The Left envisions a future for Palestine in which people of all religions and ethnicities enjoy equal rights. But achieving this universalistic vision requires starting from the understanding that the state of Israel is a settler-colonial enterprise.
A displaced Palestinian woman washes clothes at a makeshift camp on the Egyptian border, west of Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip on January 14, 2024. (Mahmud Hams / AFP via Getty Images)
The events of October 7 and the genocidal war Israel launched on Gaza in their wake have provoked a flurry of discussions over the nature of Zionism and the competing claims of Israelis and Palestinians to the territory of historic Palestine. Zionists tend to argue that such historical claims justify the existence of a Jewish state there, while left-wing critics of Israel often describe Zionism as a “settler-colonial” project that displaced the indigenous Palestinian population.
In a recent article for Jacobin, Ben Burgis argues against calling all Israelis “settlers” and questions the usefulness of the analytical opposition between Israeli settlers and indigenous Palestinians to make sense of what is wrong with Zionism. He claims that some Palestine solidarity activists are saying that Israelis should be displaced from the contested territory because their presence there is illegitimate. They are indulging in the “anti-Zionism of fools,” according to Burgis, by countering the “blood and soil” of Zionists with equally dubious claims on the part of Palestinians.
Burgis hopes this group of activists is relatively small, and he wants to set the record straight for the Left: the problem with Zionism isn’t that they are making illegitimate claims about the land, but that they assert that “anyone’s status or rights in the area where they live depend on their ethnicity or religion or where their ancestors lived.” Burgis claims that the Left can forgo making a parallel argument on behalf of Palestinians and instead make more principled and universal appeal to equal rights regardless of religion, ethnicity, or ancestral origin.
I share Burgis’s aim of making a universalistic argument for a democratic state in historic Palestine, where people of all ethnicities and religions would have equal rights. But I disagree with his claim that we should discard indigeneity and related concepts in trying to understand what is wrong with the Zionist project. The settler-colonial analysis does not imply what Burgis fears, and it does a better job of clarifying the substance of a universalist alternative than the view he advocates.
Unpacking the Argument
I take Burgis’s argument to be the following: the Right bases its arguments for Zionism on historical claims to the land. All arguments that make these sorts of claims as to who belongs on what land are “blood-and-soil” arguments. And there is a “relatively small” part of the Left that unwittingly makes such arguments, but on behalf of Palestinians. But these arguments dangerously imply a lack of commitment to moral universality and equality.
Therefore, Burgis argues, we shouldn’t call all Israelis settlers (as opposed, say, those Israelis who are illegally settling Palestinian territory in the West Bank), since it seems to imply that Israelis don’t have a right to live in historic Palestine. Given the danger manifest in denial of universalism and the resulting chauvinism about who has a right to live in the region, he concludes that there is no normative value in using the categories of “settler” and “indigenous” to describe Israelis and Palestinians as groups.
I believe Burgis goes wrong, however, in holding that all arguments about historical claims to land are problematic “blood-and-soil” arguments. Not all statements about people’s relationship to certain lands are equivalent.
Rights-claims about land refer to the cluster of duties and obligations that people have to others living in the same territory. In this case, what is being asserted by most Palestinian solidarity activists is that Palestinians should have the right to return to the land from which they were displaced. Their status as people who are displaced from their homeland (i.e., as indigenous to it and torn from it) is the basis of this right.
The right of return does not entail displacing Israelis in kind, which means that it does not entail moral particularism over and against universalism. The analysis of Israel as a settler-colonial project is a structural analysis. The terms “indigenous” and “settler” do not refer to discrete individuals who are on a spectrum of proximity to the events of 1948 or to the various settler projects in the West Bank and Gaza. It’s not suggesting, as Burgis seems to think, that there is a grading curve for which Israelis can be evaluated as better and worse than others — and then for which there can be settler grade inflation that creates a misleading impression that each Israeli is as bad as every other Israeli throughout the country’s short history. The analysis is not personal in that way at all.
