Mick Hartley

This, from a couple of weeks back, is well worth a read. In an appreciation (not so much a review) of Adam Kirsch's book On Settler Colonialism: Ideology, Violence, and Justice, Paul Berman discusses the current campus obsession with the demonisation of Israel and the valorisation of the Palestinian struggle.

As originally conceived a couple of decades back, the academic/anthropological study of "settler colonialism", as set forward by theorists such as Patrick Wolfe, referred to the big English-speaking countries of the US, Canada, and Australia, which were established, so the theory has it, by genocidal projects directed against the original inhabitants. More recently though, as Berman notes, "the self-accusatory ideology has taken a strange twist".

This is a turn, enraged and indignant, toward Israel. It is a belief that Zionism’s project to build a Jewish state represents the same imperial and genocidal impulse that led to the terrible assaults centuries ago by the English and other Europeans on the indigenous peoples of North America and Australia. Now, this is not an altogether preposterous belief. No one needs to be reminded that, in the course of Israel-and-Palestine’s modern history, masses of Jews did pour into Palestine from elsewhere in the world, and masses of Palestinians did get driven from their homes, and Palestinian suffering was severe from the start, and has lately become horrific in the extreme. These are realities which, seen from one angle, could indeed be likened to the arrival of European colonists in North America and Australia centuries ago and its resultant disasters. And yet, other angles do exist. One of those angles has to do with the history of the modern world, and not the history of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

The single biggest event of the modern world was World War II, which was a bit of a catastrophe (on this point some people do need to be reminded). And the catastrophe had the effect of sending one enormous population after another into terrorized flight all over the world, like billiard balls banging into one another and ending up in places they had never imagined being. The largest instance of this was in the Indian subcontinent. The war led to the dissolution of the British Empire, therefore to the independence of the suddenly partitioned India and Pakistan, which sent fourteen million or more Hindus and Muslims into flight, terrified of one another and seeking the protection of their co-religionists.

[It's perhaps worth noting that the ethnic cleansings of the last century weren't all a result of World War II. Apart from Stalin's propensity to move populations – eg the Tatars – from one end of the Soviet Union to the other, there was also the matter of the Greek/Turkish war, culminating in the evacuation of Smyrna in 1922.]

The second largest instance was the fate of the Germans after Germany’s defeat. Some twelve million or more ethnic Germans and German citizens fled from the Slavic lands, and their erstwhile neighbors took over their homes and property. The flight of the Jews from Europe was still another instance, smaller only because the Jewish population in Europe was smaller, and smaller yet after so many of the Jews were murdered. The flight of the Jews from the Arab countries was still a further instance. And finally there was the flight of the Palestinians, desperate to escape the Jews, who were desperate to escape the Arabs.

The “genocide” accusation against Israel and the Zionists has been a staple of the larger denunciation of Israel, back through the decades, and to question it right now can seem morally obtuse—right now, when Israel’s campaign to destroy Hamas has brought about the death of tens of thousands of Palestinians. Still, lucidity has its claims, and it is worth recalling yet another historical reality, which is that, over the long course of Zionism’s progress, the Palestinian population has not, all in all, shriveled. On the contrary. Nor has Zionism brought about the destruction of Islam, or of the mighty Arab civilization, or the Arabic language. Nor is there even the remotest danger of anything like that occurring in the future—which might suggest that “settler colonialism” is not the ideal framework for analyzing the Jewish-and-Arab tragedies. The consequences of World War II might appear to be a better framework.

The proponents of the decolonization ideology insist on their own framework, even so, which means they insist on viewing the Jewish refugees as haughty imperialists, worthy of decolonization, and insist on viewing the Palestinians as American Indians. And they are adamant in these insistences. The decolonization argument tends to be, in Patrick Wolfe’s word, a matter of “binarism,” meaning there are Good People and Bad People, and he who speaks of mutual tragedies and mutual future possibilities is morality’s enemy. And by insisting on these contentions, the ideologues succeed in being analytically dubious and politically frightening at the same time.

For it is one thing to deliver fire-and-brimstone church sermons on topics of Original Sin in the big English-speaking countries, but those same concepts in connection to Israel tend to have an ominous implication, given that, as everyone has come to see during this last year, Israel could indeed be defeated in a military war, and the Jews could indeed be “decolonized,” which is to say, massacred. And if that were to happen, the proponents of the decolonization ideology in the American universities—not just the students, but the professors, enough of them to be noticeable—would respond, as they have already shown us, by cheering.

Also, of course, Israel is the ancestral home of the Jews – a point which could hardly have been advanced by those British colonisers staking their claims in North America and Australia.

Their cheers would be deep and vigorous, too. That is because, in the decolonization ideology, as Kirsch explains, “Palestine is the reference point for every type of social wrong,” and the destruction of Israel would be the triumph for the ideology itself and for every well-intentioned person and political movement around the world. And so, the new and exotic academic ideology that inveighs against “settler colonialism” has turned out to be a recognizable thing. It is one more variation on a phenomenon well known to the twentieth century—the noble doctrine that turns into its opposite. Kirsch makes the point: “I see it leading people who think of themselves as idealists into morally disastrous territory, in ways that are all too familiar in modern history."

We pass through Frantz Fanon and Gary Snyder (the hippie/Buddhist San Francisco poet? Yes indeed)….

Finally:

But I think that chiefly it is worth recalling that, in our own moment, the ideological condemnation of Israel, Judaism, and the Jews that carries the most weight in the world is the one that comes from the Islamist movement—the religious-and-political movement, that is, whose goal is to resurrect the ancient Islamic utopia that can be found in the Qur’an. This movement commands the support right now of many millions of people across the denominations in Islam, and it enjoys the backing of the Islamic Republic of Iran, and is confident of its beliefs and its ultimate triumph someday in the future. And naturally it exerts a pressure on everyone else, and especially on the people in the university quads right now who are protesting against settler colonialism. The pressure is to come up with ideological explanations of every sort—scientific-sounding explanations in the anthropological mode, or political explanations in the national-liberation style of the 1960s, or human-rights explanations in the modern humanitarian fashion, or countercultural displays of universal spirituality—to show that Islamism’s wrath cannot be entirely misplaced, even if the Islamist rhetoric, half medieval-theological, and half pseudo-scientific in the Nazi style (“malignant cancerous tumor,” to quote Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, just now), grates disagreeably on the modern ear.

Which is how we come to the baffling sight of supposedly progressive anti-Israel protestors on our streets chanting in praise of Hamas, and Hezbollah, and the Houthis, and all the Islamist Jew-hating outfits that are backed and financed by the theocratic regime in Tehran.