because, in ISIS’s view, they’re infidels.
But even if the killers’ actions were intended as a show of solidarity with Palestinians, their decision to slaughter Jews on an Australian beach has no meaningful connection to any legitimate interpretation of “globalize the intifada.” The slogan is not a call to kill Jews as Jews, much less Jews living almost nine thousand miles away from Palestine, but to support Palestinians in their quest to overcome the opposition of Israelis to the achievement of a legitimate Palestinian political aim.
The politics of misinterpretation
Not surprisingly, the misinterpretation of the slogan comports with the political aims of Zionists, Israeli officials, and Israel’s supporters. They want to discredit the global movement which seeks to pressure Israel to end its occupation of the Palestinian territories by identifying its motivations as rooted in the psychopathology of Judeophobia. Zionists want to do this in order to draw attention away from the political questions at the heart of the Palestinian project: settler colonialism, apartheid, genocide, and international law. Zionists cannot win in this arena, and so they attempt to shift the debate to another question.
Israeli officials are always quick to present any violence against Jews, whether directed against Jews qua Jews or otherwise, as evidence of an ineradicable worldwide Judeophobia. Zionism is predicated on the idea that non-Jews can’t help but hate Jews; that anti-Jewish violence is always simmering below the surface, ready to boil over; and that for these reasons, the existence of a Jewish state as a bulwark against the Judeophobic psychopathology of non-Jews is a moral and existential necessity. The slaughter of Jews by Islamic State killers at Bondi Beach has been dishonestly exploited by pro-Israel forces to strengthen this discourse. Violence against Jews is eternal, Zionists argue, and, what’s more, they say, it is inspired by the slogans of those who march in solidarity with the Palestinians. The argument seeks to achieve two objectives at one stroke: 1) To fear-monger in order to induce diaspora Jews to immigrate to Israel; 2) To depoliticize the Palestinians’ political project and situate it in anti-Semitism in order to discredit it.
“Globalize the intifada” is, unquestionably, anti-Zionist and expresses a view that is strenuously opposed to the continued Israeli denial of the Palestinians’ legitimate political aims. But it is not anti-Semitic. It is a political slogan based in opposition to the denial of the Palestinians’ legitimate political project. It is for this reason that the purveyors of Israeli hasbara invoke anti-Semitism as a smokescreen to conceal the political questions at the heart of the pro-Palestinian solidarity movement and its slogans. Having no argument to support settler colonialism, apartheid, genocide, and the continued Israeli violation of international law (condoned in deeds by the United States and its G7 allies), they conjure the red-herring of anti-Semitism. Western governments, such as the United Kingdom, and court journalists, such as the editorial board of The Globe and Mail, participate in this deception because they are as supportive of Israel and its denial of the Palestinians’ legitimate political aims as are the Israeli oppressors themselves. Support for Israel within the Western establishment is based on the reality that the Zionist state has, from its birth, been child, extension, and outpost, of the West in the East; the West’s, and especially the United States’, instrument for controlling the region’s petroleum resources and strategic position.
We can expect no honesty from Western governments and mainstream news media, anymore than we can from the Israeli government itself, on questions related to the Palestinians’ legitimate political project. The Western establishment and Israel maintain a symbiotic relationship, with Israel doing, as German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said not too long ago, the West’s dirty work, in exchange for the United States and its G7 subalterns, providing Israel with the political, economic, military, and diplomatic support it needs to keep the Palestinians down.
The genocide scholar Raz Segal has written an insightful article for the Guardian (“The genocide in Gaza is far from over,” 20 November, 2025) which I am flagging because it addresses a question that is almost never asked in public discourse: Why do genocides happen?
Segal asks this question because it is clear that the Nuremberg Trials, the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, and education programs designed to instil the idea of “never again”, have failed. For, in this post-Holocaust world, the slogan “never again” is belied by the reality of “again and again.”
The common understanding of genocides is that they are caused by bad people with evil in their hearts. This is The Christmas Carol version of the expunction of groups. Bob Cratchet was overworked and underpaid because his boss, Ebenezeer Scrooge, was a miser with a heart of adamant, not because he was a capitalist operating in a world of cut-throat competition. Scrooge had two choices: pay his employees as little as possible and work them as long as possible, or go under. It’s no surprise he chose the former.
How many progressives attribute the problems of the working class to the greed of corporations, as if greed can be disappeared in a poof of moral suasion, or a visit from the Ghost of Christmas Future? Where does greed come from? Scrooge’s greed came, not from his heart, but from bourgeois society and the capitalist imperatives which enslaved him. “We shouldn’t despise human nature,” counseled the eighteenth-century philosophe, Denis Diderot, “but the despicable conventions that pervert it.” Scrooge’s perversion was the despicable convention of capitalism, not a lonely childhood and a love affair gone sour, as Dickens told the tale.
What are the despicable conventions that pervert human nature to produce genocides? For Segal, and others, it is a political project—one of building ethnically homogenous societies.
British settlers in Turtle Island (North America), Australia, and Aotearoa (New Zealand), carried out genocides against the indigenous peoples of these territories, not so much with the conscious intention of building societies of, by, and for White people, but of integrating the land and resources of the indigenous people into a growing world bourgeois system of capitalist production. Inasmuch as the indigenous peoples couldn’t be, and didn’t want to be, forcibly integrated into this system, they were eliminated as obstacles. Thus, the creation of ethnically homogeneous White Christian societies in these lands was a consequence of a capitalist driven process.
Nazi Germany carried out a genocide in Eastern Europe against people it deemed Untermenschen (sub-humans)—Slavs, Jews, Romani, Blacks, and mixed-race people. Of 18 million non-combatants killed by bullets, gas, exposure, exhaustion, and disease in the German war in the European East from 1939 to 1945, 12 million were Slavs and six million Jews. Ninety-six percent of the victims were claimed by Nazi imperialist violence—that is, violence used by the Third Reich to conquer and depopulate Slav territory in order to repopulate it with German settlers.
Significantly, most of the world’s Jews lived within the territory that was the object of the Nazis’ settler colonial ambitions. The Holocaust, in the view of Carrol P. Kakel III, a US historian who has written on the American and German genocides, cannot be separated from Nazi settler colonialism. Six million Jews were killed, not for the sole reason that Nazis hated Jews—a view ingrained in the ideological zeitgeist—but as a consequence of a political project, namely, 1) clearing the European East (where the majority of the world’s Jews lived) of non-Germans to make room for an expanded ethnically homogeneous Teutonic empire and 2) eliminating an ethnic group the Nazis believed was, through the instruments of international finance capitalism and Marxist internationalism, seeking to destroy the German people as a nation.
Raphael Lemkin, the Polish-Jewish lawyer who introduced the concept of genocide in his 1944 study Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, attributed the Nazi genocide of the Slavs to the German settler colonial project, but insisted that the genocide of the Jews, the Holocaust, originated in psychopathological Judeophobia, unconnected to any Nazi political aim. Lemkin’s insistence that Nazi violence toward Jews was driven by psychopathology (thus, bad people with evil in their hearts) likely originated in his Zionism. A core belief of political Zionism is that non-Jews can’t help but hate Jews. As a consequence, Jews can never safely live among non-Jews, and must therefore have their own state if they are to be safe and survive as a people. Genocide scholar A. Dirk Moses has argued vigorously against the view that the Holocaust was the consequence of apolitical hatred, rooting the Judeocide instead, along with other genocides, in political projects. He criticizes the Genocide Convention for depoliticizing genocide—that is, for failing to recognize that genocides are carried out by ethnic groups against other ethnic groups they see as economic or political competitors. Often, but not always, the competition is over land. Or one ethnic group sees another as a threat to its survival.
Certainly, the origins of the genocide of the Palestinians can be found in a political project—clearing Palestine of its indigenous population to make room for Jewish settlers and the creation of a Jewish ethnic state. Zionist settler colonialism has obvious connections to the British-settler colonial genocides of the indigenous peoples of Canada, the United States, Australia, and New Zealand, as well as the Nazi political project of creating an expanded German empire in the European East comprised solely of Aryan Germans.
Segal argues that the reason we live in a post-Holocaust world of again and again is because the political project that has regularly given rise to genocide—one of creating ethnically homogeneous states—continues to be seen as legitimate. One of the reasons (though not the only or even most important reason) the United States, Britian, Canada, and the Soviet Union backed the creation of an ethnic Jewish state in Palestine, was because they believed that ethnic states were legitimate, necessary, and desirable. Self-determination, the notion that every ethnic group should have its own state, enjoys considerable esteem. Thus, the idea of a single democratic state in Palestine, from the river to the sea, where everyone is equal, is frequently dismissed in preference to the creation of two ethnically homogeneous states existing side-by-side—one Jewish, the other Palestinian. This is the two-state solution. Zionists prefer one Jewish state in all of Palestine (today’s reality) and some Palestinians would like to see a Palestinian state from the river to the sea, cleansed of its Jewish inhabitants, save for the descendants of Jews who lived in the country prior to the political Zionist waves of European immigration.
Abolishing genocide and getting to a world of never again means abolishing the idea that the ethnic state is either necessary or desirable. We don’t need ethnic states; we need civic states, where all people are equal and gender, sexual-orientation, ethnicity, national origin, religion, color, language, and all other ascriptive markers of identity have no political significance.
However, ideas are not abolished by fiat; conduct is not deduced from principle. The fact that the land of the indigenous peoples of North America and Oceania offered attractive possibilities to metropolitan Europe, and the proletarians it disgorged to the colonies, created the idea of the desirability of settler colonialism. The idea of political Zionism arose in the anti-Semitism of Europe, which in turn arose in the need of Europe’s rulers to diffuse threats to their rule by turning their subjects’ anger against a scapegoat. The war against the Jews became a substitute for the class war against Tsarist oppression and capitalist exploitation. A. Dirk Moses makes a compelling point that genocide is pursued as a solution to a political problem, but political problems arise not in the world of ideas, but in social and economic intercourse.
One of the surest ways of solving the political problem of two groups vying for political and economic resources within the same territory is for one or both of them to try to expel or physically destroy the other. So long as humanity is divided by ascriptive identity will identity groups vie for political and economic resources, and so long as identity groups vie for political and economic resources, the possibility of genocide will be ever present.
Bernie Sanders is the only US senator to acknowledge the Israeli genocide against the Palestinians, and even he does so post festum, and grudgingly. Only after a mountain of evidence had been amassed by multiple organizations and experts—from the ICJ to human rights groups and genocide scholars (including Israeli ones) and finally from the United Nations Human Rights Council (to say nothing of what was evident for anyone to see in the overt expressions of genocidal intent and conduct of the Israeli leadership and its revenge-ravening military)—did Senator Sanders, the soi-disant democratic socialist from Vermont, get around to acknowledging that indeed a genocide is in progress. This, after months of being pressed by his supporters to concede the obvious. Having acquiesced to both political pressure and reality, he conciliated the genocidaire by blaming Hamas for the ongoing holocaust of the Palestinians, al-Nakba al-Mustimira. On top of that, he continued to endorse arms shipments to Israel in the form of “defensive arms”, thus drawing a misleading distinction between offensive and defensive weaponry.
