The challenge of stopping the carnage in Palestine is so huge that it will not be achieved by one movement or one process… It will be a fusion of discrete processes that together will create a transformative movement.
Acclaimed historian Ilan Pappé has provocatively argued that Israel’s genocidal war on Palestine has triggered a terminal crisis for Zionism and its settler colonial project. In this interview, Pappé explains his argument and lays out the tasks for the international solidarity movement, most importantly intensifying the campaign for Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS), in support of the Palestinian people’s struggle for liberation.
First, to go back to the moment of inception. The foundation of Israel as a settler colonial state project comes, ironically, during an era of intense decolonization from empire in its many forms. Born within months of two independent (and anticolonial) nation states, India and Pakistan, Israel in hindsight seems like the anomaly of the anticolonial moment. Do you think the fact that Israel had to repackage colonialism for the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, long after it had been delegitimized elsewhere, accounts for some of its ferocity as a state?
In essence, the ferocity of the project is perhaps not informed by its historical timing in my mind. The ferocity is because of the nature of settler colonial projects such as Zionism, which unlike classical colonialist projects did not seek to exploit the native population but were looking for ways of eliminating it (through expulsion or genocide). The timing played a role in the vast efforts the young Israel invested in covering up its violent inception by various means and arguments that quite often were contradictory; for instance, depicting the Palestinians as successors of the Nazis on the one hand, and on the other claiming that they left Palestine voluntarily in 1948.
The Zionist leaders were cognizant of the tricky time during which their settler colonial project was conceived and therefore were busy from the very beginning building a powerful apparatus of propaganda to make sure that the decolonized world and its supporters in the Global North would reject any reference to Zionism as colonialism and only accept it as an enlightened project of national liberation. The impulse for violence today is the same one that motivated the early colonizers, but the need to repackage the project has become, as you put it, more difficult in a world that knows too much and has large sections that care about and identify with the colonized.
In a recent piece you argued that a post-Zionist, decolonized Palestine will “likely look to Europe (perhaps to the Swiss cantons and the Belgian model) or, more aptly, to the old structures of the eastern Mediterranean, where secularized religious groups morphed gradually into ethnocultural ones that lived side-by-side in the same territory.” Historians, such as Ayesha Jalal, have long made a distinction between religion as faith and religion as “a social demarcator of identity.” While the first can “be seen as matter of personal belief,” the latter “aims specifically at establishing boundaries with other communities.” Do you think such a distinction is relevant for Palestine?
Yes, I do. I think Ussama Maqdisi’s work on the Ottoman era is a vital history of the region about forms of coexistence through group affiliation that also had ecological implications. Maqdisi phrases this syncretic existence of different groups as an “ecumenical framework” where boundaries between groups were porous rather than calcified. This live mosaic of coexistence is a very relevant structure for an area where modernity and tradition will have to adopt a dialogical relationship rather a zero–sum game approach that modernization theories have advocated ever since the arrival of imperialism to the Arab World.
In many post-October interviews, you have stated that from the historians’ perspective, we’re likely seeing the beginning of the end of the Zionist project. You have used the “fracturing of Israeli Jewish society” as one of the indicators of a possible terminal crisis. Given that this fracturing has not questioned the continued existence of the Jewish ethno-nationalist state, what are the possibilities and limits of this development?
Presently, it is impossible to expect any significant willingness among Israeli Jews to jettison Zionism. Therefore, I am not talking about a voluntary transformation of a collective Jewish identity in historical Palestine from an ethnonational one to an ethnocultural one. I suggest that this would be something that the liberation movement could offer Jews as part of a vision of a liberated and decolonized Palestine. How it will unfold depends on if the liberation of Palestine succeeds and in what way. I claim that the disintegration of the state will occur, but I can only hope the void it will create will be filled by constructive ideas like this one.
The US state’s support for Zionism has proven remarkably resilient in the face of the increasing unpopularity of and protests against the ongoing genocide in Gaza amongst the American people. What sort of changes in the US political scene would need to happen to shake US support for Israel?
The changes in the American position on Israel and Palestine will be triggered, in my mind, by two opposing trends that, in this particular case, would have the same outcome. If America eventually, and not necessarily immediately in the next elections, moves toward a more progressive foreign policy informed by changes in the Democratic Party, then this will bring a change in the policy towards Israel.
The challenge of stopping the carnage in Palestine is so huge that it will not be achieved by one movement or one process…It will be a fusion of discrete processes that together will create a transformative movement.
If it moves in the opposite Trumpian direction, it will lead to an isolationist American policy that can also undermine the American commitment to Israel. So, either younger civil society forces that are pro-Palestinian will have an impact on policy in the future, or the harsh economic realities imposing their limits on being a world superpower in that future would make America less interested in Israel. The change will happen either for cynical economic reasons or due to moral considerations.
Much of your thinking on this issue is based on the loss of Zionism’s core international constituency, particularly in the American center and center-left. While this loss is clearly a sea change for the Zionist project, what do you think will happen to processes of Zionist migration to the West Bank from the US, since some of those migrants tend to be the most violent and committed supporters of the project?
The number of the American Jews among the settlers is not that meaningful. The danger is from the seven hundred thousand Jewish settlers who are graduates of the Religious Zionist institutions. These graduates come mainly from the more deprived socio-economic sections of Israeli society and some from the religious Zionist bourgeoise. When this messianic movement was on the margins, the voice of American Jews, such as Rabbi Meir Kahane, was more dominant. But nowadays the dominant voices are those of people such as Itamar Ben Gvir, a Mizrahi Jew, and Bezalel Smotrich, who is Israeli-born and from the Ashkenazi religious Zionist elite.
You foresee the end of the Zionist project as a decades-long process, marked by increasing violence on the ground in Palestine. You’ve also said that the responsibility for the international solidarity movement is minimizing the harm to the Palestinians caused by Zionism’s death throes. Granting your claim that these efforts will, ideally, be led by Palestinians, how do you see this task for the international solidarity movement playing out? How do you envision present efforts—the encampment movement, the broader BDS movement, labor-for-Palestine organizing, and the rulings of international legal bodies—as contributing to that effort? For those of us who want to help, how can one escalate for Gaza?
I think it is quite remarkable that the international solidarity movement was able to act in uniformity despite the fractured and factionalized liberation movement they are in solidarity with. The challenge of stopping the carnage in Palestine is so huge that it will not be achieved by one movement or one process. It will be a fusion of discrete processes that together will create a transformative movement.
So, while you are part of one such discrete process, you are not likely to see the dividends, but you have to abide. What many activists have come to recognize is that what matters is not how much they have achieved but, rather, if they did enough for the cause they believe in. In the case of the encampments, BDS, and so on, it is clearly a matter of doubling and tripling the effort, not changing the mode of action. ×
______________________