Elham Kadkhodaie, assistant professor at Faculty of World Studies, Tehran Univ.
In 1897, in the city of Basel, Switzerland, a group of individuals gathered to lay the foundations of a state for “a nation that did not yet exist”.[1] The official and unofficial efforts of this movement ultimately led to the establishment of the Israeli regime in the Palestinian land — a regime that is increasingly trying to deny its abnormality and illegitimacy. This abnormality and the existence of many contradictions between the true nature of Israel and how it tries to represent itself has compelled Israel and its supporters around the world to focus their budget and energy on the “normalization” project. Contradictions such as being democratic or Jewish, being colonial or anti-colonial, and being Eastern or Western have posed serious problems to defining a clear national identity and presenting a favorable image of the Zionist regime to the world.
One of the abnormal aspects of Israel is its strange relationship with colonialism and colonial powers throughout history. The phenomenon of Zionism was, in fact, a response by European Jews to the problem of discrimination and the challenge of Jewish identity. It tried to provide a therapeutic prescription derived from the same societies that created the origin of the disease. In other words, the Zionists prescribed Jewish racism and nationalism to save the Jews from the extreme racism and nationalism of Europe. This could not be implemented without the use of colonial tools and the support of the imperialist powers. Familiarizing oneself with the perception and mindset of the Westerners about Islamic countries during the colonial era, a phenomenon that is well described by the criticisms of orientalism, shows how the foundation of political Zionism was laid. That Zionist activists try to depict as legitimate the creation of a state for themselves in the middle of Islamic territories by completely denying the rights of the people living in that area comes from how conquest, occupation, and exploitation of nations were normalized throughout the history of colonialism. That is why calling the Israeli regime a “settler-colonial state” is one of the most accurate descriptions of it. Of course, the history of the Ottoman government’s concessions to Western countries was also a suitable ground for such aggression, in such a way that years before the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the occupation of Palestine, European powers were present in Palestine under the pretext of supporting the Christian minority and facilitating trade relations. And they received extensive privileges from this empire. These concessions and contracts, which were known as capitulation, had in practice led to the formation of a kind of state within the state.
In his extensive efforts to materialize the Zionism project, Theodor Herzl began to hold dialogues with Britain to take over the Al-Arish region of the Sinai desert, with Portugal for an area in Mozambique, with Belgium for a part of Congo, and with Italy to seize a part of Tripoli, in addition to meeting and negotiating with the Ottoman sultan. These dialogues confirm the notion that Zionism completely originated from the colonial approach of Europe, but considering that it did not have an independent government and army like European countries, it had to get the support of these governments to carry out the occupation and colonization in its stead. According to Pakistani thinker Shahid Alam, an important aspect of Israel’s exceptionalism was the success of Zionism in convincing colonial Britain to carry out the occupation and colonization phase for it. Of course, the Zionists, with their familiarity with the political atmosphere of the West, were able to convince them that they would be a good representative of the Western civilization in the backward and savage — as depicted in the Orientalist perspective — world of West Asia. Herzl writes in The Jewish State: “We should there form a portion of a rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism. We should as a neutral State remain in contact with all Europe, which would have to guarantee our existence”.[2] Ehud Barak, former Prime Minister of Israel, described Israel in an interview as “a villa in the middle of a jungle.”[3] In other words, the Zionists managed to change their image in the discriminatory social classification of Europe from being Easterners or “the others” to being civilized Westerners who can protect the interests of the European powers in West Asia.
The interaction of colonial Britain with Zionism was not limited to occupation of Palestine and formalization of the creation of a “national home” for the Jews in this land as in the form of the Balfour Declaration. During the guardianship years, Britain prepared Zionist individuals and institutions to achieve political independence with the type of interaction it had with them. Granting them autonomy in various matters such as healthcare, education, training, and providing them with military equipment are examples of this.[4] In other words, the Zionists, despite not having an official government, tried to gain experience and develop efficient workforce through taking the executive affairs of the Jewish minority in Palestine into their hands by creating institutions and cooperating with Britain.[5] This autonomy found legal legitimacy by formalizing the Zionist institutions in the text of the guardianship document approved by the League of Nations.[6]Article 4 of the document talks about creating Jewish Agency with the purpose of cooperating with the government in economic and social affairs relating to “Jewish national home” in Palestinian territories.[7] This is in the case that, no similar legitimacy or formalization in this document is given to Palestinian institutions (Khalidi). Although Haganah, the military branch of Zionist pseudo-government, was apparently clandestine and illegal, the legal military cooperation between the Zionists and Britain in the form of Palestine Police Force actually provided military training for the Zionists. Also during the Arab uprising in 1936 [known as The Arab Revolt], Orde Wingate, senior British Army officer, created Special Night Squads to train and use Zionist forces in violent suppression of the Palestinians. The impact of this cooperation had been to the extent that Moshe Dayan, former Minister of Defense of Israel, said of Wingate, “He taught us everything we know”.[8]On the other hand, the Palestinians, who were the original inhabitants of the land and of course constituted the majority, were not only deprived of such privileges, but Britain prevented the emergence of effective leaders and the formation of Palestine as an independent political unit through various interferences, intensification of tribal rivalries among famous and influential families, and severe and violent suppression of protest movements. Some of the inhumane suppression methods used by the Zionist regime today, such as collective punishment and house demolition, are the methods used by the British rulers of Palestine. The most violent and effective one occurred during the Arab uprising in 1936 in which the Palestinian popular movement as a protest against the British occupation and the Jews’ immigration to their country was severely suppressed and all possible Palestinian leaders of resistance were either executed or exiled. Therefore, in 1948, when the British left Palestine and the Israeli regime declared its independence, the regime practically acquired all the equipment of an independent and efficient (and of course repressive) government.
