[Zionism emerged in response to 19th-century European antisemitism
— but its aims in Palestine drew upon Western colonial ideologies.
To present the current conflict as a timeless feud denies both
European responsibility and Palestine’s multiethnic hi]
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THE WEST’S LOVE FOR ISRAEL ERASES THE MIDDLE EAST’S REAL HISTORY
 
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Ussama Makdisi
November 29, 2023
Jacobin
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_ Zionism emerged in response to 19th-century European antisemitism
— but its aims in Palestine drew upon Western colonial ideologies.
To present the current conflict as a timeless feud denies both
European responsibility and Palestine’s multiethnic hi _

Press photograph from the Palestinian revolt of 1936–39, showing
Arabs arrested by the British police, April 5, 1939., Kedem /
Wikimedia Commons

 

The love of Zionism in the West has always had a troubled relationship
with genocide
[[link removed]].
Its origins as a political ideology lay in an era when European
empires routinely justified the exterminability of what they
considered to be inferior peoples and uncivilized barbarians.

The nineteenth-century European Zionist idea of implanting and
sustaining an exclusively Jewish nationalist state in multireligious
Palestine was a response to European racial antisemitism. But it was
also premised, from the outset, on the erasure of native Palestinian
history and the political significance of their centuries-old
belonging on their own land.

After the Nazi Holocaust of the European Jews, Western philozionism
was powerfully reinforced by a sense of guilt and empathy for the idea
of a Jewish state. Now, philozionism has come full course to
embrace genocide [[link removed]] in Gaza
in the name of defending this Jewish state.

In recent weeks, Western liberals and states have given overwhelming
backing for Israel’s “right to defend itself.” This shrill
support has barely wavered as Israel has methodically waged a
scorched-earth campaign for over a month, destroying tens of thousands
of homes, hospitals, schools, mosques, churches, and bakeries and
subjecting Gaza’s Palestinian refugee population to an
extraordinarily cruel collective punishment.

This latest installment of philozionism exposes more clearly than ever
the ruthless double standard that underlies it: Israeli history and
life are cherished; Muslim and Christian Palestinian history and life
are fundamentally devalued.

Double Standards

This double standard has a long history. Protestant enthusiasts and
theologians in Europe and North America embraced the idea of the
“return” of the Jews to biblical Palestine, but had no interest in
the actually existing, diverse population of contemporary Palestine.
The Zionist movement itself largely ignored the native Palestinian
population. Part of this was a fact of geography and history: Zionism
was born _not_ among the ancient Jewish communities of the East, but
in Eastern and Central Europe. Its leaders were not Arab or Eastern
Jews, but European Ashkenazi Jews. Its ethnoreligious nationalist
ideology was forged not by the pluralism of the Middle East but by the
competing racial and ethnic and linguistic nationalisms of Europe. The
racial antisemitism evident in the West was alien to the rhythms of
religious difference, discrimination, and coexistence so familiar to
the diverse inhabitants of the Ottoman Islamic East.

Israeli history and life are cherished; Muslim and Christian
Palestinian history and life are fundamentally devalued.

But, at least in part, the European Zionist project’s overlooking of
the native Palestinian population was based in racism. Indeed, it
developed as a colonial project. While leading Zionists grappled with
the racial antisemitism of Europe, they also expressed
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shared, contributed to, and circulated many of the foundational racist
tropes of nineteenth-century Western culture. That is, that the
non-West was manifestly inferior, and that Eastern peoples were more
primitive than Western ones; that the land of the indigenous peoples
was largely “empty” and thus open to colonization; and that
colonialism was salvation, and the removal of native peoples was
either inevitable or necessary because these peoples were racially and
mentally inferior, uncivilized, and thus without historical or ethical
value. One of the slogans of the Zionist movement was “A land
without a people for a people without a land.”

The racism inherent in this colonial Zionism was manifested in both
the Balfour Declaration of 1917 and the official charter of the
British Mandate of Palestine of 1922. Neither of these colonial
documents referred to Palestinians directly. Instead, they described
them as “non-Jewish communities” who paled in historical,
religious, and civilizational significance when compared to what they
identified as the more important “Jewish people.”

