Herodotus, widely considered as the father of history, mentioned the existence of Palaistinê between Phoenicia and Egypt, and still failed to condemn Hamas. Damn all historians! – An Anonymous Disappointed Liberal
But you are neither a Palestinian nor a Muslim. Why put yourself out there in this climate? – An Anonymous Sanctimonious Liberal
When I look at the partition of Palestine in 1947 and 1967, the ghost of India and Pakistan rise like smoke from charred buildings of Karachi and Kolkata. – Tithi Bhattacharya (A historian from partitioned Bengal)
The solidarity that is needed today will have to be built primarily by the peoples themselves. Only then can hope be reborn…– Samir Amin (Egyptian-French economist of Marxist persuasion)
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On 7 October 2023, the Hamas led an attack on the Gaza envelope, which is part of the southern district of Israel, killing reportedly 1200 people. The Hamas is a political and military organization governing the Gaza Strip of Palestinian territories that are under occupation by Israel. Many considered the military incursions of 7 October as an outright terrorist attack on civilians. Yet, others called this a ‘jail-break’ in terms of a reaction to Palestinian people bearing the burden of around seventy-five years of displacement, apartheid, surveillance, and endless other atrocities. Majority of inhabitants in the Gaza Strip are descendants of refugees who were displaced from the region which became Israel after the 1948 Arab–Israeli War. Nearly two million Palestinians have been notoriously cornered into this densely populated enclave where their movement has been severely restricted, and food, water and electricity supply has been controlled by the Israeli government; making such habitation the largest open-air jail in the world. After this attack, the Israeli military has launched a disproportionately brutal retaliation, resulting in massive suffering and a mounting death toll.
Some, of course, seek to rationalize the ensuing Israeli-Palestinian conflict by drawing on the belief that Israelis are the original inhabitants of this region and have suffered two millennia of exodus, and that they have the right to return and settle in what is considered as the ‘promised land’ as per the Biblical belief. Others consider that Israel is a settlers colony, and that Palestinians have all the rights to recover their country. Not so long back, the compromises of the Oslo Accords were thought to be a way forward in settling the crisis by creating two states, within which Israelis and Palestinians would achieve the long-lost peace in the region. Yet, such peace has failed to materialize. In the context of rising Islamophobia, conservative popular opinion asserts that the lack of peace in the region is due to a longer history of religious strife and supposed Muslim bigotry. Needless to say, history is more complex.
The region was one of the earliest to witness human habitation, settled agricultural communities, the growth of commerce and the rise of civilization. The longue durée perspective reveals a tumultuous history of the region as a crossroad of religion, culture, commerce, and politics. It is located at a strategic location between Egypt, Syria, and Arabia, and is situated in an area between three continents. The Jericho-Dead Sea–Bir es Saba–Gaza–Sinai route attracted many migrant groups, which contributed to an increasing urban fabric and wealth generation. In fact, the oldest known defensive wall was found in Jericho that shows how wealth and power required strategic defence. With an immensely long history of human settlement, commerce and empire formation, the region was also an important centre for the development of and complex interface between diverse religious faiths and worldviews. For instance, the Old City of Jerusalem is home to several sacred sites of the three major Abrahamic religions: the Temple Mount and the Western Wall for Judaism, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre for Christianity, and the Dome of the Rock and al-Aqsa Mosque for Islam. The development of Judaism, Roman paganism, Christianity, and Islam are all part of the region’s historical tapestry. Essentially, the region saw the emergence of the earliest norms and narratives of organizing societies.
In the light of the region’s prosperity and strategic location vis-à-vis important networks of trade and commerce, contestations over access to these were endemic. Many of these conflicts that appear as religious strife in history, were embroiled in the rise and fall of different empires, and were embedded in the competing political formations over the control of this region’s strategic location within long distance trade. It was believed that the earliest Jewish temple in Jerusalem was destroyed by the polytheistic Babylonians. And yet, when a second temple was built to replace the earlier Solomon’s Temple, it was destroyed this time round by the Romans. A pagan Roman temple was set up on the former site of Herod. The destruction of the Second Temple constituted a transformative juncture in Jewish history, which saw the advancement of Rabbinic Judaism as the primary form of religious practice among Jews worldwide. The Judaic sects which had their base in the Temple dwindled in importance, including the priesthood and the Sadducees. It is believed that the Temple was built on the site of what is today called the Dome of the Rock. Its gates led out close to Al-Aqsa Mosque that was constructed much later by the Umayyad caliphs; indicating the proximity of spiritual places of worship, and correspondingly, the close interface between the Jewish and Muslim communities. Like their Roman predecessors, the caliphs periodically unleashed violence on the Jewish and non-Jewish populations of Jerusalem at particular historical conjunctures. More than a clash of faith, these instances arose when a threat to their political authority and strategic interests surfaced as a consequence of the city’s inhabitants supporting the rebellions of rival princes.
