In 1890, 99.7% of world Jewry lived outside of Palestine. In 1897, Theodore Herzl, one of the founding fathers of Zionism, published an article called Mauschel. This word is an epithet derived from mauschein, to “speak German with a Yiddish accent,” which is the equivalent to the slur kike in English. In this article he divided the Jewish world in two: the Jiden (Yid) and the Juden (Jew). For Herzl, a “Yid” — a Yiddish-speaking Eastern European Jew — was the epitome of evil, a degenerated thing that was less than human. A Jew was someone brave, “masculine,” energetic, while a Yid was a parasite. Herzl hated the Yid; he despised Eastern European Jews, seeing in them the truth of antisemitic slurs. Sure that he was better than these degenerate Ostjuden, these Yids, Herzl used this opportunity to clearly delineate the difference between the two Jewish “types.”

Herzl proposed the “evacuation” of the Jews from Europe — identical to the antisemitic plan for deportation and expulsion. Herzl and the other founding Zionists were assured that the antisemites of Europe — who shared their hatred of the Jiden Jew, which Herzl imbued with every antisemitic trope — would support their project. Zionism, in its inception, was tied up with antisemitism.

He wrote, “We want to let respectable antisemites participate in our project, respecting their independence which is valuable to us as a sort of people’s control authority.” In 1922, he wrote, “It would be an excellent idea to call in respectable, accredited anti-Semites as liquidators of [Jewish] property. To the people they would vouch for the fact that we do not want to bring about the impoverishment of the countries we leave. The anti-Semites will become our most dependable friends, the anti-Semitic countries our allies.”

This is not an inconsequential aside. The Shoah was predicated on working with Zionists. Most modern Western Zionists have never heard, for instance, of the Haavara (Transfer) Agreement, signed on August 25, 1933 between the Zionist Haavara corporation and the Nazi government. Under this agreement, the Nazis expatriated 60,000 German Jews to Palestine between 1933 and 1939.

Zionists attacked Yiddish as the national language of the Ostjuden people. The most prominent Zionists were all western European Jews who had acculturated to their local nationalities; they despised the eastern Ostjuden, and made this clear in their repeated antisemitic remarks. Vladimir Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the founder of Revisionist Zionism and the murderous Irgun militia, wrote “[B]ecause the Yid is ugly, sickly, and lacks decorum, we shall endow the ideal image of the Hebrew with masculine beauty. The Yid is trodden upon and easily frightened…. The Yid is despised by all…” “Early Zionists,” writes Sarah Levy in Jacobin, “partnered with a rabidly antisemitic ruling class to secure funding for their colonial project in Palestine.” In return, Zionists aided British efforts to defeat left-wing International Jews like Marx, Trotsky, Béla Kun, Rosa Luxemburg and Emma Goldman.

The Jewish workers of Eastern Europe were doubly oppressed; first as Jews, then as workers. They were a citadel of revolutionary action in the early 20th century. The Zionists promised to storm and empty that citadel if the rulers of Europe would only give them the chance.

Zionism is Settler Colonialism

Long before anyone dreamed of a Jewish state in Palestine, the largest and most significant Ashkenazi community could be found in Poland. In the late Middle Ages the Jews were violently expelled from France, England, the German states and Spain. In each of these kingdoms, Jews were by law prevented from farming or working in many gilded crafts. They were forced to serve as bankers and whitesmiths, and forbidden from owning land so the crown could seize their moveable property. Poland never expelled its Jews. Quite the reverse; they were given protection under the law of the Polish Commonwealth and eventually the Jews of Poland accounted for three-quarters of the entire population of Jews in the world.

This came to an abrupt end with the First Partition of Poland in 1772, when the country was carved up by the Russian Empire, Prussia, and Austria. By 1795, Poland was swallowed entirely. The Russian Empire absorbed most of the Jewish territories, so the bulk of European Jewry passed into Russia.

