Zionism Was Always Genocidal: On What Even Anti-Zionists Miss

The Limits of Avi Shlaim's Anti-Zionism

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Zionism is a settler-colonial movement — images from the Nakba and a map showing the progressive take over of Palestine.

I’m on Avi Shlaim’s mailing list. His latest dispatch included a link to an interview he gave to ‘Reclaim the Narratives’ last September in Berlin. Reading Avi Shlaim’s book The Iron Wall when it first came out in 2001 kickstarted my journey out of Zionism. Up until then I was a ‘soft Lefty’ and an unconscious apologist for Zionism, without recognising what it actually was. I now recognise The Iron Wall to be highly limited, but given my complete indoctrination in, and ignorance of what Zionism is, it was at the time profoundly challenging for me.

Shlaim was not an anti-Zionist when he wrote The Iron Wall. He was what I’d call a liberal Zionist, which is what I was. Liberal Zionists might criticise the state of Israel, but don’t ever question its right to exist as an exclusively Jewish settler-colonial project at the expense of all the non-Jewish indigenous people of Palestine. When the question comes up they sidestep it or gloss over it. I realise now that liberal Zionists are still more loyal to the state of Israel than to universal human values, and they seem to propose something absurd, which is that it is possible for settler-colonialism to be a bit more gentle and considerate.

In recent years Shlaim finally moved to a full anti-Zionist position, and I don’t doubt his complete empathy for Palestinian suffering and his support for their cause. But as I listened to his interview, I realised that despite his anti-Zionist stance, there are still gaping holes in Shlaim’s consciousness about Zionism and Jewish identity or faith.

A blind spot about the genocidal nature of Zionism

Shlaim admits that Zionism is by definition racist based on the simple fact that it has always sought to create a national entity based on one ethnicity and to the exclusion of others, most notably the indigenous Palestinians. Shlaim distinguishes between societies that are racist — and there are still plenty out there — and countries that are officially racist. He correctly cites Israel’s 2018 Jewish Nation State Law as evidence that Israel is officially a racist state. This law alone should have been grounds for Israel’s immediate expulsion from the United Nations. That it wasn’t tells you everything about the world we live in.

Shlaim recognises the inherent racism of Zionism but not its genocidal nature. He admits that he was reluctant to use the word ‘genocide’, until he saw Israel’s actions in Gaza. He quotes his own autobiography, where he wrote, “For all its sins, Israel has never committed genocide”. He goes on to say that “the identity of the state of Israel is inextricably linked to the Holocaust. … And it seemed perverse to accuse the Jewish state of perpetrating a genocide”.

This is an honest admission — Shlaim is an honest man — but here lies the first blind spot. How can you recognise Zionism as a settler-colonial project and only concede genocide based on Israel’s actions in Gaza since October 2023? Shlaim is a scholar who professes to follow the evidence. But the genocidal intent and plan are evident from the start of the Zionist movement in the late 19th century — almost eight decades before Israel was created.

Settler-colonialism is, by its very nature, a policy of elimination. As Patrick Wolfe argued, “The distinction between dominion and occupancy illuminates the settler-colonial project’s reliance on the elimination of native societies.” (Wolfe, P. (2006). Settler colonialism and the elimination of the native. Journal of Genocide Research, 8(4), 387–409).

Colonialism and its instruments, or an apartheid regime, would qualify as ‘dominion’, whereas settler-colonialism is a policy of erasure, removal and replacement — elimination of the native — which takes place in many forms, not just killing. A home invasion, with the intent of replacing the existing inhabitants with the invaders’ people cannot be spun to be anything other than what it is — an intentional act of elimination.

Legal frameworks are created after an event or a phenomenon has been identified. You don’t need laws against theft in a society where theft doesn’t exist. You only need a law against a particular human behaviour once it’s been perpetrated, recognised, and deemed something society doesn’t want. The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide was based on what the Nazis did. There were many genocides throughout human history, but the Nazi genocide was committed by a ‘modern and civilised’ society using the most advanced technology available at the time, and the full legal, bureaucratic and technological machinery of a modern state. The UN Convention reflects what the Nazis did and defines those particular actions as genocide. ‘We recognise they did certain things, and think they were very bad. We don’t want it to happen again, so we’re going to make a rule that says you can’t do those things and if you do, there will be consequences’.

