Israel and the United States: The Catastrophic Synergy of Two Settler Colonial States

Of all the remarkable and still unfolding geopolitical aspects of the present war in Palestine, what stands out most is the unstinting support given to Israel by the United States from the very moment that the barbaric attack carried out by Hamas in Israel came to the attention of the world.  The US was not alone in unequivocally condemning Hamas, but President Joe Biden, characterizing the terrorist attacks as “pure, unadulterated evil” in a speech delivered on October 10, made it known that the “United States has Israel’s back”:  “We’re with Israel.”  Days later, in an extraordinary demonstration of just how “rock solid” American support of Israel is, Biden took the risk of traveling to Israel. By this time, at least 2,000 Palestinians, the vast majority of them civilians, had also been killed in the relentless, indeed merciless, aerial bombing of Gaza. Biden met with Jewish survivors of Hamas’s attack, holding some of them to his chest in a warm and consoling embrace; but, not surprisingly, he made no pretense of any similar commiseration with Palestinians.  Throughout, the United States vetoed resolutions in the United Nations calling for a cease-fire.  Since Hamas carried out its attack nearly two months ago, some 16,000 Palestinians, the greater majority of them women and children, have perished in a devastating orgy of fire, wrath, and destruction.

Gaza, Bombed Out of Existence: “An Empty Land” in colonialist Thinking, Now a True Wasteland

It is not only with Britain, but with Israel as well, that the United States has long had a “special relationship”.  On 14 May 1948, less than an hour after Israel proclaimed its independence, the US became the first country in the world to recognize Israel as a sovereign state. Ever since, Israel has been backed by American arms, recently to the tune of $3 billion every year, and the two countries have celebrated their ties as an enduring partnership of two democracies allegedly inspired not merely by mutually shared interests but by the love of liberty.  Several commentators have pointed to the great many sources of this unusual relationship.  The US has the world’s second largest Jewish population after Israel, but there are several other, lesser explored, aspects of this relationship, not the least of them being the fact that the modern American university, and nearly every sphere of scientific and humanistic inquiry, has been disproportionately shaped by Jewish intellectuals.

However, in all the vast commentary on the unwavering support that Israel has received from the United States in the last 75 years, the most critical factor has been rarely discussed.  Both Israel and the United States are settler colonial states. Though the idea of “settler colonialism” is now a staple of scholarly discourse, it has made scarcely any inroads into the common understanding of colonialism.  School textbooks down in the United States down to the present day do not use the term “settler colonialism”, and here I will not take up the matter of whether the extermination of American Indians has received even remotely the kind of recognition that it needs.  (“Recognition” barely gets us to the question of “justice”, but that is still more remote a possibility.)  But it behooves us to have at least an elementary sense of how settler colonialism provides another lens on the more general phenomenon of colonialism. The British in India, to take a well-known example of colonialism, absorbed ever greater parts of the country into British India after their initial conquest of Bengal in 1757, and some British families put down roots in India extending over the course of several generations. Though the relationship was often exploitative in the extreme, the British did not seek to exterminate the population and generally did not treat the local population merely as slave labor.

Settler colonialism is an altogether different phenomenon.  It is, in the first instance, predicated on the legal fiction, one that the Europeans boldly even merrily advanced, of terra nullius—that is, the notion that the lands they had encountered were “empty”. These lands were construed as sparsely populated, and that too by those viewed as savages bereft of civilization, and otherwise as unproductive.  Europeans thought nothing of claiming these lands as their own: however, it is not merely when they encountered opposition that they killed the indigenous people, since extermination was but a blood sport. Indigenous populations were nearly wiped out, but many of the natives were also taken into slavery.  Settler colonialists could not countenance even remotely the idea of accommodation and, without exception, settler colonialism resulted in the replacement of Europeans for the indigenous populations.  The other word for this phenomenon is genocide—even if, in the aftermath of the Second World War and especially in the last few decades, the world has settled upon a more capacious understanding of what constitutes “genocide”.

