u/_Sichlitt_

Palestinian nationalism is fascism with anticolonial aesthetics.

I've done reading into the British mandate period and specifically Arab nationalism of the time, and it is crystal clear to me that Palestinian native indigeneity claims are basically volkisch nationalism that has been reified into postcolonial vocabularies.

For those who don't know, Palestinian nationalism in the interwar period was under a broader umbrella of pan-Arab nationalism. It was spearheaded by Sati al Husri, an intellectual who set up the Iraqi and Syrian education systems. He imagined the Arab nation as a mystic primordialist organism where the individual should dissolve into the collective will of the Arab ummah. Arab nationalism took a particularly fascist turn in the 1930s in Baghdad, where the al-Muthanna Club read and disseminated Italian and German fascist texts. All of the leaders of Palestinian nationalism frequented these circles in the lead up to the Arab revolt. The Palestine Arab Party, the largest in Palestine in the 1930s headed by the Grand Mufti and Jamal al-Husayni, was ideologically and organisationally inspired by Italian fascism and even named its paramilitary youth wing 'the Nazi Scouts.' The Protocols of the Elders of Zion was printed and disseminated frequently in Palestine by the PAP and all, yes I mean all, of the popular Palestinian newspapers from 1926 onward.

So the 'anticolonialism' of Palestinian nationalism in this period does not look like traditional colonial contexts. It looks like the 'anticolonialism' of too many Jewish migrants parasytically infecting the Arab Volk in a secret Great Replacement conspiracy of World Jewry to destroy nations/Islamic civilisation and enslave/ethnically cleanse them. If you look at the structure of Palestinian historiography today, it's the exact same idea. The 'zionists' with a secret plan to destroy the 'natives' through demographic manipulation. The coloniser isn't defined by structural relation in a stratified racial regime. It's defined by the boundaries of the imagined nation. The general will of the volk. Even looking at the preeminance of the fellah peasant in the historiography looks less like actual Marxist analysis and more like a scientification of a volkisch myth. The romantic peasant tied to the land, the olive tree, the native keffiyeh, under siege from the rootless foreign jews who desecrate the land with industrial methods and ecocide.

I'm convinced the entire narrative of the mandate period is an academised dogwhistle for fascist antimigrant politics, where regional economic pressures were displaced onto the migrant scapegoat.

Who tf looks at 5,000 jewish refugees a year arriving to Palestine and concludes 'ah yes, this is all part of the secret plot to destroy the Arab nation.'

I often hear the mainstream Israeli/American argument that Arafat miraculously walked away from the summit with no counter offer and immediately instigated the Second Intifada with the al-Aqsa libel. But I've also heard that Arafat did not refuse a 'final settlement' but refused the specific offers made at the summit because it would essentially Balkanise the West Bank and make a contiguous Palestinian state unviable, and that Arafat had actually begged Clinton for the summit to be delayed cos they hadn't finalised specifics on counter offers. Is this true?

Because I am under the impression that there's a heavy amount of retrospective rationalisation by liberals attempting to parse a statesmanlike rejection of specific terms deemed to be unfair. When really, I think it doesn't matter what was offered at the summit because the moment Arafat declared peace with Israel he'd be dead the next day. I feel he must've been trapped by his own rhetoric with the ghost of Anwar Sadat over him.

I don't know much about this later period so if anyone could correct me it'd be much appreciated.

EDIT: I'm a bit surprised that hardly any pro-Palestinians have replied to this post?

I find it INCREDIBLY telling that critical theory has developed some of the most abstract depersonalised structural theories of racism, misogyny, homophobia etc etc, but the MOMENT it comes to antisemitism they fall back on the most crude shitlib 'invisible line' that gets crossed over from legitimate discourse.

It's gotten to the point now where people don't recognise something as antisemitic unless someone literally shouts 'gas the jews.' Antisemitism isn't just interpersonal prejudice. It's a distorted theory of power. It's a very particular imaginary which locates the 'Jew' as a fetishised symbolic foil to world redemption. The whole point of antisemitism is that it emerges within a narrative structure. I could unironically graft all of the motifs of the protocols of the elders of zion onto the Jewish state and because I never once mention the word 'Jew' I'm apparently not antisemitic.

Notice how these so called leftists all of a sudden sound like MAGA reactionaries the moment it comes to antisemitism?

'I'm not antisemitic, jewish friends agree with me'

'Jews weaponise antisemitism, they have a victim complex'

'How can I be antisemitic if Arabs are semites?'

'I have nothing against Jews, I just hate the octopus of world zionism sucking the blood out of nations'.

When did the left become so braindead?

