By Blake Alcott

In the case of Palestine, whether the outsiders are seen as the British, the Israelis or the United States, this criterion for declaring it today a ‘colony’, between the river and the sea, is perfectly fulfilled.

Apologists for Zionism and Israel in academia, media and politics deny that Palestine is now ‘colonized’, mainly on the grounds that there is no ‘mother country’ – no country ruling Palestine from outside its borders. This too-narrow definition of a ‘colony’ takes as its template for instance Britain’s rule over India, Kenya, or North America, France’s rule over Algeria or Indochina, etc.

Also fitting this template of the ‘mother country’ was Britain’s rule, officially through its Colonial Office (CO) during its Mandate over Palestine from roughly 1918 until mid-May 1948, the day of Israel’s self-establishment.

But this criterion of rule from the conquering outsider’s capital city is minor and is not a necessary feature of colonialism. The important and sufficient criterion is that outsiders came and conquered and stripped rule and self-determination from the indigenous people. And continue to deny such self-determination.

In the case of Palestine, whether the outsiders are seen as the British, the Israelis or the United States, this criterion for declaring it today a ‘colony’, between the river and the sea, is perfectly fulfilled. The additional fact that many conquerors from the outside came and stayed – settled in Palestine – makes it a settler-colony, but in this article I largely ignore this in order to focus on the aspect of rule by conquering outsiders.

The hot bad word ‘colonialism’

Almost everyone disapproves, in public, of colonialism. This is especially true of those on the political ‘left’: Social Democrats, US Democrats, UK Labourites, plus Greens and Communists. All hold the apparently rock-solid view that colonies were bad and have no legitimate place on the world map today.

But wait, what did the foreign-policy spokesman for the Swiss Social Democratic Party, Fabian Molina of Zürich, write me in an email about Israel’s legitimacy? He wrote,

The establishment of Israel is based on the partition plan of the United Nations of 29 November 1949 [sic.: 1947], which served to solve the conflict over land between the Jewish and Arab population in the territory of the former British Mandate in Palestine. The founding of a democratic Jewish State was a central lesson out of the horrors of the Holocaust. As an anti-Fascist I stand firm as a rock for Israel’s right to exist.

Molina totally ignores the pre-1947 period of Palestine’s colonisation, but more important is that for him the indigenous Palestinians have no say. They aren’t in the picture. All that counts is what the US-dominated UN had to say and what happened far from Palestine – in Europe – to millions of Jewish people.

Similarly, how can the British Labour Party affirm again and again that it is right that Israel – a colonial entity – exists in Palestine? Even Jeremy Corbyn, perhaps the only major Western politician ever to befriend Palestine, held the Zionist position that a Jewish state on 80% of Palestine is OK; he wanted the two-state ‘solution’.

Support for Israel’s existence from the vocal, hypocritically anti-colonialist ‘left’ means either that it indulges unabashedly in Israeli Exceptionalism or that it does not understand that Israel is a colony.

As soon as the ‘left’ realizes that Palestine is colonized – in the strict sense of the word – it will have to realize that it has to support the self-determination of the Palestinians – all 14 million of them, spread all over the world – which means the replacement – not the ‘transformation’ – of Israel with a democratic state. It has sadly not been enough for the ‘left’ that there is consensus that Israel is an apartheid state; maybe if the accurate epithet ‘colonial’ is added they’ll wake up.

Back to the facts: British rule

When the colonization of Palestine by the Ottomans ended around 1920, Britain took over. As the dominant member of the League of Nations, it easily gave itself a ‘Mandate’ to rule Palestine ostensibly in the name of the League of Nations – which was in effect simply the handful of countries who had won World War I. The neologisms ‘Mandate’, and Britain as ‘Mandatory’, thinly disguised what was really a colony. They entered the dictionary when they were written into Article 22 of the Covenant of the League on 28 April 1919.

Palestine was then a colony because the people ruling it were not indigenous to it. And you were ‘indigenous’ to Palestine if you and some or all of your progenitors had lived for a long, long time, unbrokenly, in the area of defined by the ‘Mandatory’ borders. The same applied incidentally to the neighboring Mandates ruled by Britain or France, namely Transjordan, Lebanon, and Syria (Bilad as-Sham, including Palestine).

What did rule over Palestine, in this case indeed from a far-off perch, London, look like? Palestine the territory, as well as the official ‘Government of Palestine’ set up in Jerusalem as the local ruling apparatus, was run out of the British Colonial Office from 13 February 1921 until July 1945. In the several years just before and after this time span it was run out of the Foreign Office by George Curzon and Ernest Bevin, respectively, working closely with the Colonial Office. The UK, was hiding nothing.

