Israel Was *Always* a Racist, Settler-Colonial Project

Claims that it is antisemitic to say this are either disingenuous or ignorant…

The views expressed in this article are those of the author, expressed in an unofficial capacity, and do not reflect the official policy or position of the Department of the Navy, Department of Defense, or the U.S. Government.

Two weeks ago, New York governor Kathy Hochul forced Hunter College, part of the City University of New York (CUNY) system, to take down a job listing. Before saying anything else about the incident, let me reproduce the listing in its entirety, so that those unfamiliar with what I’m talking about have a chance to form an unbiased opinion of it. I use a photo because the listing, per Hochul’s order, is no longer available online:

The position was for a professor of Palestinian Studies. Apparently, this was the section that caused Hochul to step in: “We seek a historically grounded scholar who takes a critical lens to issues pertaining to Palestine including but not limited to: settler colonialism, genocide, human rights, apartheid, migration, climate and infrastructure devastation, health, race, gender, and sexuality.”

Now, you might be wondering what exactly Hochul’s problem with this was, and why she thought it appropriate to interfere with academic life in such an obtuse way. Indeed, Hunter sociology professor Heba Gowayed told the New York Times that Hochul’s action constituted an act of censorship: “There’s always a lot of censorship and pushback when people talk about Palestine, but no one expected a Democratic governor of New York to get involved in such an egregious way in something that should be decided by the experts in the field.” But, as the Times also noted, not everyone agreed that Hochul’s decision constituted inappropriate interference:

Jeffrey Lax, a CUNY professor and founder of the group Students, Alumni and Faculty for Equality on Campus, which “advocates for Zionist Jews discriminated against and excluded on college campuses,” objected to such censorship claims, saying the listing promoted dangerous falsehoods.

“It accuses Israel, falsely, of being a settler colonial state, of being an apartheid state and of committing genocide,” he said. “These are, to me, the most horrific modern antisemitic false tropes against Jewish people.” Why, he asked, was there no “critical lens” applied to Hamas, terrorism or other aspects of Palestinian life that did not include charges against Israel?

When he saw the listing, he distributed it to allies, calling it a “modern-day blood libel,” he said.

It appears that these complaints inspired Hochul’s intervention. Her office told the Times, “Governor Hochul directed CUNY to immediately remove this posting and conduct a thorough review of the position to ensure that antisemitic theories are not promoted in the classroom…Hateful rhetoric of any kind has no place at CUNY or anywhere in New York State.”

Thus, we arrive at the crux of the matter – ongoing claims that antisemitic rhetoric has overtaken the American university system since the terrorist attacks perpetrated by Hamas on October 7^th, 2023. This idea, along with closely related ones – that Jews in America have suddenly become unsafe, that universities are crawling with terrorist sympathizers who support violence, particularly against Jews – are increasingly difficult to avoid encountering in today’s media environment. And despite their sheer absurdity, they continue to bedevil well-meaning people who don’t follow these things closely, and who don’t have much knowledge of Israel, Palestine, Zionism, international relations, etc.

So let’s carefully examine what Professor Lax – and, apparently, the New York State government – are so upset by. Lax claims that the job listing “accuses Israel, falsely, of being a settler colonial state, of being an apartheid state and of committing genocide.” He argues that such accusations “are, to me, the most horrific modern antisemitic false tropes against Jewish people,” and that they constitute “a modern-day blood libel.” Hochul’s office, in turn, claimed that the listing contained “antisemitic theories” and “hateful rhetoric.”

First off, the listing doesn’t actually mention Israel, let alone accuse it of “being a settler colonial state, of being an apartheid state and of committing genocide.” It merely says that those three concepts, alongside others (human rights, migration, climate and infrastructure devastation, health, race, gender, sexuality) constitute “issues pertaining to Palestine.” Second, and much more important, even if the listing had explicitly made such claims, Lax and Hochul would still be dead-wrong in objecting to them, for reasons that should be obvious. Israel is a settler-colonial state. Israel is an apartheid state. And Israel is committing genocide – with the full support of the U.S. government, on a thoroughly bi-partisan basis.

Let’s run through these in order.

