With the surge of far-right Zionist parties in Israel, most clearly manifested in the 2022 elections, the question has been raised of whether these parties’ views represent a dramatic departure from mainstream Zionist thought regarding the dynamics of power relations between Jews 1 and Palestinians in Palestine. In particular, the question is whether and how these views depart from mainstream Zionism regarding the place and political status of Palestinians throughout the whole land of Palestine, including Palestinian citizens of Israel. 2 Answering this question will help advance the following three main arguments: (a) what we witnessed in the dramatic rise of unrefined extremism towards Palestinians was inevitable within a mainstream Zionist referential perspective; (b) Zionism, 3 with its ethnoreligious exclusivist imaginary, has been from its inception entrapped in a path that can be pursued only through escalating violence (the end of which we have not seen yet) and inhabits a social-political milieu conducive to extremism; and (c) because Zionism is incompatible with an equitable relationship with the Palestinians, and is openly opposed to equality, power sharing and inclusive belonging, the current political and intellectual challenge for Israelis and Palestinians alike is to imagine a future outside the box of Zionism in the land between the River Jordan and the Mediterranean Sea.
To make these arguments, I introduce the concept of process in settler-colonial settings, defined as the ongoing interaction between the structure of settler-colonial projects (see Glenn 2015; Wolfe 2006) and the agency and resistance of the native population. This article’s theoretical point of departure is that Zionism and the project of establishing an exclusive Jewish state in Palestine started as and remains an unfolding settler-colonial project. I, like many other scholars, have analyzed Zionism’s encounter with the Palestinians within a settler-colonial paradigm. 4 I will argue that while a major intent of Zionism has been emancipation of the Jewish people, once Zionism targeted Palestine (or any other country) as the sovereign homeland of the Jewish people exclusively, it inevitably placed the project on a settler-colonial track to take over that homeland, with all that usurpation entails vis-à-vis an unavoidable protracted conflict with the natives, eliminatory conduct towards them, the imperative to dominate and control, the deployment of all forms of violence to achieve these goals and crush resistance, and the construction of the native in the colonizers’ imaginary as primitive, threatening, violent, and terroristic.
Is the Dramatic Rise in Jewish Extremism vis-à-vis the Palestinians an Aberration?
In response to the sharp upsurge in undisguised extremism exhibited in the 2022 Israeli elections, particularly the rise of far-right religious Zionist parties and their assumption of powerful government positions, many observers have reacted with surprise, claiming this development is an aberration from what Zionism represents, or that, as the New York Times’s Thomas Friedman indicates, the “Israel we knew is gone.” 5
It is true that two extreme religious Zionist parties, Otzma Yehudit (Jewish Power) and Religious National Party, and their two respective leaders, Itamar Ben-Gvir (Minister of National Security) and Bezalel Smotrich (Minister of Finance and Minister in the Ministry of Defence), have demonstrated blunt and openly racist views towards the Palestinians and have a history of extreme activities against them. 6
Smotrich’s views of Palestinians are based on messianic religious interpretations and are clearly articulated. 7 Resorting to the biblical story of Joshua’s coming to the land of Canaan and his treatment of the native residents upon arrival, Smotrich wants to offer the Palestinians three options: accept Jewish rule and be subservient, leave or fight and be defeated ( Hecht 2016). More recently he announced that there is no such thing as a Palestinian people and that it is an Arab fabrication to fight Zionism ( TOI Staff 2023). Ben-Gvir’s views which I analyzed elsewhere using the metaphor “landlord–tenant,” are also clear. He believes, as he made clear in his election campaign, that Jews are the landlords of the land because it belongs to the Jewish people: “[t]he time has come for us to be the landlords in our own country,” he proclaimed at his victory rally on election night ( Kingsley and Tavernise 2022). In this landlord–tenant dynamic, the land of Palestine is meant for the Jewish people only. As “landlords,” Jewish people have a right to belong and own the homeland, while as “tenants,” Palestinians merely have a right to live there under certain conditions.
This is not only a rhetorical departure from the mainstream Zionist parties represented in the Knesset—from Labor to Likud. It is inaccurate and simplistic to claim that these two far-right parties hold the same views as the mainstream regarding the relationship with Palestinians, or that they advocate the same policies towards them. All Zionist parties are not the same in this regard.
