It’s been a long time since I read either Fayez Sayegh’s seminal Zionist Colonialism in Palestine (1965) or Maxime Rodinson’s Israel: A Colonial-Settler State? (1973.) In the intervening decades, a lot has happened…
Sayegh was one of the intellectual fathers of the famous “Zionism is Racism” resolution that UN General Assembly adopted in 1975, and rescinded, under super-heavy American pressure, 16 years later. He died in 1980…
Rodinson was a brilliant French Marxist and an early and vocal supporter of Palestinian rights. (His use of the question-mark in his book’s title I emulated in my 2004 book Amnesty After Atrocity?; in both cases, it was a way of indicating that we had heard and engaged with the arguments of the critics of our main thesis.) Rodinson died in 2004…
Other things that have happened since I read those two books were:
- The academic field of “settler colonial studies” became far, far more advanced than it was back in the mid-1970s, including with the establishment of the journal Settler Colonial Studies in 2010-11. Several of the key pioneers in this emerging field, including Patrick Wolfe and Lorenzo Veracini— both of them, Australian scholars– have written extensively about Zionism as a form of settler colonialism. Wolfe’s seminal article “Settler colonialism and the elimination of the native”, published in 2006 in the Journal of Genocide Research, contained numerous intriguing insights into the many forms of erasure the Zionists deployed against Palestinian Indigenes, and the observation that “elimination is an organizing principle of settler-colonial society rather than a one-off… occurrence.” For his part, Veracini– who was the founding editor of Settler Colonial Studies— authored a whole book titled Israel and Settler Society (Pluto Press, 2006.)
- At a more modest level, for my part, back in 2021 I launched a project titled “Project 500 Years” to try to track the origins and development of the process by which five small or relatively small powers perched on the Western coast of Europe came to dominate all the processes of international politics and economics, at first on their own and then with the increasing agency of some of their colonial offshoots (especially the Anglophone offshoots.) Those five colonial powers were, in chronological order of the initiation of their projects: Portugal, Spain, England, Holland/Netherlands, and France. You can see the main products of that inquiry here.
Throughout the decades I have retained the strong interest in the Palestine Question that I first developed back in 1970. And with the Palestine Question now clearly one of the main fulcrums (fulcra?) of the current big shifts in the global balance I thought it useful to go back and see what we might learn by (re-)examining the Zionist project in a comparative as well as world-historical way, including by exploring the ways it is similar and the ways it is different from the other, “West”-origined settler-colonial projects of the past 500 years.
This essay is my first stab at doing this. (Fully realizing that numerous people in the settler-colonial studies field have already done considerable good work in this area, which I am still catching up with.)
Back in 2015, the historian of early America Nancy Shoemaker published an extremely helpful short article, “A Typology of Colonialism.” She noted that her examples came from US and Pacific history, but her typology seems valid for just about all the projects undertaken by the five West-European powers that violently created transoceanic empires starting in the 15th century.
In her typology, Shoemaker identified twelve different forms of the colonial beast, “distinguished mainly by colonizers’ motivations.” They are:
| Settler Colonialism | Planter Colonialism |
| Extractive Colonialism | Trade Colonialism |
| Transport Colonialism | Imperial Power Colonialism |
| NIMBY Colonialism | Legal Colonialism |
| Rogue Colonialism | Missionary Colonialism |
| Romantic Colonialism | Postcolonial Colonialism |
Shoemaker’s typology seems generally very helpful, though I note that her categories are probably not mutually exclusive in any given use case. Israel, for example, clearly falls in the category of Settler Colonialism, the defining feature of which Shoemaker defines thus: “Employing a logic of elimination,’ as Patrick Wolfe put it in the American Historical Review, they attempt to engineer the disappearance of the original inhabitants everywhere except in nostalgia.” But for many of the “Western” supporters of the Zionist project, it was also to some extent an instance of NIMBY Colonialism– that is, a project whereby the initiating/supporting metropolitan powers relocate to far distant shores people or projects that they don’t want too close to home. Shoemaker provides instances of that in Botany Bay in Australia, and the French and Chilean penal colonies on distant Pacific islands. (There were other notable penal colonies in Martinique and also Georgia.) But getting rid of, or re-directing, Jewish people from Europe to Palestine was also a non-trivial motivator for Western support of Zionism…
