Tag: Settler colonialism

Whether the West Bank, Gaza, East Jerusalem, the Golan Heights, or Israel, It’s All Stolen Land

By Stephen Gowans

13 June 2026

According to the Israeli daily Haaretz, “left-wing UK leaders” are “slamming” an Israeli real-estate event, alleging that it seeks to sell properties to Jews on stolen West Bank land.

While efforts to impede the ongoing Judaization of Palestine are commendable, there is a fundamental problem that lurks in the campaign’s understanding of what is and isn’t stolen Palestinian land. The reality is that all the land in historic Israel that is claimed by Jewish settlers—both within the 1967 borders and outside—is stolen.

Failing to acknowledge this reality implicitly legitimizes Israeli colonialism and all earlier thefts of Palestinian land. While it identifies land stolen in 1967 as Palestinian, it tacitly accepts land stolen in 1948 as legitimately belonging to Zionist settlers.

Of course, it can’t be true that land taken from Palestinians by Zionist violence in 1967 is Palestinian land, while land taken from Palestinians by Jewish settler violence in 1948 is not.

All the same, the illogic is concealed behind the claim that the violent transfer of Palestinian land to the new Israeli state in 1948 was legitimized by the UN partition plan.

This view, however, is wrong for a number of reasons.

1.) The plan was legally invalid, since it was based on a General Assembly resolution, and

1a.) General Assembly resolutions are non-binding, and

1b.) the General Assembly didn’t have the authority to partition Palestine. (Indeed, the UN Charter accords to neither the General Assembly or the Security Council the authority to create new states);

2.) The Palestinians rejected the plan;

3.) The Zionists also rejected it, as evidenced by the fact that:

3a.) They didn’t implement it; and

3b.) They conquered territory in excess of what the plan allocated to them.

The plan apportioned 56 percent of Palestine to one-third of the population that was Jewish (mainly settlers), and only 42 percent to the Palestinians, who comprised two-thirds of the population. (Two percent was allotted to what was to be an internationalized Jerusalem.)

By early 1949, the Zionists—keen to control as much of Palestine as they could—had conquered 78 percent of the territory (versus the 56 percent they were supposed to have under the plan.)

Still, even if the partition plan had been legally valid, it remained flagrantly colonial, since it endorsed the expropriation of the territory of the existing inhabitants by a group of settlers animated by the project of expelling as much of the Palestinian population as possible and them imposing a regime of Jewish ethnoreligious supremacy on those that remained.

The partition plan has become embedded in international law, but colonialism does not become just by virtue of its inclusion in international law. International law is the instrument of the colonial powers that formulated it. They formulated it to defend and promote their interests—not to protect weaker peoples and states.

The great powers make, and have made, international law, and when it doesn’t suit their purposes, they break it. So it is that they have read the partition plan into the global legal order, even though the plan was invalid under the very same order.

There exists today one Jewish supremacist state in all of historic Palestine. All the land, both within and beyond the 1967 borders, is stolen. The ineluctable conclusion is that home sales to Jewish settlers anywhere in historic Palestine, (not only in the West Bank), are auctions of stolen land.

The competing view that only settlements in the West Bank represent confiscated Palestinian land, endorses the colonial fiction that Jewish settlement within the 1967 borders is not colonial and has not taken place on the dispossessed land of the Palestinians. On the contrary, all the territory controlled by the US-backed colonial settler regime is colonized and stolen.

The solution to colonization is not colonization of all but 22 percent of a people’s territory—what’s proposed in the two-state “solution”—but decolonization, the creation of one democratic state, in which all people are equal, regardless of their ethnicity or religious identity.

That’s what Palestinians proposed from the very beginning. It is a multidimensional solution, one that remedies both the problems of settler colonialism (by creating its antithesis, the democratic state of all its citizens) and the problems of anti-Semitism and anti-Palestinianism (by depoliticizing ethnic and religious identity and thereby establishing the full equality of individuals, regardless of the religion they practice or the people they identify as.)

From the 22 percent of historic Palestine that the two-state proposal envisages for a Palestinian state; to Jawlan (called the Golan Heights by Israelis; conquered by the US-backed colonial settler regime in 1967; ethnically cleansed of its Syrian population; settled by Jews; and annexed by the Israeli state in 1981); to Israel itself: it is all stolen land. Failing to recognize this reality perpetuates an injustice and blocks implementation of the only fair and democratic solution to the multiple problems at the center of the Zionist colonization of historic Palestine and Jawlan.

Nazi Myth. Zionist Myth.

By Stephen Gowans

4 June 2026

A national Canadian newspaper, The Globe and Mail, published an editorial on 4 June 2026, lambasting Canadian prime minister Mark Carney for failing to condemn anti-Zionism. The editorial board pressed Carney to equate opposition to Israel’s existence with demonizing Canada’s Jews.