Yet, even if such views are almost unprecedented in their undisguised extremity, they derive from the same ideological well of mainstream Zionism that claims exclusive rights over the Land of Israel for the Jewish people. There is a defining essence that both mainstream and the extreme Zionist parties share: Palestine, or the Land of Israel in Zionist lingo, is the exclusive sovereign homeland of the Jewish people and no other people have the right to self-determination in it (as recently stipulated in the 2018 Nation-State Law 8 ). This essence is also outlined explicitly in the first item of the 2023 Netanyahu government’s “basic principles”: “[t]he Jewish people have an exclusive and unquestionable right to all areas of the Land of Israel. The government will promote and develop settlement in all parts of the Land of Israel in the Galilee, Negev, Golan, Judea and Samaria.” 9
This is the essence of Zionism in relation to Palestine and the Palestinians, which has been politically and violently enacted since the start of the Zionist project, constitutionally legislated since 1948 in numerous Basic Laws, 10 politically implemented in discriminatory policies supported by over 65 Israeli laws in all spheres of life inside Israel (of pre-1967 borders)—including citizenship, family unification, and forced displacement ( Adalah 2017)—and clearly and proudly articulated in Zionist public discourse.
A recent example demonstrates how ingrained these views are in mainstream Zionist discourse. Prior to last year’s upsurge of far-right-wing Zionist parties, Yair Lapid spoke to the Israeli “nation” 11 in a major televised speech one day after his swearing-in as Prime Minister. His speech laid out what he argued was “[t]he deep Israeli truth” about “truly important topics” on which “we believe in the same things.” The “we” refers to those who own the homeland, which becomes clear in the first item on the list of the collective beliefs he articulated:
[w]e believe that Israel is the nation-state of the Jewish people. Its establishment didn’t begin in 1948, but rather on the day Joshua crossed the Jordan [River] and forever connected the people of Israel with the Land of Israel, the Jewish nation and its Israeli homeland. 12
The fourth listed belief elaborates further:
[w]e believe that Israel is a Jewish state. Its character is Jewish. Its identity is Jewish. Its relations with its non-Jewish citizens are also Jewish. The book of Leviticus says, “But the stranger who dwells with you shall be unto you as one born among you, and thou shalt love him as thyself.” ( Lapid 2022; emphasis added)
While the Jewish supremacist principle might not be stated in the same language by all mainstream Zionist parties, all have effectively acted in line with it as coalition leaders or partners. Furthermore, it is captured in the supremacist Nation-State Law. Both the Law and the government guidelines refer to Jews—worldwide, regardless of their own beliefs or desires—as “landlords” in the land of Palestine, which is in fact inhabited by more Palestinians than Jews ( TOI Staff 2022). The expression “landlords,” popularized by Ben-Gvir, is precisely what is meant by the concept of a “Jewish state” or “the state of the Jewish people,” which is the common language of all Zionist parties, and, of course, of the constitutional Nation-State Law. 13
This relationship of landlords and tenants is exactly what is common among all Zionist parties. But, as explained above, there are differences among the parties in how this hierarchical framework should be effected—specifically, differences in how to treat tenants in the homeland of the Jewish people. Some threaten tenants with a second Nakba (or catastrophe, referring to the expulsion of 750,000 Palestinians from the country in 1947–1948), 14 others propose population exchange 15 to get rid of them, and some (like the Religious Zionist Party and Otzma Yehudit) might find the status of tenants too benevolent. Yet others want to treat Palestinians with fairness, as exemplified by Lapid’s quote above, and equality, in the spirit of the Declaration of Independence. But within Zionism, equality lies in civic rights for Palestinians within the state of the Jewish people, which is not their state, and never in national rights; hence the paradox of the term “Jewish and democratic,” a phrase commonly advocated by various Zionist parties, which hardly conceals Jewish supremacy.
The essence of the extremism expressed more openly recently, therefore, is not an aberration from mainstream Zionism when it comes to the heart of the Jewish state’s vision of the status of Palestinians; to the contrary, Ben-Gvir articulated the core of the relationship between Jews and Palestinians according to all branches of Zionism currently represented in the Knesset. There is not one Zionist party that presents a vision of a common homeland for both Jews and Palestinians in Israel or in the whole of Palestine. Therefore, it is a stretch to argue that these extreme leaders represent a rupture with Zionism. The concept of an exclusive Jewish homeland, exclusive Jewish state, and exclusive state of the Jewish people is the common foundation of all Zionist parties currently represented in the Knesset. Adding the term democratic and insisting on the self-definition as “Jewish and democratic” does not conceal the exclusivity and Jewish supremacy. Such a state cannot be democratic unless the term applies to Jews only, which it does in practice, and which in turn makes Israel a Jewish supremacist state that has many common features with Herrenvolk democracy, as defined by van den Berghe (1967). Some Zionist parties would not mind dropping the term “democratic” from the self-reference to Israel as “Jewish and democratic,” while others would insist on maintaining it. But the term “democratic” is erroneous, because it does not and cannot under Zionist ideology include Arab citizens as equals in the form of a “state for all its citizens” 16 or include them in the definition of the homeland, state, public good, or “we the people”; vis-à-vis the Palestinians in territories occupied in 1967, other terms such as “apartheid system” are more warranted, according to international (and Israeli) human rights organizations. 17
The policies derived from the project of an exclusively Jewish sovereign state in a homeland originally inhabited by Palestinians and now by Palestinians and Jews is at the core of causing and fuelling the conflict, the inevitable Palestinian resistance, and the dynamics of the rising extremism, as I describe below.
