Israel has killed more than 1,300 Palestinians in Gaza since the so-called “ceasefire” took effect a year ago, more than the number of Israelis killed on October 7, 2023. The supposedly unlimited “right” to genocidal retaliation invoked ever since has left at least 74,000 dead.

This quotidian slaughter is not new. For years, it was normalized under the euphemism of “mowing the grass,” as Israel repeatedly brought its impunity and overwhelming military superiority to bear against a defenseless, besieged population: in 2008, 2012, 2014, 2018, and 2021.

As a result, a generation of Palestinians in Gaza has been condemned to life and death under the deadly gaze of an Israeli panopticon. Even before the latest escalation, they endured the constant hum of drones overhead; the repeated reduction of homes and entire neighborhoods to rubble; and the mourning of shattered lives, families, and futures. Each time, Israel invoked “self-defense.” Yet the staggering asymmetry of the violence told a different story.

Changing this unconscionable status quo requires confronting the history that produced it, challenging not only the notion that one individual is responsible, but the deeper myth that Zionism simply “went wrong.”

In Gaza, the fiction of “collateral damage” has reached its most grotesque inversion. The term has long been deployed to assuage Western consciences, casting our own violence as regrettable but invariably legitimate, while violence committed by others remains categorically inexcusable, even barbaric. Yet the purpose of such overwhelming force is clear: to make the price of resisting an illegal occupation unbearable, while American weapons and diplomatic protection ensure that Israel bears remarkably little of the cost.

And Gaza is but one front. Across Israel and the occupied territories, a system of apartheid is enforced through law, military rule, and state-backed settler violence. Beyond Palestine, Israel has repeatedly bombed its neighbors, terrorizing the region in the name of “counterterrorism.” As Palestinian Ambassador Majed Bamya captured this fundamental double standard before the United Nations Security Council: “Is there an international law for them, and an international law for us? Do they have the right to kill, and the only right we have is to die?”

The horrors of Gaza, and the scale of Western complicity, have begun to rupture the indifference that has long emboldened Israel’s unchecked exercise of military power. Public opinion is shifting, even as political elites struggle to contain it. This has often come at the expense of basic democratic principles, laying bare the contradictions at the heart of Western “liberalism.” Yet even some of Israel’s sharpest critics in mainstream US politics, such as Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), have repeatedly and mistakenly located the problem in “Netanyahu’s extremist government.”

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is a war criminal. But he is not the problem. He did not invent the occupation or build apartheid alone. He has overseen the genocide in Gaza, but he inherited a social and political order structured around Palestinian dispossession and erasure. He may be forced out in coming elections. But the ideological forces that made him possible will remain. Changing this unconscionable status quo requires confronting the history that produced it, challenging not only the notion that one individual is responsible, but the deeper myth that Zionism simply “went wrong.”

The Settler-Colonial Origins of Zionism

From its origins in the late 19th century, Zionism was shaped by a colonial imagination that rendered Palestinians largely invisible, treating a country inhabited by an overwhelming Arab majority for at least 1,200 years as though it were terra nullius. Or, in the words of a popular Christian Zionist slogan of the day, “a land without a people for a people without a land.” But the Zionist ambition to create a Jewish homeland in a territory with a small Jewish minority raised an unavoidable question: What was to be done with the people already living there? The contradiction between Zionist territorial and demographic ambitions and Palestinian presence would shape the ensuing century of dispossession, conquest, and conflict.

It is in this sense that, as Patrick Wolfe famously observed, “The question of genocide is never far from discussions of settler colonialism.” Unlike traditional colonialism, which generally sought to dominate territories for the economic benefit of a distant metropole, settler colonialism seeks total societal transformation, remaking the conquered territory into a permanent home of a new settler state. “Territoriality,” or control over the land, is its “irreducible element,” and its underlying logic is not primarily one of exploitation but that of elimination. Settler colonialism, in short, “destroys to replace,” making invasion “not an event but a structure.”

“Every native population in the world,” Jabotinsky observed, “resists colonists as long as it has the slightest hope of being able to rid itself of the danger of being colonized.” That, he acknowledged, “is what the Arabs in Palestine are doing.”

In response to this characterization, Zionists often adopt the language of decolonization, recasting Zionism as the national liberation movement of an Indigenous people. It is true that Jews have a deep historical and religious connection to the land. It is true that Zionism was conceived as a national movement. And it is also true that virulent, increasingly eliminationist antisemitism across Europe made Jewish life increasingly untenable. But none of these facts negates Zionism’s colonial structure.

Nor did its founding ideologues necessarily disguise that reality. The “founding father” of political Zionism, Theodor Herzl, appealed to Cecil Rhodes for support for his movement precisely because it was “something colonial.” He further envisioned the prospective Jewish state as “a portion of a rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism.” Aptly named institutions, including the Jewish Colonization Association and the Jewish Colonial Trust, formed part of the movement’s political and financial infrastructure.

That colonial orientation helped Zionism secure the patronage of the British Empire. With the 1917 Balfour Declaration and British Mandate, London threw its imperial weight behind the creation of a Jewish “national home” for a largely European diasporic population. The national aspirations of the existing majority Palestinian population, indeed, even its existence as a people with political rights of its own, were denied outright. Britain’s support reflected not simply sympathy for Jewish self-determination, but a combination of geopolitics, antisemitism, and Christian philosemitism.

As historian Rashid Khalidi has argued, Britain thus enabled the Jewish community in Palestine to develop the institutional capacity of a proto-state while systematically subverting Palestinian nation-building efforts. When Palestinians revolted against this colonial order from 1936 to 1939, British forces, aided by Zionist militias, brutally suppressed the uprising. By its end, Khalidi notes, some “10% of the adult male population was killed, wounded, imprisoned, or exiled.”

Zionist leaders understood the roots of Palestinian resistance perfectly well. Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the ideological pioneer of Revisionist Zionism, from which much of the Israeli right traces its lineage, embraced territorial maximalism. Yet he was not ignorant to Palestinian aspirations. “Every native population in the world,” Jabotinsky observed, “resists colonists as long as it has the slightest hope of being able to rid itself of the danger of being colonized.” That, he acknowledged, “is what the Arabs in Palestine are doing.”

David Ben-Gurion, the mainstream leader of the pre-state Jewish community and Israel’s future first prime minister, similarly recognized the roots of the conflict. “Let us not ignore the truth among ourselves,” he remarked. “Politically we are the aggressors and they defend themselves.”

The Partition and the Nakba

After World War II, a financially exhausted Britain, facing mounting anti-colonial pressures from India to Egypt and escalating anti-British violence by Zionist paramilitaries, abandoned Palestine and handed the problem to the newly established United Nations. The UN promised to serve as a new experiment in democratic internationalism, yet it remained profoundly shaped by the colonial order that it had inherited. Most colonized peoples still lacked representation when, in 1947, the General Assembly adopted Resolution 181, calling for the partition of Palestine into a Jewish state and an Arab territory.

This blunt instrument, deployed disastrously in Palestine and elsewhere, treated pluralism itself as a “problem” to be solved. Rooted in the colonial logic of divide and rule and a European conception of ethnonational citizenship, it cast the solution to communal conflict as demographic engineering: the pursuit of homogenization and the construction of “racially specific landscapes.”

Palestinians rejected partition. The Zionist leadership accepted it. But that familiar fact obscures the extraordinary concession Palestinians were being asked to make. Despite constituting some two-thirds of the population, they were expected to accept the creation of a Jewish state on more than half of the country, including some of its most densely populated and economically valuable........

© Common Dreams