The Silence of the Flesh: A Short Genealogy of Zionism & the Israeli Colonial Apparatus
At the most intense moment of the Israeli-Palestine “war”, Israel has revealed its true face. As history clearly shows, Israel is not, nor ever was a country nor a state. From the day of its founding, Israel – posing as shelter for Jewish identity, a beacon of technological progress and “civilization” – turned out to be, at its root; a racist colonial apparatus. We are witnessing today, Israel’s final metamorphosis; it is now a terrorist state that is no better and not much different from Russia.
And it is indeed a “war” not a real war. To quote Bill Hicks; “there never was a war,” because “a war, is when two countries are fighting”. Given the fact that Palestinians are using rocks to defend themselves from Israeli tanks, it should seem very clear, that what the international community is witnessing (and doing nothing about it) is without a drop of doubt: Genocide.
May 14th 1948 marks the date when the so-called State of Israel was founded and when the British army left Al-Quds (Jerusalem). The author states here in advance that he is neither a historian nor an expert on the Israeli-Palestine conflict. Things that perhaps many people would find a little naive to be questioned and problematized, will be addressed in the text that follows. Two main concerns: First, what was the British army doing there, and what was its role in the founding of Israel? The second, more common question, or perhaps a question that should be asked more often; what was happening on “holy land” before the founding of Israel?
Both of these questions are exhaustively well addressed in Naomi Shepherd’s Ploughing Sand: British Rule in Palestine, 1917-1948 and Ussama Samir Makdisi’s Age of Coexistence: The Ecumenical Frame and the Making of the Modern Arab World. Most historical and factual statements concerning the history of the Israeli genocide are taken from these texts. As it turned out, things did not start on October 7th. Neither did the conflict begin in 1948. In truth, everything took its start in 1917 with the drafting of the Balfour Declaration.
The Balfour Declaration was written immediately after the British invasion of Palestine. The Declaration stated the need for establishing a Jewish community in Palestine. But why was the British Empire, all of a sudden, interested in creating a “National Home” for the Jewish people? Put simply, the Balfour Declaration had one and only aim in mind: The strategic deployment of Zionism in order to strengthen the power and influence of the British empire and the destruction of the Ottoman powers. Zionism was mobilized by the British to increase the chances of victory in WWI. The Balfour Declaration would be the first among numerous drafts and regulations that would shape the necessary conditions for the genocide and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian population. What the author finds interesting, as a Georgian and as somebody who knows a thing or two about imperialism, occupation and assaults on one’s identity, is the similarity between the Russian and Western forms of colonial expansionism. What the British Empire did with Palestine, the activation of a hybrid war waged at multiple (military and ideological) levels is all too similar to the Russian strategy of occupation in Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Including Putin’s imperialistic narratives of Russification.
What differentiates Western colonial strategies from Russian imperialism is the level of sophistication. Western powers have now mastered the art of outsourcing genocide to other countries, who gladly; proudly take up the colonial legacy and wage war in their name. Needless to say, the case of Ukraine is quite different. In fact, Ukraine is in a position similar to Palestine. This is not to be conflated. The arming of Ukraine is an important and much needed intervention to curb Russian power and influence. We must see the common thread without making one-dimensional evaluations. Russia must be stopped and a temporary alliance with the U.S. is more than an acceptable compromise. To pit empire against empire is indeed the correct strategy for resistance.
Zionist nationalism however, has been part of the British (and now American) Biopolitical strategy to falsify, reshape and ultimately replace Jewish identity with its counterfeit Zionist, white European variety. Russia has been actively engaged in the ethnic cleansing of Georgians in Abkhazia, using similar strategies, like passportization. Further, let us not forget that the Soviet Union was also in favor of founding the Israeli state and Russian Jews were part of the white Zionist influx of individuals who started populating and eventually colonizing Palestinian land.
The system of mandates was no doubt a colonial project. After WWII the mandate system was replaced by the UN Trusteeship system, which however did not bring about any fundamental change in the asymmetries of power-relations between countries. Numerous Jewish communities were against the founding of Israel from the very beginning (1917). Deeming it, in fact, to be an anti-semitic project. Zionism and Jewishness have never had anything in common. Zionism, as a false identity was from its very inception part of the imperialistic agenda. Still more parallels can be drawn between Zionism and Putin’s project of Russification, which entails the fabrication of an entire counterfeit genealogy for the former soviet republics, where somehow, magically, every post-soviet state and its people carry a trace of the Russian. Where Zionism entails the mobilization and falsification of Jewish identity, Putin’s rhetoric entails the same thing for Georgia and the people of the Caucasus, especially Abkhazia and South-Ossetia.
The production of subjectivity, on the one hand, represents a new style of governance and political warfare, but on the other, it has always existed as a particular apparatus of control. Despite being fundamentally different from classical forms of repression, be they Soviet or Liberal (police, prison, censorship, fines etc.), some trace of this dispositif can be identified everywhere throughout the history of power. Michel Foucault was the expert in analyzing such apparatuses.
To return to our main point and conclude: Zionism is a way of silencing Jewishness, of rendering the Jewish identity passive and immobile through the production of its false version. This is what the author refers to as the Silence of the Flesh. The term refers to the occluding of a people, through a constant and on-going activity of another people, who are supposed to represent the former. In reality, of course, it is a way of forging identities with the express purpose of destroying those who these identities were supposed to represent in the first place.
1. Makdisi, U. (2019). Age of Coexistence: The Ecumenical Frame and the Making of the Modern Arab World. Univ of California Press.
2. Shephard, N. (1999). Ploughing Sand: British Rule in Palestine, 1917-1948. Rutgers University Press.