The Dynamics of Rising Zionist Extremism and the Question of Inevitability
As a settler-colonial project, Zionism is, by definition, conflict-instigating and a carrier of violence, and resistance is the inescapable reaction to it (see Rouhana 2004; Svirsky 2017; Veracini 2011; Wolfe 2006). This was clear to many Zionist founders. As early as 1923, Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the ideological father of revisionist Zionism (the ideology that guides the ruling Likud party and others) argued that Palestinians would react to the Zionist project with resistance because Zionists were coming to take the native Palestinians’ homeland ( Jabotinsky 1923). Whether backed by biblical promise or any other justification, once the sixth Zionist Congress voted in 1903 for Palestine as the site of the future Jewish homeland, people came from Europe and claimed Palestine as theirs. Whatever description Zionist discourse gives to those who came to claim the land—pioneers or olim, for example—they fit the essential description of settlers in the sense that they did not go to Palestine as immigrants seeking a better life jointly with the land’s existing inhabitants, nor as refugees seeking safety, but to claim it as their own, exclusively. As many scholars have documented, taking the land from its inhabitants, which culminated first in the establishment of Israel in 1948, was a violent project supported by British colonialism and met with fierce resistance ( Bishara 2022; Gelvin 2007; R. Khalidi 2021; W. Khalidi 1971, 1992). The settler-colonial project continued after 1948, putting the Palestinian population inside Israel under strict military rule with emergency regulations ( Bäuml 2017) and creating two types of citizenship: colonizer and colonized, as described by many scholars ( Bishara 2017; Jamal 2017; Rouhana and Sabbagh-Khoury 2014), and as I lately called it, citizenship of “landlords” and “tenants.” The settler-colonial project continued unabated, in full force in the Palestinian territories that Israel occupied in 1967.
Precisely as would be expected in any settler-colonial project, and as some Zionist leaders anticipated, this project has faced persistent native resistance. Perhaps the extent, endurance, and forms of resistance were underestimated. An inevitable and self-serving by-product of the settler-colonial project is constructing the natives as a group lacking in national consciousness or connection to the land, as undeserving, or as undeveloped, which might have contributed to underestimating the power of the natives’ agency and the depth and tenacity of their resistance.
The total and uninterrupted Palestinian refusal to adhere to or accept settler-colonial policies of dispossession and submission mobilized a mutually reinforcing process in which extremism, within a Zionist worldview, is the unavoidable response because the dispossessed group’s acts of defiance must be crushed with increasing violence. To elaborate on the dynamics of extremism, I will discuss a core concept in settler-colonial literature and introduce a new concept.
“Structure” is a core concept in settler-colonial studies. A settler-colonial project based on elimination of the native (in this case demographic, national, and cultural and historical) 18 is a structure rather than an event in Wolfean terminology ( Wolfe 2006) because the colonizers come to stay; the settler-colonial project seeks to acquire the land permanently, replace the native, build a new society and establish sovereignty on the very land they conquer. As apparent from Israeli policies towards Palestinians, “elimination is an organizing principle of settler-colonial society rather than a one-off (and superseded) occurrence.” ( Wolfe 2006: 388) As Glenn (2015) clarifies, structure can be seen as “the underlying systems of beliefs, practices, and institutional systems that undergird and link the racialization and management” of the colonized. Thus, closing the gates of the state almost hermetically to native Palestinians after being driven out in 1948 ( Harpaz and Herzog 2018) is an ongoing eliminatory strategy, augmented by demographically motivated laws 19 that emanate from the same settler-colonial structure. This is done while simultaneously opening the gates unconditionally to Jews anywhere. The “structure” is also reflected in the continuing expropriation of land—the transfer of land from Palestinian owners to Jewish possession (a process that has never stopped since 1948, first within the 1948 borders and later in the West Bank after its occupation in 1967)—in limiting Palestinian space, 20 in economic strangulation ( Dalal 2004), and in sustained efforts of cultural and national erasure. Palestinian political and cultural discourse is fully aware of this structure, as reflected in the commonly used term “the continuing Nakba,” ( Ali 2013) meaning that settler-colonial policies never ceased.
However, this analysis, while rightly highlighting that settler-colonial projects are not events but ongoing projects, is insufficient to understand the dynamics that settler-colonial projects create and face. While the concept of structure contains within it the inevitable resistance of the colonized, it does not give sufficient attention to the process that results from the dynamic interaction between the settlers’ invasion and the natives’ agency, resilience, and resistance. As the structure is ongoing, so too are the dynamics ongoing and continuously changing. I will refer to these changing dynamics as the process of settler colonialism that results from using all forms of violence—physical, structural and cultural ( Galtung 1990)—which are inherent in settler colonialism and numerous modes of natives’ resistance. Agency is reflected in various forms: physical violence; boycott, divest, and sanction (BDS) and other popular activities; political organization and protest; global resistance; legal advocacy; advancing visions of decolonization; denying the legitimacy of an exclusive Jewish regime—the political euphemism for Jewish supremacy; and the resilience of sumud, the strategy of staying and resisting (see also Meari 2015), or “refusal to submit,” to use Simpson’s term ( Simpson 2014).
