A history of the charge of genocide against Israel. Part II

A discourse in search of a solution: the obvious Nazi reference and the maintenance of antisemitism

Initially, Zureik continues to appeal to the old Christian antisemitism, that of substitution theology and Christian primacy over the Holy Land: “The Zionist Jews claim that Palestine is their land, that God promised it to them, and that the prophets prophesied their certain return to it. Some Christians have been taken in by these claims in view of certain prophecies which appear in some books of the Bible. But these Christians forget that the Jews refused the Christian message in its entirety and that they, by surrendering to this Jewish claim, surrender the cradle of their religion to a group which has refused it and has fought it throughout the centuries.“^[5]. Similarly, Sayegh’s antisemitism is based on the idea of Christian primacy over the Holy Land. Addressing an American Protestant audience in 1946, he points to their responsibility for the possible founding of the State of Israel, and to what appears to him to be the main consequence of that founding: “Israel and the Jewish immigrants who are now pouring into it have taken root in the land of Christ”^[6].

The persistence of Christian roots in the antisemitism of these two theorists probably stems from their formative years in American missionary institutions. Indeed, the antisemitism that the latter were still propagating in the ’20s directly irrigates most of the anti-Jewish and anti-Zionist arguments mobilized by Zureik and Sayegh. The article “Zionism and the Jewish Problem” by missionary John Punnett Peters, published in 1921 in the prestigious Sewanee Review, an offshoot of the Southern Episcopalians, is a perfect illustration^[7]. Peters begins with an approving reference to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. He then attacks both the Zionist movement and the Jewish people, who are said to have been guilty since “the conquest of Canaan”. According to him, as with Saadeh, Zureik and Sayegh, Jews constitute an “unassimilable mass” and a “political and economic threat” wherever they live. Like our Arab nationalist ideologues, Peters also condemns the supposed tendency of Jews to believe themselves “a race chosen by God”, to rely on a “law of exclusivity” and to display “racial pride” coupled with “religious intolerance”. We find a very similar argument in Sayegh: “the Jewish worldview is a legacy of humiliation, revenge and cultural fossilization of the most primitive kind”^[8]. More than that, Peters opposed what he saw as a “Jewish invasion” and advocated an alliance between Christians and Muslims to combat the influx of so many “parasitic” immigrants from Eastern Europe to the Middle East.

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Sayegh also took up the theme of the struggle between humanity and the Jews, denouncing Zionism and Judaism as “a danger to Civilization and the Spirit”.

This Christian antisemitism is matched in the discourse of these two theorists by a much more modern conspiracy fantasy. In his book, Zureik fantasizes global Jewish power over governments and the media as the only possible explanation for the Arab defeat: “The power is the world-wide power of the Jews—politically, financially, and culturally. […] In recent years this power has been centered in the United States. No one who has not stayed in that country and studied its conditions can truly estimate the extent of this power or visualize the awful danger of it. Many American industries and financial institutions are in the hands of Jews, not to mention the press, radio, cinema, and other media of propaganda.”^[9]. Or: “These two interests, the American internal and the Soviet external, coincided with other imperialistic interests and with the world-wide power of the Jews and led to the partition decision and to the sacrifice of right and principle”^[10]. And finally: “Zionism is a worldwide net, well prepared scientifically and financially, which dominates the influential countries of the world”^[11]. Sayegh would also take up the theme of the struggle between humanity and the Jews – which his former leader Antoun Saadeh had developed in a 1946 speech – as he denounced Zionism and Judaism before the Christian-Muslim conference in Aley as “a danger to Civilization and the Spirit”^[12]. Ten years later, in Arab Unity, Sayegh again shares the vision of an omnipotent Zionist network defeating Arab unification projects: he attributes the creation of the State of Israel to the occult influence of “the gigantic global forces mobilized by the Zionist Internationale”^[13]. This conspiratorial vision can be linked to the theories of a Saadeh or to the influence of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