I know full well why they won't touch on antisemitism as a system of thought, because the moment they do it'll implicate their entire Palestine narrative. People are such experts on what antisemitism ISN'T.

I've always taken issue with Patrick Wolfe's settler colonialism framework as applied to Palestine, and I think I've managed to lay out the reasons why I think it's totally incoherent and essentially provides pseudoscientific cover for fascism.

Now first of all, I'm going to completely err away from common Zionist arguments against the 'settler' label by insisting that Jews are indigenous to the region and therefore can't be colonisers. I find this to be a silly idealistic argument that entirely talks past what is (supposed to be) a structural theory about colonial relations in a stratified racial regime.

So here's Wolfe's basic framework:

Settler colonialism is defined by the acquisition of land through the elimination of the native, whose engine runs on a structural 'logic of elimination' which can be manifest in multiple forms, from dispossession to bureaucratic replacement to assimilation to genocide. Elimination is a 'structure, not an event.'

The clearest issue with this framework is that it's not actually a structural theory. It's a moralised tautology. It commits the obvious fallacy that anyone working in political ideologies knows is bad faith. It embeds conclusions and outcomes into the definition itself. It is ENTIRELY circular. In the words of JVP's Stefanie Fox, 'zionism is what it does.' This is the absolute rhetorical core of the entire pro-Palestine movement. 'Why did the Nakba happen? Because Israel is settler colonial. How do we know it's settler colonial? Because the Nakba happened.' I'm sure many people on the sub have noticed that it's incredibly difficult to debate these people because they've rigged the game through semantic wordplay.

It is structurally identical to the kind of right wing definition of socialism that produces a never ending circlejerk of confirmation bias. Imagine defining socialism as:

'the collectivisation of the means of production through a logic of totalitarianism, genocide, state surveillance and mass starvation.' We all know this kind of outcomes-based definition is pseudoacademic, because it forecloses multivariate causal mechanisms that produce material outcomes while lacking any kind of falsifiable exit clause, while merely asserting a monocausal force entirely by the way in which the definition is constructed, rather than by demonstrating why 'settler colonial structures' must, necessarily, lead to elimination. The obvious problem, of course, is that these co-called 'eliminatory' outcomes may be products of a whole slew of structural pressures that can just as easily be explained by one of any number of factors in many kinds of conflicts.

The second issue is that within the only structural claim in Wolfe's entire framework, that 'the acquisition of land necessitates the elimination of the native', both the 'acquisition of land' and 'elimination' can be defined by literally anything. Legal land purchase, occupation, expulsion, assimilation, rights protections, constitutional acknowledgements, apartheid, ethnic cleansing, migration. Everything. The JNF purchasing a wet bog in 1923 is part of the same teleological structure of elimination as West Bank settlers evicting Palestinians in 2026. This isn't demonstrated. It's asserted through a mysterious secularised preordainment. When everything is elimination, you've essentially established a hermetic self-sealing and unfalsifiable dogma which becomes a childish labelling game designed purely to delegitimise the existence of the national home. It is also not explained why the 'acquisition of land' must necessarily 'eliminate the native'. It's kind of just, assumed.

It produces a backwards historiography where you first label Zionism as 'settler colonial' and then fold all 'facts' into an invisible hidden hand of 'elimination' wrought by the ontologically malevolent nature of the settler entity, rather than by an intersectional analysis of the messy, contingent forces that led to a specific outcome. This is also why Zionist settler colonial 'structures' rely so heavily on analogical thinking. Comparisons to Australia, Rhodesia, Algeria, South Africa, North America are necessary to the polemic because the actual localised context does not do sufficient work on its own to legitimise the framework.

My main problem though is that this framework is INCREDIBLY vulnerable to internalising Arab nationalist priors as to what constitutes an indigenous collective. The 'settler' and the 'native' are not neutral sociological categories here. They establish the legitimate boundaries of the nation. The Arab nationalist construction of the nation is that of a primordialist volkisch community, where Palestine is an integral limb of the 'organic' body of the nation, necessarily rendering any Jewish political presence as parasitic by the way in which they're defined outside of the boundaries of the collective. Applications of Wolfe adopt wholesale this modernist construction of the nation as an 'indigenous' collectivity and then mythologise pre-Zionist contact as a prelapsarian Eden, where deviation from this mono-ethnic paradise is rendered definitionally as the 'Fall' from organic wholeness. And then of course, because the presence of the 'settler colonial entity' is definitionally an act of annihilation of the volk, its total dismantlement is the only necessary act of palingenetic redemption for a return to 'paradise' (ie a monist Arab ethnostate).

