Israel and the language of decolonisation

A post by PaulL, irregular contributor.

I listened to a great podcast by Russ Roberts interviewing Haviv Rettig Gur on the history of the formation of Israel, and why those who cast this as a decolonisation battle are wrong. In particular, he explains why the attacks by Hamas (and the general approach of terrorism to defeat an occupying power) won’t work with Israel.

The podcast is excellent(link here) , and well worth listening to (despite being an hour forty long). I think Gur makes some insightful points that put interesting colour on the current situation.

I’ll summarise some of it, as I know not everyone will listen, but I do recommend listening if you can, it’s very detailed and brings forward things I simply didn’t know from history.

The first part deals with the history of the formation of Israel. Gur and Roberts chronicle the increasing anti-semitism through the 1880s to the early part of the 20th century, including the eastern European pogroms, and the way that many European powers closed their borders to Jews.

There is an interesting discussion of the death of Alexander II, his son’s reversal of the reforms, and then the impact of that on the Jews in Russia. It’s interesting his view that the pogroms in Russia were very bottom up, and in fact discouraged by the government, which in some sense to me is worse than if it were imposed from the top down.

The parallels of this current attack by Hamas with the pogrom in Kishinev (Wikipedia link) in 1903 are really interesting. Gur’s contention is that this is embedded in Jewish culture, particularly European Jewish culture, and is seen as a period of disgrace in some sense – women raped in front of their husbands with the menfolk unable to protect the women and children. A contemporaneous quote from the Yiddish Daily News:

The mob was led by priests, and the general cry, “Kill the Jews”, was taken-up all over the city. The Jews were taken wholly unaware and were slaughtered like sheep. The dead number 120 and the injured about 500. The scenes of horror attending this massacre are beyond description. Babes were literally torn to pieces by the frenzied and bloodthirsty mob. The local police made no attempt to check the reign of terror. At sunset the streets were piled with corpses and wounded. Those who could make their escape fled in terror, and the city is now practically deserted of Jews.

There’s an interesting fact about the emigration to the USA of European Jews from 1908-1925. Of all the immigrants to the USA, a lot of them returned back to Europe – the USA didn’t suit them. 57% of Italians, 40% of Poles, 64% of Hungarians, 67% of Romanians, and 55% of Russians returned home. Among the Jews, the figure was just 5%. His thesis is that they simply had no choice – what they were leaving was so bad that they stuck it out in the USA. I had no idea that the emigration to the USA was so fluid in that time, and that so many people returned home.

But, in this same time period, the USA started limiting Jewish immigration – in 1921 120,000 Jews emigrated to the USA, by 1934 it’s down to 2,700. This provides an explanation as to why so many Jews didn’t leave Germany and central Europe prior to WWII – they simply had nowhere to go as so many places closed their borders.

He also has an interesting take on the holocaust, and how the original concentration camps were seen as meaning what they said – concentrating the Jews in one place. The Jews saw it as a new form of persecution, but it was just persecution. They went mostly quietly to their deaths, as they (mostly) didn’t know they were death camps. Again, the horrors of the holocaust led to a Jewish culture of “never again.”

He talks a lot about the different experiences of Jews in the various European countries during WWII. His point is that the Nazi holocaust only succeeded where the local people supported it. Without people giving up their neighbours, there was no holocaust. The Danish Jews fared relatively well, because the population didn’t give them up. And in Hungary, only the rural Yiddish Jews (the Jews who could easily be seen as the “other”) were given up. The middle class Jews in Budapest – your neighbours and your colleagues – were largely protected. The point being that the holocaust wasn’t something Hitler did (although it was also that). It was the culmination of four decades of persecution, and it was supported by many people in each of those countries.

He then moves on to the aftermath of WWII, and makes an interesting point. Many of the Jews who were liberated in 1945 had nowhere to go. In 1947, two years after “liberation”, there were still a quarter of a million Jews in Bergen-Bensen – still in the concentration camp, being fed by the allies, with nowhere to go. The US wouldn’t take them. England wouldn’t take them.

Those who were originally Polish went back to Poland, and there were pogroms after the war. I never knew that. The Jews were still being attacked in Poland.

There’s a bunch of good information elsewhere on the formation of Israel, but this history is all the backdrop to the point where Israel was formed. There’s some good treatment of the fact that the English (who had conquered/taken the Palestinian mandate from the Ottomans after WWI) were a bit stuck. They’d promised the Palestinians autonomy in return for support during the war. They’d also promised the Jews (who are indigenous to Israel) some sort of homeland. And nobody wanted to take many of these Jews, they needed somewhere to go because they’re still stuck in the camps. After Israel is formed, many of these Jews from the concentration camps are the ones who initially go to Israel, and many of these Jews are those who are the earliest members of the IDF.

