THE IDEOLOGICAL STRUGGLE AGAINST ISRAEL

Israel’s response to the October 7 Hamas rampage has led to an unprecedented increase in public hostility. This hostility has been directed not only toward Israel’s military strategy of urban warfare, which, like any such strategy, has led inevitably to widespread death and destruction, but also toward the Jewish State itself. Much of this hostility can be attributed to plain old antisemitism.

At Princeton, the Near Eastern studies department offers a course whose reading list includes a book that claims that Israelis systematically maim Palestinians to harvest their organs.

At the University of Michigan, benches in front of the Hillel House have been defaced with the Star of David, followed by the equal sign, followed by the swastika.

At Harvard, visibly Jewish students have been jeered at and physically assaulted walking to class.

There have been countless other incidents of such run-of-the-mill antisemitism. Still, it would be a mistake to conclude that antisemitism alone undergirds the current hostility toward Israel. After all, some of this hostility comes from Jews themselves.

One of the most visible organizations criticizing Israel has been Jewish Voice for Peace. Commentary Magazine’s Eli Lake has even identified what he calls the “AsAJew” phenomenon, to describe the many Jewish anti-Israel activists who cite their religion to legitimize their tactics. Some of these activists may be fairly described as “self-hating” Jews – but they are Jews nonetheless.

To those who would stand up for Israel, it is important to look beyond antisemitism, and to recognize that hostility toward the Jewish State is also based on something different: the settler-colonial paradigm. According to this conceptual framework, the State of Israel is an illegitimate entity designed and populated by Europeans colonizers who invaded a foreign territory to exploit the indigenous people, and to impose their culture and religion on them. This paradigm views Israelis as comparable to the British settlers in Kenya or the French in Senegal or the Belgians in the Congo.

Subscribers to this paradigm are willing to excuse, and even glorify, the rape and murder of innocents because they see such crimes as the natural, inevitable reaction toward settler-colonialism. That is why on October 7, while the barbarism was still underway, a writer for Teen Vogue could post on X “What did y’all think decolonization meant? vibes? papers? essays? losers.” That is also why the post garnered over 100,000 likes, and was reposted 23,000 times.

The fact that this paradigm has gained wide acceptance among the academic, cultural, and media elites should not delude anyone as to its intellectual merit.  It is strikingly dumb.

To state just a few of its obvious flaws: The British, French, Belgian, and other European settlers were sponsored by their mother countries, for whom they acted as agents. The Jewish settlers in Palestine were not sponsored by Czarist Russia. They were certainly not agents of Russia. They were refugees fleeing Russian pogroms.  

The European settlers moved into foreign lands to which they were strangers. There were no African traditions celebrating ancient British tribes who had once inhabited the region. The British and other Europeans were intrusive newcomers, lacking any prior connection to the colonized territory.

The Jewish settlers, by contrast, were returning to a land with which they had deep religious and cultural bonds. There had been a continuous Jewish presence in Palestine for nearly three thousand years. The Jewish settlers adopted Hebrew as the official language of their nascent state, the same language spoken by the Jews of the Bible, and preserved by the Jews of the Diaspora at Passover seders and other religious festivals.

Notwithstanding these and myriad other discrepancies, the settler-colonial paradigm is widely accepted in influential circles today. It provides Israel’s critics with a superficially respectable basis for their hostility, a basis seemingly untarnished by antisemitism.

Israel’s supporters must recognize that the struggle against the Jewish State has become primarily an ideological struggle, and that the settler-colonial paradigm lies at the heart of it.

This struggle resembles in many respects the ideological struggle between the East and West in the Cold War. In that struggle, Marxists believed capitalism was doomed, and would eventually collapse due to its own internal contradictions. Many of today’s enemies of Israel likewise believe that the Jewish State is on the wrong side of history. In accordance with the settler-colonial paradigm, Israel is based on the shaky foundations of apartheid and racial discrimination, and is doomed to collapse.

