“This is not a clash of civilizations. It’s a clash between barbarism and civilization,” declared Benjamin Netanyahu to the U.S. Congress on July 24^(th), apparently not appreciating which side of this divide most of the world perceives him to be on.  More recently, on October 5^(th), in preparation for a whole new war, he made it more explicit: “As Israel fights the forces of barbarism led by Iran, all civilized countries should be standing firmly by Israel’s side…”  Yet even this was not Israel’s rhetorical peak.

“We are the vanguard of civilization,” declared the outgoing Israeli ambassador to the United Nations, Gilad Erdan, a man who transcends “blowhard” and takes unintentional irony to a cosmic art form.  His August 13^(th) comment reminds me of Gandhi’s reply when asked what he thought of Western civilization: “It would be a good idea.”  Israel is rather the vanguard of Western colonialism, in a time when that form of “civilization” seems thankfully almost behind us.  Indeed, Israel is one of its few remaining overt vestiges, a twenty-first century anachronism, currently carrying out a tradition-themed mass slaughter of the natives, a tragedy out of a time warp.

And yet, Erdan is not far wrong.  In some ways Israel does represent our current “civilization.”  It embodies in unusually vivid and undiluted form a deep historical legacy, a colonialist structure of society, thought, and power that is still entirely with us, but now dulled and buried beneath an immense gauze of international laws, humanitarian rhetoric, and behind-the-scenes imperialist machinations.  The racist, nationalist logic that makes Western countries and Western people worth far more than everyone else still drives the ruling system of our world, long after the trappings of colonialism have faded away in all but a few places.

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Colonies can be ruled from nearby or from afar, by those who move in or by the parent countries that set them up.  This difference was the cause of the American Revolutionary War between the distant colonialists in London and the on-the-ground colonialists in what became the United States.  Both sides were white.  Neither cared about the Native American people they were killing and whose land they were stealing or the African Americans they were kidnapping into slavery.  Both sides were eager exponents of white supremacy, but that did not keep them from fighting.  Similar wars broke out in many countries of the Americas, in the majority of cases not with Britain but with Spain.  Usually the people fighting for independence were every bit as colonialist as the European overlords they fought.  When they won, as they generally eventually did, the classical kind of colonialism, ruled from abroad, gave way to settler-colonialism, ruled in the land of the colonized people—but never by the colonized people, never respecting their rights.

Israel is a latecomer to the game of settler-colonialism, reflecting the age-old weakness of the Jews’ position among the peoples of the West, always operating in the shadow of pervasive and often violent anti-Semitism.  It was only in the twentieth century, after World War I, that the British issued the Balfour Declaration, aiming to create a Jewish homeland in Palestine, where Jews were no more than 10% of the population, endorsing the ambitions of what had up till then been a small Zionist strand within the mottled stream of Jewish opinion.  It was British imperialism that nurtured the Zionist project into viability in the ensuing years.  But it was only after World War II that this state actually emerged, breaking away from the remote rule of their British colonial overlords and violently expelling enough of the native Palestinian Arab population to call itself a majority within borders they would self-define.

In earlier centuries other European peoples—especially the British, Spanish, Portuguese, and French—had carried out similar projects, built upon ethnic cleansing and genocide, replacing most of the populations of Australia and the Americas in the process.  Jews sometimes participated in these various projects, but only as a small minority within each, subject to internal discrimination while undoubtedly treated much better than “the natives.”  In no case did Jews get a land of their own, a place where they could defend their own security as a people and face no discrimination for being Jewish.  Thus, the outrage, the self-righteousness of Zionist Jews, underpinned by a hidden thought, potent without ever having to be spoken—“We were prevented from acting before by anti-Semitism, and now you seek to hold us down with all this anti-colonial preaching which never stopped you.”  No doubt this is true, since anti-colonialism was not even a major force until, ironically, right around the time when Israel’s turn finally came in 1948.

It took a long, slow, painful struggle, beginning as far back as the eighteenth century, for Ashkenazi Jews to gain their rightful place among the Western peoples with whom they had been living for so long.  Before that, Jews had lived at best as outsiders in the midst of European societies.  The Nazi Holocaust against the Jewish people was the ultimate backlash against all their advances.  When the concentration camps, extermination camps, and catastrophic decline of Jewish population were discovered, there was overwhelming revulsion around the world.  With revulsion came sympathy and most Europeans finally fully accepted the Jews as one of “the peoples”—that is, the Western peoples.  Zionists, who had always been a minority among Jews, then demanded that “their” people be allowed the same right to colonize long since given to many others.  According to Zionist logic, this “right” could be denied only by anti-Semitism, a prejudiced refusal of Jewish entitlement to the same supremacy over the natives of the world long since conceded to other European peoples.  And in such a small country, too!  Who could complain?

Of course, the obvious problem with this logic is that it completely ignores the possibility of a principled anti-racist stance that rejects colonialist racism and anti-Semitism with equal rigor.  This requires elevating all the peoples of the world to the same level as Europeans, not just the Jews.  A principled anti-racist stance does not regard the delay of Jewish colonial aspirations as an injustice since it regards all such aspirations as aspirations to injustice.  Its logic lies outside the whole system in which Zionism operates.

