Parsing Zionism, Imperialism and the Jewish community

Conflations, abstractions and distinctions

In October 2023, when what since became the undeniable Israeli genocide in Palestine still only threatened to become one, I made a conscious effort at regular updates to this blog. As someone who's spent time in Palestine and knows the issues well, and as a result doesn't worry too much about stating things for the actual quite simple facts they are, I wanted to put down some basics, so that people felt somewhat orientated in the deliberate obfuscation of information and history that is anyway par for the course with Zionism, all the more so this last year and a half.

I can only apologise that I didn't keep that up more regularly. Cycling through Latin America made it hard, as did writing a new manuscript (going ok), as did, truly, the unspeakable Israeli willingness to murder Palestinians. Awful as the early language of "children of darkness" and "thinning out" the population of Gaza was, it was expected that the Israelis might have had some standards of basic morality that might have stopped them by now or, failing that, that their chief sponsors and facilitators in the US, UK and EU would also have interceded to avert rather than facilitate yet more genocide. Week in and week out, there was little new to say, and a year and a half later, we now simply look at North American and European political establishments that have truly been hollowed-out by Zionism and are — if less directly — nonetheless as murderous as the project of Jewish statehood in Palestine that they support. I have worked offline as much as I could to help raise awareness or funds, the story of Palestine and imperialism is woven also in the story of Latin America that I am writing, but I know I did not do enough.

Colonial Boomerang

With these horrors still the moral centre of the universe, the events to which world attention still gravitates, and likely now also the supernova event in which US soft power finally dies a death it should have long ago, there is no doubt that —outside of the events themselves — are structural factors worthy of analysis for helping to navigate the new world being made.

In this, I wanted to give some time to writing the distinctions between Zionism, Imperialism and the Jewish community.

Discussing these interrelated issues is made deliberately fraught, yet a clear understanding of how the three interact is too essential to how we talk about Palestine — and now also minority and civil rights in Europe and North America —to leave unaddressed. The mass killing by Jewish-Israeli soldiers and pilots in Palestine has now made the jump across, with the US Government in recent weeks essentially disappearing off the streets, and subsequently detaining, the university students Mahmoud Khalil and Rümeysa Öztürk (and many others), both at the behest of Jewish-Zionist groups— the most prominent ones being named Betar and Canary Mission. If any still doubted it, such escalations make clear that the racism and violence fuelling the genocide in Palestine was never going to respect borders.

The idea of the colonial boomerang effect is well-documented through history; it posits that the methods and logic of the colony are eventually imported unavoidably back to the core. With this in mind it is important to stress that what we see in the Jewish colony in Palestine is not simply mass violence, or settler violence, but specifically Jewish supremacist settler violence. If we take the boomerang rule, therefore, what we should expect back at the core is by the same token not only violent authoritarianism, but its enactment in the name of Jewish supremacy. Given how prominent Jewish groups have been in lobbying for Zionism at the North American and European core, there is no reason to believe they would (or even could if they tried, because such extremist projects are inherently resistant to being rewired) exclude the Jewish supremacist component on its way back to that core.

When Jewish groups mobilise for the deportation of students from minority groups for their dissent, and successfully enlist the US Government to carry that out for them, this becomes a very firm example of Jewish supremacy. The relentless focus on white Jewish people as apparent victims of prejudice, while actual and visible minorities suffer far more and far more threatening prejudice, was also already soft Jewish supremacy. The unfettered flights of British or French or German Jews to go and join the slaughter in Palestine, while Muslims or Muslim-looking people are profiled for merely using airports when not travelling to commit war crimes, is a further form of Jewish supremacy.

