Fayez Sayegh

Zionist Colonialism in Palestine traces the historical roots of the Zionist movement and the uprooting of the ancient Palestinian Arab people from their ancestral homeland. In their hopes of establishing a “national home” for the Jewish people, long persecuted in Europe and integrated into various nations oppressing them, Zionism emerged out of the thinking of Theodor Herzl, who declared the necessity for establishing a Jewish nation to end their plight. This manifested in what was called “Eretz Israel,” the lands of Palestine, laying Jewish claims on such populated cities as Al-Quds (Jerusalem) and Bethlehem. The Zionists’ enemy was not the vile anti-Jewish pogrom-mongers, but assimilationists who thought Judaism was a religion and not a nation. In other words, they were self-segregationists. Initially, this movement had little success in drawing settlers from Europe, and Herzl himself declared the Palestinians to be welcoming of the few who took the journey. However, the international situation changed after the First World War when Britain established its rule over Palestine and saw in Zionism a fortuitous prospect to extend their colonial possessions. The Balfour Declaration decreed such a Jewish homeland in Palestine and therein the Jewish population grew twelvefold in the inter-war period. After the world anti-fascist war, and with Britain losing its grip on all their colonies, Zionism needed a new, more reliable master — and found it in U.S. imperialism. The violent establishment of the state of Israel in the postwar period, the barbaric dispossession and expulsion of Palestinians from their lands, found its expression in the 1948 Nakba. In the 75 years since that event, the supremacy which the Zionists established over Palestinian lands has been based on the same racist basis of old European colonialism, except even more base, because in their eyes Palestinians are not even “useful” — they are only to be evicted and wiped from their land to fulfil a fantastical Zionist prophecy about a “chosen people” and a “chosen land” that could only have been chosen by racist prejudicial thinking.