By Joseph Massad*
Why does the West defend Israel's apartheid regime?
Without regret, the United States and the colonizing countries of the European Union and the United Kingdom have not abandoned their commitment to defend “Israel's right to defend itself”. What these governments want with this white supremacist refrain is "Israel's right to defend" its regime of segregation or apartheid and Jewish supremacy against anti-colonial native resistance.
They were supported by mainstream media, as well as social media, which suppress and ban pro-Palestinian positions, thus making a particular contribution to legitimizing Israel's right to defend its regime of apartheid.
Liberal “neutrality”
An entire lexicon containing white-liberal ideological vocabulary was constructed over decades in order to defend the Zionist regime in the ongoing colonial war against the Palestinian people. Israel's liberal (and conservative) white apologists insist that what exists in Palestine is not a colonial war of conquest and an anti-colonial indigenous liberation struggle, but rather a "conflict". This term began to be used since the early 1920s, at least by Zionists, and later by the British, appearing in early Zionist documents and being presented as a neutral descriptor.
Subsidiary liberal “neutral” terms define this colonial war and resistance to it as “confrontations” and as a “cycle of violence”.
Palestinians are rarely identified in the white liberal Western lexicon as the indigenous people of Palestine undergoing ethnic cleansing, and Israeli Jews are never exposed as colonial Jews carrying out ethnic cleansing.
Palestinian resistance is labeled “neutrally” as “violence” and, more importantly, “terrorism”, while Israel's colonial bombs are referred to as “retaliation”, with a new keyword introduced as “neutral” at the same time. in which it is insisted that Palestinians are the ones committing violence “before”.
The intention is to erase the Zionist colonial war against the Palestinians since 1880 as not being the primary cause of their calamity and their Nakba. This “neutral” term seems to naturalize the conquest of Palestine with colonial settlements as a “peaceful” process to which non-white Palestinian barbarians responded with violence, and against which Israel, European and civilized, now “fights back”.
The strategy of the white-dominated Western liberal media often insists on representing the Palestinian struggle as a religious conflict between “Jews” and “Muslims”, describing them as two indigenous communities at odds with each other since ancient times.
Some of the white liberals, recognizing that their dedication to occupation colonialism in Palestine and to the apartheid Israeli and Jewish supremacy has given rise to conflicts of conscience, have in recent years joined armies of Western liberal human rights advocates in denying Palestinians indigenous national rights in favor of their "human" rights, urging Israel not to violate them.
This rhetoric depoliticizes the Palestinian struggle and deliberately hides once again the nature of the occupation colonialism that lies behind the Israeli oppression to which Palestinians are subjected.
Likewise, ethnic cleansing of Palestinians is renamed in the liberal lexicon as "evictions" of Palestinians from their homes, which legitimizes Jared Kushner's and Israel's official depiction of colonial Jewish settlement supremacy in the country as a simple "struggle for power". real estate”.
The Time of Uprisings
It was in 1884 that Palestinian peasants initially resisted European Jewish settlers who began to found a colonial regime of apartheid and of Jewish supremacy in Palestine […]. Historian Neville Mandel, in his book titled Arabs and Zionism before World War I, found that “there was virtually no Jewish settlement that had not at some point come into conflict” with the native Palestinian peasants. According to Mandel, between 1904 and 1909, multiple Palestinian uprisings broke out against Jewish settlers and many Palestinians and settlers were murdered, which led to the arrest of peasants by the Ottoman authorities.
None of the acts of resistance were able to stop the march of Jewish colonization, championed by the British colonial power and the League of Nations, preparing the final battles for ethnic cleansing in 1947 and 1948. Zionist bands conquered Palestine and established a Jewish settlement colony , immediately seeking to establish a Hebrew Suprematist regime of apartheid, followed by dozens of massacres of Palestinians.
massacre of the natives
European Jewish settlers borrowed much of their colonial and racial strategy from white European settlers. This includes the important mantra that colonizers had no choice but to slaughter native Africans.
The history of the last 73 years of Palestinian resistance is suppressed not only by the Zionist colonizers, but also by their imperialist sponsors in Europe and North America.
Defending South Africa's suprematist colonial massacres of the indigenous Nama people in Namibia, the Portuguese colonial representative in the League of Nations, Freire D'Andrade, whose country had several settlement colonies adjacent to Namibia and South Africa, claimed in 1923 that “There was in South Africa an anti-European movement which was of considerable importance. The remark was often heard that Africa belonged to the Africans and that the Europeans should be thrown into the sea”.
