Israel is carrying out a genocide in Gaza. This is precisely what numerous United Nations experts have said.
Several countries have joined South Africa in a case in the International Court of Justice accusing Israel of committing genocide against the Palestinian people, and judges at the Hague have said it is “plausible” that Tel Aviv is violating the Genocide Convention.
Top Israeli officials have made genocidal calls for the elimination of the Palestinian people, and Israel’s far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich argued that it would be “justified and moral” to starve to death all 2 million Palestinian civilians in Gaza. (He lamented that the international community would not permit this.)
Some people who do not closely follow geopolitics are confused how a state that claims to represent the Jewish people (although many Jewish people around the world oppose it) could commit such heinous crimes, after European Jews suffered through a genocide at the ends of Nazi Germany and its fascist allies.
To understand the blatant genocide that Israel is carrying out today in Gaza, with the full support of the US government and most of Europe, it is important to recognize Zionism’s roots in Western colonialism.
Contrary to popular belief, Israel was not founded in response to the barbarism of the Nazi Holocaust. The British empire had already endorsed the creation of an Israeli colonial regime in historic Palestine three decades before, in the Balfour Declaration of 1917, at a time when Europe was colonizing the Middle East (West Asia).
It is not a coincidence that the Balfour Declaration came immediately after the 1916 Sykes–Picot Agreement, in which the British and French empires carved up the Ottoman empire’s territory and established their own colonies in West Asia.
A map of territories that the British and French empires would control according to the Sykes–Picot Agreement of 1916
Zionism was directly modeled after 19th-century European colonialist movements.
The “founding father” of the political Zionist movement, Theodor Herzl, wrote a letter to Cecil Rhodes, the genocidal colonizer of Africa (after whom Rhodesia was named), asking for help to colonize Palestine. In the letter, Herzl boasted that Zionism was “something colonial”.
Reassuring his European colonial sponsors, Herzl insisted that Israel (which he called “Der Judenstaat”) would “form a part of a wall of defense for Europe in Asia, an outpost of civilization against barbarism”.
This is exactly the same colonial language still used today by Israel’s longest ever serving leader, far-right Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. “We’re protecting you”, Netanyahu told the US Congress in an address in July 2024. “This is not a clash of civilizations. It’s a clash between barbarism and civilization”.
While Israel’s supporters in the 21st century usually downplay the country’s colonial origins, the original Zionist leaders were proud of their colonialist ideology; they didn’t hide it. An influential early Zionist group called itself the Palestine Jewish Colonization Association.
One of Herzl’s major political allies was British Secretary of State for the Colonies Joseph Chamberlain, a blood-soaked colonialist who violently opposed sovereignty for Ireland and terrorized the peoples living under British colonial rule in Africa.
In fact, the British empire initially considered creating a Zionist regime in Uganda, which it had also colonized in east Africa, before later settling on Palestine. The British empire’s 1917 Balfour Declaration was the green light for creating Israel by colonizing Palestine — again, decades before World War II and the Nazi Holocaust.
The Israeli regime’s fascist barbarism today makes sense when one understands that both Zionism and Nazism originated in European colonialism.
The Nazis wanted to colonize Eastern Europe to have “Lebensraum”, and tried to kill and ethnically cleanse the region’s inhabitants to steal their land; just like Zionists want to colonize historic Palestine and other parts of West Asia, and are killing and ethnically cleansing the indigenous inhabitants to steal their land.
What US-backed Israeli forces are doing today in Palestine is not new: it is what the US and Canada did to the Native peoples of North America, what France did to Algeria, what the UK did to Ireland, and what Germany did to Namibia.
Zionism is colonialism, which is why it is no surprise at all that the Western imperial powers continue to support it so strongly. (They do not need an Israeli lobby to convince them to support colonialism; this is what imperial powers do. The US did not need a lobby to wage savage imperial wars of aggression against the peoples of Korea, Vietnam, Cuba, Nicaragua, Yugoslavia, etc.)
Indigenous Palestinians being expelled by Zionist militias in the Nakba of 1948
After being created through the mass ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in the 1948 Nakba, Israel’s colonial regime initially acted as an outpost of the British empire. This was clear when the UK (and France) intervened to help Israel fight against Egypt’s revolutionary anti-colonialist pan-Arab leader Gamal Abdel Nasser, after he nationalized the Suez canal in the so-called “Suez crisis” of 1956 (which was really a crisis of colonialism, in which a formerly colonized nation asserted sovereign, popular control over its territory and infrastructure, so the colonial powers that had profited from that infrastructure invaded to try to stop the nationalization).
The United States subsequently overtook Great Britain, and, since 1967, Israel has been an outpost of the US empire. Washington has used the colonialist Zionist regime as a vicious attack dog to try to liquidate all anti-imperialist opposition forces in West Asia, first targeting communists, then Arab nationalists, and now Islamic-nationalist groups fighting for national liberation.
As former US Secretary of State and NATO commander Alexander Haig boasted, “Israel is the largest American aircraft carrier in the world that cannot be sunk”.