If we think of the structure as a continuously evolving set of institutions, policies, subjectivities, imaginations, and so forth ( Svirsky 2017), this set becomes the site of potential transformation in the settlers’ society and polity because of the dynamic process between the settler-colonial strategy to subjugate the colonized group and the group’s refusal to submit. Therefore, shifting the focus from the structure that settlers constantly erect against continuously deployed resistance to the process of dynamic interaction between them elucidates the transformation of settler society institutions, policies, practices, subjectivities and imaginations. In this analysis, native agency is fundamental for understanding how the dynamics of settler strategies unfold in a process that requires the settler state to escalate those strategies to address its own inability to control the colonized or to crush their refusal to be controlled and submit. This is best represented in the now common Israeli saying about Palestinians—a sort of the colonizer’s popular articulation of the process: “If they do not understand by force, they will understand by more force.” In the process of employing increasing force, the colonizer society itself changes and even transforms in different ways: politically, militarily, and so on. In some cases, emergent forces might challenge the structure, which means challenging settler colonialism itself. This challenge can only take place outside Zionism, as I will discuss later.
While structure refers to “organizing principles” and the changing practices necessary to realize them, process—the dynamic interaction between the colonizers’ structures and the colonized peoples’ various forms of resistance (that are also modified and accommodated)—refers to the dynamics that feed and maintain the ever-evolving structure. The process affects internal politics within settler society, including power relations between different factions; internal ideological variations; the emergence, weakening, or disappearance of ideological trends; resorting to new modes of violence; seeking new forms of legitimation; and, by contrast, the emergence of anti-colonial forces within settler society—here, anti-Zionist forces. Thus, within the structure, there is currently a consensus among all Zionist factions represented in the Knesset, religious and secular, far-right and less far-right, 21 on possessively safeguarding the exclusively Jewish state with Jewish privileges that translate into Jewish supremacy. All major strategies, security orientations, social policies, and legislative work related to the Palestinian other—citizen, resident or occupied—emanate from this structure and are sites for evolution.
Applying this distinction between structure and process in settler-colonial dynamics, the Zionist project as a structure of constant displacement and replacement has gone through major transformations that push it increasingly and inevitably toward further extremism. Although essential for understanding escalating settler-colonial violence and its ideological foundation, the structure-agency process does not reveal the levels it can reach or if and how it can be reversed. Such an understanding requires global political analysis, with particular focus on colonial Western policies and discourse vis-à-vis the Zionist–Palestinian conflict and comparative examples of the role such politics played, such as in the South African case.
I will illustrate how the process of interaction between the structure of settler colonialism and Palestinian agency leads to changing the structure itself towards undisguised extremism. 22 But, as I will argue in the last section, the agency of the colonized is a source of power with the potential to steer the colonizers in opposite directions as well—namely, to think outside the Zionist box.
Zionist ideology has always presumed exclusive Jewish ownership of the homeland, even if cloaked in democratizing language. Recent right-wing Zionist politicians like Ben-Gvir have bluntly brought this view out into the open through the concept of ba’al habayi—the explicit categorizing of the Jewish people as landlords of the homeland. This metaphor brings to life the necessarily differentiated status, where the landlord-colonizer’s citizenship entails the exclusive right of belonging and major privileges of a landlord—ownership and sovereignty at the core—while the tenancy of the colonized (including citizenship inside Israel, residency in occupied East Jerusalem, and under occupation in the West Bank and Gaza) is conditional, contractual, and precarious. As argued above, mainstream Zionism may leverage more subdued discourse and less oppressive policies, but it shares with the emergent far-right the same foundational perspective on Jewish–Arab power dynamics.
The landlord framework introduced by the far-right is a reaction to two perceived threats that many Jewish Israelis share and are rooted in the failure to subdue Palestinian agency. The first is the recent participation of an Arab party in the Israeli government. Although it assumed no ministerial positions, the United Arab List Party’s participation in the “Anyone but Bibi” Coalition was a first in Israel’s history. Moreover, its participation involved no discussion of or change in the hierarchical nature of the relationship between Arabs and Jews, but promises were made to improve the conditions of Arab citizens, such as demolishing fewer houses and recognizing some Arab towns in the Naqab out of many that have been denied recognition under settler-colonial land control policies ( Adalah 2019). Perhaps symbolic in nature, this move gave “tenants” some elements of the privileges that have been reserved exclusively for the “landlords” but only after the party recognized Israel as a Jewish state.
