B’nai Brith Canada, a pro-Israel lobby group, has invented “a national crisis” of antisemitism by defining opposition to Zionism and criticism of Israel’s conduct as Judeophobia in order to press Canadian governments at the federal, provincial, and municipal levels to implement legal measures to criminalize pro-Palestinian and anti-Zionist political positions.
30 April 2026
By Stephen Gowans
On April 27 B’nai Brith Canada issued its Annual Audit of Antisemitic Incidents, arguing that “Canada is in the throes of a national crisis of antisemitism.” The report documented 6,800 incidents of antisemitism” in 2025, the “highest volume recorded” since the group began its tracking in 1982.
What is B’nai Brith, how does it define antisemitic incidents, and what actions does it want governments to take to address the crisis it has identified?
B’nai Brith is a pro-Israel lobby group which “works tirelessly to support and defend Israel” and whose mission is to “stand unequivocally with the State of Israel,” according to its website. The group does not represent Canadian Jews as a whole. Not all Canadian Jews are Zionists or supporters of Israel. Instead, the outfit represents Israel and Jews in Canada who stand firmly with the Jewish state.
Significantly, B’nai Brith describes its support for Israel as “unequivocal.” It backs Israel, right or wrong. In 1988, a US warship, the USS Vincennes, shot down an Iranian civilian airliner, killing 290 people. Then US president George H.W. Bush refused to apologize for the incident, saying that “I will never apologize for America.” B’nai Brith is the George W. Bush of Israel. It will never apologize for what it calls “the only Jewish state in the world.”
The group’s commitment to defending Israel is evidenced in its definition of antisemitism. The organization uses the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) Working Definition of Antisemitism, prepared by an outfit that is as ardently pro-Israel as the B’nai Brith. The IHRA definition has been widely criticized for 1) not being a definition at all, but a list of examples of what the group calls antisemitism, with no explanation of the principles than undergird the examples; and 2) for including anti-Zionism and criticism of Israel in three of its 11 examples.
The IHRA cites the following as an example of Jew hatred: “Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination.” While anti-Zionists do not deny Jews the right to establish a state per se, they do deny Jews (and anyone else for that matter) the right to establish a national state on the country of another people. Israel’s existence depends on the non-existence of Palestine. In practice, Jewish self-determination is equivalent to the denial of Palestinian self-determination.
A careful and precise interpretation of the IHRA example above would exclude anti-Zionism as an example of antisemitism were an anti-Zionist willing to accept the creation of a Jewish state on a genuine terra nullius (unoccupied, unclaimed land). Indeed, I would argue that virtually all anti-Zionists fall into this category, since their opposition to Jewish nationalism lies not in Jews creating a state, but in the cancelation of one people’s right of self-determination (the Palestinians’) to assert another’s (that of Jews).
However, it is clear from the B’nai Brith report that the organization has interpreted the IHRA example to mean that anti-Zionism is antisemitism. The report describes criticism of Zionism, (e.g., that “Zionism is analogous to “settler colonialism”) as “demonization of Jews who believe in the right of the Jewish people to practice self-determination in their ancestral homeland,” and that this criticism, or “demonization”, creates “a moral justification for attacks that target the Jewish community.”
I would make a few points in reply:
Jews, to be sure, did have a state in Palestine in antiquity. But the Palestinians’ ancestral claim to the same land is equally strong. Indeed, it seems likely that today’s Palestinians are the descendants of Jews who lived in Palestine in antiquity, and were converted to Islam during the Muslim Expansion of the seventh century.
Palestine was the ancestral homeland of many peoples. That Jews once had a state there does not negate the rights of other peoples who have also had a presence in the same territory. The Palestinians, significantly, have an unbroken, multi-millennial presence in the land.
Criticism of Zionism does not create a moral justification for attacks that target the Jewish community. The categories Zionist and Jew are no more coterminous than are the categories Zionism and Judaism. There are more Christian Zionists in Canada than there are Jews, let alone Jewish Zionists. And not all Jews are Zionists; some are ardently anti-Zionist. Zionist and Jew are not the same. Criticism of Zionists is not equal to criticism of Jews. Likewise, criticism of Zionism is different from criticism of Judaism; one is a nationalist ideology, the other a religion.
It is likely that a majority of Jews in Canada support Israel and hold Zionist views. Based on this reality, B’nai Brith advances the sophistical argument that criticism of Zionism and Israel amounts to criticism of Jews (again, illegitimately conflating Jew and Zionist), and that, therefore, this criticism amounts to antisemitism. The argument is tantamount to claiming that anti-Nazism, at the height of the Nazi’s popularity, was an expression of hatred of Germans as a people. Only if one conflates Nazism with German ethnicity can this sleight of hand be pulled off.
Other indications that B’nai Brith defines anti-Zionism and pro-Palestinian positions as antisemitism:
The pro-Zionist organization objects to pro-Palestinian student clubs at Canadian universities celebrating Palestinian resistance, decrying armed Palestinian resistance as “terrorism.” As an organization that stands unequivocally with Israel, we can be sure that the B’nai Brith regards the Irgun and Stern Gang—Jewish insurgent groups which, from 1931 to 1948, practiced terrorism in Palestine—as groups that resisted British colonialism. Albert Einstein, Hannah Arendt, and the British preferred to call them terrorists, even fascists. Of course, one can be a resistance fighter and use terrorist methods, as much as a state can be a state and practice terrorism, Israel being an emblematic case. The categories are not mutually exclusive.
