A-Infos (en) France, PCL #39 - Israel, from colonialism to genocide (ca, de, fr, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

Faced with the massacres in Gaza, the increasing number of murders and 
the destruction of homes in the West Bank, the rampant settlement 
activity there since Hamas's war crimes of October 7, 2023, and the 
statements by Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir calling 
for the murder of Gaza's inhabitants, we cannot help but be appalled. 
Clearly, a crime of genocide is being openly perpetrated, and its 
perpetrator, the Israeli government, must be prevented from carrying out 
this policy to its conclusion.

Let's be clear from the start, this isn't a Jewish issue. Besides, what 
are we even talking about when we talk about Jews?

Obviously, Jewish men and women do not constitute a race. In fact, no 
human race exists, and Jews are no exception. The article " How the 
Jewish People Was Invented" by the Israeli Jewish historian Shlomo Sand, 
published in Le Monde Diplomatique in August 2008, explains that " 
contrary to popular belief, the diaspora did not originate from the 
expulsion of the Hebrews from Palestine, but from successive conversions 
in North Africa, Southern Europe, and the Near East. This shakes one of 
the foundations of Zionist thought, namely, that Jews are descendants of 
the Kingdom of David and not-God forbid!-the heirs of Berber warriors or 
Khazar horsemen  ."

Moreover, Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, the second president of the State of Israel, 
and David Ben-Gurion, one of the founders of this State, mentioned on 
several occasions in their writings - at least until 1929, the year of 
the great Palestinian revolt - that "  the peasants of Palestine are the 
descendants of the inhabitants of ancient Judea  ."

This is also the thesis of the Israeli Jewish historian Tsvi Misinai, as 
reported on  the French-language  Jewish portal jforum.fr , in an 
article dated December 7, 2010. This historian states "  with the utmost 
certainty: nearly 90% of Palestinians have Jewish ancestors.  And about 
half of them know it ," he specifies  .

Regardless of the credence given to these theories, we can be certain of 
one thing: Jewish communities, like any human group, are constantly the 
site of phenomena of genetic and cultural mixing.

Nor is the issue at stake a question related to Jewish culture, which is 
also impossible to define unequivocally, as Ashkenazi, Sephardic, and 
Mizrahi cultures do not form a uniform whole. There is, of course, a 
cultural foundation built upon a religious tradition. But being Jewish 
today does not mean adhering to that religious tradition. Many Jews 
today are atheist or agnostic. And today, 44% of the Jewish population 
of the State of Israel identifies as  secular  , according to the 
website jerusaleminstitute.org.il

Ultimately, in 2,000 years of Jewish culture, for example within Europe, 
racist, supremacist, and genocidal ideas have never held any sway within 
Jewish communities. On the contrary, they have far too often been 
subjected to mechanisms of discrimination, cultural contempt, and racist 
massacres. Thus, the situation in Palestine, since the creation of 
Israel in 1948, is largely a direct consequence of European antisemitism 
and its most extreme form: the extermination of European Jews carried 
out by the Nazis and their allies, in which the Palestinians played no part.

The infernal mechanics of colonialism
"  The only good Indian is a dead Indian  ," U.S. General Philip 
Sheridan is said to have remarked. While the veracity of this quote is 
disputed, it nonetheless embodies the brutal scorched-earth tactics this 
general employed against Native Americans, who suffered a veritable 
genocide. These ideas were, moreover, part of a pervasive racist 
ideology within American colonial society.

As for the Jewish supremacists currently members of the Israeli 
government, their statements fully correspond to the logic that a good 
Palestinian can only be a dead Palestinian.

In colonial expansion in the United States, as in this Jewish colonial 
expansion in Palestine, the goal is to appropriate land inhabited by 
another people. In both cases, this process is rooted in an asymmetrical 
military power dynamic, with, on one side, a people whose land and 
ability to build their future are confiscated, and on the other, 
settlers financed by one or more imperialist powers. And the settlers, 
regardless of their culture or origin, ultimately see the other only as 
an obstacle to be destroyed in order to build their own future.

Today, in Israel, "  a strategy of terror has taken hold, now embraced 
by the settlers and covered up by the army,  " as historian Vincent 
Lemire stated in Le Monde on August 18, 2026. "  The Israeli settlers' 
government proxies are fanning the flames, like the Minister of National 
Security, Itamar Ben-Gvir, who, since October 7, has issued 250,000 gun 
permits and purchased 10,000 assault rifles for the settlers  ."

