Zionist Settler-Colonialism and the Logic of Genocide in Gaza: A Conversation with Professor Avi Shlaim...
Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.
"All worldly pursuits have but one unavoidable and inevitable end, which is sorrow; acquisitions end in dispersion; buildings in destruction; meetings in separation; births in death. Knowing this, one should, from the very first, renounce acquisitions and storing-up, and building, and meeting; and, faithful to the commands of an eminent Guru, set about realizing the Truth. That alone is the best of religious observances. Milarepa
"What you are is what you have been. What you’ll be is what you do now. The Buddha
"Irrigators channel waters; fletchers straighten arrows; carpenters bend wood; the wise master themselves. The Buddha
"An idea that is developed and put into action is more important than an idea that exists only as an idea." The Buddha
Information concerning the horrific genocide of the Palestinian people in Gaza by the Zionist state of Israel (under the "leadership" and direction of the brutal butcher man Netanyahu) is generally presented to Americans with a very biased pro Zionist slant. Most often without recognizing the humanitarian atrocities the IDF and the Zionist government of Israel have rained down on the innocent people of Palestine.
The US government, with its unethical and immoral support through the MIC (money talks and the war machine in Washington is always only to happy to find ways to support wars somewhere on the planet), bears responsibility as well for the over 60,000 innocent Palestinian deaths and the massive destruction of property in Gaza. Caused by weapons of death supplied by the US government.
While this site freely acknowledges the horrific act of Hama on October 7, the deaths of approximately 1200 Israelis and the taking of some 240 hostages, the Zionist response was an overwhelmingly disproportionate response and it was evil to its very core. The intent of the Zionist government of the butcher man Netanyahu was to kill or starve as many Palestinians as possible by its genocidal fervor.
There is a plethora of accurate truthful information that tells the true story of the Palestinian and how the Zionists since 1948 have spent years oppressing and suppressing the good people of Palestine for their own self interests.
Hopefully the cease fire will hold this time and and peace will become a new and lasting reality in the region. However, given butcher man Netanyahu has said there will be no Palestinian state in which Palestinians have autonomy over their own lives until fanatism has been eliminated. Well butcher man, perhaps it is YOU and YOUR Zionist government that has been engaging in genocide for the past 2 plus years that are the true fanatics, along with the fanatical pro Zionists in the USA.
Moving on... the following is a scholarly article from the perspective of Edinburgh University Press.
Abstract
Amidst the ongoing Zionist settler-colonial genocide in Gaza and shortly after the 7 October Hamas attack on Israel, the interview with the prominent activist and historian Avi Shlaim was initially conducted on 24 October 2023, but has undergone subsequent revisions from May 2024 until September 2024 to reflect the unfolding genocide in Gaza. Professor Shlaim, a member of the ‘New Historians’, along with Benny Morris and Ilan Pappé, analyses the political, ideological and military apparatus of Israel in terms of settler-colonialism, Apartheid, and the attempted elimination of the indigenous Palestinian population. In this interview, Shlaim places recent events in this historical context, considering political, psychological, and sociological conditions and ramifications.
Avi Shlaim: Tayseer, I’ll do the interview, but I’ve just had very bad news. We have a young Palestinian woman from Ramallah living with us in Oxford. She has just received news that her aunt and two of her cousins, who moved from Gaza City to Nuseirat Refugee Camp in the south, were bombed by the Israelis. Her aunt was killed along with two of her cousins.
Tayseer Abu Odeh: I am very sorry to hear this terrible news. Our deepest condolences go out to her and her family. We are all traumatised by this horrendous genocide.
Avi Shlaim: Yes, this horrendous murdering of innocent civilians is not the same as previous Israeli assaults on the people of Gaza. This is ethnic cleansing and genocide.
Tayseer Abu Odeh: Indeed, and yet this interview was organised in advance of the recent escalations when I paid you a visit at Oxford University a few months ago. May we begin with the historical context of the appalling genocide taking place in Gaza right now?
Avi Shlaim: Of course, the starting point of the war in Gaza is not Hamas’s attack on 7 October. This is the Israeli narrative and, as always, it is selective and self-serving. This attack did not happen in a vacuum. The backdrop to this attack was 56 years of Israeli occupation. Israel is a settler-colonial state. That is the relevant context. That is how Israel started and that is how it has remained to this day. Noam Chomsky once remarked that settler-colonialism is the most extreme and vicious form of imperialism. The Palestinians have the unique misfortune of being at the receiving end of both Zionist settler-colonialism and Western imperialism, first British imperialism and later American imperialism. But to understand the real context for this attack, we should go back to the Nakba of 1948. I would go even further back in history to the Balfour Declaration of 1917.
In a very real sense, the Palestinians have been under military rule ever since then, under the British Mandate until 1948 and under military government inside the state of Israel until 1966 when the military government was abolished by Prime Minister Levi Eshkol. Since 1967 the whole of Mandatory Palestine has been under Israeli military control.
In June 1967, Israel completed the occupation of Mandatory Palestine, and since 1967, it has acted illegally in relation to the Palestinians. Everything that Israel has done since June 1967 is illegal. The annexation of Jerusalem in June 1967 is illegal, the settlements, every one of them are illegal, the so-called security barrier that Israel has built in the West Bank is illegal, and the entire occupation is illegal on two counts. First, its very existence is against international law, and secondly, the conduct of the occupying power, its actual policies on the ground, are also unlawful. Four major human rights organisations in the last three years have produced reports that conclude that Israel is an apartheid state. Israel is certainly an apartheid state, but it is an apartheid state because it is a settler-colonial state. Settler-colonialism is the all-important context.
The Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories is the most prolonged and brutal military occupation of modern times. Israel is still the occupier of both the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, although it withdrew unilaterally from Gaza in 2005. Under International Law, international lawyers argue that the Palestinians have the right to resist the occupation, including armed resistance, and these international lawyers provide ample evidence to support this legal right.4
Tayseer Abu Odeh: The Palestinian struggle for freedom and self-determination has always been represented as a form of terrorism and barbarism, no matter what form it takes. Of course, this is not to say that Hamas should not be subject to criticism also. It can be criticised in various ways, but Zionist settler-colonialism cannot be adequately fathomed without addressing its inevitable foil, namely Palestinian armed resistance.5
Remember that Eli Ben-Dahan, Deputy Defence Minister of Israel, spoke of Palestinians as non-human or inhuman: ‘to me, they are like animals, they aren’t human’ (Pileggi 2015). The same Orientalist rhetoric has been reiterated again and again by Israel’s Defence Minister and other leaders inside Israel along with the pro-Zionist advocates in Israel, the US, and elsewhere. However, many critics, such as Noam Chomsky, Edward Said, Ilan Pappé, Judith Butler, Nur Masalha, Norman Finkelstein, Rashid Khalidi view Hamas as an anti-colonial Islamic movement, an armed resistance group akin to other anti-colonial guerrilla forces and militias, and an entirely predictable feature of any project for national sovereignty under colonial conditions. How do you understand conflicting views of Palestinian resistance?
Avi Shlaim: Hamas is the abbreviation of ‘Islamic Resistance Movement’, an Arabic acronym for Ḥarakat al-Muqawamah al-Islamiyyah/ There is also an extensive scholarly literature on the historical and social roots of Hamas, especially among the 1948 Palestine refugees, and on the political rise of Hamas after the outbreak of the First Palestinian Intifada (Uprising) (December 1987-September 1993) against the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. So my view of Hamas is that it is an anti-colonial ‘Islamic Resistance Movement’ born of the First Intifada—the Intifada being a form of popular Palestinian resistance to the Israeli settler-colonial occupation. Also, the ample legal literature and sources I have cited above show that under International Law the Palestinians have the right to resist the occupation.
Since the 1990s Hamas has been the main element within the Palestinian national movement that has actually resisted the Israeli occupation. The Palestinian Authority in Ramallah is not a resistance movement. It is perceived to be a collaborationist regime. It is in effect the subcontractor for Israeli security. Hamas has popular political legitimacy in the eyes of the Palestinians, whereas the Palestinian Authority does not. In January 2006, Hamas won an absolute majority in a fair and free election and proceeded to form a government. Israel refused to recognise the democratically elected Hamas-led government.
Against this backdrop, Israel engaged in economic warfare to undermine the government, and the Western powers have supported Israel in this effort. Based on the 2006 election results, I regard Hamas as a true representative of Palestinian resistance to the Israeli occupation. It is necessary to distinguish, however, between the political wing and the military wing of Hamas. Hamas is a political party and not a terrorist organisation. The military wing has committed terrorist acts like the latest on the 7th of October when it attacked civilians in Israel. But that doesn’t make the whole organisation a terrorist movement. Israel and its allies, however, repeatedly describe all the Palestinians, and not just Hamas, as terrorists.
Israel denounces the entire Palestinian people as a bunch of deranged fanatics, as violent antisemites, and even as Nazis. My own view is that the Palestinians are normal people who aspire to what all normal people anywhere in the world aspire, which is to live in freedom and dignity on their own land. It is Israel that is stopping them from realising their basic rights and, above all, the right to national self-determination.
Tayseer Abu Odeh: Not all scholars bifurcate Hamas into a political and military wing. Judith Butler, for instance, contends that October 7th can be read as a form of Palestinian armed resistance, be it violent and brutal (Starr 2024). Of course, murdering civilians is horrendous and abhorrent. But to designate the Hamas-led attack on Israel as entirely terroristic (as a plethora of mainstream writers, critics, and pro-Zionist journalists and politicians including, but not limited to, Joe Biden, Naftali Bennett, Benjamin Netanyahu have) risks extending this judgment to the Palestinian cause writ large. If a people have no right to resistance—and this also means no right to freedom and self-determination—then its own civilian population is, in turn, vulnerable to terrorism. Amichai Eliyahu, Israel’s right-wing minister of Heritage, unabashedly renewed his call to drop a nuclear bomb on Gaza (Bachner 2023)
Avi Shlaim: I agree, of course, the starting point of the war in Gaza is not Hamas’s attack on 7 October. This is the Israeli narrative and, as alway I as, it is selective and self-serving. This attack did not happen in a vacuum. The backdrop to this attack was 56 years of Israeli occupation. But to understand the real context for this attack, we should go back to the Nakba of 1948. I would go even further back in history to the Balfour Declaration of 1917. In a very real sense, the Palestinians have been under military rule ever since then, under the British Mandate until 1948 and under military government inside the state of Israel until 1966 when the military government was abolished by Prime Minister Levi Eshkol. Since 1967 the whole of Mandatory Palestine has been under Israeli military control.