But forget Sanders for the moment. What about the 99 other senators who haven’t even grudgingly acknowledged the genocide?
Most senators are millionaires or multimillionaires, who are intimately interconnected familialy, socially, politically, and professionally with the top investors and leading CEOs of the most profitable US companies, on whom they rely for campaign contributions and lucrative post-political-career opportunities. Accordingly, they are devoted to upholding the systems of capitalist exploitation and US imperialist competition—the foundation of their wealth and privilege, and more broadly, the wealth and privilege of their class.
West Asia is important to the senators’ class, and largely for one reason: petroleum. While the United States, the world’s largest oil and natural gas producer, draws the bulk of its oil and natural gas from the Americas, the price of energy depends on the unhindered flow of petroleum resources worldwide. Hence, West Asia—and Washington’s outpost in the region, Israel—is vital to the smooth functioning of capital accumulation at home, and therefore to the senators’ core personal and class interests.
Additionally, China depends on access to West Asian oil to fuel its military and keep its economy running. Controlling the region gives Washington considerable strategic leverage over its leading rival. What’s more, Japan and Western Europe—key US subordinates and potential strategic competitors—are also dependent on West Asian petroleum. Controlling the Arab world’s oil and natural gas helps Washington keep these states in line.
Hence, US capitalism has an interest in dominating West Asia and suppressing West Asian expressions of national assertiveness and local sovereignty. Arab and Iranian nationalists, were they allowed to thrive, would seek to turn the region’s petroleum resources to the benefit of local populations at the expense of US capitalist class imperatives. They’ve done it before, and would, if they could, do it again.
Now, some would argue that Washington’s foreign policy is controlled by “the Israel lobby,” a group of Christian and Jewish Zionists who advance Israeli goals at the expense of US interests. To be sure, the Israel lobby has enormous influence in Washington, but key parts of this argument—articulated by political scientists John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt—are often left unexamined.
When we say “US interests”, whose interests do we mean? Those of the bulk of the US population, or those of the approximately one percent of the population that owns and controls the economy and dominates the state (including the Senate)? (Mearsheimer and Walt see only one undifferentiated US interest, unmediated by class.)
Are the interests of the bulk of the US population at odds with the Zionist interests of Israel?
Do the interests of the US plutocracy mesh with the Zionist aims of the Jewish settler colonial state?
I would argue that US economic, military, and diplomatic support of Israel is at variance with the interests of the vast majority of US citizens (and therefore would agree with Mearsheimer and Walt, so far as they define “US interests” as the class interests of most US citizens—those of the employee class—as distinct from those of the US economic elite.) At the same time, I would argue that the interests of the US capitalist class mesh well with Zionist interests.
Significantly, the “Israel lobby” is largely made up of major US investors and the top CEOs of the United States’ leading companies. The group of Israel-zealots that Mearsheimer and Walt argue have highjacked US foreign policy, happen to be the elite of US capitalism, according to research by Laurence H. Shoup, whose has specialized in examining the contours of the US ruling class. If the Israel lobby has hijacked US foreign policy, then so too have the leaders of corporate America taken control of the levers of the US Departments of State, National Defense, and Treasury, along with the posts of National Intelligence Director and Ambassador to the UN. Shoup and others have shown that these key posts have long been dominated by the US capitalist elite. The Israel lobby exists, but it is a subset of the corporate lobby, a fact that points to a commonality of interest between the US capitalist class and its outpost in West Asia.
How are US capitalist and Israeli interests alike?
First, it should be noted that Israel is completely dependent on the United States. It could not survive without:
US military and economic subsidies, and US guarantees that the Israeli military will be equipped with a qualitative military edge over every other state in its region.
Unwavering diplomatic support, that allows Israel to act unconstrained by international law and over the objections of international public opinion and the expostulations of the states of the world, including US subordinates, without fear of penalty. (There are two roque states in the world: Israel and the United States. The former acts under the aegis of the latter and the latter under the aegis of its immense power.)
As a consequence of its dependence on the United States, the embattled Zionist state has no option but to pursue US goals as a condition of continuing to receive US support. The US goals it pursues include suppressing any force that might attempt to bring the region’s energy resources under local control for the purpose of uplifting the local population at the expense of aggrandizing the interests of US investors and oil companies and denying Washington control of West Asia, thereby negating US strategic leverage over China, Japan, and Western Europe. Moshe Dayan, an Israeli chief of defense staff, minister of defense, and minister of foreign affairs, is reputed to have said that Israel’s mission is “to be a rock, an extension of the West, against which the waves of…Arab nationalism will be broken.” Echoing Dayan, Israel’s current prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, wrote in 1998 that Israel acts as “the West’s policeman in the Middle East.” Referring to states in West Asia that are keen to assert their independence as “militant regimes”, Netanyahu declared that Israel’s role is to “safeguard the broader interests of peace” since no other state in the region can be relied on by Washington to check either the militant states’ “ambitions or obsessive plans for armament.” Safeguarding the broader interests of peace means safeguarding the status quo of US power in West Asia.
This is the fundamental quid-pro-quo of the US-Israeli relationship: Israel helps Washington stop the emergence of another Mohammad Mosaddegh, Gamal-Abdel Nasser, Colonel Gaddafi, Saddam Hussein, or Hafez or Bashar al-Assad—nationalist leaders who sought to put the interests of their own people above US capitalist class strategic interests and those of US oil companies and investors—and Washington provides Israel with the resources it needs to remain a viable state in West Asia.
It should be added, however, that Washington hardly needs to compel Israel to vigorously oppose West Asia’s nationalists. Whether expressed overtly, as a secular movement under an national liberationist label, or whether it lurks inside Islamist states or movements, like the Islamic Republic of Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas, and Ansar Allah, West Asian national liberation is irreconcilable with Zionism. The two movements are mutually antagonistic. Israel and the US capitalist elite, thus, share a common enemy. Both parties seek to despoil the peoples of West Asia of their land, labor, and resources, and West Asian nationalist forces seek to overcome the despoliation. To secure both Zionist and US capitalist class goals, West Asian nationalist movements must be crushed or at the very least contained. This makes US plutocrats and Israeli Zionists natural allies.
[S]ettler colonies are … typically highly militarized and violent societies, which tend to be reliant upon external support in order to maintain their material privileges in a hostile regional environment. … For this reason, settler colonies are much more dependable partners of Western imperial interests than ‘normal’ client states. In the Middle East, for instance, Arab governments supported by the US (such as today’s Egypt, Jordan, and Morocco) face repeated challenges from political movements within their own borders and are always forced to accommodate and respond to pressures coming from below. This is different from Israel, where the majority of the population views their interests and privileges as dependent upon continued outside support.
In upholding the interests of their class, US senators, then, naturally defend Israel, because it is a US instrument for the fulfillment of a common US capitalist class – Zionist project of dominating West Asia. Israel’s character as a settler colony — from which flows its: multifarious familial, social, cultural, and economic ties to the United States; it’s violent, militaristic character; its complete dependence on US aid and support to survive; and its shared opposition with the US capitalist elite to West Asian national liberation — makes it the ideal candidate to represent US imperialist interests in West Asia.
Given who senators are, and their position at the apex—and as the beneficiaries—of the US capitalist system, it is unthinkable that they would exhibit even the slightest degree of solidarity with the enemies of their class and the targets of their exploitation. We can express outrage that only one senator has even acknowledged the Zionist genocide against the Palestinians, but to do so would fail to recognize the capitalist reality of the United States and its governing class. Expecting senators to concede that a genocide is underway, to say nothing of condemning it and acting to stop it, is tantamount to expecting wolves to become vegetarians.
As for Bernie Sanders, his reluctantly conceding that his beloved Israel is carrying out a genocide against the Palestinians confirms what is already obvious: he is no socialist. Socialists do not defend settler colonialism, apologize for apartheid, or tolerate Zionism. Nor do they uphold the status quo of Israeli oppression of the Palestinians by arguing that Israel has a right to defend itself. (Israeli Zionists have no more right to defend themselves than slave-owners have the right to defend themselves against the uprising of their slaves.) And socialists certainly don’t vote for the continued delivery of arms to genocidaires, in the form of “defensive” weaponry, a sophism that obfuscates the reality that “defensive” weapons have a utility equal to offensive weapons in maintaining Israel’s regime of Jewish supremacy. Would a socialist advocate the provisioning of “defensive” weapons to slave-owners to defend themselves from the uprisings of their slaves? As a socialist Bernie is a fraud. As a senator, committed—with the rest of the Senate—to defending the interests of the US capitalist class and its overseas outposts, he’s more believable.
In a Jacobin interview, Gilbert Achcar, a man Lenin may have characterized as a ‘social parson and opportunist’, and thus fitting as a Jacobin contributor, makes some good points about the Israeli genocide of the Palestinians, but offers a facile assessment of Hamas’s Oct 7 action.
A meaningful evaluation of Operation Al Aqsa Flood would answer the following questions:
Against what goals should the attack be evaluated?
What were Hamas’s goals for the Oct 7 action?
Was the attack rational, given the goals set for it and the information available to Hamas at the time?
To what degree have Hamas’s goals been met?
Is it too early to say?
Achcar addresses none of these questions. Instead, he decries the Oct 7 action as a catastrophe that handed Israel a pretext to carry out a genocide. He argues instead for non-violent resistance.
Why? Because, he says, Israel is many times more powerful than the Palestinian resistance. Armed Palestinian action will inevitably be crushed, leaving non-violent resistance as the only safe option.
Fair point.
But Achcar also believes that any gains the Palestinians make will arise from whatever pressure they can place on Israel and its allies to accommodate their demands. In his view, non-violent action is more likely to create pressure without providing a pretext for violent retaliation, and therefore, is the safer path to follow.
What Achcar misses, however, is the critical point that the catastrophe he condemns as Hamas’s child—the mass atrocities Israel is carrying out against the Palestinians—has turned world public opinion against Israel and created enormous pressure on the Zionist state to accommodate the Palestinians’ demands.
Israel’s reaction to the Oct 7 operation has left Israel greatly weakened. Its standing in world opinion is in the toilet. More and more, people have woken up and taken a hard look at what Israel really is, and they’ve come to see it, in growing numbers, as a racist, apartheid, settler colonial abomination. The abomination’s allies are no longer as keen to offer their unqualified support. Serious efforts are afoot to create a Palestinian state—efforts that had slipped from the agenda prior to Oct 7.