It is amazing, though sadly not surprising, that anyone, let alone a college professor, disputes the notion that Israel is a settler colonial state. Anyone with even the slightest knowledge of the region’s history (a category that admittedly includes very few Americans) knows this; it is a central topic of discussion in the historiography. Israel’s official ideology, Zionism, was conceived in the late 19^th century as a response to the vicious antisemitism then raging in Europe. The idea behind it was that Jews would only be safe if they had a nation-state of their own. By itself, that wouldn’t have been the worst idea, were it not for the fact that its proponents saw it as requiring the mass ethnic cleansing of the indigenous population, who they perceived as inferior.

Zionism was consciously conceived as a settler colonial project, something that everyone involved in its creation and development wrote and said explicitly, over and over, again and again. The historian Shay Hazkani observes in Dear Palestine: A Social History of the 1948 War that “For many early Zionists, including the founding father of political Zionism, Theodor Herzl, European settler colonialism – especially the German experience before the First World War – was a model.” “Arthur Ruppin, who headed the Palestine office of the Zionist Organization (ZO)…explicitly sought to replicate this model to transform the demographic balance in Palestine in favor of the Jews.” Of course, Jewish settler-colonialism in Palestine would never have succeeded without the sponsorship of the British empire, which needed a vehicle through which it could better control one of the most strategically important areas in the Middle East. Thus, the Zionist movement began as a settler-colonial project under the tutelage of an empire with a penchant for supporting settler-colonial projects.

Again, it must be emphasized that the Zionist movement discussed this openly and without controversy at the time. As the historian Rashid Khalidi put it in his famous book The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine, “The social and economic institutions founded by the early Zionists…were also unquestionably understood by all and described as colonial.” He elaborated:

Significantly, many early apostles of Zionism had been proud to embrace the colonial nature of their project. The eminent Revisionist Zionist leader Ze’ev Jabotinsky, godfather of the political trend that has dominated Israel since 1977…was especially clear about this. Jabotinsky wrote in 1923: “Every native population in the world resists colonists as long as it has the slightest hope of being able to rid itself of the danger of being colonised. That is what the Arabs in Palestine are doing, and what they will persist in doing as long as there remains a solitary spark of hope that they will be able to prevent the transformation of ‘Palestine’ into the ‘Land of Israel.’”

The political scientist Corey Robin, in his recent article castigating Hochul’s decision to remove the job listing, describes a book that his wife inherited from her grandparents, both of whom were Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany. Titled A Palestine Picture Book, it was published in 1947 on behalf of the Jewish National Fund (JNF). The JNF, Israeli historian Illan Pappe notes, was “the principle Zionist tool for the colonization of Palestine” – which would certainly explain A Palestine Picture Book’s contents. Robin provides a long list of excerpts, plus more on his website. Here are just a few:

It is barely forty years since the large-scale Jewish colonization of Palestine was begun. Despite natural and political handicaps, Jewish colonization, once begun, continued.”

Long a barren waste, it has been transformed by Jewish settlers into a place of fertile fields and green gardens in a generation’s time….

Orange plantations now cover thousands of acres of the once water-starved coastal plain in dramatic contrast with the parched tracts of soil where colonization has not yet begun….

Buried beneath these dunes is the ancient city of Caesarea, the port of Herod the Great, a prey to the shifting sands that the modern settler must continually combat in order to preserve his trees and fields.

On its [the Galilee] western shore is the city of Tiberias, which Joseph ha-Nasi, Duke of Naxos, rebuilt in the sixteenth century above the ruins of the ancient city with the intention of inviting colonists all over the world to settle there….

From Lake Chinnereth the Jordan flows through a wide valley studded with new and thriving Jewish settlements…

The Jordan sweeps past Kfar Ruppin, southernmost settlements in the Jordan Valley….

“The book,” Robin concludes, “is rife with references to colonization, settlement, settlers, and ethnic homogeneity. […] Colonization and settlement, in other words, are part of the uncontroversial vocabulary of Zionism ca. 1947. Yet, call Israel a colonial project today, say that it is and has always been a settler society, and you’ll be branded an anti-Semite or a self-hating Jew.”