Regarding my own inquiries in 2021 into the origins of the five big European-origined global empires of the past five centuries, I published these essays in my “500 Years” project that are relevant to the present inquiry:
| The hubris of the long-distance empire | One of the key conclusions in this essay was: “if you’re running a long-distance, sea-based (or more recently, air-based) empire, you can treat conquered peoples with utmost disrespect and cruelty. If they rebel, you can round them up and ship them off to another part of your empire… and then, you can replace them with either members of your own nation (as settlers) or with a bunch of enslaved people whom you ship over from another of your imperial holdings.” |
| Portugal and the origins of “the West” | This essay tracked the pioneering role that Portugal played, from 1415 CE on, in building a trans-oceanic empire, first down the coast of West Africa and then by entering and traversing the Indian Ocean. It identified the strong counter-Muslim (as well as purely avaricious) motivations of those early moves; the extreme cruelty employed by early Portuguese “navigators”; and the role of their empire in helping to establish/consolidate the (otherwise, fairly improbable) concept of Portuguese nationhood. |
| More on Portugal’s use of exemplary terror | This one expanded on this aspect of Portugal’s early colonial ventures, especially in the Indian Ocean. |
| Language, empire, nation, state | This essay explored the role that the need for communications within those early imperial networks played in codifying what became each network’s “national” language. A similar essay could be written about the need for trusted risk sharing/management mechanisms in each colonial network leading to the consolidation of “national” financial institutions. Takeaway: The five empires played a huge role in building the sense (and reality) of nationhood within their respective metropoles. |
| The “innovation” of transoceanic empires with cannons | Here, I built on the thesis of the first of these essays and noted that the fast and heavily-armed ships employed by the builders of those five empires gave them a “hit and run” capability not enjoyed by the builders of large land empires, who after conquest still had to find a way to live with their (remaining) neighbors… |
So in pursuit of my current project here, I tried to build a typology of significantly sized settler colonialisms in terms of their outcome as visible today. Here’s my first stab at this:
| TYPOLOGY OF SETTLER COLONIALISMS, BY OUTCOME | |
| Outcome, as visible today | Instances |
| 1. Settler entity dominance, and near-total erasure/elimination of the Indigenes | USA, Canada, Australia, Argentina, Brazil |
| 2. Settler entity dominance, with less than total but still significant erasure of Indigenes | New Zealand (Aotearoa), Chile, Peru… |
| 3. Settler entity dominance, but with significant accommodations to the Indigenes | Mexico, Bolivia… |
| 4. Mixed outcome | South Africa, Hong Kong |
| 5. Evacuation of the nearly all the settlers, termination of their ruling entity and its replacement with one controlled by Indigenes | Algeria, Mozambique, Angola, Malaysia, Kenya, Indonesia, Zimbabwe, Canton |
| 6. Geographically partial evacuation of the settlers and their entity, and establishment of Indigenous rule in the areas evacuated. | Ireland |
Some notes on that table:
- It is only a first stab! I would much welcome corrections, additions, comments!
- I was trying to include only colonial projects in which its authors aimed explicitly at the establishment of a stable and self-perpetuating community of colonial settlers and the perpetuation of this community’s rule over the territory in question– and had also achieved a non-trivial portion of these goals as of around 1935 CE. (Ireland was a chronological outlier, but I think it an important case.)
- I excluded many cases of colonial projects in which I thought the establishment of a stable and self-perpetuating community of colonial settlers was not a primary goal. That included just about all of West Asia. (I also did not include India, but possibly should have?)
- The main variable in the first column is the degree of success the settler-colonial project could register as of 2025 CE. Other variables could of course have been chosen…
Israel is, obviously, not in the table above. As of 1935 CE, the Zionist project– which was quintessentially a settler colonial project!– was still only a set of small scattered colonies linked by a network of plans and institutions. But it did not (yet) have a ruling political entity in Palestine, where its colonies existed only at the indulgence of the territory’s British rulers.
One absolutely key aspect of the Zionist project has always been its deeply dyschronous nature in terms of the the trends at play everywhere else in the world system! As I’ve noted several times recently, including here, the UN adopted the Partition Plan that provided the “birth certificate” for the establishment of an explicitly Jewish State in Palestine four months after it had welcomed India and Pakistan into membership, following those states’ achievement of independence from Britain.
