Israel: The Last Outpost of White European Colonialism

The Israel-Palestinian conflict is routinely framed as an ancient religious war between Judaism and Islam or as a battle between Israel, the Middle-East’s only ‘Western-style democracy’ and autocratic regimes in the region.

“The Israel-Palestinian conflict is routinely framed as an ancient religious war between Judaism and Islam or as a battle between Israel, the Middle-East’s only ‘Western-style democracy’ and autocratic regimes in the region”

Countercurrents

These narratives obscure a fundamental truth: what we witness today in Palestine is neither about religion or civilization or systems of governance per se.

Countercurrents

To understand this conflict properly, we must abandon the comfortable myths that present both sides as equally culpable parties in an age-old feud.

Instead, we must recognize Israel as what it truly is: the last outpost of white, European colonial settlement, a state that embodies the same logic of dispossession, racial supremacy, and territorial conquest that characterized five centuries of white colonial expansion across the globe.

To put it more accurately, the state of Israel is nothing more than the continuation of white, European settler colonialism, a five century old project that began with Christopher Columbus in 1492 to grab land in Asia, Africa and the Americas.

The pattern was consistent across continents: European settlers arrived, declared indigenous lands “empty” or “underutilized,” systematically displaced native populations, and established racially-stratified societies that privileged the settler community.

Countercurrents

In the Americas, approximately 32.5 million Europeans settled in the United States alone between 1820 and 1932, while Argentina received 6.5 million, Canada 5.2 million, and Brazil 4.4 million.

Australia received 2.9 million European settlers between 1821 and 1932, transforming a continent inhabited by Aboriginal peoples for over 60,000 years into a “neo-European” society.

(Ironically, it is the white people in all these captured lands that are complaining about ‘migrants’!)

The creation of Israel was not the fulfilment of an ancient biblical prophecy or the natural expression of Jewish self-determination.

“The Israel-Palestinian conflict is routinely framed as an ancient religious war between Judaism and Islam or as a battle between Israel, the Middle-East’s only ‘Western-style democracy’ and autocratic regimes in the region”

Countercurrents

It was, as noted economist Yanis Varoufakis has courageously pointed out, a European solution to a European problem.

“This problem was created entirely by Europeans,” he noted in a recent interview.

“First we carried out centuries of persecution of the Jews. Then we subjected them to the Holocaust… after the Holocaust, we Europeans got rid of our remaining Jews by supporting their migration to Palestine.”

The Israeli settlement of Palestine follows the classic colonial template that had been perfected as part of the historical European expansion.

Like the Spanish conquistadors who displaced indigenous peoples across the Americas, the British settlers who transformed Australia through systematic dispossession, or the various European powers that carved up continents for settler colonies, the Zionist project involved the systematic displacement of indigenous populations, the appropriation of their lands, and the construction of a settler society that viewed the original inhabitants as obstacles to be removed or subjugated.

Countercurrents