Shahd Dibas: Ever since the foundation of modern Israel in 1948, the mainstream leaders of Zionism have attempted to justify their settler-colonial enterprise as a European project of modernisation, which would expiate for the long history of antisemitism in Europe and compensate for the horrors of the Holocaust especially. What do you think of this framing?
Avi Shlaim: I do not agree with this framing because the Zionist movement predated the Holocaust. The Balfour Declaration of 1917 marks the beginning of the systematic Zionist takeover of Palestine. This is not to dismiss the Holocaust as irrelevant. It is relevant for understanding the subsequent course of history. But, even before the Holocaust, there was a case for a Jewish state as an expression of the desire of the Jews for national self-determination. After the Holocaust, the case for a Jewish state became stronger. The tragedy is that Europe, where the Holocaust was perpetrated, chose to compensate the Jews, to make amends to the Jews, at the expense of the Palestinians. Britain and America did not open their own gates to the survivors of the Holocaust. They pointed them in the direction of Palestine, where they were not wanted and where they themselves did not want to go. But they were given no choice.
Western guilt for the Holocaust led to the UN resolution of November 1947 to partition Mandatory Palestine into two states, one Jewish, one Arab. This resolution was grossly unfair to the Palestinians. It meant that their country would be divided and 55 percent of the land would be given to the Jews, a minority that owned only 7 percent of the land at the time. Moreover, it established a Jewish settler-colony in their midst. This is why Arabs rejected it. But, at the same time, the UN resolution also gave a charter of international legitimacy for a Jewish state.
In the aftermath of the 1948 war, Israel signed armistice agreements with all of its neighbours, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Egypt. These are the only internationally recognised borders that Israel ever had, and these are the only borders I recognise as legitimate. What I reject is the Zionist colonial project of going beyond the Green Line, that is, beyond the armistice lines.
Tayseer Abu Odeh: Recognition of the pre-1967 borders as legitimate, however, does not do justice to illegitimate pre-1967 events: the expulsion of almost one million Palestinians, their continuous uprooting and murder according to what Patrick Wolfe calls ‘the logic of elimination of the native’, and the destruction of more than five hundred villages (Wolfe 2006: 387-409) Taking into account the strategic settler-colonial Israelisation of Palestinian people in the West Bank and Jerusalem in the name of cultural assimilation, we cannot turn a blind eye to the sheer fact that the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948 was, by and large, a settler-colonial blueprint that is built on the existential, ecological, economic, and cultural erasure of indigenous Palestinian people who have been expelled from their own lands, made refugees and massacred in cold blood. The rhetoric of 1948 borders flies in the face of the 1967 demographical and geopolitical status quo—deeply rooted settler-colonial Zionism, be it of left or right-wing Zionists or the Israeli government. There is no such thing as Palestine or even Palestinians, as Golda Meir, a former Prime Minister of Israel, once asserted.
Avi Shlaim: Whichever way you look at it, the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 involved a colossal, monumental injustice to the Palestinians. History is often cruel to the weaker party, and this was clearly the case here. The question is, where do you go from here? One answer is to dismantle the State of Israel to undo the injustice done to the Palestinians. I think this would compound the original injustice with an even greater injustice.
Tayseer Abu Odeh: But we must avoid the false equivalencies which are habitually made between very real horrors and the hypothetical horrors that have always dominated the colonial imagination. Given that taking territory by war is illegal under international law, let us consider the scale of the actual injustices that we are here invoking. The massacres committed by Israel since 1948 include the expulsion of 750,000 people. Recent Israeli airstrikes and artillery fire in Gaza have resulted in the brutal killing of more than 41,000 Palestinians, including almost 16,000 children, 11,000 women, and 10,000 bodies still missing under the rubble. This is in addition to the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who have been killed, maimed, injured, and detained by the Israeli military forces in the occupied West Bank. Dozens of newborns also die of famine and parents struggle day and night to feed their children in Israel’s open-air prison and graveyard that is Gaza, as you once defined it. The West Bank is boiling in turmoil, and the ongoing incitement from Bezalel Smotrich, Itamar Ben-Gvir, among other extremist officials to flatten certain parts of it and turn them into a second Gaza is really appalling and horrendous. The unprecedented daily military incursions, massive destruction of infrastructure, forced displacement, and ongoing attacks on civilians are relentless. The injustices extend beyond life and into the grave. I am thinking of when, almost one year ago, Israeli forces brutally attacked a funeral procession for Shireen Abu Akleh, the courageous Palestinian-American journalist, whom they had murdered. They kicked and beat people. The coffin dropped to the ground. Palestinians are not even permitted to mourn.
Zionism’s ideology of ethnic cleansing is strategic and successful today because of the phenomenon of ‘Newspeak’, as Pappé once suggested, using George Orwell’s phrase. ‘Newspeak’ names rhetoric designed to camouflage the devastating and sadistic impact of its eliminatory practices. Yet recently, Israel seems to have turned a blind eye to the international community. How would you interpret Israel’s discourse, its Newspeak?
