Securing Race in a Time of Genocide: Zionism, Antisemitism and the current racial regime

A talk I gave this year

‘The Zionist cause could not justify its conquest of Palestine without leaning on the same justifications of all other conquests throughout history - i.e., by citing physical, civilizational, mental and moral superiority, the other facet of which is how the conqueror directs his gaze at the subjects of his conquest. In this regard, the Zionist movement had to accomplish two simultaneous missions through the novel: first, to justify the non-integration of Jews in their European societies, and, second, to justify uprooting an entire people from their land.’

Ghassan Kanafani, On Zionist Literature (1967[2022]: 80-81)

The Palestinian intellectual and political leader, Ghassan Kanafani, wrote these words in his 1967 book, On Zionist Literature, a book about the Zionist movement’s ‘weapon of literature... a crucial and indivisible part of the movement which political Zionism employed extensively…’ be it written by Jews or non-Jews (p. 1). Kanafani was assassinated by the Mossad in 1971 in Beirut, and his book translated into English and published by Liberated Texts in 2022. Kanafani undertook this study because he was interested in knowing why there is such striking similarity between the phrases used in ‘Western political commentary’ and ‘Zionist novels’ and why the ‘Western reader accept[s] the same racist and fascist positions in Zionist novels that are deemed contemptible when taken by non-Jews?’

I am immediately struck by the fact that, six months into the genocide being enacted on the Palestinians in Gaza, the questions posed by Kanafani in 1967 appear as though they could have been written now. I refer to them as a way of reflecting on the question I have been asked to address today: why is it that the subject of race is often not engaged in discussions of military violence when we can see so clearly that the lives of some are deemed more important than the lives of others? The simplicity of this question often eludes a serious response.

As someone who has been trying to think and act with and against race – by which I mean working to undo the structural injustices produced in the name of maintaining racial hierarchy while recognising that it cannot be avoided in the name of a hypothetical ‘postracial future’ – I am struck by how far people will go to avoid speaking about race… or speaking about it in a meaningful way, a way that could help us to understand why the world continues to be organised along a continuum of ‘the human, the not-quite-human, and the non-human,’ as the Black studies scholar Alexander Weheliye puts it.

Setting these questions in the context of the current assault on Palestine is not opportune. Yes, on the one hand, it is unconscionable to speak publicly on this – or indeed any – topic and not speak about Palestine. We must never stop speaking about the atrocities being carried out in all our names, given that this has been repeatedly presented as a war for the salvation of western civilisation. But beyond this, the case of Zionism, as Kanafani makes clear, indicates precisely how race operates in contexts of colonial domination.

And because the colonisation of Palestine, and the subsequent untold violence done in the aim of maintaining and extending this colonial domination, has been presented as a conflict between uprooted and beleaguered Jews and threatening and primitive Arabs – in other words, as two opposed groups along the continuum of humanity, two groups who were in fact racialised conjointly in previous times - it is exemplary of race in all its complexity.

Zionism, then, is not just the regime of racial and colonial domination in Palestine itself, it also makes visible the struggle to assert the supremacy of western civilisation. This struggle continues so long as there is resistance to it. We are now witnessing an acute stage of this resistance, and therefore, an intensely violent and repressive response to it with implications for groups and individuals far beyond Palestine itself. This response pulls on myriad threads and purposefully creates doubt and confusion. Paying attention to this allows us to identify the workings of race at multiple levels.

In what follows, I will focus on three aspects:

·      How I understand race

·      Zionism as a racial-colonial endeavour

·      The contemporary confusion over antisemitism

What race does

By design, the societies that birthed race as an idea and practice of differentiation, domination, and exploitation have a serious lack of racial literacy. This makes it difficult to parse how racial logics, embedded in public culture through law, policy, the criminal punishment system, education, and health and medicine, function and are reproduced, recalibrated over time, and shaped by context.

We cannot be done thinking about race, because race - which I understand to be a technology of power for the management of human difference, the main goal of which is the production, reproduction and maintenance of white supremacy on both a local and a planetary scale - is not done with us.

According to many people, both well-meaning and those with an agenda to lash back at the upsurge of antiracist and decolonial protest of the last few years, we must move beyond race to arrive at a future where equality reigns.

It is instructive to watch people such as Donald Trump or Douglas Murray invoke Dr Martin Luther King’s famous words, ‘I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character’ to vilify antiracists.  The reduction of race to the ‘colour of one’s skin’ is to wilfully misunderstand the purpose and usages of race and its role in the constitution of the modern-colonial world system.

