Widening the Colonial Lens
When I started The Now Exchange, a non-profit that aims to increase health access and choice for women in Bangladesh, I embarked on an educational and practical journey that hammered in for the umpteenth time the lasting and sprawling effects of imperialism. The health infrastructure of Bangladesh was and is shaped by a myriad of factors: high mortality rates, malnutrition and starvation are all tied to the effects of British colonialism, as well as its byproduct, Pakistani colonialism - all within the last 150 years. Bodies of women were used, abused and discarded by both. They were used as vehicles of fertility to increase labor supply and agrarian outputs. They were raped on an unfathomable scale, considered one of the most savage in human history; they were forcibly impregnated as a means of impugning Bengali bloodlines.
There are infinite direct colonial legacies like these that are glaringly violent, even if widely ignored and forgotten by the Western public. There are additionally infinite neo-colonial legacies that are slightly less visible on the surface but deeply pervasive, like structural adjustment programs and conditional aid. Colonialism shapes most aspects of modern life: the conflicts around us, the goods we consume, the people we love, the way we work, and as I will explore in next week’s Bondhu Thanksgiving Dinner, even the way we eat. It’s all there for those who want to understand it, and it’s easy to ignore for those who benefit from discounting it.
There has been a concerted effort over the last month to discredit the language, knowledge and histories that shape the resistance narratives of Palestine. In viral think pieces including this particularly dangerous trash in The Atlantic, flashy sponsored IDF social media content and even in positions of state officials, there are a few dangerous assumptions that are reoccurring: that terms like “colonialism,” “Zionism” and “genocide” are being incorrectly applied, and that the people using these terms are too ill-informed, far-removed and uneducated to have a perspective. These assumptions are unsurprising and dismissive, containing the many isms - racism, elitism, fascism - that allow power differentials to thrive.
Colonialism was first most publicly applied to Israel in Maxime Rodinson’s 1967 essay “Israel, fait colonial,” published in a journal edited by Jean-Paul Sartre and republished in 1973 as “Israel: a colonial-settler state?” 50 years later, much of his analysis strongly resonates:
Some argue as though colonialism were a creation of the mind, an immediately recognizable entity, clearly demarcated from right to left and top to bottom, and identifiable by some unambiguous definition as a plant or animal is. This is a common practice that seems impossible to uproot and that continues to wreak havoc in the social sciences and the ideologies in which they bask. There is no such thing as colonialism and imperialism as such. What there is is a series of social phenomena in which numerous analogies with one another can be found, but also infinite nuances, and which have come to be referred to with labels.
He importantly notes that Leon Pinsker, an early Zionist visionary, uses the term “colonial” to describe his aspirational goals in Auto Emancipation. This was a key document in 19th century Zionism (in its Jewish nationalist iteration; a whole other discussion can be had on Christian Zionism) that refers to emancipation as “the foundation of a colonial community belonging to the Jews, which is some day to become our inalienable home, our country.” He never saw his words manifest; he lived and died in Russia, where the oppression of Jews grew flagrant, pervasive and unbearable by the end of the 19th century.
Years later, Theodore Herzl’s formative visions of Zionism also grappled with the question of where this theoretical state should be. He debated Argentina and Palestine as possible sites in his foundational manifesto, The Jewish State. The arguments he makes are a fairly obvious pandering to Britain’s imperial goals:
If His Majesty the Sultan were to give us Palestine, we could in return undertake to regulate the whole finances of Turkey. We should there form a portion of a rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism. We should as a neutral State remain in contact with all Europe, which would have to guarantee our existence. The sanctuaries of Christendom would be safeguarded by assigning to them an extra-territorial status such as is well-known to the law of nations. We should form a guard of honor about these sanctuaries, answering for the fulfillment of this duty with our existence. This guard of honor would be the great symbol of the solution of the Jewish question after eighteen centuries of Jewish suffering.
I urge people to read these documents, because they contain more than colonial aspirations; there is beautiful pride and harrowing pain within, including desperation for safety and self-determination which bear tremendous relevance to today’s crisis. Unfortunately, those just desires were manifested through colonial force, and the intentions do not negate culpability.
Herzl created the Zionist Organization at the Congress of Basel in 1897. The Ottoman Empire was losing power in Europe and nationalism was blossoming in the European and Arab worlds. A simple glance at a map will tell you that this region was a pressure cooker caught between these dividing worlds. Herzl is explicit about the superiority of the European model of statehood in his manifesto, which became legitimized by the British in the 1917 Balfour Declaration - a letter from the British Foreign Secretary to a Zionist leader that assures the British “view with favour the establishment in Palestine a national home for the Jewish people.”
Balfour himself wrote in a 1919 memo to his successor that “the four great powers are committed to Zionism and Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age-long tradition, in present needs, in future hopes, of far profounder import than the desire and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land. In my opinion that is right.”
Historians largely agree that another part of the British’s true motivation in the declaration was to stake a claim in the soon-to-be-dissolved Ottoman Empire. This was en vogue with the “New Imperialism” of the time - a time when the Europeans did this:
Israel’s colonial history is indeed different from other colonial histories - are any ever identical? The first wave of colonialism dominates the public’s understanding of it: the British, Spanish, Portuguese, French and Dutch were on a global conquest for wealth and power which was achieved via mass murder, migration and enslavement. This second wave of imperialism in the early 20th century provides a much more relevant and recent picture of how major powers sought to claim access to new lands, resources and routes. The impacts of this wave are playing out in real time in the Congo and Sudan, meaning that the divisions and power differentials at play in these conflicts can be traced back to turmoil left behind by their respective colonizers (Belgium and Great Britain) during the exact same time frame the British saw its opportunity in Palestine.
