It is difficult to find the proper and printable words to describe the daily injustices of a genocide, which is made harder by my personal relationship to the state perpetrating it. I am a Reform Jew, the least religious of the denominations but still every bit as Jewish, and my relationship with Israel has been tenuous ever since I really learned about its creation as a freshman political science student in 2005. I was raised with glossy images of Israel and “the world’s most moral army” and the belief that my people, the victims of bigoted colonial conquest for millennia, had finally found a peaceful place in our image to call home.
Those were lies.
That home has never even been ours, let alone peaceful. The cruel irony of the modern state of Israel is that it could not exist without colonial conquest. Britain first paved the way for this so-called Jewish state through the Balfour Declaration in 1917, pledging to establish “a national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine after the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire. This declaration was made a year before the end of World War I, when Britian could still delude itself into believing it was going to be the premier colonial power of the 20th century, as it planned to expand its footprint around its Indian occupation in Asia.
The Balfour Declaration did state that “nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine,” establishing a century-long Western tradition of giving lip service to the Palestinian people and little else. In fact, the Jews may have been getting lip service too, as this story behind the British occupation of Jerusalem allegedly for its Jewish population was in conflict with their other imperial conquest alongside France, the Sykes-Picot agreement which divided the Levant into five entities along imperial interests. To believe the British were altruistic in their pursuit of this so-called Jewish state is to ignore their attempts to colonize the entire region surrounding and including it.
In 1947, the United Nations passed a resolution splitting Palestine into two states, and on May 14th, 1948, Israel was officially realized through the aid of another imperial power in the United States. During the establishment of Israel between 1947 and 1949, over a quarter million Palestinians were expelled in the Nakba, with the total amount of people eventually displaced estimated to be over 700,000. How some Jews can look at the birth of modern Israel and not see our own history in the Palestinian struggle it created is just mind-boggling to me.
After withdrawing from Vietnam in the 1970s, America turned its attention to Israel’s surrounding oil-rich region filled with key global shipping lanes, and from 1982 onward, the United States conducted military operations in Lebanon, Iran, Iraq, Somalia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Iraq, Pakistan, Somalia, Libya, Iraq, Syria, Libya, and Yemen.
A couple of those, like the intervention in Syria where the United States fought back against a regime committing a genocide, can be seen as military operations for good. However, if there is one thing that we have learned in the last year, it’s that indiscriminate air strikes don’t just hit the bad guys, and the United States has left a trail of civilian blood in its wake in the Middle East, in spite of all its supposed good intentions in a region housing the world’s most valuable and liquid commodity.
If you draw a line from the western edge of Libya to the western edge of Pakistan, Israel is about in the middle. Strategically, it is an ideal forward operating base for the imperial powers across the Mediterranean and Atlantic who have been slicing and dicing this region up along their own interests for over a century, with little to no concern for how it impacts the people who actually live there.
Our modern world is underwritten by the United States’ historic agreements with OPEC in 1971 and 1973 to price oil in dollars. The petrodollar is as good of a “too long, didn’t read” summary of American interests in the Middle East as you will find. Oil literally makes the world go round, even as it slowly marches us ever closer to the apocalypse, and the United States going to war over and over again in Iraq, the world’s 5th largest oil producing country bordering the world’s 3rd, 7th and 10th largest oil producing countries, is simply not a coincidence.
So whose interests does Israel primarily serve? Is it really an altruistic endeavor by the United States and Britain to establish a home for the Jewish people after a Holocaust? Or was it created primarily as an imperial foothold in the most important geopolitical region in the world that imperial powers have been meddling in for over 100 years?
Israel is not ours.
This is why I derisively call it a so-called Jewish state, because that is at best a secondary reason for its existence, as it was created by the same kinds of imperial forces Jews have struggled against for centuries, all while Israel has committed similar crimes towards its neighbors. Modern Israel absolutely is a Jewish ethnostate, but it is not the Jewish state.
It is an outcrop of imperialism. Jim Crow exported to Jerusalem. Until the Jewish state does not come at the expense of another people, it will not represent the centuries of Jewish struggle that define our traditions and beliefs. The Israel that we are promised, that we celebrate on Rosh Hashanah, has not yet been created.
In many ways, the plight of the ancient Israelites cast out of Egypt exists today in Jews defending this sadistic apartheid state, as they also find themselves lost in the desert and worshipping a false idol. This Israel is no Israel worth celebrating or preserving, and if history has proven anything, it’s that we do not need an imperial power’s permission to exist.