Notably, Robin wrote that in 2014. Over a decade later, Professor Lax, governor Hochul, and contemporary Zionists everywhere continue to prove him right. Their motive for ardently denying Israel’s unmistakable settler-colonial past (and present) is obvious. Now that “the West” has finally joined settler-colonialism’s countless victims in acknowledging it to be a racist and murderous practice, they are desperately frightened that people are connecting the dots between the sordid histories of settler colonialism in places like the United States, Canada, and Australia with what has been going on in Palestine since the turn of the 20^th century. Indeed, Khalidi and other scholars have detected a conscious attempt on the part of Israel and Zionism to obscure their settler-colonial origins. “Unremarkably,” he wrote, “once colonialism took on a bad odor in the post-World War II era of decolonization, the colonial origins and practice of Zionism and Israel were whitewashed and conveniently forgotten in Israel and the West. In fact, Zionism – for two decades the coddled stepchild of British colonialism – rebranded itself as an anticolonial movement.”

Given that settler-colonists continue to flock to the West Bank and steal Palestinian homes and land with the full support of the Israeli government, denying Israel’s settler-colonial nature constitutes willful blindness. To give a concrete example: not far from where I live, there are Synagogues auctioning off stolen Palestinian land to Jewish settlers – today, in 2025. Once those settlers arrive in the West Bank and literally steal someone’s home (click here to see an example of this actually occurring), they behave disgustingly toward their Palestinian neighbors, whom they ultimately seek to displace entirely. That people are starting to (a) pay attention to this, and (b) take action against it, has Zionists everywhere worried and furious.

Lax was also upset that Hunter College’s job implied that Israel is an apartheid state. Again, you have to be either extraordinarily ignorant or willfully blind to dispute this. The (Israeli) human rights organization B’Tselem has documented the nature of Israel’s apartheid regime extensively. As they put it in their exhaustive report, bluntly titled “This is Apartheid,” “The Israeli regime enacts in all the territory it controls (Israeli sovereign territory, East Jerusalem, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip) an apartheid regime. One organizing principle lies at the base of a wide array of Israeli policies: advancing and perpetuating the supremacy of one group – Jews – over another – Palestinians.” This is the very definition of the word “apartheid,” hence the report’s title. B’Tselem, of course, were hardly the first people to notice this, nor were they the most prominent. For example, the late Jimmy Carter (not exactly an anti-Israel figure) had been publicly calling Israel an apartheid regime for decades before his recent death.

Zionists are outraged that people now correctly describe the Israeli system as apartheid because the term carries a moral stigma due to its association with white supremacist South Africa. They do not want Israel to be associated with a regime that was so universally despised. Once again, however, a basic knowledge of history shows how absurd it is for Zionists to whine about comparisons between the two countries. As the journalist Antony Loewenstein has recently reminded us, “Israel and Apartheid South Africa Were the Closest of Friends.” Especially since the 1970s, he writes, “many in the ruling Israeli Likud Party felt an affinity with South Africa’s worldview,” given their “ideological affinity about how to treat unwanted populations.” He quotes the Jewish South African dissident Ronnie Kasrils, who explained the connections between the two regimes more thoroughly:

Israelis claim that they are the chosen people, the elect of God, and find a biblical justification for their racism and Zionist exclusivity…This is just like the Afrikaners of apartheid South Africa, who also had the biblical notion that the land was their God-given right. Like the Zionists who claimed that Palestine in the 1940s was “a land without people for a people without land,” so the Afrikaner settlers spread the myth that there were no black people in South Africa when they first settled in the seventeenth century. They conquered by force of arms and terror and the provocation of a series of bloody colonial wars of conquest.

Certainly, the creators of South Africa’s apartheid system recognized Israel as one of their own. According to Loewenstein, “One of the architects of apartheid in South Africa, former prime minister Hendrik Verwoerd, wrote in the Rand Daily Mail in 1961 that ‘Israel, like South Africa, is an apartheid state’ after taking Palestine from the Arabs who ‘had lived there for a thousand years.’” Israel would go on to sell South Africa weapons (something Nelson Mandela did not forget), collaborate with it on the construction of illegal nuclear warheads, and, along with the United States under Ronald Reagan, continue supporting it until the vile regime finally collapsed.