Separating Zionist / Jewish

The conventional method among traditionally leftish groups advocating for Palestine, particularly Jewish people doing such advocacy, is to sidestep this issue by merely labelling Jewish people who identify as advocates for the Israeli state as Zionists, and leaving it at that. This is inadequate. This method, which is to effectively excommunicate Zionists— and with them all the undesirables and undesirable conduct emanating from within the Jewish community— and place it at the door of Zionism. Somewhat ironically, this mirrors the Zionist tendency to dismiss anti-Zionist Jews as "self-hating" and other things, and in a media environment of considerable Jewish overrepresentation, we are left with narration of the genocide in Palestine susceptible to becoming only an intra-Jewish feud over what constitutes a Jew.

Putting even that aside, however, the desire to simply and quickly recode Jewish-Zionists (kippahs, rabbis and synagogues and all) as only Zionists is unrealistic. It is all the more unrealistic when Zionism effectively owns —from its most prominent rabbis to its biggest institutions — the Jewish religion, and is much better-placed to (as it often does) infer that the anti-Zionist is not really Jewish, or representative, or is merely some kind of eccentric. If anyone has the sway to excommunicate anyone in the Jewish community, it is certainly not the anti-Zionist camp, regrettable as that may be.

More importantly still, this method —quite apart from delaying a halt to Israeli crimes in Palestine — is also endangering, because most Zionist organising is not done under the identity of Zionist, but under the identity of Jewish, the latter of which affords far greater freedom of operation on account of being a protected category. Far and away the most successful example of Zionist lobbying is simply to invoke, as everyone knows, "antisemitism" by way of shutting down criticism of the Israelis. If one group is talking about one thing (Zionists) and the other is talking about another (Jewish), then the chances are that something is going to get lost in the middle. This is exactly what is happening. If people, moreover, are expecting to come under attack from something called a Zionist, and yet the attack comes in the end from something more typically representative of the Jewish community, they stand to be blindsided. The inverse is also true, naturally, that making critiques of Zionism and being accused of prejudice against Jewish people is a source of disorientation precisely because people are talking about separate things; the conflation is contagious.

Of Imperialism

A further and more recent development alongside all this, practiced best of all on the political left and among Jewish anti-Zionists (notional or committed), is to blame imperialism for the genocide being carried out by the so-called Jewish state in Palestine. Naturally, this invocation of imperialism is valid and essential; it is hard to imagine anyone fool enough to reason that the genocide in Palestine is not a co-sponsored US genocide, made possible by the bipartisan and red-blue regime of Donald Trump and Joe Biden.

While this much is valid, however, and it is not for nothing that the US is known by millions as Great Satan, it does not alter a fundamental fact that the genocide is being carried out at root by Jewish-Israelis (and overseas Jewish volunteers) against non-Jews. Its most prominent advocates in European and North American capitals are all Jewish. That these people, when they perform, demand or legitimise genocide are acting out their Jewish values is not altered by the fact that these are not the values of all Jewish people, many of whom abhor these values as humans first and, if it is even relevant, as Jewish people in the specific.

Imperialism is an abstract concept that helps describe behaviour, while this usage risks it being used as a real concept that takes the place of the behaviour; in so doing it removes agency from Jewish military forces in Palestine, and advocates out of it. Moreover, if the intervention of a power so violent as the US is required to stop a genocide being carried out by a community, this is a question of capacity not morality, and still means the Jewish community—in Palestine and out— has been made primed and ready for genocide.

Rwanda and the limits of imperial explanation

In the case of the Rwanda Genocide, there also exists a strong imperialist backstory; namely in imperial Belgium using the Tutsi minority as chosen partners. This manipulation then created the social imbalances and resentments that unfurled first in conflict and finally in genocide. Explaining this dynamic of imperialism helps us understand what happened, and gives invaluable historical context, but does not alter that the genocide was one by Hutus against Tutsis. None feel the need to frame the genocide squarely in its imperial dimension, because it is understood that the emphasis on structural factors alone marginalises understanding of individual and cultural motivations.