The second perceived threat is framed by Israeli media as rising “security” concerns. Beginning with manifestations of solidarity between Palestinian citizens of Israel and Palestinians under threat of eviction in an Arab neighbourhood in occupied East Jerusalem, a series of reactions and counter-reactions led to escalating mutual violence in which both Jewish and Arab citizens were victimized, but Israeli police arrested hundreds of Arab, not Jewish citizens ( Najjar 2021). Zionist media, however, painted these clashes and expressions of solidarity as Arab-led violence against Jews, encouraging the perception that the “tenants” were getting out of hand or raising their heads.
Both examples—participation in the government of the Jewish state, and resistance and solidarity—challenged the entrenched settler-colonial landlord–tenant hierarchy, albeit in different ways. In both cases it was the challenge to the sense of total control that steered many in Israel towards escalating their strategies of crushing constantly emergent agency and thus contributing, with other factors (not discussed here), to moving broad segments of Israeli society to the right and forcing corresponding changes to the Zionist project’s structure. In this context, what was implicitly under the surface—landlord–tenant power dynamics—was brought explicitly into the open in the form of escalating extremism.
The Social-Political Milieu Conducive to Extremism and the Trap of Zionism
A combination of factors, which, when merged into one worldview (Zionism), create a unique social and political milieu that is permissive of employing and escalating violence, dismissive of criticism and inclined to be righteous (thus providing a sense of impunity), and conducive to resorting to extremism. These factors should be considered within the context of global comparative politics. For example, the international system played a major role in pushing South Africa to end Apartheid by becoming increasingly critical, vocal, and active against it, with the West, including the US, joining international opposition to that system. Compare that to a global climate—particularly in the West and including intellectual space and academia—in which discussing Israeli policies is considered “sensitive,” supporting BDS is often equated with antisemitism and criminalized in some states, and the concern about being labelled antisemitic (with its many emerging new definitions 23 ) suppresses open discussion of the conflict, subdues the production of critical knowledge about it, and instils concern about taking public positions against Israel or Zionism. 24 The climate-suppressing criticism contributes to a sense of impunity within Israel that did not exist in South Africa. Furthermore, in the cases of international criticism, Israeli society has developed its own internal immunity. Three factors contributing to this political milieu are described below.
- 1)
Zionism’s settler colonialism is founded on a defining biblical promise—that that particular land is the land promised by God to Jews. 25 The often-referenced fact that the fathers of Zionism were secular, while important, does not decrease the significance of this promise, as evidenced by it becoming an integral part of Israeli political argumentation vis-à-vis the Palestinians and the international community by religious, religious nationalist, and secular parties, like the Likud. 26 In a moment of historical significance, the secularist founder of the state, David Ben-Gurion, told the British Royal Commission in 1937 that the Zionist title to the land emanates from the Bible, not from the Balfour Declaration. As A. Bishara (2017, 2022) shows, differentiated citizenship in Israel, what I have called elsewhere settler-colonial citizenship or citizenship of “landlords and tenants” (Rouhana 2023), is based on that entitlement, as are exclusive Jewish sovereignty, demographic control, and land policies. Thus, while settler colonialism, if challenged by international law, might use political, diplomatic, or security considerations until they become implausible and a new imagination emerges, Israel’s settler colonialism increasingly resorts to religious claims to justify the settler-colonial project and establish a new kind of international legitimacy ( Rouhana 2021)—one that happens to resonate with some Christian fundamentalist circles in the West ( Shalhoub-Kevorkian 2021).
The fact that the Jewish people have cultural and historical connections to the land is a unique ingredient not extant in any other settler-colonial case; Zionism has transformed that connection into rights of exclusive sovereignty. The programmed and active erasure of the cultural and national presence of other pre-Zionism nations (particularly continuous Arab presence since the 7th-century Arab conquest) was geared towards creating national Jewish continuity from the time in 70 CE known historically as Destruction of the Second Temple, when the Roman Empire dispersed the Jewish population, to late 20th-century Zionist claims to Palestine. The historical and cultural Jewish connection to the land made it possible for the Zionist narrative to skip about 2000 years of history and claim entitlement to the land while ignoring its native people and their centuries of continuous belonging to the same land. This sense of entitlement is particularly entrenched because it fuses the religious with the national. Zionism is founded on this claimed entitlement that is inherently exclusive and effectively supremacist—placing the Jew above the native.
- 2)
The Jewish experience in Europe ingrains a feeling of entitlement and instils a sense of righteousness. Setting aside the colonial powers’ (particularly the British) enabling of Zionism and tabling the argument about its essence as a settler-colonial project, Zionism sought to find a home for Jews to protect them from discrimination, exclusion, and violence they experienced in Europe. The pogroms they endured in Eastern Europe and their rejection in other parts of Europe after attempts at integration made the quest for a homeland resonate with many Jews. The problem is that seeking their homeland in other peoples’ homelands was inevitably settler-colonial as there were no empty countries available, except for in the constructed imagination of the colonizers.
