Settler Colonialism: The Primordial Sin of the State of Israel and its Grave Consequences on the Current Massacre of Palestine

This article was exclusively written for The European Sting by one of our passionate writers, Mr. Alexandros K. Liakopoulos. The opinions expressed within reflect only the writer’s views and not necessarily The European Sting’s position on the issue.

“Settler colonialism describes the logic and operation of power when colonizers arrive and settle on lands already inhabited by another group. Importantly, settler colonialism operates through a logic of elimination, seeking to eradicate the original inhabitants through violence and other genocidal acts and to replace the existing spiritual, epistemological, political, social, and ecological systems with those of the settler society”, according to Dwanna L McKay, Kirsten Vinyeta and Kari Marie Norgaard, the sociologists who recently dealt with the subject. The phenomenon comes in striking contrast with exploitation colonialism, which could also be termed capitalistic imperialism, which entails an economic policy of conquering territory to exploit its population as cheap labor and its natural resources as raw material. In the first case, colonialism may last forever; in the latter, it mostly lasts so long as the local population can accept the occupation without revolting, or the natural resources do not go extinct.

The whole field of settler colonialism is often credited to the Australian historian Patrick Wolfe, an expert in a variety of subjects such as anthropology, genocide studies, indigenous studies, the historiography of race, etc. However, as Wolfe has stated: “I didn’t invent Settler Colonial Studies. Natives have been experts in the field for centuries.” What is more, Wolfe’s work in Aboriginal Australia and Native Americas has been precedented by the work of the French historian and sociologist Maxime Robinson, a son of Auschwitz concentration camp victims, who in 1967 published an article under the title “Israel: a Colonial Settler-State?”. Later, after the Iranian Revolution of 1979, Robinson also coined the term “Islamic Fascism” to describe the fundamentalist nature of the new regime.

Beyond credits of origination of terminology, let’s dive into the subject. As it becomes apparent, settler colonial movements are distinguished from standard colonialism – like British rule in India, for example – by the fact that the settler population wishes not just to steal the native population’s resources, but it searches to replace the native population altogether. There are lots of examples of this: European settlers dispossessed native peoples in what we today call the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. The Spanish Conquistadores also dispossessed wide parts of the Central and Latin American native populations, through both warfare and diseases (see: Jared Diamond: Guns, Germs and Steel: A short history of everybody for the last 13.000 years).

The definition of genocide in international law exactly describes what those Europeans did to the local population: mass killings; inflicting conditions calculated to bring about the physical destruction of all or part of the native community; preventing births within the local population; and forcibly transferring native children to the settler population. European settlers who today call themselves Americans, Canadians, Australians, and New Zealanders never had to account for their crimes against those native peoples. Neither did their Spanish and Portuguese counterparts that have colonized Central and “Latin” America, settling themselves in the lands of the indigenous populations after an unprecedented extermination. This heritage of settler colonial barbarism and destruction seems to have influenced the perception of the Western world of today; it seems to have “infected” its DNA to the core, in a sense, making it blind, or highly myopic at best, to the evils of its past, which it cannot look into the eye, and thus, to the evils of today, which it tends to overpass, so long as they are produced from a member of the Western camp.

As Jonathan Cook – writer, journalist, self-appointed media critic, winner of the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism – recently put it on one of his tweets, “The truth is the “western” world order was built on genocide. Israel is just following in a long tradition. Settler colonial movements do not always end up committing genocide. In South Africa, a heavily outnumbered settler colonial population came to an “accommodation” with the native population: apartheid. The white group took all the resources and privileges. The black group was allowed to live but only in ghettoes and squalor. In such circumstances, peace is possible only when the settler colonial project is abandoned, power is shared and resources distributed more equitably. This happened, imperfectly, with the fall of apartheid. The final model for a settler colonial population is to drive the native population over the border, in an act of ethnic cleansing. This was Israel’s preferred option in 1948 and again in 1967, when it decided to expand its borders by occupying remaining Palestinian lands in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza. The Palestinians in Gaza are an object lesson in the various ways a native population can be abused by a settler colonial movement… Unlike white South Africa, Israel is not looking for peace and reconciliation. It is revisiting other settler colonial options. In the current attack on Gaza, it is implementing a mixed model: genocide for those who remain in Gaza, ethnic cleansing for those who can get out (assuming Egypt finally relents and opens its borders). None of that has anything to do with Hamas. The most one can say is that Hamas’ resistance has forced Israel’s hand. It has had to abandon its siege-apartheid model – the long-term imprisonment of a population with no resources, no freedom of movement, no clean water, no jobs. Instead, it has returned to the tried-and-tested formulas of genocide and ethnic cleansing. Hamas is a symptom of the decades of trauma Palestinians in Gaza have been through, not the cause of that trauma.”

