Links to Some of My Published Articles on Israel/Palestine
Predating substack posts
In the immediate aftermath of October 7, 2023, and the start of the Israeli military operation that developed into the current attempted genocide, there were a number of prominent scholars and others who indignantly denied that Zionism was a form or product of colonialism. I understood why they would think that. No nineteenth century European Jew ever thought or said that Jews should emigrate to Palestine in order to steal land, build a militarized state, or establish a supremacist settler colony. Zionism originated in the debate about how to solve the “Jewish question” in Europe. This first essay examines how that attempt to free European Jews nonetheless turned into an effort to steal land, build a militarized state, and establish a supremacist settler colony. To paraphrase Herzl’s epigraph to his manifesto, The Jewish State, “Even if you did not will it, it became reality.”
https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/false-messiahs/
One of the most salient facts of the global response to these events was a sharp dichotomy of the reactions of what are generally known as the West, or Global North, and the Global South. In this brief essay I explain this as the result of the prevalence of two different historical narratives: the Western narrative of the struggle for freedom and democracy against autocracy and totalitarianism, and the post-colonial narrative of the struggle of those largely on the other side of what W. E. B. Dubois called “the color line,” against the domination of much of that same West, which manifested itself to most of the world as the imperialist North. The North/West has yet to produce a coherent narrative that includes both the stories it tells about itself and the experiences that others have had of it:
https://responsiblestatecraft.org/israel-gaza-public-opinion/
The way that the American and much of the Western political leadership spoke about Israel evoked the myths of its pioneer/socialist founding as a refuge for the world’s most persecuted people and seemed uninformed by contemporary reality. I sometimes felt that President Biden’s idea of the State of Israel had been set when he watched the movie Exodus, and that he had not internalized any new information since then. This article was an attempt to wake people up to the religious extremist and supremacist realities that dominate the land between the River and the Sea:
https://mondoweiss.net/2024/03/redemption-through-genocide/
One of the main tools of Israel’s defenders has been, as always, to use the memory of the Holocaust to portray Jews, and therefore the State of Israel (though they are not the same) as eternal victims, striving only to defend themselves from a permanently antisemitic world, in which hostility to Israel is a sui genesis hatred unconnected to that State’s actions. As the international human rights infrastructure was slowly mobilized by the Global South in ways that the North/West had never imagined, Israel’s defenders tried to portray the very institutions founded to prevent the reoccurrence of the Holocaust as desecrating the Holocaust’s memory. Which is a better memorial to that atrocity: the State of Israel or the international human rights regime? I argue it is the latter:
https://www.thenation.com/article/world/israel-palestine-holocaust-antisemitism-war/