While Eqbal Ahmad and Fayez Sayegh disagreed about resistance strategies, they both analysed Zionism as a form of settler colonialism. In his landmark Zionist Colonialism in Palestine, published in 1965, Sayegh argued that Zionism aimed at establishing first a ‘settler-community’ and then ‘a settler-state in Palestine’, in imitation of the colonial ventures of European nations in earlier centuries. ‘If other European nations had successfully extended themselves into Asia and Africa, and had annexed to their imperial domains vast portions of those two continents’, he wrote, ‘the “Jewish nation” – it was argued – was entitled and able to do the same thing for itself’. There is no shortage of statements from Zionist leaders that support this interpretation. The architect of modern Zionism Theodor Herzl wrote in 1896 that a Jewish state in Palestine would be ‘a portion of the rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism’. The same colonial stance recurred in 1947, when Chaim Weizmann, later to be Israel’s first president, stated before the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine:
Other peoples have colonized great countries, rich countries. They found when they entered there backward populations. And they did for the backward populations what they did. I am not a historian, and I am not sitting in judgment on the colonizing activity of the various great nations which have colonized backward regions. But I would like to say that, as compared with the result of the colonizing activities of other peoples, our impact on the Arabs has not produced very much worse results than what has been produced by others in other countries.
Today, the theme of Israel as an outpost of western civilisation continues, with, for example, Israeli President Isaac Herzog declaring in December 2023 that the war on Gaza is ‘really, truly, to save Western civilization, to save the values of Western civilization’ and that, if it weren’t for Israel, ‘Europe would be next’.8
While Sayegh saw an analogy between Zionism and nineteenth-century European colonialism in Asia and Africa, he also pointed to important differences. Crucially, for Zionism ‘colonization would be the instrument of nation-building, not the byproduct of an already-fulfilled nationalism’. Moreover, because Zionism was an ‘anomaly’ – a colonialism launched in an era of decolonisation – it had to confront the problem that Palestinians themselves had developed national aspirations. This is why it has ‘so passionate a zeal’ for the ‘physical expulsion of “native” populations’. Zionist colonists aim, ultimately, not at establishing a South Africa in the Middle East where Palestinians are subordinated into a racially separated, super-exploited workforce, but at the complete elimination of the Palestinians. When it is unable to achieve this goal, says Sayegh, it settles for an ‘apartheid’ state of racial segregation. Either way, racism is ‘the quintessence of Zionism’. More than 50 years after Sayegh wrote Zionist Colonialism in Palestine, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International acknowledged that Israel operated an apartheid system. Missing from their accounts, though, was an explanation of why Zionism contains an impulse towards racist exclusion. Without discussing the dynamics of settler colonialism which Sayegh had outlined, Israel’s segregationist policies appeared as the result of individual decisions by racist politicians rather than expressions of a deeper structural process.9
Eqbal Ahmad’s most detailed analysis of Zionism – ‘“Pioneering” in the nuclear age: an essay on Israel and the Palestinians’ – was published in 1984 in the journal Race & Class. Reading the essay today, it sizzles with insights that feel contemporary. Because the underlying logic of Zionist colonialism has not changed over the last half century, Ahmad’s analysis of it remains applicable. Echoing Sayegh, Ahmad thought that, while there were similarities to South African apartheid, Zionism was ‘structurally and substantively’ different. The more precise comparison, he argued, was to European settler colonialism in the Americas. With both, there were ‘the myths of the empty land, of swamps reclaimed and deserts blooming … messianic complexes of manifest destinies and promised lands … a paranoid strain in the colonising culture, an instrumental attitude towards violence and a tendency to expand.’ He noted that settler colonies of this kind tend to pursue three goals: some level of independence from their western state sponsors; a normalisation of their relations with neighbouring countries; and a solution to what they consider the ‘native problem’, through the elimination, expulsion or containment of the Indigenous populations.10
