Rev Left Radio - [BEST OF] Understanding Settler Colonialism in Israel and the United States

Episode Date: October 8, 2023

Originally aired on May 30, 2021 In this classic episode, Alyson and Breht use texts from Fanon, Cesaire, Mao, and Lenin to help make sense of the Israeli occupation of Palestine, the history of zionism, the role of the United States in the conflict, and more. They define settler colonialism and imperialism, show how they are operative in the conflict, and then have a wide ranging conversation on the recent attack on Gaza, ongoing Isreali settlements, the principle contradiction of the conflict, why we should advocate for a one state solution instead of a two state solution, the importance of BDS, and more!  --------------------------   Support Rev Left Radio on Patreon or make a one time donation

Hello, you are listening to Red Menace. My name is Allison, and I am here with my co-host, Brett. This month, we are doing an episode that is a little bit different. Normally, we alternate back and forth between, you know, kind of doing a theoretical overview of a tech. and doing current events, but for this month, we decided that we were going to do something that combines a little bit of both of those. So for today's episode, we want to talk about the crisis in Palestine that we've seen very acutely over the last month. What's going on there and kind of go back and forth on that a little bit before giving some analysis on why we think

settler colonialism is a useful lens for understanding this crisis, what settler colonialism is, how it relates to countries like Israel, but also countries like the United States. States where we're recording this right now. And then also you're thinking about how imperialism ties into all this before finally wrapping up with the discussion of how some of the authors that we've read who are critics of colonialism and imperialism can help us understand sort of what we're seeing playing out right now. So things are a little bit different today, but we hope that this will be a useful interjection into sort of the discussions that are going on here. When we propose this idea, the current ceasefire had not yet been reached, but obviously when you are listening to this

episode and we're recording it. That has been. And despite that, I think it's really important for us to continue to talk about this issue because that ceasefire does not mean the end of the violence against Palestinian people. And we need to continue to be vigilant about standing solidarity. So hopefully this episode can provide you with some of the tools that you need to think about this issue in a complex way that doesn't morally equivocate, but that stands in solidarity with colonized people around the world, including in Palestine. Yeah, absolutely well said. And I actually am really excited about this episode and the structure of it, kind of combining a current events with a theory episode and looking back over our catalog so far. And, you know, I'm open to doing more

episodes like this. At some times, you know, we started the current events trend during the heated moments of, you know, Black Lives Matter and the pandemic and the Trump thing and Biden coming into office. There was current events like every single day. Sometimes, though, just to force a current events episode when there's not a lot going on in the sense of normal media, of ebb and flow, an episode like this really stands out and gives us an opportunity to do something a little different. So we definitely are open to feedback if you'd like us to do more just sort of unique episodes like this going forward because this was particularly interesting and sort of fun if you can use that word in such a context to do this. But let's go ahead and start with just

a brief explanation of what has happened. As Allison mentioned, the ceasefire has been made. so this is just sort of looking back over the last couple of weeks and I know most people listening will be more or less familiar with the basics of the situation but a way to start this off is just to remind people that

although we talk about these conflicts almost as if they're like isolated events or little brush fires that pop up it's really important to understand the violence and the oppression as an ongoing process that's really brought to sort of moments

of relative acute struggle So, you know, when it's not in the news, when nobody's talking about Israel and Palestine, they're still a settler colonial occupation, there's still the IDF brutalizing Palestinians, there's still the ongoing settlements of literally having Israeli Jews show up and take your house if you're a Palestinian while you're out grocery shopping, backed by the full weight and power of the Israeli state. So, you know, to say that this is, the ceasefire has ended the violence is really a sort of misnomer and a bad way to look at it. But this last sort of acute flare-up of this ongoing

conflict was distinct for a number of reasons. And I think at the end, we're going to sort of look back, reflect on it, talk about what has and what hasn't changed, etc. Because I think there's lots of interesting points to cover there. But the basics of this last little conflict was, and I say little, but you know, this horrific ongoing tragedy and occupation was over 230 dead Palestinians, including over 60 dead children, with the full support, obviously, of the U.S. Imperial State, Biden, Kamala Harris, you know, arguing that Israel has a right to defend itself, never once mentioning Palestinians. It's always interesting that Israel always has a right to defend itself.

Palestine never does. I mean, the phrase Palestine has a right to defend itself or Palestinians have a right to defend itself literally never comes up. So, you know, take that for what it is. But the whole conflict in this recent one started from a multitude of issues. One, there's obviously this long protracted past and history just a couple of years ago. We saw clashes and it made international news. But this one, I think, was fueled by two really important occurrences.

That one is the ongoing sort of settlements and the evictions of Palestinian families in Cheek-Jurah, which is a neighborhood in East Jerusalem. And this neighborhood was actually originally built by Jordan for Palestinian refugee families in 1956 to move into this neighborhood. So this has been sort of a neighborhood that Palestinians have lived in for a long time. The settlements and evictions are happening in that neighborhood. And that already started ratcheting up tensions. And then there was the Israeli sort of force against the al-Aksha mosque, which is Islam's third holiest site. and it was during the sort of tail end of Ramadan, so there's lots of Muslim worshippers present. This is also believed to be the place where the Prophet Muhammad ascended to heaven.

So clearly it's a very important religious holy site of four Palestinian Muslims in the area and for Muslims across the globe. And there was tear gas, there was brutalizations, police breaking windows, and really terrorizing the worshippers at that mosque. So in response to these, you know, two events, really, Hamas fired off rockets, Israel did its predictable thing of turning around and just going on pretty much 11 days straight of bombing indiscriminately, you know, places where civilians are. And, you know, to understand this situation, you have to understand Gaza itself is a very tiny territory. You're boxed in. Israel directs who can. enter who can exit what can enter and what can exit um there everything is is tightly pushed together

and you have high-rise apartments um and so the bombing of these buildings um is just uh war crimes i mean this is the slaughtering of civilians there's no other way to put it in any international law these would be considered war crimes there's the bombing of a journalist outfit that's also attached to an apartment building and just just devastating regular civilians' lives, and there is nowhere to run. There is nowhere to go. I heard stories of Palestinian parents having to trade one of their children for one of their brothers' children so that if one of them got bombed in the middle of the night, at least one member of their family would go on living, right? So this is the horrific cost-benefit analysis that Palestinians

have to make, and there just is no escape. And I think it's also worth pointing out before I toss it back over to Allison that, you know, the point of these settlements, you know, broadly speaking, is in part to break up Palestinian territory and increase the presence of Jewish Israeli citizens throughout Palestine. Really, and we can talk about this in the last part of this discussion, but to sort of make the two-state solution more or less impossible. You know, the Israeli right once one ethno-nationalist Jewish state, and that requires the dispossession. the removal, the genocide of Palestinians, and the settlements are also ways to break up contiguous territory

so that there is no really contiguous territory that Palestinians can claim. So while some people that are in defense of Israel will gesture toward this quote-unquote peace process or this quote-unquote two-state solution, the settlements themselves are in direct contradiction to even that idea. And again, we'll get more into that

in the last part of this discussion. But I think that pretty much puts all the pieces on the table for this last outburst and what's been happening. Do you have anything to add to that, Alison? Yeah, I think that last point that you're making about the function of settlements, right, being to force a one-state solution in which the single state is the Israeli state is really important to think about, right? What we've seen in terms of internal Israeli politics over the last several decades, really, coming out of, you know, the developments that have happened in terms of parliamentary coalitions. is really the rise of a form of Zionism that's commonly referred to as revisionist Zionism. So revisionist Zionism was historically often contrasted to labor Zionism or to practical Zionism, whereas labor Zionism and practical Zionism were sort of secular left-leaning in orientation.

They also largely were kind of fine settling for partition. I will argue later on in this episode that their focus was still settler colonial, but they were kind of willing to settle for a compromise in terms of partition. Revisionist Zionism largely defined itself in terms of territorial maximalism, so the idea that we need to take all of the land of historical Israel and unify it under Israel, was sort of central to that. And the ruling Likud Party, as well as the parliamentary coalition that has formed around them, as well as Netanyahu, of course, really is invested in the revisionist Zionism perspective, and that is the dominant ideology of Israeli politics today. Again, I'm going to argue

later that all of these forms of Zionism are fundamentally settler colonialism, but understanding the dominance of revisionist Zionism can help us understand what's going on with current settlements and current bombings. Like you said, Brett, the settlements are about taking land and continuing this process of dispossession, but we can also understand the bombings in terms of this. This most recent sort of instance of bombings and this crisis that has occurred has displaced 75,000 Palestinians in Gaza so far. So even this sort of more acute warfare style of action that we're seeing from the IDF is still about dispossession. It's still about taking land. It's still about making Gaza unlivable. And this is a history that goes all the way back to the foundation

of Israel and the Nakba, in which certain towns were destroyed and made unlivable so that Palestinians would be forced to simply leave, and Israel could rebuild in that instance. For example, we can see this in what happened in Gaza in this most recent bombing with reporting that possibly every single school in Gaza was destroyed in the bombing. The civil infrastructure of Gaza's civil society is being destroyed through this process. In addition to that, the destruction of the offices of the Associated Press, of Al Jazeera, of the organizations that can actually cover these bombings firsthand, is a part of making Gaza an unlivable place and is part of a broader revisionist Zionist goal of taking all of this land and creating a unified ethno-nationalist

Zionist state on this land. So we have to understand this most recent fighting absolutely in terms of, you know, this broader project of Zionism and particularly this virulent right-wing strain of Zionism that has come to dominate Israeli politics. People often say that this form of Zionism is not representative of the Israeli populace on the whole, but Netanyahu has been Prime Minister for a cumulative 15 years now, and the Lakud Party has held power for a significant amount time. In addition to that, polling of Israeli citizens about the bombing campaign showed that upwards of 70% were opposed to a ceasefire agreement and believed that continued bombing against Gaza should happen despite the attempts to try to create a ceasefire for the moment.

I think this is indicative of the fact that the project of Zionism is largely of this revisionist sort today, and that this project is about absolute territorial domination and dispossession. So when we're thinking about that, it's not enough to just think of Zionism as an individual thing, right, as an ideology in and of itself detached from the rest of the world. And what we want to get into today is understanding Zionism as actually part of a broader ideology and part of a broader material system that can trace itself back to European colonization. What is happening in Israel is not in many ways distinct from what happened in Rhodesia, what happened in South Africa, and what happened and is happening in the, United States, where the occupation of land, the extermination of native populations, and the replacement of those populations with settlers, is an ongoing political process. And this is a process that we refer to as settler colonialism, which will give in some of the definitional work

about what settler colonialism is and what makes it distinct. But this lens of thinking about Zionism can be very helpful because it helps us understand that Zionism is not, you know, an aberrant phenomenon in opposition to the global order. It is in fact a product of a European order of domination. From the beginning, Zionism banked its interests on gaining help from European colonial states, getting the British help in terms of colonizing Palestine with central. In addition to that, many Zionists were willing to accept a British plan that had been proposed earlier to give parts of Uganda as part of a Jewish home state. So from the very beginning, there's this settlement process in relationship to European

colonialism that is central to understanding Zionism. And so if we want to make our anti-Zionism and critiques of Israel consistent, they have to be a critique of colonialism and of settler colonialism globally, everywhere that it exists. So what we're going to do, kind of moving forward with this episode, is get into what is settler colonialism, what is imperialism, what is the relationship between these two things? Then, how is the United States settler colonialists, how is Israel colonialists, and how do these settler colonial states relate to each other in a way that is producing this current crisis as part of a broader structure of displacement and eliminationism and exterminationism that is endemic to European colonial ideologies. So that's kind of where

we're planning on going with this. Hopefully you will find that helpful. There's a lot of historical depth and complexity to the question of Palestinian liberation. And often people feel scared to engage in these debates simply because they may not know all the history or all the theoretical lenses that are necessary. So our goal in this episode is to give you some of that. So you can proudly and loudly speak out in support of Palestinian liberation and opposition to settlement and Zionism. Yeah, beautifully and beautifully said, we have a lot to get into. We're going to start with some basic definitions and deepen the analysis from there. And again, at the very end of this episode, we'll have a reflection period where we just sort of converse about a bunch of other topics that we didn't get to cover in these first three parts.

