Claims of alleged ‘Zionist imperialism’ are flat-out false
It’s not a Palestinian state that needs creation. It’s acceptance by the Palestinians of the rightful and peaceful existence of Israel as a Jewish state.
Israel is a state. It is a state set up under the explicit auspices of the United Nations, in 1947-48, in what was intended to be a rational and peaceful two-state solution to long-running disputes between the Jews and the Arabs in the British mandate territory of Palestine. The Jews accepted the UN proposal. The Arab leadership rejected it. They immediately set about trying to destroy the nascent state of Israel. They failed totally. But they have never come to the table to negotiate a two-state solution in good faith.
This is not a matter of settlements on the West Bank or of Israeli treatment of the Palestinian Authority/Fatah/Palestine Liberation Organisation. There simply has never been a Palestinian Arab leadership that was prepared to accept the radical defeat of efforts to destroy Israel and to lead Palestinian Arabs to lay down their arms and make a viable settlement with it. Neither Fatah nor Hamas seeks a two-state solution. They seek the destruction of Israel.
Hamas made that clearer than ever on October 7, 2023.
Iran under the Shia theocrats has called for the obliteration of Israel since 1979.
In the 1920s, the Zionists themselves debated whether an agreement with the Arabs could be reached and a Jewish state accepted in the Middle East. Ze’ev Jabotinsky and others argued pessimistically that the Arabs would not accept a Jewish state until all their efforts to destroy it had been defeated and they came to the realisation that the Jews were there to stay.
The frustration of repeated efforts at negotiation led to a shift to the right in Israeli politics – from Labor to Likud. Israelis slowly and reluctantly reached the collective conclusion that Jabotinsky had been right.
The present war has brought all this to a climax. Hamas demonstrated, once and for all, that its whole purpose was the destruction of Israel and the massacre of Jews. Iran’s brutal and fanatical regime and its Shia proxy Hezbollah in Lebanon had long made plain that their plans were annihilation of the “Zionist entity” and the Jews worldwide.
Israel has hit back with stunning effectiveness, after the initial shock of the October 7 assault by Hamas. But thousands of self-styled radicals, Muslim immigrants in the West and common citizens have rallied to the cause of Hamas and chanted explicitly anti-Zionist and anti-Semitic slogans over the past 21 months. Those slogans are not simply criticisms of the way in which Israel has responded to its avowed enemies and an atrocious assault on its citizens.
They pivot on the supposedly Marxist insistence that Israel is itself a Western, “white”, neo-colonial and imperialist project. Much of the angry support for Israel’s Arab enemies springs from that premise.
That premise, however, is flat out false. It is anchored to the notion that there was a straight line between Britain’s promulgation, in 1917, of the Balfour Declaration – promising the Jews a state of their own in Palestine in an effort to enlist their support against the Ottoman Empire and the Central Powers (German Empire, Austro-Hungarian Empire) more generally – and the actual creation of Israel in the late 1940s. But there was no such straight line. The rise of Nazism and World War II changed things radically – in an anti-Zionist direction.
What is ‘Palestine’?
Before taking a look at how the imagined straight line was actually a reverse course, let’s go back and ask: What is “Palestine”? Is it or was it a country, a people, which Western-backed neo-colonialists opened up to Jewish colonisation, before, during and after WWII? Quite simply, no. There was no state called Palestine at any point in the past 3000 years.
“Palestine” is simply a very old name for the coastlands of the Levant between Egypt and Lebanon. Before WWI, it was a sub-component of the Ottoman (Turkish) administrative district called the Vilayet of Beirut. Its inhabitants were diverse and always included Jews.
After the downfall of the Ottoman Empire at the end of WWI, “Palestine” became a British territory under a mandate from the League of Nations, between 1919 and 1948.
Jewish immigration began to increase under the Zionist impulse, but so did Arab immigration.