A procession of ‘Secretaries of State for the Colonies’ had overall say not only over Asian political entities like Malaya and India and African ones like Kenya and Nigeria, but also over Palestine. They had the decidedly non-Arab names of Winston Churchill, Victor Cavendish, J.H. Thomas, Leo Amery, Sidney Webb, Philip Cunliffe-Lister, Malcolm MacDonald, William Ormsby-Gore, George Lloyd, Walter Guiness, Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, Oliver Stanley, George Henry Hall and Arthur Creech-Jones.

If you research the Mandate in the British National Archives, after 1921 at least nine out of ten documents you need are classed under ‘CO’ (Colonial Office); the rest are scattered under ‘CAB’ (Cabinet), ‘FO’ (Foreign Office), and ‘WO’ (War Office).

Armed soldiers – the muscle of whoever is in effect ruling a place – were also British or came from other British colonies. During the three Mandate decades several hundred thousand British soldiers ‘served’ in Palestine, while others ran the police, largely manned by indigenous Palestinians. They violently put down partly violent protests in 1920, 1921, 1928, 1929, 1933, 1937-39, and 1946. This is what colonial powers do – and what Israel, after being handed the colonial by Britain baton in 1948, continues to do as you read this. (The indispensable and wide-ranging assistance given during the Mandate by Britain to the Zionist state-in-waiting is a topic for another article.)

The ruled indigenous Palestinians were aware of this legerdemain of disguising a colony as a ‘Mandate’. In a written statement on 22 March 1922 they caught Colonial Secretary Churchill out, showing him that when he wrote that “the majority of the Colonies are in the same position that Palestine would enjoy under the [1922] draft Constitution” he was conceding that Palestine was actually a colony.

The facts of European-Jewish Zionist forced immigration

That Palestine was a British colony up until 14 May 1948 is thus uncontested. But did it remain a colony after that, when a new ruling state was unilaterally established covering most, and later all, of the area between the river and the sea?

To answer this we need some history of the Zionists whom Britain allowed to settle in Palestine with the intent of establishing their own state there. The main fact is that they were not indigenous; virtually all of them were Europeans, with a smattering of Americans and South Africans. It is not important that they were Jewish, nor that the state they worked fifty years to establish – dating from 1897, the year of the first World Zionist Congress, convened by the Austrian Theodor Herzl in Basel – was to be Jewish. From the point of view of the Palestinians (Moslems, Christians, Jews and Druze alike), conquest and colonization would have been just as violent and unjust were the perpetrators Moslems (such as the Ottomans) or Christians (such as the Crusaders or the British), Hindus, Tatars or Martians.

The inidgenous people unanimously, hundreds of times, told Britain and the world they did not want this type of (forced) immigration. They said they wanted to decide their own immigration policy (and it would not include Zionist immigrants). Keep in mind the basic demographics: when Britain took control Jews were around 8% of the Palestinian population – about half of them indigenous Arab Jews who had no truck with Zionism – while when Britain withdrew in 1948 they comprised around 32% (in numbers around 600,000), of whom perhaps only 10% were indigenous Jews. Why the increase? A colonial power in London forced it.

That the new rulers were European is shown by the countries of birth and emigration of the signatories of the ‘Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel’ of 14 May 1948. Were they descendants of untold generations who had uninterruptedly lived in Palestine?

No. Of the 37 signatories, only one was born in Palestine (in Tiberias, to parents who had immigrated from Morocco in the 19^th century). Another was born in Yemen. Eight immigrated from today’s Belarus, seven each from today’s Poland and Ukraine, three each from today’s Moldova and Lithuania, two from what was then Galicia, two from Germany, and one each from Russia, Hungary and Denmark. To say that Palestine (a place in Asia) was not, during the period of Zionist build-up before 1948, settled by Europeans is absurd. And what they succeeded in doing was colonize Palestine in the political sense of taking political control of the country.

Many of these colonizers abandoned their European surnames for Hebrew ones, for instance David Ben-Gurion (born Gruen), Moshe Sharett (Shertok), Ehud Barak (Brog), Eliezer Ben-Yehuda (Perlman), Avraham Granot (Granovsky), Yitzak Ben-Zvi (Shimshelevich), and Golda Meir (Myerson). That after 1948 many others from the Near East and North Africa also immigrated is irrelevant: You do don’t have to be European to be a colonizer.

