Liberties There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence

Three months after its barbaric attack on southern Israel, Hamas published a memorandum explaining its actions. “The events of October 7 must be put in their broader context,” it said. That broader context, according to Hamas, is “all cases of struggle against colonialism.” Zionism is a “colonial project,” according to the memorandum, and Israel is therefore an “illegal entity.” These days this is not an uncommon analysis. In the West, Zionism’s relation to colonialism has become a political shibboleth, shouted from the streets and the campuses. According to the rules of the present discussion,  tell me whether you think that Zionism is colonialism and  I will tell you whether you are a Zionist apologist or an  antisemitic bigot.  The confusion here is not only political but also intellectual.  The primary task of theoretical terms such as colonialism  and imperialism is to elucidate the facts, and to offer an explanation of the facts that may be critically examined. They are not meant to serve as badges of ideological loyalty. These abstract terms must be judged as concepts before they are admitted as slogans. The first question, then, is whether the post-colonial framework is helpful for making sense of the situation. Is it useful for understanding the unrelenting crisis tormenting Palestinians and Israelis? More urgently, is it helpful for resolving it?  Let us begin at the beginning. Like other colonial efforts, Zionism was a European movement that aimed to transpose Europeans (and, later, non-Europeans) to a land populated by non-Europeans. It strove to create a European state, or state-like, entity in the Levant. Prima facie, this sounds like colonialism. But it is hardly the whole story. Zionists never saw themselves as shouldering “the white man’s burden,” as Kipling infamously put it. Jews took to Palestine to escape persecution and squalor, not to partake in la mission civilisatrice or to promote imperial powers. Their objective was to leave Europe, where Jews were themselves the domestic victims of the imperial states, not to carry Europe’s flag to Palestine. If anything, early Zionists wished to sever ties with their places of birth. Their descendants certainly do not see themselves as ambassadors of Polish, German, Russian, Iraqi, Moroccan, Yemeni or other metropoles.  Colonial imperialism provided the context in which Zionism took shape — how could it not in a world dominated by colonial powers? In his attempt to lay the foundations for a national home for Jews, Herzl wooed the Ottoman Sultan and the German Kaiser. His successor in the Zionist leadership, Chaim Weizmann, secured the Balfour Declaration from the British after they seized Palestine from the Ottomans. (Many decades later Yasser Arafat courted first the Soviets and then the Americans.) But Zionists did not seek to impose their culture or their religion on the Arab population of Palestine, nor did they exploit the land’s natural resources for the benefit of their European motherlands. Jewish émigrés to Palestine — before the war and certainly after it — were more refugees than colonial settlers.  Then there is the idea of “settler-colonialism,” defined by the sociologist Gershon Shafir as “the active repossession  of land and its repopulation, most commonly by white immigrants from Europe, through the exclusion, expulsion, or elimination of native peoples.” He added that the Zionist program undeniably involved “the creation of new settlements, over and against the wishes of native peoples.” But these empirical characteristics, these facts, do not explain what happened, and why. Was the pre-Zionist Jewish minority in Palestine less entitled to expand its population and ownership of land than the Arab majority? Did it aim to “destroy and replace” the indigenous population?  To fit Zionism into the settler-colonial mold, it is useful to ignore the fact that Jews were indigenous in Palestine, albeit a minority, and that they had been forcibly exiled from their land without ever having renounced their loyalty to it. It is also useful to forget that alongside the great displacement of Palestinians within the mandate of Palestine in 1948, there was a parallel displacement of Jews. In every area conquered by Arab forces, Jews were evicted or killed, and their dwellings were demolished. In fact, Arabs remained in areas conquered by Jewish forces in 1948, whereas not a single