Civilization and its Discontents

Shortly after October 7th, the Atlantic Monthly published a piece by Simon Sebag Montefiore, British aristocrat, Tory, earnest defender of colonialism, and sloppy Pop historian.

Montefiore’s article was nothing but Zionist apologetics laced with talking points from the American far right’s war with “woke” intellectuals. It was not surprising that the Atlantic printed it, as this has long been a publication for Democratic neocons and Zionists. The issue of Palestine has always exposed the dishonesty and hypocrisy of certain liberals, quoting conservatives and claiming to support democracy and equality here at home while supporting the opposite in Israel. This is precisely the debate that is now tearing the Democratic Party apart. Young Americans who grew up knowing nothing but non-stop American wars since 2001 now understand that support for Israel is part and parcel of the militarism and imperialism that followed September 11th, 2001, and of course the militarists and imperialists are pushing back.

These Young Americans have also taken note of the undeniable similarities between Zionism and Christian nationalism. Both are malignant nationalist, supremacist ideologies. Zionism, which pretends to be a perfectly natural, reasonable form of self-determination by one people is in fact the ideology underlying a racist state built upon the suffering and ethnic cleansing of another.

Jews, especially those from the Austro-Hungarian empire who settled in Palestine long before Herzl wrote “Der Judenstaat,” had a very different conception of what life in the “Heiliges Land” meant. Early “Palestinians” were largely motivated by religion. These early Zionists thought of living in the land peaceably with the indigenous people and it was normal to think of themselves as citizens of the Ottoman empire. It wasn’t until the Revisionist Zionist movement that the notion of territorial maximalism took root. This was formalized at the 1942 Biltmore Conference in New York City. In any case, there is only one Zionism now, and it is a cruel, savage, selfish ideology based on a zero-sum calculation — Jews must own all of Palestine, and no sharing or compromise can be possible for the state to be fully “Jewish.”

There are now almost 10 million Israelis. No one imagines anyone marching them into the Sinai desert — as Israel has long fantasized about marching Gazans. Even without formal recognition, there are numerous regional trade deals, particularly between Israel and Saudi Arabia and the UAE. If official recognition is withheld it is chiefly because of the brutal treatment of Palestinians. Israel’s preoccupation for its existence — at a time when it is the 14th military power in the world, BFF’s with every other colonial power, can claim to have had a couple of US aircraft carriers deployed as a courtesy, and is the only nuclear power in the Middle East — is overwrought if not outright propaganda. The “massed Arab armies” so often cited (as in Montefiore’s piece) are in fact Palestinian liberation movements without states, navies or air forces.

Although Israel has always regarded Palestinian statehood as a non-starter (see Jabobinsky and the Likud platform), it is touchy when anyone questions its legitimacy.

But Israel’s legitimacy is not a question of the right of Jews to exist, or even to remain in Palestine. The question of Israel’s legitimacy concerns Israel’s “right” to exist as an Apartheid state — a designation many Israelis accept, by the way. Israel’s legitimacy also depends on its geographical boundaries. Just as I have a legitimate claim to my own home but not my neighbors’ or the entire neighborhood, Israel’s legitimacy depends on how much of other people’s property it has stolen or has claimed.

Besides annexing the West Bank and openly seeking to reclaim Gaza, Israel occupies both Lebanese and Syrian territory. Israel’s legitimacy is also called into question when asking why Jews should hold all the power in the state, while 56 laws discriminate against non-Jewish citizens of that state. Or when asking what right Israel has to keep millions of stateless Palestinians under martial law, in ghettos and concentration camps. Or the legitimacy of a Law of Return for Jews that lets any Jew anywhere “return” to Israel while the same is denied to Palestinians. In the United States, the legitimacy of the state flows from the consent of the governed. In Israel, the legitimacy of the state seems to flow from the fact of being a Jew. To describe Israeli and American democracy as indistinguishable is completely wrong. Americans may live in a racist nation, but not one with laws literally based on race.

So let me get on with my critique of Montefiore’s rubbish.