So without further ado, let's move in to part two. So to kind of get into the definitional and theoretical side of things for today, we need to start by defining what settler colonialism is. So this is a word you've probably heard us use before. It's a term that I definitely reference quite frequently because it's very important to my analysis of the world in general, but it's one we haven't really sat down and thought through systemically. So we're going to go ahead and work on that today. To start, we can draw on what I think is a very basic definition from scholars Adam Barker and Emma Bartel Loman, who kind of have an introductory piece on settler colonialism that gives a definition that I actually think is quite functional

and can work well for us. So they argue that, quote, settler colonialism is a distinct type of colonialism that functions through the replacement of indigenous populations with an invasive settler society that, over time, develops a distinctive identity and sovereignty, end quote. So let's go ahead and just break this down a little bit. First, the definition explains that settler colonialism is distinct from other forms of colonialism. To understand this a bit, we can think of British colonialism in India. Although there were genocidal aspects to this form of colonialism, which can be seen most clearly in the Bengal famine, the goal and the endpoint of this form of colonialism was not total extermination of the population of India. British colonialism in India did not see to eliminate

the population that was present through a process of extermination. as replacement, but rather sought to use repression of the native population alongside colonial oversight by the British to extract labor and resources from India. The goal was not to create a new homeland for British colonizers, but to export certain forms of slavery, exploitation, and violent extraction of resources abroad in order to import goods back to Britain. Likewise, the process of colonization, which occurred throughout most of Latin America, took a somewhat different approach to colonialism than what we see with Southern colonialism. The colonizers who first came to Latin America largely were not focused on finding a new home,

but on finding gold and riches to take back to Europe. The goal was not at least immediately the establishment of a new nation in the Americas, but rather the ravishing and exploitation of the Americas. This originally involved the enslavement of the native population to aid in resource extraction, Colonial overseers, you know, they would eventually create massive estates based on slavery and feudalist models of exploitation and the Americas, but the goal originally was not to create a new nation. When the Catholic Church put a halt to the enslavement of indigenous peoples of Latin America, chattel slavery was introduced through the forced enslavement and trade of African slaves to substitute for that indigenous labor force. Now, of course, the exploitation of indigenous people continued in other forms. What is important to see here, though, is that the project was not, at least at its outset, about taking land from the indigenous people and replacing them with Europeans.

In fact, we saw forcible rape and intermarriage between Europeans and indigenous peoples, leading to the sort of modern mestizo or mixed race majority that makes up much of Latin America today. This form of colonialism, which occurred in Latin America, still had a genocidal effect on indigenous peoples, of course, and the glorification of mestizo identity in countries like Mexico, with its notion of La Raza Cosmica would eventually lead to the development of a replacement imperative. But the original colonial task in Latin America was one of resource extraction, not outright extermination and replacement. We can compare this to the process of colonialism in North America to understand this distinction between colonialism and Suther colonialism. more clearly. While there was an economic kind of base of some of the settlements who were made up of merchants or soldiers when they came to the U.S., that was really the minority, and there was a much more sizable religious element to settlement in the area we now call the United States, in which those fleeing religious persecution were seeking a new home in the so-called new world.

These settlers had no interest in sending wealth back to England, but rather wanted to find a new home for themselves. And despite often receiving aid from the native population of North America, these settlers quickly understood that their hopes for a new European nation in North America required the systemic dispossession of native land. And as the colonial project in North America and what would later be called the U.S. took shape, an ideology which viewed the natives as regressive and in need of extermination took hold. Unlike in Latin America, we did not see widespread forced intermarriage that would lead to a mixed population. Instead, settlers here developed a complex ideology of racial purity and separateness,

which insisted that coexistence with the indigenous peoples of the continent was impossible. Extermination became the only solution. So this definition of settler colonialism that we've looked at also mentions the development of a distinct settler identity. And we'd see this clearly

when we looked at the blood-soaked history of the United States. The settlers who settled in the area we now call the U.S. quickly stopped seeing themselves as British. And in fact, the theory of settler colonialism allows us to understand the American revolution as a product of this new identity formation. The British expected the colonies in North America

to act as regular colonial entities, and that's to say that they expected their role to be the enrichment of Britain itself. But instead, the settlers here came to see themselves as a distinct nation who wanted independence from Britain, and as such they revolted. This new nation was a nation which was profoundly shaped by settler colonialism from the beginning, the frontiersmen, the pioneer, the explorer, all these tropes which became so central to U.S. American self-perception were ideas shaped by the taking of land. And while many want to reframe the frontier as a vast empty expanse that needed to be mapped, the reality was that the frontier was the front lines of a war of extermination, in which sometimes heavily populated territory was depopulated via genocide and repopulated with settlers.

So a new American identity was born and defined by this ruthless capitalist expansion and colonialist expansion, and the idea of replacing the indigenous people with Europeans and enslaving Africans as a subjugated workforce. So our definition of settler colonialism also focuses on a notion of sovereignty, and this notion is also very crucial to understand how settler colonialism functions and can be understood by briefly thinking about the United States. So ideologies of manifest destiny and religious ideals of a nation destined to reach from sea to shining sea drove extermination and land theft. Capitalist notions of land usage derived from John Locke, for example, argued that because the indigenous people did not use land productively, defined, of course, in terms of commodity

production, they had no claim to sovereign possession on the land. And so, though the sovereignty of the United States is taken for granted today by many, the concept of sovereignty emerged as part of a process of extermination and repopulation that itself was settler colonialist. So, before we move on from definitions. It's important to say that as of yet, it might sound like this understanding of Southern colonialism is based purely on an understanding of the past, but nothing could be further from the truth. Largely in part the heroic and violent resistance of the Native peoples of North America, the project of extermination and genocide has never been fully completed. The various nations whom this land belong to still exist, and often they

are forced in conditions of horrific poverty and violence. You, listening to this now, stand on the land of indigenous people who are still here. As I record this, I stand on the land of Tongva people who are still fighting occupation, largely in regards to trying to stop the California State University system for building a fucking parking lot over one of their sacred religious sites, Pavunga. These struggles still exist, and the settler colonial project played out in terms of colonies killing natives to steal resources, then in terms of the Trail of further and westward expansion in the selling off of stolen lands. The organ trail that we all associate with quaint video games was actually about a key piece

of infrastructure in the process of genocide. After the Civil War, the campaign of determined to exterminate more and more of the indigenous nations was a part of this going process. All of these things attest to the fact that this process is continuing. But if all this so far sounds too distant, think perhaps of the sterilization of some 50% of Native American women in the 1970s. Think of the land dispossession to build pipelines that's happening now. Think of ongoing keystone pipeline resistance today. And a key insight of settler colonialism as a theoretical tool is that this isn't about a past historical event. It's not about things that happened and are over, but it's about an ongoing process, an ongoing

project that exists today and structures all of our lives for those of us who are living in settler colonies. We're standing right now on occupied land where settler colonialism continues to enact dispossession, extermination, and replacement. The process is ongoing, and so too is resistance. So this should give you, you know, some sense of what settler colonialism is. It's a form of colonialism that's about extermination and replacement. That's about land theft. That's about dispossession, that's about a unique settler identity, the preservation of that settler identity, usually through ideologies of racial purity. And here we are living in that context in the United States, and it's a context that we'll argue in depth applies also to Israel. So this broad view

of settler colonialism is helpful for understanding the discussion that we're going to be have. But we also need to think about imperialism. This is the other sort of key thing to understand what's happening in Palestine and the ongoing occupation there. So I'm going to hand things over to Brett, and he will go ahead and dive into what imperialism is for us, for people who need just kind of a little bit of a definitional refresher. So what is imperialism? Imperialism, as we know from our reading of Lenin and others, is the monopoly stage of capitalism, and it represents the completion of the territorial division of the world.

It is defined by the export of finance capital as opposed to commodities, it is fundamentally extractive, and it is an attempt by powerful capitalist nations to extend their economic and political power, open up new markets around the world, funnel resources from smaller and weaker countries back into their own, and to shape the social, political, and economic system of other countries for the imperialist country's benefit. imperialism can take many forms, from outright invasion and occupation to proxy conflicts and weapon sales, to coup attempts and assassinations, to debt traps in the funding of opposition movements, to blockades, sanctions, and embargoes. It is also referred to as the quote-unquote highest stage of capitalism, and this is because it is simply what happens when capitalism in a given country develops beyond its industrializing phase into its post-induced. financialization phase and begins to articulate itself globally in the name of multinational

monopoly capital. There is no stage above this stage because, in essence, it represents the globalization and logical conclusion of capitalist development itself. This stage can stick around for a long period of time, however, as long as imperialist countries can compete against one another, and as long as there are underdeveloped sections of the global economy that can still be controlled, influenced, or dominated, and resources that can still be siphoned in to the imperial core. Another way to think about this stage is as the Oroborist stage of capitalism, the snake eating its own tail, the stage at which capitalism begins to devour itself in the planet, putting our entire species and civilization into existential crisis and fomenting endless wars,

conflicts, and acts of aggression between states. Competition between imperialist countries was the cause of both world wars, for example, and the predation of the global south by Western imperialism was behind such conflicts like the Vietnam War, the Korean War, and the Iraq War, to name just a few. It's also behind the ongoing Cuban embargo, the sanctions on Venezuela and Iran, et cetera, the recent coup in Bolivia, the ongoing Cold War between the West and China, the genocide of indigenous peoples across the world, and on, and on and on. I would venture to say that every major war, proxy conflict, bombing campaign, and coup attempt that has occurred during our lifetime is, in some fundamental way, related to imperialism. And this fact leads

to an obvious conclusion. If we want to live in a world no longer defined by endless wars, constant geopolitical unrest, nuclear proliferation, the military industrial complex, and trillions upon trillions of dollars being wasted on weapons of war instead of being used to meet the material needs of human beings all over the planet then we must reject and transcend imperialism which is to say we must reject and transcend capitalism itself it's also worth saying here that some common obscurantist mystifications that liberals indulge in on this front are using terms like

militarization or endless wars instead of or in insisting that we can keep capitalism but get red of the imperialist wars of aggression that powerful capitalist nations like the U.S. are constantly engaged in. The truth is, as Lenin showed the world, that imperialism and capitalism are one and the same. They are two sides of the same coin, and the one necessitates the other. Moreover, the contradiction between class solidarity and nationalism is important precisely because nationalism is an organizing principle of imperialism, while class struggle works against it. After all, every major conflict the U.S. has engaged in has always been framed in terms of

patriotism and of defending freedom and democracy and of American national interests. If one accepts the premise of American nationalism, that by being born in the same country we somehow have shared interests with our own ruling class, instead of the working class of other countries, one can much more easily be tempted into supporting imperialist aggression by their own country. This is why we are indoctrinated from day one to be patriots and proud Americans, while any sense of identification with our class is completely omitted from our education, popular culture, and mainstream media. Nationalism in imperialist countries is essential to cultivate from the perspective of the ruling class for this reason, while class consciousness

on the behalf of the proletariat must be combated, slandered, downplayed, and if possible, eradicated. So now we have a good idea of imperialism, and the question becomes this. How is imperialism related to colonialism? I have a few thoughts on this connection, though there may be some that I miss. For one, colonialism is connected to imperialism through their shared underlying economic system, capitalism. Classic colonialism, the process by which European powers invaded, occupied, and controlled other countries, was part of the primitive accumulation phase of capitalism. For example, the genocide of the indigenous people in North and South America

was part of an effort by colonialist countries to open up new territories and steal new land in order to grow their economies back home, to settle excess populations from the relatively crowded Europe, to control the import of new goods, to expand their markets, and to control and extract resources from around the globe. The kidnapping and enslavement of Africans was an attempt by colonial powers to extract free labor to generate profit and jumpstart the accumulation process of capitalism more broadly.