And racial and religious tensions escalated. Policing the mandate became an arduous task for Britain and, in 1936, the Palestine Royal Commission, chaired by Earl William Peel, was created to look into the situation. It came up with a plan, in July 1937, for the partition of Palestine – the first time this had been proposed.
Peel and his colleagues observed that Jewish immigration had been beneficial not only to the immigrants, but to the Arab population in Jewish-controlled areas. The Jews brought investment, education, enterprise and modern methods of public sanitation. The health, incomes and longevity of the Arabs in Jewish-administered areas improved significantly compared with Arab populations under Arab control.
The Jews, in short, had a lot to offer the Arab world.
However, the Arab leadership categorically rejected the idea of any Jewish state. The Zionists were divided on the subject, though prepared to accept partition if the Arabs would agree, but they would not. Meanwhile, Nazi anti-Semitism and militarism were coming to a head. The British authorities, anxious about strategic stability in the Middle East, set aside the partition proposal and issued a White Paper, in 1939, sharply restricting Jewish immigration to Palestine, to mollify conservative Arab opinion. Then came the Holocaust – but no rescinding of the White Paper.
This is where the anti-Zionist rhetoric breaks down. From 1939 to 1949, Britain stood in the way of both partition and Jewish immigration to Palestine, seeing geopolitical advantage in courting Arab and Muslim opinion. The Jews, during and after the Holocaust, became determined to create a homeland where Jews could live as they chose and defend themselves.
There had long been anti-Semitism in Europe, especially Eastern Europe, but the Holocaust was something else. Those who survived it were often starved, desperate and displaced. Menachem Begin, who survived in Poland, the epicentre of the Holocaust, would later say, “I fight, therefore I exist”.
Zionism a left cause
There was, however, considerable support for the Zionist cause in both Europe and the United States – chiefly on the political left. This is a profound irony, in present circumstances. In the crucial years 1945-49, it was the liberal, socialist and communist left in the West and the Soviet bloc that championed Zionism – and not the foreign policy elites in London, Paris or Washington.
Leftist support for Zionism sprang from passionate anti-Nazism, stoked during the war years, and from the perception that the ethos of the Zionists under David Ben Gurion was socialist, while the Jews had been among the most notable victims of Hitler’s brutally racist regime.
Far from the post-war partition of Palestine being a neo-colonial project, it was called for on the left against the foreign policy establishments. And the arms which, alone, enabled Israel to defend itself against all-out Arab assault in 1948 came from behind the Iron Curtain – from the Skoda works in Czechoslovakia, with the backing of Joseph Stalin.
The foreign policy elites had an imperialist but not a Zionist agenda. Washington wanted to buttress the British Empire in the Middle East and London sought to create Arab client states to ensure access to oil. The truth, in other words, is precisely the opposite of what our present left-wing comrades assert. The imperialist right was anti-Zionist and pro-Arab – and completely unsentimental about the Holocaust and the fate of the Jews.
In Israel’s Moment (2022), a powerful history of the subject, American historian Jeffrey Herf observes: “The documents of the US State Department’s ‘Palestine File’ and those of the Pentagon on ‘The Problem of Palestine’ from those years (1945-49) are notable for how little the events of World War II, especially the Nazi race war of extermination on the Eastern Front and the Holocaust, seem to have influenced policy.”
He further remarks: “Recent historians of Western decision-making in the early Cold War have underestimated the extent of antagonism to the Zionist project, overestimated pangs of guilt among Western policy makers, and overlooked the passions of anti-fascism, anti-Nazism and anti-colonialism among Zionism’s most determined advocates.”
Against this background, it is startling to contemplate the way in which the current pseudo-left has embraced Islamist anti-Semitism in the name of liberation and condemned Israel as a racist, fascist and colonial settler state.
Both president Harry Truman and former British wartime prime minister Winston Churchill were pro-Zionist, but the US State Department, the Pentagon and the CIA were anti-Zionist, and it was against their opposition that Truman raised the matter of partition in Palestine at the new United Nations.