Avi Shlaim: When the Nakba happened in 1948, three quarters of a million of Palestinians were made refugees and the name ‘Palestine’ was wiped off the map. I am one of the Israeli ‘new historians’, alongside Ilan Pappé and Benny Morris. Morris has since veered to the extreme right, so I no longer have any affinity with him, but I still have affinity with Pappé. Pappé authored a book about 1948, entitled The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (Pappé 2006). The old Zionist claim was that the Palestinians in 1948 left of their own free will, or on orders from their leaders and in the expectation of a triumphal return, so Israel is not responsible for the Palestinian refugee problem. Morris, before he changed his political position, when he wrote serious history, and Pappé, have demonstrated that the Palestinians did not leave, that they were expelled. There can be no more debate that in 1948 Israel perpetrated an ethnic cleansing of Palestine. The only difference between those two historians is that Morris said there was no master plan for ‘transfer’, whereas Pappé believes that the Haganah’s Plan Dalet, plan D, was a master plan for the expulsion of the Palestinian people.
But let me add that the Nakba is not a one-off event that happened back in 1948. It’s an ongoing process, and we are seeing it, even today, unfolding in front of our very eyes in the West Bank. Israel has been practising ethnic cleansing ever since 1967 and, more specifically, in East Jerusalem. In the present government, headed by Benjamin Netanyahu, there are some far-right religious Zionists. Itamar Ben-Gvir, the leader of the Jewish Power Party, and Bezalel Smotrich, the leader of the Religious Zionism Party, would like to annex the whole of the West Bank formally and expel as many Palestinians as possible. Thus, we have in the present government an extreme form of settler-colonialism and religious nationalism. They are a minority, but we should remember that the basic ideology of Zionism is to build a Jewish state on as much Palestinian land as possible, with as few Arabs inside it as possible. This is the policy that is being implemented today.
Let me turn now to the war in Gaza. By my count, this is the seventh Israeli military assault on the people of Gaza since the unilateral disengagement in 2005. The first assault was Operation Cast Lead of December 2008. But what is happening in Gaza today is different. Israel is raining down death and destruction on Gaza on an unprecedented scale. What is happening today is genocide in Gaza and the intensified ethnic cleansing of the West Bank under the dark shadow of this war.
Tayseer Abu Odeh: Ilan Pappé contends that more than 36 out of 45 major massacres were committed, including, but not limited to, Tal al-Za’atar, Sabra and Shatila, Kafr Qana, the village of Tantura, Tirat Haifa, among others. (Pappé 2006: 258). This is situated within the context of, as you put it rightly, the continuous horror of the Nakba. That’s precisely one of the central meanings of the Nakba; that is, a present simple tense that exhibits a continuous traumatic state of fear, uprootedness, displacement, homelessness, statelessness that has plagued and traumatised the individual and collective existence of Palestinians inside Palestine and in exile.
It has become a feature of Palestinian identity, which brings me to the question of nationalism. I would identify the ideology of nationalism (and the related ideology of a supposed ‘clash of civilizations’) as at the root of antagonisms. But is there not a positive meaning to ‘nationalism’, also? Let’s take Frantz Fanon’s theory of national culture in the context of the Algerian Revolution. He claims that there is a benign and creative aspect to national liberation movements. Oftentimes, national liberation struggles are intentionally directed at a process of decolonisation that flies in the face of the colonial use of nationalism, which is wrapped up in its imperialist project. As Fanon writes, ”It is national liberation which leads the nation to play its part on the stage of history. It is at the heart of national consciousness that international consciousness lives and grows” (Fanon 247-248). So, how would you distinguish the emancipatory aspects of nationalism in the context of a national struggle of liberation?
Avi Shlaim: One difference between Algeria and Palestine is that the colonial power, in the case of Algeria, was France with its metropolis. One day after a successful struggle for National Liberation, France withdrew from Algeria and conceded independence. Whereas in Palestine, the colonial power is Israel, and there is no metropolis that Israel can retreat to. That is a very fundamental difference, but we are still faced with the grim reality of a colonial situation. Israel used to boast after the withdrawal from Gaza in 2005 that it gave independence and freedom to the residents of Gaza. It gave them an opportunity, so Israeli propaganda claimed, to turn Gaza into the Hong Kong or the Singapore of the Middle East.
This is a completely absurd and fatuous claim when compared with the reality in Gaza. We have to ask ourselves what happened before 2005 in Gaza? And the answer is a classic colonial situation in which a tiny minority of Jewish settlers controlled 25% of the territory of Gaza, 40% of the arable land in Gaza and the very scarce water resources. Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005, not as part of an overall settlement, not as a result of negotiations with the Palestinian Authority. The withdrawal from Gaza was not a step towards a comprehensive settlement. Rather, it was a step undertaken in the Israeli national interest, and it was a prelude to consolidating Israeli colonialism on the West Bank. In the year after withdrawing 8,000 settlers from Gaza, Israel introduced 12,000 new settlers into the West Bank. So that’s what we have today, a classic colonial situation in which Israel is the colonial overlord that tries to perpetuate the status quo and the subordination and disenfranchisement of Palestinians.
Colonial regimes in general are not open to negotiations, rational argument, or rational persuasion. Colonial regimes only withdraw because of pain; when they can no longer sustain the cost of the occupation. Colonial regimes can end in one or two ways; namely, they can end in violence, or they can end with justice for the colonised. In South Africa, we have a model of a colonial situation, which ended with democracy and equal rights for blacks and whites. I wish that this colonial situation in Israel-Palestine could end with justice for the Palestinians, but at the moment, there is no sign of this. All signs suggest more violence and bloodshed, and possibly genocide.
