Debunking a libel: Israel is not a colonial-settler project – Sara Gon - Biznews

The claim that Israel is a “settler/colonial” state is a distortion of history. Sara Gon explores Zionism as a lived experience, not merely an ideology, rooted in the Jewish struggle for survival against centuries of persecution, pogroms, and genocide. From the Russian Empire’s pogroms to the Holocaust, Jews faced systemic displacement and extermination. Israel’s founding in 1948 provided a refuge for displaced Jews, embodying resilience and the right to exist.

Sara Gon

To try to explain the history of the Israel/Palestinian conflict is extremely difficult. It’s long, complicated and replete with decades of propaganda aimed at delegitimising Israel.

Introduction − hypocrisy of hate
The hypocrisy of those bent on perpetuating the libel that Israel is a ‘settler/colonial’ state is breathtaking. From the first Islamic state of Medina established by the Prophet Mohammed and the three caliphate successors (the Rashudin, Ummayad and, twice, the Abbasid caliphates), Muslims conquered, colonised and settled in areas as far east as China, the Middle East, as far west as France, Spain and Portugal, as far north as Russia, and as far south as Morocco, Libya, Algeria, Egypt and Tunisia. There were a further 13 Muslim empires which included, variously, Chad, India, Niger and Turkey. Turkey was the seat of the Ottoman Empire and was the last Muslim empire: it collapsed at the end of World War I.

The primary purpose of Mohammed’s conquest and most of those Muslim armies that followed was to spread Islam throughout the Middle East and the world. It was conversion by the sword, as a result of the belief that Islam was the final and true monotheistic religion. The Islamic Empires were amongst the greatest colonisers in world history.

The history of Zionism as lived experience
In this article, I debunk the libel that Israel is a ‘Settler/Colonial’ state and therefore not entitled to exist. Most societies in the world are ultimately settler societies. If they weren’t, most of humanity would still be found in the cradle of mankind in Africa.

This article is a précis based on a podcast by Haviv Rettig Gur, a Senior Analyst at The Times of Israel, a highly knowledgeable historian of Jewish and Israeli history, and an extremely perceptive and articulate analyst of the conflict.                                                                          

It is a historical examination of why Israel, rather than being a ‘settler/colonial’ state worthy of destruction, is a ‘refugee state’, created and founded to protect Jews from discrimination and death. I have added some comments for elucidation.

It began in Russia
In 1881, the Black Hand, an anarchist group, assassinated Czar Alexander II of Russia. He was a reformist who abolished serfdom in the 1860s. On the morning of his assassination, he gave the order to draw up a ‘constitution’ ahead of the establishment of a parliament for the Russian Empire.

Alexander II looked at Western Europe to bring Russia into the modern age. The anarchists, however, viewed these reforms as a way to preserve the prevailing social classes, rather than abolish them and bring about equality.

The czar was succeeded by his extremely conservative son, Alexander III. He had been educated under the Russian Orthodox Church, and was uninterested in his father’s reforms – he blamed his father’s reformist impulses for his death.

Alexander III began a massive crackdown on everything he regarded as inimical to the Russian Empire. He reversed most of his father’s reforms, although he did not reinstate serfdom.

In 1882 he passed the antisemitic May Laws. They further restricted where Jews could live, study and be employed. 

At the same time, the Russian Empire experienced the great upheaval of industrialisation, predominantly through the building of railroads and electrification.

Industrialisation mostly occurred in the Southern Russian Empire (Ukraine), in cities like Odessa, with mixed Jewish and non-Jewish populations. Industrialisation resulted in massive changes, like urbanisation and the economic weakening of the peasant class. This led to the beginning of mass, popular pogroms.

People would march through the streets of cities of Western Ukraine, attack Jewish homes, scream at and grab Jews in the streets, often attack them, and sometimes kill them.

Pogroms spread from city to city very quickly. The progress of the early pogroms literally followed the rail network. Pogroms became a normal experience: all Jews came to expect them.

Many Jews were killed between 1918 and 1921, with estimates putting the number of separate and distinct pogroms at 1,300. The number of deaths was thought to have been as high as 250,000 Jews, mostly during World War I and the Russian Civil War (1918 to 1921).

The most famous pogrom occurred in Kishinev, in Moldova, in 1903. About 50 Jews were killed, but what caught the Jewish imagination and turned Kishinev into a rallying cry throughout the Jewish world was not the 50 dead. It was how they died: it was the cruelty of the perpetrators who raped and murdered women in front of their husbands, fathers and brothers.

Because these pogroms coincided with the May Laws, and Alexander‘s crackdown and his reactionary political impulses, Jews believed that the pogroms were instigated by the regime.  Rettig Gur says that historians generally agree that that this belief was probably wrong – a misunderstanding of the internal mechanisms of Russian politics and society.

