If you ask someone in most Muslim-majority countries about Zionism, they may not be able to define it. They probably can’t explain its historical evolution or recognize its veneer of “Judeo-Christian” theology.
However, if you were to describe the role Zionism has played in the Middle East and explain how it has affected Palestinian society, they would, to the last Muslim, recognize the quintessence of Zionism: settler colonialism and empire.
While England, France and their allies were carving up the Ottoman Empire, no Muslim country was completely independent. On the eve of Israel’s emergence, essentially every Muslim individual lived under European colonial control.
India, for example, had been colonized since 1747, when it accounted for 25% of the world’s GDP. It would remain under the yoke of parasitic, extractive colonization for nearly three centuries, at which point it accounted for just 4% of the world’s GDP. Indonesia would remain colonized for 350 years under Dutch rule.
The violent French colonization in Algeria resulted in the murder of 10% of the Algerians, with the displacement of those who remained. Even the language was almost entirely erased, with Arabic needing to be reintroduced to the younger independent Algerians.
What has been happening in Palestine has been no different. When you remove the trappings of theology, Zionism stands stark and naked as a colonial enterprise.
We don’t have to look just at the philosophers and critics of Zionism, such as Edward Said, Patrick Wolfe, Ilan Pappe or Noam Chomsky. The early pioneers of Zionism, such as Russian-born Vladimir Jabotinsky, openly held that ‘Zionism is a colonization adventure’ and wrote in 1923:
“Every indigenous people will resist alien settlers as long as they see any hope of ridding themselves of the danger of foreign settlement. That is what the Arabs in Palestine are doing and what they will persist in doing as long as there remains a solitary spark of hope that they will be able to prevent the transformation of Palestine into the Land of Israel….Zionist colonization, even the most restricted, must either be terminated or carried out in defiance of the will of the native population.”
Theodore Herzl, the father of modern Zionism, imagined Israel as a bulwark of European values amongst Arab savages, where citizens would speak German, wear top hats, attend operas and hold duels. He held that the Jewish state in Palestine would be a “portion of the rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism.”
As Jamil Hilal pointed out in 1976, the one minor difference between the logic of Zionist colonialism and extractive colonialism is that “Zionists strove not to exploit the indigenous Palestinian population but to displace it.”
The weaponization of Western guilt combined with European expertise in colonialism culminated in the Nakba—the Great Catastrophe—of 1948, where 750,000 Palestinians were expelled from their land through ethnic cleansing, forced displacement and widespread murder. For the Palestinians, however, the Nakba never stopped. It continued through the Naksa—the Great Setback—of 1967, through the massacres at Sabra and Shatila, the ongoing occupation of Lebanon, Syria, East Jerusalem, Golan Heights, West Bank, and now the genocide and near-total destruction of life in Gaza.
So, with due respect, when Christian Zionists like Mike Huckabee try to explain premillennialist eschatology or conflate the biblical Israelites with the modern state of Israel, all we hear is generational guilt about Euro-American refusal to protect the Jews of Europe from the Holocaust. They are now assuaging that guilt at the cost of Palestinian lives.
Couching colonization within Calvinistic millennialism or Darby’s dispensationalism does not alter the nature of colonization for its victims. The Palestinians are not resisting occupation because the land is somehow holy.
They are resisting because it is their home. It is where they have lived for generations.
When we, as Muslims, protest Zionism as the European colonial replacement of an indigenous Palestinian culture (which is Jewish, Muslim and Christian), the bludgeon of anti-semitism immediately comes crashing down on us. Since the beginning of the genocide in Gaza, I have seen this attempt at silencing dissent now being experienced by Christian and Jewish allies as well.
I have watched, bemused, the disorienting experience of many American Christians facing censorship and libel for the first time, simply for criticising a political entity, a state. Even now, to lend credence to our struggle and justify our existence in Palestine, we have had to rely on our Abrahamic cousins to amplify our voices. We may protest as much as we want, but somehow we are lent legitimacy only when we have our Jewish and Christian allies marching with us—or co-authoring articles with us.
We must speak, however, and continue to bear witness because “neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim,” and if for nothing else, to bear witness for progeny that will hold us to account.
Most Muslims may not know much about Christian theology outside of the love we have for Mary and Jesus, as our Messiah and the Ruh-Allah (Spirit of God) and in the context of the immaculate conception and his ultimate return, which I think more Muslims than Christians currently believe in. We may also not know precisely what a covenantal land-based faith means to its followers.
But I can assure you, we know colonialism when we see it. Zionism and Israel are the most violent modern examples of this. It harms us all as a family.
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Ali Khan is a gastroenterologist in Little Rock, Arkansas.