Despite his very recent philonazi past, Zureik is willing to acknowledge the suffering of the Jews during the war (without, of course, mentioning the part that certain currents of Arab nationalism played in it): he thus evokes the “persecution suffered by the Jews through the ages and particularly under the Nazi yoke and during the Second World War”^[14]. But this is to immediately assign them a share of the responsibility: “Let’s admit for the sake of argument that the Jews had nothing to do with the persecutions they suffered”^[15]. Above all, Zureik, in an accusatory inversion that promises a fruitful future, comes to compare Judaism and Zionism with Nazism: “how can we accept the view that any one people is the special people of God, that there- is a covenant between God and them, or that God has singled them out for a particular relationship or distinction. The idea of a “chosen people” is closer to that of Nazism than to any other idea, and (in the end) it will fall and collapse just as Nazism did..”^[16]. He goes even further: “Despite the displaced thousands they have seen and the news of destruction, killing, mutilation, and other awful things they have heard, they have not perceived the true extent of Zionism, its world-wide strength, its goal of conquest and annihilation, and its naked cruelty in realizing this goal. They have not perceived the intensity of the hidden yearning in the breasts of the Jews, a yearning which has been increasing throughout the ages, to found their own state in Palestine, or the extent to which the flower of their youth has in recent years been saturated with Nazism and other “isms” which encourage domination and conquest.”^[17]. This argument immediately became popular in the political discourse of Arab nationalism: Nasser thus did not hesitate, as early as 1962, to speak of “Nazi Zionism”^[18].

Sayegh also euphemizes the influence of Nazism on Arab nationalism. It is reduced to mention of “the Nazi propaganda machine actively laboring to exploit Arab grievances and to stimulate anti-British and anti-French sentiment”^[19]. In his 1946 lecture at the School of International Relations in Philadelphia, Sayegh also equated Zionism with Nazism, in a direct reference to Hitler’s ideology as he went so far as to denounce the creation of a “newly discovered master race at the expense of hundreds of thousands of homeless and destitute Arabs”^[20]. In addition, both Zureik and Sayegh make the replacement of the Arabs of Palestine by Jews the core of Zionist ideology: Sayegh writes that “The outcome of the policy of the Balfour Declaration—the displacement of the Arabs, the bringing-in of Zionists to replace them, and the setting-up of a Zionist state in Palestine was nevertheless foreseen by the Arabs as the ultimate objective of the Zionist Movement”^[21], while Zureik considers that “The aim of Zionist imperialism, on the other hand, is to exchange one country for another, and to annihilate one people so that another may be put in its place”^[22].

Up until the 1960s, Zureik and Sayegh thus displayed a remarkable cohabitation: Christian theological arguments stemming from American evangelicalism, which contest any spiritual continuity of the Jewish people allowing them to claim religious legitimacy to reside in the Holy Land, coexist with the modern vision of a worldwide Jewish conspiracy and with the first attempts to Nazify Israel, conveying the implicit idea that the essence of Zionism is genocidal and that it aims to replace Arab populations with a Jewish one.

An initial reformulation of Arab nationalism in the 1930s: insistence on the illegitimacy of the Jewish presence in Israel

The theological illegitimacy of the Jewish presence in Palestine, which stemmed from Christian antisemitism, was gradually replaced by new arguments, destined for a certain posterity, to challenge the Zionist project: from now on, any ethnic, historical or cultural link between the emigrant Jews forming the Yishuv and the biblical Hebrew people, once sovereign over the territory of Israel/Palestine, was to be denied. This argument unfolds in two stages. First, it asserts that Jewish sovereignty over this land was short-lived, and is itself the result of colonization:

“The Zionists claim that Palestine is the national home of the Jews because they inhabited it for many generations in the past, that they were then driven from it, and that they now have the right to return to it. The fact is that the Jews infiltrated Palestine in ancient time as other Semitic tribes infiltrated the countries of the Fertile Crescent, but they established a unified kingdom in it only during the period of David and Solomon (1017-937 B.C.), and this kingdom lasted only for a limited period”^[23]

Secondly, and more profoundly, Zureik argues that the Ashkenazi Jews who settled in Israel at that time had no ethnic link with the biblical Hebrew people, being mostly of European origin and descended from a people converted to Judaism, the Khazars:

“In addition, the Zionist Jews who are now immigrating to Palestine bear absolutely no relation to the Semitic Jews. In fact they are from another stock which is completely different from the Semitic stock. Historians affirm that the great majority of the eastern European Jews—and they are the ones who are now pouring into Palestine trace their origins back to the Khazar tribes who embraced Judaism in the eighth Christian century and who later spread throughout eastern and central Europe. Thus their only bond with the Jews who settled in Palestine in ancient times is religion, which is not a valid basis on which to build nationalism or to found a state.”^[24]

This argument was popularized by lobbyists active in England and the United States trying to prevent the creation of the State of Israel^[25]. It stems from fairly old historical works, now strongly contested by the state of research, as shown by the highly critical reactions of professional historians^[26] to the release of the book The Invention of the Jewish People by Israeli “new historian” Shlomo Sand^[27].

