Mick Hartley

Gaza protestors, we learn, are descending on Chicago for the Democratic Convention next week. Many on the left seem to view this as a reasonable response to the Democrats' support for Israel, and in the noble tradition of left-wing protests against establishment policies. The gold standard here, I suppose, would be the 1968 protests against the war in Vietnam at the Democratic Convention – again in Chicago – which has gone down in left-wing folklore. That was a notably violent affair, characterised by the brutality of Mayor Daley's police department set against the likes of the Yippies under Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin. 

But, as Jonathan Chait points out, this is very different:

The Chicago protests are being led by Hatem Abudayyeh, the national chair of the U.S. Palestinian Community Network. On October 7, Abudayyeh made an official statement for USPCN celebrating the slaughter of Israeli civilians: “Palestinians have an internationally-recognized right to resist illegal military occupation, and today’s attacks from the Palestinian Resistance should be understood as a legitimate response to unending violence from Israel’s extreme right-wing, racist, white supremacist, zionist government and settler movement … now we have no choice but to defend ourselves, because the Israeli military and racist settlers have been attacking and killing with impunity, and must and will be stopped! We will win our liberation and Return!”

And while this rhetoric may be shocking, every major anti-Israel activist group has adopted a similar position. Students for Justice in Palestine called the October 7 attacks “a historic win for the Palestinian resistance” against “the façade of an impenetrable settler colony.” The Palestinian Youth Movement saluted “the active decolonization of Palestinian land” and stated “We have a right to resist on our own land.” Within Our Lifetime declared, “Zionism is a settler-colonial white supremacist ideology built on the genocide and dispossession of the Palestinian people,” and therefore, “We defend the right of Palestinians as colonized people to resist the zionist occupation by any means necessary.” Jewish Voices for Peace declined to condemn the attack, instead blaming it on Israel: “The bloodshed of today and the past 75 years traces back directly to U.S. complicity in the oppression and horror caused by Israel’s military occupation.”

The common thread running through these statements, other than unbounded eagerness to shed Israeli blood, is a worldview suggested by the recurring terms settler and colonist. All these groups adhere to a left-wing western doctrine that is the subject of an excellent new book, On Settler Colonialism, by Adam Kirsch….

Settler-colonialism theorists believe certain people have an authentic, permanent relationship to the land. Their rhetoric, as Kirsch points out, echoes the romantic nationalism of the old German right. “Palestinian Indigenous sovereignty is in and of the land. It is grounded in an embodied connection to Palestine and articulated in Palestinians ways of being, knowing, and resisting on and for this land,” writes Jamal Nabulsi of University of Queensland. Palestinians have “a culture indivisible from their surroundings, a language of freedom concordant to the beauty of the land,” in the words of the scholar Steven Salaita.

Compare this with the blood-and-soil nationalism of Nazi ideologists such as Richard Walther Darre — “The German soul, with all its warmness, is rooted in its native landscape and has, in a sense, always grown out of it … Whoever takes the natural landscape away from the German soul, kills it” — and you will have difficulty detecting any difference. Indeed, if you switched Palestinian with German, it would be hard to tell one theorist from the other.

An important corollary of settler-colonialist thought is that, because they lack a naturalistic connection to any soil, the Jews must be rendered a permanently rootless subaltern class. This has an echo of the Nazi conception of the Jew as alien, and at times its rhetoric has the same overtones. Salaita, again, on the Zionists: “In their ruthless schema, land is neither pleasure nor sustenance. It is a commodity … There is no real notion of the commons in Zionism. Public space is deeply personal, demarcated and apportioned based on a crude obsession with genetics … Having been anointed Jewish, the land ceases to be dynamic.” This is blood-and-soil nationalism for the left.

The irony is of course that the Jews have a deeper and longer connection to the land of Israel than the Palestinian Arabs. And, in the background, unacknowledged here and unacknowledged by the protestors, are the claims of Islamic and Arabic imperialism – which can never accept a Jewish state on the land decreed to them by Allah.

And let's not talk about Arab "settler-colonialism" across north Africa. Or the current and continuing genocide of black Africans in Sudan….