The pro-Israel group objects to the use of the terms “massacre” and “genocide” by Canadian journalists reporting on Israel’s conduct in Gaza and deplores the Canadian media’s “focus on civilian casualties and humanitarian imagery” along with the “presentation of casualty figures.” Moreover, it defines the following headlines as examples of anti-Israel media bias linked to antisemitism:
“Israel killing journalists and getting away with it, say advocates.”
“More than 400 dead in Gaza as Israel makes ‘extensive’ strikes ending ceasefire, standoff.”
“Winnipeggers rally to condemn Israel’s attacks on Iran, humanitarian crisis in Gaza.”
The points above make clear that the B’nai Brith is little more than a pro-Israel public relations outfit that objects to any and all criticism of Israel, and seeks to neutralize opposition to the state it tirelessly defends and stands by unequivocally by smearing the state’s opponents as Jew haters. In the organization’s view, pro-Palestinian, anti-Zionist, and Israel-critical positions are antisemitic by definition. Political positions are cast as expressions of irrational hatred. When it reports that there is a crisis of antisemitism in Canada, what the Israel lobby group really means is that there is a growing tide of opposition to Zionism, hostility to Israel’s conduct toward the Palestinians, and intolerance of Israel’s character as an ethno-supremacist, apartheid, state.
Name-calling critics of Israel and anti-Zionists as anti-Semites is fairly harmless. But B’nai Brith has no intention of stopping at traducing Israel’s opposition. Its real intention is to pressure Canadian governments at all levels to criminalize pro-Palestinian and anti-Zionist positions by portraying them as hate-speech.
The pro-Israel lobby group calls on the:
Federal government to designate the Lebanese, Egyptian, and Jordanian Muslim Brotherhood as terrorist organizations;
Provincial and territorial governments to prosecute antisemitic hate crimes, which, given the organization’s broad definition of antisemitic hate, includes any expression of opposition to Jewish nationalist ideology and ethno-supremacism and all support for pro-Palestinian positions;
Municipal authorities to ban “events that promote hatred”, by which it means pro-Palestinian and anti-Zionist events, including Al Quds Day.
To understand how dishonest both the B’nai Brith and its report are, consider what a pro-Palestinian report would look like if it mimicked the pro-Israeli lobby group’s approach. It would define denial of a Palestinian right of self-determination on the Palestinians’ ancestral homeland as anti-Palestinian hatred. Denouncing Hamas as a terrorist organization; denying the Nakba as a genocide; disputing the stamp of Israel’s conduct in Gaza as genocidal; dismissing as false or exaggerated reports of torture and sexual assault in Israeli prisons; denouncing the October 7 attacks as acts of terrorism rather a campaign of national liberation; rejecting the reality of Israeli apartheid; all of these–in other words, adopting the B’nai Brith’s own political positions—would be defined as hate speech rather than political speech. The media would be censured for describing October 7 as a massacre and focusing on Jewish casualties, as well as for failing to place Palestinian atrocities within the appropriate context. Media “bias” would be blamed for an avalanche of anti-Palestinian hate incidents. Finally, the report would call on governments at all levels to criminalize political speech that is critical of the Palestinian cause.
Canadians might think of the B’nai Brith as a Jewish advocacy group that works to overcome antisemitism. In reality, it is a pro-Israel lobby group that uses antisemitism as a weapon to smear people and organizations that oppose its pro-Israel political positions. The outfit poses as a representative of all Jews in Canada, but is, on the contrary, only a champion of Israel and Zionists, not Jews and Judaism. Its self-avowed mission is to work “tirelessly to support and defend Israel”, which it does, in part, by attacking opponents of Israel as antisemites, using a definition of Jew-hatred that includes opposition to Israel and the nationalist ideology on which the state is founded.
There is no crisis of antisemitism in Canada. The “crisis” is a myth invented by the Zionist outfit to pressure Canadian governments, at all levels, to criminalize pro-Palestinian positions and anti-Zionist advocacy—that is political speech—as hate speech. B’nai Brith must be resisted, exposed for the pro-Israel lobby group it truly is, and contained as a menace to the right of political advocacy.
On April 14, Ezra Klein, the New York Times’ columnist and podcaster, sought a “reckoning with Israel’s ‘one-state reality’.” He organized a discussion with Marc Lynch and Shibley Telhami, a pair of academics who had written a 15 July 2025 article in Foreign Affairs, The Promise and Peril of Recognizing Palestine. Their article asked whether “a two-state solution [could] emerge from a one-state reality?”
The discussion had two merits: First, it acknowledged that a Jewish supremacist state exists from the river to the sea. As Lynch and Telhami put it in their Foreign Affairs article:
Israel is not a democratic state incidentally occupying Palestinian territory. All the territory west of the Jordan River has long constituted a single state under Israeli rule, where the land and the people are subject to radically different legal regimes, and Palestinians are permanently treated as a lower caste.
Israel, in other words, is a democratic state for Jews, and a Jewish state for Palestinians, on whose country, land, and homes, Israel has been built. The philosopher Domenico Losurdo called it a Herrenvolk democracy—a democracy for (and only for) a master people. Others call it, correctly, an apartheid state. The three descriptions are congruent.
The second merit was Telhami, who offered a number of important insights. I’ll cite but one.
Israeli strategy from Day 1 has been to have what they call escalation dominance. It is a one-sided deterrence; it is that whenever there’s a fight with any party in the region, Israel can escalate it to the next level until it has the upper hand, and it will always have the upper hand. In effect, you’re saying you have to have strategic dominance over every conceivable party in the Arab world and the Middle East. That’s half a billion people. And you are a country of 10 million. That is why Israel doesn’t want Iran to have nuclear weapons
The last sentence, perhaps, requires some elaboration. Consider this: On April 18, New York Times’ reporters Mark Mazzetti, Adam Entous and Julian E. Barnes began a report on the US-Israeli war on Iran with the following: “The United States and Israel launched their war against Iran on the argument that if Iran one day got a nuclear weapon, it would have the ultimate deterrent against future attacks.”