While Zureik and Sayegh do not yet refer to Zionism as colonialism, the entire discursive infrastructure is already in place: Zionists are Western (or at least exogenous and racist) invaders of a land held for millennia by the Arabs of Palestine, descendants of the region’s indigenous peoples, including the ancient Hebrews.

Zureik goes even further, making the Palestinians the descendants of the original peoples who were finally Arabized: “On the other hand, the Arabs in Palestine represent not only the tribes which migrated from the [Arabian] Peninsula in the seventh century—those tribes were in fact small in number—but all the inhabitants, Semites and others (Philistines, Canaanites, Amorites, Aramaeans, etc.) who have come to Palestine one after another since the dawn of history and who were Arabicized in the seventh century and thereafter. Thus they are the original inhabitants of the country, and the sojourn of the Jews in their country was only transitory and temporary when compared with the long history of the country.”^[28].

For his part, if Sayegh praises the Middle Eastern “melting pot” made up of “indigenous peoples, migrants from the North and East, residues of imperial conquests or Semitic invasions”, it is above all because these components ultimately disappear in a “process of Arabization”. This process is described as linguistic, cultural and even racial homogenization, based on a quotation from the first historian of Arab nationalism George Antonius: “the process of Arabization [has] three lasting results : the enthronement of Arabic as the national language, the introduction of Arab manners and ways of thought, and the implantation of an appreciable Arab stock in the racial soil.”^[29]. Under the guise of defending blending and condemning racism, Sayegh’s work is a continuation of the essentialist, exclusionary conception of the nation already found in Saadeh’s work on the Syrian case.

In short, in Zureik’s work as in Sayegh’s, an initial euphemization of the Arab nationalist discourse developed during the war took place in the 40s and 50s: assent to fascism and Nazism obviously disappeared. But this euphemism was not without an accusatory inversion: it was now Israel that was accused of Nazism and racism. This reversal does not, however, prevent the persistence of conspiracy and eliminationist antisemitism, as well as a quasi-racial conception of the Arab people. While Zureik and Sayegh do not yet speak of colonialism when referring to Zionism, the entire discursive infrastructure is already in place: Zionists are Western (or at least exogenous and racist) invaders of a land held for millennia by the Arabs of Palestine, descendants of the region’s indigenous peoples, including the ancient Hebrews. Zureik’s rhetoric refers to the Arabs of Palestine by mixing up Land, Blood and Honor (“If this is the way with the aggressor, how would it be with the victim of aggression, defending his land, his blood, and his honor?” or “the land which has been dyed red with their blood, and with whose soil the sweat of their brow has been mixed”). This tone is curiously reminiscent of both Blut and Boden ideology and Rosenberg’s Myth of the Twentieth Century. In Sayegh, following the historian Philip Hitti, whom he quotes, we find a vision of the Arab Nation as an eternal People: the Arab Nation alone is destined to endure:”The Babylonians, the Assyrians, the Chaldaeans, the Phoenicians—all of whose ancestors were nurtured in the Arabian peninsula—were, but are no more. The Arabs were and remain”^[30]. In both cases, these conceptions of Arab nationalism leave little room for a Jewish presence in Palestine, to say the least.

A second stage of reformulation: part of an anti-colonial rhetoric

The strategy of accusatory inversion and euphemization culminated in Fayez Sayegh’s landmark 1965 book, Zionist Colonialism in Palestine. This book was primarily intended for a Western audience. It was immediately translated into English and French, and was the first publication of the PLO Research Center headed by Sayegh. The discourse was profoundly reconfigured. It no longer includes any positive mention of Nazism. The subtlety of arguments aimed at establishing Arab nationalism and its primacy in the Middle East seemingly disappeared, along with the associated racial dimension. The antisemitism clichés of Christian anti-Judaism and conspiracy theorizing about the occult power of the world’s Jews are also discarded, as is the vision of a struggle between Jews and humanity.

