By BRUNO HUBERMAN*
The Zionist left attacks the Palestinian struggle for decolonization
The Zionist left, that is, the portion to the left of Israel's defenders, has one objective at this moment: to construct the discourse that the horror seen in Gaza is the product of a conflict between two “demons”.
Both Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and the Palestinian group Hamas are far-right fundamentalists who have led to the endless cycle of violent actions. The Palestinian attack of October 7th and the Israeli bombings would be its tragic consequence.
This is the argument of the article “Far right uses decolonization for reactionary projects“, by Fábio Zuker, published in the newspaper Folha de S. Paul. The author is based on a essay by Miri Davidson to maintain that the extreme right has claimed a false discourse of decolonization to justify violent measures. The basis of this violence would be nationalisms in which a “nativist” vision predominates, the idea that a certain social group would be the true native of the land and the holder of the State.
Fábio Zuker distorts Miri Davidson's argument to include Israel and Palestine in this type of narrative and, thus, delegitimize the Palestinian struggle for decolonization through a false equivalence with Israel's genocidal violence. The author even states that the victims, the Palestinians, “are co-responsible for this genocide”.
The effect of this narrative is the depoliticization of Palestinian anti-colonial resistance. Fábio Zuker erases the colonial reality in Palestine, which is at the root of oppression, to construct the representation of a conflict between moderates and extremists. “No one is native to the territory between the [Jordan] River and the [Mediterranean] Sea,” he says.
The aim is to justify the role of the Zionist left as guardian of the Jewish community against the supposed extremism of the global left that supports the Palestinian resistance. The Zionist left seeks to side with “moderate Palestinians” as victims of “extremism” and, therefore, as those who have a privileged moral position to resolve the Palestinian question exclusively through dialogue.
This ideology ignores that, due to the asymmetry of power, no decolonization process ended through dialogue, but through disputes that always involved the use, by the colonized, of the most different forms of resistance recognized as legitimate by international law. .
Nativism, colonialism and genocide
Daniel Denvir points out, in “All-American Nativism”, that US nativism is based on a history of colonization by white Europeans settling on land stolen from indigenous people, victims of genocide, and the enslavement of Africans. This made the group made up of whites, Anglo-Saxons and Protestants the so-called true Americans.
If, in the past, certain white people were also victims of nativist racism, such as the Irish and Jews, currently everyone has been included in American whiteness. US nativism, like that of the far right in European countries, is now turning against Muslim immigrants and other “brown” people.
The same goes for Israel, a country founded through colonization by European, African and Asian Jews. This fact, however, is ignored by Zuker to construct the second point of his narrative: Zionism would be anti-colonial nationalism, a reaction to the oppression promoted by the Ottomans, British and Arabs.
This denies how Zionism, an ideology that emerged among European Jews with the stated aim of colonizing Palestine, prospered thanks to European imperialism. The Jewish historian Maxime Rodinson said that if Zionism were truly a national liberation movement, Zionists would have fought alongside the Palestinians against the British Mandate, not alongside the British in suppressing the Palestinian uprising of 1936-39.
Although Jews were also part of the native population in Palestine, Zionism turned them into settlers. Zionism racialized the “new Jewish man” in opposition to native Arabs and endowed those identified as Jews with material privileges. On the other hand, the Palestinians were reduced to Muslim invaders, just like under Western nativism.
The problem with including Palestinians in this basket, as Fábio Zuker does, is that they are under a real colonial process, not an imaginary one. They are natives, not nativists. Nativity is a relational identity, constituted through the colonial process. What makes Palestinians native is not their relationship to the territory or their ethnic belonging per se, but their subjugated position in the colonial situation.
It was Zionist colonialism that made the Palestinians native, just as it was American colonialism that made the Lakota people, for example, indigenous. There is, in fact, a growing solidarity between indigenous peoples and Palestinians because they see themselves in the same anti-colonial struggle against genocide.
Genocide is a constituent phenomenon of settler colonialism, from the Americas to Oceania. The Australian researcher Patrick Wolfe argues that settler colonialism is based on a logic of elimination, as it aims to erase natives both materially and symbolically through identity erasure, expulsion and genocide.
The speeches of Israeli leaders who propagate that Palestinians do not exist are, therefore, a form of genocide complementary to physical extermination. The devastation of Gaza is the current stage in the process undertaken since 1948 by Israeli governments – left and right – to erase the Palestinians. It is no coincidence that the State of Israel was founded through Nakba, the process of expulsion of 750 thousand Palestinians and the destruction of 500 villages.
Eliminating indigenous people allows settlers to become natives. This is the great device that Fábio Zuker uses to criticize the extreme right, which the author, however, ends up using in relation to the Palestinians. Erasing the Nakba makes Zuker reproduce Israel's colonialist ideology, which, paradoxically, he claims to combat. Israeli colonialism did not begin with the 1967 occupations: it is a structuring part of Israel.
Palestinian resistance and their claim to indigeneity, however, threaten nativist discourse and Jewish racial supremacy. For this reason, it is demonized by Zionists, on the left and on the right.
*Bruno Huberman He is a professor of International Relations at the Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo (PUC-SP). Author of The neoliberal colonization of Jerusalem (EDUC). [https://amzn.to/3KtWcUp]
Originally published in the newspaper Folha de S. Paul.
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