In order to engage in these acts of inhuman brutality, slaughter, and domination, an ideology of white supremacy and manifest destiny had to be created, as well as the idea that indigenous peoples and African peoples, among others, were less than human, and thus didn't deserve the rights or respect that the so-called enlightened Europeans would offer to each other. Racism, as we know it today, has its origins in this process of colonialism, and it fundamentally shapes the predators and prey of modern

imperialism. So not only does imperialism and colonialism share an underlying economic imperative and system, both are also fundamentally rooted in an ideology of white Western supremacy and an entitlement to the resources and wealth of other non-white countries. Non-Western countries can and have been imperialist to be sure, but to be imperialist, like, say, Japan before and during World War II, requires one to operate in the sphere of influence and according to the informal rules and logics

of European colonialism and imperialism itself. Ultimately, I consider imperialism to be part and parcel of the very same historical process that started out as colonialism. If colonialism was an early process of capitalism itself, necessary for the birth and expansion of capitalism, then imperialism is the later part of that very same process. It's the mechanism by which capitalism maintains itself post-industrialization. Far from seeing them as two distinct separate processes,

I personally see them as different stages of the same basic historical process, funneled through the crucible of their shared underlying economic system. Capitalism. So now that we have some basic definitions on the table of both settler colonialism and imperialism as well as how they relate to one another, in this next section part three, we're going to expand out from those definitions and apply these concepts a little more concretely. And I'm going to start out this section by talking about how the United States is a settler colony

and then explaining how the U.S. is still a settler colonial entity today and how that shapes its politics and society. So the United States is the definition of a settler colony. Initially, an outgrowth of the British Empire, its 1776 revolution marked not a break from the fundamental processes of British colonialism, but rather a separatist movement on behalf of the emerging ruling class in the states against the control and dictates of the British crown. Dressed up in the rhetoric of the European Enlightenment and framed as a democratic rupture from monarchism,

the American Revolution was actually rooted in the economic interests of the white property-owning mercantile class within the colonies and was at least in part about maintaining slavery in the colonies as the British Empire was considering abolishing slavery outright. Regardless, after bucking off the fetters of British rule, the American government went on to continue and intensify the genocide of indigenous peoples and the enslavement of Africans. American wealth and power was quite literally rooted in these processes. This settler colonial project, still ongoing, has shaped the entirety of American politics and economics. There has been no break from its colonialist history, no stopping of the genocide of Native Americans, and even the institution of slavery still exists within the American prison

system, disproportionately populated, of course, by black and brown people. People of color who wish to inhabit high positions in the American government and empire must internalize and perpetuate the myths, the injustices, the inequalities, and the imperial aggression of the American state, or they stand no chance of climbing into the ranks of the ruling elite. See Barack Obama and Kamala Harris, for example. To this day, America broadly has refused to engage seriously in any attempt to bring break from its blood-soaked history. In fact, many Americans refuse to admit the truth of this

history, refuse to acknowledge how it continues to shape American life, and would more likely start a civil war than support material policies like reparations, which are essential to redressing these historical and ongoing injustices. Moreover, American fascists, both within and without the government itself, have internalized the white supremacy forged through settler colonialism and continue to enact settler violence on colonialist subjects, domestically and abroad. Furthermore, I would argue that fascism naturally arises among the settlers of a settler colony state rooted in ethno-racial nationalism. We see this phenomenon in Israel among its settler population. We see this in the U.S. among its settler population. We saw this in South Africa among its

settler population, et cetera. Once the processes of settler colonialism have begun, fascism will naturally follow as the settlers themselves try to paper over the contradictions of their settler colonialism and maintain their hegemony internally. Lastly, if you needed any more evidence that the U.S. is and remains a settler colony society, you need look no further than some of the biggest social uprisings in the last decade. From Standing Rock to Black Lives Matter, the biggest rebellions against the U.S. state have been spearheaded by the colonized themselves, proving the depth and ongoing presence of settler colonialism, the contradictions it continues to give rise to within our society, as well as the demand for decolonization, as inseparable from our broader

efforts to turn this society into one rooted in egalitarianism, democracy, sustainability, and justice. So now that we've talked about the settler colonial history of the United States in more depth, it's important that we take a second and we start to do a similar analysis of Israel and Palestine. And this is going to require a lot of depth, because a lot of our listenership is in the West, where you may not know this history, you certainly probably were not taught much of it. And this history is super important to understand things. Before we get started on kind of doing some historical analysis and trying to argue that Israel is a settler colony. I do want to state, this is not a comprehensive history. I had to

cut back so much of what I want to include here to make this fit in the episode in any reasonable manner whatsoever. So please know that this is not exhaustive. It does not cover every relevant factor in that ultimately there's no replacement from diving into the historical literature yourself and starting to piece this story together and hearing it, you know, from credible historians. I'm only doing synthesis work here that I think will be helpful. So the first thing we need to discuss is the history of Israel and the history of Palestine and the history of the Zionist movement. So we'll start by thinking about Palestine. The area that we now know as Palestine was held under Ottoman control from 1516 through 1917. During this long period, the Ottomans themselves

occupied a land that did have a large Arab-speaking population who were distinct ethnically from the Ottoman Turks. And this is important to think about what was happening prior to the British mandate and prior to the existence of Israel. There was, we will talk a little bit more, a brief period where Ottoman rule was interrupted by Egyptian rule from 1832 through 1840, but broadly this whole time from 1516 to 1917 can be understood as Ottoman rule of Palestine. During the period of Ottoman rule, revolt and revolution by the Arabic-speaking people of the region were not uncommon. The Druze in particular posed at times significant threats to Ottoman rule. In the 1690s, the Ottoman rural Palestine began to take a more distinctly colonial form, as it found

itself in opposition to native dynasties, which had been granted a fair bit of autonomy in the region previously. Ottoman soldiers increasingly began to harass and exploit local populations of Palestine, and in 1703, this came to a head with the Nikib al-Ashra uprising, out in which Arab-Palestinians revolted openly against Ottoman rule. This briefly resulted in actual Palestinian self-governance of Jerusalem, but as is often the case in these situations, it was ultimately crushed by the Ottomans. In 1831, Egypt invaded and conquered Palestine. The period of Egyptian control was also extremely unstable, arguably more unstable than the previous Ottoman period. Egyptian policy was highly unpopular and led to numerous rebellions against the

Egyptians. And finally, after all of this unrest in 1840, Britain was able to take control of Palestine and they returned it to the Ottomans in exchange for the right to secure European political interests in the region. After regaining control, the Ottomans instituted several reforms as part of the broader Tanzimat liberalizing reforms, which affected the whole empire. And these reforms granted increased autonomy to the Jewish Christian and Muslim communities in Palestine. It was during this period of renewed Ottoman rule that the project of Zionism began to pick up pace. Jewish immigration to Ottoman Palestine had occurred in both the 17th and 18th centuries, though never as a mass movement. There were some fringe messianic movements and also just kind of

interspersed immigration that was not coordinated, but none of this really took the form that we would associate with Zionism. The so-called First Alia, or mass immigration of Jews to Palestine, occurred during the period of 1881 through 1903. This wave of immigration was largely practical in nature as Jewish settlers fled from intense oppression and pogroms in Russia and Yemen. And the first Aliyah managed to purchase a significant amount of land for tens of thousands of settlers, but the project didn't work particularly well, and into international funding from the newly developing Zionist movement was necessary to maintain the project. Even after the funding, many of the settlers chose not to remain in Palestine.

A lot of the land that they ended up with was not particularly suitable for farming, and many of the settlers didn't know how to grow the kind of crops that would be necessary. necessary in the area. So the First Alia is generally understood to have ended in failure. Despite the failures and difficulties of the First Alia, a thinker named Theodore Herzl began to advocate for a broader Zionist project in the 1890s, leading to the First Zionist Congress in 1897. This Congress adopted a program referred to as the Basel program, which stated that the goal of Zionism was to secure for the Jewish people a publicly recognized legally assured homeland in Palestine. The Congress was largely opposed by both Orthodox and reformed Jews in Europe

and was a particularly secular project in its inception. Herzl had a very secular understanding of what he believed Zionism would be. The Congress also established the World Zionist organization to pursue the goals of Zionism. And at the time, many people saw the conference as rather fringe. It had to occur with mass opposition from the local Jewish community, and many people brushed it off. But Herzl reflected in his diary shortly after the conference that, quote, were I to sum up the Congress in a word, which I shall guard against publicly announcing, it would be this. At Basel, I founded the Jewish state. If I said this out loud today, I would be greeted by universal laughter. In five years, perhaps, and certainly in 50 years, everyone will perceive it, end quote. And in this sense,

you know, Herzl's words were quite predictive. The birth of Zionism would eventually be followed by a period referred to as the second Aaliyah, which occurred from 1905 through 1914. During this period, tens of thousands of Jewish settlers would immigrate to Palestine in order to develop colonies and settlements. Although Zionism influenced some of these settlers, the project on the whole was not necessarily Zionist in orientation in the way that we would think of it today. Like the first Alia, the second was largely practical in nature, as Jewish settlers led pogroms throughout Europe. But still, Zionism did play a role in this period of settlement, and this period helped establish infrastructure that

would be crucial for the Zionist project. In particular, the establishment of the Bargyora was extremely important. The Bargyora was a Jewish paramilitary, which developed self-defense capacities for the settlers. Although much of the function of the group was built around self-defense, they also had a clandestine insurrectionary function. According to the Jewish virtual library, the organization adopted the motto, quote, In blood and fire, Judah fell, and in blood and fire, Judah will arise, end quote. This motto, of course, hinted at the desire for a reestablished Jewish state in the historical land of Judah. And the Bargiura was not, of course, the first organized form of self-defense for Jewish settlers.

The first alia and earlier waves of the second alia had actually worked with Arab watchmen for protection. but the Bargyorah developed a more separatist orientation, arguing that Jews needed to defend Jews, and in their own words, quote, there is no redemption for our nation in our homeland, unless each of us labors with his hands and stands up his self, end quote. Furthermore, Israeli historian Shabtai Tibet argues that the goal of the Bargyara was explicitly nationalist in orientation, and that they saw self-defense as a first step towards the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine. So in this period of the Second Alia, Zionism may not be the dominant ideology, but within the

armed wing of the settlers, certainly these ideas of Jewish nationalism are starting to develop. While these earlier waves of Jewish settlement in Palestine occurred under Ottoman rule, that rule would quickly collapse. During World War I, the Ottomans sided with the central power, a decision which ultimately led to the fall of the Ottoman Empire itself. In Palestine, an Arab revolt against the Ottomans occurred throughout the 1910s, the goal of establishing Arab autonomy over Palestine. Several British politicians had promised Arab autonomy in exchange for help combating the Ottomans. But despite the Arab War's vault, Britain had other plans. In 1916, France and Britain signed the secret Sykes-Pago agreement,

which would partition the Ottoman Empire and define each empire's respective spheres of influence. And in 1917, the British issued the Balfour Declaration, which promised to establish a Jewish national home in Palestine, and the Balfour Declaration was itself signed by an anti-Semitic British politician who wanted to get rid of Jews from England. But nonetheless, this promise by Britain was a betrayal, and as such, the Arab revolt did not result in the establishment of an independent Arab Palestine, but instead saw the transfer of occupation from the Ottomans to the British. And this leads us to the next period in Palestinian history, which is often referred to as the British mandate period. During the British mandate period, Britain oversaw the Palestinian territory

on behalf of the League of Nations. Many Arabs rightfully felt that the mandate violated the agreement which the British had made prior to the Arab revolt, and the period of the British mandate saw continual rebellions by the Arabs. Despite these conflicts, the British mandate period saw significant economic development in the region, and the British mandate period also saw extensive Jewish settlement in Palestine. British immigration policy was extremely friendly to Zionism, and between 1920 and 1947, the Jewish population within Palestine grew from 11% of the total population to 31%. Furthermore, in 1933, the Nazis and some German scientists controversially signed the Havara Agreement. The agreement had several functions, but most crucially, it allowed

