5 Israel

Shabi

The common leftist view of Israel’s origins as colonial is borne out by the nation’s founding fathers describing it in these terms, while the Palestinians already living in that land experienced it as such in forced expulsions and dispossession. That same expansionist logic, one that violently displaces Palestinians, continues to this day in the illegal Jewish settlements network beyond Israel’s internationally recognised borders and into the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem.

But this obscures the thing that propelled so many European Jews into Palestine in the first place: centuries of endless European antisemitism culminating in the Holocaust. There would be no Jewish national project in Israel had there been no deadly antisemitism racing across Europe at that time. The Palestinian intellectual Edward Said expressed this duality in Israel’s formation by describing Palestinians as “victims of victims, the refugees of the refugees”.

We can add to that the experiences of Jews who had lived in Arab countries for millennia, with no reason to leave, yet ended up as the socioeconomically disadvantaged majority Jewish population in Israel. Mostly free of the pogroms that were a feature of Christian Europe, these communities were uprooted by a pincer of competing forces: Jewish nationalism in Israel and the Arab nationalisms of countries such as Iraq, trying to shake off the yoke of British imperialism.

None of this justifies the ongoing dispossession of Palestinians, or cancels their right to the same freedoms all humans deserve. Instead, it introduces a universalist understanding of antiracism, to complement the analysis of this conflict as a relentless power imbalance between oppressor and oppressed. It means we can view the Palestinian Nakba (catastrophe), the Holocaust and the exodus of Jews from Arab lands as a tangle of communities caught in the expanse of European colonialism and extreme racial thinking. It opens up the possibility of a morally and politically coherent view of different racialised minorities, even while our experiences take distinct paths. It enables a rejection of any zero-sum competition over suffering and a rejection of the idea that the safety of one people can ever come at the expense of another. It allows us, in other words, to imagine a shared, equal future, in which everyone is free.

Shabi (2023) To understand Israel-Palestine, first understand the history of racism and antisemitism