The West’s Love for Israel Erases the Middle East’s Real History
Press photograph from the Palestinian revolt of 1936–39, showing Arabs arrested by the British police, April 5, 1939. (Kedem / Wikimedia Commons)
Zionism emerged in response to 19th-century European antisemitism — but its aims in Palestine drew upon Western colonial ideologies. To present the current conflict as a timeless feud denies both European responsibility and Palestine’s multiethnic history.
The love of Zionism in the West has always had a troubled relationship with genocide. Its origins as a political ideology lay in an era when European empires routinely justified the exterminability of what they considered to be inferior peoples and uncivilized barbarians.
The nineteenth-century European Zionist idea of implanting and sustaining an exclusively Jewish nationalist state in multireligious Palestine was a response to European racial antisemitism. But it was also premised, from the outset, on the erasure of native Palestinian history and the political significance of their centuries-old belonging on their own land.
After the Nazi Holocaust of the European Jews, Western philozionism was powerfully reinforced by a sense of guilt and empathy for the idea of a Jewish state. Now, philozionism has come full course to embrace genocide in Gaza in the name of defending this Jewish state.
In recent weeks, Western liberals and states have given overwhelming backing for Israel’s “right to defend itself.” This shrill support has barely wavered as Israel has methodically waged a scorched-earth campaign for over a month, destroying tens of thousands of homes, hospitals, schools, mosques, churches, and bakeries and subjecting Gaza’s Palestinian refugee population to an extraordinarily cruel collective punishment.
This latest installment of philozionism exposes more clearly than ever the ruthless double standard that underlies it: Israeli history and life are cherished; Muslim and Christian Palestinian history and life are fundamentally devalued.
Double Standards
This double standard has a long history. Protestant enthusiasts and theologians in Europe and North America embraced the idea of the “return” of the Jews to biblical Palestine, but had no interest in the actually existing, diverse population of contemporary Palestine. The Zionist movement itself largely ignored the native Palestinian population. Part of this was a fact of geography and history: Zionism was born not among the ancient Jewish communities of the East, but in Eastern and Central Europe. Its leaders were not Arab or Eastern Jews, but European Ashkenazi Jews. Its ethnoreligious nationalist ideology was forged not by the pluralism of the Middle East but by the competing racial and ethnic and linguistic nationalisms of Europe. The racial antisemitism evident in the West was alien to the rhythms of religious difference, discrimination, and coexistence so familiar to the diverse inhabitants of the Ottoman Islamic East.
But, at least in part, the European Zionist project’s overlooking of the native Palestinian population was based in racism. Indeed, it developed as a colonial project. While leading Zionists grappled with the racial antisemitism of
Europe, they also expressed, shared, contributed to, and circulated many of the foundational racist tropes of nineteenth-century Western culture. That is, that the non-West was manifestly inferior, and that Eastern peoples were more primitive than Western ones; that the land of the indigenous peoples was largely “empty” and thus open to colonization; and that colonialism was salvation, and the removal of native peoples was either inevitable or necessary because these peoples were racially and mentally inferior, uncivilized, and thus without historical or ethical value. One of the slogans of the Zionist movement was “A land without a people for a people without a land.”
The racism inherent in this colonial Zionism was manifested in both the Balfour Declaration of 1917 and the official charter of the British Mandate of Palestine of 1922. Neither of these colonial documents referred to Palestinians directly. Instead, they described them as “non-Jewish communities” who paled in historical, religious, and civilizational significance when compared to what they identified as the more important “Jewish people.”
British foreign secretary Arthur Balfour himself explained the meaning of this occlusion in a confidential memorandum in 1919. He admitted there was little point pretending that the post–World War I notion of self-determination could be reconciled with Zionism in Palestine, through which mostly European Jews would be encouraged to settle and colonize there and thus redeem what was habitually referred to as a derelict land. Balfour wrote in 1919:
But these “present inhabitants” had a real existence — and for Zionist Jewish nationalists who wanted to build a Jewish state in Palestine, it was unwelcome. Unlike the distant, academic Protestant clergymen obsessed with biblical prophecies, colonial Zionists were increasingly preoccupied with their far more secular “Arab” question: how to transform a land actually inhabited by an overwhelming majority of Arabs into an exclusively Jewish state. Muslim and Christian Palestinians were seen, in other words, as a real impediment to the successful unfolding of colonial Zionism. They had to be skirted, avoided, repressed, removed from view, and ultimately physically expelled.
The Zionist movement refused to change its fantasy of transforming a multireligious land that had for centuries enjoyed profoundly organic cultural, linguistic, religious, trade, and historical connections with the lands that surrounded Palestine into a sovereign and segregated Jewish state. Backed by their British imperial protectors, the movement doubled down on its project to systematically colonize Palestine.