Another reason Zionists lose it at any mention of the word “apartheid” is because it suggests that Israel, like white supremacist South Africa, is a racist state. The problem, of course, is that Israel is indeed a racist state, and has been from its inception. The Ashkenazi (i.e., white European) Jews who founded Israel were bitterly racist toward Arabs, Palestinians, and their fellow Mizrahi (nonwhite) Jews. Hazkani, in Dear Palestine, surveyed the private letters of Mizrahi Jews who came to Israel, which reveal that they faced intense discrimination from their Ashkenazi brethren. One Moroccan Jew wrote to his family back home, “the European Jews who suffered tremendously from the Hitleristic Nazism see themselves as a superior race…and the Sephardi [Mizrahi] as belonging to an inferior one… they treat us like savages or unwelcomed elements.” Such racism was even more vicious when it came to non-Jewish brown people – especially Palestinians.

This is something that our culture, steeped in both the oppressor/oppressed binary, as well as decades of Holocaust remembrance, is very uncomfortable acknowledging. Nonetheless it has to be faced openly. Jews can be just as racist as anyone else, and as accounts like Hazkani’s demonstrate, this included Israel’s founders and much of its population. Naomi Klein explains in her latest book that “the Israelis who came to Palestine in the 1940s were survivors of genocide, desperate refugees, many of whom had no other options, and…they were settler colonialists who participated in the ethnic cleansing of another people…[T]hey were the victims of white supremacy in Europe being passed the mantle of whiteness in Palestine.” Difficult as it may be, “Engaging with the form of Zionism that created the state of Israel in 1948 means accepting that a people, just like a person, can be victim and victimizer at the same time; that they can be both traumatized and traumatizer.” A cursory glance at contemporary Israeli public opinion polls, or at the sorts of things Israelis enjoy posting to social media, demonstrates that, today, Israelis are solidly in the latter category.

Professor Lax also objected to the implication that Israel is carrying out a genocide in Gaza. While I’m sure you can find plenty of lawyers willing to argue the contrary (you can find lawyers willing to argue anything, really), numerous credible authorities have made the case that Israel is, in fact, engaged in genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. These include Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the Human Rights Clinic at Boston University’s School of Law, UN Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories Francesca Albanese, and the government of (post-apartheid) South Africa, via a case brought before the International Court of Justice (backed by Ireland, Spain, Mexico, and Egypt, among others). Even if all of these entities are wrong, the fact that they have enough evidence to make the accusation at all shows that it is hardly something that can simply be dismissed out of hand, let alone be considered an expression of antisemitism.

Which brings us to the final accusation – or rather, set of accusations – made by Lax, Hochul, and countless others. Lax claims that these “dangerous falsehoods” (accusations that Israel is a settler colonial, apartheid, genocidal state) constitute a “modern day blood libel.” This is, quite simply, embarrassing. There is no way any serious person can make that case. One can only begin to justify such lunacy if one accepts the utterly false ideas that all Jews are Zionists, that Zionism is Judaism, and/or that the Israeli state speaks for, or somehow represents, global Jewry. And even then, such criticisms still wouldn’t amount to a blood libel. Accusations like this are why many people are getting tired of the shrieking about antisemitism - because Zionists blatantly use the term as a means of silencing critiques they are unable to dispel. This, in turn, is dangerous, as it numbs people to the fact that real antisemitism actually is on the rise (the kind espoused by neo-Nazis and white nationalists, and encouraged by the present administration).

Let’s look closer at these accusations of antisemitism coming from pro-Palestine circles. In addition to Lax and Hochul, countless individuals have claimed that Jewish people (mainly college students) do not feel safe in post-October 7^th America because of an exponential increase in antisemitic incidents. These complaints are often made by non-Jews on behalf of Jews, but there are indeed some Jewish people, many of them students, who have made such claims themselves. Lax in particular stated that “These [criticisms of Israel] are, to me, the most horrific modern antisemitic false tropes against Jewish people.” Comments like that often pass without scrutiny, presumably because people fear that it will look bad to dismiss complaints of antisemitism. The problem, however, is that there is no antisemitism here. There is nothing – absolutely nothing – about any of the criticisms of Israel implied by that job listing that can be plausibly construed as exhibiting a racist hatred toward Jews as a people.

