It’s more than TikTok: From historical homelands to settler colonialism

By classifying Israel as a settler colonial project, Palestinian scholars have found a narrative that is both compelling and into which multiple facts of their current existence can be slotted

(The first part of this series examined the shift in Palestinian liberation discourse from territory to rights. This second and final part examines the challenge posed by settler colonialism narratives to traditional Zionist narratives and the public recasting of the US as a partisan instead of a mediator to this conflict.)

“Facts do not at all speak for themselves, but require a socially acceptable narrative to absorb, sustain and circulate them. Such a narrative has to have a beginning and an end. In the Palestinian case, a homeland for the resolution of its exile since 1948.”

- Edward Said, Permission to Narrate, 1984

Historical homeland

Notwithstanding its underlying ethnonationalist ideology, Zionism was, until recently, predominantly painted as a progressive cause in the West. Despite this view categorically not being shared by other post-colonial states — in 1975, for example, the UN General Assembly passed resolution 3379 determining Zionism to be a form of racism and racial discrimination — western progressives have by and large exempted Israel from the criticism and scrutiny reserved for colonial projects. (Israeli diplomatic efforts ensured the withdrawal of resolution 3379 in 1991.)

Palestinian scholars argue that this support was built on the widespread acceptance of two popular Zionist narratives which, in the words of Edward Said, gained “orthodoxy by repetition”. The first is the acceptance of Jewish national rights in Palestine as historical, longstanding and factual and the corresponding erasure of Palestinian national rights, and Palestinian history preceding the 1948 partition of Palestine. In one stream of scholarship, the land on which the Jewish state was built was projected to the western audience as being largely unoccupied or inhabited by nomadic Arabs who had no attachment to the land and were indistinguishable in identity from Arabs in surrounding states. Works like Joan Peters’s From Time Immemorial: The Origins of the Arab Jewish Conflict in Palestine (1984) go as far as to suggest that the vast majority of Palestinians expelled in 1948 were Arabs from Egypt who had only entered Palestine a few years before their expulsion. Peters’s work, which received scathing reviews in the UK for its glaring data inconsistencies and misquoting of sources and which the Observer called “a ludicrous and worthless book” was generally praised by American reviewers and remains a popular source for pro-Israel social media content to this day.

Rashid Khalidi, writing in 2020, explains the appeal of this “from biblical times” narrative in the West:

“Underlying this feature and amplifying it, was the profound resonance for Jews and also for many Christians of their biblical connection to the historic land of Israel. Expertly woven into modern political Zionism, this resonance has become critical to it. A late nineteenth century colonial national movement thus adorned itself with a biblical coat that was powerfully attractive to Bible reading Protestants in Great Britain and the United States, blinding them to the modernity of Zionism and it’s colonial nature: for how could Jews be “colonizing” the land where their religion began?"

Khalidi points out that threads of this are formalised in the 1917 Balfour Declaration (which recognised this right to a national home in Palestine for the Jewish people) and the 1922 Palestinian Mandate drawn up by the newly formed League of Nations in the aftermath of the defeat of the Ottomans in the first world war. The mandate provisionally recognised the national rights only of the Jewish population in the territory (who at this time made up approximately 6% of the total population) and ignored the national rights of the remainder of the population. The mandate also recognised the Jewish people (and only the Jewish people) as having a historic connection to Palestine.

The prevalence of this “empty land” narrative, despite being furiously contested by Palestinian scholars and politicians, has allowed Western progressives to by and large ignore the violent mass displacement of the existing population of Palestine (which was 67% Arab in 1948) that followed the creation of the state of Israel and further removed any requirement for the consent of the Palestinian people to the Zionist project.

The second such narrative is the continuous description of the settlers of Israel as an unfairly victimised people, whose right to the land despite being religiously, morally (given the immense suffering of the Holocaust) and legally sanctioned (by the United Nations) was being perpetually challenged by brutal and unreasonable Arabs.

