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Israeli Zionism: a Study for the American Perspective Focussing on Ideology and Historical Narrative

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Israeli Zionism: a Study for the American Perspective Focussing on Ideology and Historical Narrative Israeli Zionism: A study for the American Perspective Focussing on Ideology and Historical Narrative Diagrams and Diagnosis: A New Middle East? The Evergreen State College Spring 2016 The nature of Israel and Zionism is that of settler colonialism. Thus the actions of Israel resemble other identifiable examples under an analysis of Comparative Settler Colonialism. The existence of Palestinians and the displacement and occupation perpetrated against them has been the most significant defining factor of Israel. The Four Periods of Jewish History, a framework for understanding this narrative, is then explained. This complicated ideological telling of history, and its particularities can only be understood fully by religious Jews and thus are the only ones that can give rational for Likud government policy based as it is on the long religious history of God and his chosen people. Gush Emunim is an Israeli Jewish fundamentalist Zionist organization who, like many in Israel, saw the Six Day War as a sign from God and undertook to settle the territories recently captured although it was in fact the result of foreign military aid. The wave of messianic Zionist fervor that rose up and swept over previously regarded secular Israel and elected the Likud Party. The origins of New Religious Zionism that powered Gush Emunim’s settlement activities is found to in Rabbi Kuk Sr. whose writings transformed the messianic idea. Studies of the first settlement in 1967 in Hebron, the Etzion Bloc settlement, and finally the Ofra Settlement accomplished in 1975 produce a pattern in which the settlers forced the government’s hand with the leverage of the national psyche, use government eviction of settlements to grow their popularity and membership, and refined methods of pressure, timing, and facts on the ground. Netanyahu, recognizing the climate of American Administration focussed rhetoric on unifying War on Terror away from Settlement of the Occupied Territories. Dispensationalist shifted from the traditional view of Christians as God’s replacement for the Promise made to the Jews when they were lost in exile and instead believed that Christians were a subsequent plan of God that still necessitated the Jewish people residing in the Holy Land for the Messianic Period to begin forging a political alliance between Zionist Jewish and Christian Zionist officials. Building on the Wellhausenian or Documentary Hypothesis trying to explain inconsistencies and repetitions in the biblical text Pekka Pitkanen proposes that books Genesis and Joshua can be read as a unified work written to justify settler colonialism. In 1492 Columbus sailed the ocean blue. In truth, as in legend, this event marks the opening of the period of European Colonialism. Indeed colonial power exerts itself to this day. The reach of colonialism is global, affecting people the world over with domination, exploitation, displacement, humiliation and erasure all under the guise of liberalism, freedom, modernization, and civilizing the less­than­civilized world. And so the colonizers and the settlers do not think of themselves as bad people. Intricate systems of justification, rationalization, and what evolves into an encompassing ideology have been developed. Such ideologies justified the enslavement of Africans and genocide of Native Americans, to name two examples familiar to a U.S perspective. But somehow the discourse on colonialism is absent, the framework of colonialism is not utilized in analysing today’s issues­ especially in the case of Israel/Palestine. This paper intends to refocus this discourse on an analysis within the framework of settler colonial studies. By visiting multiple sites of colonial power, settler colonial ideology, and colonial structure the reader is afforded multiple points of reference that upon reflection will reveal mirror images across history and in future events. That is to say, understanding settler colonialism will open a new worldview, a new framework for understanding the nature of our time. Since 1492 colonialism has exerted power but only in 2011 was the academic journal Settler Colonial Studies inaugurated. This journal ​ ​ describes how, in the absence of a settler colonial framework of analysis, the crimes of Israel against Palestine are indexed as a series of individual but connected events.1 1 Salamanca, Jabary, Mezna Qato, Kareem Rabie, and Sobhi Samour. “Past Is Present: Settler Colonialism ​ in Palestine.” Settler Colonial Studies 2, no. 1 (January 1, 2012): 1–8. doi:10.1080/2201473X.2012.10648823 Such a lacking analysis leads to the conclusion of exceptionality. The U.S. if not analysed as an imperial