Contrary then to the popular perception of the persecution of Jews at the hands of Muslims, various religious communities in the region clashed with each other prior to the rise of Islam, and conflicts also arose due to schisms within the Jewish population. During the time of relative political stability in the region, we actually saw the co-existence of different sacred places and communities. In fact, the larger sense of shared association with the other Abrahamic religions nurtured a comparatively better condition for Jews of the region when compared to Jews who relocated in Europe. Further, the instances of conflicts between the Jews and other communities were irreducible to mere religious strife since these conflicts were intricately intermeshed with the calculations of empire formation and the desire to control the region’s strategic access to trade routes and commercial networks. Similar calculations have been imbricated in the ensuing conflict which has reduced Gaza to a casualty of a brute war waged by the Israeli Zionist state that is backed by imperialist forces.
Partitioning of Palestine: divida et impera of British imperialism
The prelude to the Israel-Palestine conflict lies in the promotion of Zionism by the colonial powers during World War-I, and the resulting partition in May 1948 of what was then the British-ruled Mandatory Palestine. The early Zionist movement had a grand vision of colonizing territory for a Jewish, separatist state that corresponded with the Biblical ancestral homeland of Israel for Jews. The key leaders of Zionism envisaged elaborate plans for establishing such a state, defending it against expected hostility of indigenous populations, as well nurturing an economy and integrating it into the world market. Early Zionists initially appealed to a number of colonial powers. When Britain took control of Palestine in World War-I, Zionists decided to throw in their lot with British colonial power.
The Zionist lobbying was well received by British leaders for whom World War-I reinforced the strategic importance of the Middle East. The region surrounded the sea routes to Britain’s most prized imperial colonies; namely, India, Southeast Asia, and East Africa. It bordered new oil fields in Persia and Egypt, where nationalist movements contested British rule. Further, France, another imperialist competitor, had secured a foothold in the Middle East through Syria. Notably, in France, Zionists wrested support by playing to France’s objectives in its imperial rivalry. Drawing on the 1917 Balfour Declaration, Britain began promoting the Zionist movement and legitimizing the colonization of Palestine. Jewish immigration to Palestine increased over the next few decades, though some limits to such immigration were enforced by the British from 1939 onwards in the context of growing fears about an Arab revolt during the ensuing World War-II. In the wake of the armed Jewish Resistance Movement and mounting discontent of the Arab population, Britain hastily announced in February 1947 its intent to terminate the Mandate for Palestine. It referred the matter of the future of Palestine to the United Nations. By November 1947, the United Nations authorized partitioning the land into two states, and in May 1948 the official partition unfolded between the sovereign Jewish and Arab states. It was closely followed on its heels by the first Israeli-Arab conflict (1948-49), resulting in the displacement of approximately seven lac Palestinians – also known as Nakba, the Great Catastrophe.
British imperial power deployed cross-colonial ideas, institutions, and personnel during its rule over Palestine. For example, to control the Palestinian Arab population, the Inspector General of Ceylon, Sir Herbert Layard Dowbiggin, was commissioned in 1930 to advice the process of reorganizing the Palestine Police Force. Drawing on his experience of setting up an expansive police force and network of police stations in the British colony of Ceylon, Dowbiggin was instrumental in putting in place a large police force in Palestine, including the deployment of many police stations across the rural landscape of Palestine. He was succeeded by Charles Tegart, the former commissioner of the Calcutta Police, who was notoriously known for the crushing of civil rebellions and nationalist forces in India.
Tegart’s approach, right from his time in service in India, was characterized by the colonial-era strategy of punishing the larger community for actions taken by individual insurgents. Significantly, he was the mastermind behind the brutal repression of the Chittagong rebellion in India wherein collective forms of punishment were heavily used, such as mass demolitions of houses and imposition of collective fines on entire villages that allegedly sheltered the Chittagong revolutionaries. Typically, in the long tradition of the colonial era, colonial authority easily labelled those who were difficult to subjugate as ‘criminal tribes’, ‘hereditary criminals’, ‘terrorists’ and so on. Moreover, people whose institutions and practices were different from those of the colonists were labelled ‘barbarians’, and it was in the name of civilizing them that the use of brute rule and force were legitimized. Collective punishment and constant surveillance of entire communities was effortlessly justified.
Charles Tegart was brought to Palestine in 1937 with the express purpose of advising the Inspector General on a strategy for controlling the Arab Revolt (1936-39). He recommended the building of highly fortified, military-style police stations in Arab areas, which came to be infamously known as the ‘Tegart forts’. Tegart also recommended a frontier fence along the northern border of Palestine to control the movement of insurgents, goods, and weapons. He is also known to have developed torture-driven interrogation methods during the Arab Revolt by setting up Arab Investigation Centres. In this way, many Israeli tactics of tyranny are imbricated in a much longer history of brute methods of repression and policing of local populations that have resisted imperialist subjugation across British colonies. In other words, the aforementioned forms of policing of local populations, including that of Arab Palestinians, were developed by the British imperialists, only to be perfected later by the Israeli forces. These tyrannical tactics and institutions continue to be used to this day.