Note that the reporters didn’t say the two aggressors attacked Iran because it had threatened either country or any of their allies, or because they were motivated by human rights considerations. Instead, they wrote that the United States and Israel launched their war to prevent Iran from acquiring the nuclear arms that would provide Tehran a means to deter future US and Israeli aggression. These arms would, in Telhami’s words, check US and Israeli escalation dominance. Were Iran to achieve this objective, it would deny the two aggressor states strategic dominance over “half a billion people” and “every conceivable party in the Arab world and the Middle East.” Thus, it is not a nuclear threat to the physical safety of Americans and Israelis that Washington and Tel Aviv seek to deter, but a threat to their ability to dominate West Asia and its hundreds of millions of people.
Klein, a man who acknowledges that he does not count himself among those who want to see Israel cease to exist (though the idea that anyone should want an apartheid state to continue exist is troubling), offered his own commentary, some of which had merit.
He argued that “the one-state reality” [which is to say, Israeli apartheid, is] not accidental. It was, and is, not intended to be transient. It was being etched into the land — in stone and cement, in settlements and checkpoints, in the construction of walls and the demolition of homes.”
He noted that “More settlements were approved in the last year alone than in the previous two decades combined.”
He lamented that “Israel has allowed — has protected — a terrifying rise in settler and military violence toward the Palestinians who live” in the West Bank, adding that “There is no doubt, if you go there, who rules the West Bank — and it is not the P.A.”
He pointed to how “Israel has used the war in Iran as cover to invade Lebanon, displacing more than a million people, adding that “it is an open question whether any of those 600,000 Lebanese will ever be able to return to their homes.”
He acknowledged that Israel has no intention of allowing the Palestinians a state of their own.
Sadly, Klein’s merits are outweighed by his egregious faults. Significantly, he fails to explain how Israel’s resolve to deny the Palestinians a state of their own has left the Palestinians bereft of any option but violence to redress a fundamental wrong; and that this, by itself, explains the outbreak of Palestinian violence on 7 October 2023.
Palestinian rebellion was met on the Israeli side by Tel Aviv stepping up its decades-long efforts to erase the Palestinians as a people. These efforts have been evinced, to use the language of the Genocide Convention, in the:
Killing of Palestinians in large numbers;
Inflicting on them serious bodily and mental harm; and
Imposing on them conditions of life calculated to bring about their demise.
Klein excuses these genocidal acts as “what any state and any people would do.” That’s doubtful. What any state and people might have done, and certainly could have done, is begin to redress the historical injustices that produced the rebellion. As Marx observed about the 1857 Indian Rebellion against the country’s British colonizers: “There is something in human history like retribution.” (The Indian Revolt, 16 September 1857) Or, to borrow from Marx again, with appropriate alterations of language for time and place: “However infamous the conduct of the Palestinians on 7 October 2023, it was only the reflex, in a concentrated form, of Israel’s own conduct”. Any serious effort to prevent future Palestinian violence, would address the root of the violence, not try, by escalation dominance, to suppress it, so that the fruits of the injustice Zionists have visited upon their victims — the theft of their land, homes, property, and country — can continue to be enjoyed by Israeli Jews into the future. That is what is meant when one says Israel’s response to the Palestinian rebellion is justified because it is what any state or people would do.
Genocide is built into settler colonialism. Settlers seek the land of indigenous peoples for the exclusive use of their own ethnic group. European settlers did so in North America, Australia, and New Zealand; German settlers did so in southwest Africa; and the Nazis tried to do so in eastern Europe, where Slavs, Jews, and Roma–the occupants of the land Hitler coveted for Lebensraum and German settlement–paid a terrible price. Jewish settlers have done the same to the natives of Palestine. In all cases, the result has been genocide. Settlers drive indigenous peoples off land they covet by expulsion, extermination, or both. Settler colonialism rests on the logic of the elimination of the natives.
Settler colonial states of the past have acted just as Israel, a settler colonial state of the present, has. But that’s hardly a justification for genocide. The Nazi SS Einsatzgruppen shot 34,000 Soviet Jews and dumped then in the Babi Yar ravine in September 1941 in retaliation for Soviet agents detonating mines in occupied Kiev which killed as many a three-hundred German soldiers. This was an instance of settler colonial forces undertaking harsh reprisals against the violent rebellion of the natives, in this case, against an ethnic group, Jews, viewed by the Nazis as being intimately linked to the political leadership of the resistance, or terrorists, as the Nazis called them. According to Klein’s logic, the Nazi reprisal killings were justified as “what any state and any people would do.”
It might also be pointed out that if Israel did “what any state and any people would do,” then Hamas and Hezbollah have done what any colonized and oppressed people would do. Colonized people never allow the colonizer to despoil their country, land, homes, and property, without putting up a fight. We might call this an iron law of history. To borrow Marx’s language, the inevitable rebellion of the Palestinians on 7 October 2023 no more lends itself to moralizing – for or against – than does an earthquake in California or a snowstorm in Canada, both inevitable events. It’s what colonized and oppressed people have always done and will always do. So, if we can point to genocide as what any colonial settler state and settler people would do to the people it’s oppressing, we can also point to violent rebellion as what any colonized people would do to the people who are oppressing them.