German Jews to flee Germany to Palestine while being able to retain some of their property and assets. This further, of course, facilitated ongoing settlement. Britain had originally placed Hajie as the head of the Palestinian state, giving the Arab-Palestinians some level of autonomy and control in the territory, but far short of independence. Despite this, during the period of 1936 through 1939, Palestine saw the Great Arab Revolt. Amin al-Husani would eventually flee the country for his role in the revolt, and Britain not only re-established control, but but significantly increased repression of Arab populations in Palestine. The revolt was simultaneously in opposition to Zionist settlement as well as British occupation,

and ultimately the revolt was disastrous, when many historians arguing that it clearly failed in its goals. It did, unfortunately, create increased amnesty between Jewish and Palestinian populations and facilitated a sense of separatism that was already present within the Jewish Zionist communities. During the revolt, the Zionist settlers developed the Haganah, to oppose the rebellions and to aid British colonial response to crush the revolt. And this itself was a paramilitary organization that had a self-defense orientation. But a more radical wing of the Higana that broke off, called the Urgun, also formed to engage

in retaliatory and even preemptory attacks against Arab Palestinians. And so here we start to see this violence between settlers and the Palestinians begin to really take shape in an organized manner. The British mandate came to an end at the end of World War II. There were several causes to this. On the one hand, the Argoon had declared revolt against the British and began to actively attack British colonial troops. Furthermore, the war weakened Britain and made the maintenance of their empire and colonies

far too expensive to be maintained. When the mandate fell apart, the British asked the United Nations to weigh in on what would happen to the Palestinian territory. One of the founders of the Argun, Zayev Jabotinsky, a prominent secular Zionist, stated the fundamentally settler-colonial function of Zionism around this time, and I think it's important for us to think about this as he became a influential revisionist Zionist. He wrote that, quote, any indigenous people will fight the settlers as long as there is a spark of hope to be rid of the foreign settlement. That is what the Arabs of the land of Israel are doing, and will continue to do as long as a spark of hope lingers in their heart. they can prevent Palestine from becoming the land of Israel end quote he further argued that their quote was no misunderstanding between jews and arabs but a natural conflict no agreement was possible with the Palestinian Arabs they would accept Zionism only when they found themselves up against an iron wall when armed force gave them no alternative but to accept Jewish settlement end quote and so here again

we see the more radical wing of the Zionist paramilitary speaking in terms that are pretty explicitly settler colonialist in nature. And this is an important factor for what happened next when the United Nations decided to weigh in. On the 29th of November in 1947, the United Nations voted to adopt Resolution 181, which partitioned Palestine into two separate states, one Arab and one Jewish. Although Jewish Zionists in Palestine and abroad largely supported the plan, with some notably dissenting because they didn't want a Palestinian Palestinian state at all, Palestinian Arabs were strongly opposed to it. This decision plunged Palestine into a civil war in which Arabs and Jews fought in an eruption

of violence. Admits this violence, the Jewish People's Council declared the foundation of the state of Israel. And this decision in turn immediately prompted an invasion by neighboring Arab countries and marked at the beginning of the 1948 Arab War. The war ended in 1949, but by the time it ended, Israel had significantly developed its military capabilities and conquered much of Palestine. And this process of conquest in the immediate sense displaced 350,000 Palestinians who had their land forcibly taken from them. But this was part of a broader process during the period that was an intentional expulsion, not just fighting during the war, but genuine ethnic cleansing. And this process is often referred to as the Nakhba by the Palestinian people, a word which means

the disaster or the catastrophe. The Nakhba displaced nearly one million Palestinians from their home and land. It did not simply represent the physical displacement of populations, but also the cultural destruction of Palestinian societies and the extermination of some 15,000 Palestinians as well, who could not escape to be displaced, but were simply killed in horrific death squad style violence. Towns were given Hebrew names, mosques and other cultural sites were destroyed. Some 400 Palestinian towns were completely depopulated, often being destroyed and rendered uninhabitable. But uninhabitability wasn't the goal. In classic settler colonial faction, this depopulation was not an end in itself, but rather facilitated settler repopulation. Through bloodshed and violence,

the partition was enacted, and the Palestinians would eventually establish their own government within the Palestinian territories that would go through several iterations. But despite this, full independence for the Palestinians was not achieved in this instance as they became a protector of Egypt during this period of time. The partition was not, however, the end of Israeli settlement and conquest. In 1956, Israel invaded the Sinai Peninsula in Egypt. While this invasion was unsuccessful and it was pushed back, it demonstrated that Israeli expansion was still an ongoing goal beyond the lines of partition drawn by the British government and the United Nations. In 1967, in response to disputes regarding Israeli access to the Straits of Tehran, Israel launched

airstrikes against Egypt. At the same time, the Israelis also began an offensive against the Gaza Strip in Sinai, and this sparked the Six-Day War, in which Israel would fight against Egypt, Jordan, and Syria. During the war, Israel expanded its territory, seizing the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem. They also took control of Golan Heights, which had been a part of Syria. Some 300,000 Palestinians were further displaced from the West Bank, and 100,000 were displaced from Golan Heights. Ultimately, the Gaza Strip, as well as the West Bank, would remain under Israeli control until the Oslo Accords were signed in 1994. The first Intifada, a wave of sustained uprisings against the Israeli occupation, occurred from roughly 1987 until the signing of the

Oslo Accords. Given this time frame, it only makes sense to conceptualize the Oslo Accords as a concession won by the brave resistance of the Palestinian people. The Oslo Accords would see the withdrawal of Israel from the West Bank and Gaza and the establishment of the Palestinian Authority. While much has definitely happened in the time since the war, we really have to stop our in-depth historical analysis of what's happening here. The Six-Day War shows, I think, very clearly the goal of Israel to continue expansion and seizing more territory, and the wake of that war and the Intifada and the Oslo Accord should not be understood as proof that Israel is not interest in occupying all of Palestine or is willing to give up territory, but should be understood instead as capitulation

in the face of intense resistance to settler colonialism. We're going to go ahead and kind of transition out of the history section to thinking about more contemporary issues, but I do want to end by really emphasizing that whatever capitulations have been made have been won through the fighting of the Palestinian people and that we need to recognize the resistance that is taking place there. There's a lot that I'm leaving out of this history. Countless books have been written on it, and there are a few important things that we've focused on here because they help us understand the relationship between Israel, Zionism, and settler colonialism. So let's reflect on that relationship a little bit before we move on. The first thing that we have to acknowledge that is not

necessarily immediately clear is that Zionism was always intended as a colonial project, but it's not obvious that it was always intended as a settler colonial project, although that is certainly the form it took. The settlers of the First and Second Aaliyah did not clearly conceptualize their project as establishing a Jewish state that required the displacement of Palestinian population. But at the same time, as early as the Second Alia, the Bargyorah did clearly represent a group of settlers who had nationalist ambitions, and who understood these ambitions as necessarily realized through violence. Furthermore, Herzl himself, didn't seem to think that Zionism would mean the displacement of Palestinians. He repeatedly argued

that Zionism would actually benefit the Palestinians as Zionists would share technology and mutual defense with them. But this, of course, never played out in practice. When Muhammad Dia al-Khalidi, an Ottoman mayor of Jerusalem, tried to explain the potential for conflict to Herzl in 1898 through a series of letter correspondences, Herzl simply brushed aside these fears, again, insist that Zionism would be mutually beneficial. As such, Herzl's understanding of Zionism was not intentionally oriented towards extermination of the Palestinians, but it was clearly kind of marked by a colonial paternalism that thought of the Palestinians as a secondary question to be brushed aside who could be benefited by settlement, rather than any concerns for their rights as people already

living in the land. Despite this, it's clear that the orientation of the Zionist project shifted. The lingering resentment over the violence which had occurred during the Arab revolts of the late 1930s had eliminated any desire for Zionists to live alongside Palestinians and had created a stronger sense of separatism and ethno-nationalism within the movement. Whatever the intentions of Herzl towards the Palestinians may have been, by the time the partition of Palestine occurred, it was clear that the Zionist plan was to displace or kill the Palestinian population within the territory, which they had declared the state of Israel. The Nakhba can be understood as the beginning of a settler colonial process of land dispossession and cultural genocide.

Now, one could argue that this process wasn't genocidal in orientation, since most Palestinians were merely displaced. But this fact is really honestly incidental. It's clear that the goal of the Zionist during the period of partition was the seizure and depopulation of land. It was largely irrelevant if this depopulation was achieved via the ends of displacement or extermination. The process of settlement was primary, and displacement and extermination were just tools that could be used towards that end. The second thing that we need to acknowledge is that from the moment that Palestine was partitioned, Israel was not willing to settle for the borders established by the United Nations, which is sort of the basis for the so-called two-state solution.

The Six-Day War is a prime example of the Zionist desire to conquer and depopulate the entire land of Palestine, and although the UN intervened in the wake of the sport to prevent total depopulation, the process of settlement hasn't stopped. Zionist settlement of the Palestinian territories has been ongoing since the labor Zionist government promoted it in the 1960s, and the revisionist Zionist government today strongly promotes it. These settlements have had shifting legal status throughout the last several decades. Sometimes they've been encouraged, sometimes they've been denounced by the Israeli state. But this is the case in all settler colonies, and the United States, often the killing of indigenous people was not legally sanctioned or carried out

by the state directly, but settlers acting in an extra or paralegal fashion are still a part of settler colonialism. Settler colonialism is about the structure of a society, not the structure of the state proper, although the state is a part of it. So this would not be a reason to throw away the analysis of settler colonialism. The growth of these settlements that have been ongoing has been significant basically since the end of the Yom Kippur War. From 1970 to 2017, the population of Israeli settlers within the Palestinian territories of Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem, went up to 700,000 from zero originally, as there were no settlements at the beginning. The international community largely understands these settlements as being illegal, but they persist often with de facto tolerance from the state, nonetheless. The ongoing displacement of Palestinians is embodied best through the process of settlement, which reveals that a goal of Zionist occupation,

is the continued expansion up until the point of the total land theft of Palestine. This is the end goal of all settler colonies. It's the end goal in the United States. It was the end goal of the settler colonial South Africa and Rhodesia. This is what settler colonies do. It's not unique to Zionism. In line with this, settlers engage in regular violence against the Palestinian people whose land they have stolen. This has included the destruction of historic olive groves, which Palestinian families rely on for agriculture. alongside the occasional murder of Palestinian civilians and retribution for military conflicts. Israel has also continued construction of a physical barrier along the West Bank, which hasn't been built along the actual partition line,

in order to allow for the seizure of even more Palestinian land. But again, this is just what frontiers have always looked like. Even the current crisis can best be understood as a part of the process of settler colonialism. This most recent outbreak of bombing began with settler violence. Israeli occupying forces attacking the mosque during Ramadan and cutting off access for Muslim worshippers to the Damascus Gate are part of a continued policy of suppression and destruction of Palestinian culture that goes all the way back to partition and the Nakaba in which Palestinian towns were destroyed and renamed. Meanwhile, in the Shikirah neighborhood of East

Jerusalem, this right-wing settler organization has intensified their ongoing attempts to abect and displaced Palestinians living in the neighborhood. As we discussed, over 50 Palestinians had been evicted previously prior to this most recent crisis, and this crisis was in many ways started by the attempts to evict six additional families. Given the ongoing depopulation and repopulation, which has spurred the current wave of violence, we need to be clear. What we've seen in the last months is not an escalation of conflict per se or some other euphemism. It's an ongoing dispossession of Palestinian land as part of a broader project of subter colonialism. These considerations, I think, make it quite clear that Israel is a settler colony. The end goal of the