This program has a name: Greater Israel , which advocates its expansion 
across the entirety of the ancient Kingdom of Israel, including, beyond 
all of Palestine, southern Lebanon, the Golan Heights, and part of 
present-day Jordan. While Jewish supremacists are divided on the 
necessity of annexation beyond the Jordan River, they are not divided on 
the issue of southern Lebanon and the Golan Heights, which have recently 
been subject to renewed occupation by the Israeli army.

Greater Israel now has a legal basis since the adoption on July 19, 2018 
by the Israeli parliament (62 votes against 55 and two abstentions) of a 
"  basic law  " making Israel "  the historical homeland of the Jewish 
people  ", in accordance with all the propaganda speeches on Greater 
Israel, dramatically accentuating discriminatory policies.

This country would be "  the nation-state of the Jewish people  ," which 
leads to the denial of the existence of at least 25% Arabs among Israeli 
citizens, the vast majority of whom are Muslim, but also Christians, 
Druze, and others. This law defines Jerusalem as the "  complete and 
unified  " capital of Israel, endorsing the annexation of East 
Jerusalem. It demotes Arabic, which until then had been the second 
official language of the state, making Hebrew the sole official 
language. It affirms that "  the right to exercise self-determination 
within the State of Israel is reserved solely to the Jewish people  ." 
It calls for immigration from the Jewish diaspora.

This program has a government at its service, because all the policies 
pursued by Benjamin Netanyahu have only one purpose: Greater Israel. 
Furthermore, the "  political alternatives ," which could lead to the 
current leader's removal from power in the next elections, express no 
desire to break with his logic. As the newspaper Le Monde  headlined on 
August 21, 2026, "  In Israel, before the October parliamentary 
elections, ending the war is absent from both minds and political 
platforms  ."

And this article observes that "  Israeli society is '  addicted  ' to 
war  ." "  The campaign for the parliamentary elections, scheduled for 
October 27[2026], could have opened new perspectives, following the 
Hamas terrorist attack of October 7, 2023, which led Israel to devastate 
the occupied Palestinian territories and then extend the war to six 
countries in the region (Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Qatar, and Iran). 
Yet, all Israeli political factions refuse to offend public opinion by 
proposing anything different  ."

What is at issue is therefore not "  the Jews  ", but this criminal 
colonialism which would transform any people into a collective oppressor 
allowing an ongoing genocide to continue.

The complicity of Western states
All of this is done in broad daylight, even though the Israeli army 
tries to cover up its most criminal actions, for example by specifically 
assassinating journalists in the Gaza Strip and southern Lebanon.

At the worst moment of the massacres in Gaza, as today in the face of 
the massive colonization underway in the West Bank, the best that 
Western governments have been willing to do amounts to convoluted 
statements to regret the "  excesses  " of the genocide in Palestine.

When the French government recognized the State of Palestine, followed 
by the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and Portugal, this did not lead 
to an end to economic cooperation with Israel nor did it call into 
question the association agreement between the European Union and Israel.

As for the United States, whether under the presidency of Joe Biden or 
Donald Trump, they established a virtual airlift to supply the Israeli 
army with bombs and ammunition to crush the population of the Gaza 
Strip. The invasion of Lebanon, the massacres of civilians, and the 
resulting population displacements have not altered this support.

But to fully understand what is happening in Palestine, it is necessary 
to revisit some demographic data. And to put them into perspective, let 
us give two sets of figures based on the work of Roberto Bachi, founder 
of the Central Bureau of Statistics of Israel , first concerning the 
year 1914, that is to say before the drafting in 1917 of the "  Balfour 
Declaration  " by which the British government strategically lent its 
support to the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine; then 
concerning the year 1947, that is to say just before the declaration of 
independence of Israel.

In 1914, the total population of Palestine was 0.689 million, of which 
13% were Jewish, 10% Christian, and 76% Muslim. By 1947, the population 
had risen to 1.970 million, of which 32% were Jewish, 7% Christian, and 
60% Muslim.

Since the creation of the State of Israel in 1948, and in order to 
achieve this, Jewish militias forced hundreds of thousands of Arabs to 
flee the territories that now comprise Israel. This is known as the 
Nakba. More than 700,000 Palestinian Arabs fled or were expelled from 
their lands, and a significant number of them sought refuge in Lebanon, 
Syria, Jordan, or Egypt.