In the face of the undeniable reality that Palestine has perhaps never been more on the agenda, Achcar stamps his foot and cries, ‘No, no, that’s not true. The idea that Oct 7 has put Palestine back on the agenda is absurd.’
But what’s absurd, as anyone of an unbiased mind and clear perception sees, is that the only absurdity here is Achcar’s idea that Oct 7 hasn’t put Palestine back on the agenda.
Thinking about Achcar’s patent aversion to the Palestinians’ use of violence calls to mind three socialist epigrams about class struggle which apply as strongly to national liberation.
The only just war is war against slavery. – Marx
An oppressed class [nation] which does not strive to learn to use arms, to acquire arms, only deserves to be treated like slaves. – Lenin
Socialism [national liberation] is not a … policy for the timid. – Oskar Lange
By Achcar’s logic, we can dismiss as ill-considered the Warsaw uprising, the French resistance, and indeed, the 1939-1948 Zionist settler war for independence from Britain, all violent movements against forces much more powerful than themselves.
Jacobin’s Cloudy Thinking on Hamas’s Resistance and Palestinian Solidarity
“If no consideration in a political crisis has been addressed to the people of this country except to remember to hate violence and love order and exercise patience, the liberties of this country would never have been obtained.” British Prime Minister William E Gladstone [1]
November 1, 2024
By Stephen Gowans
Jacobin contributing editor BashirAbu-Manneh has written a criticism of the pro-Palestinian protest movement (“Palestine Needs Mass Support, Not Sectarian Marginalization,” Jacobin, October 30, 2024), arguing that its effectiveness is clouded by poor strategic thinking. It is not, however, the protest movement’s thinking which is clouded, but Abu-Manneh’s own thinking, which is contradictory and self-refuting. In effect, Abu-Manneh urges readers to hate Hamas’s violence, love international law, and exercise patience, while defining the Palestinian cause as the achievement of Palestinian Bantustans alongside a Zionist colonial settler state. To make his case, he deploys a series of arguments which collapse under the weight of their own contradictions. I have set out his arguments below, and show how they are based on poor—and, ultimately, anti-Palestinian—reasoning.
The Jacobin contributor begins his article by attributing what he calls the cloudy strategic thinking of the pro-Palestinian protest movement to its members’ anger and frustration at Israel’s indifference to “the wrath of global public opinion” and their being “ignored and sidelined by warmongering elites.” In his view, emotion has impaired judgment. A “very small minority of vocal activists,” he writes, “have turned legitimate anger and frustration … into a mindless embrace of violence” which is playing “into the hands of those who want to see a popular antiwar mass movement discredited.”
“Most worryingly,” he adds, “some voices in the Palestinian solidarity movement have glorified Hamas’s October 7 attacks,” quickly noting that: “There is no question that Palestinians have a right to resist foreign occupation. That is an achievement of the decolonization era enshrined in international law. But it does not follow that everything the Palestinian resistance movement does advances the Palestinian cause.”
Let’s unpack this paragraph.
Abu-Manneh attributes the Palestinians’ right to resist foreign occupation to international law. But where does international law come from? Does it exist independently of humanity, or is it written by humans? And which humans write it? International law is formulated, ignored, or enforced, by the most powerful states, at their discretion. The international system is characterized, not by “the rule of law”, in which no state stands above it, but “rule by law”, in which law is selectively applied by those who have sway over it, namely, states with permanent Security Council vetoes, at least four, and possibly all of which, can be characterized as formerly if not current colonial states. One, the United States, originated, as Israel has, in settler colonialism. [2, 3] If the states that dominate the international system, and therefore the formulation and (selective) application of international law, were to decide that the Palestinians have no right to resist occupation, would their resistance be illegitimate? By Abu-Manneh’s reasoning, it would be. This gives us the first clue about how the Jacobin contributing editor thinks about the Palestine question. He regards it not as a question of settler colonialism (the theft of the Palestinians’ country, land, homes, and property and what to do about it), but one of international law, a law over which powerful states, many of them with histories of colonial or settler colonial domination over other peoples, have always exercised an outsize influence. Palestinians may have the right of resistance in international law, but it amounts to little. Does international law, or the great powers who write and selectively enforce it, protect Palestinians as they exercise this right? On the contrary, these same powers raise Israel’s right of self-defense to an inviolable principle of the first order, while execrating, gagging, or punishing anyone bold enough to invoke the Palestinians’ right of resistance. At the same time, they sanction the killing of Palestinians who exercise their right as the necessary and desired outcome of Israel exercising its hallowed right of self-defense.
International law, in the form of the US, British, and Israeli-authored 1967 UN Security Council Resolution 242, recognizes as legitimate a settler colonial Israeli state, implanted by force and by means of ethnic cleansing, on the four-fifths of a country known as Palestine which Zionist settlers conquered in 1948. This law does not grant the Palestinians the right to resist the foreign occupation of this part of their country. So, yes, international law concedes a right to resist, but it is meaningless in fact, and to make matters worse, the right is conceded for only one-fifth of historic Palestine.
We can think of Israel as a settler colonial project which has consolidated its theft of Palestinian land, homes, and property in four-fifths of Palestine. We can think of it too as seeking to extend its larceny to the one-fifth of historic Palestine that has yet to be completely plundered. We can also think of international law as a means of legitimizing the theft. Alternatively, we can, as Abu-Manneh does, fetishize international law, seeing it not as the instrument of colonial and settler colonial states, used to legitimize the existence of Israel [4] but naively, as a neutral expression of universal justice.
After accepting the Palestinians’ right to resistance based on international law (and exercisable only in the one-fifth of the Palestinians’ country which Jewish settlers were unable to capture in 1948), Abu-Manneh writes: It “does not follow that everything the Palestinian resistance movement does advances the Palestinian cause.” This is true as far as it goes, but the statement is of little value unless we know what “the Palestinian cause” is. In Abu-Manneh’s view, the Palestinian cause has nothing whatever to do with decolonizing Palestine, dismantling apartheid, and overcoming Zionist racism. Instead, the cause, in his view, is bringing to fruition the two-state solution as laid out in the 1967 UN Security Council Resolution 242–that is, the achievement of a Palestinian state in one-fifth of the Palestinians’ country, alongside a Zionist colonial settler state, on the larger four-fifths.
Now that we’re clear on what Abu-Manneh thinks the Palestinian cause is, we can ask why he accepts Palestinian resistance (in the abstract) but rejects Hamas’s Operation Al Aqsa Flood (as a specific instance of Palestinian resistance.) According to the Jacobin contributor, any “reasonable cost-benefit analysis for the people of Gaza has to conclude that the price” of the 7 October attack (i.e., Israel’s retaliation) “is simply not worth it.” Owing to “a balance of power that is overwhelmingly to Israel’s advantage” the Hamas rebellion was, in his view, “a massive miscalculation.”
It is indeed true that there exists between Israel and the Palestinians a massive imbalance of power. But what does the fact that there is a massive imbalance of power mean? It means that Israel has been able to maintain an ongoing, unremitting, regime of aggression against the Palestinians, which continues the project, begun over one hundred years ago, of replacing one country, Palestine, with another, Israel, and displacing the indigenous Palestinians with transplanted Jews. This is an ongoing project. It didn’t stop in 1967, when the UN Security Council ordered Israel—without, as time has shown, the slightest intention of compelling Israel’s compliance—to withdraw from the new territories it had taken. It is not the case, as Abu-Manneh supposes, that the great imbalance of power is fixed and that the Zionist project is sated, with no further conquests on its agenda. On the contrary, before 7 October, each passing day was one in which ever more Palestinians were crushed under the wheels of the Zionist juggernaut. Settlements continued to be built in the West Bank. The Gaza blockade continued to make life miserable for Palestinians. Israel continued to threaten to Judaize the Haram al-Sharrif. Abu-Manneh assumes that there existed prior to 7 October a fixed status quo, which, however grim it was, was still better than what has befallen the Palestinians since. To the contrary, the condition of Palestinians was—despite the misplaced faith the Jacobin contributor has in international law—one of incessant weakening and deterioration. Palestinians faced, not a choice of standing still if they did nothing, or going backward if they provoked Israel’s fury, but if they did nothing, of going backward slowly, inexorably, until Palestinians and Palestine ceased to exist. It was a choice of dying on their knees or standing on their feet.
This is not to say that there are not miscalculations in struggle, and that Operation Al Aqsa Flood was not a miscalculation. It may have been. In fact, there is evidence to suggest that the attack didn’t unfold quite as the Hamas leadership intended. Far greater Israeli resistance was expected, and when Hamas fighters quickly achieved their limited objectives, the operation dissolved into chaos. [5] Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas leader who has since died in battle, remarked that “Things went out of control. People got caught up in this, and that should not have happened.” [6]
In decrying the 7 October Hamas operation as not worth the candle because the outcome has been a devastating Israeli retaliation, Abu-Manneh fails to blame the architects of the retaliatory ossuary: Israel and its principal backers, the United States and Germany, the former a veritable co-belligerent. One could argue that the carnage is due to both the provocation of Hamas (a distal cause) and Israel’s response to it (the proximal cause). Instead, Abu-Manneh chooses to lay 100 percent of the blame at Hamas’s door, removing the proximal cause (Israel and its backers and co-belligerent) from the equation altogether. This is blatant victim-blaming.
If that isn’t bad enough, the Jacobin contributing editor then denies Hamas any credit for the benefit of the 7 October rebellion. The benefit, as he puts it, is that “Palestine is now back in global political focus.” But why is it back? In Abu-Manneh’s view, “Because of Israel’s brutal genocide”, not because Hamas undertook an operation which included among its aims the rescue of the Palestinian cause from the oblivion into which it was rapidly sinking. [7] If Hamas is to be blamed for provoking Israel to accelerate the job of erasing the Palestinians—conduct hardly at odds with the history of Zionist settler colonialism (isn’t its point to eliminate the natives to make way for the settlers?)—then it must also be credited with placing Palestine back on the global agenda. Does Abu-Manneh believe that “the huge global protest movement … against colonization and occupation” and the radicalization of “a new generation of young activists,” would have occurred had Hamas or other resistance groups not carried out the Al-Aqsa Flood action or its equivalents? Palestine had fallen off the radar until Hamas acted. Now Palestine and the Palestinians are back with a vengeance. Abu-Manneh’s vaunted international law had done nothing, up to 7 October, to keep them on the agenda. Indeed, it was the failure of international law and the quietude of the Palestinian solidarity movement that galvanized Hamas to act.