Israeli state, despite public statements about a two-state solution, is clearly a single state and the end of Palestine. The fighting that we saw this month, the obliteration of Palestinian infrastructure, which destroyed schools and media offices, and which killed hundreds of Palestinians, is not self-defense. It's meant to send a message that Israeli settlement is ongoing, that life for Palestinian people will be made hellish and unlivable until they're wiped out militarily or displaced. Look at the actions of Israel during the last month, and what you see is a settler colony wielding weapons given to it by another settler colony in order to continue an ongoing process of conquest and land theft. And look, if you're not willing to take my word for it,

please take the Israeli government's word for it and weigh their own laws against our definition of settler colonialism. In 2008, the Israeli government adopted a law commonly referred to as the nation-state law. This law declared Israel a Jewish state and upheld the right of self-determination for Jews alone. The law itself states that, quote, the actualization of the right of national self-determination in the state of Israel is unique to the Jewish people, end quote, therefore denying self-determination to anyone else. Here we see the invocation of an explicitly ethno-nationalist framework in which self-determination is only for the predominant settler group. Furthermore, the law upheld the ongoing

settlement of Palestine as a continued process. The law reads, quote, the state views Jewish settlement as a national value and will labor to encourage and promote its establishment and development, end quote. And here we see the state to jury enforcing settlement, endorsing it, and promoting it. Amir O'Hana, a member of the ruling Lakud Party, has further explained the law and puts it quite well and horrifically, saying that, quote, the basic law starts by saying clearly that the state of Israel is the nation state of the Jewish people and theirs only, end quote. There is no interest there in a two-state solution. There is interest in Zionist domination and a single Jewish nationalist state at the cost of Palestinians. Furthermore, Prime Minister

Netanyahu, who has been prime minister for a cumulative 15, years, has stated in his own words the idea that, quote, the weak crumble are slaughtered and are erased from history, while the strong, for good or for ill, survive. The strong are respected, and alliances are made with the strong, and in the end, peace is made with the strong. End quote. And there you have it from the prime minister's mouth itself. This ideology, this idea being stated here, is explicitly settler colonial in orientation. In the United States, for example, the idea that strength was the law of the land was used to justify the extermination of native people and westward expansion. Settlers argued that because the U.S. had proven stronger than the

natives in combat and the process of extermination, that extermination was just. History for the settlers is always defined in terms of the strong surviving, and settler colonialism as it has developed more complex ideologies, has adopted scientific racist and socialist Darwinist ideologies, which have argued that it's right and natural for colonizers to take over the land they seek to steal because of their innate strength and superiority. We see this invoked clearly in Netanyahu's quote, these ideologies of conquest. So again, listen to what the Israeli state itself says. Another sign that I think is worth talking about that Israel is a settler colony is that it has a de facto prohibition on mixed marriages. Settler colonies require prohibitions

against mixed marriage in order to maintain their fictions of racial purity, and in order to prohibit the development of social bonds that might undermine the exterminationist ideologies of replacement. Israel does not have a system for civil marriage. All marriages in Israel are handled through religious institutions on the basis of the religion of those getting married. So, as such, Muslims would have to go through an imam to get married, while all Jews, regardless of their personal religion and whether their Orthodox are not, are required. to seek marriage from an orthodox rabbi. As such, it is de facto nearly impossible for intermarriage between Jews and Muslims and Israel to take place. There are instances of it, but they are extremely

rare. While the ideological justification for this is religious in nature, the social function remains one of apartheid separation and settler colonialism. This de facto prohibition has also been reflected in forms of government policy. It has gone beyond being de facto in some instance. In 2015, Israel banned the romance novel with a mixed Jewish and Arab couple from schools, arguing that it threatened, quote, the identity and heritage of students in every sector, end quote. So while it is ideologically convenient for Israel to allow anti-mixed marriage imperatives to function de facto in society, we also see that the state is so interested in safeguarding this idea of purity of identity, that they are also willing to create de jure interventions through the law to prohibit positive portrayals

of mixed marriages. So, what are we left with after this admittedly winding an overlong historical overview that is yet at the same time utterly insufficient? To summarize, let's return to our definition of settler colonialism provided in the beginning of the episode and see if we can't, you know, way is real against it. Our definition stated, quote, saidler colonialism is a distinct type of colonialism that functions through the displacement of indigenous populations with an invasive settler society that over time develops a distinctive identity and sovereignty end quote in the case of Israel we can clearly see a process of population replacement this occurred historically through the knockba and then through the ever

ongoing expansion of the Israeli state following partition both in the six-day war and an ongoing settlement now. I think we've elaborated on this enough. That part of the definition is clearly meant. A distinctive identity has also clearly been developed and dates back to at least the Bargyora during the Second Alia, in which Jewish defense organizations began to conceptualize their task as a distinctly nationalist task. It continued on through the establishment of a Jewish ethno state during partition and was reaffirmed in the nation state law of 2018, as well as the 2015 intervention of the education minister to defend the identity of Jewish students by opposing that book that featured an intermarried couple. Finally, we see that a theory of sovereignty dates

back to the Second Alia and has been affirmed by Zionism time and time again. This idea of sovereignty has been the basis for ongoing aggression and violence, and it provides an ideological legitimization for this violence. Sometimes it's secular, sometimes it's religious in nature, but it provides the same function. All in all, it's hard to argue that Israel does not clearly, and in a documented matter, meet our definition of settler colonialism and that Zionism is not a settler colonialism ideology. If we work with that definition, and we look at the history and we look at the facts, what we see is settler colonialism. Now, I want to conclude this section by noting that some will argue that this telling of events lumps various forms of Zionism together in a

simplistic manner, but this, in my opinion, really misses the point. Yes, there's labor Zionism, there's revisionist Zionism, there's practical Zionism, there is religious Zionism, there are a whole host of Zionist ideologies. But settler colonial societies have always had some level of pluralism in terms of ideology. In the United States, we have Democrats and we have Republicans, and within those parties, you have the Tea Party, you've self-described democratic socialists, you have moderates, neo-conservatives, blue dogs, and liberals. And despite whatever difference there may be between these ideologies, they all agree on a fundamental fact. This settler colonial society should be maintained, and the ongoing occupation of stolen

land should go unchallenged. When the state of Israel was announced, it was not primarily right religious Zionists or even revisionist Zionists who were in charge. Rather, it was originally left-wing labor Zionists and practical Zionists. And yet, under the oversight of even more moderate and secular Zionism, we saw the knock-bba occur. And this is because regardless of what flavor of Zionism we wish to discuss, which is to say the flavor of justification for settler colonialism, none of them dare to challenge occupation. As such, there's no iteration of Zionism, which can be on the side of the oppressed in the international movement against colonialism. So that's a lot of history right there, and that is a lot of information. So I'm going to stop

short, and go ahead and pass it over to Brett, who can look at the relationship between Israel and the United States, how these two settler colonies interact with each other, and how imperialism and settler colonialism create the basis for that interaction. Hopefully this has been helpful. You need to dig deeper than what I've provided here, but I hope this can be a starting point. Over to you, Brett. Okay, so after that fascinating deep dive into the history of Zionism and so much more that Allison just laid out, I'm now going to touch on the ongoing relationship between the United States and Israel and talk about how these two settler colonies relate to one another. And the first thing that I would like to say on this topic of Israel's connection to the U.S.

is that we should abandon the idea that Israel is a puppet state of the U.S. or vice versa. It's essential to realize that the very existence of Israel, as it currently exists, was rooted in Western colonialism, specifically British and American colonialism, and far from being a client state of bigger colonialist powers, it is rather a manifestation of the global order created by colonialism and maintained by imperialism.

As Caitlin Johnstone put it, quote, The U.S. is not a puppet of Israel. Israel isn't a puppet of the U.S. for that matter. Saying that one puppets the other is like saying that Ohio puppets Nevada. They're both member states of the same undeclared empire

ruled by uncrowned kings who use governments as weapons to kill and steal end quote now this isn't to say that the U.S. and Israel aren't deeply connected allies they clearly are it's also not to say that they don't influence one another

the U.S. gives Israel almost $4 billion a year in military aid defends its illegal actions on the world stage and backs it with the full power and authority of the American military On the other side, Israel helps train American police, assists in suppressing anti-Israeli sentiments and movements like BDS in the United States and beyond, defends America's criminal embargo on Cuba at the U.N., and helps the U.S. launch attacks against its enemies in the region. But none of this is because one state puppets the other, rather it's because the roots of these settler colonial societies and their present-day interests are so closely aligned.

They are manifestations of the same global empire, and they share its goals. Given this deep relationship with shared bloody roots, these two societies mirror one another in many ways. One glaring example of this is the similarities between how the U.S. state treats its internal colonized subjects, specifically indigenous and black people, and how Israel treats its internal colonized subjects, specifically the Palestinians and Arab Muslims more broadly. one could take video of say Israeli mobs beating Palestinians in the street over the last couple of weeks and splice it seamlessly into images out of Charlottesville where fascist mobs brutally beat a black man in a parking garage one could also take video of the police crackdowns on black lives matter protesters from last summer

and seamlessly splice it with images of Israeli police cracking down on largely peaceful Palestinian protesters On top of this, the settlers in each country often share very similar fascistic outlooks and political ideologies, and they talk about their respective colonized populations, oftentimes using the same tropes, slurs, and nationalist venom. There is also the example of the Christian far-right being among the most pro-Israel segments of American society, and the Israeli far-right's love affair with Trump and his fascist base of support here at home. I could go on, but it's important to note that these similarities are not merely aesthetic or surface level. They are profound reflections of the core values and structures of these societies themselves. On the international stage, these two settler colonial societies share the same exact set of enemies.

They share intelligence and weapons with one another, trained together, and back one another up in any conflict. They team up in the UN, sometimes against the entire rest of the world, to push their shared interests, and both have some of the furthest right political parties and leaders on the fucking planet. In the final analysis, the relationship between the U.S. and Israel is one of shared roots, shared interests, shared contradictions, and shared enemies. One settler colony uses the presence of the other to maintain its global and regional hegemony, while the other settler colony uses the existence of the former to fund, arm, justify, and defend itself. Now with all of that said, let's go on to part four.

Allison? All right, so now we're going to move into the final part of our episode. So now that we've done a fair amount of work, kind of getting into the definitions, history of settler colonialism, and of Zionism, and Israeli occupation, we want to take a second and use some of the texts that we've talked about and work through to try to see what they can tell us about this situation a little bit and just think about the situation going on a little bit more. One thing that we at Redmondis always try to emphasize is that the text that we're reading

shouldn't just be treated as like historical artifacts, right? These are texts that weigh on our current moment that can help us understand and interact with the world around us in really important ways. And so it's very crucial we think to see how some of those texts can work. So some of the authors that we have looked into who obviously would have important frameworks for this, and who we've already referenced some in the previous section, would be Sasser, Phon, and Lennon, and Lennon, right? The first two respectively write these massive, just important texts on colonialism, what it is, how it functions, and how it is combated. And Lennon

gives us both a theory of imperialism and a way to approach the national question through a Marxist lens. And so obviously, I think there's a lot of ways these thinkers can kind of weigh in on this. So I'm going to go ahead and just jump into some of the ideas that I had. first thinking through some of the things that we saw from Sassar. So our most recent theoretical episode is on discourse on colonialism by Sassar, where we deal with kind of this humanist critique of European humanism and the way that colonialism makes interaction between humans impossible. And I think that this sort of framework that Sassar adopts in which the discussion of human rights and the discussion of people's self-determination always excludes the colonized is very important

for thinking about this. Early revisionist Zionists, for example, championed the phrase, Palestine is a land without a people, and Israel is a people without a land. And I think that phrase tells us a lot, right? Because there were people living in Palestine. And so when we hear that phrase, what we're hearing isn't so much a statement of the condition of Palestine, but rather ideologically how these Zionists understood who counts as a person, right? What we're hearing is a qualification of who is included under human rights and human dignity. And from the very beginning in that quote, you can see the fact that Palestinians are excluded from this.