Klein’s heart bleeds for Palestinians who have been denied a state of their own and for the Shia of south Lebanon who the Israelis have driven from their homes, perhaps never allowed to return. But in his view, Hamas and Hezbollah, the inevitable response to Zionist settler colonialism, are anathema. Israel’s “right to reprisal against Hamas and Hezbollah,” he says, “is undeniable.” Sure, as much as the SS’s right to reprisal against Jews for the killing of three-hundred German soldiers at Kiev was undeniable. Zionists will object that you can’t compare Israel to Nazi Germany. But you can. As a settler colonial state, Israel shares much in common with its settler colonial cohorts: the United States, Canada; Australia; New Zealand; and Germany.
Klein must, in the words of the Syrian singer Siba, “demonize our revolutionaries,” as much as Israel must “eradicate our roots; demolish our homes; criminalize our existence; falsify our origins; separate our loved ones; and slaughter our children.”
Those who pity the oppressed but condemn their rebellion and demonize their revolutionaries are no friend of the oppressed. They aid the oppressor. But, then, I suspect Klein is alright with that.
Who Rules the US Revealed in Washington’s Cuba Demands
The idea that US foreign policy is driven by national security and human rights considerations is contradicted by the list of demands the US State Department issued to Havana last week. In reality, US foreign policy is driven by the interests of US businesses and investors, as the US demands make clear.
Cuba must:
o Transition to a market-based economy;
o Expand its private sector;
o Open its door to foreign-investment;
o Compensate U.S. citizens and corporations whose assets and properties were nationalized in the 1960s;
o Release political prisoners;
o Expand political freedoms.
Washington “signaled that the United States would not tolerate resistance to its demands.”
The New York Times’ headline that reported on this meeting said that US officials travelled to Havana to lay out proposals, when, in point of fact, as the text of the article indicated, the US delegation issued demands to which it said it “would not tolerate resistance.”
Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Epstein Avant La Lettre
I have been reading Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions, the first modern autobiography. I was shocked by one incident the eighteenth-century composer, novelist, and philosopher describes.
Rosseau writes of “a little girl of eleven or twelve,” named Anzoletta, who he and his friend, Carrio, bought from her mother with the aim of enjoying her “sensual pleasures,” that is, keeping her as a sex slave.
Carrio, who was a lady’s man, grew weary of always going to women who belonged to others and took it into his head to have one of his own; and as we were inseparable he suggested to me an arrangement which is not rare in Venice, that we should keep one between us. I agreed. The next question was to find a safe one. He made such thorough investigations that he unearthed a little girl of eleven or twelve, whom her wretched mother wanted to sell. We went to see her together…She was fair and gentle as a lamb. … We gave the mother some money, and made arrangements for the daughter’s keep. (The Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Book Seven, Penguin, 1953, p. 302.)
Rousseau says that he developed a parental affection for the girl that prevented the relationship from developing into a sexual one. All the same, he and Carrio bought the girl with the intention of “being the corrupters of her innocence,” as Rousseau writes.
What is striking is that the theorist of liberalism passed over the incident without showing the faintest pang of conscience, though at other times he expressed great remorse for actions that by today’s standards pale in comparison with the intended sexual enslavement of a prepubescent girl.
Throughout his Confessions, Rousseau claims to tremble in outrage at wrongs and the exploitation of the weak, though clearly his aversion to injury inflicted on the weak was far from universal, and likely very much limited to inflictions upon people such as himself, and certainly not on little girls of poor families.
There is a fundamental injustice at the root of Palestinian violence. In 1948, Jewish settlers stole most of the Palestinians’ country. Israelis claim that part of historic Palestine was given to them by the United Nations, but the claim is false, and even if it were true, Palestine wasn’t the United Nation’s to give away. It’s true that the United Nations General Assembly in Resolution 181 of 29 November 1947 recommended a partition of Palestine between a state for recent Jewish immigrants and a state for indigenous Palestinians, but the recommendation was rejected by the Palestinians, and was never implemented. Moreover, the United Nations had no authority to deny the Palestinians self-determination in their own land, or to confiscate part of their country to create a Jewish state. There was no moral foundation or legal basis for the creation of a state for Jews in Palestine. Israel is not the child of moral necessity and law but the product of naked aggression, land theft, and ethnic cleansing.
In 1967, Israel conquered those parts of Palestine it had not stolen from the Palestinians in 1948. Its new conquests included the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem, along with parts of Egypt (the Sinai) and Syria (Golan). Since then, the newly-seized Palestinian territories have been occupied while the Sinai has been returned to Egypt (in return for Cairo renouncing Arab nationalism and becoming a US client state), and the occupied Golan has been annexed illegally with the blessing of the United States.
Today, approximately seven million Jewish settlers live in conquered Palestine, occupying about 85 percent of the country. A roughly equal number of Palestinians live in the remaining 15 percent of their homeland (while some eight million are scattered abroad, many living in refugee camps in Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan). Israeli policy, as evidence by the country’s actions, is to gradually drive into exile as many of the seven million Palestinians who remain in historic Palestine as possible, mainly by usurping their land and making their lives miserable. The process echoes the efforts of the Nazis from 1933 to Kristallnacht of 9-10 November 1938 to drive Jews out of Germany in order to create an ethnically pure German state. The Israelis, for their part, aim to create nothing as extreme as the Nazi’s homogeneous ethnic state, but a demography that substantially favors Jews. With a rough balance of Jews and Palestinians currently living within the territory Israel controls, that means either significantly reducing the Palestinian population, or ceding a Palestinian state on the 15 percent of historic Palestine in which Palestinians are concentrated, and accepting that the land of Israel will not include what Jews of antiquity knew as Judea and Samaria. The latter option, however, is rejected, not only by the current Israeli government, but by Israeli society generally.