It’s tempting to say that we are applying a modern lens and moral value on colonialism, an argument often made for religious texts, laws, historic figures, etc. This was a few generations ago. It’s about 60 years after the abolishment of slavery in Great Britain. It was about a hundred years after they lost the thirteen American colonies, and after they witnessed a powerful insurrection in Haiti. It was only decades after the British directly supported the revolutionaries of South America in an attempt to diminish Spanish power. Kipling’s “White Man’s Burden” was published in 1899, followed by years of response, parody, and debate. This was not a period of time where any political leader was remotely unaware or naive of colonialism as a means of exploitation and building empire. It was done openly, time and time again, with constant resistance.
The British and Zionist efforts were mutually beneficial and allowed a geographic advantage to one, and provided a colonial permission slip to the other. Enshrined in this exchange, though, was the rampant anti-Semitism across Europe. While supporting Zionist goals, Britain simultaneously partook in establishing racist, anti-Jewish immigration laws within its own boundaries. The 1905 Aliens Act was passed to curb the immigration of Jews fleeing persecution in Eastern Europe, and the overlapping timelines of this rising “threat” and the rise of Zionism did not go unnoticed. It was notably opposed by Parliament’s only Jewish member, Edwin Montagu. His memo to the British Cabinet does not hold back on making the direct linkage between British anti-Semitism and Zionist goals:
When the Jews are told that Palestine is their national home, every country will immediately desire to get rid of its Jewish citizens, and you will find a population in Palestine driving out its present inhabitants…
...it seems to be inconceivable that Zionism should be officially recognised by the British Government, and that Mr. Balfour should be authorized to say that Palestine was to be reconstituted as the "national home of the Jewish people". I do not know what this involves, but I assume that it means that Mahommedans (Muslims) and Christians are to make way for the Jews and that the Jews should be put in all positions of preference and should be peculiarly associated with Palestine in the same way that England is with the English or France with the French, that Turks and other Mahommedans in Palestine will be regarded as foreigners, just in the same way as Jews will hereafter be treated as foreigners in every country but Palestine…
I can easily understand the editors of the Morning Post and of the New Witness being Zionists, and I am not in the least surprised that the non-Jews of England may welcome this policy. I have always recognised the unpopularity, much greater than some people think, of my community.
There are three major dimensions to Israel’s colonial path:
1 - Zionism in its political manifestation is underpinned by explicitly colonial motivations in Pinkser’s Auto-Emancipation and Herzl’s The Jewish State. Their arguments provided a justification for…
2 - The British, and their conquest for control of this particular region in the midst of the New Imperialist era. In the three decades under its control, the population of this land grew between 1918 and the 1948, with the Jewish population rising from 8.1% of the land to 82.1% (Jewish Virtual Library). Imagine how this shift in proportion affected the outcomes of conflicts throughout the 20th century. A reminder that this population shift was a specified goal of Lord Balfour: “We are dealing not with the wishes of an existing community but are consciously seeking to re-constitute a new community and definitely building for a numerical majority in the future.”
3 - The most commonly discussed colonial aspect of Israel: its ongoing occupation of Palestine since 1948. International law, human rights groups, and Israel’s own Supreme Court agree on this characterization.
These first two dimensions are incredibly important to weave into the current conflict narrative. The notion that anti-Zionism is anti-Semitic is an erasure of the Jews who stood - and stand - against a Zionist state. Orthodox communities in the late 1800s. Secular Jews in the early 1900s. Anglo-Jews at the turn of the century, including the only Jewish person in the British Parliament at the time of the Balfour Declaration. Jewish socialists. Satmars. Holocaust survivors like Hajo Meyer. The thousands of cross-demographic Jews today who stand bravely on frontlines and oppose the perpetual violence of the Israeli state.
I originally sought to write this piece about global failures to actualize “never again” in Cambodia, Bangladesh, Rwanda, Sudan, Congo - among other historic and ongoing genocides. Central to all of these conflicts - and the debates around whether “genocide” is an applicable term - is a concerted effort to deny history and Global North complicity. Colonialism is not only a shared past that these geographies share, it is a central cause of conflict. It leaves behind borders that scatter and entrap the people within, social hierarchies upheld by bureaucracy and weapons, and disparities in how food, water, shelter and human decency are allocated.
The timing of Britain’s support of Zionism is explicitly and not coincidentally aligned with brazen colonization efforts taking place in Europe in the early 20th century. Ignoring and denying the colonial underpinnings of Israel’s inception is not only ahistoric, but is a key instrument of keeping people divided. As the Global South diasporas rally with clarity and vigor around colonialism and its relation to a free Palestine, we need to understand how Jewish oppression was weaponized in a colonial project to create Palestinian oppression. We need to see how the Israeli state and Zionists are continuing their displacement and erasure of Palestinians while systematically silencing Jews who view their Judaism, their history, and their moral requirements differently. That same silencing and infantilization is being extended to Global South diasporas because what unites us all is the very history they wish to suppress: that colonialism and its effects live on with violent vigor.