This kind of ideology is central to colonialism. Throughout Cesar's work, we see the way that the dehumanization of the colonized is necessary in order for colonizers to be able to live with the kind of intense violences that they're committing. And what we've talked about here is an instance of those intense violences. The displacement which occurred during the Nakhba, the ongoing slaughter of civilians is something that you can only do if you think you're not killing your fellow humans. And so that sort of destruction of humanity that Sassar gets at,

which is at the core of the colonial ideology is clearly at play here. I think you can see this in a lot of ways with just kind of a sort of casual cruelty that can end up being employed in these situations. You know, doing research into the history of the modern settlements within the, uh, within the Palestinian territories, you see so many instances of cruelty that almost doesn't feel planned but is spontaneous, the destruction of olive groves that Palestinians have had for generations and required to survive. Dunn is just part of rioting as an afterthought, as just a petty way to inflict harm and damage on the people who live there. Or one famous instance from a settlement in which someone had inscribed using graffiti on a door gasped the Arabs, just this casual expression

of genocidal intent is itself testament to the destruction of humanity that comes from colonialism and the way that colonialism requires us to see those who are colonized as subhuman. In the most recent sort of things that we've seen developing with Sheikh Jara, there's this footage of a settler who is occupying a house arguing with the Palestinian couple he stole it from. And in this video, we see this sort of remarkable ideological excuse-making in which he can't seem to confront the fact that he has harmed these people. They tell him, Jacob, you know this isn't your house, and his response is simply, if I don't take it, someone else will. It's not yours anymore. And that is not how one talks to a fellow person, to someone that one respects. That is someone talks when they

have washed their hands of responsibility to other human beings and can justify any sort of atrocity from land theft to genocide. And so when Cicere gives us these ways that the ideology of colonialism destroys the possibility for human interaction. We see that very clearly at play in what's going on in Palestine right now. And it's truly horrific to see that these ideologies continue to self-perpetuate in modern instances of colonial occupation. Yeah. Incredibly well said.

And I would add to that, you covered some of the things that I think clearly we can pull from these past texts and bouncing off something that you said is the sort of the psychology of the colonizer. the mindset of Israeli settlers and the sort of fascism that grows organically out of the soil of settler colonialism. And it infects the minds of human beings to the point where in the process of dehumanizing the other, they themselves become less than human. And actually, we'll play a clip here of Abby Martin, the investigative journalist on the ground in Israel, interviewing regular Israeli citizens at random.

and hearing what they have to say just the genocidal murderous logic that so easily pours forth from Israeli citizens is a testament to that exact sort of psychological monstrosity created by settler colonialism. I think Israelis have to take over and they have to kick them away. It will be much better, not to kill them, just to go back to Arab countries. But it's really rightfully ours. If you look at the history and the wars, and we didn't even start a lot of the wars, we conquered these places rightfully like it's ours. A thousand four hundred years later, we come back. Now, I'm not saying that we can blame the people living here for what happened,

but you've got to accept that that's some kind of divine justice, that their great-great-great-great-grandfathers kicked my great-great-great-grandfather out of here and then we come back and all of a sudden they're like well no we don't want it's not fair I think that the Jews came here they took it they took this land and this is our land now and I don't think they should be here

no Arabs like Arabs they want we gave them Gaza they should go live their quiet leave they want they should go back to Iraq I don't know to wherever they want I think that we need to How do you say kick out the Arabs? How do you say kick out the Arabs? Yes, yes, tell me that word. I don't think there's any answer to it.

Really? There's only one way, like, I would carpet bomb them. You would carpet bomb them? It's the only way you could deal with it. Or try to stop them a different way. It never worked. I think that we are miserable. The Arabs make it be a terrorist attack.

We need to kill Arabs. I think another thing, that the Jews should have rights to hate them. I think we have the right to hate them. I don't see a reason why not. I won't trust any of them. There's no chance of peace here in this country. You can't have peace with them, they always hate us. So if you can't have peace and if the situation can't carry on like this,

then we need to handle them in other ways, there's no other choice. I think we should give them a country. if you're doing any problem you just go in there to give them a country and then it's going to be a war between countries you know if they're going to throw rockets we're going to throw one big one and done and another thinker that

we didn't mention in the initial question itself but I think is helpful is Mao and his work on contradiction one of the things that we covered with Mao's on contradiction is the importance of identifying the principle contradiction, right? The primary contradiction in a given conflict. And to not confuse that with other

contradictions that may be secondary or maybe non-intaginistic, for example, because that allows you to create a strategy that enables you to fight more effectively for your liberation. And I think this is particularly true when it comes to the Israeli-Palestine conflict because so many people, especially in the West, especially liberals, they'll do this thing where they'll sort of reduce it to oh they've been fighting for thousands of years over religion right um and and one the the whole they've been fighting for thousands of years is a historical sort of nonsense that papers over a plethora of of wrinkles and historical occurrences and but you'll hear it from i mean mainstream figures all the time you hear it from like the daily show um you know things like that i heard it just

this week multiple times from from liberal um talking heads but it's actually kind of timely because Jank Yugar from the young Turks really encapsulated this idea of front-loading the conflict with religion and he tweeted out to much disdain and scorn. Israelis and Palestinians kill each other over which sky god they pretend to speak to and it's politically incorrect to point out there is no human god

let alone one that favors Jews or Muslims. All this violence over the equivalent of which character they like better in the Marvel cinematic universe. So this is not something tweeted by a new atheist in 2006. This is somebody who's a millionaire talking head, liberal pundit, once again, centering the conflict as if it's a religious one. The primary contradiction, as we've covered throughout this entire episode, is not by any means religious. It is the contradiction between the settler colonial, the settler colonizer, and the colonized.

And that is the primary contradiction. That is what needs to be identified as such. and downstream from that it can be dressed up in religious garb it has religious connotations etc but i think displacing that primary contradiction in that way and saying that it's religious or you know cup papering over the the long history of this conflict as they've just been fighting for thousands of years it's like it's just innate in these people to fight like that is also bigoted a historical nonsensical and so you know and we can understand this in our own situation, the importance here of really identifying that principle contradiction and making

sense of the situation around you so that you can effectively move within it, if you make the mistake of thinking it's fundamentally about Jews and Muslims, you miss 90% of the conflict have no hope for overcoming this occupation and settler colonialism, et cetera. So that is another thing that I think is worth mentioning and learning from the past. Yeah, and I think it's important to push back against all these attempts of kind of obscuring the contradiction. The religion one, if you think about it for a little bit and do even the basic bit of investigation, which I know liberals are loath to do, but if you take the time to actually do that, it becomes very clear that you can't clearly map this as a religious conflict. One reason is that Palestinians are

not universally Muslim, right? Some of the displaced Palestinians that we've seen are historical Christian communities in Palestine. There are also Palestinian Jewish communities that have been hurt as a result of this. And that clearly disrupts kind of this idea that this is a fundamentally religious conflict. In addition to that, I also think that the idea that this is Islam versus Judaism ignores the long and proud tradition of Jewish opposition to Zionism. As we mentioned in our history section, you know, when Herzl was pushing this early Zionist idea at the World Zionist Congress, he was pushing a secular idea that many religious Jews were extremely opposed to on religious grounds. And although eventually religious iterations of Zionism would come into existence and would

become predominant within, you know, the current Israeli government where they have a coalition with the right-wing nationalists, there is still, to this day, religious dissent within Judaism against Zionism that has to be focused on. Historically, this descent has come from progressive Jews, but also even from Orthodox and Hasidic communities with thinkers like Martin Buber, a fantastic Jewish theologian, who comes from a Orthodox Hasidic perspective to critique Zionism from Jewish values. And so the idea that this is Islam versus Judaism is fundamentally absurd when one side is not entirely Muslim, and the other side cannot in any sense historically or presently be said to speak for Judaism holistically. So we need to push back against that obscuring.

But also in that Abby Martin clip, you know, there's the one person who's interviewed who says, like, well, their ancestors took it from us and now we're taking it back. And this is another thing that you will often hear referenced in terms of this conflict. But that is also a historical, right? The dispossession of the Jewish people from Jerusalem in particular was not done by the Arab people. It was done by the Romans after the Jewish revolt against Rome failed. So even thinking back historically, this is completely untrue. It's not the Palestinian people who dispossessed this land in the first place and who sent Jewish people into international exile. That goes far before the development of a distinct Palestinian Arab identity by, you know, countless years. So we really

need to push back against these attempts to obscure this conflict into something else. The other thing that I kind of want to think about, you know, and this kind of, I think, ties into Bostasar and Mao in terms of coalitions a little bit, is the lost opportunity here. As we talked about in our history, It was not the Palestinian Arabs who controlled Palestine prior to Zionism, right? Palestine was occupied by the British and before them by the Ottomans. And the Palestinian Arabs were engaged in anti-colonial struggle against the Ottoman Empire and to various degrees against the British Empire as well. And so one thing that's really unfortunate about how things have gone is that there could

have been room for solidarity between Jewish people and Palestinians in terms of both being victims of colonialism. Even when we think about anti-Semitism in the context of Europe, both Sassar and Fanon make a clear case that that anti-Semitism is an expression of colonial ideology and is a perfection of colonial violence. And so this could have been a source of solidarity. We see actually early on in the process of settlement the possibilities of things moving in a different direction. The Hebrew University, for example, was funded by a grant from Palestinian families to help Jewish people escape pogroms in persecution and be able to be able to, to come to Palestine. There was not this immediate sort of hostility that existed at the moment of

the first and second Aliyah when people came over, but in fact was the possibility for some level of solidarity. But a settler colonial ideology supplanted that solidarity and created an exterminationist imperative that made an interrelation impossible because of the idea that Zionism had to be a Jewish state, a Jewish nationalist project, which would take over the land that supposedly was historically Israel. So we see these lost possibilities for coalitions against colonialism and this lost possibility for a form of contact that could have been non-dominationist. And that goes out the door, unfortunately. And it's very unfortunate to see because there are historic moments where we see where things could have gone differently, perhaps. Yeah. Absolutely. Do you want to

move on to just a more general question or do you have any specific texts that we've covered so far that you want to reference before we move on? Yeah, I wanted to talk a little bit about how Lenin frames into this, I think, because I think this, you know, it's very obvious how phenomenons this air fit in, if you agree with our analysis of what's happening. But the question of Lenin, I think, is a little important. We've obviously discussed, you know, throughout our earlier episodes, how imperialism relates into this using Lenin's theory. But I also think Lenin's approach to the national question, especially as Stalin summarizes it in foundations of Leninism, which we've previously covered, can help kind of show why Marxists have to be in solidarity

with the Palestinian people, right? There are, unfortunately, chauvinist Marxists who take a stance of saying, well, I'm opposed to both governments and the working class of both governments, of both countries need to unite with each other. And while that sounds nice, it is also completely unrealistic and ignores the function of Palestinian nationalism as opposition to imperialism, which is one of the key criteria for the application of the national question in the way that Lenin develops it. We see in the Palestinian situation, the characteristics of a nation, as Lenin outlines it, a common culture, a common language, a common homeland, all of these things coming together. And we also see the other important thing,

which is that their nationalism is a nationalism fundamentally opposed to imperialism. The Zionist project is propped up by the United States in many ways, as we have said, and was founded with the support of British colonialism on the whole. And so if you are opposed to imperialism. If you are in favor of international solidarity of the working class, then you have to support this instance of nationalism, which is itself opposed to imperialism and fighting for the conditions at which international solidarity between workers could be possible. So it's not enough to hand-ring about, oh, wouldn't it be nice if the Israeli workers and the Palestinian workers got along, because that cannot happen in a context of occupation where national self-determination hasn't

been established. So I think it's very important to insist that Marxists have an obligation to avoid a chauvinist line on this, in line with the traditional history of the national question, and to support Palestinian liberation. This is the correct Marxist position that follows, even aside from Sassar and Fanon, from Lenin's foundational ideas on the national question. Yeah, really good. And I want to echo this quote from France Fanon. I know we've talked about it before.

