Colonization in Palestine is an Objective Reality, Not a Talking Point
Rally for peace and in support of Palestine in Ljubljana on October 13, 2023. (Hladnikm, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons)
Every once in a while, The Algorithm tells you something important. Over the past couple of weeks, my Facebook feed has repeatedly offered me an ad from The Atlantic. The ad encourages me to take a look at an article by Simon Sebag Montefiore titled The Decolonization Narrative is Dangerous and False.
As recently as a few years ago, it would have been very unusual to see an article in a major US publication openly trying to refute what much of the world knows: that Israel’s project in Palestine is a settler colonial project. The standard practice was simply to ignore the colonization issue. Yet in recent months, we are seeing more and more pieces seeking to debunk the “decolonization narrative,” all the more so since Israel began its genocidal assault on Gaza after the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks.
This is a welcome sign that the colonizers are losing control of the narrative.
Don’t think of colonialism!
I’m not going to engage here in a point-by-point refutation of the Atlantic article. I’ve written extensively about settler colonialism, most recently in a piece for Truthout. Readers who are interested in learning more about why settler colonialism is such a central part of any accurate and critical analysis of on-the-ground realities in Palestine can dig into any number of essential perspectives from scholars such as Rashid Khalidi, Noura Erakat, M Muhannad Ayyash, Ilan Pappé, J. Kēhaulani Kauanui, and Patrick Wolfe, not to mention Fayez Sayegh’s classic 1965 book Zionist Colonialism in Palestine.
The increasingly frequent and aggressive attempts to delegitimize the settler colonial framework - attempts that include efforts to silence, intimidate, and punish those who employ this framework explicitly or implicitly in their analysis and advocacy - speak to the desperation of the colonizers and their inability to prevail in an argument about the facts. (I’m reminded of Edward Said’s fundamental observation in After the Last Sky, a book constructed in dialogue with the work of photographer Jean Mohr. “Every assertion of our non-existence, every attempt to spirit us away, every new effort to prove that we were never really there,” wrote Said, “simply raises the question of why so much denial of, and such energy expended on, what was not there?”)
To use a Shakespearean metaphor, we might say that when it comes to settler colonialism, Zionists doth protest too much. Their insistence that there is nothing colonial about Zionism ends up working like the phrase (“Don’t think of an elephant!”) that linguist George Lakoff used as the title of his influential 2004 book advising the Democratic Party to change their approach to political messaging.
Beyond this, I want to call attention to how the recent surge in critiques of the settler colonial framework seeks to draw on a tried-and-true strategy that pro-Israel partisans have been using for decades: the strategy of trying to convince the public that facts putting Israel in a bad light are not facts at all, but rather are mere Palestinian “talking points.”
But in Palestine, colonization is not a “talking point.” It’s an objective reality.
Just ask the thousands of Palestinians in Gaza whose parents and grandparents were driven out of villages that were wiped off the map in order to create space for new “Israeli” communities like Sderot and Ashkelon. Or ask the Palestinians in the occupied West Bank who are being driven out of their homes right now by Israeli gangs working hand in glove with the military. These kinds of actions are the sine qua non of settler colonialism, and today’s headlines speak directly to this reality.
Global Gaslighting
For a long time, Israel has devoted significant energy to waging ideological struggle in the U.S. in particular. Plenty of ink has been spilled to discuss the broad strokes and fine details of this effort to maintain unconditional support from Israel’s fellow settler society and to undermine pro-Palestinian voices in the U.S. Just this week, we learned about the aggressive attempt by an Israeli diplomat to pressure Bard College into dropping a course on Israel’s apartheid system, fearing that “if we do not make an example out of this class then classes like this are going to sprout like mushrooms all over the US.” (Bard’s administration, to its credit, resisted this pressure.)
But there is also a flip side to this strategy. As noted above, the heavy focus on the U.S. has gone hand in hand with seeking to ignore what most of the rest of the world is saying. And why would Israel want to do that? Perhaps it’s because the global majority sees what is happening on the ground - the mass killing, the territorial conquest, the home demolitions, the political detention, the torture, all of it - and recognizes it as organically related to what much of the world has experienced over the past few centuries at the hands of Euro-American colonizers. Indeed, anyone who knows even a small amount about how the colonization of North America or South Africa or Australia was carried out would recognize these elements for what they are.