The Convention includes the definition of genocide and what act in relation to genocide are punishable:

Article II

In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

(a) Killing members of the group;

(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;

(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;

(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;

(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

Article III

The following acts shall be punishable:

(a) Genocide;

(b) Conspiracy to commit genocide;

(c) Direct and public incitement to commit genocide;

(d) Attempt to commit genocide;

(e) Complicity in genocide.

If you want to split hairs, you can try to examine Israel’s actions against each of the items in Article II to test whether or not what Israel is doing qualifies as genocide. Genocide scholars around the world including in Israel itself have already agreed that Israel’s actions in Gaza constitute a genocide.

If, in its time, the Nakba was seen for what it was and the Palestinians were listened to, things could have been very different. When it became obvious that Israel was in contravention of UN General Assembly Resolution 194 — already a pretty weak legal tool — the world looked the other way. Israel was never going to allow the Palestinians it has violently driven out to return. It systematically destroyed their homes, villages and towns so they had nothing to return to. From 1948 onwards, Israel has been progressively taking over all Palestinian land and resources to give to Jewish settlers, or appropriated them for state use. Zionism should have always been recognised for the settler-colonialist movement it is, and settler-colonialism should have been included in the Genocide Convention. The very same human mindset that has been enabling the annihilation of the Palestinian people is behind all of our human problems.

Gaza only made the ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people more visible to more people, because it was live-streamed and has been so visibly barbaric. But Zionism was and always has been a genocidal movement that has been committing genocide incrementally since 1948. Gaza, the West Bank, Iran, Lebanon are just an acceleration of the genocidal plan — not anything new.

In a post-Second World War world with a colonialist mindset, no one wanted to include settler-colonialism under this Convention. If settler-colonialism was defined as genocide and included in the Convention, the world’s most dominant powers would have faced immediate indictment.

Both history and the law are written by those who hold the power to control and manipulate narrative, memory, and the way we interpret reality. In our world, power is not benevolent — it is the ability to impose one’s will on others by any means available: economic, political or military.

We live in a world that is still in the grip of a colonial mindset. The bullies with the biggest guns and the most exploitative and extractive economies still dominate the international playground. There is little doubt that settler-colonialism is, by its very nature, genocidal. To wake up now and call Israel’s attack on Gaza genocide, but ignore the genocidal intent of the Zionist movement, is disingenuous at best. The Zionists weren’t just racist — they thought nothing of replacing an entire indigenous population with Jews. It doesn’t matter what excuse settler-colonialists offer to justify their actions; the intent was always eliminatory. All through the existence of the state of Israel this was evident. The world didn’t choose not to care. It chose to enable it.

A blind spot about Judaism and Jewishness

Another glaring blind spot I recognised in Avi Shlaim’s interview concerns his view of Judaism. Shlaim says, “I’m Jewish and the core values of Judaism are truth, justice, and peace. … The essence of Judaism is non-violence.” He suggests that Netanyahu and the coterie of religious Zionists who surround him have perverted what he regards as the true values of Judaism.

Like many secular, traditional or religious Jews, Shlaim ignores the foundational identity myths that define Jewishness. Most Jews would not physically harm anyone outside the group (domestic abuse, child abuse, discrimination against homosexuality and its punishment, economic exploitation, exist in all Jewish communities as they do in all societies). But to suggest that the core values of Judaism are ‘truth, justice and peace’, or that Jewish faith is inherently non-violent, is deeply problematic.

Even secular Jews celebrate some version of Jewish festivals where Jewish foundational myths are repeated unexamined. In every seder — the Passover ritualised dinner — no matter how watered down, Jews celebrate the killing of all the firstborn sons of Egypt as the culmination of the plagues inflicted on the Egyptians by God. It doesn’t matter that this probably never happened; it is celebrated uncritically as a necessity because the Israelites were under threat. The killing of innocent Egyptian children is presented not as a moral problem, but as a divine gift — and that framing goes entirely unexamined.

