The creation of Israel was not a colonial project

Great Debates
1

I’ve been following the various debates online that have heated up into overdrive since the atrocious Hamas attacks earlier this month. One of the most common criticisms of Israel from the left is that Israel was created as a colonial project. This is very false on a factual and historical basis.

Colonialism involves powerful nations and organizations imposing their will on the less affluent and powerful, on their own territory, in an exploitative relationship. Desperate people doing desperate things is not colonialism, and it’s offensive and inaccurate to compare the two. Jews were moving to Israel in the late 19th and early 20th out of desperation – because they had literally no place to go, and their former homes were unsafe for Jews. Centuries of pogroms and anti-semitic violence had followed Jews literally everywhere on Earth they went, culminating in the Holocaust. And Jews had been living in the land that would become Israel for thousands of years. While for much of this time Jews were a small minority, it’s factually false to imply that major powers moved Jews en masse in the mid 20th century for colonial purposes.

In the late 19th and early-mid 20th century, Jewish people literally had nowhere safe in the world to go. Not anti-semitic Europe, not white supremacist North America, and not anywhere else with no cultural or historical connection to the Jewish people. So thousands and thousands of Jews started, in a trickle that became a flood, to go to their ancestral homeland, with the intent to carve out a safe place for Jews since there was literally nowhere else on Earth that was safe. The Holocaust only cemented that this need for a safe place for Jews was non-negotiable.

In the early and mid 20th century, many colonial western powers assisted the Jews in the creation of Israel for their own geo-political purposes (chiefly, to have an ally in the region). But that does not make Israel a colonial project, any more than the creation of North and South Korea (which were similarly aided by different outside powers) were colonial projects.

None of this excuses or wipes away atrocities conducted by Jews and Israelis, during the creation of Israel and afterwards. Yes, the Jews that created Israel were quite reasonably desperate for a safe place for Jews… that doesn’t erase the fact that the creation of Israel was highly disruptive and worse to many of the non-Jews living there. And it certainly doesn’t erase, or excuse, the fact of decades of discrimination and oppression towards Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.

But Israel is not a colonial project. That’s just a factually false notion, and repeating it is both offensive and harms the good cause of Palestinian freedom and self-determination. There are good and factual reasons to support a geo-political solution that gives Palestinians freedom and self-determination that don’t need to use false notions like Israel as a colonial project. Zionism arose from this desperate need for a safe place for Jews, and it’s why I remain a Zionist – which doesn’t mean supporting the Israeli government in everything (or indeed anything) they do, but it does mean supporting the existence of a permanent safe place for Jews. IMO, the Israeli right has done great harm to the cause of Zionism, empowering and inflaming violent extremists like Hamas and working against the only possibility of long-term security for Israel – a permanent two-state solution that gives Palestinians freedom and self-determination alongside Israel.

2

Thank you for posting this thread. Obviously, I 100% agree with you. There is plenty of room for criticizing Israel and its actions, but viewing the conflict through a lens that simply does not apply to this situation is a big part of the problem, in my experience.

I’ve made a handful of posts along these lines and even considered starting a thread but honestly did not have the emotional capacity to do so. I will try to intelligently contribute to yours instead, but first I wanted to say, thank you.

3

It was not a colonial project but it did involve one of the last acts of British Colonialism when the remnants of the British Empire decided that they were the rightful owners of Palestine and entitled to give the land to European immigrants based on an ancient religious entitlement and guilt for their treatment in Europe for centuries. While the last part was some justification for giving these people a homeland, carving out a portion of Europe for that purpose would have made a lot more sense than taking it away from the people who traditionally inhabited it. The rest is colonialism in it’s broader sense.

4

This ignores history. In fact Jewish people started migrating into the Ottoman Empire back in the late 1800s, and this included not just European Jews but also Middle Eastern Jews from countries like Yemen and Iraq, who had never set foot in Europe. It also ignores the Jews who always lived in Israel.

Finally, by identifying the Jews as “Europeans” you’re explicitly viewing the situation through a myopic lens. Your lens is well calibrated for the American model of race, but the Europeans did not consider the Jews to be Europeans. Not for the over two thousand years that the Jews lived among them, since the Mecedonian Empire brought the Jews into the European sphere of influence.

The Jews were not Europeans with a funny religion. They were outsiders, and treated as such from the moment they lost their homeland until they returned, everywhere they lived - in Europe, in the Arab world, or under Ottoman rule they were always other, always second class at best.

From across the Atlantic, they’re white, we’re white, what’s the problem? And look, now they’re colonizing the brown people! But this is an incredibly myopic view, colored by American race relations rather than reality.