Tayseer Abu Odeh: As a historian recovering your own history, you do offer some hopeful signs, however compromised. Your last book, Three Worlds: Memoirs of an Arab-Jew (Shlaim 2023). It seems that this book is, biographically, an elegy for the forgotten and lost world of Jewish Arabs in pre-1950s Iraq. You write: ‘Baghdad was known as ‘the city of peace’ and Iraq was a land of pluralism and coexistence. We in the Jewish community had much more in common, linguistically and culturally, with our Iraqi compatriots than with our European co-religionists. We did not feel any affinity with the Zionist movement, and we experienced no inner impulse to abandon our homeland to go and live in Israel’ (Shlaim 2023: 8).
Let us imagine a future scenario in which Palestinians and Israelis coexist in peace like this. The Oslo Accords in 1993 proved to be a sort of quintessential political and existential capitulation in favour of the settler-colonial enterprise and at the expense of Palestinians. To my knowledge, the two original sins of hostility between Jewish people and Muslims are nationalism and Huntington’s manufactured ‘clash of civilisations’. The narratives are a part of Zionism’s systematic apparatus of apartheid and existential denial. Do these two narratives in particular undermine the possibility of future coexistence and peace between Palestinians and Israelis?
Avi Shlaim: The Three Worlds in the title of my autobiography are Baghdad, where I lived up to the age of 5, Ramat Gan, a town in Israel where I went to school from the age of 5 to 15, and London, where I went to school from the age of 15 to 18. The narrative stops at 18, but there is a long epilogue that traces the evolution of my thinking about Israel-Palestine up to the present. My position at present is to support and advocate one state, one democratic state from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, with equal rights for all its citizens regardless of religion and ethnicity.
Now, the book revolves around the pivotal concept of the Arab Jew. This is a very controversial concept in Israel. Many Israelis deny that there is such a thing. They claim it’s a contradiction in terms, an ontological impossibility. They claim that if you are a Jew, you cannot be an Arab, and if you are an Arab, you cannot be a Jew. For my Zionist critics, I pose a problem. Here I am, an Arab Jew, and I am proud both of my Arab heritage and of my Jewish heritage. I know no better way to describe my original identity than that of an Arab Jew. We were Arab Jews, we lived in Iraq, we lived in Baghdad, we spoke Arabic at home, only Arabic. Our social customs were Arab. Our culture was Arab culture. Our food was Middle Eastern food. My parents’ music was a very nice blend of Jewish and Arabic music.
Europe, especially Germany, had a ‘Jewish problem’. Iraq did not have a Jewish problem. Iraq had many minorities. There were Jews, Christians, Catholic Chaldeans, Circassians, Assyrians, and Yazidis, and there was a long tradition of religious tolerance. In Iraq, the Jews were not the other. In Iraq, the Jews did not live in ghettos. This is very important, and it’s often forgotten today.
My memoirs attracted a lot of interest in the Arab world because any Arab born after 1948 would probably not know that, at one time, there were Jews living throughout the Arab world. Older Arabs would know that, and any older Arabs that I talk to always bring up very happy memories of relations with their Jewish neighbours and Jewish friends. So, to me personally, it’s very important to insist that Arab Jews existed once.
For me, the hyphen in the term Arab-Jew does not divide. The hyphen unites the two elements because I see no contradiction between the two halves of the equation. Nationalism is the basic problem. It is a very divisive and destructive ideology, it usually ends in war, and sometimes in genocide. Zionism, or Jewish nationalism, a divisive force in the region, it is an exclusive ideology which portrays Palestinians as ‘other’. It is an ideology that separates Jew from Muslim, Israeli from Arab, and Judaism from Islam.
My family and I, as Arab Jews, enjoyed life in an Arab country. Muslim-Jewish coexistence was not an abstract idea or an ideal. It was everyday reality. We lived this reality, we touched it; and my own past, my own experience in an Arab country, leads me to conclude that antagonism between Jews and Muslims is not inevitable or inescapable. In other words, Israeli-Palestinian, Israeli-Arab antagonism is not preordained. It is the result of nationalism, and much more particularly of Jewish nationalism. My own experience enables me to think of a better future for our region. A future marked by equality, coexistence, and cosmopolitanism.
Shahd Dibas: Why do Itamar Ben-Gvir and Avichay Adraee, both of Iraqi descent and Arab-Jewish heritage, espouse extremist views and demonstrate a profound antipathy towards Palestinians, particularly in the light of their ancestors’ traumatic expulsion from Iraq, a heart-wrenching monumental transition that subjected them to dire conditions and compelled them to become refugees in makeshift tents. What complex factors have driven them to seemingly disassociate from their Arab identity?
Avi Shlaim: This is a very important question, which I tried to answer in my autobiography. I was displaced from my homeland when I was five years old, and I grew up in Israel. As a teenager aged 14 or 15, I was interested in politics and there was an election. I went to a rally of the Herut party. Herut was a nationalist party, the forerunner of Likud, headed by Menachem Begin. He was a spellbinding orator, and I applauded him, together with other Mizrahim in the crowd. As a young man, I flirted with right-wing Israeli politics. The reason, looking back, was that the Labour Party establishment in Israel looked down on us because we were Arab Jews. They were patronising, and they discriminated against us, the Mizrahim. I suffered from a distinct sense of inferiority because I was an Iraqi boy. I internalised the values and the prejudices of my new society. This sense of inferiority defined my relationship with Israeli society.