The United States, much like Australia, has evolved from being a settler colonial state into becoming a fundamentally immigrant society, but the periodic recrudescence of virulent white nationalism in both countries suggests that they continue to be guided by the instincts of settler colonialists.  There is but no question that the origins of the modern nation-state of Israel lie precisely in a similar kind of settler colonialism.  The founding of Israel was only made possible by the mass expulsion of Palestinians who term their displacement, and the dispossession of their lands, as nakba. Even as astute, learned, and sensitive a philosopher as Martin Buber was susceptible to the idea that it was given to Jewish settlers alone to make the land productive: “This land recognizes us, for it is fruitful through us: and precisely because it bears fruit for us, it recognizes us.” The land had thus far been unproductive, merely waste land: as Buber opined in an open letter to Mahatma Gandhi on 24 February 1939, “The Jewish farmers have begun to teach their brothers, the Arab farmers, to cultivate the land more intensively.”  Buber had at least the decency, utterly wanting in the present generation of Israeli leaders and their unthinking supporters in the United States, to add that “we do not want to dominate them; we want to serve with them …”

Palestine does not exist: one American, and not merely Israeli, politician after another has pronounced this as an unimpeachable fact over the last several decades. At my own university, the Chancellor, in his first message to the university community days after October 7^th, while deploring the “heinous” attack by Hamas, found himself incapable of even mentioning Palestine. A week after his first message, and that at a time when a few thousand lives in Gaza had already been snuffed out, the Chancellor of UCLA could only muster up enough “courage”, if that is the word for so supine and cowardly a gesture, to say that what was happening in Gaza was “troubling”.  If Palestinians cannot even be named, they certainly do not exist.  The United States and Israel together have woven a dance of death which has been catastrophic for their own countries and will undoubtedly prove to be an unmitigated disaster for the entire world.

First published in the Indian Express (online), 27 November 2023, as “Israel and the United States: The synergy of two settler-colonial states, a disaster for the world“

*Cochin’s Jews: History’s Last Gasp

Samuel Hallegua, 79 years old, has died at his home in Fort Kochi. The Hindu, which reported his death yesterday, described Mr Hallegua as a ‘community leader’ and, more poignantly, as someone who resented, not without reason, the transformation of Cochin’s once flourishing Jewish community into a tourist relic. Mr Hallegua’s family is said to have been present in Cochin since 1592, and it is his family members who, in the mid-eighteenth century, helped to reconstruct the famous synagogue in Mattancherry that Mr Hallegua had, not without considerable misgivings, been showing, as the Warden of the Cochin Jewish Synagogue, to the tourists who flock to Cochin.

A number of scholars, among them Nathan Katz and Joan Roland, have done much justice to the extraordinary history of the Jewish presence in India. The story of Jews being sheltered in Shanghai – which I have described in a previous blog — while they were being butchered wholesale in the home of what is charmingly described as the Enlightenment is remarkable enough, considering that their protector was the Japanese commander of the ghetto who refused to implement orders for their final extermination, but still more remarkable is their centuries-old sojourn in India. India is one country where they did not only not face persecution, but where, much as adherents of many other religions have found, they could openly practice their faith and signal their own distinct contributions to the making of Indian civilization. India remains singular in the worldwide Jewish experience, and Professor Katz justly wrote some years ago, in his book Who Are the Jews of India?, that “Jews navigated the eddies and shoals of Indian culture very well. They never experienced anti-Semitism or discrimination.” He goes on to describe in what respect India could have served as a model for the world: “Indians Jews lived as all Jews should have been allowed to live: free, proud, observant, creative and prosperous, self-realized, full contributors to the host country.”

Among the three distinct Jewish communities that have been present in India, the Cochin Jews numbered about 2,500 shortly before the independence of India in 1947. Only a dozen Jews remain in Cochin today, none of them under the age of 50. How and why their numbers dwindled will seem no mystery to those who, citing the creation of the state of Israel, the horrendous experience of European Jews, the long history of anti-Semitism in many parts of the world, and the passage of the Law of Return, deem it but natural that India’s Jews also sought to migrate to Israel. But surely the matter cannot be allowed to rest there, unless one is prepared to concede that the modern nation-state is the only entity capable of commanding the loyalties of human beings, and that primordial ties, of blood and religion for instance, reign supreme in human affairs. This part of the story, it appears to me, has been inadequately understood. Just what is this thing we call home, and does the geography of the landscape that might be called ‘home’ correspond to the psychogeography of home? In their passage from India to Israel, many Indian Jews may have gained much – solidarity with other Jews, new employment prospects, and the sense of freeing themselves from their hitherto eternal diasporic condition. But, equally, it should also be understood that they may have lost much, just as India lost much from their departure. With the decimation of Cochin’s Jewish community in the aftermath of independence and the creation of Israel, we might say that the logic of the nation-state has triumphed over the possibilities of civilization, and that the modern arithmetic of ‘majority’ and ‘minority’ has triumphed yet again. How are those who are in the majority ever to learn about the traditions, norms, civilities, and graces of hospitality?

