Lies and Proclamations

Are women less rational than men? Do immigrants contribute to society? Do certain groups deserve fewer rights?

You don’t need to be a philosopher or a linguist to realize that those are not real questions but semantic ambushes. The question is structured so that one side in the conversation must prove its adequacy while the other simply waits to be convinced. In these questions, equality moves from something that is axiomatically presumed to something that needs to be demonstrated; one party stands on the dock, and the other sits in judgment.

When asked questions like that, we don’t say “let’s have a balanced debate”, we say “that is not a legitimate question.” Not because certain issues are taboo, but because we immediately recognize that the question itself carries a verdict and creates a power imbalance. Was anybody who asked questions like those ever convinced by whatever answer you give them? Of course not; the intention of the question is not to be educated about an issue, but to create an asymmetrical relationship.

...

We are confronted with – and often fall for – the justificatory trap in most conversations about Zionism.

There are, of course, legitimate questions to ask about Zionism as a national liberation movement. We ask questions about other national movements to better understand them either academically or politically. We may ask, “What is the history of a national movement?” “What are its internal debates?” “How are ideological disputes reflected in policy?” And of course, we do ask questions about a country’s policies and their moral consequences.

What we don’t ask is: “Does this movement have a right to exist at all?” This question does not operate at the same level. It does not critique actions or evaluate policies; it interrogates being. It places identity itself on trial. And when that question is asked asymmetrically—of one group and not of others—it becomes bigotry.

Consider how conversations about Zionism generally start. Not What is Zionism? Not: What are its historical roots? Not: What should Israel do? But: Is Zionism legitimate?

At first glance, it appears to be just another difficult question—provocative, perhaps, but within the bounds of acceptable debate. But the moment it is posed, the burden of proof shifts. Zionism is no longer a historical movement to be understood but a claim that must justify itself before anything else can be discussed. Thus, its existence becomes provisional and its legitimacy contingent. When you are asked that question, you are not being called to be a participant in a conversation; you are being called to the stand.

Of course, criticism of policies and governments is normal and acceptable. You can see what ardent Zionists – like myself – say about the current Israeli government. But the key difference is that policy scrutiny operates within a framework. We argue about what states do, not whether entire peoples are entitled to national self-determination. We debate French policy. We do not routinely ask whether France should exist. We critique Indian nationalism. We do not begin by asking whether Indians have a right to national expression. We analyze the Italian Risorgimento. We do not place Italian unification on trial as a moral anomaly.

(All good faith questions are welcome, Anon - thanks for this one!)

TLDR: Because words change meanings over time and Herzl wasn't psychic.

In the 1890s, "colony" just meant a planned settlement or concentrated community. This included Jewish agricultural colonies in the Pale, temperance colonies in Colorado, and utopian communes everywhere.

It was basically the Victorian word for "intentional community," with absolutely no imperial baggage required.

The specific meaning activists now deploy (colony as racial domination, metropole extraction, indigenous suppression) is a 20th century framework that didn't exist when Herzl was writing in 1896.

So a reader of the 21st century finds the word "colony" in an old text and assumes it carries a technical definition that was coined decades later.

It's a little like finding the word "trauma" in a Civil War field report and concluding the surgeon was diagnosing PTSD.

Meanwhile, 'settler colonialism' as applied to Israel isn't a neutral analytical tool that happens to fit badly. It's a framework specifically constructed to exclude the features that distinguish Jewish return from actual settler colonialism...and it still fails on its own stated terms.

Jewish immigrants to the Levant were never agents of any empire. They were overwhelmingly refugees from empires who were fleeing Russian pogroms, Eastern European persecution, and later Nazi Germany. No metropole sent them. No metropole would take them back if the project failed.

That's not a minor quibble about definitions, either - it's the primary distinction between settler colonialism and every other form of large population movement in history.

There's also the matter of indigeneity. The Jews returning to the Levant weren't arriving in a place with which they had no connection.

Jewish presence in the region is documented continuously from ancient history, including in Egyptian records dating to roughly 1210 BCE.