By the same token, this denial of agency fails to account for outliers of the genocidal behaviour; it also presupposes that those who do not participate in the genocide are avoiding it not out of human and cultural values but because they are anti-imperialists (an unlikelihood). Likewise, the fact that all of the killing was done by Hutus does not mean that every single Hutu was a killer.

Dispensations for the Jewish community, and discomfort around naming it as both wrongdoer, and the active party and identity in this genocide in Palestine, is preventing people from describing the genocide in plain terms. As a counterpoint that proves the point; people are comfortable asserting the Jewish character of a group like Jewish Voice for Peace, because their conduct is rightly deemed ennobling. Where the conduct of the Jewish community is rightly deemed ignobling, the Jewish characteristic is being stripped away and substituted for Zionist or Imperialist. Cumulatively this creates a distorted image of the sum total of Jewish organising for and against Zionism.

Ways forward

For all that theory helps us navigate complicate issues, it is in itself an insufficient remedy to them, especially when a genocide is raging in Palestine, and stands also to escalate to the West Bank.

The emphasis on Imperialism alone is like watching bullying in a playground and discussing it in terms of the problem of schoolyard bullying, rather than stopping the bullying, or even however the bully gained influence. Imperialism is a theory built from the sum total of individual behaviours, not the behaviours and actions themselves, just as you cook meals with ingredients and not with recipe books. Theory will only get you so far.

Uncomfortable as it is for many, the Jewish community at institutional level has lobbied hard to get to the political position it currently holds. Rabbis and synagogues can still (shamefully, in notionally secular societies) be found rallying support for the Israelis even in the midst of history's best-documented genocide. Israeli lobby groups such as AIPAC, or the many Friends of Israel chapters, did not take up such commanding position within the Imperialist system by looking at it as an inert monolith that could not be penetrated, especially if these systems were corrupted or — as very much so in the US case —in decline.

When anti-Zionists describe all of this as a theoretical inevitability, they disregard not only the evil of the agency involved in mobilising for genocide, but also the very real work that went into such ascendancy. In some ways, this over-theorising could be regarded as a washing hands of the expectation that the anti-Zionist Jewish community must, to truly be rid of it, probably make equivalent (or likely even greater) effort to take down the ascendant and Zionist part of their community. Outsiders of the community help them less by remaining silent on the very obvious Jewish dimension to Zionism, both in this genocide and the lobbying before it across many decades.

Critically, and when the victims of the recent US deportation effort are all of them Palestinian, black, brown or Muslim, we also see implicitly the problem of representation in the movement for Palestinian liberation.

While Jewish people who disapprove, or perhaps even abhor, what their community is doing may have to suffer guilt at it, but they are not suffering deportation. Nor are their livelihoods being destroyed. If the extent of their commitment to ending Zionism is closer to developing merely an idea but not a hard political reality of a community that opposes Zionism, then perhaps that's fine, and maybe even helpful, but it won't liberate Palestine, and it won't keep people safe from the attacks now escalating; attacks in the name of Zionism, and made by members of the Jewish community.

It is never desirable to bring a community into contact with the state as a way of addressing negative behaviour. Whether black people and gangs, or Muslims and "terrorism", a great deal of harm is done when such heavy-handed and top-down approaches are used. The only thing potentially worse, however, is if states are content to have Jewish groups and figures lobby endlessly and shamelessly for a "safe” yet manifestly genocidal Jewish state in Palestine, because to them it represents a more palatable idea to sell to the world as legitimate than the proposition of a Jewish-run US air base, positioned in the Eastern Mediterranean and on the threshold of the world oil economy. For those who must relentlessly centre Jewish risk and not a genocide of Palestinians, this partnership has also always been historically unwise for the Jewish community.

In the absence of state involvement, what is at the very least needed is a frank and open conversation about the penetration of the Jewish community by and for the purposes of Zionism. Truly anti-Zionist Jews I suspect would even welcome it, and enough Palestinians have been murdered for not being Jewish that we should at the very least be able to make it this far.