Likewise, the strategy of partition was a potent tool of British imperialists, which was clearly compatible with the doctrine of divida et impera (divide and rule). The strategy of partition was a prominent, tried-and-tested strategy of the ruling elites of the British imperialist era. Prime Minister Lloyd George, for example, had partitioned Ireland in December 1921. As the Second British Empire proved difficult to hold on to post the end of World War II, India too was partitioned. With the loss of India, the Oriental end-point of the Second British Empire was immediately reestablished on the Persian Gulf, with the Palestinian region rising in importance. This was more so, given that imperial control over neighbouring Egypt proved difficult, especially as Egyptian nationalism grew and eventually precipitated the toppling of the monarchy in order to establish the Egyptian republic in 1952. Given this, Palestine was the obvious alternative for the strategic control of the Suez Canal that connects European trade with Asia.
Yet, even before the twentieth century, the Palestinian region had a significance for the Second British Empire. As early as 1847, Benjamin Disraeli in his banal novel, Tancred, recognized that for the vast and fast expanding Second British Empire, the centre was Palestine. He even proposed Delhi – in the highly prized possession, India – as the capital; hinting thereby at the strategic importance of Palestine for an effective passage to and control by the British over the eastern half of their Empire. Disraeli’s character proposes that Palestine be conquered, on behalf of Britain, by the Maronites, i.e., native Christians of the eastern Mediterranean and Levant region of West Asia. The proposal reflected the impossibility of the Jewish colonization of Palestine, given the small number of Jews in England at the time. The novel’s subtitle, “The New Crusade” is telling; implying not only the use of the ever-ready Maronite allies of the imperialists, but also the subtext of trading interests which inform what appear as mere ‘wars of religion’. Undoubtedly, it was the Palestinian region’s strategic location with respect to trade routes and its proximity to the Suez Canal which informed its early positioning within the imperial gaze.
Of course, the discovery of oil deposits in the Middle East in the early twentieth century further propelled Palestine’s importance for imperial powers. Henceforth, apart from a question of access to trade routes and the Suez Canal, the region’s strategic importance also grew in terms of its rich petroleum deposits.
Anointed oil: Israel and imperial surrogacy
In the wake of Britain’s exhaustion and declining imperialist might in the course of World War-II, the United States (U.S.) emerged as the new superpower. Already by the early twentieth century, American military interventions were closely tied to the interests of big businesses and banking firms, as famously elaborated by U.S. Marine Corps Major General Smedley Butler, who wrote in the November 1935 issue of the socialist magazine Common Sense:
“I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street.”
Expectedly, America keenly eyed the Middle East’s newly discovered and vast oil deposits. U.S. State Department officials in 1945 were known to have identified the Gulf region as “probably the richest economic prize in the field of foreign investment.” Eisenhower later described it as the “most strategically important area of the world.” Addressing the U.S. Congress on 5 January 1957, Eisenhower described that the Gulf region (and Arabia):
“normally supplies the petroleum needs of many nations of Europe, Asia, and Africa. Now the nations of Europe are peculiarly dependent upon this supply and this dependency relates to transportation as well as production.”
A growing control on these oil deposits proved even more crucial in the context of America’s quest for global dominance. As rightly noted by Noam Chomsky:
“It has been a basic principle of international affairs since World War-II that the energy reserves of the Middle East constitute an essential element in the US-dominated global system. American policy towards affairs of the region cannot be understood apart from this fundamental principle.”
Nevertheless, the aforementioned calculations themselves did not translate into a close and coordinated alliance between America and Israel. For most of the 1950s, the U.S. relationship with Israel was relatively cool and distant. Correspondingly, there was no American support for Israeli expansion into the Gaza strip and Egyptian Sinai in 1956. This Israeli expansion was linked to the Suez Canal crisis, which saw the British, French, and Israeli forces coordinate invasions into Egypt as part of their contestation with the Nasser-led government that nationalized the foreign-owned Suez Canal company.
Post 1956, Nasser became an international symbol of Third World independence and Pan-Arabism. His Arab national project steadily came to threaten U.S. dominance in the region, and he became an ‘extremist’ in the eyes of the U.S. As we enter the 1960s, larger global politics brought the U.S. government closer to Israel and wedded American imperialist interests in the Middle East to Israeli expansion and promotion of Zionism. The U.S. military’s defeat at the hands of Communists in Vietnam was a marked development. It further fuelled mass anger against American military interventions which pushed labouring men on imperial adventures across the world. Importantly, communists had forced U.S. retreat in Indochina. Meanwhile, anti-colonial struggles had also erupted across Africa; namely, in Kenya, Algeria, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, and elsewhere. In this context, Israel became increasingly important for the U.S. dominated western bloc.
Popular movements against regimes that favoured U.S. imperialist interests in the Middle East, the extension of support by the Soviet Union for these people’s movements, and the imperialist interest in the region’s oil and gas reserves are the key factors leading to a combination of ruling elites and Zionism. With the goal of preventing the Soviet Union from aiding the region’s democratic movements against the nexus of Arab elites and imperialist forces, the top priority for America during the peak of the Arab–Israeli conflict was the extension of support for the State of Israel. However, preoccupied in Vietnam, the United States was not able to easily assert the dominance it desired in the Middle East. Israel was, hence, brought in from the cold to perform this function of establishing regional stability for the U.S., triggering a strategic alliance between the two since 1967. In the year before the Six-Day War (1967), the total American aid to Israel was 23.7 million dollars. Following this, this aid skyrocketed to 106 million dollars annually. In the words of Cheryl A. Rubenberg, who has traced the changing U.S. policy vis-à-vis Israel:
“The most important outcome of the June War [1967] was that for the majority in the policymaking elite, Israel’s spectacular military performance validated the thesis that Israel could function as a strategic-asset to the United States in the Middle East.”