But aren’t we all we opposed to race? Do we not want to ensure that no one is treated unjustly because of how they have been racialized? Would it not be better not to invoke terminology that has been used to dehumanise people and even justify their annihilation?

In response, I often return to a simple proposition: how can we undo a system we refuse to talk about? Can we unravel gendered violence by refusing to talk about it, even if we know that gender is a harmful construct? I think most would agree that the answer is, no. This then begs the question, when we hear calls to ‘move beyond’ race, who does this moving beyond serve? When our critics say talking about race is unhelpful, my answer is, who is it unhelpful to? For many on the left, but also spuriously today on the right, the answer is to focus on class instead of race. All this talk of race, they say, is a project of elites, bent on taking the spotlight off the ‘left behind white working class’ (as the right would have it) or the real problem of capitalism (as we hear more often on the left).

But it is not possible, on the one hand, to claim that we must go beyond race and then demand more attention to the ‘white working class’. This means, quite simply that you are talking about race, but that for you, race is synonymous with being Black, Muslim, Roma, or – in sum – not white. Look around at who the actually existing working class is, and you will quickly find out that it is multiracial and, moreover, that the entire notion of class is impossible to disentangle from how race is used as a mechanism to assign different roles to differently racialised groups in the economy.

This means that it is not enough either to beg us to focus on capitalism rather than race. In very simple terms, as the radical geographer and abolitionist activist, Ruth Wilson Gilmore tells us, ‘all capitalism is racial capitalism.’

But, going a bit deeper, it means that, at the root of capitalism, which began in Europe and spread via the mechanisms of colonialism and imperialism throughout the globe, we find what the late Black studies scholar, Cedric Robinson calls racialism. To understand racial capitalism, he wrote in Black Marxism, we have to understand that the ‘tendency of European civilization through capitalism was not homogenise but to differentiate¾to exaggerate regional, subcultural, and dialectical differences into “racial” ones.’

What does he mean by this? Simply, for our purposes, race is not difference per se, but it is the practice of differentiation in the interests of domination and exploitation, both of which existed as practices prior to the development of capitalism, but which become essential for its expansion. This involved ascribing people a natural condition in life, for example, tying enslavement to a particular population (as slavery became a massified practice essential to the development of the industries that drove and cemented European-American power – sugar, cotton, minerals, etc., - slavery came to be seen as the natural conditions of Africans, (although within Europe, various populations had previously been enslaved). Robinson identifies this as beginning under feudalism in Europe, observable in the treatment of migrant workers who became enslavable. This practice of differentiation becomes a modus operandi that comes to define Europe as a civilisation and sets the scene, providing the operating manual if you will, for the later enslavement of Indigenous people in the so-called ‘New World’ followed rapidly by Africans.

It is through such mechanisms that, over time, race comes to be seen as a human attribute, as definitive of one’s identity, rather than being, as the Black radical intellectual, W.E.B. Du Bois spoke of it, a badge that one is compelled to wear. To quote him, in Dusk of Dawn, Du Bois wrote of race that, ‘the physical bond is least and the badge of colour relatively unimportant save as a badge; the real essence of this kinship is its social heritage of slavery; the discrimination and insult; and this heritage binds together not simply the children of Africa, but extends through yellow Asia and into the South Seas.’

Here Du Bois, who by the second half of his long life, had become committed to analysing colonialism and imperialism as intrinsic to the domination of the West over the majority of the world, which he linked to the experiences of Black people living in the aftermath of slavery in the US, is telling us about what race does, rather than what it is. The effects of racial differentiation are to extend the ‘discrimination and insult’ and bind together all those whose existence became a counterpoint to the dominance of white European ‘man’, who needed this ‘Other’ to establish his superiority and legitimise colonial-racial rule.

As Stuart Hall said in his 1997 lecture, Race, the Floating Signifier, ‘the masculine form is deliberate’: race is a ‘masterconcept that organises the great classificatory systems of difference that operate in human societies.’ Along similar lines to Du Bois, Robinson, and others in the Black radical and race critical tradition, Hall stresses that, while race has ‘horrendous human and historical consequences,’ it is nevertheless a ‘system of meaning’ which continues to organise the world. In this sense, although Black theorists have always brought to the fore the irrationalist, depraved and chaotic forces at play in the deployment of racial rule, race cannot be disregarded as merely irrational. The depravity at the core of the dehumanising logics of race and their attachment to the pursuit of domination by Euro-America over the earth, ‘forever and ever, amen’, as Du Bois put it, demands to be looked at squarely in the face.