It gets brought up quite a bit, but it is important and it's directly relevant. So Fanon says in Wretched of the Earth, Chapter 1, I believe, quote, this compartmentalized world, this world divided into two, is inhabited by different species. The singularity of the colonial context lies in the fact that economic reality, inequality, and enormous disparities in lifestyles never managed to mask the human reality. Looking at the immediacies of the colonial context, it is clear that what divides this world is first and foremost what species or what race one belongs to. In the colonies, the economic infrastructure is also a superstructure.

The cause is effect. You are rich because you are white. You are white because you are rich. This is why a Marxist analysis should always be slightly stretched when it comes to addressing the colonial issue. And I think this is relevant because earlier I was talking about the principal contradiction not being religion, being the colonized and the colonizer. I think it also is true in a colonial context. The principal contradiction currently is not even between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, which somebody is saying like the working class of both, you know, states need to come together and I'm against both states as such. I think that obscures that issue and misplaces the fundamental contradiction. The contradiction right now is between colonizer and colonized. That contradiction has to be overcome and we can talk about ways to do that before these other contradictions like the contradiction between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie in that region can be meaningfully addressed. And so I think it's another important thing that we can pull directly out of Fanon to help us make sense of it. Yeah. I think you know, the primacy question is a difficult one to debate, because I also think at the same time,

you don't have colonialism or settler colonialism without capitalism, right? So the question of which one is foundational becomes very difficult, but the strategic question is less difficult, which is precisely what you said. If we are to have solidarity between the working classes of the world, then we all need to be fundamentally of the same human species first, right? And colonialism is a block to that. So even if you insist that the class contradiction is the foundational one, that doesn't change the strategic sort of insight, that it is opposition to anti, or opposition to colonialism that is a necessary and not necessarily sufficient, but certainly necessary prior condition to addressing that contradiction in the first place, regardless of which one's primary.

And there's good empirical evidence of this as well. We've seen strikes by workers in Israel where the strike demands explicitly are for further dispossession of Palestinian land, or more recently where the strike demands are the release of IDF soldiers captured by the Palestinians. And this indicates that even organized labor in Israel takes a colonial form. And absent decolonization, there cannot be a sort of labor solidarity that exists there. Decolonization is the prior question to that solidarity, regardless of what is primary or foundational. Yeah, exactly right. else before we just move into a more open discussion. I have some issues I want to throw your way. No, I think we are good to move on to kind of the broader discussion. Okay. Because one thing

you hear a lot in this conversation and especially in Western media, you hear the phrase peace process as if it's an ongoing sort of attempt to make peace on both sides, which is absurd. But you also hear the two-state solution. And this is proffered by liberals all around the world as the solution, right? The solution to now the Israeli right and more right-wingers are like, no, we want a one-state solution, a Jewish ethno state in which the Palestinians are eradicated from the territory. But liberals, you know, being good liberals as they are, they can't say that. So they want a two-state solution.

But the two-state solution is one, a red herring because Israel itself doesn't even believe in it. The settlements are a direct strike against it, making the possibility of a two-state. two-state sort of impossible. And I think by accepting that the two-state solution is the solution, you sort of embrace and internalize some fundamental premises of settler colonialism itself, as if you know, Israel has a right to exist as a Jewish ethno state on occupied territory. And that, in and of itself, is already accepting a huge amount of the premises and logics of Zionism as it exists. So if the two-state solution is not the solution, and you agree with me on that, Allison,

what is a solution? What should a principled Marxist analysis result in regarding a conclusion for how to best meaningfully address this situation? Yeah. So first, kind of to talk a little bit more about the two-state solution, I think it's important to really acknowledge that, like, you're right. This is the position of international liberals and has never really been the position of either sides engaged in the situation in Occupy Palestine, right? The original UN partition was considered pretty much unacceptable by the Palestinians and also by the revisionist Zionists and a huge chunk of them. And it really was just that the practical Zionist quickly declared the state of Israel when the original partition was set up that allowed for

this supposed two-state situation to happen. But then, you know, even in the Six-Day War, we saw an attempt to take the entirety of the land, right? So even thinking in the 60s, the project was clearly not to accept a two-state solution, but to try to take all of the land of Palestine, and that was clearly what was happening there, and only UN intervention was really able to prevent that from happening. So the two-state solution is a pipe dream. I think we just have to acknowledge that. No one is particularly interested in this, and the predominant sort of contemporary ideology of the Israeli state, again, is a revisionist Zionism, which insists on taking the maximum amount of territory possible. So it is a non-starter. And when liberals are talking about

that, they are talking about, you know, what they're always talking about, these abstract, it would be nice ideals, not the world that we're living in. And so we have to deal with the world that we're living in. So the first thing that I would say is that the question of what is the solution is a question that has to be defined by the Palestinian people. That is a question that is going to be defined through their demands. People who are colonized and who rise up in decolonial action are the ones who have to be able to decide what that looks like. So we can give input and we can give weight on sort of what that might look like ourselves, but ultimately that is a question for the Palestinians to answer. Now, the nice thing is, you know, Abby Martin has also done a lot of

interviews in Palestine. And the thing that you largely hear from many Palestinians is we want to state with equal rights. What you hear from many Palestinians is very much the opposite of what you hear from those videos of Jewish settlers and Israeli immigrants who are stating, you know, we want to wipe out the Palestinians. It's we want a state that does not give special rights to Jewish people and does not take rights away from Arab people. And I think, at least in my mind, the ideal end goal is a single state that has room for both the Jews and Arabs in it, right? That is what we want. And I think many Palestinians have articulated that demand as such. And I think it's very important to be clear about that. You know, it is, I think, fair to understand the extent to

which anti-Semitism drove the Zionist impulse and led to the first and second Alia. And I think that again, we can see in those early moments of immigration to Israel that Palestinians were often very sympathetic to that and that the Palestinian people do not, contrary to what the Zionists say, want to drive all the Jews out of Palestine. There is not real sufficient evidence of that. Even Hamas no longer has that kind of language in their program as of 2017 when they significantly reoriented their program towards more kind of mainstream anti-colonial politics away from their historical sort of anti-Semitic perspective. So it seems clear to me that the Palestinian struggle is not one that seeks to create a Palestinian ethno state that would be at the exclusion of the

Jewish people, but rather to create a state that doesn't give special rights on the basis of ethnicity. Furthermore, it would be a state that has a civil court system, unlike Israel's current system, which has a religious court system where the court system that you're a part of is on the basis of what religious group you are a part of, regardless of your personal religious opinions or not. So we need to move away from the Israeli state, and we need what would be one state that would have equal rights for all citizens, ideally. The only way we will ever get there is through Palestinian liberation. The Zionists have made it extremely clear that that is an endpoint that is unacceptable to them. So long as their politics are in command and their state built on theocratic court

systems and the, you know, maximalist desire for territory exists will never get there, which means that if what you want is a state that treats both Jewish people and Palestinian people equally, the only hope for that possibility is solidarity and support with the Palestinian people in their struggle for decolonization, where they'll define the terms of what that process looks like. Yep, exactly. And that echoes my sentiment as well, particularly rooting, you know, our ideas in what Palestinians themselves are advocating for, a decolonized, single state, rooted fundamentally and built upon equal human rights,

and then downstream from that, equal civil rights, equal representation, equal participation, where everybody in the state is seen as an equal citizen. And that is the only real solution. The two-state solution is a non-starter, and as Allison and I both said in our own ways, you know, it's not even really believed in by the Israeli right themselves. So I think that's important to note because it comes up a lot.

And, you know, you'll find people in your family who may be liberal or may have good intentions, parroting things like that. And if you can bring some clarity to the situation, it can really sway people's opinion. And specifically talking about swaying people's opinion or more broadly mounting a pressure campaign against Israel in a show of international solidarity, there is the BDS movement. And I think it's, I'm interested in your thoughts on this, Alison,

but I also think it's incredibly timely because, once again, Abby Martin, my friend and comrade, recently just won a lawsuit. She sued Georgia over their anti-BDS law on First Amendment and due process grounds, won the lawsuit and got the law struck down. This is a, you know, phenomenal victory,

and we'll see where it goes from here. But the BDS, the boycott, divest and sanctioned movement is an attempt by people who exist outside the region to show solidarity with Palestinians and against the Israeli apartheid state. And this is a victory for that. And it's quite, I mean, just to stand back for a second and realize how in the UK and the U.S. BDS has been criminalized. It is a completely peaceful, you know, consumer choice sort of movement that requires no. no violence, you know, no Hamas scary rockets, nothing like that. It is the most peaceful declaration of a person saying,

here's my First Amendment right to have free speech and to protest, and this is how I'm going to do it in a peaceful manner. And that has become criminalized in the UK and the U.S. So while Israel, we can sell $3.8 billion worth of weapons and funding to Israel, to slaughter children, and that's okay. but the boycott, divest, and sanction movement is disgusting, despicable, and against the law. I mean, it speaks volumes about the hypocrisy of settler colonialism broadly and of the American state itself. But BDS as a tactic of international solidarity, is it something that, you know, basically just what are your thoughts, Alison, and should Marxists adopted as something that we should defend and promote?

Yeah, so part of my support for BDS is the fact. that Palestinians have pushed it, right? And so part of that question of what decolonization looks like should be determined by the Palestinian people, well, BDS is one of the forms that that has taken. I've heard some Marxist critiques of the way that it is a consumer choice sort of ideology still, but ultimately at the end of the day, I think that it is a powerful movement, and it is a way to show solidarity concretely. And if it wasn't, it wouldn't be pushed back against as intensely as it is. I mean, people lose their careers over support for BDS. People find themselves In serious legal trouble, as you've mentioned, over supportive BDS, there is a de facto criminalization of the position.

And if that weren't the case, right, then maybe we could think about, you know, the question of effectiveness. But the need for the state and for society to crush it, I think is very, very indicative of the importance of the BDS movement. I also think the BDS movement, as you hinted at, does a really good job of looking at the contradictions of capitalist ideology, right? because what is more central to American capitalism than you are a consumer who has the choice to spend your money as you please and vote with your dollar, right? We hear that over and over again from sort of neoliberal capitalists. So when you put that to the test and say, okay, I'm going to vote with my dollar by not giving money to companies that are operating illegally in Israeli settlement, suddenly that is an unspeakably evil position to have. And so part of what is useful about it is it does call attention to and highlight the hypocrisy that is at the core of this idea. and the extent to which capitalism and colonialism require an ever-shifting set of values, not because they believe in anything, but because they believe in nothing other than domination. And the ideology will shift to justify that domination over and over and over again. So I think that BDS is very important in that regard.

It calls attention to that, and it creates a practical basis for international solidarity beyond just sort of saying, like, I support Palestine. It gives more coherence to that. So I think that that's important. I also think BDS isn't enough, of course. We need other forms of resistance that go beyond that in terms of opposing continued aid and in terms of pushing civil society to move in a different direction. You know, many people have their criticisms of if not now as a movement,

but one thing that we saw recently that I think was fantastic was young Jewish activists with if not now outside the Reform Judaism headquarters, pushing for Reform Judaism as a movement and the Reform Judaism Movement or a union as an organization to oppose Zionism and to oppose ongoing occupation and ethnic cleansing that is happening there and that kind of move to change social values through direct action I think is also incredibly valuable

and important. So BDS is not the end of the story but it definitely is a part of it and it definitely plays an important ideological critique of capitalism and colonialism. Yeah, well said. And I think that leads well into this next question which, you know, is tentative, but I like hearing people's thoughts on this because it does seem on some level as somebody who's been politically engaged for a long time and obviously I have studied history so know that my political consciousness extends beyond my birth

that things, they're not changing at the level of power dynamics, right, between Palestinians and the Israeli state and the U.S. support for the Israeli state. But it does seem on some level that with every iterative, of this international recognition. Awareness is being raised and people are becoming more and more clued into what's happening and just viscerally, intellectually, politically opposed to this brutal, I mean, human rights violations doesn't even begin to get at it. And in America specifically, you know, there's a whole generation of young, socially aware,

you know, young people in their teens and early 20s that, You know, just through last summer, you know, we're sort of opened up to what righteous protests in the name of equality look like, how the state bears down and brutalizes those who are standing up for equality while opening the ropes and facilitating something like the fascist right on Capitol Hill in some instances, because it aligns with the values and incentive structures of the state itself. So you have this broadening of social and political awareness more broadly. And then people, those same people, right, who just went through all last summer, seeing the realities of this, look over and see the exact same thing happening over there. It's racialized. It's disproportionate. There's huge power discrepancies, et cetera.

