In an October 23 article in The Atlantic (yeah, I’m behind), Simon Sebag Montefiore took various world academies to task—and rightfully so—for their appalling anti-Semitic statements. He writes,
The Hamas attack resembled a medieval Mongol raid for slaughter and human trophies—except it was recorded in real time and published to social media. Yet since October 7, Western academics, students, artists, and activists have denied, excused, or even celebrated the murders by a terrorist sect that proclaims an anti-Jewish genocidal program.
Continuing,
Indeed, it requires an astonishing leap of ahistorical delusion to disregard the record of anti-Jewish racism over the two millennia since the fall of the Judean Temple in 70 C.E. After all, the October 7 massacre ranks with the medieval mass killings of Jews in Christian and Islamic societies, the Khmelnytsky massacres of 1640s Ukraine, Russian pogroms from 1881 to 1920—and the Holocaust.
Monteriore does not merely call to account Leftists, liberals, and academics who express or support anti-Semitic positions. He sees critiques of settler-colonialism as a central issue. He goes so far as to say, “Whenever you read a book or an article and it uses the phrase ‘settler-colonialist,’ you are dealing with ideological polemic, not history.”
That’s hardly the case.
I became aware of Monteriore’s article before I mostly left social media, as it was shared by a number of Southern Baptist acquaintances. A week later, Al Mohler, who never misses a chance to blame “the left,” raised settler-colonialism in his November 1, 2023 Briefing. In a 3,568-word mini-epic, ‘Settler Colonialism’ and Anti Semitism: The Ideology Behind Virulent Opposition to Israel (and the U.S.) on College Campuses, he says:
[I]n the ideological soup that is so much of the progressive left on America’s college and university campuses, and not just in the United States, but around the world, particularly in Western Europe and in the United States but increasingly the United States is kind of the vanguard of much of this leftist thought…One in particular we need to consider today. And it goes under the name of settler colonialism. And my guess is most of you have never heard about this ideology or this theory, but you need to know about it because this is what is driving academically, ideologically, intellectually what’s going on here.
Almost inexplicably, in his criticism of campus anti-colonialists, the president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s “flagship” university comes a C-sharp short of a worship chorus for imperialism and its love-child, colonization.
As you look at the 19th century, it was the age of empires, and in many cases, it was European empires. The French had an empire, the Dutch had an empire, and there were others, including Belgium and Germany, or at least the German states, they had empires.
But Christians understand that in a fallen world, some things can be a very mixed picture. And empire is one of those mixed pictures. Intellectual honesty just requires saying yes. Empires, they require force. In some cases, they also lead to extraction. You have diamond mines in the southern tip of Africa that are owned by British imperialists like Cecil Rhodes as in Rhodes Scholars. And you just don’t deny the fact that there was coercion, there was extraction, there was oppression in many cases. But at the same time, as you just think about some of those places, some of those nations that became a part of the European empires, quite frankly, they were unable to feed themselves. They were warring nations of various ethnicities without any kind of national government. They did not function well socially. They had no access to modern technology.
Exploitation, brutalization, murder, maiming, theft, slavery, rape, pillage, and farther down, down through the darkness we arrive at a “mixed picture” of empire and colonization. Christians understand that in a fallen world bad things happen instead of good. We all know fruit trees can grow through cow dung, but we need not downplay dung’s pungency to know apples taste good. In other words, because God can wrangle good in the midst of evil, we need not spit-shine the evil. I feel confident the 10 million dead and maimed Congolese from King Leopold II of Belgium’s greed and bloodlust would have been just as well off regardless of their lack of “modern technology.”
Reaching his main criticism of the “academic left,” settler colonialism, Mohler writes,
So during the period after World War II, you did have an academic left that started to develop ideas. And one of the ideas they developed is that the great evil was imperialism and an extension of that great evil was colonialism.
And in colonialism, you had a major power that took control or sovereignty over a weaker power and sometimes made that area a colony. Now, in American history, we talk about the 13 colonies…So that’s a part of America’s history too. But those on the academic left who were really trying to work through new theory, that came to the theory that imperialism was something of an original sin. Colonialism was its extension, and by the time you get to the new academic left fueled, yes, by a certain form of cultural Marxism and by critical theory applying all this ideology, one of the ideas that developed has become known as settler colonialism.
I’m not an expert on leftist academic thought. I’ve never taken any decolonialism classes. But I’ve read enough history to know that colonialism, imperialism, conquest, and the whole sorry mess were not developed by leftist academics or critical theorists. Colonization is a feature of imperial expansion, not a bug, and although modern Israel is not an empire, “settler colonization” has been its modus operandi since the onset of political Zionism.
History, not polemics, tells us so.
Ze’ev Jabotinsky, a contemporary of Zionist founder Theodor Herzl and himself the founder of Revisionist Zionism, in a 1923 article titled “The Iron Wall” wrote,
Every native population in the world resists colonists as long as it has the slightest hope of being able to rid itself of the danger of being colonized…We cannot offer any adequate compensation to the Palestinian Arabs in return for Palestine. And therefore, there is no likelihood of any voluntary agreement being reached. So that all who regard such an agreement as a condition sine qua non for Zionism may as well say ‘non’ and withdraw from Zionism. Zionist colonization must either stop, or else proceed regardless of the native population [emphasis in original]. [i]
Spoiler alert: it proceeded regardless of the native population. Jabotinsky would go on to lead a violent, Zionist paramilitary group in Palestine, the Irgun which committed terrorist acts against the Palestinians and the British.