The horrors of the Holocaust convinced more Jews, as well as many non-Jews, of the justness of this quest. I will return to this story later. For now, my point is that the long Jewish experience of persecution in Europe entrenched the sense of entitlement and the right to what Zionists called the return to their historic homeland. It also provided the basis for a self-perceived moral high ground and became a force field that continues to shield many Israelis (in their own minds) against considering international criticism for human rights violations. Prolonged harsh victimhood, especially if its lessons are not inclusive of the experiences of other groups ( Rosler and Branscombe 2020), might have blinded many from the inevitable destructive dispossession their project entails.
- 3)
The sense of existential threat inherent in the settler-colonial project. As I mentioned earlier, originally Zionism has neither achieved nor sought the genocidal elimination of the Palestinians through mass killings, as has occurred in some other settler-colonial contexts. At the same time, the other forms of elimination that the Zionist project pursued have not achieved their final goals due to Palestinian resilience. The Palestinian national movement, which dissipated after its defeat in 1948, re-emerged as a strong actor after the mid-1960s (buttressed over the years by regional and geopolitical actors), demanding self-determination and the return of Palestinians to their homeland, as supported by UNGA resolution 194 and its repeated endorsement by the UN ( UNCCP 1961). The re-emergence, as well as the existence, of Palestinians was perceived by many in Israel as an existential threat. The root of this perception, for a state with Israel’s military, technological advancement, and Western support, is found not in the realm of military and other forms of hard power, but in the underlying psychological foundations of the settler-colonial project and its failure to eliminate the native.
The perceived threat is inherent in the very existence of the Palestinians; Israel’s original and ongoing violence and eliminatory policies towards them do not emanate from the fact of their being Arab or Palestinian as such, but from their existence on the land Zionists claim as exclusively Jewish. That Palestinians continue to exist, resist, claim the right of return to their homeland and the right of self-determination (regardless of how the hegemonic media construct resistance and portray it to the world), and refuse the legitimacy of Jewish supremacy is a reminder that Israel’s existence is not secure. Therefore, no matter how many major military campaigns Israel undertakes against the Palestinians, no matter how many hundreds of thousands it pushes out, the tens of thousands it kills, and the hundreds of thousands it wounds, arrests or tortures, the Palestinians continue to be perceived as a major threat. The Palestinians, with their resilience, keep reminding the Israelis of the fact that their state and its ongoing expansion is built on the Palestinian homeland and that they will not stop seeking self-determination, including their right of return.
The deep denial of this fact (which occasionally arises in political—but mostly cultural—expressions) 27 is motivated by not only moral concerns, but also fear of the potential consequences of facing it. For example, in a moment of historical honesty, Moshe Dayan, then-Israeli military Chief of Staff, gave a eulogy for an Israeli killed in a 1956 attack by a group of Gaza-based Palestinian guerrillas on a kibbutz near Gaza. In a short speech that has endured for decades and become a foundational reference for the ongoing dynamics of settler colonialism and resistance, he told the mourners:
Let us not today cast blame on his murderers. What can we say against their terrible hatred of us? For eight years now, they have sat in the refugee camps of Gaza and have watched how, before their very eyes, we have turned their land and villages, where they and their forefathers previously dwelt, into our home. ( Shalev 2014)
While this quote demonstrates an understanding of Palestinian resistance at the time, the lesson from it is most revealing:
Let us take stock with ourselves. We are a generation of settlement and without the steel helmet and the gun’s muzzle we will not be able to plant a tree and build a house…Let us not drop our gaze, lest our arms weaken. That is the fate of our generation. That is our choice—to be ready and armed, tough and hard—or else the sword shall fall from our hands and our lives will be cut short. ( Shalev 2014)
The insecurity, alertness and toughness are all expected because of “the generation of settlement,” which has never ceased. Israeli reactions to various forms of Palestinian political expressions and activism, cultural activities and even human rights activism reflect the desire to crush any manifestation of potential effective Palestinian agency.
The sense of threat is exacerbated by a fundamental feature of the settler-colonial project: exclusive ownership of the homeland. Thus, challenging this exclusivity (which is in fact Jewish supremacy) is defined as a source of threat that must be stopped, even if it is a democratic challenge. 28 The existential insecurity and the corresponding massive violence required to gain illusive security is a defining feature of the project.
But while the existential insecurity has its psycho-political foundations in the very structure of the project and the dynamics of Palestinian agency, one wonders why fear of the Palestinians (in addition to demonizing them) has become such an industry in Israeli public discourse. In this regard, one has to examine the political expediency that also requires the production of fear and insecurity, a “security theology,” as Shalhoub-Kevorkian (2015) called it, to maintain and justify settler-colonial violence—and to justify escalatory and extreme policies.
