Excerpts from a long, very engaging and thought provoking interview.
The colonisation of Palestine is an intrinsic “moment” in the history of European imperialism (beginning with the British Empire, followed by the French Empire, and continued to this day by Israel’s close association with the “Western” powers, which provide it with funding, weapons and diplomatic protection). It enacts its extreme forms (settler colonialism, which replaces the indigenous people with settlers, directing their expulsion and then elimination) and extends the imperialist enterprise even beyond its supposed historical endpoint. It uses the consequences of the extermination of the Jews of Europe as an opportunity, a (demographic and intellectual) resource, and an ideological cover. I would propose a critical variation on this scenario which, I hope, does not disregard its general truth. It is certainly true that Zionism, since its founding fathers (Herzl, Weizmann), has been both a typically “European” nationalism (among the oppressed nationalities) and an “Orientalism” steeped in the idea that European culture is superior to Eastern barbarism. It is surely true that this ideology has given free rein to the “secular messianism” of the State of Israel and its will to technological and military power. However, the idea of an Israeli colonisation enterprise serving a Euro-American “collective imperial metropole” is a fiction that has the serious disadvantage of minimising the way in which Europe “vomited out” its Jews (Shlomo Sand). It downplays the role played, in the foundation of Israel, of the consequences of Nazism and antisemitism, the violence of the European civil war in which Jews were the main victims, and thus the complexity of the motives that led the postwar United Nations to confer legitimacy on the new state on part of the territory of “historic Palestine”…
It also has the drawback, following on from this, of obscuring the complicity of the Arab states (I am not talking about the peoples), which were themselves subject to imperialism but ended up using this complicity to conquer dominant positions within it (as is today true of Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States, also involved in the genocide in Sudan). Their policy towards the Palestinians has constantly veered between impotent bluster, cynical manipulation and self-serving bartering.
So, it seems to me that a balanced view of Europe’s “historical responsibility” for the colonisation of Palestine, which today has led to ethnic cleansing, genocide and the devastation of the country, has to include other elements. It must integrate the antagonisms and contradictions that have shaped European history over the last two centuries (a history of self-destruction) and also reflect on the Arab world’s capacity for resistance and autonomy (a capacity that has been constantly neutralised or betrayed). Integrating these considerations does not remove the general sense of the relationship of domination, but it avoids reducing it to an abstract binary schema, or essentialising it.
We must not think in binary terms, opposing peace to war, or “non-violence” to “violence” per se. We must always introduce a third term, which complicates the debate but may help to clarify it. When it comes to the response to destruction, enslavement or extermination, the third term, as we have just said, is resistance, which is “just war” (it is even the only form of just war, provided that the means are also appropriate to this). When it comes to the ultimate goal, the third term is justice for the oppressed, which means that only “just peace” is a true, acceptable, honourable peace, and that perhaps it is even the only lasting peace. Peace, war, resistance and justice are the four poles of the same problem, the four terms of a single decision.
we must be aware that the classification of terrorism is subject to state manipulation through legal or pseudo-legal labels designed to place certain enemies of the hegemonic powers in the position of “outlaws”. This is what happens when a particular organisation or group is placed on international criminal lists. This obscures two facts of the most paramount importance: first, the fact that, in situations of war of liberation, today’s “terrorists” are tomorrow’s “legitimate interlocutors” with whom negotiations must take place, and they must therefore be lifted from their status as criminals. Sometimes negotiations begin “in secret” even while operations to eliminate terrorists are underway. This is what happened in Algeria between the French colonisers and the National Liberation Front, to the benefit of the latter. Or in South Africa, even if in different ways. This does not mean that there is no terrorism, but that we must not jump from recognising terrorist actions (even explicitly claimed ones) to essentialisingmovements and their specific organisations as “terroristic” and intrinsically evil ones, which must be eliminated by any means necessary. Hamas, however disastrous its programme and actions may be, is not Islamic State (Daesh). This means that the historical relationship between struggles for emancipation or resistance and “terrorism” as a tactic has always been (and is now more than ever) complex, impure and subject to change.
Most importantly, though, this also obscures the fact that the main purpose of official definitions is to conceal the reciprocity and asymmetry between terrorist actions and “counterterrorist” operations. In a completely arbitrary manner, the former are deemed criminal, while the latter are considered legitimate, regardless of how savage their means are.
In the broader context of the plan to annex Palestine, the current project suggests another line of thought: it is the incorporation of a trend that is constitutive of Israeli settlement (promoted by Zionism as a “pioneer” ideology) into the programme of artificialisation of the world that now characterises the capitalist mode of production. Anyone who has set foot in Israel cannot fail to be struck by the fact that the “return” to a land decreed to be ancestral (from which the Jews were “exiled”, not in a metaphorical or spiritual sense, but a historical and material one) can only be achieved by cleansing the territory of everything that reflects its millennia-long history, whereby the signs of Arab-Muslim civilisation (and incidentally Roman, Christian and Ottoman civilisation) are imprinted into the landscape and architecture of cities. All this must be replaced by a “modern” environment…
The historical trend of Zionism fits directly into the programme of post-industrial capitalism (which I have elsewhere called absolute capitalism): an extractivist financial capitalism that uses the resources of technology revolutionised by AI and the use of synthetic materials to completely deterritorialise human habitation, “inventing” cities of the future that are not connected to any past, in which the behaviour of individuals is entirely governed by the circulation of money, remote working and preconditioned consumption. It is also important to note that in this form of capitalism, the destruction of the environment is not just a “negative externality” but itself a method of production.
I see the rise of fascism in our “liberal” (neoliberal, then “national authoritarian”) capitalist states. One of the most indisputable signs of this is the formalisation of racist policies (targeting immigrants, ethnic and religious minorities, in particular, in France, Arab-Muslim communities). Another is the aggressive resurgence of a misogynistic and homophobic macho culture, whose link to the aforementioned tendency toward a militarisation of capitalism would not be hard to demonstrate. This ultimately leads to the emergence of a violently xenophobic nationalism, for which the “body” of the nation, based on descent and a community of (religious, family, patriotic) values, must be preserved from any foreign contamination, and even purged of the dissidents and abnormal individuals it contains. All of this fits into the definition of what you call supremacism (implying: white supremacy), except that the same tendencies are pushed in completely different cultural and “racial” contexts by groups that are incompatible with each other
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