Popular culture was more influential than academic writing in creating and sustaining this narrative. Leon Uris’s 1958 bestselling novel Exodus is a classic case in point. Despite being panned by critics, it sold in the millions. Writing in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, Bradley Burston describes the Exodus mania in the US. He writes, “it was nearly as common to find a copy of "Exodus" in American-Jewish households as to find the Bible - and, of the two, not a few Jewish households apparently had only “Exodus." David Ben-Gurion, the first Prime Minister of Israel is said to have remarked of Exodus, “As a literary work it isn’t much, but as a piece of propaganda, it’s the best thing ever written about Israel.”

Uris uses the classic western movie setup, with a clear good guy — Zionist protagonist, Ari Ben Canaan — forced to take up arms to fight a horde of murderous Arabs and the unfair British. It is very much the classic underdog story of a hero triumphing against all odds culminating in the creation of Israel. The 1960 Hollywood film which had the blond haired, blue eyed Paul Newman playing Canaan (cast as much for his looks as his squeaky clean personal image), succeeded in making a generation of Americans relate to the new state of Israel like nothing had before. It also cemented in these minds the Arabs in Palestine as an illogical and violent people whose actions were motivated by nothing but blind hatred for Jews. This portrayal of the Arab male in Hollywood as a violent extremist is a trope that has continued in Hollywood ever since. In his 2003 book, Reel Bad Arabs, Jack Shaheen reviews 900 films with Arab characters and finds only six with positive depictions of Arabs. Palestinians are continuously only depicted as evil terrorists — beginning with Black Sunday (1977) which shows Palestinians about to massacre 80,000 American sports watchers, and continuing through the 1980s and 1990s with blockbusters like The Delta Force (1986), Wanted: Dead or Alive (1987), Navy Seals (1990), True Lies (1994) and Executive Decision (1996).

While none of these narratives has been left unchallenged — Palestinian scholars and their allies have spent decades dismantling them, debunking data and providing evidence — these efforts did not make significant inroads into the popular discourse in the US at the time. To borrow from Said, they lacked a socially acceptable narrative to be slotted into. Until now.

Changing the race conversation in America

The last decade in particular has seen two important developments in American popular culture that are of relevance here. First, a widespread discussion of racism as systemic as opposed to individual. Beginning in the aftermath of the 2014 police shooting of 18 year old Micheal Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and the demonstrations that followed, and peaking in intensity after the 2020 police killing of George Floyd, which saw the largest ever public demonstrations in the US, this discourse has moved beyond police brutality to cover a diverse range of subjects, including the lack of representation of people of colour in major American cultural conversations (including in the media and Hollywood). It has asked important questions about the stereotyping and racial prejudices apparent in popular works of cinema and fiction, and has, most importantly, created an American generation with a deep (and perhaps unprecedented) understanding of the exact mechanics of systemic inequality, including erasure. This has meant that for young Americans (the most racially diverse American generation to date), narratives that were designed to soothe earlier generations only serve to irritate. Hints of the superiority of “western civilisation” (extremely popular with the Thomas Friedman generation) are now seen as comically racist.  The very same Paul Newman branding of the Zionist as blond haired and blue eyed to this generation suggests colonialism rather than familiarity, and the longstanding Israeli social media strategies which were designed to appeal to the west (which recommended highlighting the fundamentally western nature of Israel) only serve now to reinforce this suggestion of colonialism.

The second, though less widespread change across the US, Canada and Australia has been more vocal conversations about the ethnic cleansing of the respective Indigenous populations of the lands and the harms inflicted by settler colonialism in these countries. While a recent referendum in Australia to constitutionally recognise Indigenous people failed with 60% voting against, polling indicates that a majority of under 50s voted for the referendum (with 18-24 year olds in particular overwhelmingly voting for the referendum). In 2021, investigations unearthed mass graves at the site of a Canadian school set up as a part of a policy “assimilate” Indigenous children, sparking a widespread conversation on the impact of such policies in particular and settler colonialism in general. While these conversations are yet to yield meaningful results for Indigenous populations in the US, Canada and Australia, they have rendered younger people in West more aware of the harms of settler colonialism and more sensitive to suggestions of it.