My own early experience helps me to answer Shahd’s question. Why do the Mizrahim, the Jews of Arab heritage, like Itamar Ben-Gvir and Avichay Adraee, support the nationalist parties, the Likud, and parties that are even more right-wing? The Zionist answer would be that the Mizrahim lived with Arabs, knew their mentality, that Arabs only understand the language of force. That is why they vote for nationalist parties. I reject this explanation entirely because it is self-serving. My explanation of why the Mizrahim still vote predominantly for right-wing parties is that they were indoctrinated in Israel to hate the Arabs. In addition, in order to establish their credentials as Israeli nationalists, the Mizrahim over compensate, and vote not for the Labour Party, not for centre parties, but for nationalist parties and for national religious parties. The Mizrahim vote for right-wing parties in order to emphasise their position as ‘Israeli nationalists’ and ‘patriots’. They want to establish their place in the hierarchy above the Arabs, the Palestinian citizens of the State of Israel, but below the Ashkenazim. They flaunt their sense of superiority over the Arabs. Israeli society is very hierarchical, so there are also hierarchies among the Ashkenazim as there is also a hierarchy within the Mizrahim: Iraqis are at the top of the pile, while Moroccan Jews are at the bottom. However, whether Ashkenazi or Mizrahi, they are united in regarding Arabs as inferior. Basically, Israel is a deeply racist society, and this racism goes a long way to explain the genocide that Israel is currently committing in Gaza.
Shahd Dibas: Thinking about Israelis’ own histories and life experiences, how did the experience of serving in the IDF in 1948 shape the literary works of novelists and poets who were in that position?
Avi Shlaim: I would like to speak about an Israeli novelist called Yizhar Smilansky, better known as S. Yizhar, who was a soldier in the 1948 war and in 1949 wrote a novella called Khirbet Khizeh. In it, he describes how he and his company drove Palestinian civilians from their homes. This was an early admission in a literary form of the intentional expulsion of the Palestinians. In this sense, S.Yizhar is a forerunner of the ‘new historians’. He was a novelist. This is a literary work, but it resonates with the new history, which emerged in Israel in the late 1980s. Benny Morris, Ilan Pappé and I are Western-trained historians. We did archival work and discovered empirical evidence that Israel expelled the Palestinians in 1948. The Palestinian refugees did not leave; they were pushed out. Our scholarly work confirms the first-hand testimony of S. Yizhar. One of Ilan Pappé’s books is called The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. This is precisely what happened in 1948.
Tayseer Abu Odeh: Moving from the discipline of history and fiction to psychoanalysis, I would also mention Jacqueline Rose. We have already mentioned Fanon. Psychoanalysts and their critics understand the practice as a form of self-discovery, self-knowledge, and self-critique. In her book The Question of Zion, Rose delves into the subconscious of Zionism by grappling with the depth and breadth of its coercive neuroses, death drives, and repressive forms of sadism, emphasising the dangers that an exclusively Zionist state would have for the Jewish people (Rose 2007). How would you assess Rose’s paradigm of critique for Israelis and Palestinians?
Avi Shlaim: I’m a great admirer of Rose’s work. She’s a brilliant woman and she was a close friend of Edward Said. Her book The Question of Zion is inspired by the title of Said’s book, The Question of Palestine. The book is based on three lectures that Rose gave at Princeton University. It is dedicated to memory of Edward Said. The best, the most original chapter in that book is ‘Zionism as Psychoanalysis’. The book begins with a quote from Golda Meir: ‘All the wars against us have nothing to do with us’. You couldn’t find a more striking example of Zionist self-righteousness than that. And it also points to a trend among Zionists and Israelis to regard their aggression against Arabs as a response to Arab provocation or Arab violence. But, to me, it’s not a response. To me, Zionism is the original source of violence in the Middle East because the whole Zionist project of building a Jewish state on Palestinian land involved aggression against the local population. Arab violence was a response to that. But going back to Rose, she counters the standard Zionist claim that Israel always acts in self-defence. She explores the inner psychological sources of Israeli aggression, to show why they habitually resort to force. As a historian, I find a lot of empirical evidence to support her psychological insights.
The 1948 war is a good place to start. In 1948, Israel had to rely on military force to defend itself. It defeated the Arabs, and expanded its borders beyond the UN partition plan. Since 1948, Israel has tended to resort to force, not as a last resort, but as a first resort. To explain this tendency, an important consideration is the Holocaust as a symbol of utter and tragic Jewish impotence. During the Holocaust, the Jews went to their deaths like lambs to their slaughter. The State of Israel is a reaction against the impotence of the Jews of the Diaspora. I was brought up with the slogan ‘Never Again, Never Again, Never Again’. And when I was inducted into the Israeli Army in 1964, we had a ceremony on the Judean Hills and we all shouted ‘By blood and fire, Judea fell, by blood and fire, Judea will rise again’. So, there is a very strong emotional attachment to the notion of Jewish power and Jewish self-reliance. Today, one of the extreme parties in the government is called ‘Jewish Power’. As the name suggests, it is a Jewish supremacist party. Its leader, Itamar Ben-Gvir, is of Iraqi-Kurdish descent.
Resorting so eagerly to military force is, again, not just a reaction to Arab violence or Palestinian violence, but is driven by inner psychological motivations, such as the desire to be the master. And, indeed, Israel is a Jewish supremacist state which exercises power over, oppresses, represses, and subordinates Palestinians. I wrote a long book called The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World (Shlaim 2001). The updated edition, published in 2014, is 900 pages long, but I can summarise it in one sentence, which is this: Since its establishment in 1948, Israel has been reluctant, remarkably reluctant, to engage in genuine negotiations with the Palestinians to resolve the conflict. On the other hand, it has been ready, all too ready, to resort to military force in dealing both with the Arab states and the Palestinians.