The outcome of the Cold War ideological struggle offers grounds for optimism for the outcome of this current ideological struggle against Israel.

The chief reason for the West’s victory in the Cold War was reality. Communism didn’t work. Capitalism did. Ideologues on both sides could argue theory endlessly. But they could not ignore the empirical evidence.

Rather than collapsing, as Marxists fervently believed and preached, capitalism flourished and enriched the countries that practiced it. The relevant evidence was as clear as a controlled laboratory experiment. Capitalist West Germany far surpassed communist East Germany – even though both countries were populated by Germans, and eastern Germany had been richer than the western part of the country prior to World War II.  South Korea far surpassed North Korea – even though both countries were populated by Koreans, and the north had been richer than the south in the 1950s. And of course, the United States outpaced the USSR.

Ideologues could litigate, but reality adjudicated and ruled on who was right and who was wrong.

Something similar will happen eventually in this current ideological struggle against Israel. Reality, based on the empirical evidence, will ultimately determine which side prevails. And that evidence is clear.

If Israel were a settler-colonial entity, established to exploit the indigenous population, one would expect that any territory abandoned by it would flourish. But the opposite has happened.

Israel occupied Southern Lebanon from 1985 to 2000. Since then, although subjected to almost daily rocket and mortar attacks from that country, Israel has refrained from sending in ground troops, limiting its response to air attacks on military targets. According to the settler-colonial paradigm, Lebanon once free of Israeli occupation, should have flourished. Instead, as Hussain Abdul-Hussain, a research fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, notes:

Between 2000 and 2023, the Lebanese economy collapsed as the country slid downwards on every governance indicator. In 1996, Lebanon ranked 109 of 191 countries in the “rule of law” category according to data service The Global Economy. By 2006, Lebanon had dropped to 126, and in 2021, Lebanon had slipped as far down as 162. Similarly, Lebanon has suffered the spread of corruption. In 2004, Lebanon ranked 97 out of 145 on the Corruption Perception Index. In 2022, Lebanon ranked 150 out of 180.

Israel occupied Gaza from 1967 to 2005. Following its withdrawal, and before Israel launched its ground assault in response to the October 7 rampage, Gaza received billions of dollars in international aid. The UN provided $4.5 billion in aid between 2014 and 2020. Qatar provided $1.3 billion in aid during the same period. The United States, Germany, and many other foreign nations contributed massive amounts. Yet long before the Israeli invasion, while Gaza was free of the settler-colonizers, its economy tanked. According to a UN report, “[d]uring the period 2006–2022, the GDP per capita of Gaza shrank by 27 per cent, from $1,994 in 2006 to $1,257 in 2022.

None of this makes sense under the settler-colonial paradigm. In the absence of an exploitative Israel, Lebanon and Gaza should have prospered. Instead, they deteriorated.

Nor does the settler-colonial paradigm explain why Libya, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen are all failing states.  No Europeans —Jewish or non-Jewish – are present in those countries to exploit the indigenous populations. Yet the only products they seem capable of producing are chaos and bloodshed.

Antisemitism is known as the world’s oldest hatred. It exists and indeed thrives today. But it is not the only basis for current hostility toward Israel. The most dynamic engine driving that hostility is the settler-colonial paradigm. While it is distressing to see the wide acceptance accorded that theory, especially by the highly educated, there is also some cause for optimism. For the paradigm is so factually and logically unsound, that it cannot long survive.

Speaking at the Palace of Westminster in 1982, President Ronald Reagan predicted that Marxism was destined to be left “on the ash-heap of history.” Many dismissed his words as fanciful. But seven years later, the Berlin Wall came down.

The settler-colonial paradigm may appear to be a powerful intellectual weapon in the campaign to delegitimize Israel. But reality is not swayed by hollow theories. Like Marxism, this paradigm is destined for the ash-heap of history.