Decolonisation and its discontents. Part Two.

Why the Two State Solution is a second front in the defence of the rules based order

A destroyed mosque in Gaza City, 2014. Author’s own photo.

In Part One of this long read, I critiqued decolonisation theory, acknowledging what is real in it while criticising those on the left who have cited it to excuse, or even celebrate, the Hamas terror attack of 7 October. In Part Two - the conclusion of a response to Simon Sebag Montefiore’s Atlantic article - I explore how it became entwined with the One State Solution for Palestine, and examine its exploitation by Neo-Stalinism. The full text will go up on Medium later this week, but please share and subscribe.

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Does the settler colonial frame apply to Israel-Palestine?

Let us clear up a language issue. There are Israeli settlers in the West Bank, living on stolen land, with a project of illegal colonisation and the prevention of any Palestinian statehood. Their settlement project has been repeatedly described as apartheid by the UN’s special rapporteur.

But that is not primarily what the decolonial activists are talking about. When the SOAS-UCU resolution speaks of the "ongoing settler colonial occupation of Palestine" it has to be talking about the Jewish presence in Palestine, not simply West Bank settlers.

With the emergence of Likud/far-right hegemony in Israeli politics, and since the collapse of the Oslo process, framing Israel as an essentially "settler colonial project", linked to a generic global phenomenon of white supremacy, has become central for those on the left opposed to the Two State Solution.

The Israeli anthropologist Jeff Halper, in Decolonising Israel: Liberating Palestine, outlines the argument as follows. The essential process driving conflict between Israel and the Palestinians is:

"the colonization of Palestine by the Zionist movement, culminating in a state of Israel ruling over the entirety of the country".

Zionism, he says, adopted the settler colonial process because it could not live with an indigenous Arab population and had to drive Arabs away, following the historic patterns laid down by white settlers in the USA, Canada, Australia, North Africa and even Nordic peoples in Scandinavia (against the Sami people). As a result, he insists, nothing short of the abolition of the State of Israel, and the abandonment of Zionism by Israeli Jews, can solve the problem:

"If the problem is a dispute between two countries or a civil war between two nationalisms, as the Palestinian/Israeli “conflict” is often phrased, then a conflict-resolution model might resolve it. But it cannot resolve a colonial situation. That requires an entirely different process of resolution: decolonization, the dismantling of the colonial entity so that a new, inclusive body politic may emerge."

Halper cites Lorenzo Veracini's five stage model for settler-colonialism, in which the arrivals first create an ideology (Zionism), then invade (the Yishuv during the British Mandate period), then commit "foundational violence" (Nakba, occupation of Palestinian territories). Stage four is the creation of a "Dominance Management Regime". Stage five is the final triumph of the settler regime where the indigenous people are driven out, killed, marginalised or pacified.

To prevent this final stage - which so many Palestinians fear is the true strategy of the Likud/far-right coalition and the de facto goal of the current Gaza operation - Halper, writing in 2021, argued that only a comprehensive plan of decolonisation, which dismantles the Dominance Management Regime can end the conflict.

Halper criticises the Fatah/PLO tradition for abandoning anti-colonial project, in favour of co-existence with Zionism, and notes that since the 1980s:

"no detailed program of decolonisation has ever been presented, not by the Palestinian leadership, or by its academics or civil society activists".

He wants the Palestinians and the Israeli left to unite around One State Solution, and to use their leverage within international civil society, and ultimately with influential governments, to pursue the One State Solution via a mixture of carrot and stick: BDS etc as the stick, security guarantees for Israeli Jews as the carrot.

Dipping into Halper's 2021 book after 7 October, I am struck by the fact that there are only four references to the word Hamas, each of them glancing, and precisely zero expectation that Hamas might totally alter the dynamics of the situation by launching a genocidal attack aimed at triggering a regional war for the destruction of Israel.

Halper was not alone in discounting the possibility. Jake Sullivan's infamous Foreign Affairs article did the same. Nor did it cross my own mind, even when covering the 2014 war from inside Gaza, that these suit-wearing social conservatives had any intention of fighting Israel for anything other than concessions. Since 2014, most Israeli debates about the One State Solution have revolved around the expected subsidence of the Palestinian armed struggle.

