Roy Altman, at Quillette, on the settler-colonialist canard about Israel – despite evidence of the continuous inpresence of Jews in the Levant for more than 3,000 years.
The claim that Jews are imperialist “colonisers” isn’t new. It emerged from the Victorian-era antisemitism of an influential English journalist and matured in the early Soviet Union, long before the modern state of Israel was founded. As Paul Johnson (1928–2023), the great historian, observed:
“The Soviet campaign against the Jews, after 1967 a permanent feature of the system, was itself conducted under the code-name of anti-Zionism, which became a cover for every variety of anti-Semitism. [The] Leninist theory of imperialism, like Marx’s theory of capitalism, had its roots in anti-Semitic conspiracy theory.”
As Johnson showed, the claim that Jews are “imperialists” predated Vladimir Lenin, leader of Soviet Russia from 1917 until his death in 1924. Johnson traces the source of this claim to the English writer and journalist J.A. Hobson, who travelled to South Africa to cover the Boer War in 1899. Hobson, as Johnson relates, regarded Jews as “almost devoid of social morality,” and possessing “a superior calculating intellect” that allows them “to take advantage of every weakness, folly and vice of the society in which he lives.”
In his 1900 work, The War in South Africa: Its Causes and Effects, Hobson blamed the conflict (falsely) on “a small group of international financiers, chiefly German in origin and Jewish by race.” Two years later, in 1902, Hobson expanded on this conspiracy theory in Imperialism: A Study, which argued that international finance—directed by Jews—was “the chief force behind colonies and wars.”
In his own book about imperialism—and its supposedly Jewish causes—Lenin wrote that he’d “made use of the principal English work on imperialism, J.A. Hobson’s book, with all the care that, in my opinion, this work deserves.” As Johnson explains, Hobson’s theory that an international oligarchy of Jewish financiers—the “peculiar race,” in Hobson’s words—was behind all European colonialist projects “became the essence of Lenin’s own” view, expressed to great effect in his above-quoted 1916 work, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism.
Keep in mind: This is 32 years before the modern state of Israel came into being. “Leninist theory,” as Johnson notes, subsequently
forms the attitudes of many Third World states toward imperialism and colonialism, as they acquired independence in the 1950s and 1960s. Granted the theory’s antisemitic roots, it was not difficult to fit into it the concept of Zionism as a form of colonialism and the Zionist state as an outpost of imperialism.… That ‘Zionism’ in practice stood for ‘the Jews’ became quickly apparent.
In the 1960s, Yasser Arafat, head of the Palestine Liberation Organisation from 1969 until his death in 2004, repurposed Hobson’s theory to suit his own political objectives. While Hobson had claimed that Jewish financiers were bankrolling the expensive colonial ventures of European governments, Arafat pivoted to the more extreme contention we see in academia today: that Jews have no historical connection to the Land of Israel at all—that they’re simply colonists in Israel, in much the same way as the British were colonists in America, India, and South Africa, among many other places.
The whole Palestinian project – a project of astonishing success because, well, because Jews – is based on lies.
Mick Hartley 