At roughly the same time, the Russian Empire acquired territory around the Black Sea from the Ottoman Empire through the Russo-Ottoman wars. The Black Sea region was lightly peopled by semi-nomadic peoples, and the rulers of the Russian Empire — the ethnic “Great” Russians, or “Black” Russians (referring to the black soil in the most populous parts of that empire) — wanted to settle the territory and establish colonies to increase the overall population, and therefore increase the size of any potential army and the economic wealth the Black Sea region could contribute to the imperial Tsarist state.

To achieve this, Catherine the Great created the Pale of Settlement in 1791. The movement of all ethnic groups was heavily restricted by law in the Russian Empire, but the Pale placed unprecedented restrictions on the newly-acquired Jewish “citizens” of former Poland. The proclamations creating the Pale restricted Jews within the Empire to a line of imperial provinces from the North Sea down to the Black Sea. Jewish merchants were forbidden from doing business in the rest of Russia. Catherine granted permission for the Jews to settle along the Black Sea, in the new territories, where they would be permitted to own farms and land. The population of Russian Jewry, unable to subsist on the meager agricultural output of the Pale, were forced to migrate southwards. This was, of course, the plan of the Tsarist government: to use the Jews as a kind of colonist shock-troops to create a buffer with the Ottomans and provide new wealth to the Tsar.

The Pale soon became a kind of hell, with a series of increasingly antisemitic Tsars — and the reasons for this deep hatred can be traced back to the reinforcing effect played by the government’s material reliance on the oppression in the Pale — targeting Russia’s Jewish people, who were not, by law, permitted to escape, with vicious pogroms and campaigns of government theft.

What does this have to do with Israel?

It was in this environment that the dream of a Jewish homeland in Palestine was created. The founders of ideological Zionism took Catherine the Great’s plan for settlement and paraded it around Europe for eighty years until it was finally accepted. Instead of the Black Sea, the settler shock-troops would move to Palestine, where, after World War I, Ottoman control had begun to collapse. Zionism is nothing more than a devil’s bargain, struck between the intellectual strata of the wealthiest elements of the Pale of Settlement and the vicious antisemitic ruling class of the European states. “Give us this land, and we will open it up to Europe — and in the meantime, you’ll be rid of us, and we will solve for you the question of what to do with your Jews.’”

Zionist settler colonialism was the answer to the “Jewish Question” shared between petit-bourgeois Jews and the antisemities of Europe. The defenders of the Zionist state claim that world Jewry has a historic claim on the land of Palestine. But whether someone has a legal or moral claim on land based on some historical past doesn’t determine whether it is a settler colony. In fact, as we will see, European Jewry has no claim on Palestine through blood, even if the fatally-tainted fascist logic of blood-inherited right to land (blood and soil) were sound, which it is not. Indeed, even the Zionist’s invocation of history is flawed, as it derives from a holy text, rather than any other historic document. So, what is settler colonialism?

 Settler colonies differ from “classical” colonies in an important way. In the classical colony, foreign settlers exploit the Indigenous population. This is not so in settler colonies. Settler colonies establish and maintain a relationship in which the settler population seeks to utterly eliminate the Indigenous population. The categories  of settler and Indigenous person cannot exist without one another: without a settler, there is no indigeneity. Without Indigenous peoples, there are no settlers.

Settler colonialism occurs where foreign settlers arrive in an inhabited territory and found a new society — in the meantime, displacing or eliminating the existing people and destroying their societies. The archetypical settler colony is, of course, the vast continental settler republic of the United States of America, which even to this day is “perfecting” its genocide of the Indigenous population of Turtle Island and the North American continent.

First, to break down and understand the colonial relationship, we must identify an external, settler population. Who were the Jews coming into Palestine? They were Europeans. They came from European cultures, European societies, and spoke primarily Yiddish, or one of the Romance languages. Antisemites will insist that the Jews remain Jews wherever they go — that there is some metaphysical and specifically non-European “Jewishness” to them. But the creation of the Zionist state necessitated the creation of a new Hebrew language to go along with it.

