Zionism is an ideology of colonialism, murder and brutality. It must be overcome

Judaism is not a race it is a religion. However the long history of European antisemitism, culminating in the Nazi Holocaust, forged its religious character into a national and racial one, albeit rooted in white supremacy under the auspices of Zionism.

This regressive trajectory confirms that in human affairs the oppressed often, though not always, find their identity not in the rejection of the values of their oppressor, but in their embrace of them. The history of Zionism bears this out and is being borne out now with the genocidal slaughter being visited on the Palestinians of Gaza as these words are being written.

As we approach this May the 76th anniversary of the State of Israel’s establishment, the failure of this settler colonial project is reflected in the fact that Israel has never developed beyond its current status as a latter day Sparta, doomed to an existence rooted not in security, stability and peace, but in insecurity, instability and conflict.

Unfolding now, today, in Gaza, is genocidal slaughter utilising modern technology with murder not progress in mind. It is stark reminder of the chilling words of the Marxist thinker and philosopher Theodor Adorno.

To wit:

No history leads from savagery to humanitarianism, but there is one that leads from the slingshot to the megaton bomb.

The horror being visited on the Palestinians is that of a colonial power shaken to its very foundations by the ability of a colonised people under its jack boot to break out of their chains on their reservation and give vent to a killing rage developed over the long years of their structural oppression.

Dehumanisation of the colonised is the non-negotiable condition by which the coloniser is able to justify their colonisation, and so in breaking free for those few hours, the Palestinians reaffirmed their humanity in the spirit of resistance. The killing of the innocents is the devil’s work, and the innocent civilians butchered by Hamas fighters on October 7 was the work of the devils of occupation, siege, and collective punishment.

Now, seven months on, the killing rage of the ethno-religious war machine that is the Israeli military reflects not strength but weakeness — the grievous weakness of the idea that white European settlers could ever hope to establish a state based on the malign principle of religious, cultural and racial supremacy on the land of another people.

Within every national identity there exists the seeds of progress and regress, with the difference between either contingent on the response to specific events in the history of same. When it comes to the State of Israel, the most important impetus in its establishment in 1948 was a Nazi Holocaust that was counter-Enlightenment in character and barbaric in application.

The key to the fate of the Jews of Europe fortunate enough to survive this heinous exercise in industrialised mass slaughter came with the conclusions drawn. It boiled down to the philosophical conundrum posed by the question of is/ought. This is never going to happen to the Jewish people again, or This ought never to happen to anyone again?

The former conclusion underpinned the impetus behind the establishment of the State of Israel and continues to drive its mode of existence as a settler colonial, ethno-religious state, born on the back of a programme of mass murder and ethnic cleansing and sustained at the negation of the Palestinian people ever since.

Clearer than ever now is the fact that the status quo is no longer sustainable. Over long years of futile attempts at locking in the plight of the Palestinians as a subject people with failed after failed peace initiatives, facilitated by Washington — an honest broker not — the only thing that has changed in any quantifiable way is the awareness within the Arab street, and increasingly across the world, that Israel’s very mode of existence is the issue.

There is no two-state solution available anymore, if indeed there ever was up to this juncture. The only lasting solution to this perennial crisis is, as with the de-Nazification of Germany and Europe post-WWII, the de-Zionification of Israel and one state in which all share equal civil, economic and political rights. As part of this process war crimes will must needs have to be accounted for and suitable reparations for seven decades of ethnic cleansing, occupation and oppression made to the indigenous people of Palestine.

Ultimately, until the ethno-nationalist, white supremacist ideology of Zionism is relegated to history, no progress will or can ever be made when it comes to achieving stability and harmony in the Middle East, and by extension across the world.

End.

Thanks for taking the time to read my work. If you enjoy my writing and would like to read more, please consider making a donation in order to help fund my efforts. You can do so here. You can also grab a copy of my book — ‘This Boxing Game: A Journey in Beautiful Brutality’ — from all major booksellers, and my newly published novel, ‘Metrosexuals: An Edinburgh Tale’, from Amazon.