The religious, linguistic, and ancestral connection to the land is what distinguishes this case from the British in Kenya or the French in Algeria, who had no such ties - and it is some of the best-documented, most indisputable history humans have ever gathered. (This is why they're so constantly engaged in historical revisionism.)

So when proponents of the settler colonialism framework of accusation encounter these objections, what do they do?

They move the goalposts.

The absence of a metropole gets explained away as an "exception."

The indigenous origin of the Jewish people to the Levant gets ahistorically dismissed or ignored, despite the fact that the Jewish people are the only group whose national identity, language, and religion originated in and remained oriented toward that specific land throughout their entire existence.

The framework gets rewritten and the history is revised until Israel fits the allegation.

So, one word in Der Judenstaat doesn't settle* any of this.

From The Atlantic: The False Narrative of Settler Colonialism (paywall bypassed)

Much more in this post.

- He compares 1910s Palestinians to 1910s Sinn Fein in Ireland, which is a very anachronistic projection through history, because Sinn Fein was supporting the Zionist Mule Corps (and vice versa) as a decolonization project in Palestine at the time.

- He frames 1936-1939 as a Zionist plot to wrest military control of the land from the Arabs to the Jews, which is in my mind a way of doing history backwards. The Zionists are bad -> anything that we ourselves have done that benefitted the Zionists was secretly orchestrated by them behind the scenes -> the failed Arab revolt against the British was a Jewish plot from the beginning. He doesn’t elaborate on how the White Paper (which banned Jewish refugees entrance to Palestine during the Holocaust) was a result of this revolt, which is a glaring omission, because:

- There is almost no mention of the Holocaust in this book. To the point where it almost feels like a form of revisionism; there is absolutely no way of explaining the current conflict without understanding the role that the Holocaust played in it, and, moreover, the role that Arabs and Palestinians specifically played in it. Hajj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, very famously collaborated with the Nazis and spent the 1940s in Nazi Germany trying to bring the Holocaust to Palestine. He is mentioned once, offhandedly. This is probably my biggest problem with the Palestinian narrative generally: 1/4 of the IDF in 1948 were Holocaust survivors, fighting against people who had collaborated with the Nazis, people who had sworn to drive them into the sea in an attempted war of extermination, and they won against all odds. The Nakba is an injustice, but it would indisputably be a greater injustice if the Jews had lost, and the Palestinian response to this is (in English) to ignore it, and (in Arabic) to wish the destruction of the Jews had occurred. Khalidi neglects to engage with any of this, and cherry-picks the worst of Herzl and Jabotinsky’s writing to portray them as akin to the French invading Algeria and the British invading Kenya. So far, this is the most dishonest thing he has done — and I do find it striking, the role that Herzl holds in the Palestinian consciousness, when his specific ideas never held significant weight in Zionist spaces during his lifetime (Jabotinsky is another matter entirely, but even Khalidi has to admit that he was an incredibly fringe case).

- This book claims the Kennedys (bafflingly) had Palestinian-leaning sympathies pre-JFK’s assassination, and doesn’t mention Bobby Kennedy at all. “Why were American-Palestinian relations strained during the 60s-80s? Could it be because the PLO assassinated the brother of a man whose own assassination was one of the greatest cultural traumas of American history? No, it’s the Jews who are to blame.”

- An absurd number of citations here amount to “my dad told me this” or “trust me I heard this as a child.” Most maddening are the ones related to the 1967 war; we could take the word of the numerous records and transcripts made by Israeli and American diplomats at the time, or we could trust Khalidi and his dad by word of mouth. It’s bad history.

- That Egypt, Syria, and Jordan weren’t planning an attack in 67 is taken as a given, and any allusions to the contrary are framed as Zionist propaganda, or, in Khalidi’s words “Israeli myth.” The fact that these countries were blockading Israel and rallying troops at the border is neglected entirely.

- “The hard-line Zionists defined their success on the replacement of Palestine by Israel… for them, if Palestine existed, Israel could not.” Maddening sentence written by a man who has spent the past 116 pages arguing that if Palestine were to exist, Israel wouldn’t. If his goal is to prove the hard-line Zionists wrong, he is failing on every front.

- Beyond ignoring the agency of Palestinians, Khalidi goes out of his way to minimize the agency of Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, and Jordan.