The U.S., hence, quickly replaced Britain and France as Israel’s new, more committed imperial sponsor; extending vast quantities of economic assistance, military equipment, and support for virtually every Israeli foreign policy objective. The Israeli expansion of 1967 marked a continuation of the 1948 logic of occupation and dispossession, which has defined the Zionist movement from the beginning. However, 1967 went against the international consensus, with Israel being seen as occupier wherein it had earlier been seen as victim. To legitimate this state of affairs, colonial expansion was strengthened and consolidated in Israeli politics and society, allowing for new political ideologies and practices of occupation and settlement. In these endeavours, as well as in the wake of the continued consensus of the international community that Gaza and the West Bank are not legally annexed but occupied territories, the Israeli Zionist state steadily gained significant support from its key ally, America.
In pursuit of a stable flow of oil from the Persian Gulf, among other goals, America by the 1970s had clearly replaced Britain as the main security patron for Saudi Arabia as well as the other Arab states of the Persian Gulf. Since the 1970s there has been an agreement with the oil-rich Saudi Arabia for oil sales exclusively in U.S. dollar (USD), in return for military protection. By 1975 all countries which were part of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) had reached similar agreements to price oil exclusively in USD and to invest surplus oil proceeds in the U.S. government’s debt securities. In exchange, America extended military protection to these OPEC countries. Such developments have expectedly culminated in the consistent international demand for the USD, irrespective of the economic health of the U.S.
This apart, in defence of its strategic interests, America has also propped up several anti-democratic regimes across the world, providing them economic aid and military hardware. For example, in a 16 May 2017 article, The Huffington Post reported that “The 45 nations and territories with little or no democratic rule represent more than half of the roughly 80 countries now hosting U.S. bases.” The article further pointed to what many political scientists call the “dictatorship hypothesis”, wherein the U.S. “tends to support dictators [and other undemocratic regimes] in nations where it enjoys basing facilities.” It has supported several dictators like the Shah of Iran, Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines, Somoza dynasty of Nicaragua, Fulgencio Batista of Cuba, Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire, Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia, Zia-ul-Haq and Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan, Yoweri Museveni of Uganda, warlords in Somalia, Augusto Pinochet in Chile, and Jorge Rafael Videla of Argentina, to name a few.
Nevertheless, there has emerged significant resistance to American dominance and imperialism. The mounting contestation of U.S. hegemony on worldwide accumulation is clearly reflected in the expensive battles waged under the garb of the ‘war against terror’ since the early 2000s. Indeed, in order to maintain the dollar’s hegemony in the oil trade, America has been drawn more and more into expensive military operations to crush people’s movements against regimes that have been pliant to its imperialist interests. One of the recent manifestations of such people’s resistance was the Arab Spring in the early 2010s. Notably, the U.S. intervened in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Lebanon, etc., and continues to pump in billions of dollars to manage regimes amenable to its strategic imperialist interests. According to a 20 November 2019 CNBC news report, since their beginning in 2001 to the end of the 2019 fiscal year, the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Pakistan have cost U.S. taxpayers USD 6.4 trillion.
In this way, the U.S. remains embroiled in the local turmoil of many countries where it has intervened, and is unable to disentangle itself without the steady chipping away of its hegemony. To meet the rising expenses of maintaining scores of military bases across the world, the U.S. has taken to demanding increased economic burdens of its ‘allies’. It has been demanding that they contribute a greater share towards military interventions. Former U.S. President Donald Trump’s aggressive demands from military allies were part and parcel of this unfolding situation.
The pressures of the rising costs of waging direct wars in defence of its imperialist interests are also accompanied by the growing concerns about the loyalty of the American armed forces. In a context of continuous protracted wars to be waged in far flung regions of the world where insurgency shows little sign of subsiding, the fears of revolts within the military are on the rise. There are precedents of the discipline and chain of command in the American military crumbling in the early 1970s when Vietnamese people, the Black revolt in the U.S., and the antiwar movement all helped to create such a crisis for the military. Indeed, in the tenure of President Nixon, the revolt among the US armed forces against their officers was increasing. “Fragging” refers to soldiers rolling a fragmentation grenade into their own officer’s tent, to stop them from being sent into combat. In 1969, there was one fragging incident for every 3,300 servicemen, but this increased to one per 572 in 1971.
