Part IV -- Zionism Sets the Direction
Let's take a look at Israel's founding ideology and the factors that historically shaped it in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
First: Zionism is the ideology that makes the claim that the Jews are a nation and they have the right to their own state. It arose as a predictable consequence of long periods of European (not Middle Eastern, Arab or Muslim) anti-Semitism. It also arose out of a 19th- and 20th-century European political culture wherein the standard organizational arrangement was nation-states, most of which were relatively homogeneous in population.
Second: As a consequence of this political standard, the Zionist leaders concluded that the answer to the suffering caused by anti-Semitism was the creation of a Jewish state.
As the Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann said, the goal was a state "as Jewish as England is English." By the end of the 19th century, the World Zionist Organization had launched a campaign to convince Europe's great powers to support the founding of such a state.
Third: The open question was where such a state would be founded. Although, most of the Zionists were not religious, they eventually fixated on Palestine because of its Biblical relationship to the ancient Hebrews. By 1917, in the midst of World War I, Chaim Weizmann managed to recruit British backing for the founding of a "Jewish national home" in Palestine.
Fourth: And "therein lies the rub," as Hamlet would say. The mass influx of Europeans, in this case Jews, into a well-populated non-European land -- according to British Mandate records, there were some 700,000 Arabs living in Palestine -- presaged disaster. The fact that these Zionist immigrants sought domination, ultimately a state for one group alone, would inevitably introduce a corrosive racist element into the country. The indigenous population would eventually have to be segregated out and denied resources and rights -- a process, which over time, would lead to an apartheid state of affairs.
The fact that this predictable path discouraged neither the Zionist Jews nor their British patrons tells us that, when Weizmann made his deal with the British, it was done in a time and place operating on the racist assumptions of colonialism. Indeed, it turns out that Israel is the last great disaster of the age of colonialism -- an age in which Europeans took their superiority (both physically and religiously) for granted. And, if they lorded over non-Europeans it could only be for the benefit of the latter, as was suggested by Rudyard Kipling's poem "The White Man's Burden." All of this was shown to be both obsolete and obscene with the coming of the Nazis and World War II.
Fifth: The racist prognosis described above has been realized in Israel. Here is a snapshot of the present situation. B'Tselem, a leading Israeli human-rights organization, has been documenting the violations of human rights in Israel's Judea and Samaria (more properly known as the occupied Palestinian territories) since 1989. Earlier this month, it issued a position paper announcing that it has decided to call out Israeli policy for what it is -- organized, state-sponsored racism. The paper is titled "A Regime of Jewish Supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea: This Is Apartheid." The paper makes the case that "what looks like apartheid -- which the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court defines as inhumane acts committed under a regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over any other racial group or groups -- ought to be called apartheid."
Sixth: Present-day Israel came about in a predetermined way flowing from Zionism's initial assumptions. In the first half of the 20th century, Europe and the United States saw nothing wrong with colonialism and helped the Zionists establish a Jewish national home in Palestine. Then came World War II, and the West's attitude toward racism changed. Yet, in the shadow of the Holocaust, now stood Israel, whose leaders were convinced more than ever that only an ethno-centric, exclusively Jewish nation-state could guarantee survival. So their original purpose and their original racist practice never has changed.
Part V -- Conclusion
The resulting apartheid state has attracted the rising wave of today's rightist fringe like bears to honey. Whether they are white nationalists, Christian nationalists, or just nationalist thugs in suits, they all sense something laudable in Israel. It is a standard-bearer for their own hopes and dreams. To repeat Ben Lorder's phrasing, the Zionist state has become "a canvas to project their own fantasies of nationalist chauvinism." As a consequence, the Israeli flag is no longer just Israel's. Its symbolism has become broader in an all-too-negative way. That is why it was so avidly displayed at the failed insurrection of January 6.
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