Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, June/July 2021, pp. 22-23
The Middle East in the Far East
By John Gee
SETTLER COLONIALISM has been the origin of many modern states, including the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. However, there is one important difference between most modern states founded on this model and Israel.
In the early stages of growth of settler colonies, such as those of North America or Australia, the newcomers’ relations with the indigenous populations loomed large in their consciousness. The process of their expropriation was drawn out and their resistance was experienced, by the settler population, as a threat, particularly in the frontier zones where the two societies met. This encouraged a high degree of solidarity among the colonists until late in the settlement process: they inhabited a land that was home to other peoples, they feared indigenous resistance and their histories were created and shaped by their experience as the colonizers.
All societies develop and change. In some cases, such as in Kenya, or what are now Zimbabwe and Malaysia, settlers were very few compared to the indigenous population and the latter eventually achieved independence. In others, where the settler population came to constitute the great majority of the population, new independent states were founded, such as the United States, Canada and Australia. Over the generations, people who had originated as colonists came to think of themselves as indigenous and the lands on which they lived as unquestionably theirs. Their societies tend to develop like those of other countries. No longer facing “external threats,” new priorities came to the fore in their lives as institutions and societal structures emerged that were no longer constrained with the imperatives of colonialism.
In particular, class conflicts within these societies could become quite acute. In the U.S., for example, while there was a frontier, class conflicts were somewhat muted, as the ability to migrate westwards offered hope of a better life to the propertyless of the east and served to keep East Coast wages high compared to Europe. But with the closing of the frontier, the U.S. experienced labor conflicts of an intensity greater than those usual in the Old World.
A few settler societies were in a position intermediate between these kinds. People of settler origin formed a substantial minority within the total population, and normalization either as independent states of the indigenous or of an overwhelmingly dominant colonial population proved extremely difficult. In the case of South Africa, the indigenous were first excluded from power and deprived of possession of much of their land and then, under apartheid, the exclusion of the black majority from power over their country was excused by classifying them as citizens of “homelands” who had no claim on white South African territory at all, though most continued to live and work there.
Israel was a historical latecomer as a settler colonial state. Had the conflict that followed the 1947 U.N. partition vote resulted in the expansion of the proposed Jewish state to the borders Israel actually attained, but with the indigenous Palestinians remaining in situ, it would have contained a clear Palestinian majority in ownership of the great majority of its easily habitable land, limiting the scope for settling new arrivals. The new state would then have had to choose between becoming a democratic state of equal citizens, regardless of nationality or religion, or installing its own version of apartheid.
The only reason this did not happen at that time was because the great majority of the Palestinians, in what became Israel, were expelled. The conditions for the new state to be a democracy were established by the exclusion from its territory of the indigenous people, who could not be trusted to endorse their own dispossession. There was no need for something as damaging to the international status and self-image of Israel as a formal regime of apartheid, since the remnants of the Palestinian people living within its ’48 borders were in no position to veto anything it wished to do and there was a broad consensus among the new settler majority on their exclusion from power.
Limited within its 1948 borders, Israel might well, over time, have followed in the path of the U.S., Canada and Australia. By the 1960s, class conflicts within Israeli Jewish society were growing, tensions over secular/religious and Ashkenazi/oriental Jews were becoming more pronounced and individuals who were born in Palestine/Israel were moving up the leadership ladder. In 1966, the military government under which Palestinian citizens of Israel had lived was terminated—a sign that the government believed that less extreme means of control were now adequate. Little thought was given to Palestinians elsewhere, even by the intelligence services: their fate seemed to have been sealed, their feelings and wishes of no consequence.
However, Israel’s borders did not remain static. The tendency toward normalization was interrupted as a result of the 1967 war and particularly by the maintenance of a regime of occupation and colonization in the West Bank and Gaza Strip that followed. Palestinian resistance has affirmed that the Palestinian people have not disappeared or assimilated into other Arab societies. The higher growth rate of the Palestinian population under Israeli rule, compared to the Israeli Jewish population, has fed fears about the “demographic question” of the latter once again becoming a minority in historic Palestine, as indeed they now are.
Withdrawing from the West Bank and Gaza Strip would have allowed Israel to maintain a large Jewish majority within its borders, but a full withdrawal was not contemplated. An appetite for retaining control was fed by its ideological underpinnings, which led to the establishment of settlements within the newly occupied lands. They were bound to provoke strong opposition from the Palestinians, particularly when built in close proximity to Palestinian population centers, on land taken from Palestinian owners or customary users. It is small wonder that settlements became breeding grounds for racist extremism and aggressive nationalism as the narrative increasingly hardened into “us versus them.”
Distinctions have often been made between ideological settlers, driven by nationalist views, and non-ideological settlers, who have moved into the West Bank because of financial incentives, low cost housing and a better environment, but those distinctions don’t really count for much. Once settled into a house in the West Bank, families are unlikely to support politicians who appear to pursue policies that might prejudice their ability to stay. So, it should be no surprise that the overwhelming majority give their electoral support to the most chauvinist parties: among the settlers, political acceptability starts with the Likud and ends with supporters of the once-outlawed racist politics of Meir Kahane. As colonist numbers and influence have expanded, they have dragged the center point of Israeli politics further and further toward extreme nationalism and racism, driving Israeli society as a whole away from normalization. With all the faults of their own society before them, Americans who recognize this are still likely to say, “That’s not us.”
Things will only get worse while the regime of occupation, colonization and repression continues. The road to normalization for Israel’s Jewish majority will be through a break with the dominant thinking and practices, as well as through respect for the rights and humanity of the Palestinians, which will not occur without effective Palestinian resistance, realignments within Israeli politics, and strong external pressure.
John Gee is a free-lance journalist based in Singapore and the author of Unequal Conflict: The Palestinians and Israel.