Let's turn to today, or more precisely to 2020-2021. The population of 
the occupied Palestinian territories (West Bank and Gaza Strip) is 
estimated by Wikipedia at 5.1 million inhabitants (3.1 million in the 
West Bank including East Jerusalem and 2 million in the Gaza Strip).

As for the total population of Israel, as published by the Central 
Bureau of Statistics, it is 9.45 million. Of this, the proportion of 
people considered Jewish is 74.1%. A simple calculation shows that in 
2020-2021 the Jewish population represented only about 48% of the total 
population in the combined "  Israel plus Occupied Territories  ," which 
corresponds to the smallest area claimed within Greater Israel.

Moreover, this proportion continues to decrease, particularly within 
Israel. While in 1950, just after the Nakba, the Jewish population 
represented 87.8% of the total population of Israel, it has been 
steadily declining ever since, reaching 74.1% today.

This is partly explained by the difference in birth rates. It is 19.6% 
for Jewish populations, while it reaches 23.5% for Muslim populations. 
Finally, an article in Le Parisien on October 21, 2025, reminds us that 
in 2019, for the first time, the number of emigrants exceeded the number 
of immigrants; in 2020, the balance was negative by 11,000 people, and a 
2023 opinion poll shows that a third of Israelis are considering leaving 
their country.

Israel is a country founded on a Zionist ideology of 
settler-colonialism, supported by Western countries. This has 
necessarily resulted in the dispossession of Palestinian lands. 
Demographics in Palestine show how, in a country that has become 
perpetually at war, the survival of   the "nation-state of the Jewish 
people  " is becoming increasingly precarious.

Although Arab governments are quite comfortable with the ethnic 
massacres suffered by Palestinians, the actions of Jewish supremacists, 
as well as the policies of Benjamin Netanyahu, and also the violence 
committed against neighboring countries, are increasing hatred against 
Jewish Israelis among Arab populations, just as they are increasing 
anti-Semitism across the globe.

Historically, unconditional Western support for Israel stems from its 
role in the international balance of power in the Middle East. Created 
after the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the discovery of vast 
hydrocarbon deposits in Iraq, Iran, and the Arabian Peninsula, Israel 
has been a key factor in Western, and particularly American, dominance 
over the Middle East. However, shifts in geopolitical balances, such as 
the rise of China, have begun to weaken this dominance.

Finally, while almost all Western governments have no qualms about 
maintaining economic and military support for Israeli colonialism, the 
spectacle of the massacres in Gaza has shocked populations in Western 
countries, including the United States.

This is beginning to have electoral repercussions in the United States, 
fueling the rise of "  socialist  " factions within the Democratic 
Party. These factions are starting to achieve electoral successes, such 
as the election of Zohran Mamdani as mayor of New York City. And as the 
website jforum.fr, already mentioned, points out, a third of New York's 
Jewish population, mostly young people, voted for him. The divide also 
runs through the diaspora.

Socialist movements in the United States are calling for a break with 
policies of support for Israel. Yet Israel remains a small, isolated 
country in the heart of a vast Arab world whose populations are largely 
hostile to it.

Since its creation, and even more so today, Israel's survival 
fundamentally depends on the military and economic support of Western 
countries, and in particular the United States.

Jewish supremacists pose an immeasurable risk to the Jews of Israel.

The unlikely future of peace between peoples
Combating the colonial logic that underlies the creation of the State of 
Israel always triggers fantasies about seeing "  Israeli Jews thrown 
into the sea  ." This is obviously not our perspective. The majority of 
them were born there and are destined to live there. This is simply 
about offering some perspectives and reminding ourselves of our own 
responsibilities as "  European citizens  ."

Peace among nations is our goal. But Jewish nationalism makes a peaceful 
future in the Middle East impossible. It is not a question of rewriting 
the past, but of charting a course for the future.

For Jewish supremacists, the project is Greater Israel. This project 
implies, in order for Jews not to find themselves in the minority, 
either the extermination or the deportation of the vast majority of the 
inhabitants of the occupied territories.

The extermination of 5 million people appears impossible. Oh! Not for 
humanitarian reasons, but simply for political ones. As for Donald 
Trump's statements about deporting the two million inhabitants of Gaza, 
they simply demonstrated that it was impossible. The Greater Israel 
project is impossible. Pursuing it will exacerbate the violence and 
could plunge the entire region into a conflagration from which it is not 
certain that Israel would emerge victorious.

