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Ilan Pappe: Zionism as Settler Colonialism
Ilan Pappé is one of the most courageous and eloquent Israeli historians of what has come to be known, in the country, as the New Historians and his book, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, of 2006, remains a central work for the understanding of the politics of Zionism and Israel. An abridged version of the early chapters of the book can be read at libcom.org. Below, we share an excellent interview with Pappé on the same subject, from 2018.
Continue readingIsrael Can’t Imprison Two Million Gazans Without Paying a Cruel Price
From the Verso Books Blog …
Under Israeli blockade since 2007, Gaza is the world’s largest open air prison. While major Western media outlets are painting Israel as the victim of a surprise attack, Israeli journalist Gideon Levy argues that Israel’s ruthless imprisonment of 2 million Palestinians is to blame for the present violence.
Gideon Levy, 12 October 2023
This op-ed was originally published by Ha’aretz on 9 October 2023.
Continue readingBenjamin Steinhardt Case: Decolonizing Jewishness
“If you have come here to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.”
–Aboriginal activist saying, attributed to Lilla Watson
Seven decades on, Israel is geopolitically embattled and the Jewish community is increasingly polarized around the issue of occupation. The occupation – Israeli military control over the Palestinian West Bank and the borders of Gaza Strip – is five decades old. Entire generations of people have grown up without political or civil rights, under the military jurisdiction of a “democratic” state. Some trace the problem to the very existence of the State of Israel. How did the Jewish struggle to free ourselves from antisemitism lead to this point?
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Tagged Benjamin Steinhardt Case, colonialism and anti-colonialism, israel, palestine
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Uri Gordon: Anarchism in Israel and Palestine
Anarchism has been a political undercurrent in Israel and Palestine for a century, appearing in three disconnected waves: the libertarian socialism of the early Kibbutz communes, the publishing and cultural activities of Yiddish-speaking immigrants, and contemporary Israeli anarchism. In Palestinian society there are individual sympathizers but no organized anarchist movement, with Marxist parties such as the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) leading the secular left wing. Yet the first Intifada (1987–9) drew widespread support from anarchists as a grassroots uprising involving tax refusal, general strikes, urban confrontation, and the establishment of underground schools and mutual aid projects. Since 2000, Israeli and international anarchists have been leading solidarity campaigns in Palestine.
Continue readingAnarchist voices on Palestine-Israel: Albert Meltzer
Anarchist tactic for Palestine
The Arab revolution is centred on Palestine. The re-awakening of the Arab nation and the consequent nationalist revolution has brought the masses of Palestine in conflict with British Imperialism. Every movement against British Imperialism must be welcomed as the rulers of this country rule (or, synonymously, misrule) the larger part of the world’s colonial peoples. The opposition of revolutionaries to British Imperialism and its allies must be taken for granted.
Continue readingAnarchist voices on Palestine-Israel: Emma Goldman
To the Editor,
“Spain and the World”.
Dear Comrade,
I was interested in the article, ‘Palestine and Socialist Policy’, by our good friend Reginald Reynolds in ‘Spain and the World’ of July 29th. There is much in it with which I fully agree, but a great deal more which seems to me contradictory for a Socialist and a near-anarchist. Before I point out these inconsistencies, I wish to say that our friend’s article lends itself to the impression that he is a rabid anti-Semite. In point of truth, I have been asked by several people how it happens that ‘Spain and the World’ printed such an anti-Semitic article. Their surprise was even greater that Reginald Reynolds should be guilty of such tendency. Knowing the writer I felt quite safe in assuring my Jewish friends that Reginald Reynolds has not a particle of anti-Semitic feeling in him, although it is quite true that his article unfortunately gives such an impression.
I have no quarrel with our good friend about his charges against the Zionists. In point of fact I have for many years opposed Zionism as the dream of capitalist Jewry the world over for a Jewish State with all its trimmings, such as Government, laws, police, militarism and the rest. In other words, a Jewish State machinery to protect the privileges of the few against the many.
Continue readingMartin Buber’s messianic Zionism
There is a Jewish tradition about seventy angels known as “princes” who are set in charge of the seventy nations of the world.Each of these “princes” supervises his own nation, acting as its spokesman before the throne of glory. When their respective nations are embattled, they too become involved against each other. The “princes” are the real victors and the real vanquished; and their wars, victories and defeats, their ascents and descents on the mighty ladder, are what historians characterize by the name of history. Each of them has a purpose and function of his own; and so long as the “prince” does his part, so long as he accomplishes his purpose and fulfills his function, he is entrusted with power. But he is responsible to his Master, and is required to render an accounting to him. Therefore, when he becomes so intoxicated with power as to forget who he is and what his function is, arrogantly assuming himself to be the lord and master—then the hand of his Sovereign falls upon him: falling either in the form of lightning which flings him into the abyss of nothingness, or gradually as a steady rain, which carries him little by little down to the abyss of nothingness.
Martin Buber, On Judaism (1967)
“Palestine belongs to the Arabs”. The words are Mahatma Ghandi’s and they are cited by Martin Buber in a 1939 letter that he wrote to Ghandi in defence of the creation of a Jewish community in Palestine, by which time he was already living in Jerusalem, having left Nazi Germany in 1938.
To read Buber’s letter over 80 years after its composition, and, above all, after the creation of the state of Israel in 1948, is to be taken back to a time when perceptions among Jews, and especially Zionist Jews, of what kind of polity the new state should be, in a world of nation-states, were intensely debated. And Buber’s Zionism reminds us of a vision of messianic utopianism, by no means exclusive to Buber, which he believed would set Israel apart from other states, teaching by example a form of non-sovereign, agrarian communalism bound to the land of Palestine, but resonating throughout the world’s nations.
Continue readingHannah Arendt: Zionism Reconsidered
It will not be easy either to save the Jews or to save Palestine in the twentieth century; that it can be done with categories and methods of the nineteenth century seems at the very most highly improbable. If Zionists persevere in retaining their sectarian ideology and continue with their short-sighted “realism,” they will have forfeited even the small chances that small peoples still have in this none too beautiful world of ours.
Hannah Arendt
It is impossible to understand the politics of the state of Israel without some understanding of Zionism. As a modern nationalist movement, with the particularity of being a Jewish nationalism, Hannah Arendt’s critical engagement remains fundamental. We share below her 1944 essay, “Zionism Reconsidered”.
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Edward Said: Truth and Reconciliation
In all my works, I remained fundamentally critical of a gloating and uncritical nationalism. … My view of Palestine … remains the same today: I expressed all sorts of reservations about the insouciant nativism, and militant militarism of the nationalist consensus; I suggested, instead, a critical look at the Arab environment, Palestinian history, and the Israeli realities, with the explicit conclusion that only a negotiated settlement, between the two communities of suffering, Arab and Jewish, would provide respite from the unending war.
Edward Said, “Orientalism, an Afterward” Raritan 14:3 (Winter 1995)
Despite this article being written in 1999 during the now discredited “peace process”, its powerful message for the basis of truth and reconciliation in Palestine is equally important today. The writer contends that the people of the region can never move forward unless the oppressors humanise those they systematically oppress and the injustices that have been committed are recognised.
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