Challenging the settler-colonialism debate on zionism and Israel - opinion

I ventured into hostile territory recently. Intellectual hostile territory, that is.

I read an article that appeared in Issue 60 of Theory and Criticism, a journal devoted to “theoretical thought and critical study.” It is published by the Van Leer Institute in Jerusalem, which “fosters innovative interdisciplinary research in the humanities and social sciences,” according to its website. It furthermore “develops new ways of addressing questions of global concern that have special import for Israeli society and the region.” That means it sees itself as initiating involved engagement.

The authors of the article are Ariel Handel, a faculty member of Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, Jerusalem’s Urban Design program, and Moriel Ram, currently a visiting research fellow at the University of Central London (and a lecturer in politics of the global south at Newcastle University). Handel has previously authored a paper published in Political Geography titled “Violent dwelling: Settler colonialism and domicide.” Ram’s research interests lie at the intersection between militaristic geographies of death, urban geopolitics of faith, and medical spatialities of health. ​

One line in their article, “What follows settler-colonialism?” caught my eye. 

It is not that I am unaware of the theme of “settler-colonialism.” On one of my bookshelves at home is the 1973 English version of Maxime Rodinson’s Israel: A Colonial-Settler State? – Rodinson, a Jewish Marxist, viewed Zionism as a capitalist European venture and his analysis’ conclusion is that Europe’s Jewish bourgeoisie, weaker than those who were not Jewish, felt threatened and feared antisemitism. As a result, in the spirit of the times, embraced Zionism.

The literature on the subject of settler-colonialism is enormous. There are journals. There are conferences. There are books. There are hundreds of engaged scholars. There is a special vocabulary with terms such as “territorialization,” and references to “the bourgeoisification of the Green Line” and “homeland tourism as a diasporization strategy.” 

There is, to echo author Tuvia Tenenbom’s observation on the “peace industry” in his book Catch the Jew! an academic industry in categorizing Zionism as a form of settler-colonialism in quite a negative framework. The Academia online website offered me 1,155 papers that discuss “settler colonial studies.” This conceptualizing is not just theoretical. It needs to be understood that, as per Patrick Wolfe’s 2006 formulation, settler colonialism is seen as a “logic of elimination” with territory being its “specific, irreducible element.” It seeks to eradicate all indigenous presence and access to a territory by asserting sovereignty and claiming space. In short, Israel is bad.

Today's public thinks in black and white

Perceived this way, it is clear why the pro-Palestine crowd has managed to whip up such violent reactions this past year among its ranks of supporters and why the charge of “genocide” is so prevalent. Whereas, in the past, the frenzied mobs that stormed the Bastille or marched on the Winter Palace came from lower classes,  the contemporary Marxist anti-Israel masses come from the universities and the wealthier classes, such as James Carlson, arrested at Columbia University, who paid $2.3 million for his Brooklyn home.

In A sense, the Marxist academic analysis of Rodinson and of the many who followed his direction is echoed in the line I caught in Handel and Ram’s article. They write, “This article does not deal solely with settler-colonialism in its entirety. It deals with Israel/Palestine: the settler-colonialism of refugees that itself created a massive refugeedom...” That Israelis would compose that line is staggering. Did their early education skip the Jewish people’s history in the Land of Israel, both during the 1,000 years of various forms of political independence and sovereignty and the subsequent 1,800 years of the loss of that independence and sovereignty? Are they ignorant of the constant Jewish presence that was in the country? Or are they purposefully ignoring the facts?

Theories, however, need to be proven and not just pronounced.

The call to be Zionists did not start with Moses Hess (1812-1875) and Theodor Herzl (1860-1904) or even Rabbi Zvi Hirsch Kalischer (1795-1874) and Rabbi Yehuda ben Shlomo Alkalai (1798-1878) a few decades earlier. Moreover, Jews did not need to be refugees to return to the land. The Jews sought to remain in Judea after the fall of the Betar fortress (on Tisha B’Av, 135 CE) throughout the centuries of occupation, repression, and economic deprivation.

Through the centuries of exile, the psalmist’s grievance: “How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land?” and the fervent commitment “If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning” were never forgotten. Jews always returned to the land in every century, such as the sages of Babylon, the Karaite “Mourners of Zion,” the rabbis of Paris and London in the 13th century, the kabbalists exiled from Spain to Safed in the 15th century, the 18th-century hassidim, and the pupils of the Vilna Gaon in the early 19th century.

The so-called “false messiahs” including 8th-century Obadiah (Ishaq ibn Ya’qub al-Isfahani) David Alroy (b. 1160), Shlomo Molcho (1500-1532), David Reuveni (1490-1541), Shabbatai Tzvi (1626-1676) and others all sought to return Jews to the Land of Israel, even by force of arms. The conquerors of the Jewish homeland came – and most went. Romans, Byzantines, Persians, Crusaders, and Mamluks. It was the Muslim Arabs that became a permanent presence after their invasion of Jerusalem in 638 CE, then under the occupation of the Ottoman Empire.

Why do Handel and Ram and the dozens of other anti-Israel settler-colonialism academics choose to ignore all this history? And why, given that the Arab Muslim presence resulted from the 7th-century wars of Muslim expansionism and conquest and that those Muslims sought to replace the indigenous Jewish population, are they not considered settler-colonialists?

If indeed, as Handel and Ram quote in their article, there is a consensus that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict may only end following complete Israeli decolonization and the formation of a Palestinian state in its place, why cannot that praxis be applied by Zionists? That is, in reverse?

Why cannot they accept the reality of Zionism as the Jewish liberation movement and that Israel is the victory over Arab-Muslim colonization?

The writer is a researcher, analyst, and opinion commentator on political, cultural, and media issues.