An important point in the history of Zionism, and what makes us call Israel’s relationship with colonialism “strange,” is the pragmatic encountering of the phenomenon of Zionism with the colonial powers, meaning that the Zionists cooperate with Western powers to the extent that it is in line with their interests. Therefore, amid the intensification of the Palestinians’ struggle against the occupation of their land, the indiscriminate immigration of European Jews to Palestine, and the restriction of immigration by the British, the Zionists rose up to oppose and confront the British forces. This encounter turned violent, to the extent that the Zionist military forces in practice used terrorism to achieve their goals, and finally, they forced the British to leave this land by increasing the cost of their presence in Palestine. However, the Zionists tried to justify it in their narrative, presenting this terrorism as a liberation struggle against colonialism, and Israel as the result of this anti-colonial struggle.
In the early years of the formation of Zionism and the beginning of Jewish immigration to Palestine, some naive thoughts were expressed such as the possibility of Palestinians and Jewish immigrants living peacefully together or the peaceful transfer of Palestinians to neighboring countries (which were inspired by colonialist misconceptions that had been institutionalized in Europe for many years — ideas that the humanity and agency of the Easterners ignored), but in fact, it was this force, violence, discrimination, and of course, legitimization based on sham legalization of British colonialism that made the formation of Israel possible. But what distinguishes Israel from the other colonial projects of European countries is not just its formation at a time when the official life of classic colonialism was coming to an end, but also the kind of its relationship with colonialism. The Zionists had to force a colonial government to colonize a land for them for the first time in history (Alam).
Of course, Israel’s dependence on and association with colonialism does not end with the declaration of independence of this regime in 1948. With the emergence of the United States of America as a global power and modern colonialism, the foreign policy activities of the Zionist regime focused on gaining the unlimited support of the US and forming a “special relationship” with it by introducing itself as a powerful base for the Western Front in the West Asia in the global struggle against communism. Operation Nickel Grass during the 1973 war and the continuous supply and transfer of hundreds of tons of military equipment to Israel by the US Air Force, while Egypt had dealt serious blows to this regime, are among examples of such unlimited support.
The relationship between Zionism and colonialism, whether in its traditional or modern form, is a mutual and changing relationship. Without the support of imperialist powers, the massive immigration of Jews to Palestine and the formation of the Israeli regime as well as its continued existence would not have been possible. On the other hand, without the existence of this regime “based on colonial settlement” in the region, the colonial countries would have faced serious problems to secure their interests in the region. Of course, more important than these issues is that the idea of Israel came from the Europeans’ racist, colonialist view. The logic of exclusive immigration based on ethnicity, settlement, creation, and preservation of the Jewish majority and the formation of the Jewish state is a logic that cannot be separated from the foundations of racial discrimination and colonialism whatsoever. After the six-day war of 1967 and the occupation of further lands by Israel, this entanglement between the colonialist logic and the nature of Israel could no longer be hidden and posed serious challenges not only internationally, but also in terms of identity and for the residents of the Zionist regime. Israel, which was an occupier and colonizer from the beginning, was no longer able to hide its colonial reality.
(The views expressed in this article are author's own and do not necessarily reflect those of Khamenei.ir.)
[1] Alam, M. Shahid. Israeli Exceptionalism: The Destabilizing Logic of Zionism. Palgrave, 2009.
[2] Herzl, Theodor. The Jewish State. Translated by Sylvie d'Avigdor, 1946.
[3] Eldar, A. “The Price of a Villa in the Jungle.” Haaretz, 30 Jan. 2006, https://www.haaretz.com/2006-01-30/ty-article/the-price-of-a-villa-in-the-jungle/0000017f-eda5-d0f7-a9ff-efe5356e0000
[4] Khalidi, Rashid. The Hundred Years' War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017. Henry Holt and Co., 2020.
[5] Hurewitz, J. C. (2022). The Struggle for Palestine. Plunkett Lake Press.
[6] UN Secretary-General & League of Nations. “Text of Mandate [for Palestine].” United Nations Digital Library, 18 Apr. 1947, https://digitallibrary.un.org/record/829707?ln=en
[7] UN Secretary-General & League of Nations. (1947). Question of Palestine: Text of Mandate . Retrieved from United Nations Digital Library: https://digitallibrary.un.org/record/829707?ln=en
[8] Weinthal, Benjamin. “Israeli General Slams ‘Antisemitic’ German Official for Defaming Israeli Hero.” Jerusalem Post, 12 Aug. 2022, https://www.jpost.com/diaspora/antisemitism/article-714601