Having dismissed Palestinian militant action as ill-advised in light of the enormous imbalance in power between Israel and the Palestinians, Abu-Manneh turns to international law as the Palestinians’ possible savior. In view of the fact that the UN and international law have played important roles in facilitating the Jewish settlers’ spoliation of Palestine and its indigenous people—especially UN General Assembly Resolution 181 of November 1947, which recommended the partition of the Palestinians’ country, and UN Security Council Resolution 242 of 1967, which legitimized the Zionist settler state’s capture of four-fifths of Palestine, and the ethnic cleansing of much of the Palestinian population from it—the idea that the Palestinians should look to international law for salvation is wholly unconvincing; one may as well have asked Hitler to solve the problem of anti-Semitism.
All the same, Abu-Manneh is particularly encouraged by “the July International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruling (July 19, 2024) [which] has deemed Israel’s occupation illegal.” But it should be understood thar the ICJ opinion has not deemed as illegal the Zionist occupation of a country called Palestine; it has only declared illegal the occupation of the one-fifth of Palestine which the settlers failed to conquer and ethnically cleanse in 1948. What encourages the Jacobin contributor, is thus, an ICJ ruling which presses Israel to accept the two-state solution, what Palestinian scholar Rashid Khalidi denounces as “a one-state, multiple-Bantustan solution.” [8] And how is the two-state solution—which Israelis vehemently oppose [9], and whose history is one of a false promise designed to keep the Palestinians passive while what remains of their country is gradually taken away from them—to be brought to fruition? Through “focussed political work and organization” counsels Abu-Manneh—in other words, by mobilizing radicalized youth and the “huge global protest movement” to press countries to pressure Israel to grant the Palestinians the sop of a few Bantustans. Abu-Manneh’s favored two-state solution, “has always been meaningless, a cruel Orwellian hoax,” concludes Khalidi. It “would effectively maintain the status quo in Palestine under a different form, with an externally controlled Quisling ‘Palestinian Authority’ lacking real jurisdiction or authority replaced by a Quisling ‘Palestinian state’ similarly devoid of the sovereignty and independence that attach to a real state.” [10]
Abu-Manneh’s thinking is problematic, if not naïve and, worse, revolting, on three levels.
First, it ignores his own assessment of public opinion. Israel, he notes correctly, is “protected from the wrath of global public opinion.” Moreover, “protesters and activists” are “ignored and sidelined by warmongering elites.” If Israel is insulated from public opinion, and protestors and activists are ignored, how is “focussed political work and organization” going to compel Israel to grant Palestinians the multiple Bantustans Abu-Manneh thinks will resolve the Palestine question? The imbalance in power between Israel and the Palestinians is indeed huge, but the yawning chasm is not only a military one, but a public diplomacy one, as well. If you’re going to say, don’t take on Israel militarily, because its military power is overwhelming, don’t, at the same time, say take on Israel in the realm of public opinion, without recognizing that Israel’s public diplomacy power is also overwhelming. This is surely clouded strategic thinking.
Second, in advocating a one-state-multiple-Bantustan solution, Abu-Manneh proposes that radicalized youth and the huge global protest movement accept Jewish settler colonialism and Zionist apartheid in four-fifths of the Palestinians’ country, in return for Palestinian Bantustans on the remaining one-fifth. Were the radicalized youth who Abu-Manneh celebrates to accept his program they would immediately become de-radicalized, for there is nothing radical about Abu-Manneh’s counsel. Neither is there anything progressive about it. Would a movement against apartheid in South Africa which advocated multiple Bantustans alongside a white supremacist state be called progressive? Of course not. So why would we think the equivalent for Palestine is acceptable? Indeed, it’s difficult not to conclude that the whole point of Abu-Manneh’s intervention is to persuade the global protest movement to deradicalize, on the grounds that this will somehow (he doesn’t quite say how) pay off in strategic gains. This comports with the mild, reformist, orientation of Jacobin—a periodical of the Left devoted to hating violence, loving order, exercising patience, and bartering principle for bourgeois respectability.
Third, the energy of the global protest movement and radicalized youth—energy Abu-Manneh seeks to mobilize on behalf of his favored one-state-multiple-Bantustan solution—would hardly exist had Hamas not undertaken the very same Operation Al-Aqsa Flood he so deplores. Had Hamas accepted anything like Abu-Manneh’s counsel, Palestine and the Palestinians would now be virtually invisible and teetering on the precipice of extinction.
The Jacobin contributor believes that “glorifying” Hamas’s violence will frighten people away from joining the protest movement he acknowledges is already huge and global. In fact, the movement Abu-Manneh has set out to save from cloudy strategic thinking is huge and global despite, or perhaps because of, the “cloudy” thinking he deplores. The Jacobin contributor also fears that failing to denounce Hamas’s 7 October resistance allows Israel and its supporters to discredit opponents of the Israeli’s genocide against the Palestinians. Operation Al Aqsa Flood, was, he argues, a miscalculation that is wholly responsible for the slaughter of tens of thousands of Palestinians. Yet, the operation hardly seems to have been a miscalculation from the point of view of preventing the erasure of Palestine and the Palestinians; it is responsible, at least distally, for revitalizing the pro-Palestinian movement, a revitalization Abu-Manneh welcomes, but all the same fails to give Hamas credit for. The Jacobin writer appears to believe that there are ever more legions of people ready to join the global protest movement if only a very few voices in the Palestinian solidarity movement stop glorifying Hamas’s 7 October attack. His assessment is unconvincing. If more people haven’t joined the already huge and global movement, a more plausible explanation is that they see –to invoke Abu-Manneh’s own assessment of the impotence of public opinion—little point in being “ignored and sidelined by warmongering elites” as Israel enjoys its protection “from the wrath of global public opinion.”
It is unclear why Abu-Manneh believes that failure to decry Hamas’s 7 October uprising plays into the hands of Israel and its supporters, unless he believes, notwithstanding his endorsement of resistance in the abstract, that violent resistance against Israel is illegitimate. Could it be that his reference to the right of Palestinian resistance is mere lip-service? He says resistance is legitimate, but despite this, insists that glorifying the resistance of Hamas on 7 October plays into the hands of the Palestinians’ enemies. This is a contradiction. How could glorifying a legitimate act discredit the movement? Abu-Manneh might say the reason why is because Hamas’s resistance, albeit legitimate, was a miscalculation. But how does glorifying a Hamas miscalculation play into Israeli hands? It doesn’t make sense. It seems more likely that Abu-Manneh is a supporter of violent rebellion in the abstract, as an idea alone, suitable only for discussion in university colloquia, and certainly not as a project to be carried out in the real world.
The reality is that the revitalization of the global Palestinian solidarity movement wouldn’t have happened had Hamas not launched its 7 October operation. Abu-Manneh fails to credit the very same operation whose glorification he deplores for re-igniting the mass movement he welcomes, presenting an argument that can hardly be taken seriously, namely, that the way to build mass support for Palestine is to glorify an international law which has achieved nothing for Palestinians, while defining the Palestinian cause as the achievement of an apartheid Zionist settler state in four-fifths of the Palestinians’ country, alongside multiple Bantustans in what is left over.
Abu-Manneh’s clouded thinking recalls E.H. Carr’s riposte to the advocates of peaceful change. In his Twenty Years’ Crisis, 1919-1939, Carr wrote, that the “attempt to make a moral distinction between wars of ‘aggression’ and wars of defense’ is misguided. If a change is necessary and desirable, the use or threatened use of force to maintain the status quo”—one thinks here of Israel’s vaunted right to defend itself—”may be more morally culpable than the use or threatened use of force to alter it.” [11] He continued: “The moral criterion must be not the ‘aggressive’ or ‘defensive’ character of the war, but the nature of the change which is being sought and resisted. ‘Without rebellion, [humanity] would stagnate and injustice would be irremediable.’ Few serious thinkers maintain that it is always unconditionally wrong to start a revolution; and it is equally difficult to believe that it is always and unconditionally wrong to start a war.” [12]
This isn’t to say that Hamas started a war on 7 October. The war is a long-running one, whose origins are found in the actions of Theodor Hertzl and his supporters and successors to create a Jewish state by making an existing country, Palestine, cease to exist. Hamas only opened a new battle in the long-running war on 7 October. The point is that the violent rebellion of the natives must be evaluated against the nature of the change that was sought and resisted (ultimately, the liberation of Palestine, and immediately, the arrest of the disappearance of Palestine and Palestinians.) Hamas appears to have accomplished its immediate aim and for this, for its fight against the iniquities of settler colonialism and apartheid, and for its role in helping to revitalize the pro-Palestinian movement, it deserves credit.
So, is glorifying Hamas’s 7 October rebellion strategically unsound? It may be, but not for the contradictory reasons Abu-Manneh adduces, and nor for any reason I can fathom. The Jacobin contributor has allowed his anger and frustration at Hamas’s Islamist character—which he revealed in an earlier Jacobin article [13]—cloud his judgment about the merits of the organization as a vehicle for the liberation of Palestine. I share Abu-Manneh’s opposition to Hamas’s Islamism, but I recognize the merits of the group’s Operation Al Aqsa Flood. Whether one agrees or disagrees with the political Islam of Hamas is of no relevance to the question of whether the organization’s conduct has advanced the aims of overcoming Zionist settler colonialism and apartheid. Neither Hamas nor its secular compatriot organizations will ever be acceptable to respectable opinion in colonial and settler colonial countries, and bartering away principle for respectability by denouncing Hamas or refusing to give it the credit it deserves, is a fool’s game.
1. Cited in E.H. Carr, The Twenty Years’ Crisis, 1919-1939, Palgrave MacMillan, 2016, p. 193
2. Three of the five permanent UN Security Council members, the United States, France, and Britain, were once self-declared colonial countries. All retain some colonies today under various euphemistic aliases, such as regions, protectorates, and territories. Puerto Rico, for example, is a de facto US colony, while Guadeloupe and Martinique count among a number of French colonies. Bermuda, Gibraltar, and the Falkland Islands, inter alia, are British colonies. Russia and China were empires, based on the domination of conquered peoples by a metropolitan ethnic elite.
3. For more on this perspective on international law see the Third World Approaches to International Law Review, https://twailr.com/
4. Benjamin Netanyahu has called Israel “the West’s outpost in the Middle East” (and hence, the instrument of the colonial and colonial settler powers which comprise the West). Quoted in Adam Shatz, “The sea is the same sea,” The London Review of Books, (Vol. 40 No. 16, 30 August 2018).
5. “A time of painful birth and major transformation’: a senior Hamas leader reflects on October 7 and its aftermath,” Mondoweiss, October 6, 2024; Our Narrative: Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, Hamas Media Office; Ben Hubbard and Maria Abi-Habib, “Behind Hamas’s Bloody Gambit to Create a ‘Permanent’ State of War,” New York Times, Nov. 8, 2023; Nelly Lahoud “A Catastrophic Success for Hamas?”, Foreign Affairs, October 23, 2023.