Then he covers Jewish expulsion from much of the Arab world through the late 40s and the 50s. Baghdad was 25% Jewish in 1930, by 1950 it was 0% Jewish. The attacks, the pogroms, the othering were very similar to what had happened in the early part of the 20th century in Europe. The difference is that this time there was somewhere for the Jews to go. The Jews across the middle east, across north Africa, basically get expelled, and mostly go to Israel. They don’t get massacred, they leave.

Then they move into a discussion of decolonisation. Gur’s point is that the model the Palestinians are using is Algeria. The Algerian independence movement was the template for decolonisation. The model is that you have this colonising power, and they get lots of benefits from their colonisation. So you have to impose perceived costs on them that are greater than the benefit of staying.

And so, anti-colonial struggles, by their basic logic, tend to horrific cruelty, tend to terrorism. Not because colonized peoples are more cruel than anybody else, but because that is the basic founding logic of anti-colonial struggles; and it worked everywhere. It worked everywhere it was tried in the 20th century.

That’s why it’s called terrorism, the horrific brutality isn’t a side effect – it’s the intent. The more massacres you do, the higher the cost of staying. It worked in Algeria with the Algerian National Liberation front – the French packed up and left, they went back to France.

The Palestinian Liberation Organisation was modelled on the NLF, and had very close ties to Algeria:

In 1974, Arafat gives a speech of the U.N. General Assembly. Who introduces him to the podium? The President of the Assembly, who was also the President of Algeria, who was also a leader in the FLN. In 1988, the Palestinians issue–Arafat issues–a Palestinian Declaration of Independence. By the way, on November 15th, 1988, Yasser Arafat declares independence of the State of Palestine. Where does he do it? In Algiers. Palestinian school children learn the Algerian experience. And that drives decades of terrorism: of raids across the border, of mass murders, of shooting up school buses of Israeli children, of the Second Intifada, 140 bombings of the airplane hijackings, and also ultimately…the 1972 Munich massacre, the Olympic Massacre. And October 7th, 2023

They then talk in detail about why this won’t work with Israel. Because the Jews aren’t colonisers. They don’t come from a single country, they have nowhere to “go back to.” They don’t have some other citizenship, there isn’t a government that can give up like the French did.

Where do we come from? Fifty percent of us come from the Arab world–50% of the Jews. Most Israelis–most Israeli citizens–are Arabs. If 50% of the Israeli Jews are Arabs and all the Israeli Arabs are Arabs, that’s 70% of, 65% of Israelis? I’m not good at math. That’s why I went into the Humanities. But, we belong in the Middle East more than in anywhere else.

What does that mean? That means that if you want to kick us out like the French back to France, you have to have a very serious conversation with the Baghdadis. Because about a third of the real estate of Baghdad belongs to Jews who were forced to flee. 

And this is the big point. The whole decolonisation narrative that is being propounded by Palestinians, and in the universities of the west, simply won’t work.

now there’s a second narrative, second set of narratives that don’t work. That is: the Hamas and violent part of the Palestinian movement that says, ‘Oh, I know how we get this land back. We just make it really uncomfortable for these people to live here.’ Not recognizing that that cost-benefit analysis doesn’t quite work for us because we don’t have anywhere else to go, most of us.

Haviv Rettig Gur: I’ll say more than that. It’s not just that we have nowhere else to go.

Now go back to everything we talked about at the beginning. Our foundational lesson, the idea at the heart of our identity, what it means to be Israeli more than any other thing that it could possibly mean is that nothing is safe. Nothing is anything but precarious, except being on our own terms, self-reliant in our own land. The founding of Israel is the day we stopped dying, literally. And so, if that is the meaning of Israeliness, and it’s a meaning, so foundational…..

And, it is why the anti-colonial paradigm has done horrific damage to the Palestinians. For two reasons. One, I can’t give them what they want. They’re exacting a cost from me. And, the idea of this kind of pressure–of all pressure, terrorism, sanctions, social shaming. All pressure, the idea is if you change your behavior, the pressure ends.

But, they’re asking for me to change a behavior that is literally who and what I am. It’s my one historical lesson from a century of genocide.

And so, the anti-colonial paradigm doesn’t work on me. I’m immune to terrorism….. 

There’s so much more in the podcast, but I think that Gur has got at a fundamental misunderstanding. The people who talk about decolonisation simply don’t understand Israel. The Zionist project is not a colonial project. The Jews in Israel can’t simply “go back” to where they came from, a large proportion of them were refugees. They have literally nowhere else to go. When people say “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”, they are assuming the Jews go away. But to where?

Nobody likes what’s going on in Gaza at the moment. The deaths (all deaths) are horrific. But the Israelis are not going to just accept massacres like those of October 7 without response. They’ve been there. It didn’t end well for them. Those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it.