This takes me a bit away from your question about Rose, but I elaborate on this as an example of how my work as a historian complements her work as an expert in psychoanalysis. Rose was a professor of literature at Queen Mary College, and every year I went to talk to her new students. She taught a course called: ‘Israel-Palestine, Palestine-Israel: Politics and the Literary Imagination’. My field is History, not literature, but I’ve learned a great deal from reading her work. She is a prolific writer but there is also a Jacqueline Rose Reader which I warmly recommend.
Tayseer Abu Odeh: I’m reminded of Norman Finkelstein’s provocative critique of Zionism through the lens of the holocaust narrative. Finkelstein’s parents were Holocaust survivors, and his intellectual experience resonates more or less with your response. He wrote a great deal about the malign ideological instrumentalisation and exploitation of the Holocaust by Zionists. Finkelstein insists that this enduring trauma, and the mantra ‘never forget’, must never be used by American Jews as an ideological chant of complicity and denial (Finkelstein 2000). It is an offence to the memory of this collective tragedy. Finkelstein discusses this as the anti-Semitism of Israel, which camouflages and exonerates its own acts of violence, and silences Palestinian suffering and the Palestinian cause for self-determination and national liberation.
Avi Shlaim: Norman Finkelstein’s The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering (2000) was a very controversial book, but one thing is indisputable—the Zionist movement has always tried to make political capital out of the Holocaust. That is unacceptable to Finkelstein, and it is unacceptable to me. The Holocaust was a horrific tragedy, and it makes the Jews one of the most wronged people in human history. But it in no way justifies what Israel does to the Palestinians. The real lesson of the Holocaust is ‘never again’ against anyone, not just against Jews. To use it to silence criticism of IDF war crimes is moral blackmail and as such utterly wrong. Finkelstein is absolutely right in denouncing this misuse of the Holocaust to advance a Zionist agenda. The sad historic irony is that whereas the Jews were the defenceless victims of the Nazi genocide, today it is the Israeli army, allegedly ‘the most moral army in the world’, that is conducting a genocidal campaign against the innocent and defenceless civilians of Gaza.
Tayseer Abu Odeh: Considering various rhetorical and ideological supports, let’s also address the historical association between European imperialism and settler-colonialism, understanding that we should not conflate recent history with earlier forms of European imperialism, in Byzantium, the Roman Empire, and so on. Said reminds us perceptively that neither Byzantium nor Rome nor Athens nor Baghdad nor Spain nor Portugal, during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, controlled territories outside their borders. But they were seized by Britain and France during the nineteenth century. Almost 80% of the globe was colonised by European powers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Settler-colonial Zionism is arguably a by-product of these colonial powers. Do you agree?
Avi Shlaim: At first, the Zionist movement was very weak. It revolved around a few Zionists in London during the First World War. The major breakthrough in Zionist history was the Balfour Declaration of 1917, when the mighty British Empire endorsed the project of a Jewish national home in Palestine. Britain had no right—moral or legal—to offer Palestine as a national home to the Jews. This is a case of one country promising to another people the land of a third. British support for Zionism during the First World War was based on the misperception that Jews were a uniquely influential people, that they had covert power, that they controlled international finance, and therefore by issuing this declaration, Britain would acquire a major ally. But the truth of the matter was that Jews did not have covert power, and the Zionists were a tiny minority within the Jewish minority in Britain. It was a colossal strategic blunder for Britain to align itself with Zionism and thereby alienate the Arab and Muslim world.
We don’t have time to talk about the history of the British Mandate in Palestine from 1922 to 1948, but as I see it, this is essentially a story of Britain stealing Palestine from the Palestinians and giving it to the Zionists. Israel could not have emerged in 1948 but for the support of the colonial power of the day. After the Second World War, America replaced Britain as the pre-eminent Western Power in the region, and it has supported Israel all along to this day. It is a basic tenet of Zionist foreign policy from the days of Theodore Herzl, always to have the support of the pre-eminent power of the day on your side and this has been a successful Zionist strategy, without which Israel could not have sustained its colonial regime over the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and the Golan Heights.
Britain and America were not always in agreement. On the 2 June 1948, two weeks after Israel was proclaimed, Sir John Troutbeck, a senior diplomat in the British Foreign Office, sent a memorandum to Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin, in which he complained about the American role in the creation of Israel. The Americans, he said, were helping to create ‘a gangster state with a thoroughly unscrupulous set of leaders’ (Rogan and Shlaim 2001). I used to think that this judgement was too harsh. Today, after seven Israeli assaults on the people of Gaza, with the complicity or active support of both Britain and America, I no longer think that this judgement was too harsh.
Tayseer Abu Odeh: It’s striking that you have returned to the Palestinian Revolt of 1936-1939, which was crushed so brutally by the British army. Could we see this as the historical prelude for the later Nakba in 1948?
Avi Shlaim: That is my reading. Britain sponsored the Zionist takeover of Palestine, and supported the Zionists in establishing state institutions and allowing unlimited Jewish immigration into Palestine. On the other hand, they curbed and obstructed Palestinian efforts to develop political institutions. In 1936, the Arab Revolt broke out, lasting three years. The revolt was suppressed not by the Zionists, whose military capability at that time was very limited; it was crushed with the utmost brutality by the British Army. I agree with Rashid Khalidi, in a chapter he contributed to the volume The War for Palestine: Rewriting the History of 1948 (2001) that Eugene Rogan, the director of the Middle East Centre at St Antony’s College, Oxford and I co-edited.