• The usual racist trope of the barbaric Palestinian versus the civilized European: “The Hamas attack resembled a medieval Mongol raid for slaughter and human trophies–except it was recorded in real time and published to social media.” However, Israel’s siege of Gaza seems to harken back in history before the Mongol’s, to the Hebrew genocides recorded in the Bible – sieges of civilian populations behind walled cities (as Gaza is) and genocide of civilians.
• Anti-intellectual posturing: Western academics have supposedly “denied, excused, or even celebrated the [October 7th] murders by a terrorist sect that proclaims an anti-Jewish genocidal program.” Montefiore has been watching FOX News too much, as apparently have the editors of the Atlantic. If you take the effort to look at the first controversy at Harvard, one by a group of students supporting Palestinians, it is in fact not a celebration of Hamas at all. For the most part academics have nuanced views of both colonialism and the right of oppressed people to fight back, and apparently Montefiore believes there is no colonialism or oppression in Palestine.
• Right-wing epithets used for effect not clarification: “fashionable ideology” “leftist intellectuals” “Marxist theory” “Soviet propaganda” “anti-semitism” “intimidating jargon” “once-respectable intellectuals” “radical follies.” I can only conclude that Montefiore has been hanging out with Ron DeSantis or Chris Rufo and exchanging notes on Truth Social. He’s not talking to the average liberal; he’s signaling to Christian and Jewish Zionists — extreme ones. Montefiore is one more link in the attack engine that has been going after academics who don’t toe the line on Israel.
• Resents calls for “decolonization: Well, guess what? Israel is a colonial settler project. Zionism had a long history of appealing to colonial empires (Ottoman, British, American) for its existence, and it now depends on colonial empires (Britain, France, US) for its continued existence. It may be a great shock to Montefiore, but colonized people resent being colonized. There is nothing wrong with trying to shake off the oppressor, though I wish Hamas had not ended its breach of the Gaza concentration camp security walls with the massacre of civilians and kidnappings. He goes on to insult those who share the view that colonized people have a right to fight their oppression as poseurs, wine-drinking fakes.
• Antisemitism: Montefiore claims that the Hamas massacre is pure and simple antisemitism, and he provides a list of all the Jewish calamities that Jews recall at Tisha B’Av. He fails to mention that in the Zionist madrassas in the West Bank they are teaching kids that Palestinians are Amalek — the personification of pure evil. He fails to mention that the Israel-Palestinian conflict is first and foremost a land dispute.
• Genocide denial: Montefiore denies that a genocide is taking place in Gaza. When General Yoav Gallant announced a total siege on civilians and called them “human animals,” it was clear that a genocidal war was about to begin. And sure enough, it began with cutting off everything civilians need to live. Then half of Gaza’s 2.2 million people fled south for their lives, only to be bombed there. Over 8,000 civilians have been killed, half of them children. More than half of all Gaza homes were destroyed a week ago; by the end of the war there will not be anything left. Wolf Blitzer interviewed an Israeli colonel who left him speechless when he admitted slaughtering 50 civilians to kill one Hamas commander. PBS showed an Israeli tank shooting a passenger van in Gaza. Thirty journalists have been bombed. The New York Times reported that Israeli officials told State Department officials they were going to visit Hiroshima and Nagasaki on Gazans. And liberal Israeli media is reporting on two different plans to illegally transfer whatever is left of the carpet-bombed Gazans to 10 cities in Egypt in further violation of laws of war. Of course this is genocide. Instead, Montefiore mentions some harassment of West Bank Palestinians by settlers but glosses over the 1948 Nakba, where Zionist militias wiped out 500 villages and displaced 750,000 Arabs, many of whom live in Gaza today and for whom this is a second Nakba. He claims the Jewish exodus of almost a million Mizrachi Jews is somehow equivalent. However, two thirds were recruited by the Jewish Agency and the Knesset debated the necessity of doing so. The only thing that makes them equivalent is that both the Nakba and the various aliyot were organized by Israel.
• Montefiore whines about corrupt Arab governments – as if the multiple-indicted Netanyahu were also not the head of a corrupt government.
• Montefiore admits that the British stiffed the Arabs when it promised its new spoil of war to British Zionists in a letter from Balfour to Rothschild. He writes that the only promise of an Arab state was a 1915 agreement with Sharif Hussein, but he omits the many partition plans that were proposed. One, the Morrison-Grady plan, included the Negev in an Arab state, but it was thwarted by the Jewish Agency’s establishment of “11 points” — militarized kibbutzim in the Negev which included some of those attacked by Hamas on October 7th. I could go on, but Montefiore’s history lesson is simply a dishonest exercise by a professional historian.
• Montefiore writes: “It was an armed Jewish revolt, from 1945 to 1948 against imperial Britain, that delivered the state. Israel exists thanks to this revolt, and to international law and cooperation, something leftists once believed in.” What a warped portrayal. Montefiore would have you believe that the West was opposed to Zionism but it was only saved by plucky Zionists who persisted. Not so. The British outsourced much of the administration of Palestine to the Jewish Agency, which was a plus because it didn’t cost Britain a cent, and the departing colonizers bequeathed Israel with most of their infrastructure, armaments, and the military laws used to subjugate Palestinians to this day. Britain had departed long before May 14, 1948 and when they finally issued the official Termination of the Mandate it praised Zionists for making the desert bloom. The United States recognized Israel 11 minutes after its independence was declared. Israel has always been the darling of colonial powers and not the plucky little victim. It didn’t take long at all after independence for the colonial powers to arm Israel with nukes.