The trap of Zionism—perhaps its tragedy—is that the regime of Jewish supremacy it established as the landlords of Palestine, or those who hold the “title,” can continue only by brute violence—physical, structural, and cultural. Jabotinsky, long before Dayan, was perceptive and right: the natives will never accept being deprived of their homeland. His concept of the Iron Wall that the Zionist project needed to erect is exactly the violence that Israel must keep inflicting on Palestinians to take over the land and try to bring them into submission. Jabotinsky in fact describes the process beyond the duality of settler-colonial resistance and provides his own strategy to deal with the resistance, long before Dayan did: crush it. He argues:
Every native population in the world resists colonists as long as it has the slightest hope of being able to rid itself of the danger of being colonized…That is what the Arabs in Palestine are doing, and what they will persist in doing as long as there remains a solitary spark of hope that they will be able to prevent the transformation of “Palestine” into the “Land of Israel.” ( Jabotinsky 1923)
Using overwhelming power against any manifestation of resistance is rooted in this concept. 29
Despite the Iron Wall and its inherent violence—“the hundred year’s war on Palestine” as described by R. Khalidi (2021)—self-determination, the return of refugees, and the equality of Palestinian citizens in Israel in a non-supremacist state remain vital demands with enormous political, cultural, and civil society support. It is precisely the process of dynamic interaction between the ongoing settler-colonial structure and its failure to subdue persistent resistance of the Palestinians through which more violence becomes necessary and ideologies of extremism and supremacy flourish in the hopes of bringing them into submission.
Daring to Imagine—a Future Without Zionism
Zionism has two major components that are rarely connected by its supporters. The first is the just cause to liberate European Jews from repression, exclusion and violence. The second is that it sought to solve this problem in a land far away from Europe; land that was already inhabited by a people, and with the clear goal of taking it from them. Regardless of any justification, the only way that such a goal could have been pursued is through settler colonialism, with all its features, and by establishing a regime of Jewish supremacy.
What makes Zionism a settler-colonial project is not its quest to rescue European Jews from persecution. The Jewish experience in Europe was intolerable. But Zionism did not limit itself to the goal of liberating European Jews in Europe, nor to finding a refuge in another land through the consent of its native inhabitants, where they would arrive as welcomed immigrants, not as settlers. The moment that Zionism started thinking of an exclusive homeland outside Europe, whether in Uganda or Palestine, it inevitably became a settler-colonial project and tied its interests to colonial powers. Palestine was chosen by a vote in Europe, as if Palestine was a land without its own people. By becoming a settler-colonial project, Zionism necessarily and effortlessly adopted the settler-colonial mindset and its practices—espousing superior and racist views about the natives, claiming the land was empty or neglected or advancing other justifications, seeking demographic elimination, and building the needed force, supported by a colonial power, to violently take over the land. That Jews were victims in Europe obscures for many Zionists the truth of what they were and are doing to the natives and provides for others the dubious moral justification to take the land of another nation. The Jewish experience in Europe and the Jewish cultural connection to the land of Palestine could have been used to argue for accepting Jews in Palestine under the Ottoman rule or the British Mandate (or later after the Palestinian independence that should have transpired), as immigrants seeking refuge, not as settlers desirous of taking over another people’s homeland. Instead, the British provided the colonial Balfour Declaration, which claimed national rights in Palestine exclusively for Jews, served as the basis for the League of Nations Mandate for British control of Palestine (R. Khalidi 2017), and laid the foundations of the landlord–tenant relationship. The rest is both history and our shared present (see W. Khalidi 2014).
Supporters of Zionism highlight the first component—liberating European Jews from persecution—but dismiss the second by using different mechanisms to deny, justify, distort, or rationalize it, often with a thinly masked sense of superiority. While all these mechanisms are worth examining, I will provide one recent example by Yehuda Bauer, the leading Czech-born Israeli scholar of the Holocaust. He recently claimed that Palestinians:
do not recognize the existence of a Jewish people, half of which is not here. For if they acknowledge this, they will have to admit, one way or another, the rightness of the basic political claim about a people re-establishing a homeland from which it has been absent for a long period of time, because it has no other territory in which it can establish the political expression of its collective and political identity. ( Bauer 2023)
This argument probably encompasses best what I mean by dismissal of the other, and the sense of superiority. From this perspective, the many Palestinians who recognize the existence of the Jewish people should allow them to come to take over their homeland simply because Jews have no homeland (and perhaps because they are more deserving, even though “they were absent for a long time”).