British foreign secretary Arthur Balfour himself explained the meaning
of this occlusion in a confidential memorandum in 1919. He admitted
there was little point pretending that the post–World War I notion
of self-determination could be reconciled with Zionism in Palestine,
through which mostly European Jews would be encouraged to settle and
colonize there and thus redeem what was habitually referred to as a
derelict land. Balfour wrote in 1919:

For in Palestine we do not propose even to go through the form of
consulting the wishes of the present inhabitants of the country. . . .
The four Great Powers are committed to Zionism. And Zionism, be it
right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age-long traditions, in
present needs, in future hopes, of far profounder import than the
desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that
ancient land [[link removed]].

But these “present inhabitants” had a real existence — and for
Zionist Jewish nationalists who wanted to build a Jewish state in
Palestine, it was unwelcome. Unlike the distant, academic Protestant
clergymen obsessed with biblical prophecies, colonial Zionists were
increasingly preoccupied with their far more secular “Arab”
question: how to transform a land actually inhabited by an
overwhelming majority of Arabs into an exclusively Jewish state.
Muslim and Christian Palestinians were seen, in other words, as a real
impediment to the successful unfolding of colonial Zionism. They had
to be skirted, avoided, repressed, removed from view, and ultimately
physically expelled.

The Zionist movement refused to change its fantasy of transforming a
multireligious land that had for centuries enjoyed profoundly organic
cultural, linguistic, religious, trade, and historical connections
with the lands that surrounded Palestine into a sovereign and
segregated Jewish state. Backed by their British imperial protectors,
the movement doubled down on its project to systematically colonize
Palestine.

In 1923, the Russian-born settler Vladimir Jabotinsky described
colonial Zionism as an “iron wall
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that would crush the spirit of the natives of Palestine. Behind this
“iron wall,” protected by the bayonets of the British empire,
Jabotinsky insisted that colonial Zionism could grow unfettered and
ultimately dispossess the natives no matter how much they protested.
He believed that only when the natives had given up all hopes of
resistance could Zionists hope to make peace with the “primitive”
Palestinians. Such callous attitudes toward the Palestinians led some
prominent European Zionists such as Hans Kohn to break decisively with
the movement in 1929. Kohn was shocked by the Zionist contempt for
native Palestinian national aspirations. He was also appalled by the
Zionist suppression of their just movement for political and national
freedom. “Zionism,” Kohn insisted at the time, “is not Judaism
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Kohn, however, was a voice crying in the wilderness. Following the
rise of the antisemitic and racist Nazis in Germany, many more
European Jews — who were blocked from emigrating to the United
States because of that country’s racist immigration laws — sought
refuge in Palestine. These refugees from Europe were quickly
conscripted into the increasingly militant Zionist nationalist cause,
along with many Eastern and Arab Jews who were native to Palestine and
the region. In the wake of a massive anticolonial uprising on the part
of the Palestinians that commenced in 1936, the British colonial
authorities drew up a highly prejudicial partition plan in 1937. This
scheme foreshadowed the fateful 1947 UN partition plan of Palestine.
Both were predicated on dispossessing the native Palestinian majority
of much of its land and homes to make way for a Jewish state.
Britain’s 1937 Peel partition plan, for example, recognized the
injustice of any partition to the Arab natives who owned the majority
of the land. With remarkable disingenuousness, it lauded the
proverbial “generosity
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the Arabs to justify their coerced role “at some sacrifice” to
themselves into solving the West’s “Jewish Problem.”

British and UN plans were predicated on dispossessing the native
Palestinian majority of much of its land and homes to make way for a
Jewish state.

The Nazi German Holocaust of European Jews and the concomitant growth
of the Zionist movement in British-occupied Palestine reinforced the
Western imperative to create a Jewish state at the expense of the
Palestinians. Although they rejected allowing the survivors of the
Holocaust into the United States, US politicians supported sending
Jewish displaced persons to Palestine in the name of decency and
humanitarianism. Zionist leaders and propagandists figured vastly more
prominently in immediate postwar thought and, crucially, in the
corridors of political power and decision-making in the West than did
their Arab counterparts. Native Palestinians were entirely shut out of
the decision-making process that directly affected them. In November
1947, the Western-dominated UN voted to partition Palestine and
establish a Jewish state, despite the fact that the overwhelming
majority of the population was Palestinian, and the vast mass of
historic Palestine was owned by Palestinians.