6. Summer Said and Rory Jones, “Gaza Chief’s Brutal Calculation: Civilian Bloodshed Will Help Hamas,” The Wall Street Journal, June 10, 2024.
7. “Sinwar certainly achieved his goal of bringing the Palestinian issue to the center of geopolitics,” writes Yaroslav Trofimov in “Sinwar’s Bloody Gambit Changed the Middle East—but Not as He Imagined”, The Wall Street Journal, Oct. 19, 2024: “We make the headlines only with blood,” Sinwar said. “No blood, no news.” Summer Said and Rory Jones, “Gaza Chief’s Brutal Calculation: Civilian Bloodshed Will Help Hamas,” The Wall Street Journal, June 10, 2024.
8. Rashid Khalidi, “The Neck and The Sword,” New Left Review, May/June, 2024.
9. “The U.S., Europe and many Arab governments insist the overdue answer is the two-state solution, under which Israel and a Palestinian state would exist side-by-side. The snag is that Israelis and Palestinians no longer believe in it.” Marcus Walker, Fatima Abdul Karim and Anat Peled, “The Way to Fix the Middle East Conflict Looks Obvious—Except to Israelis and Palestinians, The Wall Street Journal, Aug. 18, 2024.
10. Rashid Khalidi, ‘A new abyss’: Gaza and the hundred years’ war on Palestine, Guardian, 11 Apr 2024.
11. Carr, p. 193.
12. Carr, p. 193.
13. Bashir Abu-Manneh, “The Palestinian Resistance Isn’t a Monolith,” Jacobin, April 28, 2024.
Haaretz columnist Gideon Levy recently misattributed the Himalaya of injustices the Israelis have visited upon the Palestinians to ‘the army,’ as if, absent the IDF, Israel—not only its conduct but its very ethos—would become acceptable to world opinion. [1] But were the IDF to disband, or renounce its genocidal conduct, Israel would still be a Jewish state, founded on the robbery of the Palestinians, and committed to their continued dispossession and exile in order to maintain the state’s Jewish character.
The army’s role in Israel is to defend Jewish supremacy and extend the territory over which Jews come first and Palestinians matter not at all. The 1948-9 theft by Jewish nationalist settlers of the Palestinians’ country, along with their homes, land, and property, is Jewish supremacy’s original sin. The IDF defends and promotes it. The two-state solution ignores and conceals it.
The fruits of the Jewish nationalist plunder are thus defended by violence, and extended to such territory in the West Bank which Jewish settlers have not yet completely taken for their own use. The process is summarized by a single word: Zionism—the racist ideology of Jewish nationalism and Palestinian dispossession. Pro-Zionist, as the Palestinian revolutionary Leila Khaled once pointed out, equals anti-Palestinian.
It is Zionism (the project) and its child, Israel, not the IDF (the project’s instrument), that lies, contra Levy, at the root of the problem of Israel.
To correct Levy, the following injustices, which he attributes to the IDF, are properly understood as the bastards of settler colonial Jewish nationalism.
“…the Sde Teiman base is [Zionism], the human shields used in Gaza are [Zionism], the assassinations are [Zionism]. Forty thousand dead are [Zionism], the destruction of Gaza is [Zionism]; the cruel roadblocks in the West Bank are [Zionism]; the killing of the 3-day-old twins, along with their mother and grandmother, while the father was out obtaining their birth certificate, is [Zionism]; the growing use of drones for killing people in the West Bank is [Zionism]; the pilots, artillery units, armored units, bulldozers, canine units, they are all [Zionism].”
It is difficult to understand how the two-state solution continues to be seen by people ostensibly committed to Leftist or humane values as constituting either a just solution, or even a practical one. Levy himself rejects the two-state solution, not because he dislikes it, but because, with 700,000 Jews in the West Bank, he recognizes that the idea is no longer workable. Scholar Rashid Khalidi calls the two-state solution an Orwellian hoax—a promise to replace the quisling Palestinian Authority with a quisling Palestinian pseudo-state. The two-state solution has always meant one Jewish state plus Palestinian Bantustans, Khalidi argues.
The two-state solution in its current guise rests on UN Security Council Resolution 242, formulated by the United States and Israel, and ratified by the Soviet Union, as a solution to the 1967 Six-Day War, in which Israel conquered the Sinai, the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and parts of Syrian territory in Jawlan (the Golan Heights).
The resolution (unheeded by Tel Aviv) demanded that Israel withdraw to its pre-1967 position, roughly the armistice lines which ended the conflict of 1948-9 between the Zionist settlers and four of the Arab states—Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan. These states had intervened in the war between the Palestinians, who were seeking to keep their country, and the Zionists, who were seeking to make it their own.
At the heart of 1948-9 conflict was UN General Assembly Resolution 181 of 29 November 1947, which ended the British Mandate in Palestine and ordered the partition of the country between Jewish and Arab states, to be linked by an economic union, with Jerusalem under international control. The resolution assigned 56 percent of the Palestinians’ country to Jewish settlers, most of whom were recent immigrants, and who comprised less than one-third of the population. The Palestinians, the majority, were granted a state comprising only 42 percent of their country. The remaining two percent was allocated to an internationalized Jerusalem.
Neither the Palestinians, who had been disarmed by the British Mandate, and in any event had little military training, or the Arab armies, which were rendered ineffective by division and the absence of a central command, and were outnumbered by Jewish settler forces by at least three to one, could prevail against the well-organized, well-trained, and well-equipped Zionists. The Jewish nationalists could count on the assistance of Western imperialist countries as well as the Soviet Union, which shipped arms to the Zionists through Czechoslovakia. Indeed, it was the colonialist West in partnership with the USSR that presented and approved the partition of the Palestinians’ country. Little wonder that the great powers should play a key role in helping the settler army rob the Palestinians.
The outcome of the war was, from the Palestinians’ perspective, a Nakba. Zionist settlers conquered 80 percent of the Palestinians’ country—not just the 56 percent which Resolution 181 allocated to a Jewish state, but also half the territory allocated to an Arab state, and, on top of that, West Jerusalem. At the same time, they exiled (ethnically cleansed) 700,000 Palestinians, at least half and probably much more than half of the Palestinian population. In 1967, the Zionist settlers gobbled up the remaining 20 percent of the Palestinians’ country. It is on this one-fifth of Palestine—what is deceptively called ‘occupied Palestinian territories’—that apostles of the two-state solution propose to give the Palestinians a rump state. The term ‘occupied Palestinian territories’ is deceptive because it refers only to the territory Zionist settlers have occupied since 1967, and not the larger territory they’ve occupied since 1948.
The inequity of a two-state solution should be glaring enough. How is it fair to grant Palestinians a tiny, disjointed, fraction of their own country? But the problems run deeper than that. A two-state solution ratifies two fundamental injustices.
The first injustice is the decision of the UN General Assembly, under the influence of the United States and the Soviet Union, to partition Palestine, granting more than half the country to recent Jewish immigrants. The UN General Assembly had no more authority to rob Palestinians of a part of their country than did the British in the 1917 Balfour Declaration to promise Jews a homeland in Palestine. Au fond, Resolution 181 is a violation of two principles: democracy (the Palestinians were opposed to their country’s division) and self-determination. It is also an expression of US and Soviet imperialism. Gifting the larger part of Palestine to recent Jewish immigrants, a minority, contrary to the majority’s wish, and over its objection, suited the electoral goals of the US president, who hoped to strengthen his appeal to Jewish voters, and comported with the geopolitical aims of the Soviet Union, which hoped to build influence in the British-dominated Middle East. Palestinians didn’t count. What’s more, neither the General Assembly or the Security Council had the authority to create two new states, let alone, abolish another (Palestine.)
The second injustice is the ratification of Zionist conquests in the 1948-9 war, which allowed Jewish settler forces to extend their plunder of the Palestinians’ country to 80 percent of the territory from the 56 percent allocated in Resolution 181.
The two-state solution thus fails to address the fundamental injustices at the core of the problem, namely:
The negation of democratic principles;
The denial of Palestinian self-determination;
The spoliation of the Palestinians’ country and the forcible transfer of their land, homes, and property to Jewish settlers with the approval and aid of imperialist powers;
The immiseration of the Palestinians by the theft of their land, homes, and property and the corresponding enrichment of Israeli Jews in whose hands these stolen goods have been deposited. The two-state solution offers no mechanism for reversing the colossal inter-ethnic redistribution of wealth, whose major effects have been the ghettoization of millions of Palestinians in squalid refugee camps and the enrichment of Israel and its favored Jewish citizens.
Israel is the outcome of an enormous theft, and an affront against democracy and self-determination, approved (without authority) by the UN, sanctified by international law, backed by the colonialist West, and supported by the Soviet Union. The two-state solution ratifies these crimes, throwing a few crumbs to the plundered and immiserated Palestinians as a sop.
In The Palestine Question, legal scholar Henry Cattan asked whether a two-state solution based on the implementation of Resolution 242 would resolve the Palestine issue. Since it would simply restore the conflict that existed prior to 1967, he answered in the negative.
Would implementation of Resolution 181, and a two-state solution as originally envisaged by the UN in 1947—which at least condescended to allow the Palestinians to keep more of their country—work? No, insisted Cattan, since the resolution was rejected by both the Palestinians in words (who understandably objected to their victimization by a settler colonialism that would deny them self-determination) and Zionist settlers in deeds (who sought in 1948-9 to conquer as much of Palestine as their strength and Soviet arms would allow, and in 1967, when their strength had greatly increased, extended the conquest to the whole of the Palestinians’ country. It has been clear from the beginning, and is all the more evident today, that the Jewish nationalists want all of Palestine, and have no intention of settling for less.)
The solution to the Palestine problem is not, then, a ratification of Zionist settler colonialism, as the apostles of the two-state solution propose; settler colonialism, after all, lies at the heart of the problem. The problem can only be resolved at its core, which is to say, by de-colonizing Palestine, not just occupied ’67 Palestine, that part of the country which the two-state advocates propose to throw to the Palestinians as a sop in the hope of pacifying them, but also occupied ’48 Palestine, the greater part of the country conquered in the 1948-9 war by Jewish nationalist settlers.
Palestine must become a democratic country, from the River to the Sea, in which all people, regardless of religion or ethnicity, are equal. There should never have been a Jewish state in Palestine, any more than there should have been a white supremacist state in South Africa and another in Rhodesia. All the brutalities of the Zionist regime—the genocide, the official racism, the pogroms, the ethnic cleansing, the prison abuses and torture, the incessant colonial expansion—flow ineluctably from the project of maintaining a Jewish state on the stolen land of the Palestinians.