• Montefiore is either wrong or lying when he writes: “Most Israelis are descended from people who migrated to the Holy Land from 1881 to 1949.” This is complete garbage. In 1947 the population of Israel was roughly 650,000 Jews and Arabs twice that number. From 1948-1951, 690,000 Jews immigrated; from 1952-1960 300,000 Jews immigrated; from 1961-1971 430,000 immigrated; from 1972-1979 268,000 immigrated; from 1980-1989 154,000 immigrated; from 1990-2001 over a million; from 2002-2010 181,000 immigrated; from 2011-2020 237,000 immigrated. An overwhelming majority of Israel’s population came as a result of recent settlement efforts funded by Zionist organizations, notably the Jewish Federations of North America. Over 2 million European Jews immigrated after 1948 and 1.2 million Russians came in the Seventies — many of them not even Jewish but useful as a demographic counterpoint to Arab birth rates. Although the American Jewish community has played an outsized role in colonizing Israel, only about 140,000 Americans have immigrated.
• Montefiore writes that if Americans are no longer settlers, then Israelis should not be considered such either. I suppose the implication of his argument is that if Americans can normalize the occupation of indigenous lands, why can’t Israelis do so too? There’s too much to unpack here but I will point out that Native Americans can move anywhere they like within the United States, can vote, run for political office, and are subject to dual systems of law ONLY when one system is their own, not imposed on them by race laws.
• Montefiore attempts to put a spin on Israel’s ethnic mix, citing Ethiopian Jews and Mizrachim. It’s the “some of our best friends are X” argument only slightly repackaged. But Ethiopians and Mizrachim serve in the IDF and prisons and drive the bulldozers which destroy Palestinian homes. They live in West Bank settlements where they destroy Arab and Bedouin crops and livestock. Israel’s Ashkenazim are sill the Cabots and Lodges of the Jewish state. Newer olim (immigrants) from Ethiopia, Yemen, Iraq, and even Russia lack the status but thank their lucky stars they’re not reviled Arabs.
• Identifying Israel as a colonial settler project is antisemitic: “But the decolonizing narrative is much worse than a study in double standards; it dehumanizes an entire nation and excuses, even celebrates, the murder of innocent civilians.” This is quite the stretch. What Hamas did was immoral and a war crime; What Israel is doing to Palestinians is immoral and a war crime. I think we can condemn both, especially when the scale and historical breadth of Israel’s crimes is so much greater.
• Identifying Israel as a colonial settler state blocks a solution: “The Israel-Palestine conflict is desperately difficult to solve, and decolonization rhetoric makes even less likely the negotiated compromise that is the only way out.” This in itself is vapid rhetoric. How can anyone deal with systematic land theft, an occupation, a double set of racist laws, and genocidal suppression without talking about throwing off the yoke? And if Apartheid and settlements are the problem, they should be named and stopped.
• Zionist lobby groups have made it difficult to criticize Israel. In 37 states there are laws on the books which create penalties for people and organizations who support the BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) movement. But Montefiore is ready to declare war on academic institutions where students and faculty exercise their free speech: “Parents and students can move to universities that are not led by equivocators and patrolled by deniers and ghouls; donors can withdraw their generosity en masse, and that is starting in the United States. Philanthropists can pull the funding of humanitarian foundations led by people who support war crimes against humanity (against victims selected by race). Audiences can easily decide not to watch films starring actors who ignore the killing of children; studios do not have to hire them. And in our academies, this poisonous ideology, followed by the malignant and foolish but also by the fashionable and well intentioned, has become a default position. It must forfeit its respectability, its lack of authenticity as history. Its moral nullity has been exposed for all to see.” For a guy who hates boycotts, here he is ready to launch boycotts on multiple levels.
• Montefiore laments the feckless Palestinian “governments” of the West Bank and Gaza. Surely he must know that Abbas has only one function: to be the West Bank’s police chief. Abbas was not elected, while Hamas held elections most recently in 2006 — a full generation ago! It’s safe to say, Palestinians never voted for any of these crooks and thugs. And how could they? Democracy can never thrive in a prison, or where faux Palestinian “governments” are selected by Israel.
• Montefiore waxes poetic as he sings of the peace made between Yitzhak Rabin and Yassir Arafat. He neglects to mention that Israel’s settler movement, now in power, actually assassinated Rabin while Israel tried to take out Arafat before he became ill, and then cynically invested millions of shekels in Hamas, a Muslim Brotherhood group they thought had no chance of gaining traction or popularity, in order to marginalize Fatah and the PLO. And now we’ve seen how that’s worked out.