The foundation of the Zionist project also coincided with the attempt to build up a Hebrew nation, to fuse together branches of Jewry from all over Europe. For this, the Zionists turned to the eradication of the many branches of the Yiddish language. If they were one nation, they would need to share a language. Thus was created the new Hebrew — not the ancient, liturgical Hebrew used as a lingua franca for Jewish communities throughout history, but a construction of what would become a new, native, national tongue. Hebrew had not been spoken natively since the classical period. In the late 19th and early 20th century, the first modern Hebrew schools were founded in Palestine by early Zionists.

For Zionists, the profusion of Yiddish languages was not acceptable. Yiddish was linked with the diaspora which, as we shall see, the Zionists despise. It was linked with Communism and egalitarian movements, which the wealthy antisemitic people funding Zionism despised. Hebrew must replace it. Yiddish had to go.
Recall that in the late 19th century, 99.7% of world Jewry lived outside of Palestine. The Jewish population of Palestine was somewhere between 2-5% of the population in that region, roughly 20,000 or so individuals. Between 1882 and 1903, 35,000 Zionist Jews migrated to Ottoman Palestine from Russia and Romania. Between 1901 and 1914, 40,000 more European Jews migrated to Ottoman Palestine, mostly from Eastern Europe.

Between 1919 and 1923, 40,000 Eastern European Jews migrated to the new British Mandatory Palestine. Between 1924 and 1929, 82,000 Jews migrated into the region. Between 1929 and 1939, with the Haavara and the rise of Nazism in Germany, the triumphant Zionist movement welcomed some 250,000 Jews. From 20,000 Arabic Jews at the turn of the century, the population of the region now contained 460,000 or so European Jews — over 20 times the number of Arabic Jews. After the Nakba and the founding of the Zionist state, the Jewish population of Israel doubled again — from 650,000 to 1.33 million immigrating European Jews.

The laws of the Zionist state welcome the citizenship of any Jew from around the world — the “right of return” — in theory, while heavily penalizing and discriminating against Black Jews in reality. Each year, the settler population of the Zionist state is bolstered by anywhere between 20,000 to 40,000 new Jews exercising the “right to return.”

All of this at least begins to suggest the presence of a settler colony in Palestine. To confirm this, let us turn to the 1948 foundation of the Zionist state itself. How did this state come to be? In late 1947, the UN attempted to partition British Mandatory Palestine after internecine slaughter of Palestinians by Zionist settlers seeking access to land. With about 32% of the population of Mandatory Palestine, the Jews were allocated 56% of the territory. Once the UN adopted this resolution, the Arab Higher Committee began a general strike in protest.

Retaliation for settler violence began on November 30 of 1947. The British troops did nothing. This began a civil war in Mandatory Palestine, where the Haganah — the Zionist paramilitary organization, a coalition of settler militias — took the lead. In 1948, when the British withdrew, the paramilitaries declared the foundation of the State of Israel and absorbed the militia Haganah as the so-called Israeli “Defense” Force. They immediately invaded the state of Palestine created by the UN resolution.

During this war, the Haganah made use of a typical settler colonial tactic: bacteriological warfare. They used typhoid bacteria to contaminate the wells in conquered villages to prevent the population from returning. The Haganah also displaced some 700,000 Palestinians — approximately 80% of the Palestinian Arabs living in the territory. Entire towns were erased from the map. Historical sites were destroyed. The Palestinian names of geographic features were changed. Over 80% of the mosques in Palestine were destroyed by the Zionist state. Its leaders enacted laws to legalize the theft of Palestinian land; those displaced Palestinians from 1948 — known as the Nakba, the Catastrophe — were “cleansed” from the Zionist state to give land to the Jewish settlers.

