Conclusion: |
The Settler Colonial |
In 2017, the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip will have lasted for fifty years. After such a long period, the term “occupation” becomes somewhat redundant and irrelevant. Two generations of Palestinians have already lived under this regime. Although they themselves will still call it occupation, what they are living through is rooted in something else much harder to defeat or change—colonization. The term colonization, as I noted in the opening chapters, is not easily applied to the present—it is more often than not associated with past events. This is why, with the help of recent and exciting research, scholars writing on Israel are more frequently using another term: settler colonialism.
Colonialism can be described as the movement of Europeans to different parts of the world, creating new “white” nations where indigenous people had once had their own kingdoms. These nations could only be created if the settlers employed two logics: the logic of elimination— getting rid by all means possible of the indigenous people, including by genocide; and the logic of dehumanization—regarding the non-Europeans as inferior and thus as not deserving the same rights as the settlers. In South Africa these twin logics led to the creation of the Apartheid system, founded officially in 1948, the same year that the Zionist movement translated the same logics into an ethnic cleansing operation in Palestine.
As this book attempts to show, from a settler colonial perspective events such as the occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, the Oslo Process, and the disengagement from Gaza in 2005 are all part of the same Israeli strategy of taking as much of Palestine as possible with as few Palestinians in it as possible. The means of achieving this goal have changed over time, and it remains uncompleted. However, it is the main fuel that feeds the fire of the conflict.
In this manner, the horrific connection between the logics of dehumanization and elimination, so apparent in the spread of European settler colonialism throughout the world, first found its way into the authoritarian states of the Middle East. It was ruthlessly manifest, among a multitude of other examples, in the destruction of the Kurds by Saddam Hussein as well as in the punitive actions carried out by the Assad regime in 2012. It was then also employed by groups opposing that regime: the worst example being the genocidal policies of the Islamic State.
This barbarization of human relations in the Middle East can only be stopped by the people of the region themselves. However, they should be aided by the outside world. Together the region should return to its not so distant past, when the guiding principle was “live and let live.” No serious discussion about ending human rights abuses in the region as a whole can bypass a conversation about the 100 years of human rights abuses in Palestine. The two are intimately connected. The exceptionalism enjoyed by Israel, and before that by the Zionist movement, makes a mockery of any Western critique of human rights abuses in the Arab world. Any discussion of the abuse of the Palestinians’ human rights needs to include an understanding of the inevitable outcome of settler colonial projects such as Zionism. The Jewish settlers are now an organic and integral part of the land. They cannot, and will not, be removed. They should be part of the future, but not on the basis of the constant oppression and dispossession of the local Palestinians.
We have wasted years talking about the two-states solution as if it had any relevance to the issue described above. But we needed that time to persuade both Israeli Jews and the world at large that when you found a state—even one with a thriving culture, a successful high-tech industry, and a powerful military—on the basis of dispossessing another people, your moral legitimacy will always be questioned. Confining the question of legitimacy only to the territories Israel occupied in 1967 will never resolve the issue at the heart of the problem. Of course it will help if Israel withdraws from the West Bank, but there is a possibility that it will just monitor the region in the same way it has policed the Gaza Strip since 2006. This will not hasten an end to the conflict, it will just transform it into a conflict of a different kind.
There are deep layers of history that will need to be addressed if a genuine attempt is to be made at a resolution. After World War II, Zionism was allowed to become a colonialist project at a time when colonialism was being rejected by the civilized world because the creation of a Jewish state offered Europe, and West Germany in particular, an easy way out of the worst excesses of anti-Semitism ever seen. Israel was the first to declare its recognition of “a new Germany”—in return it received a lot of money, but also, far more importantly, a carte blanche to turn the whole of Palestine into Israel. Zionism offered itself as the solution to anti-Semitism, but became the main reason for its continued presence. The “deal” also failed to uproot the racism and xenophobia that still lies at the heart of Europe, and which produced Nazism on the continent and a brutal colonialism outside of it. That racism and xenophobia is now turned against Muslims and Islam; since it is intimately connected to the Israel–Palestinian question, it could be reduced once a genuine answer to that question is found.
We all deserve a better ending to the story of the Holocaust. This could involve a strong multicultural Germany showing the way to the rest of Europe; an American society dealing bravely with the racial crimes of its past that still resonate today; an Arab world that expunges its barbarism and inhumanity …
Nothing like that could happen if we continue to fall into the trap of treating mythologies as truths. Palestine was not empty and the Jewish people had homelands; Palestine was colonized, not “redeemed”; and its people were dispossessed in 1948, rather than leaving voluntarily. Colonized people, even under the UN Charter, have the right to struggle for their liberation, even with an army, and the successful ending to such a struggle lies in the creation of a democratic state that includes all of its inhabitants. A discussion of the future, liberated from the ten myths about Israel, will hopefully not only help to bring peace to Israel and Palestine, but will also help Europe reach a proper closure on the horrors of World War II and the dark era of colonialism.