The advantage of the “colonial” perspective is that it dispenses with the wobbly theories surrounding the Khazarian origin of Jewish migrants to Palestine, since all that’s needed to turn Zionism into European colonialism is to associate it with European and then American imperialism: “If the League of Nations was the instrument chosen to give the Anglo-Zionist partnership a semblance of international respectability, the United Nations was chosen for a similar purpose by the American-Zionist entente. Britain had persuaded a predominantly European League to approve a European Zionist colonization program in Palestine: the United States led an American-European majority to override the opposition of an Afro-Asian minority in the General Assembly and approve the creation of a Zionist colonial state in the Afro-Asian bridge, the Arab land of Palestine.”^[31]. This argument, however, only holds up at the price of a double inversion: firstly, denying any anti-colonial dimension to the State of Israel, even though it arose (as did Arab independence) from the dismemberment of the British Empire; secondly, making the British the irreducible allies of the Zionist movement. Sayegh would hardly have uttered such a historical untruth in the late 1940s, after the White Paper restricting Jewish immigration to Palestine, after British aid to Arab armies in the 1948 war and Britain’s abstention from the UN vote on the partition of Palestine and the creation of the State of Israel.

The characterization of Zionism as a “foreign body in the region” shows that, in Sayegh’s words, the assimilation of Judaism to the “mental illness” that plagued Saadeh’s Syria is never far away.

Nor is there any need for complex, overtly racist foundations of the Arab Nation, when, for the first time, the evocation of the indigeneity of the Palestinian people and implicit references to South African apartheid are mobilized: “The Arabs of Palestine who continue to live in the Zionist colonizing state since 1948 have their own “‘Bantustans’, ‘indigenous reserves’, ‘ghettos'” or elsewhere “where a Jew, under nationality law, can claim citizenship upon arrival, the indigenous Arabs of the Zionist colonizing state are subject to a system of qualified eligibility”^[32]. Despite the historical evidence of multiple migrations and invasions of the Fertile Crescent, the Palestinian people are regarded as “first”, in order to confer on them the same kind of racial purity as in Saadeh’s developments on the Syrian people, albeit in a form acceptable to international opinion. The characterization of Zionism as a “foreign body in the region”^[33] shows that, in Sayegh’s words, the assimilation of Judaism to that “mental illness” that plagued Saadeh’s Syria is never far away.

Aimed at a Western audience, the publication of Zionist colonialism in Palestine cohabited without difficulty with an eliminationist antisemitism massively present in official Arab newspapers, which regretted, for example, on the occasion of the Eichmann trial that he “didn’t finish the job”^[34]. Sayegh was not the only one to reformulate the most radical Arab nationalist discourse as anti-colonial to make it more audible to world public opinion: Johann Von Leers, a Nazi propagandist who at the time was working for Egypt’s leader Nasser, also used this new rhetoric. Wishing to publish in Germany the essays by the Mufti of Jerusalem called The Truth about Palestine in Arabic, he chose the title The World Struggle against Imperialism and Colonialism to appeal to the German Left^[35].

A reformulation that leads to the theory of settler colonialism

Having put European Jewish settlers face to face with indigenous Palestinians, all that remains for Sayegh to do is to characterize the type of colonialism he believes is unfolding in Palestine. Although intended to appeal to a Western audience, particularly on the left, his definition is markedly different from the Marxist or Leninist understanding of the term, which linked it to imperialism and capitalist exploitation of colonized peoples. As Sayegh readily admits: “The other European settlers who went to other parts of Africa and Asia were motivated by economic or politico-imperialist motives. The Zionist settlers, on the other hand, were driven by neither of these two impulses”^[36].

Sayegh also defines colonialism in a new way, bringing onto the conceptual and political scene what he calls settler colonialism^[37]. Stemming from the successive ideological reformulations of Arab nationalism in the 1930s, this ideological version of settler colonialism is destined to become one of the pillars of contemporary anti-Zionism. The book, published in 1965, is not linked to the situation of occupation created by the Six-Day War. It attacks the very legitimacy of Israel’s existence. For Sayegh, settler colonialism implies that the core of the Israeli national project is the “eviction” or even the “elimination” of the Arabs of Palestine. This definition goes far beyond the emerging meanings of the concept of settler colonialism at the time, which aim to analyze the effects of the construction of new nations by new arrivals on a colonial territory^[38]. Sayegh’s ideological use of the concept of settler colonialism makes it possible to incorporate all the accusatory inversions mentioned above into the discourse of Arab nationalism. It is no longer the Arab nationalists who display an eliminationist antisemitism akin to that of the Nazis, but the Zionists who, like the Nazis, aim to eliminate the Arabs: “The Zionist concept of the ‘final solution’ to the ‘Arab problem’ and the Nazi concept of the ‘final solution’ to the ‘Jewish problem’ essentially consist of the same basic ingredient: the elimination of the undesirable human element in question […] Behind the difference in techniques lies an identity of objectives”. It’s no longer Arab nationalists who are racist, it’s Zionists: “Racism is not an accidental, passing characteristic of Israel. It is congenital, essential and permanent. Indeed, it is inherent in the very ideology of Zionism and the fundamental motivation behind colonization and the creation of the Zionist state.”^[39].