Look closely at Lax’s statement: “These are, to me, the most horrific modern antisemitic false tropes against Jewish people.” The keys words there are “to me.” Lax may very well perceive these claims about Israel to be antisemitic – but it’s not at all clear why I or anyone else should care. Lax is wrong, and what’s more than that, he’s obviously wrong (less charitably, we might speculate that he’s lying in order to protect Israel’s reputation). Criticizing the nation-state of Israel, or its political ideology, Zionism, is not antisemitic, even if the criticisms are inaccurate (though as we’ve seen, they’re not in this case). Similarly, the most important element to complaints that Jews/Jewish college students don’t feel safe is the word “feel.” This brings us to a point that cannot be emphasized enough: there is a massive - massive - difference between feeling unsafe, and actually being unsafe. Let’s take people who complain that Jews feel unsafe at their word, and ask why they might argue this.

First off, it has to be pointed out (because media in this country shamefully ignore it) that pro-Palestine protests, including the encampments that cropped up all across the U.S. last year, tend to feature rather large numbers of Jews, which somewhat obliterates the claim that these events are hotbeds of violent antisemitism. (see last year’s Seder in the Streets protest, or the recent Jewish-led protests against Trump’s despicable assault on the first amendment and immigrant rights inside Trump tower). Second, Jews who have wandered into such protests out of curiosity have discovered that claims they’d be targeted, harassed, or threatened, are completely nonsensical (see here for the account of a Rabbi who did this). The journalist Michael Tracey was particularly cheeky in how he went about this:

Jews who were far less sympathetic to the Palestinian cause discovered the same thing, such as this deeply confused woman who attempted to provoke an incident at Yale by publicly identifying herself as a Jew in the middle of Yale’s encampment. Not only was she (obviously) ignored by everyone, but if you watch the video of the incident, you can see people erecting a “Jews for a free Palestine” banner in the background. The clip quickly made rounds on the internet (incredibly, the woman’s husband shared it, thinking it demonstrated the threat to Jews on campuses) as one of the greatest self-owns of the year.

But despite all the evidence running the other way, people continue to take the claim seriously. Why? For those who are not Jews, the answer is likely the media. As mentioned, the American press have consistently downplayed or ignored the massive presence of Jewish people at pro-Palestine, anti-genocide protests, instead contributing to a narrative of raging antisemitism. Thus, people who have never attended a protest, or who don’t frequent college campuses, are easily led to believe that they are unsafe environments for Jewish people. Remember, the same people who sat in front of their televisions (or uncritically read their copies of the New York Times) in 2003, and as a result were convinced beyond the shadow of a doubt that Iraq had WMDs and was in league with Al Qaeda, are the same people who insist today that we’ve never seen such levels of antisemitism.

A particularly nefarious media source for such claims is the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), which masquerades as a civil rights organization but is in fact an organ of the Israeli government, and whose mission is to smear anyone critical of that government (legendary journalist James Bamford has said that the ADL should remove the “Anti” from its name and call itself what it really is – the Defamation League). Indeed, the ADL has been the primary source for the claim (we’ve all seen some version of it) that antisemitic incidents have risen something like 150% since October 7^th. Outrageous! Terrifying! Except, it isn’t true. Jewish Currents conducted a “line-by-line” audit of the ADL’s methodology and, wouldn’t you know it, they found that the whole thing is made up. The ADL basically defined “antisemitic incident” as “any incident wherein someone criticized Israel,” which of course have increased exponentially since Israel began its genocide. This accords with the ADL’s definition of antisemitism - CEO Jonathan Greenblatt has publicly stated that “anti-Zionism is antisemitism” - as well as with a strategy laid out long ago by Israel’s then-UN ambassador Abba Eban, who encouraged the conflation of the two as far back as 1973.