Borrowing this phrase from white occupation colonialism, the head of the Zionist organization, Chaim Weizmann, would argue, in 1930, that the League of Nations should not guarantee democratic self-representation for indigenous Palestinians, using what D'Andrade said about the consequences of the demand for democracy and independence for the European colonizers. What Arab leaders "currently want," Weizmann insisted, "is simply to throw us into the Mediterranean." How they were able to do this, Weizmann explained, was through their "desire" to establish "a parliament on a democratic basis, that is, an institution in which we would be a small minority."
Not only had Jewish settlers deprived the Palestinians, since 1948, of their democratic rights, but in fact it was they, according to Illan Pappe, who pushed the Palestinians in 1948 into the Mediterranean and into the desert, continuing ethnic cleansing in the colonies. of occupation.
The story of the past 73 years of Palestinian resistance to apartheid Israel and Jewish supremacy, however, would be suppressed not only by the Zionist colonists and their newly constructed state, but also by their sponsors in Europe and their colonies in North America who, in turn, provided Israel with money and weapons to carry on. its colonization and ethnic cleansing and who remain enthusiastic in upholding "Israel's right to defend itself", to defend its apartheid and Jewish supremacy, in the face of all indigenous resistance.
Uniting the Palestinians
The current Zionist and Israeli massacre of the Palestinian people has once again undid all intrepid attempts by Jewish occupation colonialism to divide Palestinians, and helps to cement the unity of the colonized people against the colonial usurper.
In 1948, Israel divided Palestinians into those who were expelled from its borders and those who were subjected to Jewish supremacy within them. Palestinians within Israel were further subdivided by Zionist criteria of “racializing”, so dear to European Zionist Jews but completely foreign to Palestinians.
Thus, Palestinian Arab Druze who belonged to a religious denomination were “ethnicized” as Druze, while Palestinian pastoralists were “ethnicized” as Bedouins. Both Palestinian Arab groups have been legally separated from Muslims and Palestinian Christians of all denominations, even as Israel continues to seek to separate these latter two and "ethnicize" them.
When Israel conquered the rest of Palestine in 1967, its first act was to separate Palestinians in East Jerusalem from the rest of the West Bank, and after 1993 it began to separate Palestinians within the West Bank and Gaza Strip through permanent Israeli military checkpoints. .
In 2000, it separated Palestinians from the West Bank west of its wall of apartheid newly built from those who lived on the east side. In 2005, they separated the Palestinians of Gaza from the West Bank, trying, at the same time, to de-Palestinize the expelled Palestinians who had lived in exile since 1948, in an effort that led to redefine, in the last decade, who is a Palestinian refugee, according to the UN, to reduce their number from several million to a few thousand.
Despite all these attempts to “ethnicize”, “racialize” and denationalize, Palestinian unity has persisted, in particular as all Palestinians continue to be subjugated and oppressed by Zionism and Israeli Jewish supremacy.
The current revolt, in the last week, against the apartheid Israeli and Jewish supremacy through the occupation colony, within the borders of 1948 as well as 1967, attest to this unity and similarity of the apartheid imposed on all Palestinians living under Israeli rule, which prevents all those expelled by Israel outside its borders from returning home.
This week's border march between Palestine and Jordan by the expelled Palestinians and their Jordanian allies demonstrates once again that Palestinian unity persists in the face of Jewish settlers and their state.
The resistance will continue
Last week, as has been the case since 1948, the unity of the Israeli government and the Israeli Jewish population was manifested through the fact that all Israeli Jews (with a few notable exceptions) serve in Israel's colonial army and remain available, on the reserve for decades after their multi-year mandatory service ended.
While the Israeli army and Jewish civilian extremists attack and murder Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, Israeli police and Jewish settlers attack Palestinians in East Jerusalem and throughout Palestinian settlement cities within Israel.
The main reaction of Western white suprematist countries has been to state unequivocally that they are on the side of Israel and its “right” to defend its rule of thumb. apartheid and Jewish supremacy.
In response, on the seventy-third anniversary of the Nakba, the beleaguered Palestinian people are determined everywhere to resist this enduring European trait of colonial and racial oppression and to end it once and for all.
*Joseph Massad is professor of modern Arabic intellectual and political history at Columbia University in New York. Author, among other books, of Islam in Liberalism (University of Chicago Press).
Translation: Paulo Butti from Lima.
Originally published on the portal Middle East Eye.