5

This is part of the myth. It was the mass of European immigrants that led to the establishment of a country as a homeland for Jewish people. That process took hold before WWII based on the belief that the land was largely unoccupied save for some nomadic tribes. It doesn’t matter whose eyes are looking at it, the creation of the country was justified based on British ownership of the land and their privilege to create a new country there in the same haphazard manner they had done throughout the Middle East. Whatever other view are considered, however much more history there is, the roots the roots in British Colonialism exist. There is no simple explanation of how the current situation came to be, but this part can’t be erased from the history.

6

You’re right, @iiandyiiii ! To my mind, an often-overlooked fact that confounds the colonialist narrative is that roughly half of Israeli Jews trace their ancestry to the Middle East and North Africa. Many came to Israel as refugees after 1948, after being dispossessed and expelled from their long-established homes in Arab countries.

7

This seems to take agency away from the Jews who created Israel. Yes, they had help. But it was their mission and their cause, and without these Zionist Jews there wouldn’t have been an Israel. Jews created Israel for the safety of Jews. It wasn’t created by Britain or anyone else.

8

Also, the idea that Jews would want to stay in Europe, which had, broadly speaking, been trying to annihilate them for centuries (and almost succeeded!) is ridiculous. In the early 20th, Europe was quite reasonably seen by most Jews as the last place they would want to live.

9

This is just untrue. The British announced their intent to support the already existing Zionist project in the Ottoman lands they were about to take hold of all the way back in 1917.

The British were recognizing an already existing reality (and they dragged their feet about actually relinquishing their hold over the region until after WW2). The British and the forming Israeli state were by no means friendly, with Jews in the territory extremely angry at the British for maintaining their colonial hold on the region until WW2 started and the Nazis became a bigger threat. And hostilities resumed once the war ended.

10

This IMO is well put.

11

If by “well put” you mean “completely divorced from reality” then I agree.

The Zionist project predates British involvement in the region. To pretend otherwise is revisionist history.

12

Fine. I have no expectation of persuading you other than you believe. Carry on with your “debate.”

13

Without bringing any facts (or even challenging any), you’re unlikely to persuade anyone.

14

…this isn’t a matter of “belief” but of objective historical fact. The British signed the Balfour Declaration in 1917, when they had just taken control of the region. They didn’t do so out of a fondness for Jews or because they felt guilty about the Germans committing the Holocaust in a couple of decades. They were recognizing an existing reality, namely significant Jewish settlement in the region, with the permission of the Ottomans.

15

Tel Aviv was founded in 1909. I would love if it @Dinsdale or @TriPolar could explain how the British, mighty as they were, managed to do this 7 years before the Sykes-Picot Agreement gave them control of the region.

16

Thank for your excellent OP, andy. It sums up the relevant history very well.

This post, however

You’ve already been told once that Jews aren’t Europeans, please pay attention. Europeans are the people who spent most of the last couple thousand years trying to kill us.

The immigration of Jews into Palestine occurred because most Jews weren’t safe in the places where they lived, not because they were all inflamed with Zionist ideology. Very few Jews living in stable democracies which recognized them as citizens ever decided to pack up and go to Palestine.

The independence of Israel was won by the Israeli army. Britain, the US, the UN, and the USSR were quick to recognize Israel once the war was won, but none of them actually lifted a finger to help while it was going on, and they don’t deserve the least bit of credit/blame for the creation of Israel.

17

The “existing reality” is that the Jewish population in Palestine in the late Ottoman period was about 5% cite. It’s really not reflective of reality to attempt to weave an aura of inevitability around the national aspiration of a small slice of immigrants. It’s obvious that the UK took the part of that small minority to advance its own geopolitical and socio-ethnic goals.

Not to say that Israel shouldn’t have some place in Palestine, but one can’t help but wonder how it might have been negotiated differently as a regional matter and not as Europe’s chessboard.

18

I suppose you could argue (which on preview it seems HMSU is trying to do) that the British are responsible, since they shouldn’t have allowed so many Jews to immigrate in the first place, but to the extent they did try to restrict Jewish immigration, they weren’t notably successful at it anyway.

19

Exactly. Much more formative to Zionism than the Holocaust (which happened after Zionism was pretty much fully formed and merely lended it urgency and legitimacy after the fact) was the Dreyfus Affair, which proved to the Jews of Europe that despite lofty Enlightenment language that preached inclusiveness, we would never truly belong among the Europeans.

20

Do the Ottomans still exist in this scenario? Does (Pan)Arab Nationalism?