The opposition to Truman’s advocacy was led by secretary of state George Marshall, George F. Kennan, a former US ambassador to the Soviet Union and architect of the Cold War containment policy and head of the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff, and Loy Henderson, the State Department’s leading Arabist.
The UN records, from the late 1940s, on the other hand, show that Zionism was defended as a project forwarding “otherness and difference” as against reactionary Muslim Arab insistence on racial and religious homogeneity.
This is crucial, because it remains the case. Muslim anti-Zionism is rooted in pathological anti-Semitism, which would be objectionable even if the grounds for anti-Zionism were otherwise clear. The fundamental objection to Israel, from the start and still, has not been that it uses excessive force against Arab populations (whether or not that has been the case), but detestation of the Jews and therefore total rejection of Zionism.
The British Labour government under Clement Attlee and foreign secretary Ernest Bevin, from 1945, led by the Foreign Office, took the position, as Herf expresses it:
“That the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine, by inflaming Arab opposition, would undermine the British Empire in the Middle East, block access to oil and enhance Soviet influence in the region.”
The powers that be in Washington saw the matter in very similar terms and sought to discourage Truman and other political figures, on both sides of politics, who called for a Jewish homeland in Palestine in the wake of the Holocaust.
During the November 1944 elections, both Republican and Democratic Party platforms demanded an end to British restrictions on Jewish immigration into Palestine. The Democrats actually called for Palestine to be turned from a British mandate territory into a “Jewish commonwealth”.
Such left-wing luminaries as I.F. Stone, Freda Kirchway, Henry Wallace and Eleanor Roosevelt all wrote and lobbied on behalf of Zionism.
In February 1947, the British authorities, frustrated at the refusal of the Arab leaders to countenance even a binational state in Palestine inclusive of Jews, handed over the old League of Nations mandate to the new United Nations. In April-May, the first Special Session of the United Nations was convened, at Lake Success in New York.
It set up a body called the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine. The Soviet ambassador to the UN, Andrei Gromyko, then declared that if the Jews and Arabs could not agree on a binational state, Moscow would urge partition and the creation of separate Jewish and Arab states. This, not neo-colonialism, was the climate of the time.
UNSCOP came out, at the end of August, with a majority report calling for partition. This was not what Britain wanted, and it was not what the American national security establishment wanted. Nonetheless, on November 29, by a two-thirds majority, the UN General Assembly voted on Resolution 181 in favour of partition. Note that: a two-thirds majority – not marshalled by the US or Britain, but constituted chiefly of the Soviet bloc and what we now call the “global south”.
Immediately following this vote in the UN General Assembly, the Haj Amin al-Husseini, long-time pro-Nazi and anti-Semitic Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, unleashed his thugs in a violent assault on the half million Jews of Palestine in defiance of the UN. In the first week of December, British and American foreign and security officials conducted talks at the Pentagon, in which they agreed, as Herf put it:
“That a Jewish state in Palestine would weaken Western influence in the Middle East and enhance that of the Soviets. They also agreed that it would threaten Western access to oil needed for the world economy and thus undermine the European recovery program, the Marshall Plan, which had been announced by the secretary of state on June 5, 1947, in a speech at Harvard University.
The Arab rejection of both a binational state and partition, followed by the assault on Palestinian Jews by the armed gangs of the exterminationist Haj Amin al-Husseini, might, one would have thought, have led to a British police action to stem the violence. But Britain had announced its withdrawal.
On December 10, the US State Department declared an arms embargo, which disproportionately disadvantaged the Jews. Then, in January and February 1948, the Policy Planning Staff, headed by George F. Kennan, laid out an American position opposed to the policy preference of president Truman and prominent politicians on both sides of the US congress.