The demand to get beyond race, to be postracial, the refusal to study the effects of race, and even – as we are seeing – to ban critical race theory or books dealing with Black and Indigenous studies in the US and beyond, the burning of libraries and archives in Gaza and the destruction of all its university buildings, can thus all be seen as a refusal to look and a need intrinsic to colonialism to bury the his/stories of the colonised. This refusal belongs to the logic of race, which requires both denial and the scripting of new narratives that white-out (literally) the native for full effect. Hiding the effects of race from view and packaging them as individual failure or exaggerated victimhood, or any other number of myths, furthers the racial regime; the ideological grounds with which racial rule constitutes itself.

Our task is to refuse to turn away because, ultimately, as Ruth Wilson Gilmore writes, racism is ‘the state-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death.’

To act against this, we must first understand the nature of what we are dealing with; the history and complexity of race, its capacity for adjustment and recalibration, using a host of often competing narratives, and appearing in various guises, and often – as we see in the higher echelons of British politics today – being wielded by those with different faces. We need to understand the attachment of race to other axes of domination: gender, sexuality, bodily ability and the structures of power ¾capitalism, imperialism and colonialism¾ and the relationship between all of these.

Cedric Robinson referred to this ideological work that needs to be constantly done to secure the racial project as racial regimes. Robinson defines racial regimes as

‘constructed social systems in which race is proposed as a justification for relations of power. While necessarily articulated with accruals of power, the covering conceit of a racial regime is a makeshift patchwork masquerading as memory and the immutable.’ 

Racial regimes are constantly fought back against and they are necessarily ‘unstable truth systems’ that ‘may “collapse” under the weight of their own artifices, practices and apparatuses.’ For this reason, they constantly require ‘recalibration’. We can observe both the power of racial regimes and their dialectical weakness by paying attention to these processes of recalibration.

Zionism as a racial-colonial endeavour

Race is, in many ways an inadequate word. Due to the predominance of the 19^th century theorisation of hereditary bioracial difference and the practices of eugenics and racial pseudoscience we lose a wider and deeper understanding of the history of race. Race takes form through a myriad of discourses, ideas, and practices over time. Religion, geography, culture, nation, gender, sexuality, as well as science have all been used to express the idea of human difference as natural and to legitimate what solidifies into a global white supremacist hierarchy.

At its core, race marks the boundary between those who are free and those are unfree. Cedric Robinson traces this back to Aristotle’s The Politics in which he wrote that ‘most slaves were slaves by nature,’ an idea which, Robinson says, came to infuse ‘subsequent systems of human bondage.’

This view, fundamental to the construction of a continuum of humanity, with European Christian man at the top, drives the formation of western civilisation. The west as an idea and political project, rather than an organically formed culture, is imbued with the qualities of progress, rationality, democracy, tolerance, and freedom, and counterposed to all other people who are said not to possess these qualities. The logic of race constructs these either as naturally given properties, or as qualities that can be learned, but only under the tutelage of more evolved Europeans: the Empire’s so-called civilising mission. The globalising forces that propel race outwards from a set of practices internal to Europe during feudalism to the entire globe are capitalism and colonialism, or colonial-racial-capitalism. In this sense, the Black political theorist, Barnor Hesse, talks about race as being colonially constituted.

Where does Zionism come in? Europeans posit their mission of global colonial domination from the fifteenth century on as one of civilisational destiny. The aim of extracting from and exploiting Indigenous land and labour in the majority of the world was dressed up in the costume of innovation and ingenuity. As W.E.B. Du Bois wrote in 1936, under European imperialism, ‘the philanthropic plan of carrying civilization to the natives became one and the same as the commercial plan of making native labour pay.’

Although 19^th century Zionists were responding to the objective reality of European antisemitism in all its violent and exploitative forms, Zionism as a response to antisemitism could only have been envisaged within the context of European nationalism and global imperialism. Other solutions to antisemitism, including Jewish resistance and internationalism, competed with Zionism. But Zionism won out for a number of reasons including the search by European elites to a solution to the ‘Jewish problem.’