There are other aspects of the Zionist project, in addition to its dyschrony, that make it different from other projects within the family of Western-origined settler colonialisms. But there are numerous parallels/similarities, as well, including these:
- Project participants claiming they “had to” make this trans-maritime migration in order to flee– often exaggerated levels of– oppression in their home countries? Check! Indeed, the Tudor and Stuart kings of England found it super-helpful to encourage the exodus of religious dissidents like the Catholics or Quakers from England to the shores of North America, where everyone had their own separate piece of the pie where they were supported in the stealing of land and resources from the Indigenes, and encouraged to make money in and for the London-ruled mercantile system.
- Claims of some form of “Divine” pre-ordination of the colonists’ project? Check, check, and check, for many of the Western-origined settler colonial projects around the world. Including, of course, “Manifest destiny” itself.
- The founding of a settler-extremist ruling entity in defiance of, and as a rebellion against, the somewhat more accommodating policies that the metropolitan government wanted to pursue toward the Indigenes? Check, for the settler-extremist revolt that the Anglo colonists of North America launched against London in 1776…
There are a lot more similarities (and differences) that we can explore between the Zionists’ project in Palestine and its other Western sister-projects in other places. But now, I have three questions concerning the Zionist state of Israel. The one I find least important is “A. Where would we place Israel in the above matrix, today?” The ones I am more interested in are, “B. Where might we find Israel, in that matrix, in five years time?” and “C. Where would we like to find Israel, in that matrix, in five years time?”
In terms of probabilities (Question B), I believe just about any of the matrix outcomes, from 1 through 6, would be theoretically possible. There are, quite clearly, significant political forces inside Israel that are pushing very hard to attain Outcome 1. And the Israeli ministers and parliamentarians who favor that outcome have a closely symbiotic relationship with the well-funded networks of grassroots settler extremists who play the same role in Zionist expansion that the “lawless rabble” of White extremists played in 1830, in provoking the expulsion and dispossession of the Cherokees from their ancestral lands in the American South (q.v., Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism…”, pp.391-92.)
By contrast, within global diplomacy, the current strong consensus of of the world’s governments still favors Outcome 6, as represented by the implementation of a robust two-state formula, though it grows ever harder to envision how that might be accomplished. If the Zionist settler-colonial diehards currently ravaging Palestinian communities throughout the West Bank are to be pushed back, not just from implementing those violently expansionist plans but also from the many luxurious, well-networked, and well-defended colonies that they have already established throughout the whole West Bank in the past 58 years, then who or what force will be able to accomplish that??
(We can note that there were approximately one million French settlers in Algeria prior to the Algerians winning their independence in 1962. And the French government and society had long considered Algeria to be an integral part of France. After Pres. De Gaulle decided he needed to leave Algeria there was some violence there– and also inside France itself. But nearly all those million colons were evacuated safely. Can we see the prospect of any Israeli De Gaulle taking a similarly momentous decision?)
But also, if that feat should, by some means be accomplished, then what happens to the Zionist project as a whole? Does it just redraw its aims and seek to optimize its performance within the pre-1967 borders? Or does the project as a whole sputter and die, once it is deprived of the super-charged oxygen of the seizure of land and resources from throughout the West Bank? Or does it metastasize into something new, different, and quite possibly very threatening to the whole global order?
The facts of Israel’s possession of a very advanced nuclear arsenal and of the deep embedment of both Israeli and American Zionists in crucial parts the U.S. high-tech ecosystem, including the mil-tech part of it, should give us pause.
So I have no answers here. I do think the close mesh of relationships that the Zionist state, Israel, has woven with its (also settler-colonial) “Big Brother”, the United States must lie at the heart of any planning about what is to be done about “the Israel Question.”
The symbiosis between Israel and Washington in many ways parallels (at a higher level) the symbiosis between the extremist Zionist settlers and the current Israeli government.
Can Israel’s power– in Palestine, in the rest of West Asia, and in other more distant regions– be reliably curtailed or pushed back so long as Washington is able to continue to dominate so many areas of world affairs?
As Washington’s hegemony over world affairs becomes eroded, which I think is slowly and tenuously starting to happen, most visibly in the economic sphere, will the key decisionmakers here take a serious decision to separate themselves from the fortunes of the (extremist-dominated) Israeli state?
So many questions that still remain unanswerable. But I feel fairly certain that within three to five years the picture will be much clearer. And quite possibly, a lot sooner than that.