- The claim that Egypt and Jordan, from the beginning, “welcomed mediation with Israel” and were willing to acknowledge its sovereignty is such an egregious form of historical revisionism that I’m amazed anyone takes this book seriously. If your understanding of Egyptian-Israeli relations is that Egypt was open to recognizing Israel and Israel “ungratefully” refused to accept their recognition (what???? On what grounds?) you have absolutely no business writing on 1967 at all.

- Finally we get a mention of Syrian agency! According to Khalidi, Syria’s primary role thus far has been to “sabotage” the PLO by “sponsoring nihilistic terrorist groups” (unlike the PLO itself, of course) which “killed Israelis and Jews indiscriminately,” (again, also unlike the PLO, of course).

- We’ve reached the Israel-Lebanon war, and I’ve come to the conclusion that Khalidi should have written an autobiography instead of a history. We’ve moved beyond “my father told me,” to “let me tell you what I experienced in the war,” which would be fine, it would be a very interesting first-hand account in an autobiography, but it has no business taking up nearly a tenth of what is meant to be the foundational text of Palestinian history.

- One thing I find interesting is that there isn’t discussion about competing political ideas within Israeli or Palestinian spaces. Khalidi frames it always as a zero-sum game: all Israelis want to kill all Palestinians, and as a result, all Palestinians want to kill all Israelis. Another thing that I’ve noticed is that whenever the overarching goal is framed as noble and just, all actions towards that goal are framed as being supported by all Palestinians. When anything happens that is harmful to Palestinians, it’s framed as the fault of specifically Arafat, specifically Abbas, specifically individuals or outside forces. In this way, Palestine cannot be held responsible for any Palestinian action that causes harm, nor is there room for debate on the best strategy or course of action for Palestinians.

- It’s really interesting reading this after reading Rabin’s biography. Khalidi portrays the American/Israeli relationship as being strong from the beginning, whereas actual Israeli and American documents and records recount serious animosity and frustration between their diplomats even throughout the 1970s.

- There is no mention of Israel’s offer to return Gaza to Egypt along with the Sinai — actually, I’m surprised that he didn’t talk about Israeli control of the Sinai as proof of them trying to build a “Greater Israel.” Probably too difficult to square that with them giving it back.

- These people always tell on themselves by blaming AIPAC instead of CUFI for American policy.

- We completely skip: the Munich Massacre, ALL OF 1973?? HOW????, Rabin’s assassination, the Ramallah lynchings, Israel withdrawing from Gaza in 2005, and only one off-hand sentence is devoted to all of Black September. At this point this isn’t just revisionism of Jewish history, but Palestinian history as well.

- I was hoping for more of an explanation on the Second Intifada. From an Israeli perspective, it doesn’t make any sense: they were offering Palestinians the right to sovereignty and self-governance they’d wanted, and as they were about to sign the treaty, Palestinians set off over a hundred suicide bombings and said that they would reject all terms of statehood and fight to the death. In Son of Hamas, Mosab Yousef Hussain explains this by saying that Arafat realized he would be richer through aid money and didn’t want to commit to the hard work of building a functional state; this makes logical sense. By Khalidi’s account, the Second Intifada just kind of happened one day, as if it were predestined and unstoppable. Khalidi is exceptionally good at describing Israeli aggression and Palestinian victimhood, but he completely falls apart trying to justify WHY any of this is happening. Anything Palestinians do is righteous and justified. Why are they doing it? Israel, don’t worry about it.

- “Such considerations [negative consequences] were undoubtedly far from the minds of the men (and a few women) who planned and carried out these suicide bombings.” I love this sentence. I’m obsessed with it. Women can commit ill-conceived suicide bombings too! This is feminism.

- According to Khalidi, American media focused exclusively on rockets that hit Israel in the 2014 war, and neglected any coverage of Israeli missiles hitting Gaza. I find this very hard to believe, considering both the past two years, and my own memories of 2014.

You sometimes hear string players expounding on the difference between a violin and a fiddle. It largely comes down to what kind of music they're playing, although, if you want to get technical about it, there are tunings and techniques and even instrument positions that differ between those who call their instruments fiddles and those who call them violins.