According to Sayegh, this racism would take three forms: Zionism would be a “racist system driven by doctrines of racial self-segregation, racial exclusivity and racial supremacy”^[40]. This description seems to derive directly from the judgments already mentioned about Zionism and Judaism by American Protestant missionaries in the 1920s (“law of exclusivity”, “racial pride”). The first form of racism attributed to Zionism repeats the accusatory inversion already observed: it’s not the Jews who are the object of segregation, it’s they who voluntarily set themselves apart or arouse this detestation. As for the other two forms, they are once again reversals of the supremacist and exclusivist antisemitism identified in Sayegh, Zureik and Saadeh. These incriminations logically lead to the accusation of “apartheid”: “The Zionists have reserved discriminatory treatment for the part of the Palestinian Arab people that has stubbornly remained in its homeland despite all efforts to dispossess and expel them, and in defiance of the Zionist diktat of racial exclusivity”^[41]. They also logically lead to the accusation of ethnic cleansing before its time: “the Zionists expressed their supremacy over the indigenous Arabs, first by isolating themselves from the Arabs in Palestine and, later, by expelling the Arabs from their homeland”^[42]. These incriminations are hardly substantiated: Sayegh provides no statistics, legal or historical evidence to back them up, even as he peremptorily asserts that the situation in Israel/Palestine is worse than in South Africa or Rhodesia: “Nowhere in Asia or Africa – not even in South Africa or Rhodesia – did European racial supremacism express itself in such passionate zeal for total racial exclusivity and the physical expulsion of ‘indigenous’ populations beyond the borders of the colonizing state, as it did in Palestine, under the compulsion of Zionist doctrines.”^[43]. As for the accusation of genocide or a systematic policy of elimination, raised three times, it does not even receive the beginnings of any pushback.

By removing the need to identify the economic or imperialist motives behind colonialism, this new ideology naturally explains the phenomenon in terms of the ontological racism of the colonizer, and thus points inevitably to the accusation of apartheid, ethnic cleansing and, ultimately, genocide.

Through a series of reconfigurations of an initial nationalist discourse marked by the seal of the extreme right, using the processes of euphemization and accusatory inversion, Constantin Zureik and Fayez Sayegh attribute to Israel as a supposedly colonialist state the supremacist, antisemitic and exclusivist racism of their own nationalism during the interwar period. At the same time, they make us forget the ideological filiation of their own discourse, its birth affinities with ethnocentric, authoritarian European nationalisms, and its historical compromises with Nazism. This intellectual operation crystallizes precisely in the highly ideological use of the concept of settler colonialism, destined for a remarkable posterity. By removing the need to identify the economic or imperialist motives behind colonialism, this new ideology naturally explains the phenomenon in terms of the ontological racism of the colonizer, and thus points inevitably to the accusation of apartheid, ethnic cleansing and, ultimately, genocide. It’s precisely by virtue of the inherent coherence of this ideological discourse, which is impervious to reality, that these accusations against Israel are intertwined, as in Francesca Albanese’s aforementioned remarks. They are not the consequence of a carefully established fact, but follow logically from the structure of this ideology. It also assumes that the colonizer’s victim is a supposedly pure and primordial indigenous people. This essentialism, heir to a racial vision of peoples and their relations, makes it possible to escape from the paradigm of a war between two nations to explain the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and interpret any action by the Israelis against the Palestinians as part of a logic of population replacement, ultimately genocidal.