And so by learning and looking at the own sort of settler colonial society of the U.S., it's blossomed to people's consciousness, then I'll look at that and say, that is fucking wrong. And it feels like something's changing. Maybe the actual powered material change will be a downstream effect of this. But it seems like more and more people are waking up. I mean, there's international protests whenever something like this happens. But it was huge this time.

And it seems like every time it happens, it's only getting bigger and bigger. So, you know, tentatively speaking, what are your thoughts on? Are things changing at any level that is worthwhile and worth mentioning? Yeah, so I think they are. That is one of the most exciting things is that I think there's a cultural shift happening right now. This conversation people wouldn't have been having, you know, as of the 2014 violence, for example, that was particularly intense. And I think that that was sort of the particular crisis that opened my eyes to the issue and that made me invest in anti-Zionism after being raised in a staunchly Zionist evangelical household. That was what opened my eyes. And I'm seeing more and more that now. Back in 2014, when I started to start thinking about this, the amount of mainstream resources that voiced an anti-Zionist perspective was pretty much non-existent, right? And now we are starting and really see a shift there. And I think that it's been really wild looking at just liberals even, who historically would never use the language of genocide or ethnic cleansing when talking

about Palestine, looking at what just happened this month and having to use that language, because what the fuck else are you going to call it? So I really do think there's a clear shift happening there. you are absolutely right. The uprisings that we saw this summer are absolutely a part of that. Because what many young Americans had to confront this summer and confronted it through an intense uprising was the fact that we have our own colonial military police who walk through colonized neighborhoods and cities and kill civilians, right? And there are clear connections here between what is happening in the United States as one settler colony where we have a police force whose job is colonial occupation of stolen lands and the maintenance of colonial and capitalist

orders there and what is happening with IDF and colonial police who move through Palestinian neighborhoods and enact violence there. There are clear connections here, and I think for a lot of young people that saw these uprisings this summer, it is a logical continuation of that idea to be critical of what's happening and to understand that Zionism is a colonial project. Even myself, like knowing in the abstract that that is the case. I was kind of shocked at one point watching a video from a Palestinian neighborhood in which several Palestinian women had stepped out onto a porch to film colonial occupying police walking through the area, and the police turned to them and fired flashbangs and paintballs

at them. And that is literally a video that we saw from Minneapolis this summer, when several black women were on a porch filming police walking through, and the police did the, exact same thing, unprovoked. And it kind of was this moment for, again, me as someone who understands this theoretically, to be like, fuck, this is the same shit. This is the exact same situation playing out globally because settler colonialism is not unique to the United States. And I think that those connections are becoming undeniable to a lot of people. And that for the first time, we're seeing, you know, the point where people are still facing repercussions for

being anti-Zionist, but where people are feeling like calling a spade a spade, a spade. is more important than avoiding those repercussions. And it does feel, to me, at least, like we are reaching a breaking point. Yeah, I agree. And one of the ways that this manifests is the mouthpieces for brutal Zionism are not only being taken less seriously, but are met with blowback that we've never before seen. So just one example from the last couple of weeks was Barry Weiss in our little substack writing that, you know, literally it boils down to this, killing children.

is an acceptable burden and cost of what she calls Zionism's dream of self-determination. Now, that is something that, I mean, for anybody with a heart and a mind should be repulsed at, but it's something that for decades in the United States, you could find on any major newspaper's editorial page and was met with zero backlash. And it is being lampooned from the more liberal center all the way out to the far left. And the justifications, the very cynical attempts to label anybody who opposes Israel's occupation and apartheid state as anti-Semitic. They're just falling on deaf ears more and more. People just aren't taking those arguments seriously in a new and interesting way.

So again, that's just one way that this manifests. but I do think it's hopeful. Now, it's no consolation to Palestinians who just lost their family members, their children, you know, and we always have to keep that in mind. This stuff will matter when it ends the settler colonial occupation and brutalization of Palestinian people. But this shift, this sea change in thought across the world certainly is a step in the right direction and is a much needed step,

I think, ultimately for those later more materially direct step. Yeah, no, I completely agree with that. And I think that, again, it is small consolation, but if this changes cumulatively, that really may change the public support for funding and the necessity of politicians to take a Zionist stance, which right now they do because much of the U.S. is Zionist. But if there's a shift there, that could change continued increased military funding to Israel. And while that's not a fucking solution, it does probably mean less deaths, right? And it's something that would be positive, if And we need to think about that. We need to think about the ways these ships can have broader ramifications. And hopefully it can also lead to a broader grassroots movement against colonialism in all forms wherever it is, which is what I would like to think we are hopefully converging to at some point here. Yeah.

So a way to sort of end this part, I think, and we don't often do this, but I think it would be nice to offer some recommendations for people who want to dig a little deeper. and I'll start off with just a couple of people and shows that I think are worthwhile and that I've actually used as prep for this episode and just to inform myself more broadly on this topic. So while I'm rattling some off, Alison, maybe think of a couple that you think would be particularly useful. Citations needed, right? They're a podcast, a media criticism podcast, and they've done a really good episode recently

on debunking like five common myths that you hear in the media. Israel has a right to defend itself. Hamas uses human shields, right? It lays these arguments out and this just deconstructs them. And that can be very helpful just understanding where these ideas come from, how they're used, and dismantling them when you come across them. So they also have a really great two-part series on breaking down the two-state solution and showing why it's a farce from every angle possible.

So if you want to dive deeper onto those topics, check out citations needed. Max Blumenthal over at moderate rebels just had an interview with Roger Waters of Pink Floyd and Gabor Mate, the physician, the doctor. I've actually read his book The Realm of the Hungry Ghosts about addiction and found it really amazing.

He's Jewish and he's an ex-Zionist and he talks about his sort of discovery of what the truth is, his visits to Palestine. He said, you know, after he first visited Palestine, he wept for two weeks straight and has been an outspoken anti-Zionist ever since. So again, it's crucial to hear that Jewish perspective, that anti-Zionist Jewish perspective, it's crucial, specifically because so much of the bad faith arguments against

criticisms of Israel is that it's synonymous with anti-Semitism. And the real anti-Semitism is, of course, saying that to be a real Jew means that you must support a settler colonial apartheid state. That is the anti-Semitism there. So that's interesting. And then anything by Norman Finkelstein, I've always been a big fan of Norman Finkelstein and people like, you know, Barry Weiss loved to cry about cancel culture. Her entire career, of course, started by canceling Palestinian activists on college campus. But Norman Finkelstein is a real victim of, quote unquote, cancel culture. He's been shut out of tenure, out of the mainstream media, out of academia for his outspoken support of the Palestinian struggle. So those are some resources

that I'd point people to that I've personally been finding a lot of value in recently. What would you add to that? Yeah. So I think the recommendation of citations needed is fantastic. I think both Adam Johnson and Nima Shirazi are exceptional in what they do on that show. And that episode in particular, I think, is really helpful and really useful. So I would point that direction. They've also talked about Palestine and some other episodes as well that you can go look up, because there's a lot there. And really, in terms of media criticism, those two are just fucking on top of it. And I cannot recommend that podcast enough. I, you know what, I think I might recommend a couple articles for some further reading and also articles that I used here that can

help you think about sort of the ideological debates within Zionism and the history of Zionism and how it took a settler form that are really, really helpful and that I drew on in prepping for this episode, but that I could not get nearly the detail on. So one of them that I would really recommend going to look at is Theodore Herzl and the trajectory of Zionism by William Eichler on Open Democracy. This article, I think, is fairly sympathetic to aspects of Zionism, but it gets into how Zionism was shaped and how revisionist Zionism came to dominate in many ways, and how even the left-wing sort of labor Zionism still had these settler impulses in it. So that article, I think, can be really, really helpful for thinking about the historical aspects of it. Another article that I think is

fascinating that our readership would probably enjoy that has some interesting history is a Jewish Currents article called What We Did, How the Jewish Communist Left Failed the Palestinian Cause by Dorothy Zellner. This article, I think, you know, gets into that question I was talking about of the necessity for Marxists and communists to support Palestinian liberation. And tragically, how historically we haven't always done that. It looks at the CPUSA following the Russian line in supporting Israel at a certain point and how communist politics has related to that. question. So I would look at that as well. I think that that is a very useful resource that can go beyond some of the scope of what we talked about here. And then the other article that I would recommend

that, again, goes beyond the scope of this episode, but will help contextualize again why this isn't really a religious war or something like that and why Jewish opposition has always been there is the forgotten history of the Jewish anti-Zionist left by Sarah Lazar in the website in these times. And that will give you some interesting historical takes there, well. One of the really difficult things with studying the Palestinian occupation that has been happening for so long now is that you have to go back, as we do in our history section, to the fucking Ottoman conquest of Palestine. And there is so much history that you have to deal with in order to think about this. So those are some texts that can push you in that direction,

because even what we've done here just scratches the surface of this. So hopefully those will be helpful in helping you develop that. And again, really, go listen to that five myths about Zionism episode of citation pod. That will help clear up a lot. and help you be able to engage in debates around this where you'll know how to respond to common objections that Zionists raise. Yeah, absolutely. I echo all of that. And of course, I also want to mention, since we've mentioned her a few times throughout this episode, Abby Martin's wonderful documentary, Gaza Fights for Freedom. It was made in 2019, so it doesn't cover this latest. But it gives you a lot of historical sort of facts and gives you on the ground analysis and insight into what life is actually like in Gaza and more broadly in the region. I'm going to end the episode there, but before we sort of close out, Alison, would you just want to mention what is, just again, what's going to be on our Patreon this month? I do think it's interesting

and then what we're going to cover next month so people can prepare for that. Yeah, so for our Patreon this month, I spent a lot of time diving into a lot of this history and I had to leave out things that I would be interested in talking about and that I think many people would benefit from hearing about. So I'm going to take a lot of the historical research that I did on Jewish opposition to Zionism, that history that's gone on there, the sort of conflicts against Zionism that were starting back in the Ottoman era, and just kind of the parts of history that didn't fit here, but that are very helpful for understanding the situation more. And we'll be doing a bit of historical dive into that, just things that we could not

fit in an episode that is already going to be ridiculously long in the first place. So that's what we'll have up on Patreon for the month. And in terms of next month, I don't think we settled on a final text, but we want to look at the work of Alexander Colentai, who of course was a super important Soviet politician who oversaw the women's ministry within the early Soviet Republic, also became a diplomat for the Soviet Union, was a part of the left opposition at various points, and who wrote extensively about the relationship of class and women's experience and how Marxists ought to tackle that. When we settle on a specific text, we'll go ahead and put that up on our Twitter so that everyone knows and can prepare for that. But that's where we're going to

going next because her work is absolutely incredible and ties into some important conversations that are happening and that has sprung out of RevLeft as well. So hopefully we'll be able to interject with some, you know, original source Marxist theory on these questions. Yep. And that will delve till nicely with the Rev. Left episode I'm doing with Kristen Godsey, just covering Alexander Collentai's life and works more broadly. So on Red Menace, you'll get a specific sort of text and reading from her. And on Rev. Left, at the same time, you'll get a more biographical sketch of her and her life. So that's going to end it for this month's Red Menace. Thank you to everybody who listens, who shares, who leaves positive reviews and who supports us

on Patreon. We deeply, deeply appreciate it. Love and solidarity to everybody out there fighting for liberation and free Palestine. TORNANI, you know, and TORN WANN WANN

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