The silence of the ‘liberal’ West on Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza is directly linked to colonialism and Israel’s role as the macebearer of imperialism. Although formal empires have ceased to exist, the West’s colonial apathy continues. The first ‘political’ moment of Israel’s creation was the Balfour Declaration of 1917. Geopolitically speaking, the Declaration was the result of the churning in the British foreign office regarding the fate of the region after the collapse of the Ottoman empire. On the eve of the First World War, Chaim Weizmann, a leading Zionist who went on to become the first president of Israel, saw freedom of settlement without the political demand of a Jewish State to be sufficient as the ‘minimum demand’ of Zionists. The House of Rothschild, which was opposed to British entry in the war at first, too saw the impracticability of a Jewish State within the Ottoman realm. Turkey’s decision to join the Central Powers led to a turnabout in the position of the Rothschilds. The subsequent partition of the Ottoman empire became a natural agenda for Britain, creating a situation that the Zionists could exploit.
In his many letters, Weizmann waxed eloquent about an arrangement along the lines of Egypt. He wrote, ‘‘The Jews take over the country; the whole burden of organisation falls on them, but for the next ten or fifteen years they work under temporary British protectorate ... If the British Government would accept such a view, it would not be difficult for us to prepare and to present the required guarantees, both in form of means and men…’’
Another Zionist, Theodor Herzl, the father of modern Zionism, had deep reservations against criticising imperialism. Contrary to the received notion that Herzl published his famous essay, “The Jewish State”, as an enraged response to the exacerbation of anti-Semitism after the Dreyfus Affair (wherein, Dreyfus, a Jewish army officer, was accused of being a German spy, leading to a subsequent witch-hunt trial and mob hysteria against the Jews), he took the opportunity to declare that ‘‘the Jews seek protection from the socialists and the destroyers of the present civil order...Truly they are not Jews any more… They will probably become the leaders of European anarchism.’’ Instead of fighting anti-Semitism right at the place of its unfolding and within the context of Germanic-Franco imperialism, Herzl’s suggestion for the Jews was to leave and have their own State. Surprisingly, he declared, ‘‘the anti-Semites will be our most dependable friends ... our allies’’ and went on to meet another imperialist in the Land of the Knout — Czarist Russia’s interior minister, Vyacheslav von Plehve. Herzl argued before him that taking the Jews out of Russia would go a long way in weakening the revolutionary movement. This was the only time when Herzl was correct as many of the top leaders of the Bolshevik Revolution — Trotsky, Zinoviev, Radek, Kamenev, among others — were Jews. When Plehve orchestrated the Kishinev pogrom of Jews, Herzl visited the place. Instead of denouncing the act, he felt a sense of remorse when told about the political radicalisation of Jews against Czarism.
The creation of the State of Israel after the ‘conquest’ of Palestine, writes Edward Said, “was ... the most successful and to date the most protracted of many such European projects since the Middle Ages.” A typical form of colonial logic is that the political and economic success of Israel, albeit with US aid, is deemed as a success of European Jews in Asian backwaters. The logic of ‘improvement’, which has its origin in John Locke’s justification of colonisation of the New World by European upstarts, influences the Zionist mindscape. For instance, after the Balfour Declaration, when Zionist engineers went to Palestine, they found that there were no industries beyond a manpower of five. Exports and agriculture had languished in a state of primitivity. In the 1930s, Zionist archaeologists worked hard to establish that during the (Christian) Byzantine era, the land was flourishing. Cumulatively, all this provided an epistemic justification for settler expansionism. Colonial calls for ‘conquest of labour’ and ‘redemption of the land’ resonated in the writings of both the Zionist Right and Socialist Zionists.
After its creation, Israel became the geopolitical cat’s-paw of imperialism. Its first test of worth was the joint invasion (with Britain and France) of Egypt to recover control of the Suez Canal. Another important — yet neglected — angle of the Nakba was the creation of a cheap Palestinian labour pool for corporations like Aramco that had a substantial investment from American corporations. From 2% in 1949, Palestinians constituted 17% of Aramco’s workforce.
Israel’s attack on Egypt and Syria in 1967, two countries that were reluctant to obey US diktats, helped imperialism in neutralising the last flickers in the flame of secular, pan-Arab nationalism — Nasserism and Baathism. It must also be remembered that this was the time of the Vietnam War that occupied over 500,000 US forces in Indo-China. In one way, the Israeli invasion helped the US by taking up its job as a hired gun.
The bombing of Iraq in 1981 — the Osirak attack — on the pretence that Saddam Hussein had acquired nuclear weapons served as a dress rehearsal of the farce that marked the US invasion of Iraq two decades later. At first, the Osirak attack had enraged the US administration. But Ronald Reagan’s affinity with the Jewish State in a strategically important yet hostile ‘Muslim’ region led him to justify Israeli belligerence as the result of Iraq’s past history of never signing a ceasefire or recognising Israel.
Outside the region, Israel supported the apartheid regime of South Africa. It began with the South African supply of French-made arms to Israel during the 1967 war, possibly on America’s insistence. Later, Israel provided South Africa with electrical fences to ward off guerilla infiltration by the anti-apartheid African National Congress. In South America, Israel trained soldiers in the US-backed Augusto Pinochet regime in Chile. In Guatemala, Israel provided weapons to the right-wing military dictatorship to slaughter the indigenous population.
The current US president, Joe Biden, had declared in 1986 that “If Israel didn’t exist, we would have to invent it.” The meaning of the declaration is there to stay for a long time to come even if it means the denial of the Palestinian State and the persistent threat of annihilation of the Palestinian people.
Shubham Sharma is the author of Against the Current