In the absence of any intention to concede a Palestinian state, the Zionist imperative of creating a Jewish majority within a territory in which as many Palestinians as Jews live, means either driving the indigenous people out of the country, or failing that, forcing them into an ever shrinking space, as Israel takes more and more of their land, homes, and property for the building of settlements for Jews (including newly immigrated Jews from such places as the United States, Canada, and Western Europe.) The process echoes the genocide of the indigenous peoples of Turtle Island and of the Slavs and Jews of the German East (the territory of Eastern Europe the Nazis sought to conquer as Lebensraum to settle the German Herrenvolk.) It also means denying Palestinians political rights in the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem—in other words, apartheid.
This raises a question. Why are the Israelis so adamant about refusing the Palestinians a state of their own, especially considering that the state would comprise only a tiny fraction of the Palestinians’ original country and leave the bulk of it to the Jews? The answer is surely that, from the perspective of the Zionist project, a Palestinian state represents an opportunity cost (giving up land that could be otherwise taken from the Palestinians for the use of Jews) but offers no clear benefit. The presumed benefit is peace. With their own state, it is supposed that the Palestinians will recognize the legitimacy of a Jewish state comprising the bulk of their country, making up that part the Zionists stole in 1948, plus part of the territory conquered in 1967 that has strategic value to Israel and which contains major Jewish settlements. True, the organized Palestinian resistance would gladly accept a Palestinian state in even only 15 percent of historic Palestine, but it has made clear that the realization of the two-state solution is not its end-game. Western states that back the two-state solution envisage something like a Palestinian protectorate with Israel as suzerain, controlling the state’s borders, police force, and foreign policy. The only way to persuade Israel to accept a Palestinian state, in their view, is to assure the Israelis that a Palestinian state will pose no threat to Israel’s existence as a Jewish state. And the way to do that is to insist that the state of Palestine have no military and that its leaders are quislings who serve at the pleasure of either Israel or Washington or both. This reflects an implicit acknowledgement that the dispossessed will always be a threat to those who dispossess them; that the dispossessed want returned to them what is rightfully theirs; and that unless a Palestinian state has no military and is governed by stooges of Israel and its Western patrons, the Palestinians will be at liberty to use the resources of their new state to attempt to recover, by force, what they have been unjustly denied.
Of course, Israel could be strongarmed into acceding to a Palestinian state. The Zionist state depends significantly for survival on the support it receives from the United States and major US allies. By threatening to cut off or reduce arms transfers and diplomatic support, the West could compel its client state to comply with its demands to accept a state for the Palestinians. But the West has never used its leverage to force the Israelis to make any meaningful concessions to the Palestinians, and shows no sign of departing from this policy. Indeed, since the Oslo Accords of 1993, which were supposed to begin a process of moving toward the creation of a Palestinian state, the Israelis have consistently maneuvered to undermine the project, and the West has done precious little to stop them. The number of Jewish settlers in the West Bank, which would form the largest part of a Palestinian state, has grown from 280,000 shortly after the Oslo Accords to 950,000 by 2023, more than a three-fold increase. [1] And Israeli efforts to sabotage a Palestinian state have only accelerated since 7 October 2023. The Zionist state unabashedly, even proudly, conducts itself in a manner aimed openly at denying the Palestinians a viable state. Western states occasionally utter protests, but fail to follow through with deeds that would induce Israel to abandon its ongoing sabotage.
Many states and political organizations in the West, including most far-left and progressive political parties, proclaim their affection for an independent Palestinian state along 1967 borders, along with the full right of return for Palestinian refugees (and their descendants) to the homes from which they were expatriated. Advocates of this position have no answer to the question of why a Palestinian state should be constituted along 1967 borders, that is, why it should comprise only the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem, territory not conquered in 1948? Implicitly the position endorses the 1948 theft by Zionist forces of most of the Palestinians’ country, but condemns the 1967 theft of the remaining part of the country. In this view, the second (1967) conquest is objectionable but the first and larger (1948) conquest is not. Moreover, Israel and its Western patrons would never accept the emergence of an independent, militarized, Palestinian state, for reasons cited above. Nor would they accept the repatriation of eight million Palestinians living in the shatat, a development that would radically alter the demographic balance of Israel, turning it into a Palestinian-majority state. The proposal, thus, is not only confused morally (why reject the 1967 conquest but not the 1948 one?) but is also pie-in-the-sky, since it assumes conditions (a truly independent Palestinian state and repatriation) that are completely unacceptable to the states that would need to accede to them. Moreover, were the Palestinians strong enough to compel Israel and its Western patrons to accept an independent Palestinian state on the 1967 borders, they would also be strong enough to press for the recovery of all their country. So why would they stop at the 1967 borders? The proposal, vaunted by its supporters as both morally defensible and pragmatic, turns out to be, on inspection, confused, inconsistent, and unrealistic.