The settlers moreover unabashedly called their project a ‘colonial’ one, even if a distinction was made between the separate individual ‘colonies’ – settlers who farmed Zionist-owned land, such as Petah Tikva (formerly Mulebbis) or Kibbutz Sde Boker – as opposed to the overall land of Palestine envisioned for take-over. Every such colony, moreover, was step towards statehood.

For instance, as of 1896 the ‘Jewish Colonization Association’, founded by the German Maurice de Hirsch, financed the purchase of land to which Eastern Europeans could emigrate. Frenchman Edmond James de Rothschild merged his funds and settlements (moshavot) with those of the JCA, and in 1924 a revised organization, the ‘Palestine Jewish Colonization Association’, took over most Jewish colonies, officially turning them over the state of Israel in 1957-58.

In May 1898, in Köln, Germany, the ‘Jewish Colonial Trust’ (‘Jüdische Colonialbank’) was founded in order to fund whatever activities were deemed useful for the settlement of Palestine by European Jews. According to the Jewish Encyclopedia, “The purposes of the trust were… the economic development and strengthening of the colonies in Palestine and Syria [and] the development of trade, industry, and commerce in the colonies, the loaning of money on bond and mortgage and the making of advances for colonization…” (emphasis added)

On 18 July 1917 the World Zionist Organization told the British government what it wanted in post-war Palestine. In wording recurring in the Balfour Declaration four months later, as well as in the deliberations at the Paris Peace Conference during the first half of 1919, their draft read: “His Majesty’s Government regard it as essential for the realisation of this principle [the establishment of the Jewish National Home in Palestine] the grant of internal autonomy to the Jewish nationality in Palestine, freedom of immigration for Jews, and the establishment of a Jewish National Colonising Corporation for the re-settlement and economic development of the country.” (emphasis added) That is, like Britain, they described themselves as colonizing Palestine – nothing to hide here.

The yishuv that was present in Palestine became on 14 May 1948 the official colonizing state. It was the land they were taking over – land they had only recently laid eyes on, which underlines their non-indigeneity. And all other Jews in the rest of the world, obviously non-indigenous, were given the right to immigrate as citizens.

The essence of the term colonialism

We thus have a perfectly good word used to describe the movement of a group to a new land with the intent of political control (and perhaps permanent settlement). Yet Zionists such as Dore Gold (see ‘The Myth of Israel as a Colonialist Entity’ in Issue 23 of the Jewish Political Studies Review) often wish to avoid the epithet ‘colonist’ by defining colonization over-narrowly, requiring one or both of two additional criteria: 1) that a ‘mother country’ remain in control from afar, on the model of the well-known European colonial powers, and/or 2) that external powers, perhaps including a ‘mother’ country, profit commercially, extractively or strategically from their rule in the subordinated land.

Such hurdles in the way of qualifying as a colonial entity only distract from the essence of the phenomenon: that political control is being exercised by non-indigenous people. From where, by whom, for what reasons – economic, racist, or for a ‘safe haven’ – matter little or not at all to the colonized. As the title of a famous 1979 essay by Edward Said put it, we should view the phenomenon of the Zionist take-over of Palestine “from the standpoint of its victims”. When all is said and done, the motives of the conquerors, and whether they are officially tied to a distant powerful country, is irrelevant. So is their religion and ethnicity. What counts is the loss of power and self-determination in one’s own land.

Similarly, the term ‘indigenous’, which is not defined in ethno-religious terms, but rather historically and in terms of territory, cannot be wrenched out of the actual time (whether 1917, 1948, or 2025) when the conquering and settling occur. That is, the historical claim made by Zionists to current political rights in Palestine for all Jews is infinitely weaker than the claim to self-determination of indigenous residents rooted in the country uninterruptedly for thousands of years. As the King-Crane Commission put it in 1919: “The claim, often submitted by Zionist representatives, that they have a ‘right’ to Palestine, based on an occupation of 2,000 years ago, can hardly be seriously considered.”

One cannot define away the colonial nature of Britain’s thirty-year rule by making ‘colonialism’ depend on material or other profit for Britain, and one cannot define away the colonial nature of Israeli rule by observing that the immigrating Europeans were not previously citizens of a single ‘mother’ country. Such criteria merely divert from the main issue of political sovereignty.

As Mahatma Gandhi once said, “Palestine belongs to the Arabs in the same sense as England belongs to the English and France to the French.” Nobody ever claimed that England and France belong to any Arabs – Palestinians or other ones – and nobody should claim that Palestine belongs to any Europeans, Africans or other Asians. If they do rule Palestine, they are colonists.

The views expressed in the article do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of The Palestine Chronicle.