The Colonial Mind

Democracy Now recently had a debate between Benny Morris, Saree Makdisi and Norman Finkelstein on the 60 year mark of the Palestinian Nakba. Makdisi and Finkelstein provide standard fare. Finkelstein restates his commitment to the "two-state solution" despite all the evidence this is complete utopianism on his part, and Makdisi restates the impossibility of such a program. He could have added that the "two-state solution" is not simply contradicted by the facts of the Israeli system and its ideological committments.

The two state solution has moved from a revisionist two-stage theory of liberation adopted by the PLO in the 1970s and currently by Hamas, to a two-state theory. However, since the realities of Israeli rule exclude the possibility of any two-state solution, Fatah elites use it as a slogan to stay in the favor of the Western powers who set up the Palestinian Authority apparatus for them and recently restored them to power in the 2007 coup. But it is also a slogan of the U.S., Israeli and European governments to maintain their legitimacy to speak on the question at all. They can claim they have a program for Palestinian freedom, even though their actions say otherwise.

But getting to the point about why this debate is interesting: it is the perfect articulation of Left Zionist white nationalism by Benny Morris. Benny Morris is well-known as the pioneering "revisionist" historian, the first Jew who documented with Israeli government papers that the ethnic cleansing of 1948 was a purposeful plan and that hundreds of Palestinian towns and villages were bulldozed. This undercut the main government propaganda that it was all just the fog of war.

But Morris is no repentant progressive in the normal sense. In an interview a few years ago he said that it was a shame the Zionist militias didn't finish the job. Now there's this big problem: the Jewish-only state governs 5 million Palestinians in historic Palestine and they've put this man in a moral quandry. They've made him feel bad about having to contemplate finishing the genocide. And it's so sad for Left Zionists like Morris because Palestinians by having any resistance to Israeli apartheid only bring state and fascist violence on themselves.

What's striking is the extent to which he states so clearly in this debate arguments that resonate with contemporary white racialism. He implies that the problems of the Jewish-only state arise because THEY--the Palestinians--are there in Palestine-Israel. The problem isn't him and Zionism. He (theoretically) has no problem with THEM being somewhere else, but not living next to him. Finally, in the end Morris says that white Jews could never live with Palestinians because they are different cultural species. Most white racialism today, even fascism, is not through race as a biological category, but a cultural one. Morris explains this as succinctly as possible. David Duke learned that sometime ago and the British National Party has been winning a lot of seats in state power learning this as well. They are simply for white rights and the protection of "their" culture.