To the best of my knowledge, no one in Jewish circles — secular, traditional or religious — has ever questioned the morality of the brutal genocide the Israelites, led by the mythical military leader Joshua, committed in Canaan. Jewish people are brought up on this story as a cornerstone of their identity, never stopping to examine the ethics of invading a fully populated territory, killing all its inhabitants and replacing them with the twelve tribes of Israel. There, right there in the story of the genocide in Canaan, is the seed that sprouts the Zionist movement.

Too many Jews, most of whom will never commit an act of violence against a Palestinian or anyone else, nonetheless support Israel and its actions. Shlaim doesn’t support Israel and is now openly opposing Zionism. Like me, he made a choice to place human values above group loyalty, and neither of us deserves a medal for it. Good human beings feel empathy and compassion to all of humanity. Judaism, however, demands loyalty to the group first. Orthodox Jews do not ‘marry out’ and most secular Jews follow the same rule. This reveals that in Judaism, the survival and continuity of the group come before any universal human value.

In his essay Thanking God I’m Not a Goy Daniel Klein who was born and raised as an Orthodox Jew on a colony in the West Bank writes:

"“It is upon us to praise the Master of all, to give greatness to the Former of creation, who did not make us like the goyim (nations) of the lands, and did not place us like the families of the earth, who did not make our portion like theirs, nor our fate like all their multitudes, for they bow to vanity and emptiness, and pray to a god that cannot save.”

This prayer is called Aleinu. It concludes every single Jewish prayer service, three times a day. Religious children will repeat it thousands of times before turning eighteen, and anyone who has walked into a synagogue has heard it.

Though goy technically means nation, ask any Jew what a goy is and they will likely say “non-Jew.” That interpretation is why the prayer demands apologetics.”

Critiquing Jewish religion has long been taboo, for fear that pointing out its problems might seem to justify the persecution European Jews suffered — persecution that continued as discrimination in the US, UK and Australia until late last century. Nothing justifies persecution, racism, discrimination, violence, no matter what. Victimhood is not a human characteristic; it is a position created by an imbalance of power, which is why victims are never at fault — only perpetrators are. However insular or superior Jews may have felt as a group, they didn’t deserve to be persecuted. You can dislike someone for their beliefs or customs, but you don’t discriminate against them, expel or kill them. If they act illegally or harm others, the law exists to address that — which is precisely what the world is failing to do in relation to Israel.

But Jewish religion and identity need to be critiqued and examined. I think Shlaim really believes in the version of Judaism he was taught or that he constructed, but sadly, it is fictitious. The whole spectrum of Jewishness, secular, traditional, orthodox, and ultra orthodox, suffers from the same malaise. The faith and its traditional and secular offshoots all revolve around the survival of the group. Loyalty to the group above all else is what makes a Jew a good person in the eyes of their community.

Jewishness is directly responsible for Zionism, both the original secular version, and the prevalent religious one that is gradually taking over Israel with the intent of completing the settler-colonial project and creating a religious Jewish state. Any group, secular or religious, that places group survival and loyalty to the group at the centre of everything and that teaches a mix of hostility and fear towards the outside world is essentially a cult.

I no longer recognise myself as Jewish. This is not only because I do not adhere to Jewish religion, not even its most watered down traditions, or because the idea of a Jewish ‘race’ is ludicrous and fictitious. It is because I have renounced the idea that belonging to one particular group, however loosely, is essential to my identity and survival. I cannot belong to any group that thinks and operates like a cult.

If everyone who identifies as Jewish placed shared humanity above all else, Jewishness as it is now would simply disappear. And that is precisely the fear at the heart of Jewish identity — the fear of ceasing to exist as a distinct group. It is a fear that drives insularity, exceptionalism, and ultimately Zionism itself. If Shlaim were to examine that fear honestly, and confront the Jewish undercurrent running through Zionism, the last inconsistency in his position would finally dissolve.

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Hear Prof. Nurit Peled-Elhanan discuss how Israel links its own identity with the myths of the Bible (from 07:51) in a podcast interview with +972 Magazine.

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