Israel’s roots in European colonialism explain its genocidal ideology

Israel is carrying out a genocide in Gaza. This is precisely what numerous United Nations experts have determined.

Several countries have joined South Africa in a case in the International Court of Justice accusing Israel of committing genocide against the Palestinian people, and judges at the Hague have stated that it is “plausible” that Tel Aviv is violating the Genocide Convention.

Top Israeli officials have made genocidal calls for the elimination of the Palestinian people, whom they demonize as “human animals”. Israel’s far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich argued that it would be “justified and moral” to starve to death all 2 million Palestinian civilians in Gaza. (He however lamented that the international community would not permit this.)

Some people who do not closely follow geopolitics are utterly confused how a state that claims to represent the Jewish people (although many Jewish people around the world oppose it) could commit such heinous crimes, after European Jews suffered through a horrific genocide at the hands of Nazi Germany and its fascist allies.

To understand the blatant genocide that Israel is carrying out today in Gaza, with the full support of the US government and most of Europe, it is important to study the history of Zionism – the movement that sought to establish a Jewish ethnostate – and to recognize Zionism’s roots in Western colonialism.

Contrary to popular belief, Israel was not founded in response to the barbarism of the Nazi Holocaust. The British empire had already endorsed the creation of an Israeli colonial regime in historic Palestine three decades before, in the Balfour Declaration of 1917, at a time when Europe was colonizing West Asia (a better term for the Middle East).

It is not a coincidence that the Balfour Declaration came immediately after the 1916 Sykes–Picot Agreement, in which the British and French empires carved up the Ottoman empire’s territory and established their own colonies in West Asia.

A map of territories that the British and French empires would control according to the Sykes–Picot Agreement of 1916

Zionism was directly modeled after 19th-century European colonialist movements.

The “founding father” of the political Zionist movement, Theodor Herzl, wrote a letter to Cecil Rhodes, the genocidal colonizer of Africa (after whom Rhodesia was named), asking for help to colonize Palestine. In the letter, Herzl boasted that Zionism was “something colonial”.

Reassuring his European colonial sponsors, Herzl insisted that Israel (which he called “Der Judenstaat”) would “form a part of a wall of defense for Europe in Asia, an outpost of civilization against barbarism”.

This is the same colonial language still used today by Israel’s longest ever serving leader, far-right Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. “We’re protecting you”, Netanyahu told the US Congress in an address in July 2024. “This is not a clash of civilizations. It’s a clash between barbarism and civilization”.

While Israel’s supporters in the 21st century usually downplay the state’s colonial roots, the original Zionist leaders were proud of their colonialist ideology; they didn’t hide it. An influential early Zionist group called itself the Palestine Jewish Colonization Association.

One of Herzl’s major political allies was British Secretary of State for the Colonies Joseph Chamberlain, a blood-soaked, ideologically committed colonialist who violently opposed sovereignty for Ireland and terrorized the peoples living under British colonial rule in Africa.

In fact, the British empire initially considered creating a Zionist regime in Uganda, which it had also colonized in east Africa, before later settling on Palestine. The UK’s 1917 Balfour Declaration was the green light for creating Israel by colonizing Palestine — again, decades before World War II and the Nazi Holocaust.

The Israeli regime’s fascist frenzy today makes more sense when one understands that both Zionism and Nazism originated in European colonialism.

The Nazis wanted to colonize Eastern Europe to have “Lebensraum” (living space), and tried to kill and ethnically cleanse the region’s inhabitants to steal their land; just like Zionists want to colonize historic Palestine and other parts of West Asia to expand the “living space” of their own supremacist ethnostate, by killing and ethnically cleansing the indigenous inhabitants to steal their land.

Zionism’s similarities with fascism were made strikingly clear the very year Israel was founded, in 1948, through the murderous mass ethnic cleansing of Palestinians (known as the Nakba – the Arabic word for “catastrophe”).

None other than Albert Einstein compared Israel to Nazi Germany at the time. In December 1948, Einstein (who in addition to being a renowned physicist was a committed socialist) co-authored a letter in the New York Times alongside other prominent left-wing Jewish intellectuals. They issued an eerily prescient warning (emphasis added):

Among the most disturbing political phenomena of our times is the emergence in the newly created state of Israel of the “Freedom Party” (Tnuat Haherut), a political party closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties. It was formed out of the membership and following of the former Irgun Zvai Leumi, a terrorist, right-wing, chauvinist organization in Palestine.

The current visit of Menachem Begin, leader of this party, to the United States is obviously calculated to give the impression of American support for his party in the coming Israeli elections, and to cement political ties with conservative Zionist elements in the United States. Several Americans of national repute have lent their names to welcome his visit. It is inconceivable that those who oppose fascism throughout the world, if correctly informed as to Mr. Begin’s political record and perspectives, could add their names and support to the movement he represents.

Before irreparable damage is done by way of financial contributions, public manifestations in Begin’s behalf, and the creation in Palestine of the impression that a large segment of America supports Fascist elements in Israel, the American public must be informed as to the record and objectives of Mr. Begin and his movement.

The public avowals of Begin’s party are no guide whatever to its actual character. Today they speak of freedom, democracy and anti-imperialism, whereas until recently they openly preached the doctrine of the Fascist state. It is in its actions that the terrorist party betrays its real character; from its past actions we can judge what it may be expected to do in the future.

Menachem Begin, whom Einstein et al. characterized as a fascist, went on to serve as Israel’s prime minister from 1977 to 1983. The far-right political party that Begin led, Herut, transformed into the most powerful political organization in Israel in the 21st century: Likud, the party of Netanyahu.

In short, the campaign of genocidal destruction that US-backed Israeli forces are unleashing in Palestine in 2024 is far from new; it is a continuation of a centuries-long process of Western colonialism.

What Israel is doing is what the US and Canada did to the Native peoples of North America, what Australia did to the Aboriginal peoples, what Belgium did to Congo, what France did to Algeria, what the UK did to Ireland, and what Germany did to Namibia.

Zionism is colonialism, which is why it is no surprise at all that the Western imperial powers continue to back Israel so strongly. They do not need an Israel lobby to convince them to support colonialism; this is what imperial powers do. The US did not need a lobby to convince it to wage savage imperial wars of aggression against the peoples of Korea, Vietnam, Cuba, Nicaragua, Yugoslavia, Iraq, Libya, etc.

Indigenous Palestinians being expelled by Zionist militias in the Nakba of 1948

After being established in the bloody massacres of the 1948 Nakba, Israel’s colonial regime initially acted as an outpost of the British empire. This was clear when the UK (and France) intervened to help Israel fight against Egypt’s revolutionary anti-colonialist pan-Arab leader Gamal Abdel Nasser, after he nationalized the Suez canal in the so-called “Suez crisis” of 1956 (which was really a crisis of colonialism, in which a formerly colonized nation asserted sovereign, popular control over its territory and infrastructure, so the colonial powers that had profited from that infrastructure invaded to try to stop it).

The United States subsequently overtook Great Britain, and, since 1967, Israel has been an outpost of the US empire. Washington has used the colonialist Zionist regime as a vicious attack dog to try to liquidate all anti-imperialist opposition forces in West Asia, first targeting communists, then Arab nationalists, and now Islamic-nationalist groups fighting for national liberation.

As former US Secretary of State and NATO commander Alexander Haig boasted, “Israel is the largest American aircraft carrier in the world that cannot be sunk”.