Returning to the question of why Western states allow Israel to get away with blocking implementation of the two-state solution: The simple answer, favored by followers of the US political scientists John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, is that a lobby of Zionist Christians and Zionist Jews wields enormous political power, which it has used to hijack the foreign policy relevant to Israel and the Middle East of the United States, as well those of its major allies. If this is indeed true, the obvious question is: How did this lobby get to be so powerful that it can make Washington do what Mearsheimer and Walt claim is at odds with American interests? The answer, never spelled out, lurks within the Mearsheimer-Walt theory: The lobby is made up of enormously rich Jewish financiers who identify with Israel because they’re Jews and as a consequence place Jewish interests above those of American interests. This echoes the Nazi view that Jewish international financiers, operating in the shadows, controlled German politics, to the detriment of the German Volk and to the benefit of the Jews. If, to Hitler, German Jews were committed to Jewish interests and not those of Germany, to Mearsheimer and Walt, Zionist American Jews are committed to Jewish interests and not those of America. It could also be said that the lobby comprises fabulously wealthy Zionist Christian moneybags who identify with Israel because they’re evangelical Christians and many evangelical Christians believe that God has ordered them to support Israel; as a consequence, they place evangelical Christian theological interests above those of US secular interests. But, were we to say this, we would invite an obvious question: Aren’t these evangelical Christians also Americans? If Zionist Christians define their interests as support for Israel, then support for Israel is an interest of these Americans. Likewise, if Zionist Jews define their interests as defending Israel, then the defense of Israel is an interest of these Americans. What are American interests but the interests of a group that includes Zionist Jews and Zionist Christians as much it includes those of anyone else? To say the interests of Zionist Jews and Zionist Christians are not American interests is to say Zionist Jews and Zionist Christians are not Americans—that they operate on behalf of temporal (Israel) or spiritual (evangelical Christian) constituencies whose agendas are independent of American agendas and are therefore potentially in conflict with them. This is only a way of saying “If you disagree with me about what America’s interests are, you’re not a loyal American; you are, instead, an agent of a Church or an agent of a foreign state.”
Obviously, there are many American views of what the American interest is, so many that the idea that there is one, single, American interest—the interest that Mearsheimer and Walt claim to know—is absurd. Sociologically, what is called “American interests” are the interests of the class of people who have the means to dominate the ideological sphere and represent their own class interests as the interests of everyone else. As Marx and Engels put it, the ruling ideas [about what American interests are] are the ideas of the [US] ruling class. And the US ruling class happens to be made up of fabulously wealthy Zionist Jews and fabulously wealthy Zionist Christians, along with fabulously wealthy people who identify neither as Zionist Jews nor Zionist Christians but who happen to believe that Israel is a useful instrument for defending US ruling class interests in the Middle East. We should not, therefore, adopt a view that implies, as Mearsheimer and Walt do, that Zionist Jews are not true Americans, committed to true American interests, because they’re Jews (or that Zionist Christians are not true Americans, committed to true American interests, because they’re evangelical Christians).
A better answer to the question of why Western states allow Israel to get away with blocking implementation of the two-state solution—even though these states profess to favor it—is that the United States and its North American and European clients:
Are committed to Israel as their instrument for defending their interests in the Middle East. Indeed, the entire history of political Zionism has been one of Zionists seeking the support of Western states to establish and then maintain a Jewish state in the heart of the Arab and Muslim worlds in return for acting as the paladin of Western interests in the Middle East, and Western states accepting the proposal. The Palestinians, in this view, are a threat to achieving Western aims, since they are a threat to the West’s instrument for achieving those aims.
Don’t really believe that an independent Palestinian state, existing side-by-side with Israel, constitutes a genuine solution to the problem of two national movements vying for the same space. A Palestinian state, for reasons explained above, does not make the Palestinians’ desire for the recovery of their country, and the concomitant end to the Jewish state, vanish. If anything, it strengthens it, especially if the Palestinian state is militarized and truly independent. Palestinians won’t long be satisfied with just a small fraction of their country. The dispossessed always aspire to recuperate what they have been dispossessed of, and will use an independent state as a base from which to pursue the liberation of their country in its entirety. That is why no Western proposal envisions a truly independent, militarized, Palestinian state.
Accept the view, articulated in 1923 by Ze’ev Jabotinisky, that the only way to make a Jewish state in the center of the Arab and Muslim worlds secure from Palestinian irridentism, is to overwhelm the Palestinians by force and military strength until they give up their dreams of recovering their country as futile. This accounts for why Western states, the United States and Germany especially, have been prepared to furnish Israel with munificent military aid, to the point of giving it a qualitative military edge over all regional states. Israeli military primacy in the Middle East allows the West’s outpost in the Arab and Persian worlds to a) defend itself from Palestinian irredentism and b) take on states and movements of national assertiveness and independence that threaten the West’s domination of an important petroleum-producing region.
Conceal their commitment to the strategy of the Iron Wall behind a professed commitment to the two-state solution as a way of managing the demands of their own populations to intercede on behalf of the Palestinians. We seek justice for the Palestinians through our advocacy of the two-state solution, they say, while failing to hinder Israel in its efforts to thwart the very possibility of even a non-militarized, vassal, Palestinian state.
On top of the genocidal violence Israel has inflicted on Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, it has waged a low-level war on the Palestinians of the West Bank. The war is multi-faceted: approval of new settlements; destruction of refugee camps; expulsion of Palestinians from their land and homes; settler attacks; pogroms. Almost daily, newspapers are filled new Israeli horrors.