Khalidi’s central argument is that Palestine was not lost in the late 1940s, as is commonly believed, but in the late 1930s because of the decisive and brutal way in which Britain crushed Palestinian militias. I agree with Rashid in this interpretation. So once again, it was the imperial power which defended its local protégée.
Incidentally, it was Said who wrote to me and suggested the idea for the volume, The War for Palestine. This was the late 1980s, when the ‘new history’ was just emerging. Said said to me: ‘Let’s organise a conference in Oxford of young historians to look at the moral and political consequences of 1948’. For him, the moral consequences were even more important than the political consequences. He said to me: ‘Let us look at what happened in that year. Let's take a comprehensive look, contrapuntal look’. ‘Contrapuntal’ was one of Edward’s favourite terms, meaning to look at a subject from both sides, to see what really happened in that fateful year. The result was a series of lectures that Eugene Rogan and I organised in Oxford and later published as the volume.
Tayseer Abu Odeh: I just have one last question, if you will allow me. The historical and intellectual legacy of the new historians has contributed massively to our collective and political understanding of the Nakba, Zionism, and the way in which the State of Israel emerged. And I would add the courageous critiques proposed by Said, Finkelstein, Fayez Sayegh, Nur Masalha, Joseph Massad, Jamil Khader, Judith Butler, Jacqueline Rose, and yourself. For Morris, the core of the Palestinian refugee problem lies historically in the war of independence, in which Israel defeated the Arab armies. Finkelstein and Masalha, however, view Morris’s claim as a post-Zionist claim that flies in the face of the Nakba’s historical consequences, and I think you just referred to that in answer to our previous question, but my concern here has to do with Haim Gerber’s stance; that is, that the new historians’ critical mode of thinking, which focusses on the 1948 war, should also extend to Palestinian history prior to and consequent to the Nakba.
Avi Shlaim: I agree that there are some parallels between ‘new’ and Palestinian historiography of 1948. Both are much more critical of the roles played by Israel, Britain, and the Arab states than traditional Zionist historiography. Nevertheless, I think there is a difference between the two. They are similar, but not identical. The ‘new history’ perspective largely supports the Palestinian narrative. But I wouldn’t want to speak on behalf of the Palestinians. The Palestinians are entitled to tell their own narrative of what happened in ’48. The new history has contributed to our understanding of what happened in ’48, but it focusses on the Israeli side, not the Palestinian side. Consequently, the debate has not been between Israeli and Arab or Israeli and Palestinian historians. It has been an internal Israeli debate between traditional historians and revisionist historians.
There are five major points of contention in this debate. The first concerns the causes of the Palestinian refugee problem: the old historians say they fled, we say they were expelled. The second concerns Britain’s policy as the Mandate for Palestine was approaching its inglorious end. The Zionist view is that Britain armed, encouraged, and incited its Arab allies to invade Palestine upon the expiry of the Mandate to strangle the infant Jewish state at birth. Pappé demonstrates that Britain was resigned to the emergence of a Jewish state, and that it colluded with its client, King Abdullah of Transjordan, to abort the birth of a Palestinian state. The third issue concerns Arab war aims in 1948. The old historians paint a picture of a monolithic Arab coalition united behind the aim of genocide, of throwing Jews into the sea. My book Collusion across the Jordan: King Abdullah, the Zionist Movement, and the Partition of Palestine is relevant here. I argue that the Arab coalition facing Israel in 1948 was one of the most bitterly divided, disorganised, and ramshackle coalitions in the history of warfare and that one member of the Arab coalition, King Abdullah of Transjordan, was in cahoots with the Zionists and they had a tacit agreement to divide Palestine between themselves at the expense of the Palestinians. The final issue is: why did the political deadlock persist for three decades after the guns fell silent. The old historians’ answer can be summed up in two words: ‘Arabic intransigence’. Our evidence suggests that Israel was the more intransigent party.
These are the findings of the new history in a nutshell. From a long-term perspective, what is the significance of this new history? Said provided an answer. He was not a historian. He did not write a chapter for The War for Palestine, but he contributed a beautifully-written and very moving Afterword, in which he summarises his engagement with the Palestinian issue. But in a later meeting in London, he said that the new history was valuable on three levels. First, it educated the Israeli public about the history of the conflict and about the Arab view of this conflict. Secondly, it gave Arabs, and Palestinians in particular, a genuine, truthful account of history which accorded with their own experience of what happened in 1948 replacing the usual propaganda of the victors. And thirdly, he said that the new history contributed to a climate of opinion on both sides of the divide that was conducive to mutual understanding and reconciliation, and this found expression in the Oslo Accords. But, sadly, the promise of the Oslo Accords never materialised. In retrospect, the Oslo Accords did not lead to an independent Palestinian state; they turned out to be a trap for the Palestinians, thwarting the aspiration to independence and statehood.
I've reprinted the article in full here because I believe a great majority of Americans are unaware of the Palestinians story which in reality carries the truth of an oppressed people at the hands of the Zionist government of Israel.
Footnotes to the above article for those interested can be found at the bottom of the article by clicking on the highlighted link at the beginning of the article.
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