It wasn’t only the early Zionists like Jabotinsky who embraced the colonial method. Rashid Khalidi has a current list:
Significantly, many early apostles of Zionism had been proud to embrace the colonial nature of their project. The eminent Revisionist Zionist leader Ze’ev Jabotinsky, godfather of the political trend that has dominated Israel since 1977, upheld by Prime Ministers Menachem Begin, Yitzhak Shamir, Ariel Sharon, Ehud Olmert, and Benjamin Netanyahu…[ii]
And it wasn’t only those on the political Right. Zachary Lockman, Professor of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies and of History at New York University, notes:
[T]he Israeli officials and army officers who actually oversaw the dispossession of the Palestinians in 1948 were overwhelmingly drawn from the ranks of the Zionist left…Believing themselves to be good socialists, democrats and humanitarians, they could not acknowledge their complicity in deeds that contravened the moral and political principles they professed.[iii]
It should not be difficult to believe political Zionists used colonial strategies. The founders were from Europe, home to so many of the historic colonial empires—as Mohler mentioned. Indeed, it was from the colonial British the Zionists sought a legal right to a homeland in Palestine.
In its earliest stages Zionism was of European provenance: its institutions referred to and identified themselves as colonizing undertakings in the manner of European colonization of Africa and Asia; its whole rhetoric and ideological language borrowed heavily not only from Jewish theology but also from the rhetoric and language of the British in Africa and India, or the French in Algeria.[iv]
Former professor of modern history, Israeli ambassador, Ministry of Public Security, and Minister of Foreign Affairs Shlomo Ben-Ami defends the goal of a Jewish homeland, as is right. But he also acknowledges its bringing about was more than a “mixed picture.” It was “self-indulgent,” “colonial penetration,” and “schizophrenic.”
In addition to creating ‘for the Jewish people a home in Palestine secured by law,’ Zionism was also a movement of conquest, colonisation and settlement in the service of a just and righteous but also self-indulgent national cause. An enterprise of national liberation and human emancipation that was forced to use the tools of colonial penetration, it was a schizophrenic movement, which suffered from an irreconcilable incongruity between its liberating message and the offensive practices used to advance it.[v]
I disagree with Ben-Ami that Zionists were “forced” to use “tools of colonial penetration.” They chose that route. It was intent, not accident, that wrought the “irreconcilable incongruity.”
Meron Benvinisti was formerly deputy mayor of Jerusalem in the 1970s, columnist for Israel’s largest newspaper, Haaretz, a political scientist, and author. His book Sacred Landscape: The Buried History of the Holy Land since 1948 remembers the hundreds of Palestinian Arab villages emptied then razed to make way for the new nation of Israel. In the chapter “Ethnic Cleansing,” he writes:
Early in 1948 the demolition of villages took on the character of a political mission whose objective was to block the return of the refugees from their homes…There were also practical economic considerations: for instance, the fact that there were ways of exploiting the abandoned villages to produce income for the state.[vi]
Given colonial history, the result was sadly predictable. Professor of New Testament David Crump concludes,
The final fruit produced by Zionist activity between 1920 and 1967 was the forceful eviction of the vast majority of resident Palestinians from their ancestral homes by a well-equipped, Zionist military determined to sweep the land of Palestine clean of as many Arabs as possible. The special oddity of Zionist settler colonialism is…that these primarily European (Ashkenazi), Jewish settlers had a more primal claim to the land of Palestine than the brown-skinned native Palestinians they fought to replace.[vii]
As with other phrases, just because some academics find reason to use “settler colonialism” paint on every wall does not deny its appropriateness on some walls. Khalidi can chronicle a century of settler colonialism because it existed in a physical land, not because some Berkley prof sweated it out of a Marxist fever-dream.
For over a century, the Palestinians have been depicted in precisely the same language by their colonizers as have been other indigenous peoples. The condescending rhetoric of Theodor Herzl and other Zionist leaders was no different from that of their European peers. The Jewish state, Herzl wrote, would “form a part of a wall of defense for Europe in Asia, an outpost of civilization against barbarism.[viii]
Everything problematic in today’s globalized world is not the result of “white settler colonialism.” Violence and exploitation come in all shapes, shades, colors, and cultures. The Chinese, for example, are neck-deep exploiting Congo for cobalt. To repeat myself, the misuse or abuse of certain phrases that have historic meaning and centuries of examples do not negate their accurate use. There is plenty of evidence—from Jew, Gentile, Palestinian, Muslim, and Christian—that modern Israel’s founding depended on a version of settler colonialism that produced violence and destruction on the majority native population of Palestinian Arabs.
Blaming leftist academics for modern Israel’s settler colonial strategy is little more than gaming history. It might even be considered ahistorical delusion.
fides quaerens intellectum
[i] A Stranger in the Land: Jewish Identity Beyond Nationalism, Daniel Cil Brecher, 2007, 263–264
[ii] The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017, Rashid Khalidi, 2020, pp 12
[iii] “Original Sin,” by Zachary Lockman, in Intifada: The Palestinian Uprising Against Israeli Occupation, Lockman and Beinin (eds), 1989, p 187.
[iv] The Politics of Dispossession: The Struggle for Palestinian Self-Determination, 1969–1994. Edward W. Said, 1994, pp 164–165.
[v] Scars of War Wounds of Peace: The Israeli-Arab Tragedy, Shlomo Ben-Ami, 2005, p 2–3.
[vi] Sacred Landscape: The Buried History of the Holy Land Since 1948, Meron Benveisti, 2002, p 166.
[vii] Like Birds in a Cage: Christian Zionism’s Collusion in Israel’s Oppression of the Palestinian People, David M. Crump, 2021, p 28
[viii] Khalidi, p 10
Hey, while you’re here, coffee, or a donut, or coffee and a donut would be deeply appreciated!