Against this backdrop, in particular the hesitation of some key allies to take on enhanced burdens, the huge financial costs of waging direct war, and the risks of revolts within the U.S. military, it is easy to see why and how American and Israeli interests have converged in important ways. Regional stability means a Middle East amenable to U.S., and for facilitating this, Israel has proven a useful counterweight to the rise and expansion of possible economic and political rivals who challenge America’s dominance. America has, consequently, served as a critical sponsor for Israel financially and politically while Israel has played an invaluable role in helping the U.S. dominate the Middle East. According to recent data, Washington channelises approximately 3.8 billion dollars annually in aid and an additional 8 billion dollars in loan guarantees to Israel. In return it gains access to an indigenous intelligence service; troops, trained and familiar with the territory and ideologically committed; and all the weapons they would ever need there in the Middle East.
This apart, U.S. defence corporations have been minting money. The billions of dollars that the U.S. sends to Israel end up coming back to its military industry. For example, a 2010 agreement between the U.S. and Israel allows for Israel to use a total of 15.2 billion dollars in military grants from the U.S. to buy F-35 fighters from Lockheed Martin. Moreover, there are speculations that the proclaimed ‘war on terrorism’ waged by the Zionist Israeli state and its allies against the Hamas is a masked endeavour to explore a significant economic opportunity in terms of an alternate waterway to the Suez Canal through the Israeli-controlled Negev Desert to the eastern Mediterranean coast. The proposed waterway, the Ben Gurion Canal, was perhaps first envisaged in the 1960s, as references to it are traceable to a declassified 1963 U.S. government memorandum. The memorandum proposed the use of nuclear explosives to dig the canal through the Negev Desert in Israel to reduce the otherwise much higher costs of digging such a canal conventionally. The plan has long been in cold storage, given that the risks of a nuclear fallout are all too real. Nevertheless, the interests of U.S. imperialism in the region have led to periodic revival of interest in the ambitious Canal project. The discovery of the multi-billion-dollar Gaza offshore natural gas reserves by British Gas (BG) Group in 1999, as well as the Levant discoveries of 2010, have further entrenched imperialist interests in the Middle East. This has translated into tacit support for Israel’s larger territorial claims over the resource-rich Mediterranean waters and Israeli aggression against neighbouring Arab states.
In the bid to conceal the crude interests in the region’s natural resources, the present ‘War on Terrorism’ has been fronted as a convenient ploy to divert attention away from the longstanding imperialist interests of controlling the oil supply of the Middle East, crushing Arab radicalism, and thereby turning a blind eye to Israeli colonization. The main objective remains Jewish supremacy in Palestine – as much land as possible, as few Palestinians as possible.
Indeed, a close reading of the subtext of the Israel-Palestine conflict reveals precisely how the ‘war on terror’ serves as a smokescreen for the convergence of U.S. imperialism, Israeli elites, and Arab elites with respect to beating back the revolutionary nationalism in the region. The fallout of this has been the steady growth of Islamic fundamentalism, often propped up by these converging interests. Once a Cold War ally against revolutionary nationalism of the Arab world, Islamic fundamentalism has turned into a dreaded enemy. To elucidate, two examples should serve the purpose: the Mujahideen in Afghanistan (the Taliban, Bin Laden, and al-Qaeda), and radical fundamentalists in the Arab world. In the Palestinian context, the Muslim Brotherhood is an example of the latter. It transitioned from being an opportunistically supported counterweight propped up by Israel against the Palestinian nationalist and social democratic political party, Fatah, to mutating into the Hamas and becoming the main agent of anti-colonial struggle and Palestinian self-determination in the Occupied Territories. Needless to say, the cost of this transition is paid largely by local societies, with the fundamentalists dictating regressive social agendas and facilitating the shrinking of the sphere of individual liberty.
Overall, if it was not for the entrenched imperialist interests of America in the region and its support in diplomatic, political, and financial terms for the Zionist state, it would have been impossible for Israel to continually expand and colonize the West Bank and Gaza Strip in spite of tangible Arab resistance. Neither would Israel have gone unpunished for its countless violations of international law, including its invasion of Lebanon in 1982 (which cost 20,000 lives, mostly civilian), its occupation of a long stretch of Lebanese land until 2000 (which it called its “security zone”), and its occupation and annexation of East Jerusalem and the Syrian Golan Heights. In the process, the Zionist Israeli state has steadily emerged as the face of U.S. imperialism, while common Jews have been reduced to foot soldiers of U.S. imperialism.
The Antisemitism of Zionism: truth and (possible) reconciliation
Historically speaking, common Jews have not been supporters of Zionism. Zionism was a marginal force in the early twentieth century since most Jews preferred to work for equality and democracy in a pluralist society; seeking to integrate into instead of abandoning the countries that they had called home for generations. The anti-Zionism of the Western Jewish establishment in the pre-1948 days was, in fact, rooted in their firm belief that they were Frenchmen, Germans, Englishmen, and Americans of the Mosaic persuasion. There were many then who were profoundly opposed to Zionism as antisemitism, which included a section of the Jewish elites in western Europe, and orthodox rabbis in eastern Europe. In the case of the latter, there was much unease regarding the Zionists misleading the Jewish people about what was possible; and also, the fear that the Zionist millennial vision sought to pre-empt the Acharit hayamim (the coming of the Messiah or messianic age) and the resulting ‘end of history’, as per the Hebrew prophecy. On the other hand, Jewish elites represented by vocal activists like Sylvain Levi (1863-1935) of the Alliance Israelite Universelle, perceived the creation of a Jewish polity in Palestine as “singularly dangerous”, for its potential to severely antagonize the Arab world and provoke Muslim fanaticism. As predicted, the first large-scale anti-Zionist demonstrations by Muslim and Christian Palestinians erupted as early as March 1920, during the Occupied Enemy Territory Administration, in response to steady Jewish immigration into the area and the beginning of practices like sale of Arab land to Jews.