In 1923, the Russian-born settler Vladimir Jabotinsky described colonial Zionism as an “iron wall” that would crush the spirit of the natives of Palestine. Behind this “iron wall,” protected by the bayonets of the British empire, Jabotinsky insisted that colonial Zionism could grow unfettered and ultimately dispossess the natives no matter how much they protested. He believed that only when the natives had given up all hopes of resistance could Zionists hope to make peace with the “primitive” Palestinians. Such callous attitudes toward the Palestinians led some prominent European Zionists such as Hans Kohn to break decisively with the movement in 1929. Kohn was shocked by the Zionist contempt for native Palestinian national aspirations. He was also appalled by the Zionist suppression of their just movement for political and national freedom. “Zionism,” Kohn insisted at the time, “is not Judaism.”
Kohn, however, was a voice crying in the wilderness. Following the rise of the antisemitic and racist Nazis in Germany, many more European Jews — who were blocked from emigrating to the United States because of that country’s racist immigration laws — sought refuge in Palestine. These refugees from Europe were quickly conscripted into the increasingly militant Zionist nationalist cause, along with many Eastern and Arab Jews who were native to Palestine and the region. In the wake of a massive anticolonial uprising on the part of the Palestinians that commenced in 1936, the British colonial authorities drew up a highly prejudicial partition plan in 1937. This scheme foreshadowed the fateful 1947 UN partition plan of Palestine. Both were predicated on dispossessing the native Palestinian majority of much of its land and homes to make way for a Jewish state. Britain’s 1937 Peel partition plan, for example, recognized the injustice of any partition to the Arab natives who owned the majority of the land. With remarkable disingenuousness, it lauded the proverbial “generosity” of the Arabs to justify their coerced role “at some sacrifice” to themselves into solving the West’s “Jewish Problem.”
The Nazi German Holocaust of European Jews and the concomitant growth of the Zionist movement in British-occupied Palestine reinforced the Western imperative to create a Jewish state at the expense of the Palestinians.
Although they rejected allowing the survivors of the Holocaust into the United States, US politicians supported sending Jewish displaced persons to Palestine in the name of decency and humanitarianism. Zionist leaders and propagandists figured vastly more prominently in immediate postwar thought and, crucially, in the corridors of political power and decision-making in the West than did their Arab counterparts. Native Palestinians were entirely shut out of the decision-making process that directly affected them. In November 1947, the Western-dominated UN voted to partition Palestine and establish a Jewish state, despite the fact that the overwhelming majority of the population was Palestinian, and the vast mass of historic Palestine was owned by Palestinians.
From Antisemitism to Philosemitism
The Nakba, or calamity, of 1948 soon resolved the problem of Palestinians in a Jewish state. Before, during, and after the war of 1948, Zionist forces expelled well over eight hundred thousand Palestinians to neighboring lands and expropriated their homes and lands. Liberal Western states and leaders hailed this allegedly miraculous transformation. One of the famous signatories of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Eleanor Roosevelt, for example, put the onus of Palestinian dispossession on the Arabs themselves. She admired Israel’s allegedly youthful spirit and castigated the Arabs for their “inflexibility” toward Israel and blamed them ultimately for their own dispossession. Palestinians were consistently depicted as backward, primitive, irrational, and fanatical. The Zionists, by contrast, were represented — and very much represented themselves — as modern pioneers who redeemed an “empty” land. Edward Said described this form of racism thus: “The transference of a popular anti-Semitic animus from a Jewish to an Arab target was made smoothly, since the figure was essentially the same.”
The post-Holocaust identification with Jews and Judaism — “philosemitism” — became utterly entangled with philozionism. As historian Daniel Cohen explains in his forthcoming book Good Jews: Philosemitism in Europe since the Holocaust, for European intellectuals and politicians the latter was a function of the former. In the wake of World War II, the European philosophical, religious, and moral rehabilitation of “man” was predicated on a recognition of the history of antisemitism that had culminated with the rise of Nazism. In Cohen’s reading, Jews were not seen as archetypical victims of the West’s long prevailing racist worldview that segregated humanity into superior and inferior races. Rather, they were the victims of the distinct evil of antisemitism that was conceptually and morally bifurcated from other forms of racism. Israel represented an implied Western atonement for its own terrible past; as a Jewish state, it received reparations from Germany. In this philozionist turn, to love Jews and Judaism, therefore, was to love the new state of Israel that was established in their name.
Palestinians did not even figure in this moral calculus.