Pogroms − genuine, authentic and popular
Something much worse was happening: pogroms were genuine, authentic, and popular, emanating from the bottom-up. The people around whom Jews lived really wanted them gone: they wanted Jews to be tortured and dehumanised until they understood that they weren’t wanted.

In many places, czarist police actually saw the pogroms as a threat to public order and ultimately a threat to imperial rule. So there were attempts by the regime to crack down on pogroms, though these were largely unsuccessful.

The outcry over Kishinev, particularly in the United States and Britain, where there were Jews of influence, inflicted serious diplomatic damage on Russia.

Kishinev also inspired the writing of the infamous Protocols of the Elders of Zion in 1903 by officials of the Russian regime who could not understand why the world cared that Jews had died. It was a complete fabrication, mostly likely created under the direction of Pyotr Rachkovsky, chief of the foreign branch of the Russian secret police (Okhrana) in Paris.

The writers sought to explain the diplomatic crisis by relying on long-held anti-Jewish tropes. They wanted to explain the diplomatic crisis by creating more explicit anti-Jewish politics. The secret police sought to validate the pogroms in intellectual terms.

The Protocols, supposedly the record of secret meetings of Jewish leaders, describes an alleged conspiracy to dominate the world. The conspiracy and its leaders, the so-called “Elders of Zion”, never existed. And although proven to be a fraud on many occasions, “the lie that would not die”, has continued to inspire those who seek to spread hatred of Jews. Arabic copies of it are sold widely in the Middle East today.

Reshaping of Russian Jews
The pogroms reshaped Russian Jews, both mentally and demographically.  Approximately 3 million Jews left the Russian Empire over the course of 40 years from 1882. The vast majority (2½ million) went to the United States, the source of the demography of today’s American Jewry.

Many fled westward to the Austro-Hungarian and German Empires. Both empires were convinced that Russia was trying to dump its Jewish problem on them.

Although antisemitism was a feature of these empires, their pogroms were not the same as those which had occurred in Russia. However, between not wanting the Jews and being convinced this was an intentional Russian policy, the Empires withdrew credit lines to Russia.

Eventually the pogroms moved from Eastern Europe to Central Europe, and then Western Europe. It happened at different times and in different ways, but it happened systematically.

These events were the beginning of 60 years: not just of the steady emptying out from Europe of Jews, but of “the conscious, wilful, purposeful, systematic making of Europe literally uninhabitable to Jews.”

In the 1920s the Romanians forbade or severely limited Jewish access to higher education.

In 1938 Poland passed a law stripping Jews who hadn’t lived in Poland for the previous five years of their citizenship, to ensure they did not return to Poland. About 17,000 Polish Jews were rounded up by the Nazis, who demanded the Poles take them back. The Poles confined them to a concentration camp until they were murdered at the beginning of World War II.

Immigration… and then there were the Jews
From about 1880 to 1920 massive immigration into the United States occurred from Ireland, Italy, Poland, Hungary, and Russia.

Non-Jewish emigrés usually sent young men ahead to establish themselves. Only thendid the families arrive – one, five or even 10 years later.

The Jews were fleeing; they came as families. No one arrived ahead of them. Jewish organisations, established by the American Jewish community, desperately tried to help these people. The existing community was about a quarter million Jews, mostly German speakers, many who had settled in the Midwest.

However, between 1908 and 1925, many of these immigrants returned to Europe – 57% of Italians, 40% of Poles, 64% of Hungarians, 67% of Romanians, and 55% of Russians. Among the Jews, the figure was just 5%.  For the Jews, there was no better life than in America, even if it wasn’t much better than what they’d left in Europe.

A significant factor for these returnees was an economic crash – the ‘Panic of 1907’. Consequently, there weren’t many jobs for people who didn’t speak good English, have family connections, or have higher education. Immigrants couldn’t move up the social ladder in America in the immediate aftermath of 1907.

Quotas sealed the fate of the Jews
The actions of the Western world that sealed the fate of European Jewry were the imposition of immigration quotas. As the Jews fled westwards, the European nations systematically closed entrance to the Jews, literally making their lives untenable.

In 1921, the United States Congress passed the Emergency Quota Act (Quota Act). The Americans had been trying since 1910 to slow Jewish immigration to America. The pressure on the Jews kept increasing to a point of intensity during the Russian Civil War (1918 to 1921). Every party to the civil war – Mensheviks, Bolsheviks, White Russians, Red Russians, Ukrainian nationalists – massacred Jews when they came to Jewish villages.

Estimates of Jews murdered during the Civil War who were not combatants range from 100,000 to 150,000.