The Hindu has reported Mr Hallegua as recently saying of India, “It has been more than tolerant. The Santa Cruz High School I went to was run by Jesuit priests. My sister studied in a school which was managed by Italian nuns. But we were never under pressure to shun Judaism. The country accepted us as we have been. I am a proud Indian. I’m also a Hindu in an apolitical sense.” Mr Hallegua resisted the arithmetic of modern politics to the last. That, among many other reasons, is why he should be honored as he now become among those who are departed.

*Extermination and the Museum Complex: Jews in Wartime Shanghai

I have just returned from visiting Shanghai’s Jewish Refugees Museum, located in the city’s Hongkou District. The museum, a modest affair, is located on the site of the former Ohel Moshe Synagogue, and it bears witness to the unusual and inspiring history of Shanghai’s Jews. From 1933 to 1941, Shanghai accepted 30,000 Jews while much of Europe quietly went about the business of massacring them and planning for the ‘Final Solution’. Shanghai accepted more Jews in this period than Australia, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa, and British India put together. (Let me underscore the fact that India was under colonial occupation; pre-colonial India was wonderfully hospitable to the Jews.) As Germany went down to defeat, and, in the years ahead, the state of Israel was born, the Jews who had found shelter in Shanghai left China. Nothing is left of Shanghai’s wartime Jewish community, and in the hour or two I was at the museum there were only three other visitors.

The history of Jews in China does not commence in the years preceding the outbreak of World War II. A Jewish community flourished in Kaifeng during the Song dynasty (908-1279 CE), and its presence over the next several centuries is attested to in various documents. In the nineteenth century, the Sassoon family, originating in Baghdad, relocated to India and in the decades ahead created a worldwide financial empire. Hong Kong and Shanghai were among the principal outposts of that empire. The backbone of the Sephardic Jewish community’s wealth was the hugely exploitive opium trade, but nevertheless the Jewish community appears not to have suffered any distress under the Chinese. The most interesting segment of the history of Jews in China perhaps dates to the 1930s, when Shanghai became a haven for them as they faced persecution and death in Europe. An area surrounding what is now the museum was set up as the “Designated Area for Stateless Refugees”, and a plaque in the nearby Huo Shan Park now marks the wartime Jewish presence in Shanghai. For the ten years during which European Jews sought shelter in Shanghai, they ran schools, synagogues, businesses, and newspapers in English, German, and Yiddish, among them the Shanghai Jewish Chronicle.

Under relentless pressure from the Nazis, the Japanese military commander forced the stateless refugees from Europe into a ghetto, but he resisted calls to the very end to impose the ‘Final Solution’. In nearby Nanking, by contrast, the Japanese had displayed a ravenous appetite for death and destruction. Whatever the reasons that impelled the Japanese commander, who styled himself “King of the Jews”, to disregard the wishes of the Nazi leadership, there is in these circumstances more than a mere hint that even the most autocratic or totalitarian systems are not as closed as one might imagine. Perhaps the Japanese were not moved by considerations of anti-Semitism; perhaps, notwithstanding the alliance with Nazi Germany, they understood that in the Nazi order of things, the Japanese were not unlike the Jews in being far removed from the ideal Teutonic type. Perhaps, too, they were simply moved by the plight of the Jews. However much the inclination to stress the barbarousness of killers, it is their ordinariness that equally compels attention.

Moving as is the museum, it is at the same time a troubling tribute to Jewish history and the resilience of the Jews. In the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, the permanent exhibition on the Holocaust ends with a little exhibit on the Nazi plan to build, after the Final Solution had been implemented, a comprehensive museum of Jewish history and culture. Though the Nazis could not countenance the idea of leaving alive any Jews, they nonetheless had an ardent desire to create a complete archive of Jewish history. The Nazis cannot be described as being alone in displaying this tendency: to match the enormous holocaust perpetrated against the native American population, the United States has now built a gigantic and loving tribute to the native Americans in the shape of the “National Museum of the American Indian” in the nation’s capital. The culture of the other is always a difficult affair, but it can always be celebrated through the museum complex. That has been, to a great extent, the history of the museum in the modern West, and the museum complex’s deep and hidden links to extermination and the annihilationist tendency should not be underestimated.

Designated Areas for Stateless Refugees, Shanghai. Photo: Vinay Lal, 2009.