From Antisemitism to Philosemitism

The _Nakba_, or calamity, of 1948 soon resolved the problem of
Palestinians in a Jewish state. Before, during, and after the war of
1948, Zionist forces expelled well over eight hundred thousand
Palestinians to neighboring lands and expropriated their homes and
lands. Liberal Western states and leaders hailed this allegedly
miraculous transformation. One of the famous signatories of the
Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Eleanor Roosevelt
[[link removed]], for example, put the onus
of Palestinian dispossession on the Arabs themselves. She admired
Israel’s allegedly youthful spirit and castigated the Arabs for
their “inflexibility” toward Israel and blamed them ultimately for
their own dispossession. Palestinians were consistently depicted as
backward, primitive, irrational, and fanatical. The Zionists, by
contrast, were represented — and very much represented themselves
— as modern pioneers who redeemed an “empty” land. Edward Said
described this form of racism thus: “The transference of a popular
anti-Semitic animus from a Jewish to an Arab target was made smoothly,
since the figure was essentially the same.”

The post-Holocaust identification with Jews and Judaism —
“philosemitism” — became utterly entangled with philozionism. As
historian Daniel Cohen explains in his forthcoming book _Good Jews:
Philosemitism in Europe since the Holocaust_, for European
intellectuals and politicians the latter was a function of the former.
In the wake of World War II, the European philosophical, religious,
and moral rehabilitation of “man” was predicated on a recognition
of the history of antisemitism that had culminated with the rise of
Nazism. In Cohen’s reading, Jews were not seen as archetypical
victims of the West’s long prevailing racist worldview that
segregated humanity into superior and inferior races. Rather, they
were the victims of the distinct evil of antisemitism that was
conceptually and morally bifurcated from other forms of racism. Israel
represented an implied Western atonement for its own terrible past; as
a Jewish state, it received reparations from Germany
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In this philozionist turn, to love Jews and Judaism, therefore, was to
love the new state of Israel that was established in their name.
Palestinians did not even figure in this moral calculus.

In the wake of World War II, the European philosophical, religious,
and moral rehabilitation of ‘man’ — white and Western man of
course — was predicated on a recognition of the history of
antisemitism that had culminated with the rise of Nazism.

The Western liberal denial of an ancient, sustained, and meaningful
Palestinian relationship to Palestine has had profound effects. It led
to a series of philozionist commandments that shaped the contours of
postwar Eurocentric humanism. The first of these was not to question
Israel as a Jewish state, no matter what it did to the native Muslim
and Christian Palestinian survivors of the _Nakba_. To question the
inherently discriminatory nature of a Jewish state in a multireligious
land was tantamount to questioning the West’s own antisemitic past.
In the 1950s, Western liberals and leftists overwhelmingly and
enthusiastically supported Israel against its Arab enemies — trade
unions, radicals, socialists, and liberals alike enthused about the
new state [[link removed]]. The second
commandment was to regard Israel, unlike the Arabs, as an extension of
an idealized West
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classical music, European institutions, a modern army, pioneers
fighting savages, socialist kibbutzim, and above all, a young nation
that contrasted with the background images of squalid, nameless,
“Arab” refugees. Israel was what the West wanted and needed after
World War II: an emancipated part of itself allegedly purged of its
historical antisemitism. The third commandment was to make real
Palestinians unrelatable to Western humanism.

The reality on the ground for Palestinians
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vastly different. At the base of this edifice of postwar Western
humanism and values lay a people dispossessed by colossal injustice,
whose efforts to undo this injustice was slandered and shunned in the
West, and, most of all, a people devoured in the racist Western
imagination of an age-old feud between now pioneering Jews and their
evil Arab nemesis. In 1955, the great anti-colonial poet and writer
Aimé Césaire castigated Western “pseudo-humanism
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based on a “narrow and fragmentary, incomplete and biased and all
things considered, sordidly racist” conception of the “rights of
man.” Césaire was disgusted by how postwar European states and
societies were willing to finally condemn Hitler and antisemitism but
refused to abandon most of their colonial possessions without a bitter
and sustained fight.

Likewise, Césaire noted how the United States continued to uphold its
pervasive domestic system of racial segregation. While Europeans and
Americans were resolved to consign antisemitism to the past, they were
unable to acknowledge the degree to which the racial thinking of
Nazism was but one morbid and extreme expression of a centuries-old
Western discourse and practice of racial supremacy. Instead, by
exceptionalizing Nazi Germany, and isolating it from modern Western
culture and history, and by splitting the fight against antisemitism
from that of racism and colonialism more broadly, one could love
Israel and Jews and still hate Arabs and black people; one could love
the now largely _absent_ Jews of Europe and love them instead in
their new, and in the eyes of the Western antisemites, “proper”
home in Israel, Arabs be damned.