In the immediate aftermath of 7 October there is only one form of decolonisation on offer: a Hamas victory which enacts the genocidal intentions of the 1988 Covenant. Likewise, for the Israeli far right, whose genocidal comments in response to the massacre have been well documented, "Nakba 2023" is on the agenda. Try as I might, I cannot see any practical application for the peaceful decolonisation plan Halper outlined.

Faced with this, Dmitry Shumsky, professor in the history of Zionism at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, insists that the 7 October massacre has killed the One State Solution. Not only must it drive the international community to embrace Two States as an urgent strategy for regional de-escalation, Shumsky writes:

"... it can certainly be said today that the one-state paradigm has been tested in reality, and the horrific results of this test speak for themselves. The cruel campaign of murder of Israeli civilians by the Palestinian nationalist-Islamic Hamas movement on that Black Saturday, along with Israel’s brutal campaign of retaliation, have served as a kind of precursor to the Israeli-Palestinian “coexistence” that awaits both peoples in a binational state – a taste of binational disaster."

If you want to be charitable to those left activists in the UK prepared to march, without demur, alongside people chanting "Khaybar, Khaybar O Yahud", and waving the Shahada flag (I don't), you could interpret everything they're doing as an attempt to apply Halper's utopian, peaceful strategy in the wrong circumstance.

Less charitably: if you promote a theory that tells you white people cannot be victims, that allows you to classify all Israeli Jews as white, that identifies Jews in Britain as part of a white settler colonialist elite, that rules out class solidarity, that suspends basic feminist solidarity with the victims of sexual violence, and is grounded in the impossibility of hope and change, then at some point you are going to find people tearing down posters of kidnapped Israeli kids or standing outside Keir Starmer's office ranting about how his wife is "a Zionist".

The decolonisation theory has, in short, become an obstacle to the development of a reality-based response to 7 October for parts of the left.

Allied to classical Leninism (which always supports the armed resistance of colonised peoples) and to outright Islamism - which is tangibly present on the Palestine Solidarity demos, and wants a Caliphate not decolonisation - the theory draws its mobilising power from the very incoherence Sebag Montefiore complains about.

But as Chibber points out, it is unlikely to disappear:

"Over the past quarter century, enormous resources have been sunk into the material infrastructure that sustains the theory. There are journals wholly committed to it, chairs in humanities departments dedicated to its propagation, sections in disciplinary societies that convene annually with hundreds of attendees, book series at publishing houses with enormous lists and promises of forthcoming volumes. None of this will come to an end anytime soon simply because the theory happens to be deeply flawed."

Rescuing the metaphor

I believe that the vast majority of people mobilised on demonstrations against the Israeli bombing of Gaza, and for an immediate ceasefire, are there for principled reasons. Like it or not, the decolonisation theory has taken root among them and has to be debunked, insofar as it becomes a guide to action.

Rescuing it as a lens through which to study reality means acknowledging those insights that are valuable:

• Establishing the centrality of racism to capitalism is an important theoretical achievement.

• Giving voice and agenda-setting roles to indigenous peoples, who were marginalised both by under capitalist and communist imperialism is vital.

• Critiquing academic disciplines - from anthropology to literature to economics - from the point of view of marginalised indigenous peoples is essential.

• If we understand the structural nature of racism in Western societies, and its historical rootedness in slavery and colonialism, we should expect its victims to form alliances that defy white/elite/liberal mainstream views on how the oppressed should resist.

• If we understand that racism is not only structural, but reproduced in micro-scale human interactions and relationships, we should expect its victims to bring the legacy of centuries of imperialist violence into the conversation.

The political task is to separate these entirely legitimate attempts to decolonise language and practice, each of which is essentially metaphoric (sorry Tuck and Yang), from movements that seek to excuse terrorism, deny the reality of the Hamas atrocity and destroy the state of Israel.

Israel exists. So must Palestine.