The editorial was titled “The Missing Words in Carney’s Speech”, a reference to a speech the prime minister had made to condemn what he described as a growing wave of anti-Semitism in Canada. “It was good that Mr. Carney went to a synagogue and addressed antisemitism,” argued the editorial, but added that “He should have said: ‘If you oppose Israel’s existence, if you demonize Jewish-Canadians, you are wrong, you are hateful and I stand against you.’”

The growing wave of anti-Semitism in Canada is a myth. As I explained in a previous post, 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. The organization, along with other pro-Israel partisans, are pressing Canadian governments at the federal, provincial, and municipal levels to implement legal measures to criminalize pro-Palestinian, pro-democracy and anti-Zionist, anti-colonial political positions. Carney’s speech added grist to the mill of the anti-Palestinian argument, but the Globe and Mail felt he hadn’t gone far enough.

Let’s be clear

1/ Zionism is not Judaism and nor are “Zionist” and “Jew” the same. Indeed, there are more Christian Zionists in Canada than there are Jewish Zionists.

Zionism is a settler colonial, ethno-supremacist, apartheid ideology, that is the foundation of laws and practices that maintain the dominance of one ethnic group (Jews) over all others in historic Palestine. Nazism, and the ideology of apartheid South Africa and Rhodesia, shared the same ethnic chauvinism and colonialist mentality.

2/ Conflating Jew and Judaism with Zionist and Zionism is reminiscent of the Nazis conflating, in one instance, Jew and Judaism with international banker and finance capitalism, and in another, with Bolshevik and Bolshevism. The Nazi’s “Judeobolsheviks” have become “Judeozionists” in the hands the Globe and Mail and other Israel supporters.

The conflation is a form of anti-Semitism, since it argues that ethno-supremacism and settler colonialism are inherent in Judaism (which they are not) and that all Jews, and only Jews, are ethno-supremacists who support settler colonialism (manifestly untrue.)

Neither were all Jews Bolsheviks or finance capitalists, though the Nazis would have had you believe they were. Likewise, The Globe and Mail would have you believe that all Jews in Canada are ardent Zionists and die-hard supporters of Israel. In point of fact, all Jews do not support an ideology and regime of ethnoreligious exclusion and rule over colonized natives and many of those who do support these abominations are not Jews. There is, therefore, no necessary connection between Jew and Zionist.

We can look at this another way.

Despite the Nazis’ self-appointment as representatives and champions of the German race, anti-Nazism was not hatred of Germans. Anti-Nazism=anti-German is an obvious logical fallacy, but one Nazis were happy to promote.

Likewise, despite Israel’s self-appointment as representative and champion of the world’s Jews, anti-Zionism is not hatred of Jews. Anti-Zionism=anti-Jew is also an obvious fallacy, but it is one, all the same, that Israel and its supporters are indefatigably keen to propagandize.

Having no other argument to make—how can one argue that settler colonialism and its offspring, apartheid and genocide, are good things?—Zionists reliably fall back on the myth that Nazis relied on to defend their own settler colonialism, apartheid, and genocide: Anyone who rejects the ethno-supremacist ideology I’ve adopted as self-appointed representative of my ethnic group, is obviously against my ethnic group.

Germans didn’t appoint the Nazis to represent their “race.” Nor did all Germans support the Nazis. Saying that all Germans were Nazis and that opposition to the Third Reich therefore amounted to demonizing Germans, is plainly absurd. It’s also a slur against Germans.

And yet this is precisely the argument Zionists, no less the Globe and Mail editorial board, make when they equate anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism.

The world’s Jews didn’t appoint Israel to represent them. Not all Jews support Zionism. (And most of the world’s Zionists are not Jews, but evangelical Christians. For example, CUFI, Christians United for Israel, has more members than all the Jews in the United States.) Saying that all Jews are Zionists and that criticism of Zionism is therefore demonization of Jews is no less absurd than saying all Germans were Nazis and anti-Nazism is demonization of Germans.

The truth of the matter is that Israel and its Zionist ideology are bleeding support, and the pro-settler colonial, apartheid, anti-Palestinian Israel lobby is trying to stop the hemorrhaging. Their answer: Invent a crisis of antisemitism, blame it on anti-Zionism, and press governments to implement laws and practices to silence activists calling for the decolonization and de-Zionization of historic Palestine.

Plus ca change. Throughout the late 1970s and 1980s, The Globe and Mail strongly supported apartheid South Africa and opposed the ANC, Nelson Mandela, and the liberation movement. Had it been able to, it might have argued that the prime ministers of the day should have dressed down ANC supporters, telling them that: ‘If you oppose the apartheid regime’s existence, you demonize white-Canadians.’” The newspaper, the organ of Bay Street, Canada’s financial center, will, it seems, forever be on the wrong side of history.

Why Does Genocide Happen Again and Again?

9 December 2025

Stephen Gowans

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.