“Men in the Sun”

The Palestinians as people were quickly forgotten by the international
community. In Ghassan Kanafani’s poetic words, they became “men in
the sun
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— stateless and unprotected refugees who sought to rebuild their
shattered lives in desperate circumstances wherever they were able to
do so. They became wards of a UN-supervised regime of welfare called
the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) that pushed the
political rights for Palestinians firmly off the international agenda.
In the West, Arab and Muslim communities were either tiny or totally
marginalized. They had almost no penetration in Western institutions
of government, culture, or higher education.

The Zionist movement, in contrast, coalesced around the new state of
Israel, and steadily invested in mobilizing Jewish communities and
making Zionist ideology dominant among them: its axiom was that to be
Jewish was to be Zionist, and to feel, think, and believe that the
state of Israel represented the entirety of the Jewish people. The
Zionist movement also built up a massive lobbying
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with a strong presence in every major Western state, especially the
United States. The affective, positive, emotional relationship to
Israel was reinforced by a campaign of memorialization of
the Holocaust
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the liberal West that exploded after 1967. The flip side of the
memorialization of the Nazi genocide was the consistent elision of a
hugely consequential fact, namely that Palestinians collectively were
made to pay the heaviest price for the creation of a Jewish state on
their lands, despite the fact that they had no history of
Western-style racial antisemitism. Although Israel established
diplomatic relations with penitent, reparations-paying Germans and
cultivated anti-Jewish evangelical Christian zealots, it refused
categorically to deal justly with native Palestinians whom it
consistently, and mendaciously, depicted as antisemites at the same
time as it colonized their land.

Although the overtly expansionist Israeli state began to lose some of
its leftist allies after 1967, when it invaded and occupied East
Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, and the Golan Heights, it
easily maintained its liberal
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and added to them conservative and Christian Zionist
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US financial, political, military, and political support for Israel
has increased massively in the 1970s.

“Victims of the Victims”

Palestinians were out of sight and out of mind — until they were
not. The emergence
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Palestinian resistance and national liberation movements in the 1960s
was the first sustained attempt by Palestinians to break the silence
that surrounded their history and humanity since their expulsion in
1948 from their lands and from Western consciousness. But the more the
abandoned Palestinians stridently and even violently inserted
themselves into the international arena through revolutionary
proclamations, anti-colonial armed struggle, or even spectacular
hijackings, the more Western citizens ignorant of the realities of
modern Palestinian history, saw them only as outrageous terrorists.

Palestinians were out of sight and out of mind — until they were
not.

Although the Palestinians were galvanized and sustained by
anti-colonial solidarity from across the Third World that peaked with
Yasser Arafat’s famous speech at the UN in 1974, and the passage of
the UN resolution condemning Zionism as “a form of racism and racial
discrimination
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in 1975, the Palestinians were firmly denied Western empathy. The
powerful, rich, and militarily dominant Western world continued to
resolutely uphold Israel and to look past its flagrant racism against
its own Palestinian citizens and to take for granted the continuation
of its military rule over the millions of Palestinians in the West
Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip. The Palestinian paradox was
to be “terrorists” if they disturbed the state that oppressed
them, and to be terrorized if they did not.

The demonization of Palestinian resistance as evil terrorism was added
to a centuries-old genealogy of colonial and racist depictions of
indigenous and slave revolts in Asia, Africa, and the Americas. Each
of the great upwelling movements of repressed humanity had been met
with merciless suppression by the colonizers. Just in the North
American context, the list includes the slave revolution in Haiti in
the 1790s, Nat Turner’s revolt in Virginia, and the crushing of the
Sioux in the late nineteenth century. In the twentieth century, the
interwar Syrian and Palestinian anti-colonial uprisings of the 1930s
and a host of other later anti-colonial revolutions from Algeria to
Vietnam were similarly depicted as evil, irrational, demonic, and
luridly brutal.

Middle Eastern history is reduced to a Eurocentric drama familiar to
Western publics, in which the only significant actors are the Nazis,
Jewish innocent victims, and their American and allied saviors.

The Palestinians, though, have an added burden to contend with, for
they were oppressed by the archetypical victim in modern Eurocentric
Western consciousness. To be the “victims of the victims
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as Edward Said put it, makes the anti-colonial struggle of the
Palestinians almost Sisyphean. Decontextualized and dehistoricized,
Palestinian resistance against Israel state is also seen, felt, and
sensed as a terrible reincarnation of a demonic antisemitic past.