For example, Arthur Balfour for whom the 1917 declaration of Britain’s commitment to ‘the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people’ was named, was a supporter of the 1905 Aliens Act which was passed to restrict Jewish emigration to Britain. In 1919 he wrote that the Zionist movement would “mitigate the age-long miseries created for Western civilization by the presence in its midst of a Body which it too long regarded as alien and even hostile, but which it was equally unable to expel or to absorb’ – the Jews. (https://www.palestine-studies.org/en/node/232119).

Balfour’s interlocutor Theodor Herzl, the founder of modern Zionism, blamed Jews for the antisemitism they suffered:

‘The Jewish question persists wherever Jews live in appreciable numbers. Wherever it does not exist, it is brought in together with Jewish immigrants. We are naturally drawn into those places where we are not persecuted, and our appearance there gives rise to persecution. This is the case, and will inevitably be so, everywhere, even in highly civilised countries—see, for instance, France—so long as the Jewish question is not solved on the political level. The unfortunate Jews are now carrying the seeds of anti-Semitism into England; they have already introduced it into America.’ (Herzl, The Jewish State)

In constituting Jews as a nation, rather than a religious group dispersed across the world, Zionists were making the same claims about their needs as other nationalists. As the founding director of the Palestine Research Center, Fayez Sayegh wrote in Zionist Colonialism in Palestine (1965), Zionists were acting ‘under the influence of the credo of Nationalism then sweeping across Europe.’ Zionism is not unique; all nations are founded on the idea that they have a unique destiny. As Cedric Robinson explains in Black Marxism, modern nationalism is a 19^th century bourgeois project which allowed the capitalist class to recruit the proletariat ‘in order to destroy their competitors’ within Europe (p. 27).

Race was the glue. And all nations combined an arrogant projection of their own supremacy with a paranoid need to defend against the other whose only aim was to destroy it. Thus, the Zionist reliance on the idea that it is beleaguered by hostile enemies out to get the ‘only democracy in the Middle East’ merely repeats a fundamental nationalist theme.

As Alex Lubin writes, ‘European Zionism, for example, was a form of postcolonial politics that reproduced particular forms of Eastern European nationalism—the very form of colonial power and racial modernism from which Jewish Zionists sought liberation.’ (Alex Lubin, Geographies of Liberation, p. 14).

19^th century European nationalism was a racial-colonial endeavour. As Sayegh reminds us, the Zionist colonisation of Palestine took place against the backdrop of ‘the frenzied “Scramble for Africa’.’ Like other settler colonies, Zionists established not only a colony ‘on Afro-Asian territory,’ but ‘a settler community… not indeed as an imperial outpost… but as a home-base in its own right’ much like Australia, Canada, Rhodesia or South Africa. Indeed, for Herzl, the Zionist state would be a ‘rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilisation as opposed to barbarism.’

The fundamentally European structure of Zionism meant that it could not but be a racial project. Racism was projected both on Palestinians and on Brown and Black Jews, including Jewish Indigenous to Palestine, who, as Yuval Evri and Hagar Kotef write, were turned from natives into settlers by their recruitment into Zionism.

Zionist settler colonialism is a racial project to its core if we understand the boundaries of human difference established by racial logic as shifting and stretching to accommodate the changing needs of continued racial-colonial dominance. While Black and Brown Jews are negatively racialised by Israeli state and society, they are nonetheless recruited into settler colonial rule similarly to how migrants to Australia, Aotearoa and Turtle Island shore up these white settler states against Indigenous people.  

The Zionist reliance on the argument that the majority of the Israeli population is not of European origin, related to the resistance to the idea that Jews are white people, can be challenged by the fact that, notwithstanding Ashkenazi racism, as settlers all Israelis participate in the racial-colonial domination of Palestine, particularly – but not solely – via the military. Similar arguments have been used to excuse Black and Brown political leaders, from Obama to Sunak, who enact racial rule as representatives of racial imperialist states and/or white settler colonies.

Zionism also provides a unique insight into the three-pronged structure of racial ideological production, racial capitalism and race science/eugenics. The biography of  Arthur Ruppin, who was the ‘central “colonizer” of the new Zionist community’ in Palestine as Director of the Palestine Office from 1908, shines light on this. Ruppin was a German patriot who transposed his nationalist fervour to the Zionist project. He was also a believer in eugenics and so-called ‘racial hygiene’ and played a central role in early Zionist educational planning, land purchasing and the building of the economic institutions that formed the basis for the establishment of colonialism in Palestine.