The genocidal process in Gaza has appeared to be largely tolerated 
within contemporary Israeli Jewish society. The causes of this situation 
are numerous. Beyond the logic of colonization, the trauma of the Nazi 
extermination of the Jews weighs heavily. And the war crimes committed 
by Hamas on October 7, 2023, by reactivating this trauma, facilitated 
the genocidal intent of the Israeli government.

On the Palestinian side, the memory of the Nakba, the massacres, the 
deportations of the population, and the confiscation of Palestinian 
property has also created a similar trauma. The genocidal acts committed 
in Gaza, as well as the terror imposed by Jewish supremacists on the 
inhabitants of the West Bank, bring these memories back to the forefront 
of Palestinian consciousness.

This should not lead us to consider a solution based on a false symmetry 
of responsibility in the situation. There is an aggressed people, the 
Palestinian people. And there is an aggressor, Israeli Jewish 
nationalism. But obviously, a solution cannot exist without overcoming 
these two fundamental traumas within the framework of a political 
solution. To this end, we must base our actions on supporting all 
actors, in Palestine and in Israel, who favor such a political solution.

For despite the widespread acceptance of the Israeli government's logic 
of violence, Israeli society is deeply divided. While today, by " 
preventing any political horizon  ," the war "  allows the right wing to 
maintain its grip on power ," as Mairav Zonszein, an analyst with the 
NGO Crisis Group ,  explained on France Info , the situation is not yet 
final. Faced with a "  peace camp in tatters  ," the left is "  trying 
to reunite supporters of a two-state solution  ." But for this to 
happen, Israeli nationalism must suffer a major political, or even 
military, defeat.

On the Palestinian side, the war long prevented any criticism of Hamas's 
crimes. Hamas, for its part, also used the war to consolidate its 
control over the population of Gaza, and even to try to seize power in 
the West Bank. Its perspective has never been a political solution. 
Hamas has been a de facto ally of Netanyahu, who is only concerned with 
his own political survival.

But within the Palestinian population, there are many supporters of a 
political solution. We are not thinking specifically of the discredited 
and corrupt Palestinian Authority. We are thinking first and foremost of 
the Palestinian people themselves.

In 2021, a survey conducted by the Palestinian Center for Policy 
Research and Survey showed that, faced with the current deadlock of a 
two-state solution, only 39% of Palestinians still supported it. 29% of 
Palestinians favored a one-state solution, in which Palestinians and 
Jews would be equal. The genocide has likely, and temporarily, altered 
the landscape, but the fundamentals remain. A vast majority of 
Palestinians support a political solution, and once Jewish nationalism 
and organizations like Hamas are defeated-a point that seems largely a 
given today-they will then be able to organize themselves to achieve it.

In this situation, our fundamental responsibility, in Europe as in the 
United States, is to secure an end to unconditional economic and 
military support for Israel. Any further support must be contingent upon 
concrete actions demonstrating a willingness to reach a political 
solution. This is the core of our struggle for peace in the Middle East, 
which is based on a portion of the Palestinian demands-the very demands 
from which we can exert pressure on Western governments.

Firstly, we must aim to force Western states to respect the ceasefire by 
Israel, both in Gaza and in Lebanon; the same applies to the cessation 
of warfare in Syria, Yemen, and Iraq; and we must also continue to 
oppose the war in Iran.
We must advocate for a definitive halt to all Jewish settlements in the 
West Bank and the dismantling of settlements illegally built beyond the 
1949 "  Green Line  ," which constitutes Israel's internationally 
recognized borders. This also means the reintegration of East Jerusalem 
into Palestine, the return of the Golan Heights to Syria, and the 
complete evacuation of southern Lebanon.
We must explain the Basic Law of July 19, 2018, so that the broad 
movement in support of the Palestinian cause compels our governments to 
pressure Israeli parties. The goal is to achieve its repeal, as well as 
that of all other previous legal provisions that establish 
discrimination and political inequality among citizens within the State 
of Israel.
In short, we must break the colonizing and aggressive dynamic towards 
its neighbors that characterizes the State of Israel today. We must not 
"  destroy the State of Israel  ," but rather destroy what makes it a 
colonizing state.

PclWebLetter]Lettre N° 39 du Réseau "Les ami.es de la Plateforme 
Communiste Libertaire"

https://plateformecl.org/israel-du-colonialisme-au-genocide/
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