The solution to settler colonialism is de-colonization and equality among peoples—not the two-state solution’s ratification of settler-colonialism, not the repudiation of a democratic state in which settlers and natives are equal, and not the relegation of Palestinians to Bantustans within their own country.
1. There is a danger that I have created a misleading impression of Gideon Levy’s views. To be clear, Levy makes similar arguments to my own. He says that “The decisive moment is ‘48. A people came to a populated land and took it over. That’s the core of everything.” He adds that “any solution which will not include some kind of accountability of ‘48 and some kind of compensation — not only in terms of money — will not be a just solution.” For the future, he envisages “one vote, one person, as in any other democracy,” even though it means “the end of the Jewish state.” See “It’s too late for the Jewish state”.
Yesterday, the House of Representatives voted to pass the Antisemitism Awareness Act, which would require the Education Department to use the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of antisemitism when enforcing federal antidiscrimination laws.
The IHRA defines the following as an example of “antisemitism in public life”: “Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor.”
In connection with this, it should be noted that, “the Jewish people” do not have a right to self-determination senior to, or negating, the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination on the historic territory of the Palestinians.
Israel, exercising de facto control over the traditional territory of the Palestinians from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, by the force of arms largely supplied by the United States and Germany, is an apartheid, racist, state, which enforces Jewish supremacy over the native Palestinian population. Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, B’Tselem, and other human rights organization have characterized Israel as an apartheid state.
Political Zionism, which elevates the interests of Jewish settlers above those of Palestinian natives in historic Palestine, is a racist doctrine.
Political Zionism, Israel, and the settler colonial project in the Levant, are the instruments of great powers, and most especially, since 1967, the United States. They could not exist without Washington’s ironclad support. In return, they help keep Arab and Muslim nationalist forces in check in order to safeguard US domination of West Asia and its petroleum resources and key energy supply routes.
The IHRA does not deny that the State of Israel is a racist endeavor; it only seeks to discredit those who say it is, by labelling them antisemites.
The IHRA is far from a neutral organization. It is a political animal which represents the combined interests of the United States and its key allies, and their client, Israel, whose aim it is to police criticism of Israel and the US-backed settler colonial project in the Levant under the guise of combatting anti-Jewish racism and promoting remembrance of the Holocaust.
The IHRA and its supporters are keen to foster remembrance of the anti-Jewish genocide and are equally keen to suppress opposition to what the International Court of Justice has judged to be the plausible possibility of an Israeli-perpetrated genocide in progress against the Palestinians.
Whether the Israeli military assault on Palestinians in Gaza, on civilian infrastructure, and efforts to starve the population, along with the pogroms against Palestinians in the West Bank, rise to the ICJ definition of genocide, it is clear that key Israeli decision-makers and Israeli soldiers have expressed genocidal intent and that the Israeli military campaign in Gaza is undeniably one of massacre.
The IHRA lists many examples of what it says is antisemitism but the list is open; the organization says there are other examples, which it does not enumerate. This allows the definition to expand in order to traduce critics of Israel and political Zionism’s racist settler colonial project as circumstances demand. Doubtlessly, the IHRA definition will be used, and probably already has been, to define the designation of Israel as a state plausibly carrying out a genocide as an act of anti-Jewish hatred.
Apart from the problem of the IHRA definition’s manifest political intent to intimidate critics of Israel into silence, is its logical flaw. The definition illegitimately conflates Jews and Judaism with Israelis and Israel—not all Jews are Israeli, and many Jews reject any identification with the state—so that criticism of the Zionist project is dishonestly equated to hatred of Jews. The description of Germany from 1933 to 1945 as a racist, imperialist, state, bent on genocide, hardly amounts to hate speech against Germans. By the same principle, the description of Israel as a racist endeavor, carrying out a plausible genocide against a people it has been trying to erase since 1948, is not hate speech against Jews; it is criticism of Israel and its racist project.
Israeli officials employ the legerdemain favored by the IHRA to shelter the state from criticism and opposition. Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, for example, is apt to defend every Israeli crime by labelling opposition to them as an assault on “the world’s one and only Jewish state”, as if criticizing Israel for a plausible genocide, or its apartheid, amounts to criticism of Jews as a people. Zionists would dearly love to be the spokespersons of the Jewish people, but the position is a self-appointed one, and the United States and Israel’s other patrons participate in the deception. Just as the Nazis appointed themselves as spokespeople for the Germans, over the opposition, it might be noted, of many million Germans, so too do the Israeli clients of the United States affect to be the spokespeople for the Jews (over the opposition of many Jews.).
Sadly, the frequent abuse of the word “antisemitism” for the political gain of Israel and its great power patrons, debases efforts to combat genuine anti-Jewish hatred. Stretch a definition too far, and it becomes meaningless. Still, in their zeal to defend settler colonialism in the stolen country of the Palestinians, the Zionists and their great power patrons will stop at nothing, including turning the concept of antisemitism into a politicized slur. In so doing, they impede sincere efforts to combat genuine antisemitism.
This, however, is consistent with the fundamentally antisemitic character of Zionism, a doctrine which:
a) denigrates the fight against antisemitism as pointless, since, in the Zionists’ view, hatred of Jews is ineradicable;
b) promotes the view that to secure themselves against the ineradicable antisemitism of non-Jews, Jews must emigrate from the countries in which they now live to take up residence in the Jewish state erected on the stolen land of the Palestinians;
c) defines Jews as members of a nation, rather than followers of a religion.
Points (b) and (c) are consonant with the antisemites’ belief that Jews are aliens, a nation within the nation, who must emigrate from the lands in which they live.
Thus, apart from the racism inherent in Zionism as a doctrine of Jewish supremacism in the stolen country of the Palestinians, Zionism also rejects the project of combating antisemitism and shares with antisemites their core beliefs.
Freedom does not consist in the dream of independence of natural law, but in the knowledge of these laws, and in the possibility this gives of systematically making them work towards definite ends. Friedrich Engels, Anti-Duhring, 1877.
June 26, 2021
Stephen Gowans
The United States dominates the Arab and Muslim worlds. This is a fairly uncontroversial statement. What’s less uncontroversial is the reason why.
US domination of West Asia is often understood to be related to Washington’s need to secure its energy supplies, but the United States has always been one of the world’s top producers of oil and natural gas, and often the top producer, which has allowed the country to be either energy self-sufficient, or close to it, and when it hasn’t been self-sufficient, it has relied on energy imports from Canada and Mexico to top up its energy supply more than it has relied on West Asia. The idea, then, that the United States needs access to Arab oil to satisfy its energy requirements is a myth.
The US domination of the Arab world has always been an outcome, not of a quest for energy security, but for oil profits, and for the geostrategic advantage that comes from control of a source of oil on which many other countries depend.
China, Germany, and Japan, the United States’ top economic competitors, depend on oil from the Arab and Muslim worlds. By controlling this region and the maritime shipping and pipeline routes through which the region’s oil travels to its markets in Europe and East Asia, Washington gains enormous leverage over its economic rivals. If any of these countries steps too far out of line, Washington can close the spigot. The dictum of Henry Kissinger, a former US secretary of state and national security advisor, was: Control oil and you control nations.
Expansionary Compulsion
It is the nature of profit-making enterprises that they incessantly look for new business opportunities, to enter new markets and sell more goods and services—in short, to generate more profit. They look to their governments for aid in securing and protecting these opportunities, both at home and abroad. Because business people as a class have enormous sway over governments, the aid is routinely given.
Capitalist expansion often leads to conflict among governments acting on behalf of their profit-driven, perpetually expansion-seeking, business class.
The first is the conflict between competing states to secure profit-making opportunities for their own business people and, if they can, to deny the same opportunities to the business people of other nations.
Conflict among countries for profit-making opportunities led to the First and Second World Wars, but since the end of WWII, and the rise of the United States as an informal world empire, conflict of this sort has been contained. Washington has absorbed its rivals into an economic order that regulates conflict among rival capitalisms according to rules the United States has established. The rules ultimately serve US interests. The Pentagon acts as the ultima ratio regnum of the “rules-based” system.
However, the conflict is regulated only so far as rivals remain within the system. When they step outside its bounds, the conflict becomes less restrained. This can be seen today in the rivalry between the United States, the system’s architect and superintendent, and China, which has reached a point in its economic development where the constraints of the system have become fetters on its further development. While Washington attributes its hostility to China to the East Asian giant’s “autocracy”, the origins of its animus lie, in point of fact, in the threat Chinese enterprises pose to the ability of US firms to dominate the industries of tomorrow: among them 5G, artificial intelligence, robotics, and quantum computing.
“President Biden portrays U.S. relations with China as a clash of values: democracy vs. autocracy. But his …goal is to stay ahead of China in semiconductors, artificial intelligence and other advances that are expected to define the economy and military of the future.”
The second kind of conflict arises when people who live on the territories in which profit making opportunities are present, say they want to set the terms of access to their labor, markets, and resources, or monopolize access, locking out or restricting foreign investment and trade.
Conflicts of this ilk have arisen, for example, when an oil industry, owned by foreign firms, has been nationalized, and the foreign firms’ government objects and takes measures to reverse the nationalization. This was done in Iran in the 1950s, by the United States and Britain, which organized a coup d’état against the elected government, in order to recover British oil assets. Also, in the 1950s, Britain and France sought to recover the Suez Canal, which had been nationalized by the Arab nationalist government of Egypt under the leadership of Gamal Abdel Nasser, by arranging for Israel to attack its neighbor.
Israel was envisaged by the secular Jews who undertook the project of building a Jewish state, that it would be a state that acted as an instrument of a sponsoring great power (or powers), which would be used to quell the resistance of Arabs to assaults on their sovereignty. Israel’s role would be to overcome the Arabs’ resistance to Western domination and the plunder of their markets, labor, and resources—a domination that would eventually be related to achieving the principal US aim of controlling Arab oil.
Arab oil was seen, in the words of a US State Department official, as a stupendous economic and strategic prize. It was regarded as an economic prize, because a lot of money could be made selling it. And it was viewed as a strategic prize, because whoever controlled it, effectively controlled the countries that were dependent on it.
Political Zionism as a Tool of Empire
Theodore Herzl, an Austrian journalist, pioneered political Zionism, the movement to enlist the help of a European power to build a Jewish state in Palestine. In return, Herzl proposed the Jewish state would look after the interests of its sponsor in the Arab world. Israel’s attack on Egypt in an effort to recover the Suez Canal for Britain and France, was precisely the kind of role Herzl envisaged for the Jewish state.