The pro pali movement are nazis. There are no two ways about it.

This one just about kneecapped me, though.

For context: I'm researching a list of every pogrom and massacre and anti-Jewish riot in the past 200 years.

It's already just annual mass murders peppered with, "At the time, this country had limited Jews to only 6 years of school, and school exams were purposely held on Shabbat, and also they were just getting beat up in the streets all the time?"

And yet, one bullet point still managed to jump out and sucker-punch me a lil bit.

Those examples I just gave were ALL from Syria.

Now, first of all: In 1947, Syria had a 2,500-year-old Jewish community.

This painting of Moses parting the Red Sea is from the Dura-Europos synagogue in Syria that was in use about 1,800 years ago.

Then the United Nations voted to create Israel and Palestine. And Aleppo rioted against its own Jews.

Rioters killed at least 75 Jews; set ten synagogues, five Jewish schools, a Jewish orphanage, a Jewish youth club, several Jewish shops, and 150 Jewish homes ablaze, destroying them. Thousands of Jews illegally fled Syria, including half of those living in Aleppo.

The Aleppo Codex, also called the Crown of Aleppo, disappeared for a decade. It was the earliest known Hebrew manuscript comprising the full text of the Torah. And, as the Israel Museum puts it, it was also "the most authoritative, accurate, and sacred source document, both for the biblical text and for its vocalization, cantillation and Masorah (literally, 'transmission' of the Bible, the oral and written tradition by which the Holy Scriptures have been preserved and passed on from generation to generation).... It was probably the manuscript used by Maimonides when he set down the exact rules for writing scrolls of the Torah."

When it resurfaced, 40% of its pages were missing.

But that's nothing.

You see, Arab Palestine was plagued by a godawful fascist the Brits had installed as a leader in 1921 -- before anyone knew what a Nazi war criminal was, much less that this guy would become one.

His name was Amin al-Husseini. And instead of having Palestine declare independence alongside Israel in 1948, he got all the surrounding countries to invade en masse and try to destroy it. To reclaim the land for the Arab world. Including Syria.

Syria was not a hard sell. It was voluntarily harboring a major Nazi war criminal: SS captain Alois Brunner, who rounded up and deported the Jews of occupied Austria, Greece, Macedonia, France, and Slovakia.

In fact, Syria was SO on board with al-Husseini's plan that it ALSO introduced a whole bunch of new laws for Syrian Jews!

It stripped them of Syrian citizenship. It shut down Jewish schools. They couldn't have driver's licenses. Or passports. Or buy real estate.

In 1949, it seized Jewish bank accounts. The following year, it banned them from working in agriculture too.

They had to be inside by 10 pm. They couldn't work in public service, in public institutions or in banks. People who worked in the government/military were forbidden from buying anything in Jewish shops.

And Jews were very much forbidden to leave Syria.

They could travel for business or health... if they received permission from the Mukhabarat (secret police), left family members behind to essentially serve as hostages, and left a deposit of $6,000 with the government.

Many people managed to flee the country anyway.

If your kids managed to flee, the Mukhabarat would torture you, and possibly imprison you for several years. Some people died from torture long before it got to that point.

There were repeated instances of Jews getting caught escaping the country and being not only murdered, but dismembered.

(In 1958, when Egypt and Syria briefly joined forces, the curfew became even worse. Now it was at 7 pm. And the Mukhabarat would arrest and torture any Jews who didn't make it home.)

You might wonder why Syria kept them there if it hated them so much. The answer is twofold.

First, along with the rest of the Arab League, it had invaded Israel in an attempt to reclaim the land for the Arab world, and failed. It didn't want its Jews to go strengthen Israel.

And second: for a while, it was more profitable to keep them there and exploit them.

In 1953, and again in 1958, Syria temporarily allowed Jews to emigrate.

But only as long as they handed over all their property to the Syrian government first.

(See?)

All of this mirrored not only what other Arab countries were doing, but much of what the Nazis had done in the 1930s. They stripped Jews of their citizenship, their businesses, their jobs, their bank accounts, and forced them to leave their money and property for the Nazi government if they managed to flee.