In 1921 over 120,000 Jews arrived in New York harbour, whereafter Congress passed the Emergency Quota Act, which imposed quotas by nationality. The definition of nationality was engineered to exclude Jews. In 1924, Congress passed this Act; consequently, the number of Jews immigrating to the US was reduced from about 120,000 per annum to 10,000 per annum.

By 1934, just 2,700 made it into America, while Hitler had come to power in 1933.

As the urgency for the Jews escalated, the West closed its doors – America, Canada, Britain, France, Argentina, Brazil, Australia. Essentially, Jews were being corralled into the Holocaust.

Genocide made in…..[insert the country of your choice]
The Nazis planned and committed genocide, but were not successful in the places where locals did not collaborate. Those Jews who didn’t naturally assimilate into the culture of the countries they were living in, and who lived apart, were exterminated.

In 1944 the Hungarian government joined the Nazi effort to destroy the Jews. The Nazis asked for the Jews, and the Hungarians put about 430,000 Jews on trains and transported them to Auschwitz.They were all rural, Yiddish speakers from the provinces. The middle-class Budapest Jews were not shipped off to Auschwitz, because this was distasteful to the Hungarian government: horrifying: a culpability that it didn’t want to face. These urban Jews created a discomfort: they looked too much like Hungarians. The Jews of Budapest survived the war in Hungary; the Jews of the provinces – the Yiddish speakers, the ultra-orthodox did not.

The Greeks shipped off the Jews of Salonica and Rhodes, but not of Athens.

Lithuania was an example of where the social distance didn’t matter. By virtue of the devoted collaboration of local Nazi sympathisers, between 90% and 95% of the Lithuanian Jewish population were murdered.

In the Netherlands, with the assistance of Dutch state institutions, some 75% of Dutch Jews were murdered in the Holocaust.

This was the culmination of six decades of a Europe-wide cultural, political, and psychosocial destruction.

Little change after WWII
The fundamental Jewish experience didn’t change after the War. The quotas were not lifted. After the war, 250,000 Jews remained behind barbed wire in a network of displaced persons’ camps, formerly concentration and extermination camps. Truman begged Congress, unsuccessfully, to lift the quotas.

There were no longer millions of Jews left anymore. In 1939 there were 9.5 million European Jews, 57% of world Jewry. By the end of the War, there were 3 million – the last vestiges of a decimated Jewish world.

In the immediate aftermath of the war there were about 15 million displaced persons (DPs), and almost all found a way to return home. A DP was someone with nowhere to go, either because they’d be killed if they returned, or because nobody would take them. For example, although Bergen-Belsen was liberated on 15 April 1945, Jewish DPs were still there in 1947.

About eight months after the War ended, there were about a million displaced people left. They included Nazi collaborators in places now overrun by the Red Army. A quarter of the million remaining displaced people were Jews.

So the US and Britain founded the ‘International Refugee Organisation’ (IRO) comprising about 40 countries. The IRO sent representatives from member states – generally from the West – to these camps to interview DPs to come to their countries to help rebuild economies shattered by the war. Tens of millions of workers had just been killed in the War.

In 1946 these countries absorbed and naturalised 750,000 DPs.

The camps only emptied out with the founding of Israel in 1948. Probably a quarter of the Jews who fought the War of Independence in 1948 were DPs. Their experience of World War II was the experience of the new Israel.

Truman appointed Earl G Harrison, the dean of the University of Pennsylvania’s Law School, to visit the DP camps to find solutions to resolve the Jewish DP problem.

Harrison asked Jews, through surveys, to rank the five places they wanted to go to, from most to least.  For about 90%, the first choice was “Palestine”, and for about 90%, the  second choice was also “Palestine”.

Annoyed at this apparent lack of understanding, Harrison asked if not Palestine, where would they want to go? About 20% wrote “gas chambers” or “crematoria”.

This was not about Zionism, neither ideological nor practical. For a soldier to be an Israel Defence Force soldier after three years in Bergen-Belsen, after surviving the Holocaust, and after knowing that his parents and grandparents lived through the six decades from 1882, is what the founding of Israel was mostly about.

This was Zionism, not as an ideological construct, but as lived experience.

Zionism as an ideology simply means a movement to recreate a Jewish presence in Israel. “Zion” is a Hebrew term that refers to Jerusalem.

Zionism is an ideology and much more importantly, a place of refuge. Having taken over the mantle of determining what to do with the conflict when the British gave up the mandate, the United Nations proposed the creation of two states. Israel accepted and declared independence. The Arab states did not. The United Nations accepted Israel as a nation state. The delegitimisation of Israel is genocide by other means.

Sara Gon rants professionally to rail against the illiberalism of everything. Broke out of 17 years in law to pursue a classical music passion by managing the Johannesburg Philharmonic Orchestra and more

https://www.biznews.com/global-citizen/2024/12/15/debunking-israel-colonial-settler-sara-gon

This article was first published on the Daily Friend.