I could take issue with parts of Sebag Montefiore's account of Israel's founding trauma, but he is right to point out the tenuousness of the claim that the Yeshuv was part of a generic project of white imperial settlement.

I think he underplays the danger of the genocidal thought being expressed by the Israeli far-right. Though this war hopefully ends with a ceasefire, the fall of Netanyahu, and leads to serious progress on Two States, we cannot be certain that it will. There are other, horrific outcomes that have to be named to be avoided.

What matters to me are not the details of the foundation story, nor any generic model of white settlement. It is the fact that Israel exists, and is recognised as a state under international law.

Its settlements and annexations in the West Bank are illegal under the self-same international legal system, while Palestine's claim to recognition as a sovereign, independent state is supported by that system.

That's why I defend Israel's right to exist and seek a Two State Solution in line with numerous UN resolutions, with unified state of Palestine, in the West Bank and Gaza, as close to the 1967 borders as the two parties can agree on.

At the same time we have to acknowledge the extreme peril that the global Jewish population now find themselves in.

I am only a quarter Jewish: I was raised as a Catholic and have only been in Israel for a grand total of 48 hours, in order to get in and out of Gaza in 2014. But within minutes of seeing the images flooding across social media on 7 October I understood: this is a project to eradicate my existence; the global call for a second Holocaust.

A quote from Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate began running around my brain. It’s from the letter that the physicist Viktor Shtrum receives from his secular, communist mother, in Berdichiv, after the Nazis have created the ghetto:

That morning I was reminded of what I’d forgotten during the years of the Soviet regime – that I was a Jew. Some Germans drove past on a lorry, shouting out: ‘Juden kaputt!’

I understand why Jews, in Britain and elsewhere, are terrified by the wave of anti-Semitism, including left-wing anti-Semitism, that is sweeping civil society. When I observe the leniency that some on the student left are granting to outright anti-Semitism, I see the same complacency that I've studied as a historian, among the workers’ movements of Europe in the 1930s: the same absence of a theory of evil.

My grandfather’s generation could imagine bad stuff: they’d lived through a war that killed millions. But nothing in their moral vocabulary allowed them to anticipate what Nazism would do. And that’s the point of having a moral vocabulary - something that both Leninism and postmodernism teach is pointless. The moral and ethical vocabulary allows you to recognise radical evil before it happens.

At the same time, I’ve spent years studying the ideology of the new far right. Their project, as I outlined in How To Stop Fascism, is a global ethnic civil war that ends modernity. They want Muslims expelled from Western society, just as the Nazis did to the Jews. Paradoxically what the fascists want, and what Hamas want, are the same things: that’s why much of the far right in the USA has piled in alongside the red-brown grifters to excuse Hamas and promote its narratives.

The danger is real. The multilateral world order that underpins Israel's existence is disintegrating. Might is replacing right.

Russia and China have adopted the explicit project of replacing a rules-based order and a universal concept of human rights with naked Great Power politics and cultural relativism. American power is crumbling. Instead of facing the challenge of multipolarity with confidence, red lines and a strategy, the American political class, and much of the electorate, has turned isolationist.

As a result, the unspoken fear that looms over the Middle East is not simply a regional war that goes nuclear. It is that American power in the region shatters, as it did in Afghanistan in 2021 - because the task of defending Ukraine, Taiwan and Israel at once proves too much, forcing Biden into impossible choices, which overwhelm a democracy that is already under threat from Trump and his insurrectionary allies.

Faced with this threat, the urgent fight for a Two State Solution is a second front in the defence of the multi-lateral, rules-based global system.

And to the extent that decolonisation theory has become the intellectual framework for justifying Israel's destruction, and the impossibility of Two States, it has to be resisted intellectually and morally.

The hybrid warfare context

To do it smartly, we need to understand how easily decolonisation has been co-opted into the influence projects of the West's systemic rivals, Russia and China.

Xi Jin Ping and his proxies in the West speak the language of orthodox Marxism-Leninism. Intellectually, they don't give a shit about the decolonisation thesis.