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those who claimed Israel as the only democracy in the Middle East were just as likely to claim that America was the oldest democracy in the world. And both claims relied on excluding whole swaths of the population living under the rule of the state.
But it is the journalists themselves who are playing god—it is the journalists who decide which sides are legitimate and which are not, which views shall be considered and which pushed out of the frame. And this power is an extension of the power of other curators of the culture—network execs, producers, publishers—whose core job is deciding which stories get told and which do not. When you are erased from the argument and purged from the narrative, you do not exist.
The tools of control are diverse—drones and observation towers surveil from above; earth mounds and trenches block the roads below. Gates enclose. Checkpoints inspect. Nothing is predictable.
In this way, a people is sundered from itself, and old communal bonds are eroded. The cousin who was once just down the road is walled off. What was once, in living memory, a long walk to court a potential wife in another village is transformed into an impossible obstacle course. And this is built upon the sundering that began in 1948—the sectioning off of Palestinians in Israel proper from those in East Jerusalem, and those in East Jerusalem from those in the West Bank, and those in the West Bank from those in Gaza, and those in Gaza from the world.
This putative “Jewish democracy” is, like its American patron, an expansionist power. Zionism demands, as Levi Eshkol, prime minister of Israel during the 1960s, once put it, “the dowry, not the bride”—that is to say, the land without the Palestinians on it. And every expansionist power needs a good story to justify its plunder.
But “the native population” was savage, and Jabotinsky saw a clear difference between the Jewish colonizer and the Arabs to be colonized. “Culturally they are five hundred years behind us,” wrote Jabotinsky. “They have neither our endurance nor our determination.” The early Zionists might have considered the land of Palestine as their rightful homeland, but they never imagined themselves as “natives.”
Natives, in colonial discourse, were savages with no capacity to improve the land and thus no right to it.
Zionism would free the Arab race from “the veil, the fez, the sickness, the filth, the lack of education.” This narrative of a barbaric Palestine plagued by filth and chaos, as contrasted with an ostensibly pristine and orderly West, has never faded.
The Anglo-American Committee delegates understood Zionism to be the “inevitable giving way of a backward people before a more modern and practical one.” But more, they saw in it a formative episode in their own history—the “conquest of Indians.” Zionists and their allies agreed. Jabotinsky believed the Arab race possessed “the same instinctive jealous love of Palestine, as the old Aztecs felt for ancient Mexico, and the Sioux for their rolling Prairies.”
But I understood that this was a matter not of public history but of deep belief.
Sometimes, you are blessed with a moment where all the dissembling, all the shame, all the politesse are stripped, and evil speaks with clarity. Sometimes it’s in a park named for a nineteenth-century slave trader. And sometimes it’s in a settlement that honors a twentieth-century advocate of that same system. In either case, the clarity is a gift and we should listen close.
much like our own redlined suburbs, they are state projects. In the settlements, first-time homebuyers are eligible for subsidized mortgages at low interest rates to build houses on land they lease at discounted rates—a discount made possible on account of the land being stolen. Factories and farms are propped by a similar array of discounts and subsidies. All infrastructure—roads, water, power, public synagogues, and mikvahs—is heavily subsidized by the state. In this web of subsidies is an incentive to further colonize the land of Palestinians, because further colonization advances a primary
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But what I was beginning to see was that settlement, itself, was violent. When Israel constructs settlements in the West Bank, it extends its borders past the settlements—sometimes onto Palestinian farmland. Palestinian access to this land is almost always contested, and generally granted based on a maze of permits or the mood of the security forces who guard the settlements. In any clash between Palestinians and settlers, the soldiers can be expected to take the side of the settlers. And the settlers are, themselves, often armed perpetrators of violence.
More, they were, in some profound way, suffering for the lie. They had seen more of the world than I had—but not more of humanity itself. Most stunningly, I realized that they were deeply ignorant of their own country’s history, and thus they had no intimate sense of how far their country could fall. A system of supremacy justifies itself through illusion, so that those moments when the illusion can no longer hold always come as a great shock.
there is great pain in understanding that, without your consent, you are complicit in a great crime, in learning that the whole game was rigged in your favor, that there are nations within your nation who have spent all of their collective lives in the Trump years. The pain is in the discovery of your own illegitimacy—that whiteness is power and nothing else.