Another noted Jewish critic of Zionism was the Liberal parliamentarian, Edwin Montagu, who opposed the Balfour Declaration (1917). The Declaration announced the British government’s support for the establishment of a “national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine. Montagu opposed Zionism as a dangerous antisemitic political creed due to its misplaced presupposition that Jews did not belong to other places, and that correspondingly, there is no point in fighting for a pluralist society wherever there exist different creeds and faiths. In a memo to the British Cabinet, he expressed the following poignant views on Zionism:
“…I assume that it means that Mahommedans [Muslims] and Christians are to make way for the Jews and that the Jews should be put in all positions of preference and should be peculiarly associated with Palestine in the same way that England is with the English or France with the French, that Turks and other Mahommedans in Palestine will be regarded as foreigners, just in the same way as Jews will hereafter be treated as foreigners in every country but Palestine. Perhaps also citizenship must be granted only as a result of a religious test.” [Emphasis added]
Looking at the period of the 1930s and 1940s, majority of the members of the American Jewish Left and its intelligentsia were also notably anti-Zionist. They saw Zionism as embedded in an imperial British colonialist oppression of the Arab masses. The anti-Zionism of American Jews was well represented in the plot of Mike Gold’s novel Jews without Money (1930), which depicts the brute extortion of an impoverished Jew by a Zionist entrepreneur. The plot revolves around the travails of a Rumanian Jewish painter who seeks to rise out of his difficulties by moving in the company of a wealthy Brooklyn Zionist leader Baruch Goldfarb. Goldfarb is depicted as a bourgeois cheat who swindles naïve working-class Jews. Goldfarb offers the Jewish painter a supposedly ideal and safe home, a house in “God’s country”, a Jewish enclave in the suburbs, which was unlike the multiethnic milieu he had been residing in. In actual terms, Goldfarb gets him to join his garish, politicized lodge where vote-rigging and spying on trade unions is organized. Goldfarb eventually wheedles the hapless painter out of his money. Jews without Money constitutes not only a working-class critique of American capitalism, but also indirectly exposes the internal class antagonisms within the Jewish community. Expectedly, such class antagonisms were not to dissipate with the creation of a separate Jewish state of Israel, and hence, Gold’s novel was a critique of both the dominant capitalist segment of the American Jewish community, as well as of the Zionist practices then prevailing in the U.S. and Palestine.
Importantly, in a growing globalizing human society, Zionism or the approach that Jews do not belong to other places except Israel, continues to represent a dangerous assertion. It breeds and reinforces a certain kind of Right-wing discourse wherein the dominant section can demand the different minorities to leave lands where they have been born, or empowers the dominant section to prosecute minorities as second-rated citizens. Ultimately, political creeds like Zionism and appended state formation are antithetical to the interests of minorities and pluralism. People must have the right to pilgrimage throughout the world, as well as the right to live in different societies with full equal rights. This has, in fact, been the view of majority of common Jews, whose objective interests act as a crucial counterweight to Zionism.
The main issue today is not simply to intensify the struggle and solidarity for the cause of the oppressed Palestinian people, but to also pave the way for a newer ground that facilitates widespread solidarity to emerge between the oppressed Palestinian people and the exploited common Israeli people. For this bond of solidarity to emerge, it is important for the Israeli people, who themselves are struggling against the anti-people Netanyahu regime, to realize that the bleak situation in Israel is the result of the jingoistic regimes having free rein. The longstanding conflict has created a sense of palpable despair and insecurity among the Israeli population as well. Indeed, for how long will ordinary Israeli citizens continue to live under continuous threat of war and hostility of neighbouring populations, which breeds an unhealthy dependence on imperialist America?
Two paths seem available to common Israelis. One, to continue this perpetual war with Palestinians and spend finite resources in an endless war; thereby remaining dependent for their survival on America whose only interest in this conflict is to keep Israel as an outpost to control the Middle-Eastern oil economy. The other alternative is to seek renegotiations with the Palestinian people so that the two communities can coexist without denying justice and rights to each other. A more suitable solution to end the ensuing conflict, i.e., either the two-state solution or a single secular state for the two communities, is for the common Israeli and Palestinian people to mutually determine to live together with mutual trust for common prosperity.