This is the pattern of settler colonialism. It continues today; the loss of land by way of evictions and the building of settlements in the ever-shrinking reservations of Palestinian control is settlement. The Zionists don’t deny this. The “communities” they’re building are self-consciously called settlements. They intend to erase the Palestinians from the land, and from history if they can. The very structure of Zionist society is designed to destroy any semblance of a Palestinian culture.

Today, Palestine is under an apartheid occupation. They maintain separate travel papers, separate license plates for Jews and Palestinians. Palestinians have severely restricted movement; they can’t be out past curfew or leave their reservations without passing through checkpoints, stating their purpose, showing their passes. There is little an Algerian of 1960 wouldn’t recognize in the Zionist state, familiar as they were with the exact same kind of restrictions by the occupying French government. Similar controls are exercised over the reservations of indigenous American Indians.

Indigeneity isn’t created by moral or legal claims to the soil dating back to a holy text; it is created by systems of oppression that are still in operation and that favor settlers over indigenous peoples. Just as the settler colony of the U.S. creates indigeneity among the American Indian population of the U.S., the settler colony of Israel creates indigeneity among Palestinians. Again, let us turn to the founders of the Zionist movement:

“If His Majesty the Sultan were to give us Palestine,” wrote Hertzl in his 1896 Der Judenstaat, “we could offer to resolve Turkey’s finances. For Europe, we would form part of a bulwark against Asia. There, we would serve as the advance post of civilisation against barbarism.” (emphasis added.)

Jabotisnky, that founder of the murderous Irgun, wrote in his 1929 article The Iron Wall that:

The native populations, civilised or uncivilised, have always stubbornly resisted the colonists, irrespective of whether they were civilised or savage…. Palestine has a very large potential absorptive capacity, meaning that there is room for a great many Jews in the country without displacing a single Arab. There is only one thing the Zionists want, and it is that one thing that the Arabs do not want, for that is the way by which the Jews would gradually become the majority, and then a Jewish Government would follow automatically, and the future of the Arab minority would depend on the goodwill of the Jews; and a minority status is not a good thing, as the Jews themselves are never tired of pointing out. So there is no “misunderstanding”.

The Zionists want only one thing, Jewish immigration; and this Jewish immigration is what the Arabs do not want….

We cannot offer any adequate compensation to the Palestinian Arabs in return for Palestine. And therefore, there is no likelihood of any voluntary agreement being reached.

They didn’t mince words, those Zionists of yesteryear. They were explicit, open, and conscious of their position as colonists. They relished it. It is only the American Zionist who hides this belief, while Netanyahu and the even-farther-right in occupied Palestine embrace it in their media.

Zionism is Antisemitism

“Negation of the diaspora” is the goal of the Zionist camp. That is, the destruction of all Jewish life except that which has been sanctioned by the Zionists themselves. Those Jews who are not within the borders of the Zionist state, who are not willing to murder for the Zionist state, aren’t Jews in the eyes of Zionists — we are Yids.

The diaspora is the Jewish community outside of Palestine. Diaspora is a term that refers to the semi-mythical scattering of Jews by the Romans. In fact, Jews in Europe are not lineally related to the Jews of Palestine. The eugenicist lie of the late Victorian and early 20th century, that Jews are all relatives of some depraved family tree and all bear the same genes, is just that: a lie. Zionists trumpet this antisemitic position as their truth.

Jews themselves participate in this myth-making. For instance, the Ladino commentary on Exodus Me-am Loez, written by Isaac Magrisso in the eighteenth century, says that, “Israel took upon themselves a covenant that was contracted in blood.” In what appears to be an attempt to counter the 15th century Iberian Christian doctrine of blood purity (limpieza de sangre), Magrisso proposed that the blood covenant of Mount Sinai had created a “pure” nation of Israel. Zionists adopted this same evil language. Martin Buber wrote in 1967 that “[the Jew] senses in this immortality of the generations a community of blood.”

