Rubin: False Messiahs, How Zionism’s dreams of liberation became entangled with colonialism

Well worth reading:

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Are Jews “indigenous” or settler colonialists in Palestine? They are both. The Jewish people originated in this land, and after two thousand years of exile, they developed an ideology and a political rather than purely religious movement of “return.” But their historical memory was not shared by the land’s inhabitants. The historical memory of the Jewish people did not create the right or capacity to confiscate or occupy a single dunam of land against the will of its possessors. The historical memory of one people, however tenacious, creates no right to rule over another.

Israeli Jews are settler colonialists with a historical memory of indigenous origin. This includes the Jews who fled or were expelled from Arab and other Muslim countries. They were indigenous to the region but not to Palestine, except in their own historical memory. That historical memory distinguishes Israel from other settler colonial states. So does the fact that the nation founded through settler colonialism has no “mother country” to which its members might return, as the French did from Algeria. Today’s settlers in the West Bank and the Golan Heights could indeed return—their “mother country” is Israel—but the same is not true of the citizens of Israel as a whole. They cannot return to the scenes of the Holocaust or to the Arab and Muslim states that expelled them. Great Britain, and then the United States, played the role of mother country by conquering the land, facilitating its settlement, and arming the settlers, but they have assumed no responsibility for the fate of Jewish refugees—whether from Hitler, from the persecution of Jews in Iraq in the early 1950s, or from a future conflagration in Palestine.

Instead, the Zionist movement and the Jewish state succeeded in building a new nation that is now indigenous to the land—though to what parts of the land, and with exactly what rights, is the core of the dispute over whether Israel is an apartheid settler state. The question “does Israel have the right to exist?” could have been meaningfully debated before the state existed, but now the only answer is, “Israel exists.” As a member of the United Nations, it has the right to continue to exist and to exercise the right to self-defense against other states. According to the UN charter, it also has the right to defend its territorial integrity, but implementation of that right requires defining the borders of the State of Israel. This depends on a peace settlement recognizing Palestinian national rights. Only such a settlement can establish Israel’s security as a state.

Genesis is not destiny. Documenting the historical fact that Israel came into existence in part through Zionism’s collaboration with colonialism does not mean that the only solution is a “decolonization” that would destroy the state and expel its inhabitants. What is objectionable about colonialism is not the immigration or settlement of a population of a different ethnic or national origin, or of people that are in some sense non-indigenous, but the domination of one group over another. It is impossible to rewind and rerun history. But it is possible, indeed necessary, to assure a future where Palestinians and Israelis have equal rights. Both peoples must be able to participate in choosing the government that rules them. Palestinians and Israelis must live either in two sovereign, equal states, or in one state as individuals with equal rights. The international consensus (excluding the government of Israel) in favor of the former—and the apparent impossibility of Israelis and Palestinians sharing a common sole polity—make the former the apparent choice….

Barnett R. Rubin is Distinguished Fellow at the Stimson Center and Non-Resident Senior Fellow at NYU’s Center on International Cooperation. His books include Afghanistan from the Cold War through the War on Terror (2013) and Blood on the Doorstep: the Politics of Preventing Violent Conflict (2002). His writing has also appeared in Foreign Affairs, The New Yorker, and the New York Review of Books.

Source: False Messiahs, How Zionism’s dreams of liberation became entangled with colonialism