Such a view relocates Palestinian action from one rooted in their own
history and experience. It is reduced to a Eurocentric drama familiar
to Western publics, in which the only significant actors are the
Nazis, innocent Jewish victims, and their American and allied saviors.
It allows Zionists to believe themselves to be the real victims even
as Palestinians are being slaughtered today before the world. Israeli
historian Benny Morris captured this chilling form of narcissism
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published in 2004 in the Israeli newspaper _Haaretz_. “We are the
greater victims in the course of history,” Morris insisted at the
time, “and we are also the greater potential victim. Even though we
are oppressing the Palestinians, we are the weaker side here.”

 

Supporters of Israel in the West do not see Palestinians as resisting
a colonizing state that was built coercively on their land, that has
devastated their lives, brutalized them and their families, and
besieged, exiled, harassed, intimidated, humiliated, incarcerated, and
murdered them for decades with impunity. Rather, they think that
Palestinians kill Israelis simply because they hate Jews. Philozionism
holds that to “stand with” the colonizing state of Israel is not
to hate Palestinians but to love Jews; but to stand with the
Palestinian resistance and liberation is ipso facto not to love
Palestinians, humanity, justice, or freedom, but to hate Jews, and
even worse, to want to annihilate them again.

As Israel carries out its bloody genocide against the people of
Palestine, Western government support for Israel is staggering in its
outward passion for a Jewish state and its callousness for the quality
of Palestinian existence. The unhinged rage against Palestinian
solidarity across the West constitutes a modern-day witch hunt, a
frenzy of false accusations of antisemitism that continues to deny
Palestinian history, experience, and humanity. The crucible of Gaza,
however, exposes damning evidence of the moral and political failure
of colonial Zionism on the ground in Palestine. It exposes, as well,
the depravity of many of its secular and religious enthusiasts in the
West.

The earliest consequences of the love of Zionism in the West elided
Palestinians’ existence and pretended not to see their tribulations.
But now, the mutilated, broken, terrorized, and traumatized bodies of
Palestinians are in full view of the entire world.

This essay is an expansion of a shorter piece initially published
with _Middle East Eye_ on October 27, 2023.

_DR. USSAMA MAKDISI is Professor of History and Chancellor’s Chair
at the University of California Berkeley. He was previously Professor
of History and the first holder of the Arab-American Educational
Foundation Chair of Arab Studies at Rice University in Houston.
 During AY 2019-2020, Professor Makdisi was a Visiting Professor at
the University of California at Berkeley in the Department of History.
In 2012-2013, Makdisi was an invited Resident Fellow at the
Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (Institute for Advanced Study,
Berlin).  In April 2009, the Carnegie Corporation named Makdisi a
2009 Carnegie Scholar as part of its effort to promote original
scholarship regarding Muslim societies and communities, both in the
United States and abroad.  Makdisi was awarded the Berlin Prize and
spent the Spring 2018 semester as a Fellow at the American Academy of
Berlin._

_Professor Makdisi’s most recent book Age of Coexistence: The
Ecumenical Frame and the Making of the Modern Arab World was
published in 2019 by the University of California Press. He is also
the author of Faith Misplaced: the Broken Promise of U.S.-Arab
Relations, 1820-2001 (Public Affairs, 2010).  His previous books
include Artillery of Heaven: American Missionaries and the Failed
Conversion of the Middle East (Cornell University Press, 2008), which
was the winner of the 2008 Albert Hourani Book Award from the Middle
East Studies Association, the 2009 John Hope Franklin Prize of the
American Studies Association, and a co-winner of the 2009
British-Kuwait Friendship Society Book Prize given by the British
Society for Middle Eastern Studies._

_Makdisi is also the author of The Culture of Sectarianism:
Community, History, and Violence in Nineteenth-Century Ottoman
Lebanon (University of California Press, 2000) and co-editor
of Memory and Violence in the Middle East and North Africa (Indiana
University Press, 2006). He has published widely on Ottoman and Arab
history as well as on U.S.-Arab relations and U.S. missionary work in
the Middle East.  Among his major articles are “Anti-Americanism in
the Arab World: An Interpretation of Brief History” which appeared
in the Journal of American History and “Ottoman Orientalism” and
“Reclaiming the Land of the Bible: Missionaries, Secularism, and
Evangelical Modernity” both of which appeared in the American
Historical Review. Professor Makdisi has also published in
the International Journal of Middle East Studies, Comparative
Studies in Society and History, and in the Middle East Report._

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