That system is still very much alive, but the timing of the Zionist project’s 1948 triumph was nonetheless strange.  Just in the previous two years, the Philippines had gained independence from the United States and India and Pakistan from Britain.  Indonesia was already fighting an ultimately successful war for freedom from the Dutch, and Vietnam had begun a much longer one with the French and Americans.  Most of Israel’s nearest Arab neighbors had gained independence since the Ottoman Empire’s collapse in World War I.  And Africa’s turn to rise against its European masters, country by country, was just around the corner.  It was at this late juncture when Jewish colonialists finally got their state, with the full backing of both the world’s newly-minted superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union.  (It was only later that the Soviets would turn against Israel after the new country aligned itself thoroughly with the Americans.)

But though in 1948 colonialism was already rapidly losing ground, it was far from discredited in the West.  Sure, it might not be economically or militarily practical to keep all the old colonies, but Western governments and most Western people still thought they could take up the “white man’s burden” and teach the natives a thing or two, all the while filching the wealth that was “their due” in compensation for their self-congratulating “benevolence” and in recognition of their supposed cultural and racial “superiority.”

Under this peculiar set of circumstances, the Zionist appeal to go up the down escalator of history and add to the map a new capital of colonialism actually appealed to the Western sense of justice, such as it was.  Ashkenazi Jews, the Zionists could well imply, would have had their own colonial state long since if they hadn’t been so oppressed by other Europeans.  Yes, it was late in the day to start a new one.  True, the other colonial powers weren’t creating colonies any more, unless you counted some small islands the Americans had just conquered.  But that was only because those powers had fully availed themselves of the opportunity when colonialism was in full flower.  Should Jews, just because of past discrimination, miss their chance forever?  Surely that could not be “just.”  Surely they had to be allowed to make up for lost time, never mind the trends.  After all, they had been waiting, not only since colonialism, but for two thousand years.

This explains, by the way, why the Israeli system has a pronounced racist hierarchy even among Jews.  The ruling stratum of Israel has always been dominated by the Ashkenazi, almost totally so in the early years.  And this makes sense.  Only they, having lived in Europe for over fifteen hundred years, could logically claim the right to join the fraternity of European colonialists.  It was for their sake that Israel was accepted as a new nation.  It was only they who were admitted to the special caste of those permitted to exploit the rest of the world.

All this came at a terrible cost to the Palestinians whose ancestral land they stole and the majority of whom they expelled from their homes.  This is what the Palestinian people still refer to as their catastrophe, the Nakba, from 1947-49, when the homeland they had built for centuries was ripped from under their feet, leaving them exiled or living under day-to-day Israeli discrimination and harassment.  Many centuries-old villages were obliterated from the face of the Earth, their traces often covered up by trees imported from Europe.  Was this worse than so many other exercises in colonialism, from smallpox blankets to the trail of broken treaties to the mass mutilations and deaths of King Léopold’s forced-labor Congo?  Not really.  It was a continuation of the same gruesome genre.

But we who live in the West today, particularly in countries like the USA, Canada, and Australia—are we any better?  Many of us have turned against racism and colonialism.  We are not guilty of the sins of our forefathers and mothers.  We cannot help what they did.  And yet—here we sit within lands that once belonged to vanquished peoples, their numbers vastly diminished and their lands taken away.  What they have lost there is no way to fully give back.  We watch the news, where the right of Western countries to perpetual interference in the internal politics of global South nations is taken for granted, where dozens of Westerners dead in accidents or attacks count more than hundreds or even thousands who die elsewhere—sometimes in the very act of trying to come to the West, around whose borders permeable yet lethal barriers have been erected by land and sea.  When the news is over, we watch slick extravaganzas and reality TV and pretend to be on first-name basis with celebrities.  At the end of the day, we don’t have to pay for any of what has been done to put us here.

All the Israelis ask is the right to “finish the job”—as some of their more deranged spokespeople say—to destroy the Palestinians so they can live in the same security that we do, so they can start to forget that anyone else ever lived where they now do, perhaps in the long run becoming milder and more critical of colonialism—more like us, in other words.  They are simply much less far along this path.  Just a few million more Palestinians displaced or killed and they can slip into the same state of contented amnesia that we have long enjoyed.  Why, Zionists ask, do we discriminate against their ambitions to become like us, harping forever on the rights of people from the normally unprotected global majority?  Is this not anti-Jewish prejudice at work?

My point here is not to arouse guilt but to provoke a clearer understanding.  Unless colonialist logic is rejected from start to finish, it is indeed impossible to denounce Zionism without, if not necessarily anti-Semitism, at least hypocrisy.  The accusation that anti-Zionism is anti-Semitic is horribly unjust, but it is not absurd within its own ideological context—that of worldwide colonialism and its sequels.  And that context still rules the globe.  Some of us reject it, but we have not gotten beyond it.  We cannot.  It is the world we live in.

It is not enough, therefore, to show Israel the door, to let it know its form of government is approaching the dustbin of history, that the day will come when all who live between the Mediterranean and the Jordan will have equal rights.  It is the whole rotten, monopolar, Western-dominated system that has ruled the world since the end of the Cold War that needs breaking.  But even that system is but the latest incarnation of something that traces back to Columbus and the Age of Exploration.  It is the idea that one people set out across the sea and impose their will while all the rest must suffer in obscurity.  Sail gave way to jet, monarchies to ostensible democracies, but the idea and the system remain.