“The United Nations has warned of an alarming surge in attacks by Israeli settlers against Palestinians, with the number of incidents rising every year for almost a decade. This year, the U.N.’s humanitarian office, OCHA, has recorded more than 1,400 settler attacks that resulted in casualties or property damage.” [2]
“Since the attacks of Oct. 7, 2023, over 1,000 Palestinians in the West Bank have been killed by Israeli forces and settlers; one in every five dead was a child. In the same period, over 3,000 Palestinians say they have been displaced from their homes and lands largely because of Israeli settler violence. Anestimated40,000 Palestinians have been displaced in the northern West Bank by Israel Defense Forces operations. In the past two years, Israel has erected nearly 1,000 barriers and makeshift checkpoints across the West Bank, suffocating Palestinians’ ability to move and work freely.” [3]
“Pogroms in Palestinian villages have become routine, while the army and police stand by – or worse, assist the attackers. … These terrorists brag openly, knowing that even when settlers are filmed shooting and killing a Palestinian or beating an elderly woman with a nail-studded club, no one is prosecuted and the public remains indifferent. Settler violence isn’t outside the law – it is the law.” [4]
“Israel has also conducted extensive military operations that have uprooted entire neighborhoods in Palestinian cities. Historians and researchers say that has led to the largest wave of Palestinian displacement in the West Bank in a half-century.” [5]
Meanwhile, in Gaza, the genocide—established as a fact by the International Association of Genocide Scholars; the United Nations Human Rights Council; Amnesty International; Human Rights Watch; B’Tselem; Physicians for Human Rights—Israel; the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories; and the Palestinian Center for Human Rights—carries on, despite the 10 October 2025 halt to hostilities. From the start of the misnamed cease-fire through 27 December 2025, Israel killed 414 Palestinians and injured 1,142, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health/Gaza. The victims were mainly non-combatants—Palestinians who had never participated in hostilities or had but were observing the cease-fire. “When Israel targeted two cousins on Oct. 29 — it said they were both local militant commanders — overnight missile strikes destroyed both their homes,” reported the New York Times. “One of the men was killed. So were 18 other members of their extended family, including two 3-year-olds.” The report continues: “Maysaa al-Attar, 30, a pharmacy student was shot in the abdomen as she slept in her parents’ tent.” [6]
In a 19 December 2025 report on the faux cease-fire, the Israel human rights organization, B’Tselem, made the following observations:
The ceasefire agreement between Israel and Hamas on 10 October 2025 did not lead to any meaningful change in Israel’s conduct.
Even within the territory that supposedly remained under Palestinian control beyond the “yellow line,” Israel continues to inflict extensive harm on civilians, homes, and infrastructure – often within the very area designated as the al-Mawasi “humanitarian zone,” where hundreds of thousands of displaced people currently live.
Moreover, as of November 2025, Israel refuses to open several commercial crossings through which it was supposed to allow humanitarian aid into Gaza, disrupts and delays the entry of essential aid through the crossings that have opened, and continues to impose draconian restrictions on humanitarian organizations and to prevent journalists from entering devastated Gaza.
UN agencies and international organizations reported that between the agreement’s entry into force and 21 October, Israel rejected approximately 75% of all requests submitted for the entry of aid into the Strip. [7]
The conclusion, according to Martin Shaw, a sociologist of global politics, war and genocide, is that “What we have is supposed to be a ceasefire, but Israel is still killing, starving and systematically destroying buildings; people are still dying and suffering. [8]
Lamenting the Zionist war on Palestinians, especially the largely unremarked war in the West Bank, Jack Khoury, a writer with the liberal Israeli newspaper Haaretz, wrote that “Neither the United Nations (and its agencies), nor the International Court of Justice, nor enlightened Europe, nor powerful China have been helping West Bank residents. There is also no point in trusting Arab countries.” [9] Strange that Khoury thinks any of these bodies can, or even wants to, help Palestinians. The United Nations and its agencies can’t help the Palestinians because the UN is an instrument of the five veto-wielding permanent members of the Security Council who dominate it, three of which, as we have seen (the United States, Britain, and France) conduct their foreign policies in a manner that strongly suggests they are committed to Jabotinsky’s Iron Wall view of dealing with the Palestinian threat to their outpost in the Middle East. Any one of these veto-wielding permanent members can stay the hand of UN humanitarians who take it into their heads to help the Palestinians in any material way. Western Europe fails to help the Palestinians because it too supports the Iron Wall, as evidenced by the colossal military contributions it provides Israel. China, however powerful it is, is not powerful enough to take on the United States in the Middle East, which it would have to do were it to help Palestinians against Washington’s Zionist protégé. Moreover, China is a country that exists for the Chinese; its leadership cares as much about the Palestinians as the Americans do, which is not at all. China is not a Soviet Union, pursuing universalist ideals (and even the USSR had limits on how far it would go on behalf of internationalism.) It is, by its own admission, focused on building the Central State and not interfering in the affairs of other countries (except insofar as doing so helps advance its project of national rejuvenation.) As to the Arab countries, Khoury implicitly acknowledges that they exist as what Norman Finkelstein has recently called slaves and stooges of the United States. They won’t help the Palestinians because 1) what’s in it for them? and 2) they don’t want to displease their master. It’s true that the Arab states have to feign concern for the plight of the Palestinians in order to mollify the passion of the street for the Palestinian cause, but then so too do Western states.