The US could claim it had achieved these goals in the nineteenth century, though Indigenous resistance has never ceased. Israel was still pursuing them in the 1980s and continues to do so today. Its pursuit of autonomy from its sponsor, the US, has been complex. On the one hand, it has sought to integrate its agenda closely into US ruling elites, to lesson the likelihood that they might place restrictions on Israeli colonialism. On the other hand, Israel has steadily reduced its financial and military dependence on the US. US financial assistance is now a much smaller fraction of Israel’s gross domestic product (GDP) than it was 40 years ago. In 1981, US aid was equivalent to almost 10% of Israel’s economy; in 2020, though higher in absolute terms, the $4 billion the US provided was closer to 1%. Israel’s arms industry means it is not entirely dependent on importing US-made weapons, but the country still needs US military and diplomatic protection: it relies on the US to block attempts by other forces in the region to militarily assist the Palestinians – as shown by the US-led bombing this year of the Ansar Allah (Houthi) group in Yemen – and to use its seat at the UN Security Council, where it routinely vetoes resolutions aimed at restraining Israeli violence. If Israel’s normalisation has been within reach, it is because the US put its weight behind the Abraham Accords that formalised Arab states’ recognition of Israeli sovereignty.11
It is the third goal of settler colonialism – resolving the ‘native problem’ – where Israel has its greatest difficulty. Throughout its history, it has deployed various methods to expel Palestinians: ongoing removal from their homes under discriminatory laws and regulations, intimidation and violence to pressure them to leave, and ethnic cleansing under the cover of war, as happened in 1948, 1956 and 1967, and is now occurring again in the West Bank and Gaza. The inhuman geography of the Gaza strip – where 2.3 million Palestinians, mainly refugees, are penned in, besieged, deliberately starved and deprived of clean water, and subjected to regular bombardment – is itself a product of this process of enforced displacement from other parts of Palestine. Israeli leaders apparently now believe that even in this narrow slice of land, one of the world’s most densely populated locations, there are opportunities for settler expansion, if those Gazans who survive the genocidal war can be squeezed into the southern half, or even expelled into Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula. The current policy on Gaza is being carried out by the most extremist leadership in Israel’s history but its violence flows not from a particular party but from the basic premises of the Zionist project. The aim has always been to smash the Palestinian nation into a thousand shards, so that its people are concentrated and contained in ever narrower patches of their land, while heavily armed and well-resourced Jewish settlements expand relentlessly. Yet, despite the persistent application of Israeli terror, there remain more than 7 million Palestinians living between the Jordan river and the Mediterranean, with another 6 million living in neighbouring countries, many in refugee camps and most set on returning to their homeland. Israel will probably not succeed in its current objective of dismantling Hamas but, even if it did, the Palestinian struggle for national liberation will continue.12
Israel was, of course, itself established by refugees. But rather than seeing this as a factor that made Israel exceptional as a colony, Ahmad pointed out that it was not unusual in the history of settler colonialism. Zionism was similar to the European colonies of North America, he noted, in the way it offered refuge to persecuted religious minorities in Europe, inclining its advocates to a rhetoric of liberal rights even as it sought ‘to exclude and eliminate the native inhabitants’. Later, Israel’s European leaders brought in Jews from Middle Eastern countries, as part of their effort to demographically supplant the Palestinians – garnishing Israel’s reputation as a refuge, even though these new citizens were in a subordinate social position. Where Zionism is exceptional is that, in forming a settler colonial state in 1948, at a later stage of history, it has been forced to develop a more advanced repertoire of colonial methods. The ‘unique fate’ of the Palestinians, Ahmad wrote, was their encountering ‘a remarkable phenomenon – a settler colonial movement in the twentieth century, an infinitely better organised, more desperate, more disciplined, more complex, if inherently weaker, movement than its predecessors’. That capacity to be ruthlessly well-organised could be seen, for example, in the way that Israel developed itself into one of the world’s largest arms exporters. By supplying weapons or counterinsurgency training to US-allied right-wing authoritarian regimes in South Africa, Argentina, Chile, Guatemala and Honduras, when the US was unable to act itself because of domestic or diplomatic concerns, Israel created ‘new and organic linkages’ with the US ruling class. ‘The significance of this development’, wrote Ahmad, ‘cannot be overstated’.13
Equally important were the sophisticated ways that Israel managed the demographic challenges inherent to any settler state. As its developing capitalist economy increasingly relied on Palestinian labour, Israeli leaders anticipated the longer-term danger this presented to their project. They observed how in South Africa, by the 1980s, the structural dependence on a large Black workforce was a dangerous vulnerability, because labour strikes could be used by the anti-apartheid movement to weaken the system. Israel avoided a similar fate by continuously seeking new pools of Jewish labour (such as from the former Soviet Union), concentrating on capital-intensive industries (such as the manufacturing of high-tech surveillance and military products) and bringing in temporary migrant workers from Asia.14