Kennan’s thinking, backed by George Marshall and Henderson, needs explicitly to be registered in the minds of all those who still believe that Israel was an Anglo-American imperialist conspiracy. His thinking rhymed with that of the Foreign Office, in London. Marshall met and concurred with British foreign secretary Ernest Bevin in London, even as the Arab rejectionists were killing Jewish civilians, urged on by al-Husseini. All this, bear in mind, less than three years after the Holocaust and the defeat of Hitler, whom the Grand Mufti had actively and enthusiastically supported.
Truman had had his envoy to the UN vote in favour of Resolution 181. Marshall and Kennan set out to thwart the president’s clear intention. Kennan, author of the famous “Long Telegram” from Moscow, of February 22, 1946, was the grey eminence of containment policy at this early stage of the Cold War. He looked at the issue of Palestine through that lens. His thinking was strongly shaped by the anti-Zionism of Loy Henderson and his staff, and also by the interests and lobbying of the oil companies, notably ARAMCO.
Kennan’s sources insisted that backing partition would infuriate the Arabs and undercut moderate Arab leaders; that the Zionist project would fail and be overwhelmed within a couple of years; and that bolstering the British Empire in the Middle East was the best way to contain Soviet subversion and hold the nascent Western-led world order together.
Such reasoning was coldly geopolitical. The Soviets, Kennan argued, sought to extend their influence into the Middle East by supplying arms to both sides and working to subvert existing political elites to create “people’s democracies”, as they had done since 1945 in Eastern Europe. The new CIA agreed.
State/PPS and CIA estimates that Israel would last no more than two years proved mistaken, just because Stalin via the Czechs supplied heavy weapons to little Israel. Instead of being swept away, the Jews defended themselves with decisive effectiveness. The UN declared the partition on May 14, 1948, and Israel officially declared its statehood. Seven Arab states (Egypt, Syria, Transjordan, Lebanon, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Yemen) invaded Israel the very next day, from three sides.
With the loss of 5000 soldiers and civilians, the Jewish state stood them all up and rolled them back. It was one of the most heroic and amazing feats of arms in history.
Two months into the fighting, however, the Western powers sought to head off outright Israeli victory. They called for a ceasefire in place and sent the Swedish aristocrat Count Folke Bernadotte to mediate.
Under the suasion of the British, he proposed that Israel give up the whole of the Negev (60 per cent of the territory the UN had apportioned to it), forego a corridor between Jerusalem and the coast, and accept the internationalisation of its port at Haifa. The Negev was to be handed to Egypt and Transjordan (Jordan) – which would have strengthened Britain’s hand in the Middle East.
Bernadotte further called for a return to Israel’s territory by the Arabs who had fled from it on account of the war. Ben Gurion rejected the territorial redivision and retorted that Bernadotte’s other conditions neither could nor would be met until the Arabs agreed to peace talks and accepted the legitimacy of Israel. The Arabs rejected both calls. There lies the root of the whole situation with which we are plagued to this day.
As Walter Russell Mead showed, in The Arc of a Covenant (2022), Anglo-American policy towards Israel was slow to change. The Western powers did not create Israel, nor was their backing what made Israel strong. Rather, they finally came to back Israel – to the extent that they ever did – because it made itself strong. The Arab states prepared again in the 1960s to destroy Israel, but were routed in the Six Day War of 1967. They tried again in the Yom Kippur War of October 1973, but were routed once more by Israel.
Tom Segev’s A State at Any Cost: The Life of David Ben-Gurion (2019) and many Jewish and Israeli studies have cross-examined the way Israel has been defended. There have been criticisms of many aspects of Israel’s policies and alleged excessive use of force.
What cannot be sustained, however, is the assertion that Israel was a Western neo-colonial project.
Once one grasps that, what came after 1949, after 1967, after 1973, makes much more sense. Muslim anti-Zionism as anti-Semitism is exposed for what it was and still is.
It’s not a Palestinian state that needs creation. It’s acceptance by the Palestinians of the rightful and peaceful existence of Israel as a Jewish state.
Paul Monk is a former senior intelligence analyst, a long-time consultant in critical thinking skills, the author of a dozen books, and a poet.
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