Acting as the West’s lieutenant in the Arab world would mean that, if the Arabs should seek to use their resources for their own development, on their own terms, that the Jewish state would see to it that they acquiesced to the use of their resources for the enrichment of investors represented by the Jewish state’s sponsors. The Zionist Jews would rent themselves out as an army to whichever European colonial power would back them, and the army would act as the guarantor of the colonial power’s economic interests against the interests of the Arabs.
Herzl said the Jewish state would be a “link in Europe’s rampart against Asia,” and “an outpost of civilization against barbarism” (barbarism being his word for the Arab world.) In this tradition, Moshe Dayan, who held several key posts in the Israeli government is reputed to have said that the “Jewish people has a mission, especially its Israeli branch. In this part of the world, it has to be a rock, an extension of the West, against which the waves of…Arab nationalism will be broken.” In this vein, Benjamin Netanyahu has written that Israel is the West’s outpost in the Middle East.
Arab nationalist leaders have seen the role of Israel in exactly the same light: as an instrument of the United States against the Arabs. Saddam Hussein called Israel a club the United States uses against the Arab world. Nasser, whose name became an eponym of Arab nationalism, described Israel as a poisoned dagger implanted in the heart of the Arab nation. Leila Khaled, the Palestinian revolutionary, called Israel “America and Europe combined in Palestine”, i.e., the face of the West in the Levant, or as Netanyahu wrote, a Western outpost in the Arab world.
The Empire of Liberty
Since 1967, the United States has been the Jewish settler state’s principal sponsor. It shares with Israel two important characteristics: both are European settler states, and both were founded on the belief that they had a mission from God to evict the natives and take their land.
The United States is also an informal or undeclared empire. Current US practice is to avoid the use of the word “empire” or “imperialist” to refer to the country. Zbigniew Brzezinski, Jimmy Carter’s national security advisor, wrote a book, The Grand Chessboard, in which he drew from a deep well of synonyms for empire to describe the United States, but avoided the E word.
However, concealing the United States’ status as an empire hasn’t always been the norm. Thomas Jefferson referred to the United States as an empire of liberty, with a mission to spread freedom across the world, which turned out to mean, in practice, freedom for US business people to dominate the world’s profit-making opportunities wherever they existed—or for US investors to freely take whatever they wanted, aided by US soft and hard power. In the early twentieth century, US presidents openly and accurately referred to the Philippines, Guam, Puerto Rico, American Samoa, and Hawaii, as US colonies. That’s what they were, and some of these euphemistically named “territories” remain US colonies to this day.
From the moment of its birth, the empire of liberty continually pushed, if not its territorial frontiers, then its military and economic frontiers, outward, guided by various doctrines of empire: Manifest Destiny, the Monroe Doctrine, the Atlantic Charter, the Eisenhower Doctrine, the Carter Doctrine, and so on.
Always, US expansion was driven by an economic imperative: a quest, or a need, for: new land (for plantations to be worked by slaves and for the settlement of European immigrants); new markets; new investment opportunities; and territory that had strategic value, places like Hawaii, Guam, and the Philippines, that could be used to park a few battleships, to be used in the service of gunboat diplomacy to coerce other countries into opening their markets. The need was to keep US capitalism going, for without new markets, without new investment opportunities, and without access to vital raw materials that could only be obtained overseas, the US economy would sputter, stagnate, and contract. Magnates would lose their fortunes, and the lash of poverty and unemployment would turn the minds of common people to socialism and revolution, i.e., to political and economic arrangements that did’t depend on incessant expansion, with its inevitable foreign conflicts and concomitant possibility of war, to deliver a materially secure existence.
But incessant expansion means resistance. In the decades leading to WWII it meant the resistance of other expanding powers (Germany and Japan), driven by the same needs. And it also meant the resistance of local forces of independence (such as the Arab nationalist governments in Syria and Iraq, and in the 1950s and 1960s, Egypt)—local forces seeking to use their markets, resources, and investment opportunities on their own terms, for their own development.
Israel has proved helpful to the US project of overcoming the Arab nationalists. Equipped with a US-supplied armamentarium of the world’s most advanced weapons, the Jewish settler state has crushed the Arab nationalists, intimidated them, and weakened their ability to resist. The targets have included the Arabs inspired by the Arab nationalism of Nasser, the Syrians and Iraqis inspired by the Ba’ath Arab Socialist party, and, in the larger Muslim world, the resistance project of the Iranian Revolution and Hezbollah. Had these movements been allowed to pursue their nationalist agendas unopposed, corporate America’s ability to extract wealth from the Arab and Muslim worlds would have been severely compromised.
Overlapping Interests
The interests of Israel largely overlap those of the US state and this makes Israel an effective instrument of US empire. The two states, Israel and the USA, share a common enemy: the peoples of the Arab and Muslim worlds. These peoples oppose Washington, because it imposes its will on them, sometimes directly but typically indirectly, through satraps who govern at the pleasure of Washington (such as the Saud family in Arabia, other Arab monarchies, and Egypt’s military dictator); and they oppose Israel, because it has evicted Palestinians from their homes and from the Palestinians’ country, and is an ongoing threat of further expansion into Arab territory.
If the United States did not need Israel as a tool of its empire, Israel would soon meet its demise. It is a very small country, its Jewish population comprises only seven million, and it is surrounded by hundreds of millions of Arabs who disapprove of the existence of a racist Jewish settler state implanted on stolen Arab land. Without Washington providing Israel with the means to defend itself, the Zionist state would be toppled by the internal revolt of the Arabs and the invasion of Arab and Muslim nationalist armies and movements.
How does Washington guarantee the survival of a small Jewish settler state amidst a much larger population of injured, dispossessed, aggrieved, aggressed upon, Arabs and Muslims?
First, US legislation compels Washington to provide Israel with a qualitative military edge over its neighbors. The QME policy ensures that, militarily, Israel will always be at least one qualitative step ahead of its neighbors. The Jewish settler state won’t necessarily have more weapons, but it will have superior ones.
Superior weaponry has long been the means by which the Western world and its outposts, comprising one-tenth of humanity, has dominated the remaining nine-tenths. As Hilaire Beloc rhymed: “Whatever happens, we have got, the Maxim gun, and they have not.” Today, an Israeli might say: “Whatever happens, we have got, the F-35, and they have not.” Or: “Whatever happens, we have got, the atom bomb, and they have not.”
Second, the United States provides Israel with $3.8 billion in military aid annually, about equivalent to the cost of operating a carrier strike group. This aid travels from the pockets of US taxpayers to the US Treasury, onward to US arms manufacturers, and then to Israel in the form of weapons superior to those of the Jewish settler state’s neighbors.
In this relationship, there are two winners and two losers. The winners are the dividend collectors, bond holders, and stock market gamblers who have a pecuniary interest in the US arms industry and whose wealth is expanded by arms shipments to Israel. The second winner is the class of Jewish settlers in Palestine who are made more secure and better able to continue their expansion into Arab land. The losers are, first, US residents, whose pockets are picked to confer this largesse on both the US arms industry and Israel; and second, the Arabs whose land, livelihoods, future, and lives are thereby threatened. The immediate cause of the injuries Israel inflicts on the Arab and Muslim worlds is the Jewish settler state itself, but the ultimate cause is the United States, for without the support it provides Israel by delivering its qualitative military edge, Israel would not exist as a poisoned dagger aimed at the heart of the Arab and Muslim worlds.
Third, Washington runs diplomatic interference for Israel, protecting it from attempts by other members of the Security Council to issue punitive resolutions in connection with Israel’s violations of international law, of which there are many. The losers are international law and the Arabs. The winners are Israel, which can act as it will with impunity, as well as the United States, which benefits from the services Israel provides.
And finally, the Pentagon is prepared to intervene on Israel’s behalf on the slim chance that despite Israel being equipped with superior weaponry, that Israeli forces face a threat they cannot readily deter.
Israel is thus completely dependent on the good will of the United States for survival. This comports perfectly with US aims. As a dependency of the United States, Israel must do Washington’s bidding, or perish.
“Israel, a small country surrounded by adversaries and locked in conflict with the Palestinians, depends absolutely on American diplomatic and military support. By giving it, the United States safeguards Israel and wields significant leverage over its actions.”
Services to the Empire
What services are provided to the United States by Israel in return for the quid-pro-quo of US protection?
Israel has for years waged an undeclared war on Iran, the principal enemy of the US empire in the Muslim world. The New York Times calls the campaign a years-long shadow war on land, air and sea. It involves assassination, sabotage, cyberattacks, attacks on Iranian shipping, and air strikes on Iranian targets in Syria.
In Arab nationalist Syria, Israel has armed and supported anti-Syrian al-Qaeda elements that operated in the south of the country; provided air cover for ISIS’s war on the Syrian government; and conducted countless airstrikes on Syrian targets and those of Syria’s Iranian and Hezbollah allies.
In 2007, Israel deployed warplanes to destroy a nuclear reactor in the Syrian desert. The reactor was very likely intended to produce fissile material for a military nuclear program. The Israeli action was a reprise of the country’s earlier bombing of Iraq’s Osirak nuclear reactor in 1981. Had Israel not acted, and had these Arab nationalist states succeeded in developing nuclear deterrents against US and Israeli aggression, the Arab world would look very different today. The United States would not have invaded Iraq in 2003, and it would not have marched into Syria to set up an indefinite (and little recognized) occupation of one-third of the country.
Today there are, in Syria, three foreign occupations: A US occupation, which relies on the Kurds as the tip of the US spear; a Turk occupation; and an Israeli occupation. The Israeli occupation covers two-thirds of Syria’s smallest province. The Israelis conquered this territory in 1967, ethnically cleansed it, built Jewish settlements on it, and gave it a Jewish name: Golan. The conquest, ethnic cleansing, settlement, and imposition of a Jewish name on a part of Syrian territory, perfectly recapitulates Zionist practice in Palestine: Conquer territory by force; ethnically cleanse it; implant Jewish settlements on it; and rename it (from Palestine to Israel).
These actions are just the tip of the iceberg. For decades, Israel has either intimidated Arab nationalists into submission or inaction, or has weakened their ability to resist US domination. In return, the United States has appeared to overlook the ongoing dispossession of Palestinians and Syrians; in reality, it has welcomed it.
To be sure, the Israeli Judaization project does not benefit Washington directly, but it does aid the US imperial project by firmly binding Israel to the United States as a protégé. Israeli encroachments on Arab interests spark Arab enmity. This in turn induces Israel to look to the United States for protection, which Washington is happy to provide, in return for Israel performing services in the Arab world and beyond that benefit the United States directly, such as eliminating Iraq’s and Syria’s nuclear weapons programs. The process is self-reinforcing: The services Israel provides to Washington against Arab interests strengthen Arab animosity; growing Arab animosity strengthens Israel’s need for US protection; Israel’s growing need for US protection, strengthens its willingness to ingratiate itself with Washington by doing the empire’s bidding.