In this milieu, works like Rashid Khalidi’s The Hundred Years War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance 1917 - 2017, a comprehensive but also deeply personal history of the Palestinian conflict, that makes a clear and compelling case for seeing Zionism as a settler colonial project, have made their mark. Khalidi’s book topped bestseller lists when it came out in 2020 and provides an army of material for Tik-Tokers, with videos relating to Khalidi (and highlights from his book) available in abundance. The Zionist counter to this argument has been less impactful. In an opinion published in Haaretz in 2021, Steven Lubet and Jonathan Zasloff term the framing of Israel as a 'settler colonial state' (a practice which they claim is now routine in academia and the US media) "a disheartening signal of the primacy of political activism over critical inquiry” and yet, the facts they present do little to dispel the fundamental thesis of Khalidi’s book.

In this classification of Israel as a settler colonial project, Palestinian scholars have found a narrative that is both compelling and into which multiple facts of their current existence can be slotted — the Israeli military’s overwhelming use of force for example provides imagery of widespread destruction and humiliation that is common to colonial enterprises everywhere, with several young Americans noting the parallels in imagery between the displacement of civilian populations in Gaza and the Trail of Tears (the forced displacement of Indigenous populations into the so called reservations). Similarly, policies of detainment, trial by military court and house demolitions (all practices borrowed from the British) are immediately reminiscent of colonialism in any part of the world with experience of being colonised.

The sidelining of the US

In analysing the failures of the PLO in Oslo, multiple Palestinian scholars point to their mistaken faith in the US acting as a neutral party to the dispute. Khalid Elgindy, analysing the failure of Oslo, writes, “First and foremost was the uniquely asymmetrical power and political dynamics that existed not just between Israelis and Palestinians, as occupier and occupied, but also between the United States and the Palestinians given the centrality of the U.S.-Israel special relationship.” And yet, in the early 1990s, following the collapse of the Soviet Union, it would have been a seat at an American run peace process or no seat at all for the PLO.

This is not necessarily true today. With the Trump administration recognising Jerusalem as the capital of Israel in 2018 and the Biden administration’s ongoing unrestrained support for Netanyahu’s actions in Gaza, it is possible for the Palestinians to lay to rest the myth of American neutrality and consequently reasonably reject the US as a future mediator in the dispute. This has not gone unnoticed. Chinese premier Xi Jinping, marking the international day of solidarity with Palestine, remarked “the crux of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict lies in the long overdue realization of the legitimate national right of the Palestinian people to establish an independent state.” Interestingly this was Xi’s second statement on Palestine in the last fortnight. South Africa, in ceasing diplomatic relations with Israel is choosing to project itself as representative of the opinions of the global south on this. With India treading a careful line (with the prime minister choosing to absent himself) and Brazil, China, Russia and South Africa all speaking with various degrees in favour of Palestinian statehood at the recent BRICS virtual summit on Gaza, the idea of the US as the only possible mediator in this dispute isn’t as clearcut as it was a decade ago.

In a surprising move in the current crisis, Thailand chose to bypass the US (its longterm ally) and negotiate with Hamas directly through Iran. They managed to negotiate the safe return of a significant number of their hostages in the now ended ceasefire. In an interview with Sky news (snippets of which are being shared on social media), their chief negotiator confirmed that Iran was helpful in getting their hostages back, and went so far as to justify the taking of hostages itself by saying “ Yes. Because there are more than 6000 Palestinians captured in the past and their families can’t visit them. No one heard their cries. The world didn’t hear their cries. That’s why Hamas had to do this.” While this messaging may or may not be a part of the deal with Hamas, the point to note is that Thailand by bypassing the US has arguably had greater success.

Conclusion

To conclude, while the carnage in Gaza continues, the last 57 days have highlighted the effects of the changing Palestinian liberation narratives on American public opinion. While this is perhaps the highest ever level of public support for the Palestinian cause seen in the West to date, Israel will be counting on much of this being sympathy for their current predicament, which will end with the end of Israeli onslaught in Gaza. While the sympathy undoubtedly exists and the extent to which the Palestinians can transform this sympathy into lasting solidarity remains to be seen, it is important to note that the appeal of the current Palestinian liberation narrative is crafted not just on images of their pain and suffering but on a narrative grounded in the very principles that the West claims to hold dear - liberty, equality and the end of colonialism and apartheid, which makes countering them difficult.