Interestingly, Breakthrough News managed to get inside one of the ADL’s antisemitism conferences a few years ago, and discovered that the entire event was geared toward defending Israel’s reputation, not combatting antisemitism. More recently, the ADL has publicly insisted that Elon Musk’s Nazi salutes were not really Nazi salutes, which somewhat belies the claim that they care about “antisemitic incidents” (they did condemn Steve Bannon’s later Sieg Heil, although even then only indirectly).

This media deception goes a long way toward explaining why non-Jews so frequently get taken in by claims of rampant antisemitism. But what about Jews themselves? Well, first we have to discount the growing number of Jews who are anti-Zionist, and who fiercely challenge such claims. But it is undeniably true that many others do claim to feel this way. While it would be inappropriate to attempt to psychoanalyze this entire group, the fact is that we have explanations for many of their complaints readily available. As the pathbreaking documentary Israelism exposed, Zionism has become normalized within a majority of Jewish communities. Young Jews are often taught, from birth, to identify with the nation state of Israel and with Zionism. Israel thus forms a core part of their identity; their sense of self. As Jacqui Schulefand, former Director of Engagement and Programs for Hillel at the University of Connecticut, told the filmmakers, “Can you separate Israel and Judaism? I don’t know—I can’t. You know, some people I think can. To me, it’s the same. Yeah, you can’t separate it. Israel is Judaism and Judaism is Israel. And that is who I am, and that is my identity.”

Such views are largely ahistorical. While Zionists insist that Zionism and Israel are, and always have been, essential components of Judaism and Jewish identity, it actually wasn’t until the late 1960s that a majority of Jews cared all that much about either of them. Indeed, Zionism was rejected by most Jews when it was first devised in the late 19th century. Initially an exclusively secular movement, “the majority of observant Jews in Europe opposed Zionism as a form of ‘false messianism,’” Hazkani observes in Dear Palestine. Meanwhile, for “the Jews of Arab lands,” he writes, “Zionism was not seen as infringing on Jewish tenets, but neither did it generate much interest until the late 1940s.” Many secular Jews also remained non or even anti-Zionist, preferring to stay where they were and join socialist movements to improve life for everyone, Jew and gentile alike. Significantly, the “relatively small community of Ashkenazi and Mizrahi Jews [who] had lived in Palestine continuously from ancient times” were also “not Zionist.”

But since about 1967, this started to change, and now Zionism is something that majorities of Jews claim to be committed to. Schulefand’s view, which not long ago would have been considered outlandish, is now common. This, in a nutshell, is why some Jewish students say they feel unsafe, or that a rise in criticisms of Israel constitute a rise in antisemitism. If you’re brought up to believe, with Schulefand, that “Israel is Judaism and Judaism is Israel,” then any criticism of one is a criticism of the other. Being told that Israel is engaged in a project of ethnic cleansing and genocide is going to feel like an assault on who you are as a person. It is going to be disorienting. It is going to go against everything you were taught to believe. And, of course, people like this are taught to believe that critics of Israel are raging antisemites. As part of this, they’re taught that critics of Israel who are Jewish are self-hating Jews, or else have something deeply wrong with them. They’re also taught to hate and fear Arabs, Muslims, and Palestinians. Organizations like the ADL consciously strive to instill such fears - Greenblatt has shamefully equated the traditional Palestinian scarf, or keffiyeh, with the swastika. Israel also encourages this. It has long sought to equate Palestinians with Nazis, part of its project to retroactively blame them for the Holocaust, thereby justifying the ethnic cleansing of Palestine (nakba) that brought the Israeli state into being in 1948.

One of my unofficial mottos is, “to understand is not to excuse.” Meaning, I can appreciate and empathize with why certain people hold certain beliefs, even as I know that they are ultimately groundless. Studying history properly demands that you develop this ability. I understand why Zionists feel the way they do. Having myself been brought up to believe some pretty silly things - my childhood pastor instructed me that dinosaurs and humans coexisted until the former group chose not to board Noah’s Ark - I am as much sympathetic as I am saddened at the stories of indoctrination told in films like Israelism. This is why I try to challenge Zionist ideas (among other dangerous falsehoods). But, in keeping with my motto, I cannot excuse them. I certainly can’t excuse a Democratic governor catering to them in this day and age, with everything else going on.