Israel and ‘Settler-Colonialism’

Alan Johnson is an English journalist who edits the online journal Fathom. In 2021, he responded to the charge made by 100 celebrities, mostly British, but with a smattering of Americans. These included Ken Loach, Susan Sarandon, Peter Gabriel, Mark Rylance, and others who were attempting to delegitimize the Jewish state by calling it a “settler-colonial” enterprise. Johnson wasn’t having it. His thoughtful response is here: “‘Can’t You See He’s Fooled You All?’: An Open Letter to Peter Gabriel et al explaining why Israel is not a ‘Settler Colonial’ society,” by Alan Johnson, Fathom, November 2021:

…Everything one needs to know in order to properly understand the conflict (and so make a useful contribution to its resolution) is erased by the ‘settler colonialism’ label. It misses everything that distinguishes the Jewish return to Palestine from White European Settler Colonialism. Here is a short list of the differences.

First, the intimate Jewish relationship to the land

The ‘settler colonialism’ paradigm misses everything that is historically and religiously distinctive about the Jewish relationship to the land of Israel/Palestine. That relationship is utterly unlike anything you can find in the societies usually identified as ‘settler colonial’. The Jews were returning to a land that had been theirs, in which their religion was born, their temple built, and their Matriarchs and Patriarchs walked. A land that was at the absolute centre of Judaism and Jewish peoplehood. The land from which they had been forcibly expelled. Oh, and to a Jerusalem in which they had been a majority since the 19^th century. That’s your first huge difference, right there. If it were only that, that would be enough to make the label ‘settler colonialism’ completely ridiculous, one of those ideas that as George Orwell said, are so idiotic you can only get the intellectuals to believe in them.

But it isn’t only that.

Second, the exceptional history of Jewish persecution

The ‘settler colonialism’ paradigm erases the crushing material weight of Europe’s antisemitic history as a driver in the rise of Zionism and the creation of the Jewish state. See: the collapse of the post-1789 liberal and emancipatory society, the vicious backlash (‘high’ intellectual and ‘low’ popular) against the limited inclusion of Jews in European societies in the late 19^th century, and the radicalisation of European antisemitism in the 20^th century culminating in the Holocaust….

Beginning during the 1948 war and ending in the mid-1950s, about 850,000 Jews fled from Arab lands, leaving all of their property accumulated over centuries behind. In fact, more Jews fled Arab lands than Arabs fled from Mandatory Palestine and Israel. Fewer than 700,000 Arabs — they would not be transformed until the mid-1960s into “Palestinians” — left Mandatory Palestine/Israel from late 1947 to the end of the war in 1949. Ilan Pappe is a far-left Israeli historian who has been attacking the Jewish state for the past 30 years. He is the Director of Palestine Studies at the University of Exeter. His obsession with delegitimizing the Jewish state makes him a fit subject for the psychiatrists. His work has been exposed by several of his fellow historians, including the redoubtable Benny Morris, as “sloppy” and “full of lies.”

The ‘settler colonialism’ paradigm treats a tragic, and as yet unresolved, national question as if it is a Hollywood movie, with much cheering and booing, sanctifying and anathematising. That’s why, despite your intentions, the ‘settler colonialism’ paradigm is an obstacle to the Palestinian National Movement.  As President Biden recently pointed out, the Palestinians must say unequivocally that they acknowledge the right of Israel to exist as an independent Jewish state. The ‘settler colonialism’ paradigm pushes the Palestinians and their allies in the opposite direction, egging them on to take maximalist positions that make a final status agreement impossible.

The Jews in Israel are not some group of settler-colonialists having no connection to the land, and sent out to colonize it in order to extract whatever economic benefits they could from the land itself and from its pre-existing population. The Land of Israel was in the mid-to-late 1800s a place of “desolation and waste,” as Mark Twain described it, a place where one could travel for miles and not see another human being. It had no natural resources, indeed no wealth of any kind to be exploited by “colonists.” Nor was there a mother country to whom the Zionist pioneers could look to, the way English colonists in India looked to Great Britain, or French colonists in North Africa looked to France. Their “mother country” was the place they were moving to, not leaving from — Israel.

The great colonial-settlers of the world, the most successful imperialists in the history of the world, are the Muslim Arabs. They have conquered vast territories, from the Atlantic to the Gulf, territories, suppressing the natives, and causing many of them to convert to Islam in order to avoid having to endure the status of dhimmis, with its many disabilities, including the requirement to pay the onerous jizyah, a capitation tax non-Muslims paid in order to be free of Muslim violence. Many non-Arab and non-Muslim peoples have been victims of Arab supremacism — the Berbers, the Copts, the Assyrians, the Christians both Orthodox and Catholic, the Kurds, the Jews. Some of the conquered peoples, now speaking Arabic, assumed Arabic names and convinced themselves that they too were Arabs; the most successful part of Arab imperialism was the way its victims ended up assimilating to their conquerors. Now the Arabs have 22 states — far more than any other people — and if they and the chanting pro-Hamas mobs have their way, a 23rd Arab state of “Palestine” will replace the single Jewish state of Israel.