Self-interest of people contra imperialism: the imperative of subaltern internationalism
The prevailing crisis in Gaza has repeatedly been projected in the dominant discourse as a conflict of religious communities, in which Israeli Jews are made out as hapless victims of Muslim Arab fundamentalists. Further, any support to the Palestinian cause is portrayed as an illegitimate compulsion to appease Muslim minorities in different parts of the world. It is ironic that the Jewish population, which itself has witnessed persecutions and pogroms on racial-religious lines, has segments within which have constantly resorted to racist, dehumanizing, and genocidal language in order to build the ground for erasure of the Palestinian people. Unabashed legitimation of the displacement of Palestinians has bred genocidal language and dehumanizing references, right from Golda Meir’s “Palestinians did not exist” (1969), to Menachem Begin’s Palestinians are “beasts walking on two legs” (1982), to Gen. Rafael Eitan’s assertion that Arabs are like “drugged cockroaches in a bottle” (1983), and Eli Ben Dahan’s “Palestinians are like animals, they aren’t human” (2013). In the post 7 October 2023 context, the genocidal language and action taken are in perfect sync with each other, as evident in the statement of Ariel Kallner, a member of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud Party, who explained Israel’s goal behind the Gaza war in the following terms: “Right now, one goal: Nakba! A Nakba that will overshadow the Nakba of 1948”. Echoing the same sentiment, Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant, claimed on 9 October: “We are fighting human animals and we will act accordingly…there will be no electricity, no food, no fuel. Everything is closed.”
Likewise, conservative politicians in countries allied to the Israeli Zionist state have replicated the same sentiments. For example, U.S. presidential hopeful from the Republican Party, Nikki Haley, told Fox News on 10 October that the Hamas attack was not just on Israel but “is an attack on America”, and went on to assert: “Netanyahu, finish them, finish them (..) finish them!” A day later, on Fox News, U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham rallied American conservative and religious supporters, declaring that “We are in a religious war here. […] Do whatever the hell you have to do. [..] Level the place.” Despite majority of the United Nations member countries opposing the continued Israeli siege on Gaza, we see the resonance of war-mongering among reactionary politicians aligned to American-Israeli nexus. Such reactionary political responses are trickling down to the larger social media wherein a barrage of misinformation and fake news is being constantly circulated.
In the dominant discourse perpetuated by the mainstream media and governments in power, the covert Islamophobia is hard to miss. Typically, the Islamophobic perspective dangerously conflates Arab Muslims with Islamic fundamentalists. It is an approach which overlooks the fact that a religion and its meaning or import for people tends to differ vastly across time and contexts. Wrongly subsumed within the ‘Islamic’ religious identity by the powers that be, Arab Muslims are easily projected as being programmed into comprehending their self-hood solely through the religious lens, and that the issues / problems consuming them are essentially those of religion.
This Islamophobic view projects Arab Muslims as a people perpetually prone to bigotry and persecution of other religious communities. Within this view there is constant downplaying of the rising death toll of children in Gaza by pointing to the actions of Hamas, while shamelessly claiming that Palestinian Arab children are actually ‘snakelets’, i.e., future ‘terrorists’! Another disturbing trend is the shallow humanitarianism showcased by the political elites of many countries. We are witness to a form of diplomacy which seeks to maintain bilateral ties with Israel and Palestine separately. Such diplomacy is anchored on active espousal of Israel’s monopoly over violence on the basis of the “right to defend itself”, and the corresponding delegitimization of the use of any force or assertion of sovereignty by Palestinians. Against this skewed logic informing bilateral diplomacy with Israel and Palestine, the endeavour of different countries to extend medical and food aid to Palestinians amounts to a hollow, meaningless exercise because for these countries it does not matter that Gaza remains in the thick of war as a consequence of Israel’s escalated military onslaught and colonization.
What is effaced in the demonization of Palestinian Arabs and the conflation of their struggles for self-determination with terrorism is the fact that for the past seventy-five years, the Palestinian people have used not one, but varied means to fight for justice. They have been criticized when they have used armed struggle, and also when they have resorted to non-violent means of struggle. It is then not the form of Palestinian struggle which is the issue. The real issue is that Palestinians dare to struggle. For the Israeli imperialists and their allies, violence is always morally repugnant, unlawful, illegitimate, savage, disproportionate and terroristic when it comes from those who are oppressed. In sharp contrast, violence is deemed lawful, self-protective, and justified when it is used to keep the oppressed in exploitation and oppression. Consequently, those who stand with the oppressed Palestinian population are shunned as “pro-terror” and anti-Semites.
The religious connotations consciously ascribed to the ensuing crisis further ensures that any criticism of the Zionist Israeli state is easily projected as antisemitic. In real terms, the criticism of the pro-U.S. Zionist State of Israel is not an attack on common Jews. Instead, calling out the Israeli state and its allies for their misdeeds in Palestine is in the interest of ordinary Jews, who are simply reduced by the Zionist state to pawns in the larger game plan of imperialist forces. Reckoning with the extensive U.S. intervention in the Middle East is therefore crucial so as to move beyond the popular misconceptions about a supposedly ‘just war against terror’ being waged in Gaza.
Aggressively defending its strategic interests, U.S. imperialism continues to strengthen the Zionist Israeli state and shamelessly fuels a genocide in Palestine. All this in order to protect the supremacy of the dollar-driven trade in oil. Presently, almost all the oil sales worldwide are transacted in the USD, making it de facto acquire a status of an international currency. The high rate of the USD allows for the U.S. to achieve economic supremacy since countries across the world need to build USD reserves to trade in oil. This apart, most world imports are also invoiced in dollars, and these dollar prices are not very sensitive to the exchange rate, unlike producer currency prices. Consequently, to acquire a basket of goods from across the world, a particular country needs to build reserves of USD. Eventually, the stronger USD means that commodities imported into the U.S. are relatively cheaper while those exported from the U.S. are more expensive for the purchasing countries.