This is explicitly a fascist imaginary, if we draw upon Griffin's palingenesis. What is crucial to understand here is that this primordialist grammar acts as the bedrock of all the dominant strands of antizionist Palestinian nationalism, even when the specific ideological structure and redemptive telos are different.

For the pan-Islamist, all Palestine is a waqf endowment from Allah (which is not classical Islamic jurisprudence) and thereby any Jewish land presence is an act of kafir desecration on sacred geography, where eliminationist Jihad is a moral obligation for a return to cosmic order. For the Arab nationalist, the land is an organic limb of the Arab nation, anthropomorphised as a body, a maiden raped by the octopus of world Jewry, or the embodiment of Jesus Christ himself where Jewish development of the land is an act of desecration of the Holy Land, a reenactment of the Passion of the Christ. The excision of the malignant cancer is a hygienic necessity for the regeneration of the national body (read literally any Arab nationalist text in interwar and post-Nakba period, Zureiq, Sayegh, Istiqlal).

None of these concepts are material. They're entirely ideological. Wolfe then provides the perfect pseudoscientific academisation of a fascistic imaginary in order to appeal to the global left. The volk becomes the 'native society', the international jew becomes the 'settler colonial entity', the excision of the parasyte becomes 'the dismantlement of the colonial structure.' And because the redemptive telos is malleable and Palestine acts as the axis mundi of world redemption, Western shitlibs merely swap out 'Arab ethnostate' or 'dar al Islam' for 'a democratic one state solution for Jews and Arabs', because that is their utopian ideal grafted onto the redemptive structure (with not the first bit of understanding of Middle East politics, designed entirely to obfuscate the fact that the actual nationalist telos is the removal of any Jewish political presence).

This rendition of zionism, as an automated machine of destruction, an ethnosupremacist vehicle of colonialism and deception, is a construct which the Arab nationalist MUST invent, necessarily, as a foil to himself and the redemption of the world. If, according to Edward Said, the Zionist defines himself in negation of the oriental despot, then the Palestinian even moreso defines himself in negation of the International Jew. Moishe Postone is good on this. Just as antisemitism is a fetishised anticapitalism, antizionism is a fetishised anticolonialism, where the 'Zionist' becomes the condensed symbolic object of all of the abstract forces of Western modernity on the Arab world. Zureiq MUST construct zionism as an inherently expansionist, imperialist, bloodthirsty ethnosupremacist regime, and Messiri MUST render Jewish chosen peoplehood as the original and dormant pathology of all Western civilisational history in order to construct a world enemy for self identification and victory of Arabism/Islam over Evil. The Palestinian fellah is the rooted soul of the nation, the olive tree symbolises harmonic integration with nature, while the settler is the rootless European, the ecocidal desecrator who carves up the landscape with industrial gears, the essence of anti-truth, the impostor. It's all a blood and soil myth.

The clearest thing for me is that Wolfe didn't even invent the settler colonial paradigm. It was coined by Fayez Sayegh, a member of the Syrian Fascist Party who explicitly identified Zionist ethnosupremacy and inherent expansionism in a dark Jewish psyche which seeks to destroy and enslave the world based on Jewish chosenness over goyim. That is the genealogical root.

Finally, by grafting Arab nationalist conceptions of national purity and antisemitic gazes of Jews as parasitic 'world destroyers', Wolfe's settler colonial framework becomes a structural clone of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The single-minded force of World Jewry which seeks to enslave and destroy nations and religion through secret plots, global finance and imperial collusion, gets reified as the invisible hand of the 'logic of elimination.' The key is in the deontology. Zionism is eliminatory not by doing but by the act of being, and the tautological and unfalsifiable nature of the framework operates through the same hermeneutic conspiracism as the Protocols, where all facts are able to be absorbed into a single intentionalist force whose core essence is the annihilation of the Volk. This is the same engine that drove Palestinians in the 1920s to see Jewish refugees arriving at 5000 a year and interpret it as 'the secret judeomasonic plot for an antichrist state as the base for a pan-Judaic financial empire to sink its teeth into the Arab nation and enslave the world.' And when you preemptively pogrom Jews to prevent apocalypse, and they respond in kind and your situation deteriorates, you can merely fold that back into the teleological master """zionist""" plan for the elimination of the volk. Compromise is treason. Cuckoldry to the Jewish octopus. The only logical response is total war.

So it's not only an incoherent framework, but it provides a pseudoscientific veneer over a fascist ideology. It is a libel designed to render jews as parasitic upon the organic body politic, as artificial contaminants, and provides the perfect legitimisation for the total elimination of the Jewish national home.

(Please note I am not saying Palestinian identity itself is reducible to fascism. I am saying Palestinian anti-Zionism ABSOLUTELY is).