As Fayez Sayegh then relates, ‘racism is not an acquired trait of the Zionist settler state… It is congenital, essential, and permanent’ (p. 21). This leads to three ‘corollaries: racial self-segregation, racial exclusiveness, and racial supremacy.’ As many have noted, and as Sayegh stated already in 1965, any state that considers that ‘the “Chosen people” can attain its special destiny only when it is all together and all by itself’ is a racially exclusivist state and, thus, contra its self-description, is not democratic.

The contemporary confusion over antisemitism

Any mention of Israel’s racial exclusivism and its status as a racial-colony leads to the charge of antisemitism. The Zionist mantra is that no other state is singled out for recrimination and that what is perceived to be a global abhorrence for Israel’s actions against Palestinians is due to a unique opprobrium for Jews. The fact that the majority of the world is united in its expression of solidarity with Palestine while the few states that continue to hold the most global power – those of the global north – stand with Israel is seen as proof that antisemitism mainly comes from those whom the revolutionary anticolonial psychiatrist Frantz Fanon called ‘the wretched of the earth’.

The role of race as a global project that propels and secures the dominance of western civilisation can be seen in the pronouncements of Israel and its supporters.

Isaac Herzog, President of Israel, CNN, December 2023:

‘This war is a war that is not only between Israel and Hamas. It’s a war that is intended¾really, truly¾to save western civilization, to save the values of western civilization.’

For his part, the right-wing ideologue, Douglas Murray wrote in The Jewish Chronicle that ‘the civilised world should seek revenge’ and ‘back Israel and back the destruction of Hamas.’ It is right to do so because ‘nothing could surpass the barbarism of what Hamas did’ on October 7. Murray was critiqued for minimising the Holocaust when he said in in May 2023 that although ‘the 3^rd Reich mucked up twice’ this should not lead to the conclusion that nationalism is all bad. Murray defends Israel by claiming that Hamas has surpassed the Nazis in its evil, despite the Holocaust being widely used to legitimate Israel’s existence and to justify its violence against Palestinians.

In this vein, we saw Israel’s UN representative wearing a yellow star inscribed with the words ‘never again: ‘We will wear this star until you wake up and condemn the atrocities of Hamas.’

The German state has cast itself in the role of Israel’s principal defendant, repressing and criminalising pro-Palestinian activism. While high-profile cases of the cancellation of artists and academics such as Candice Breitz and Nancy Fraser have caused outrage, the violent blacklisting of Palestinians and other negatively racialised people who stand with them over many years in Germany gets less attention.

While unquestioning German support for Israel has been said to be an expression of guilt for the Holocaust, it appears more correct that Germany has recast itself in the role of the ultimate victim of the Holocaust, that its elites experience as a trauma at the heart of western civilisation. Germany, and by extension, the West, forced by the world’s masses to bear the burden of its crimes, retaliates by transposing its responsibility onto Israel, which has been made to stand for the West in its totality.

As such, the west’s support for Israel, in addition to the role it plays for imperialism, militarism, and racial capitalism, is an expression of the fight to defend the west.

Antisemitism operates through what the decolonial thinker Houria Bouteldja calls ‘state philosemitism’, in which Jews are recruited as a buffer class between the state and the masses. Today, Jews who stand with Palestine are violently ejected from their status as ‘real Jews’, a status that can be granted and taken away by Zionists, be they Jewish or not Jewish. Zionism, then, allied with white supremacism, is Jewish in name only; the onus for those seeking a more correct analysis of what led us to the current status quo and what will lead us out of it, is to disentangle Judaism from Zionism.

Conclusion

Many more equipped than me have done vital research on the role played by universities in providing both ideological and material support for Zionist settler colonialism. Many are focused today on the military-industrial complex and the dependence of universities upon arms industry funding and educational initiatives. A key way in which these lucrative contracts are assured is through the exceptionalisation of Israel as ‘the only democracy in the Middle East’ and a haven for Jews from antisemitism. As the Black radical scholar and abolition activist Ruth Wilson Gilmore (2007: 233-4) writes, militarism is a key mechanism through which racial classifications are maintained. The military-industrial complex relies on race as the necropolitical logic which makes some lives killable and other’s grievable.

While many universities claim to be committed to antiracism, diversity and even decolonisation, none of these are being practiced while Zionism is normalised.

We are at a turning point when we could see the end of Zionism in our lifetime if we refuse to be intimidated. We are many and they are few.