Post-colonialism gets Israel wrong
Filtering a complex conflict through a binary worldview leads the left down a dark path.
Today marks a year since Hamas attacked Israel, and the subsequent war has torn a rift not only in the Middle East but also in Western societies. Criticism of Israel, always a feature of the political left, has become more uncompromising as the death toll rises. Increasingly Israel itself, rather than just its settler policy or military tactics, is in the crosshairs.
I have been watching the Middle East on and off for about 20 years, and lived in the West Bank for six months as a student. Flare-ups in violence between Israel and the Palestinian territories have always prompted emotional, and arguably disproportionate, reactions in the West. Even so, this time feels different.
Most obviously, criticism of Israel has entered every aspect of life. Walk down a residential street or spend ten minutes on a dating app and you’ll see a Palestinian flag. In this summer’s UK election, Labour won a landslide but two of its prominent candidates lost their seats to independents running on the single issue of Palestine.
The nature of the criticism has also changed. Mainstream opposition to Israel had always respected the basic provision that it has a right to exist and to defend itself when attacked; the arguments centred around how much territory it should control and how much force was reasonable. This largely remained the pattern in the weeks following the 7 October attack.
More recently, however, the language has hardened and now includes positions that, if taken to their logical conclusion, imply that dismantling the Israeli state is a morally acceptable aim.
Take the phrase “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”, chanted at a thousand marches and written in a million Instagram posts. This echoes the objectives of Hamas, which openly seeks to establish an Islamic state “from the River Jordan in the east to the Mediterranean in the west” – in other words, the entire territory of Israel.
And that is Hamas at its mildest, in a document that was intended to be translated into English and shown to the world. When addressing an Arabic audience – and I can confirm this from first-hand experience – its leaders express straightforward religious hatred. The actions of its fighters on 7 October last year show its true colours.
Original sin
How did people on the left, who generally pride themselves on tolerance and pacifism, end up parroting the propaganda of such a heinous group?
The answer may lie in another charge increasingly levelled at Israel: that it is a ‘colonial’ state rooted in white supremacism that is by nature racist and genocidal. This idea appears in the original 1964 charter of the Palestine Liberation Organisation, which sought to dismantle Israel, impose dhimmitude on Jews native to the land and expel those who had migrated there.
In the theology of campus leftism, colonialism is the West’s original sin, underpinning our continued racism and oppression of non-white peoples. If Israel is an avatar for this, then its very existence is a scourge upon the world and its destruction becomes morally acceptable.
The charge is demonstrably untrue. The history of colonialism is of resource-poor European countries occupying large swathes of territory and carting their riches back home. Israel is tiny and has no natural resources to speak of, nor a mother country that might be enriched by this exploitation. Conversely, its wars make it poorer. As for white supremacism, that is precisely what Europe’s Jews were fleeing when they established Israel.
Israel’s history, despite dark episodes, is not one of expansionist conquest. The 1948 war pitted two established communities against each other, and the displacement of Palestinians following the Jewish victory was mirrored by mass expulsions of Jews from many Arab countries. Palestinians were not passive victims: In 1941 the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem made overtures to Hitler about their shared enmity with “the Jews”.
Following later wars, Israel willingly ended its occupations of Sinai in 1982 and southern Lebanon in 2000 once the security situation allowed – hardly the actions of a colonialist power. The illegal settlements in the West Bank are a stain on the Israeli conscience, but its expansionism goes no further. The continued occupation of Syria’s Golan Heights is justified on military grounds by credible threats from Hezbollah and the Assad regime.
Neither is Israel solely responsible for the Palestinians’ continued suffering. The Palestinian authorities and neighbouring Arab states still segregate Palestinian refugees and their descendants, insisting that they should one day return to their ancestral homes rather than build a future anywhere else. For nearly 80 years they have lived and died in ‘refugee camps’ – in reality, permanent settlements – overseen by the UN.
Many of the world’s borders were redrawn in the 1940s, but only Palestinians still live with such cruel consequences. Much of the blame for that lies with their own leaders and neighbouring Arab countries.
Down a dark path
The ‘colonial’ view of Israel might be better understood within the historical tradition of antisemitism, by which Jews are cast as whatever contemporary society most hates or fears. Nazi propaganda thus linked Jews to Bolshevism, whereas in the Soviet Union they were cast as rootless intellectuals. In more pious times they were simply satanic. If you wanted antisemitism to take root among today’s cultural left, accusing the world’s only Jewish state of colonialism would be a good approach.
Sometimes, people can spread antisemitic ideas without intending to. After the 2008 financial crisis, a journalist singled out Goldman Sachs for caricature as a “vampire squid”. Many other publications picked up on this evocative image, all seemingly without realising that it invoked the blood libel and other antisemitic tropes.
As the tragedy in the Middle East escalates, amplified by misinformation and filter bubbles, careless words risk fuelling the resurgence in antisemitism that has already begun in Europe. Once exaggerated or inaccurate criticism of Israel takes hold in society, even professional broadcasters are liable to misreport events or invent a “global Jewish lobby”.
There are historical precedents for this. Roald Dahl, a beloved British children’s author and Second World War fighter pilot, set off down the path of antisemitism after witnessing Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon. Regardless of what one thinks of that war, Dahl ended up in a very dark place, as British journalist David Aaronovitch explores here.
Given Europe’s history, it’s particularly important for us all to think carefully about what we hope to achieve with our statements about Israel, and whether our words have that intended effect. And if, after careful reflection, we have nothing constructive to say, we would perhaps do better to say nothing at all.