The Settler State of Israel and the History of 'Legitimizing' Discourses

Earlier today on Meet the Press, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid pronounced his support for the continued use of barbaric force against the Palestinians of the Gaza strip. While U.S. support for Israeli violence isn’t at this point newsworthy (considering the U.S. supplies the apache helicopters[i], the tanks, and the warplanes) his statements about the nature of the conflict were particularly crude, even for a U.S. politician. According to Reid, the continued use of brutal force directed at Palestinian women, men, and children is legitimate because the Palestinians should stop defying Israel and be happy to accept the “gift of Gaza, which the Israeli’s graciously gave to the Palestinians as a way to make peace.” Harry Reid is as dumb as horse shit. How is marginalization and apartheid in any way a gift? Israel persistently blocks even basic food and medical resources from entering Gaza. Israel induces and maintains drastic insecurity in an attempt to control the bodies, lives, and resistances of Palestinians. How the fuck can any crotchety old white American man politician decry the graciousness of Israel or its Western allies to the people of Palestine? This unhistorical, imperialist, and profoundly racist discourse about gift bearing colonizers connects Israel in a historical succession of settler-state produced discourse by which settler states and their citizens first define the colonized as ‘unworthy of the land’ and then decry the graciousness of said settler state to the dislocated colonial subjects all in order to legitimate continued control of the land and resources of the contested territories.

The first half of this legitimizing discourse is traceable from European colonization of the Americas and the displacement of Indigenous Americans through the colonization of Africa and Asia, and through the colonization of Israel by Zionists in the 1940’s. US settlers ‘justified’ their genocide of Indigenous Americans and the subsequent theft of Indigenous lands with the notion that Indigenous Americans were not worthy of the land they inhabited because they failed to use it properly. European settlers to Virginia for example, justified the theft of the land with the fact that Indigenous inhabitants neither fenced nor farmed the plots ‘in the God given manner’ (to be read the ways that proto-Capitalist white settlers invented private property and separated different species of plants between different plots of land.) Through the subsequent ideological work of justifying stratification (at best) and genocide (at worst), the settler states of the Americas and their counterparts in European centers created a dense network of cultural and ideological media that, worked to justify the subsequent carving of African and to lesser extents, Asian lands. Again, the illegitimacy in claiming rights to land by colonial subjects was constructed around notions that inferior subjects were undeserving of control of their land. In these instances of Euro-American colonialism that lasted through the 19th and 20th centuries, science set savage and backward colonials in relief with the intelligence and superiority of Euro-American colonizers. Africans, for example, did not deserve their land because they could not subdue and control it properly. People of the African continent were presumably unable to beat back the wild forests and with it diseases like malaria. This notion of African irresponsibility in relation to land justified the continued inhabitation of African lands by European settlers.

While the legitimizing myths of Israel connect directly into the older discourses used to justify European settler states in the Americas, Africa, and Asia, they are also distinct in their details, owing to the peculiar history of the Zionist settler state. Much like European colonization of the Americas, Africa, and parts of Asia, Zionist inhabitation of Palestine after the two World Wars was ‘legitimized’ largely by notions about Arab and particularly Arab Muslim inability or unworthiness in holding the land. Palestinians and Muslims were unworthy of holding the land set aside for ‘God’s chosen people.’ In a throwback to the legitimizing discourses of the 17th, 18th, and 19th Centuries, European Jews were seen as the only legitimate heirs to the land because they could point to God’s hand in their singular history. Additionally, the Second World War and the horrors of Nazi Germany became important justification for the subsequent creation of the Zionist settler state. Concerned with the destruction waged against European Jews, the United Nations resolved to create Israel. Ironically, the historical discourses that had recycled through the cultural and ideological media of colonial Europe again helped to buttress this discourse on Israel’s legitimacy. In pointing to European Jewish people’s singularity in the experience of attempted genocide, the U.S. and the UN justified the creation of Israel in Palestinian territory. Despite the legitimizing discourse that connected European Jews terrible experiences with Nazi genocide, European Jews were neither the first nor the last to suffer genocide. European settlers had previously murdered the Indigenous peoples of the Americas and the African continent in order to acquire their lands and resources. In justifying European theft of Indigenous lands throughout the 17th, 18th, and 19th Centuries, European settlers had to deny the genocide of millions of Indigenous peoples. In denying prior genocides, supporters of Israel reinforce the singularity of Jewish historical experience, thus justifying the Israeli settler state.

In the second half of this discourse, settler states justify themselves by decrying their graciousness to the displaced colonial subjects. Much as the first half of the discourses that work to justify settler states, we can trace this half of the discourse down from the colonization of Indigenous American lands, through the colonization of Africa and some parts of Asia, and to the Zionist settler state. In the Americas, Africa, and Asia alike, European settlers helped to legitimate their colonial rule and the displacement of subjects from the rights to land by constructing the notion that in taking the land they were somehow giving something to the (temporarily) subdued subjects. In the Americas, European settlers partially legitimized their theft with the idea that they would graciously teach the Indigenous inhabitants about proper use of the land. In subsequent periods of the US settler state’s expansion European settlers maintained legitimacy in the inhabitation of stolen land by ‘graciously’ setting apart reservations on which Indigenous Americans could live and be trained in the properly civilized practices of Europe and the US settler state. (How the fuck being forced to learn English, converted to Christianity and pushed onto marginal lands that in many instances would be re-stolen in subsequent decades is gracious is beyond my comprehension, but I digress). In justifying the colonization of Africa and parts of Asia, Euro/Americans created similar myths about their graciousness in order to legitimize their theft of land. Owing to the scientific ideologies of the 19th century, Europeans, for example, legitimated the carving of Africa by committing to the conquering of the wild land and the eradication of disease, all for the supposed benefit of their colonial subjects. As we have already seen, Israel and its allies continue to obscure the subjugation of Palestinians with the notion that the state of Israel is gracious in its treatment of its Palestinian subjects. Reid’s comments (see above) illustrate clearly the idea that Israel is gracious to its colonial subjects. Additionally, Israel and its allies construct the graciousness of the settler state by putting it into relief with the supposed vileness of Palestinians and their political organizations. Israel is constructed as a gracious victim in opposition to ‘terroristic’ Palestinian people and political organizations.
[i] This is a particularly ironic name for a weapon used in war by a settler state against a colonized people.