This trade in USD is injurious to the poorer economies of the world and by extension to the labouring masses of these various economies. After all, to acquire USD, it has to devalue its currency with respect to USD so as to compete in the market by selling commodities at a cheaper rate than their value. Hence, the labour embodied in commodities is sold cheaply to acquire USD, which amounts to greater overexploitation of domestic labour of poorer economies.
In addition to such skewed world trade, U.S. dominance in the world economy is further evident in her disproportionate access to the world’s resources in spite of her small population. Constituting anywhere between a mere four to five percent of the overall world population, U.S. consumes up to one-third of the world’s paper, one-fourth of the world’s crude oil, 23 percent of the world’s coal, 27 percent of the world’s aluminium, and so forth. U.S. economic dominance is also reflected in the fact that despite the slowing down of her economy and the continuous fall in her share of the global Gross Domestic Product (GDP) from roughly 36 percent in 1970 to 24 percent in 2019, she continues to dominate many of the key sectors of international economic activity. U.S. corporates continue to dominate key sectors like aerospace and defence, chemicals, electronics, financial services, heavy machinery, oil and gas, pharmaceuticals and personal care, and computer hardware and software.
Evidently, for a just world order to exist, the share of the world economy must depend on the actual proportion of a country’s population. A violation of this principle amounts to the common people of developing countries being reduced to a subservient position in, both, complex and simple value extraction / transfer. While majority of people in such countries are compelled to labour more and more in return for less and less from the economy, the economic elites of the same countries – albeit at times in a subordinate role – converge with the global alliance of economic elites. Typically, when the rate of profit in these developing economies decline, their economic elites tend to financialize their wealth in dollars, which together harms their local economy.
The rise of a vibrant capitalist class in many developing countries, accompanied by restructuring of capitalist production within ‘First world’ countries which includes the continuous relocation of capitalist production from the heart of the ‘Global North’, especially the U.S., to other parts of the world and the resulting emergence of long, globalized supply chains in recent years, has meant that the profits of capitalist accumulation can no longer be transferred to the U.S. in the same quantum since these profits are increasingly to be shared with layers of local magnates positioned within globalized capitalist production system. As a consequence, imperialistic U.S. policies are driven not only by the interests of its own businesses, but also by the negotiation with interests of a larger apparatus of a global alliance among the economic elites in developed countries. As per proponents of the neo-superimperialism theory, such entanglements minimize the scope for military or geopolitical conflict between imperialist powers of the ‘Global North’ (Europe, Japan, Canada, and the U.S.), while allowing for conflicts with the ‘Global South’. Nevertheless, a more complex reality is brewing.
A more concrete assessment of twenty-first century imperialism points to different economic and political power blocs in existence, which have clashed over resources and economic power in recent years. These are namely, the United States, the European Union, and Asia centred on China and Russia. Significantly, the economic elites and their crony politicians in many erstwhile non-aligned countries, including those of the ‘Global South’, are moving in multi-aligned relationships with these different blocs, depending on the problems and prospects of their respective bargaining capacity. Nevertheless, within the ensuing imperialist world order, despite a certain degree of mounting contestation of U.S. hegemony on worldwide accumulation, the U.S. continues to rule the roost, especially through its control over the oil economy and financial institutions like the World Bank, International Monetary Fund and U.S. treasury based in Washington. The super-profits accrued by the U.S. economy allows the state to co-opt a section of the American working-class on the burning issue of American-led imperialist wars and exploitation. However, the benefits from the global dominance of the U.S. dollar are availed largely by Wall Street and the country’s defence establishment. In the long run, this American dominance has severely cost the bulk of American workers, small farmers, producers, and small businesses.
Given these realities of the imperialist world order, the labouring subaltern masses of the ‘Global South’ exercise an objective immediate as well as long-term interest in opposing wars and occupation of places like Gaza since these strengthen the hold of imperialist America on the world economy, as well as perpetuate greater exploitation of labour at the hands of domestic capital. Likewise, opposing ongoing imperialist wars serves the long-term interests of working class and small producers of the ‘Global North’. It is precisely this objective interest of the common people that highlights the scope for a subaltern internationalism on compounding international crises – one that is autonomous of the approach of governments and of political and economic elites. For erstwhile colonized regions of the world that have been plundered and brutalized by former colonial powers, solidarity for the Palestinian people seems natural. And yet, the elites who have emerged from within the ranks of erstwhile colonized societies have converged with the empire of capital, which continues to expropriate the natural resources and overexploit the people. In this way, more than Palestinians needing the solidarity of the international community, the freedom of Palestinian people is the precondition for unshackling the common people across the world from the chain of the empire of capital.
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Maya John teaches at the University of Delhi, India. She has been part of the Left movement for around two decades. Email: maya.john85@gmail.com.