There is a solution to the problem of Palestine, that is, the problem of Jewish settlers claiming a right to the territory of the natives, and a right to evict them and to prevent their repatriation, in order to create a Jewish majority state as a haven for the world’s Jews against anti-Jewish racism. Indeed, the problem of Palestine is not the problem of Palestine at all, but the problem of political Zionism, and in a larger context, the problem of racism.
The problem of political Zionism is that its proposed solution to anti-Jewish racism is the practice of anti-Arab racism. Political Zionism is a hierarchical doctrine which elevates Jews to a position of primacy relative to all other groups, with the exception of its US sponsor; vis-à-vis the United States, political Zionism accepts a servile position for Jews. In practice, political Zionism prioritizes the welfare of the Jews over the welfare of the Arabs, while at the same time subordinating Jews to the foreign policy dictates of the United States. Political Zionism says that in defense of Jewish welfare, the welfare of Arabs can be sacrificed, but in defense of Jewish welfare, Jews must do the bidding of their American master as an expedient of maintaining US protection against Arab efforts to overcome the injuries of anti-Arab racism.
The solution to the problem of Palestine qua the problem of political Zionism is the solution to the problem of racism, both anti-Jewish and anti-Arab. The solution, which has existed at least in embryo since the French Revolution, is the solution of universal equality.
It 1947, before the UN promulgated its infamous resolution to expropriate Palestine from its rightful owners and partition it into Jewish and Arab states, R. Palme Dutt proposed a solution to the problem of racism in Palestine based on universal equality. Dutt called for “the creation of a single, free, independent and democratic state, which would guarantee equal rights of citizenship with full religious freedom and full opportunities to develop their culture to all its inhabitants, Arab and Jew.” This would be one democratic state, not two national states. While the proposal, or those like it, are occasionally acknowledged in the Western world as an idea with growing currency among Palestinians, and some Jews, it is rarely explored.
Gregory Shupak, who teaches media studies at the University of Guelph, has observed that mass media “coverage is written as though ethnic partition in Palestine [the two national states “solution”] were the only way to resolve the conflict—rejecting without consideration the possibility of a single, secular, democratic state, in which all people, Jews and Arabs, have the same rights.”
Why doesn’t Washington favor a single, unitary, democratic state in all of Palestine? After all, such a state would be liberal democratic. And Washington claims to be the world’s foremost champion of liberal democracy. Indeed, Joe Biden is said to be rallying the world’s democracies against Chinese authoritarianism in an effort to strengthen a global liberal democratic order.
The answer is that Washington’s support for liberal democracy is contingent—it’s contingent on whether, at a particular time and place, liberal democracy suits US interests. Liberal democracy doesn’t suit US interests in Palestine.
A racist Jewish settler state, which by its nature must arouse the animosity of the Arab world, and which therefore makes that state dependent on the United States for protection from Arab indignation, and which consequently must do the bidding of the United States as a condition of its survival, is what suits US business interests. An Israel organized to engender the hostility of the Arab and Muslim worlds, guarantees the settler state will act as an instrument of Washington to overcome the region’s resistance to its plunder by corporate America, since, if Israel doesn’t accept this role, Washington will withdraw its support and Israel’s existence will soon come to an end.
On the other hand, a unitary, democratic, state of Arabs and Jews, with equal rights for all, is one that would be more acceptable to its Arab citizens and its Arab neighbors than the current anti-Arab racist Zionist state, and therefore would no longer require the protection of Washington for survival. As a consequence, Washington would lose its leverage over the state as the guarantor of its existence, and could no longer use the state as a battering ram against the Arabs, a poisoned dagger aimed at the heart of the Arab nation, or a rock against which the waves of Arab nationalism are to be broken.
Another reason Washington favors a racist Jewish settler state, is that it facilitates the US project of doing what Zbigniew Brzezinski called preventing the barbarians from coming together.
In the US view, the barbarians are the people who live on territory whose abundant profit-making opportunities Washington covets. The territory stretching from the Atlantic to the Persian Gulf—the area in which Arabs predominate—contains a significant proportion of the world’s petroleum reserves. Were the inhabitants of this territory to come together as a single political unit, determined to use their resources and markets for their own benefit and for their own economic, scientific, and military development, they would significantly challenge US political and economic power and deny US investors substantial profit-making opportunities. Hence, an imperative of US foreign policy is to disrupt the potential for unity in this region, and to do all that is possible to aggravate its demographic fault lines. Accordingly, the United States promotes one ethnic group against another: the Kurds in Iraq and Syria against the Arabs; the Maronite Christians against the Muslims; and the Jews against the Muslim and Christian Arabs.
When Washington wrote Iraq’s post-conquest 2005 constitution, it politicized ethnic and religious divisions within the country, to prevent Iraqis from congealing into a coherent collectivity, in accordance with Brzezinski’s (and imperialists’ longstanding) divide and rule strategy. That is the precise opposite of what the previous Arab nationalist government of Saddam Hussein did. The Iraqi president tried to mute the ethnic and religious divisions within his country, to make them irrelevant to Iraq’s politics, so that for the purposes of politics people regarded themselves as Iraqis, not as Shiites or Sunnis, Arabs or Kurds.
However, Washington doesn’t always create demographic fault lines. Sometimes the barbarians create the fault lines themselves, and Washington simply works with the material it finds.
For example, Arab nationalism has a strength vis-à-vis imperialism in bringing large numbers of people together in a common anti-imperialist struggle on the basis of their Arab identity, but it also has a weakness—it leaves non-Arabs, such as Kurds, outside the struggle. The excluded become opportunities for imperialists; they can be turned against the majority, to act as US agents in return for various Washington-provided benefits. In the case of the Jews and Kurds, these benefits have included US backing for their political autonomy vis-à-vis the Arabs.
Once recruited as an ally, the ethnic minority’s role as US lieutenant is to pull the trigger of the US-supplied gun whenever Washington gives the order. As the immediate perpetrator of the injury to the majority, the ethnic minority absorbs the blame, while the puppeteer behind the curtain escapes culpability. In this way, Washington has been able to deceptively present itself as a neutral arbiter of a conflict between Arabs and Jews in Palestine, when in fact it is the principal instigator.
Another way Washington has contributed to disunity among the “barbarians” is to promote highly sectarian brands of political Islam. Since the early 1950s, acting both directly and through its proxies, especially Saudi Arabia, Washington has promoted sectarian political Islam as an alternative to secular Arab nationalism and atheistic communism. Both doctrines emphasize the unity of Arabs against outside domination, and therefore work against Brzezinski’s dictum of preventing the “barbarians” from coming together. Communism, however, goes one step further than Arab or Muslim nationalism, promoting the unity of all oppressed peoples, including those within Arab-majority countries who aren’t Arab, and those within Muslim-majority countries who aren’t Muslim.
Political Islam can also be a doctrine of unity. The political Islam of the Iranian revolution, for example, encourages Muslims to unite against foreign oppression across sectarian lines. But Washington has always promoted a sectarian brand of Sunni political Islam, in which fanatical Sunni fundamentalists seek to settle theological scores with Muslims they abominate as heretics. This explains why the United States is antagonistic to the political Islam of Iran, with its emphasis on Muslim unity, but covertly encourages all forms of political Islam which regard other interpretations of Islam (as well as secular Arab nationalists and communists) as enemies to be destroyed.
Unfortunately, political Islam, in either its sectarian or non-sectarian forms, is a barrier to any solution to the problem of Palestine which seeks to bring Jews and Arabs together in a secular, unitary, democratic state as equals. Political Islam’s solution to the problem of the eviction of Muslims by Jews from Palestine, is not the repatriation of the Muslims, and the assignment of equal rights to all people, but the repatriation of Muslims combined with either the eviction of the Jews or their relegation to a second class citizenship in a state in which Islam has primacy.
Washington has no real objection to political Islamists who, viewing themselves as modern-day Salah al-Dines, want to recover Palestine for Islam. The more political Islam presents the Israelis with a future that denies them a place in Palestine as equal citizens, the stronger the Israeli attachment to the United States as a protector against what is, from their perspective, an intolerable future. If Jews are to leave the political Zionist highway, they must have an exit ramp to a secure future. Political Islam offers no exit ramp.
Arab nationalism also stands as a barrier, so far as it defines Palestine as an Arab country. An Arab Palestine as a national state for Arabs, would be no less an apartheid state against Jews than a Jewish Palestine as a national state for Jews is an apartheid state against Arabs. Washington can have no real objection to Arab nationalists who want an Arab Palestine, for the same reason it can have no real objection to political Islamists who want a Muslim Palestine. Exclude Jews from a fair and just political settlement, and you guarantee that they will continue to identify with the United States as their protector and the surrounding population as their enemy—all to Washington’s benefit.
What is needed is a state of all its citizens.
A Just Solution
Returning to Dutt’s 1947 analysis, the British communist argued that the United States and Britain were using political Zionism in pursuit of a policy of divide and rule; that they were deliberately setting Jews against Arabs.
Dutt wrote:
“We warn all Jewish people that Zionism, which seeks to make Palestine a Jewish state as an ally of the United States and Britain and their base in the Middle East, diverts Jewish people from the real solution of the problem of anti-Semitism, which is along the lines of democratic development and full equality of rights within the countries in which they live. It is in the interests of Jews to oppose the Zionist conception which seeks to put them in the position of being an instrument of great powers in the Middle East.”
In Dutt’s view, Jews should unite with Arabs, in a unitary, secular, democratic state, a state for all its people, rather than what it is today: a state that elevates one ethnoreligious group above another, and whose existence depends on its acting on behalf of Washington to serve up the territory of the “barbarians” as a field of lucrative business opportunities for US dividend collectors, coupon clippers, and stock market gamblers. Instead, Palestine must be an end in itself, not a means to religious ends (whether Muslim or Jewish), nor a means to ethnic ends (whether Arab or Hebrew), nor a means to Wall Street’s ends, but a state in which all its citizens, individually, are ends in themselves.
I talk with Greg and Pat on their podcast Coming From Left Field about Israel, a US beachhead in the Middle East.
Pat Cummings grew up with middle-class privilege in a close and happy Irish-American military family. He came of age in the Vietnam era, beginning his activism in the antiwar movement. He spent his life in public education, where he saw first-hand the systemic inequalities that elevated some but suppressed many.
Greg Godels grew up in a working-class family and in a working-class neighborhood. His family’s strong labor ties lead him to anti-racist and anti-capitalist activism and to Marxism-Leninism. He identifies with the legacy of Communism in the US. His writings have appeared in a number of publications in the US and internationally.
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