Tellingly, the same or similar remarks have been made by scholars and academics like Lorenzo Veracini of the Swiburne University of Technology’s Institute for Social Research in Melbourne, Australia, author of “Israel and Settler Society” (2006) and The Settler Colonial Present (2015); Joseph Andoni Massad, Professor of Modern Arab Politics and Intellectual History in the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies at Columbia University, author of “The Persistence of the Palestinian Question: Essays on Zionism and the Palestinians” (2006) among numerous other references; and Ilan Pappé, an expatriate Israeli historian and political scientist, professor with the College of Social Sciences and International Studies at the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom, director of the university’s European Centre for Palestine Studies and co-director of the Exeter Centre for Ethno-Political Studies, who was born in Haifa, Israel and was for two decades a senior lecturer at the University of Haifa, where he served as the chair of the Emil Touma Institute for Palestinian and Israeli Studies in Haifa (2000–2008);  Pappé is the author of “Ten Myths About Israel” (2017), “The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine” (2006) and “The Modern Middle East (2005), A History of Modern Palestine: One Land, Two Peoples (2003), bodyworks for which he was forced to move from Israel, something that proves his point to the core of his argumentation. What is more, the same arguments have been for long raised by brave Israeli journalists of the political left within Israel, like Gideon Levy, as well as widely circulating newspapers like Haaretz. It was upon this argumentation that the whole “two-state solution” was based back in the 1990s, which led to the assassination in Israel of one of its main architects, former Prime Minister and Nobel Peace Prize laurate Yitzak Rabin.

At the opposite of this argumentation lies a counter-factual argumentation that comes to describe the portrayal of Zionism as a settler-colonialism movement as an attack on the legitimacy of the Israeli state, or a form of antisemitism. Moses Lissak asserted that the settler-colonial thesis denies the idea that Zionism is the modern national movement of the Jewish people, seeking to reestablish a Jewish political entity in their historical territory. Zionism, Lissak argues, was both a national movement and a settlement movement at the same time, so it was not, by definition, colonial settlement movement. In line with this argumentation are also other Israeli settler apologists like Judea Pearl and Rachel Bushridge. Nevertheless, reading them and counter-valuing their argumentation to the facts of five centuries of Western settler colonization practices and more than a century of Jewish settler colonization practices makes their efforts seem pointless, superficial and, frankly, incoherent with logic and everyday experience, the very basis of science.

What is today happening in Palestine, not just in Gaza but also in the West Bank, is in line with a long tradition of Western settler colonization practices, and a somewhat shorter tradition of Israeli settler colonization practices. These practices firmly rest outside all provisions of International Humanitarian Law and the Geneva Convention, as they constitute the very basis of ethnic cleansing. The perpetrators of these actions are committing war crimes and crimes against humanity. They should be brought in front the International Criminal Court, which has full jurisdiction for the case. Should that not happen, the West collectively proves it no longer abides to International Law and it no longer recognizes the institutional framework that was forged after World War II – after lots of blood and lots of pain, after the world has said “Never Again” that is – as the ultimate guarantor of Peace and Prosperity of the Peoples of the World. Should that happen, the world moves back the Law of the Jungle, where “Homo Homini Lupus” reigns. For a civilization that has travelled long to come to the very understanding and legal provisions it today possesses, this will be a very unsettling development and it will be all due to the very nature of the settler colonialism of the Western past.