The spread of this new ideology in universities, the New Left and international organizations

As we have seen, Zureik and Sayegh were not only theoreticians, they were also diplomats. Between 1945 and 1948, their discourse was aimed first at trying to prevent the creation of the State of Israel, then at undermining its legitimacy after the UN vote. As early as 1945, the Arab League set up Arab propaganda offices to combat the project of an independent Jewish state in Palestine. The main focus was on the United States and the UN. It relies on a network of intellectuals from the American University of Beirut who hold academic positions in Anglo-Saxon university circles. These include Constantin Zureik and Fayez Sayegh, as well as other intellectuals such as the aforementioned Philippe Hitti, Professor of Oriental Languages at Princeton, and Charles Malik, Doctor of Philosophy at Harvard and founder of the Philosophy Department at the American University of Beirut, where Sayegh was one of his students. As we have seen, this network of alumni of the American University of Beirut is closely linked to the American Protestant missions in the Middle East. They maintain important contacts with Arab specialists in American universities, as well as with Middle East specialists in the State Department, all of whom are committed to the anti-Zionist cause.

However, despite this support and the considerable sums invested by the Arab League, this propaganda campaign was a failure, mainly because the content of the propaganda, as seen in the texts by Sayegh and Zureik between ’46 and ’48, was still too imbued with antisemitism to reach American public opinion, durably marked by the memory of Nazi persecutions^[44]. However, a number of strategic elements emerged that were to shape subsequent successes. Firstly, the very early idea of targeting American universities, in particular the Ivy League. The future Israeli ambassador to Washington, Eliahu Epstein^[45], was concerned about it as early as 1947 and warned Jerusalem: “lthough it is not a spectacular or high-profile element, it is one of the most useful, in the long run, as far as Arab propaganda efforts in this country are concerned and, at the same time, one of the most dangerous for our interests”. Secondly, the need to work within the framework of international organizations, in particular the UN: “The Arabs’ chances of success at the General Assembly session depend very much on the extent of their propaganda activities in the corridors of (…) the UN and on the exploitation (…) of the creation of political blocs with countries interested in Arab friendship (…)”^[46].

The setback of 1948, which led to the temporary cessation of activity by the Arab offices, was short-lived. In 1955, the Arab League reopened several offices in the United States, the Arab Information Centers (AIC), whose work plan was drawn up by Fayez Sayegh. Taking into account the previous failure, he advised adapting communication to the American mindset rather than seeking to satisfy Arab opinion^[47]. It was in line with this strategy of redefining the discourse aimed at international opinion that Zionist Colonialism in Palestine was written and published. After the Six-Day War, this strategy finally bore fruit, particularly for Black Power activists. A vade mecum written by Fayez Sayegh, Do you know? Twenty Basic Facts about the Palestine Problem, also published by the PLO Research Center in Arabic and English, was distributed to Black Power activists by the Arab Information Center in New York. It’s a short 4-page book reiterating the main theses of Zionist Colonialism in Palestine.

The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), one of the main organizations of the Afro-American movement in the ’60s, reprinted it almost as it appeared in its newsletter at the time of the Six-Day War, augmenting it with photos (including one comparing Israeli war actions to those of the Nazis at Dachau) and antisemitic references to Rothschild rule in Africa. Later, the Black Panthers would inscribe their support for the Palestinian cause in the struggle against American colonialism and in a form of community of destiny between Black Americans and Palestinians: “The Party did not arrive at this position [on the Palestinians] after reading [on the subject] , but rather because of its own experience in America. Black people in Babylon [America] were blocked by forces we didn’t understand. We found that some people in America wanted to define our struggle for us.”^[48]. Beyond these conspiratorial aspects, the Black Panther Party’s ideological takeover of the notion of settler colonialism leads to a further evolution of this ideology: it is now white settler colonialism^[49] that is evoked, and there is no need to be or have been in a situation of objective colonization (like African-Americans) to be a colonized in struggle against the colonizer.

The Black Panthers inscribed their support for the Palestinian cause in the struggle against American colonialism and in a form of community of destiny between Black Americans and Palestinians.

This success with African-American activists spread to the anti-colonial left as a whole, as well as to many countries in the Global South, notably South Africa^[50]. This was all the more of an ideological victory since black civil rights activists in the United States (particularly Stokely Carmichael)^[51], as well as anti-apartheid activists in South Africa, were until the mid-1960s sympathetic to the state of Israel^[52]. Part of this success undoubtedly stems from the particular effectiveness of the ideological discourse on settler colonialism, and its ability to reorganize the main conflicts of the period in binary terms.