world power, is seen as an exceptional case unmatched in history and therefore uninhibited by the lessons learned from past imperial powers­ thus ripe for the same mistakes. The case with Israel is identical. Without being contextualized as the colonial entity it is, Israel somehow appears exceptional case unmatched in history and therefore not able to commit the same crimes­ thus Israel is able to continue its colonization of Palestine. In order to forward Palestinian liberation Israel must be recognized as a settler colonial state and Zionism’s ideology must be analysed through this framework. Ronit Lentin positions race at center stage and so analyzes Israel (which the author terms the Zionist settler­colony) as a racial state. This refutes the claim of exceptionalism by the state of Israel, similar to exceptionalist claims of other settler colonial nations such as American exceptionalism. Such states create divisions that consolidate citizens as well as exclude other non­citizens. Lentin terms these as racial states: Racial states exclude and include in order to construct homogeneity through governmental technologies of border controls, citizenship entitlements, and census categorizations, as well as invented histories and traditions that construct state memory, cultural imaginings, and the evocation of ancient origins.2 The Israeli Racial state enacts such a racialization on the Palestinians construing them as not merely a racial other but a “despised and demonic racial group.” Zionism, like other colonizing projects, aims at modernization­ portraying in this 2 Lentin, Ronit. "Israel's War on the Palestinians: Banalization of Occupation or Routinization of ​ Settler Colonialism?" Project MUSE. MUSE, 23 Jan. 2016. Web. 06 May 2016. ​ ​ context the Israelis as modern citizen and the Palestinians as the backwards, primitive other. This racialization is a result of the Zionist imperative to create a Jewish exclusive state and results in the persecution, occupation, and genocide of the Palestinians. Lentin asserts that “Israeli settler colonialism is deliberate and intentional ... intent on the racialization and ethnic cleansing ... of their ‘promised land.’”3 Rather than an exceptional state, Israel is shown to be just one instance of settler colonialism. Comparisons can be drawn between the systematic racialization and occupation of Palestinians with the racist system constructed against African people and their descendants in the United States. The graphic quotation that follows reveals the similar qualities in the violence perpetrated by racial states against the racial other: Just as black flesh was routinely created through “the calculated work of iron, whips, chains, knives, the canine patrol, the bullet” (Spillers 2003, 207) so Palestinian flesh is routinely created through the calculated work of ... riot control equipment, air bombings and ground offensives, military court systems, torture, jails, checkpoints and walls.4 The creation of the racial other is done through the systems of power listed above. The graphic quality of this creation is not something unexpected or exceptional. It is a routine syndrome of settler colonialism. Lentin’s conclusion is that despite this routinization of occupation and racialization, despite the lack of international rapprochement, Israel’s war and occupation against the Palestinians is committed by 3 Ibid. 4 Ibid. “deliberate, complex, human joiners in routine acts of colonization, intent on racializing and dominating other humans.” Despite the apparent role of racism in these instances, the rubric of racism has not until recently been used to analyse Israeli colonialism. Author Madalena Santos cites work that demonstrates that the “increase in anti Jewish sentiment during the Nazi period resulted in increased support for the Zionist movement.” The author also asserts that many Jewish people felt the Zionist idea was tantamount to accepting anti­semitism. However the key figures in the Zionist movement maneuvered around European race­thinking to reconfigure Palestinians as the Oriental other in relation to the white Zionist “native.”5 Maxime Rodinson is a Jewish French intellectual that has been consistently questioning criticizing and calling out the Zionist project. The consideration of Israel as an exceptional phenomena is one of the biggest hindrances to understanding the conflict. The religious and racial implications of Jewishness obfuscate the essential settler colonialist nature of Zionism. Clarity is restored when consideration of Israel is made within the context of history, within the context of Colonialism. The introduction to “Israel and the Arabs” answers the question of just how it is Israel can be considered a colonial state. “The answer lies in rejecting any single model of colonial takeover, discarding rigidly conceived social formulas, and getting past the abstractions to
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