‘Colonialism’? ‘Apartheid’? Interrogating the language of Israel-Palestine

The first casualty of war is truth. Truth is killed by words, not bullets, and four such words are often fired at Israel: “occupation,” “apartheid,” “colonialism,” and “genocide.” How much truth do they hold?

“Occupation” is the most used term since 1967, for good reasons. But while the bulk of the West Bank is under Israel’s military occupation, there is a legal debate on whether the Gaza Strip is or is not under occupation, since Israel withdrew all its soldiers and settlers in 2005. One useful touchstone: If Israel is the warden of Gaza’s “open-air prison,” shouldn’t it be able to fully block it? Yet Israel has no control over Gaza’s southern border with Egypt.

But “occupation” has slightly fallen out of favor for a different reason — it doesn’t strike the ear as sufficiently malevolent for the task at hand: excusing, and effectively justifying, the slaughter of Israeli civilians. “Apartheid” and “colonialism” to the rescue?

These analogies are not without merits. I myself wrote a whole book comparing Zionists to Afrikaners (and French Canadians), and the Israeli occupation of the West Bank has elements of colonialism via the relentless, and increasingly vicious, settlement project. Yet I find the “Zionism (Israel) = colonialism = apartheid” equation factually false, intellectually lazy, morally wrong and practically counterproductive. The Israeli occupation is bad enough without them.

The odd juxtaposition of apartheid and colonialism is itself evidence of the paradigm’s scholarly laziness. Students who study apartheid know that the African National Congress strongly insisted that South Africa was everyone’s. Unlike the Palestinian PLO, and certainly unlike Hamas, the ANC shied away from depicting the rival community — the country’s white population — as foreign colonial invaders. Instead, the ANC insisted that the land belonged to all, white and non-white alike.

Students may wish to learn more about apartheid, then read the genocidal Hamas Covenant (and no, the 2017 “general document” did not amend the Covenant, as Hamas leaders clarified and demonstrated).

If they do, they may be better positioned to answer a simple question: If apartheid explains and justifies the October 7 massacre, why didn’t the original apartheid trigger similar slaughters of white South African civilians? Why didn’t the ANC’s armed wing, the uMkhonto we Sizwe, butcher and kidnap hundreds or thousands of Afrikaner women, elderly people and children?

If not apartheid, perhaps then colonialism? The chronicles of colonialism are certainly more violent. The savage war between France and the FLN in Algeria is an extreme case in point, involving mutual atrocities against civilians, like the massacres of Arabs in Sétif (1945) and of French in El-Halia (1955).

Is this eye-for-an-eye butchery what proponents of the “Zionism = colonialism” equation propose? If so, we should look at where the Israeli-Palestinian conflict approaches this horrendous end of the (anti-)colonialist spectrum of atrocities — and where this analogy fails.

Israel came closest to deliberately targeting civilians in Deir Yassin (1948), Tantura (1948), Qibya (1953) and Kafr Qasim (1956). All these incidents likely included war crimes, but overwhelming historiographical evidence indicates there was no authorized, premediated massacre of civilians. Importantly, Israeli leaders abhorred these incidents.

Consider the massacre at Kafr Qasim, which happened on the first day of the 1956 Sinai War, when Israeli border police lethally enforced a wartime curfew, leading to over forty civilians killed, about half of them women and children. The Israeli government strongly condemned the act, with Prime Minister David Ben Gurion denouncing it as “an atrocity that undermines the most sacred foundation of human morality.” The Israeli parliament stood up to honor the memory of the victims in a moment of silence. Can anyone imagine the Hamas, or even the PA, following suit?

Unlike Israel, Palestinians have deliberately and specifically targeted Israeli (and occasionally non-Israeli) civilians. This has been an explicit goal and an ongoing practice for numerous Palestinian groups. These terror attacks are almost innumerable, but, focusing on the October 7 carnage, several key differences between the FLN in Algeria and Hamas atrocities are worth noting.

First, except for the 1958 failed attempt to assassinate the French Information Minister, the FLN never attacked, let alone perpetrated massacres, in France, whereas Hamas overwhelmingly and consistently targets civilians in Israel per se, not just settlers in the West Bank (to reiterate, there are no Israeli settlers in Gaza). Second, the 1955 massacres were not sanctioned by the FLN leadership; in fact, the FLN head command firmly condemned the massacres.

Third, compared to the 1955 massacres, the number of Israeli civilians slaughtered, certainly in proportion to the overall population, is far higher. Notably, in seven years of war, France killed over half a million Algerians, and possibly three times as many, the overwhelming majority of them civilians. In its 75 years of existence, Israel has killed over 40,000 Palestinians, mostly combatants (mainly by Israeli air strikes in Lebanon and Gaza, but civilians were rarely, if ever, deliberately targeted). To state the obvious, the FLN never sought to eradicate France nor annihilate all French.

Anti-Israel students may want to pause and wonder why it was the First Intifada (1987-1991), devoid of the sadistic and genocidal dimensions of Hamas, that fostered the most courageous rapprochement between Israelis and Palestinians, for which Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin paid with his life; why it was Hamas, through its 1995-96 suicide attacks, that crushed the Oslo peace process and brought Benjamin Netanyahu to power; and why their most vocal bedfellows are the autocrats of Iran, Russia and Turkey.

Academia is no guarantee against the closing of the mind to facts and moral doubts. Indeed, in their facile, righteous reading of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through apartheid and colonialism, far-left students and faculty effectively colonize their own minds.

Academia now faces its own distinct abyss. Rather than using our intellectual tools to understand and help people, we use people as tools for self-conceited campaigns. Rather than caring about people who suffer, we leverage their suffering for our aggrandized sense of righteous heroism. Rather than inspiring people for peace and progress, we sow hatred by boxing them into curated concepts that serve our professional careers. Falling into this self-trap, we not only betray our vocation, but our fellow humans.

The ivory tower can still be a beacon of human solidarity. At its best, academia provides us with a wonderful opportunity to construct our moral and emotional compass by embracing, not eschewing, truth and doubts; by introspection, not conformism; by rising up to the promise of our unique humanity, not by degrading fellow humans.

Uriel Abulof is an associate professor of political science, teaching at Tel Aviv University and Cornell University. He lives in Jerusalem.