In 1964, Jews were prohibited from going further than 3 km (less than 2 miles) from their homes without getting special permits from the Mukhabarat.

In 1973, Jews were forbidden to own radios or telephones, or to maintain postal contact with outside world.

Plus, there was constant intense violence against them.

One Syrian Jew described going to the funeral for a neighbor who had been shot, point-blank, by a random Arab man who just knocked on his door and immediately killed him. (And also described having been aggressively questioned by secret police at that same funeral.)

There were many, many murders of Jews which went unremarked and uninvestigated.

But what got me was one last twist.

When Jews died, their property was confiscated by the Syrian government. If their heirs could afford to lease their homes from the government, they were allowed to.

If they couldn't, the property was handed over to the Palestinian refugees in Syria.

So just to summarize:

The Syrian government, along with every other surrounding country (plus Iraq) invaded Israel to reclaim the land for the Arab world. It failed.

It took revenge on the Syrian Jews, who by definition weren't in Israel.

The Syrian government targeted a Jewish population that had been there for at least 2,500 years.

There was widespread, extremely violent antisemitism. Intense restrictions on who could buy from Jewish shops. On what jobs Jews could have.

Jews were demonized. Deliberately forced into poverty and out of their family homes. They were isolated from the world. They were killed for everything from leaving the country to answering the door.

And once they left their homes, left the country, or were killed, it gave their homes to Palestinian refugees.

There were as many as 35,000 Jews in Syria and Lebanon in 1928 - almost entirely in Syria. The population dropped rapidly when the persecution started: by 1957 there were 5,400. In 1989, only 4,000 were left: 90% had fled. Today, there are somewhere between 4 and 100, depending on whose guess you go with. Syria has successfully ethnically cleansed over 99% of its Jews.

But here's the thing about that plot twist.

At most, 75,000 of the Palestinian refugees went to Syria. The numbers are impossible to fully track; there's great research about how many people left, but not so much on where they each ended up. It could have been significantly lower.

In fact - setting aside, for the moment, the fact that at least four other countries had invaded with it, and at least - hang on, let me count -

at least 10 other countries Acting Like This who hadn't even been involved in the 1948 war -

Basically, Syria started a war to yeet the Jews that displaced hundreds of thousands of Palestinians. And then it turned around and yeeted and attacked its own Jews, confiscated their homes, and gave those to Palestinians.

You can kind of see this as compensation. Maybe. If you squint real hard, tilt your head 39 degrees to the right, and see the presence of Jews as the sole actual problem here.

This is why the social media version of this history is such a successful mindfuck.

It's so far off from the truth, and leaves out such an incredible amount of what happened, that it's almost impossible to counter.

People confidently claim that the Zionists invaded in 1948; that the Zionists attacked in 1948; or that Britain gave Jews the land as some kind of pity gift for the Holocaust.

Nobody has any idea that Britain watched every other country on earth agree that the Jews were about to get killed off if someone didn't take in Jewish refugees - someone else, not any of them - and then turned around and effectively banned Jewish immigration to Palestine in 1939. That it even made boats full of Holocaust refugees turn around and go back to Europe. That sometimes, it just unloaded them and put everyone in its own detention camps.

That if it had followed the League of Nations Mandate for this little chunk of former Ottoman Empire land, and encouraged Jewish immigration, it could have taken in all the 6,000,000 Jews who were instead slaughtered.

Yes, fine, that would have quadrupled the population of the entire country, caused immediate food rationing and massive refugee camps, and terminally pissed off Amin al-Husseini, but it would also have saved six million lives.

Nobody knows, somehow, that Palestine was supposed to be, mandated to be, a place where both Arabs and Jews lived in equality and shared in governing. Or that (if you prefer a two-state solution) it was supposed to be partitioned into Israel and Palestine in 1947. After al-Husseini attacked enough people that Britain gave up on the Mandate.

Nobody knows or wants to believe that no, there wasn't a good fucking reason for all these countries to invade. That THIS was where colonialism and imperialism came in.

When 1,300 years of empire ends, and people who have been marginalized under it get rights, there is an inevitable backlash.