Settler colonialism, and by extension the language of indigeneity and settlers, describes two different relationships that Israelis and Palestinians have to the state of Israel, and to the political project that enables the inclusion of one group at the expense of the other. What using the language of settler-colonization does is make it clear that this structural relationship entails a set of duties and obligations with respect to the history of displacement that created the unequal relationship in the first place. Namely, it implies that Palestinians have the right of return, and Israelis have an obligation to accommodate that right.
It is the Israeli state that is illegitimate and political support for it that is wrong. The Israeli state is engaged in a violent settler project for which there is abundant political support both among the representatives of the Israeli people in their government, including current West Bank settlers, and throughout the population. In this context, one cannot have equal rights without the right of return.
What is especially important is that Israelis by and large reject equal rights for Palestinians because they reject the right of return, as it would challenge the demographic basis of the setter project. So it is misleading to say that the problem with Zionism is that it asserts the obscene premise that “anyone’s status or rights in the area where they live depend on their ethnicity or religion or where their ancestors lived.” Zionism is wrong not just for this reason, but because of how the Israeli state pursues political supremacy by way of demographic and territorial control — now manifesting in the form of its genocide in Gaza.
What Is to Be Done?
Burgis might reply that he was not arguing against all use of the settler-colonial analysis as it pertains to Israel, but only to “a misguided — and, I hope, relatively small — segment of Palestine solidarity activists who take the mirror image of this [Zionist ‘blood-and-soil’] position.” He writes that this minority of activists let their anger at the genocide and decades of apartheid lead them to “indulge in ugly rhetoric about how the entire population of seven million or so Israeli Jews, the great majority of whom were born in the country, are ‘settlers’ and ‘colonizers.’”
He goes on:
People who insist that Palestinians are “indigenous” and Israelis are not, and who think this is what makes the struggle for Palestinian rights legitimate, are embracing the logic of reactionaries like [New York congresswoman Claudia] Tenney and [Ben] Shapiro while reversing the implication. The problem with the Right’s claim that Israel is justified in denying basic rights to millions of people because of historical Jewish claims to “Judea and Samaria” is not that the right-wingers are misidentifying who counts as “truly” indigenous. The wildly reactionary premise is that this is even a relevant question.
But Burgis is getting the implications of these claims wrong. Calling Israelis settlers does not entail the further claim that Israelis ought to be displaced from the territory. Nor is it wildly reactionary to say that who is indigenous is a relevant political question, as the right of return and any additional political compromises in the future will have to refer to such a right — unless we think that the only salient issue is who lives in the territory right now. But everyone should agree that statement is absurd.
What would it actually mean to have a political resolution in this situation? It will require difficult compromises and trade-offs on the part of both Israelis and Palestinians
Importantly, Israelis would have to put up with a lot of change. One cannot give the Palestinians the right of return but only to the existing occupied territories and to the ghettos inhabited by Arab Israelis in the country. Even with a single, binational state solution, the Palestinians would want current settlers out of the West Bank, some land back, housing, and the basic social services required for social, political, and economic integration.
Some Israelis would have to move around to make all this possible. None of this involves displacement out of Israel, nor does it involve making Israelis subordinate to Palestinians. But it does mean a different property structure, a changed demographic makeup, and an altered balance of political influence in the country than now prevails. It means, in other words, a democracy.
Again, contrary to what Burgis argues, understanding Israel as a settler-colonial enterprise is the only possible basis on which we can negotiate competing claims to the land in favor of the binational state that both Burgis and I favor. An answer to the question of what equality would substantially mean rests on it. We are talking about a context in which “bourgeois rights” do not even exist for the majority of the Palestinian population, which means that any state that extends the franchise and recognition of citizenship to Palestinians must address this question: Who will the state recognize as a full citizen?
And we have to go much further. Social equality, not just political equality, is what equality in a binational state should mean. Its achievement would require negotiating the right of return and all the structural consequences that it entails. That’s what would prevent such a state from becoming one in which Israelis and Palestinians are formally equal and informally unequal. As we know, such an outcome can be perfectly compatible with ongoing apartheid — “separate but equal” — and undermining it is the move that favors real equality and, therefore, moral universalism.