David Biale, the Emanuel Ringelbaum Distinguished Professor of Jewish History Emeritus at the University of California, Davis, remarks that “[I]n biblical as in modern times, the Jews never were a racial group… The most important symbol of blood in Judaism is not what is transmitted from parents to children but rather the blood of the covenant of Exodus 24, that is, the rituals and beliefs that the community has shared and practiced.”

In seeking to extinguish the diaspora, the Zionists make the world unsafe for Jews. They deny that Jews can assimilate and maintain their Jewish identity, that they can be loyal citizens of any state. The canard of dual-loyalty — that Jews are at once both loyal to the Jewish community and the state, and will choose their community first (a trope, by the by, originally applied to Catholics by the Protestants) — is repeated as gospel by the Zionists and their settler state.

Right-wing nationalists and evangelical Christians share Zionism with Jewish Zionists. For them, the expulsion of Jews, the negation of the diaspora, is a long-held dream. The largest Zionist group in the U.S. Empire, for instance, is the virulently antisemitic Christians United for Israel. Zionism is the flesh and blood of white supremacy. The Ashkenazim ruling class of Israel makes alliances with right-wing politicians in other countries on the basis of anti-Arab racism and Islamophobia.

Zionism does not make Jews safe — it makes us profoundly unsafe. It is our enemy.

Who Are the Palestinian People?

Palestine was gradually Arabized over the Middle Ages, with the local people becoming culturally and linguistically Arabic. The prevailing view of the origins of the Palestinian nation, in the sense that we understand modern nations, places it in the early decades of the 20th century, roughly a century after the emergence of nationhood as a concept. Filastini, Palestinian, was introduced as a term in the late 19th century and spread by 1908 so that many Ottoman subjects referred to the now Arabized locals as “Palestinian people.” Although national identities arose throughout Europe during the mid-1800s, in Palestine this process didn’t occur until the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century and was primarily in response to pressures exerted by the Ottoman rulers of Palestine. A sense of nationhood sprang up to demand national self-determination from the appointed Ottoman government.

Palestinians are overwhelmingly Muslim, although 6% are Christians, and there are smaller Druze, Samaritan, and Jewish communities within the overarching national group.

Today, the Palestinian people are deprived of a functioning state. There is limited sovereignty in the West Bank under the Palestinian Authority. The “Gaza strip” is governed by Hamas — an organization, we should note, which was partially installed by Zionist support from Israel to give the right-wing Zionists a suitable enemy to fight and to reduce the support of Marxist groups like the People’s Liberation Front of Palestine — but both regions lack the traditional trappings of statehood. The Zionists continue to destroy water and power plants, forcing the regions to rely on Zionist utilities piped into the area. This allows the Zionists to collect the money for supplying them, and, as we have seen in this latest and most horrible phase of the Zionist occupation, to shut them off as “punishment.”

Israel, the Grinning Skull of Fascism

The Zionist state has always stood with the oppressors, all over the world, because it is a puppet of the world-imperialist United States. It retained strong ties with South Africa during apartheid; it maintained trade relations with Rhodesia, despite the U.N. bans on trade with that murderous government.

Weapons systems and techniques that will be used in the imperial heartland, in the domestic U.S. Empire, are tested first on the Palestinians by Zionist police and soldiers. The most advanced weapons systems are created in the Zionist state by Zionist corporations. They are turned on the people of Palestine and then, later, brought to domestic U.S. soil. George Floyd was killed with a chokehold technique perfect by IDF soldiers.

As the U.S. ruling class strives to perfect and solidify its technocratic government here, the template has already been tried in the Zionist state. The Zionist state, as a technocratic terror regime, prefigures the future of the U.S. state. Accepted members of the white ruling class and those few kapos selected from among the oppressed nationalities will be elevated to the status of technocrats. Everyone else will be subject to the checkpoints, the surveillance, the boot-on-the-neck, the iron heel.

What is Zionism?

It is the death of labor.

It is the grin of capital.

It is the flag of the United States of America.