In this sense, attempts to undermine the settler colonial framework, such as the recent Atlantic article, represent a gaslighting of much of the world.
The abdication of journalistic responsibility
Unfortunately, many news organizations, especially in the U.S., are complicit in this process of global gaslighting. Often they do this by avoiding any mention altogether of uncomfortable facts or, if they can’t be denied, cast doubt on them by treating them as Palestinian “claims” - talking points - that need to be “balanced” by official Israeli perspectives. This magical conversion of facts into talking points constitutes one of the most fundamental ideological functions of establishment media, especially in relation to Palestine.
In a recent interview with Canal Red, Spanish journalist Olga Rodriguez of the independent media outlet El Diario cut to the core of this issue, calling out news organizations and journalists who refuse to meet their responsibilities in reporting accurately what is happening in the world. Asked by the interviewer whether she thought journalists should “take sides,” Rodriguez responded with a hypothetical example. Imagine a scenario involving the Warsaw Ghetto during World War II, she said. One side says the Nazis are massacring Jews, but the Germans deny it. The journalist’s job, she said, is not simply to report both statements. Rather, the journalist’s job is to “step outside and investigate, then say what is really happening. Because what one side or the other says doesn’t contribute sufficient information to clarify the facts.”
Rodriguez continued:
It’s this kind of equidistant journalism that gives the same voice and the same credibility to the oppressor and the oppressed, the occupier and the occupied, the rapist and the raped. No! If you have the ability to find out the facts - and this is what journalism is about - you can’t treat equally and give the same credibility to one statistic and its opposite, to one fact and its opposite. You’re not being true to the basic work of journalism.
If colonization in Palestine is an objective reality, then journalists should be using the appropriate terminology. In Spain, where I’m currently based, the Spanish language itself can sometimes provide a clear indication of what is happening. Whereas English-language reporting in the U.S. typically refers to Jewish “settlers” when discussing Israeli communities established on occupied land in the West Bank or East Jerusalem, the relevant term in Spanish is literally colonos (colonists). But even this term is not used consistently, and the same is true for other terms that might express with precision the colonial realities on the ground.
“These images resonate”
Fortunately, despite these media shortcomings, the world is increasingly unwilling to go along with the gaslighting. Nesrine Malik, a columnist for the Guardian, notes that social media has helped amplify and broaden what has always been a deep internationalist identification with the Palestinian struggle, effectively providing a kind of connective tissue among peoples, movements, and experiences of oppression:
The heavily armed soldier or policeman with his foot on someone’s neck, the checkpoints and segregated streets and neighbourhoods – these images resonate with the past and present of people who have experienced power behave with impunity, who sense in their own societies a disparity in the value of people’s lives. There is a universal simplicity to the conflict that transcends political ideology – about the fundamental human right to full nationhood, to live in your home in safety and with dignity. As the journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates recently explained in an interview, after he visited the occupied territories, what he saw revealed to him “just how uncomplicated it actually is”. “You don’t need a PhD in Middle Eastern studies,” he said, “to understand the basic morality of holding a people in a situation where they don’t have basic rights.”
Global voices rising
Sign referencing the 1948 Palestinian Nakba at a solidarity protest held in Madrid on Oct. 29, 2023. (Photo: John Collins)
For this reason, it is no accident that we are seeing more and more expressions of Indigenous-Palestinian solidarity. It is no accident that activists across the African continent are rekindling a long tradition of pan-African support for Palestinians. It is no accident that progressive leaders in Latin America such as Colombia President Gustavo Petro have led the way in calling out Israel’s genocidal actions in Gaza. It is no accident that even in Germany, where the government has attempted to ban simple expressions of identification with the Palestinian freedom struggle, we have recently seen large demonstrations calling for an end to the Israeli bombardment.
When combined with the huge marches taking place throughout the Arab world and extending to Indonesia and Japan, these actions in every corner of the world constitute a robust rejection of Zionist/Israeli settler colonialism. They are also a determined, global response to expressions of colonial denial that continue to come across our social media feeds at a time when the facts of colonial genocide are staring us in the face.
All translations by the author.