“It’s the opposite. Lack of justice. The courts are a tool of the oppressor, a tool of the occupation.”
The “Middle East” is the insanity of suicide bombings, the backwardness of a woman peeking out from her niqab. “Democracy” is a flag over Iwo Jima, Washington crossing the Delaware, a working man rising in a town meeting. Overlay the two phrases and a collage emerges—a visual representation of Herzl’s dream of “an outpost of civilization against barbarism.”
The Zionist corpus is filled with such entries, and many of them are little more than analogues for America.
Buried in the claim is another notion—that the worth of a people is defined by their possession of a homeland incorporated as a state. The Palestinians, lacking such a state, had no right to the land and perhaps no rights at all. The charge of being without a homeland or “stateless” was often lodged at Jews themselves. Zionists sought to answer that charge, but they did not dispute its premise. Their model was America’s pilgrims or Minutemen, and the role they saw for Palestinians was thus predictable.
But better than substitute Nazis, the Palestinians gave Israel savage Nazis, third-world barbarians embodying the depraved native in the colonial mind. The Aztec. The Indian. The Zulu. The Arab. In Exodus, the image of marauding Arabs, cowardly and prone to rape, will be familiar to anyone who has seen the depiction of Black people in Griffith’s Birth of a Nation. For just as the vulgar caricature of Black people served the cause of white Redemption, so too did the Arabs in Exodus serve the cause of Zionism.
Bilby’s note speaks to the racecraft at work in the West, and to the absurd boundaries of whiteness and Jews’ uncertain place within it.
In the 1930s, when the Nazis sought precedent for their battery of antisemitic laws, they found it in America—the world’s “leading racist jurisdiction,” writes historian James Q. Whitman.
Righteous violence vented on some brutish, blighted lower caste has always been the key to entry into the fraternity of Western nations. And when those nations feel themselves humiliated, when their national honor is stained, then that venting is at its most terrible.
Elon wrote, “the moral comforts of archaeology are considerable.” Like that of the British before them, Zionist archaeology sought to affirm the Bible as history to affirm its state project. What that project needed was an unbroken narrative, stretching back to time immemorial,
The aim, Alon explained, was to create a “correlation between Jewish heritage and ownership” and to birth a generation who could not imagine anything other than complete Jewish rule over Eretz Israel.
All told, from 1974 to 1993, total annual exports from Tel Aviv to Pretoria averaged $600 million a year. Through all those critical years, Israel was not just an ally of South Africa; it was the very arsenal of apartheid.
Human rights groups disagree and point to the definition enshrined in international law, which defines the crime of apartheid as “inhuman acts committed for the purpose of establishing and maintaining domination by one racial group of persons over any other racial group of persons and systematically oppressing them.” This definition matched everything I saw on the ground during my trip.
The link is colonialism, which has always had a racist cynicism at its core—a belief that the world is not just savage, but that the most dangerous savages tend to live beyond the borders of the West.
By the end of my visit, I understood the Nakba as a particular thing, ranging even beyond any analogies with Jim Crow, colonialism, or apartheid. It is not just the cops shooting your son, though there is that too. It is not just a racist carceral project, though that is here too. And it is not just an inequality before the law, though that was everywhere I looked. It is the thing that each of those devices served—a plunder of your home, a plunder both near and perpetual:
It was important to him that I understand the odds they faced—that they were outnumbered and outgunned, that they fought until their last bullet. It was important to him that I understand that his brother had been blindfolded and shot execution-style. He told me that he was too young to fight, and when the battle seemed lost, he was charged with carrying his sisters, aged three and five, out of the village to safety.
A literature fueled by a profound human experience must necessarily burn at a high flame, and thus a “material handicap” is transformed into a “spiritual advantage,” putting in the hands of the oppressed “the conditions of a classical art,” which is to say the power to haunt people, to move people, and expand the brackets of humanity.
An inhumane system demands inhumans, and so it produces them in stories, editorials, newscasts, movies, and television.