To accept the first motivation of Zionism—nationalism that seeks the liberation of European Jews from oppression—without recognizing the inevitable consequences of the project once it sought a homeland in another people’s place is either dishonest or represents motivated ignorance. The motivation—helping European Jews—is admirable and liberating; for the native people of Palestine it might be understandable, but if it is to be fulfilled in their homeland, their homeland will be stolen, they will be displaced from it, and they will be without a homeland. Thus, they have the moral, political and existential responsibility to resist it. Whatever the liberational motivation, the path is a settler-colonial one that leads to overtaking another people’s homeland. As manifested presently in the West Bank, this track is patently immoral, illegitimate, violent, and distinctly illegal. This is why I call Zionism “settler-colonial nationalism.” This is also why it is not only self-serving, but also self-centred for many Zionists to focus on the motivation, the first component, without recognizing the gravity of the second—acting as if the motivation matters to the natives.
The end of this conflict that was created by Zionism is not in sight, but what is clear is that Zionism, speaking in the name of the Jewish people, has destined its followers to be part of a process that can lead to further dispossession and to forms of violence that we may not yet have seen, in the hopeless goal of maintaining exclusive rights in Palestine and crushing native resistance. There seems to be no way out of this process within Zionism; the way out of this trap lies outside it. Thinking outside the box of Jewish supremacy can start generating imaginations of a common future between Palestinians and Jews in Palestine, precisely like thinking outside Apartheid in South Africa opened the door to a common future. To avoid a future of utmost extremism, 30 there must be a conscious effort to begin thinking outside the trap of Zionism.
Thinking of a way out of this trap is impossible within Zionism because there is no place in its political imagination for partnership, national rights for both peoples, equal citizenship, joint ownership, true power sharing, equality in belonging to the land, or granting Palestinians recognition that this is also their homeland. This is true of every Zionist party represented in the Israeli parliament. Imagining the future without Zionism, therefore, is one of the main challenges for decolonization in Palestine because decolonization should be based on equality between Palestinians and Jews in whatever political settlement that emerges. It must be premised on a homeland belonging to both groups, in a democratic system based on equal group rights, as I discussed elsewhere ( Rouhana 2018). Just like white supremacy in South Africa had to end to advance decolonization, the same will be required here.
Imagining decolonization and equality between Palestinians and Jews throughout the whole country might appear unrealistic because it defies the premises of realpolitik. “The strong do what they can, the weak suffer what they must,” goes the Thucydidean catchphrase from the 5th century BCE. A favourite quote for the realist paradigm of international relations, this statement, like the paradigm itself, is suffused with Western cultural bias. It is only partly true. As shown countless times, the weak can also resist and refuse to submit. It is true that accelerating Jewish extremism will inevitably escalate the violence and accordingly increase the suffering of Palestinians. But this acceleration of extremism does not necessarily change the inevitability of resistance nor snuff out the agency to resist. Suffering, in some cultural contexts, is an integral part of resistance ( Salem 1993). It is the colonized people’s moral right and duty. Reasoning for enduring unbearable suffering can be found in nationalism that seeks liberation and human dignity, religious beliefs about sacrifice, cultural norms, or any combination thereof. In the Palestinian case, resistance comes at a very high price: facing vastly disproportionate use of force by one of the most powerful militaries in the world and by zealous settlers. Still, the resistance is not waning, and hence, Zionism is propelled towards greater use of force and rising extremism in the process I described above.
At the same time, Palestinian agency can (and in my view must) be expressed not only in various forms of legitimate resistance. It has the potential power and the responsibility to contribute to reversing the trend of intensifying extremism by offering a vision that is the opposite of Zionism: inclusivity for Palestinian and Israeli Jews, a common homeland, a shared future, national rights for all, total equality, ending Jewish supremacy, and forms of political arrangement that can provide these defining principles. This vision should also offer Israeli Jews the safety that Zionism sought, but without the privileges and supremacy conferred under Zionism.
Such a vision should clearly oppose reversing power relations between the colonizer and the colonized. I agree with Mamdani (2002) that in the process of decolonization, reversing the last to be first and the first to be last as described (not necessarily prescribed) by Fanon (1967), should be clearly opposed. Palestinian agency, equipped with a decolonizing vision founded on full equality, recognition of the right and legitimacy of the Israeli Jewish national group to belong to the land in equality and full security, and a common political framework of sharing the land, can help encourage imagining a future without Zionism. Because Zionism is unable, by its ideological foundations, to offer such a vision, Palestinians have the responsibility to advance it and persistently present it, together with like-minded Israelis and others (see also Bishara 2022).
This is not a modest mission to set for a people facing and resisting more than a century of ongoing aggressive settler-colonial policies. Yet, Palestinians can consult and learn from the experiences of other colonized nations, particularly the South African experience. Some earlier experiments in mainstream Palestinian political thought, such as the one democratic state offered within Palestine Liberation Organisation circles in the late 1960s ( Shaath 2016), or the state for all its citizens offered in the 1990s (Bishara 2022), provide some indication that such a vision is possible. But this is the topic of another article.