Further evidence that the Western states view in Jabotinsky’s Iron Wall the correct way to manage the threat Palestinian irridentism presents to their outpost in the Middle East comes from their insistence that “Israel has a right to defend itself.” In practice this phrase means “Israel has a right to use overwhelming violence against Palestinians, far in excess of what is actually needed for defense.” Even if we accept that Israel has a legitimate right to defend itself from the recalcitrance of the people it oppresses, in the same manner that defenders of the slaveocracy of the American South might have said that the slave-owners had a right to defend themselves against the rebellion of their slaves, or fascists might have asserted a Nazi right of self-defense against the uprising of the Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto, a critical question arises as to how much violence is necessary for Israel to provide itself an adequate defense? It is clear to all but biased observers that the level of violence Israel inflicted upon Palestinians in Gaza from October 2023 to October 2025 (with the substantial aid of arms flows and intelligence from the United States, Germany, and other Western states) was well beyond what was necessary to defend Israel. Instead, the level of violence was consistent with the aim of achieving permanent security, which is to say, annihilating the possibility of future Palestinian attacks altogether–in other words, preventive war. The threat of future rebellion can be construed as immanent in Hamas, or more broadly the Palestinian resistance, or most broadly of all, Palestinians as a whole, for it is from within the Palestinian community that the threat of violent rebellion against Israeli oppression arises. Did the Nazis have a right to defend themselves against the Warsaw uprising by annihilating the community from which the threat arose: the Jews? By the logic that underpins the slogan “Israel has a right to defend itself”, they did. The genocide scholar A. Dirk Moses has argued that genocide is a quest for permanent security. The condition for genocide is an inverse relationship between the existence of one group and the existence of another. If the existence of Israel, as a Jewish state, is threatened by the existence of a Palestinian nation as a displaced people, then the Palestinians are at risk of genocide at the hands of the Israelis. Likewise, Israelis are at risk of genocide at the hands of the Palestinians, since the existence of a Jewish state in the Palestinian homeland threatens the existence of the Palestinian nation. It is for this reason that the idea of one, democratic state from the River to the Sea, in which everyone is equal, regardless of ethnicity or religion, is preferable to a struggle between two peoples to build their own ethnic states in the same space. Struggles between ethnic groups have a high potential for genocide.
One way of achieving Israel’s permanent security is to eliminate the Palestinians as a people. This can be accomplished in various ways. One way is to disperse Palestinians throughout the world in order that they become assimilated into other communities and cultures. Israel would love nothing more than for Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan to accept the Palestinian refugees living within their borders as citizens. After a time, these Palestinians and their descendants would come to identify as citizens of the countries in which they live, rather than as Palestinian refugees waiting to return home.
Another way of destroying the Palestinians as a nation is to destroy what makes them a nation—their heritage and culture; the things that bind them together as a people and make them more that just a collection of individuals. This is part of the reason why Israel has destroyed mosques, schools, universities, and other cultural infrastructure in its war on Gaza, and targeted the community’s intellectuals.
Physical annihilation of individual Palestinians is yet another way of achieving the same end, but killing every Palestinian, or even a substantial fraction of them, is too difficult to be considered a practical aim. Nevertheless, physical annihilation does have a role to play in Israel achieving permanent security. Overwhelming physical violence, along with the imposition on Palestinians of conditions that are inconducive to a thriving life—too little food; inadequate sanitation; shortages of potable water; inadequate shelter; no garbage collection; no schools; no universities; no recreation; no cultural activities; impoverished health care; i.e., the conditions that Israel has imposed on Gaza with Western backing— combine to limit population growth, if not reverse it, but more importantly, create significant incentives for self-exile. The aim of Israel’s brutal war on Palestinians qua Palestinians is to make their conditions of life in the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem, impossible, so that they vacate these territories to make way for Jewish settlers.
When Western states justify Israel’s massive violence against Palestinians as self-defense, they endorse their protégé’s adoption of a point of view that is no different from my telling you that if you bite my toe while I’m stepping on your head, I have a right to take a crow-bar to your skull and bash your brains in. That North American and European governments offer this justification is further evidence of their commitment to Israelis using massive reprisal violence to deter the future rebellions of the Palestinians. Massive violence as reprisal for rebellion has forever been the theory and practice of the oppressor.
If, as Khoury points out, the United Nations, the European Union, powerful China, and the Arab states, won’t help Palestinians, who will? The answer has always been no one but the Palestinians themselves. And the Palestinians have, for a very long time, asserted their own agency. They have launched massive strikes, practiced diplomacy, appealed to the conscience of humanity, invoked international law, inspired countless UN General Assembly and Security Council resolutions on their behalf, and used moral suasion. They have tried making concessions. They have also used violence. Nothing has worked…yet. That the Palestinians have resorted to armed force, and will continue to do so, is assured.
Simone de Beauvoir once remarked that “All oppression creates a state of war”. I would say that all oppression is a state of war, and until the oppression of Palestinians is overcome, they will continue to turn to violence (along with other methods of struggle.) Anyone who condemns them for doing so sides with the oppressor.
1. Hamas Media Office, “Al-Aqsa Flood: Two Years of Steadfastness and the Will for Liberation”, Dec. 2025.
2. Feliz Solomon, “Israeli Settlers Burn Mosque as West Bank Violence Escalates”, The Wall Street Journal, Nov. 14, 2025.
3 Mairav Zonszein, “There Is No Cease-Fire in the West Bank”, The New York Times, Nov. 11, 2025.
4. Yoana Gonen, “Creative Use of Bullshit: Why Right-wing Populist ‘Journalist’ Amit Segal Calls Haaretz Israel’s Greatest Threat”, Haaretz, Oct 28, 2025.
5. Natan Odenheimer and Fatima AbdulKarim, “How Israel’s Settlement Surge in the West Bank Is Displacing Palestinians”, The New York Times, Dec. 4, 2025.
6. David M. Halbfinger, Bilal Shbair and Aaron Boxerman, “The Truce Is 2 Months Old. So Why Have Hundreds of Gazans Been Killed?” The New York Times, Dec. 24, 2025.
7 “No Place Under Heaven”: Forced displacement in the Gaza Strip, 2023-2025,” B’Tselem, Dec. 19, 2025.
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 are heretics.
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 point of 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 Jew-hatred. 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 beyond question and based on the reality that the Zionist state has, from its birth, been child, extension, and outpost, of the West in the Middle 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 and West Asia under the bootheel of US imperialism.
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.
What's Left 