This success was confirmed within international organizations, with a strong penetration of this discourse within the UN. Here again, the main architect was Fayez Sayegh. At the end of the Six-Day War, the USSR’s representative at the UN took up Sayegh’s arguments and compared Israel to “Hitler’s Germany”, denouncing a supposed policy of “extermination of the indigenous populations”. Within the Arab League, Sayegh was the driving force behind the famous UN resolution 3379 of 1975, which equated Zionism with “a form of racism” and linked it to “colonialism and apartheid”. From the 1965 text to the 1975 resolution, we’ve come full circle, so to speak. It didn’t end there: the accusation of genocide against Israel was to flare up again during the Lebanon war. The UN General Assembly passed resolution 37/123^[53], which described the Sabra and Chatila massacres as an “act of genocide”. The Soviet Union asserted that what “srael is doing on Lebanese soil is genocide. Its aim is to destroy the Palestinians as a nation”, while the Nicaraguan delegate is astonished “that a people who suffered so much from the Nazi policy of extermination (…) should use the same fascist and genocidal arguments and methods against other peoples”^[54]. For the first time, the accusation of genocide levelled against the Hebrew state was explicitly brought into the realm of international law, marking the culmination of the circulation of a discourse whose successive reconfigurations have inverted the political sign, from the extreme nationalist right to the anti-colonial left, contaminating even the humanist consensus of international organizations. Fayez Sayegh saw to this, serving from 1969 until his death in 1980 as rapporteur for the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, the UN body responsible for monitoring the implementation of the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination.

In the academic world, this ideological drift, initially marginal, has gradually become the majority. After a prehistory in the 60s to 80s, the theory of settler colonialism, has gradually structured itself into a field of study, that of settler colonialism studies^[55]around Patrick Wolfe’s 1990s work on Australian Aborigines. Initially rather influenced by Maxime Rodinson and his circumstantial and limited conception of settler colonialism, Wolfe rallied to Sayegh’s vision, criticizing Rodinson’s for failing to identify the eliminationist dimension of settler colonialism^[56]. His articles published between 2006 and 2016 on Israel/Palestine mark this evolution: he relies in effect on Fayez Sayegh himself, Edward Said, who carries the same arguments, or on the work of Zureik’s Institute for Palestine Studies. In Traces of history: Elementary structures of race, he quotes extensively from the Israeli “new historians” Ilan Pappé, Gershon Shafir and even Shlomo Sand, whose work, at its most ideological, has consisted precisely in revising the history of Zionism in the light of accusations of ethnic cleansing, apartheid, racism and even genocide^[57]. In Patrick Wolfe, we find the same comparisons between Nazism and Zionism as in Zureik and Sayegh: he speaks of Herrenfolk^[58] about Israelis, of a situation comparable to the Warsaw Ghetto^[59] and “goyim-rein zone”^[60]. A testament to this evolution of Patrick Wolfe and settler colonialism studies as a whole can be found in a 2012 special issue on Palestine^[61] of the most important journal in this field of analysis, Settler colonial studies, which contains an article by Wolfe reiterating the thesis of the elimination of the Palestinians, an article by Ilan Pappé and at the end of the volume consequent extracts from Sayegh’s Zionist Colonialism in Palestine. As early as 1946, Sayegh’s efforts to impose his views on the academic world were finally crowned with success: the ideologization of the field of settler colonialism was complete.

In this ideological drift of the discourse on settler colonialism, Israel’s place is central, as the latest avatar of European colonialism (“It is very strange, isn’t it, that the last European settlement established on Earth – Israel [..] is being established in an anti-colonial atmosphere”)^[62], as the only foreign body within formerly colonized countries^[63] and as the most visible element of “a subjugation of the Global South by the Global North”^[64]. Note also that the colonizer’s elimination (genocide) of indigenous peoples is a structural feature here, since according to Patrick Wolfe “invasion is a structure, not an event”^[65]. Genocide need not be proven. The essentialist and racist character of the notion of indigenous people is taken up in an acritical manner, without its racialist underpinnings being explored. The stage is thus set for this discourse on settler colonialism, purged of its fascist origins and all-too-direct antisemitism, to become a global ideology, accepted in academic circles, within the global left and international institutions. This ideology makes it possible to characterize any conflict as a structuring and radical opposition, because ultimately genocidal, between North and South, white peoples and peoples of color, colonizers and natives, dominant and dominated. Within this structure, Israel and the Jews always occupy a place that is both decisive and negative.

Daniel Sfetzel