Zionism is Now The Highest Stage of Imperialism
In 1922 the League of Nations issued its Mandate for Palestine which gave the British formal ruling power of the country. The Mandate was part of the carving up of the Middle East territories by western capitalist states after World War I in the so-called Sykes-Picot Agreement. The Mandate was issued at a time when about 78 percent of the indigenous population was Arab or Muslim, and about 9 percent Jewish.
The Mandate also made good on the “Balfour Declaration” of 1917. Lord Balfour, an antisemitic British imperialist, promised the Jewish Zionist movement that Britain would support a homeland for the Jews in Palestine. The Middle East was strategically chosen to further Britain’s dominance in the oil-rich region. As scholar Rashid Khalidi notes, the League of Nations Mandate was an “extraordinary gift to the Zionist movement…the clear implication…is that only one people in Palestine is to be recognized with national rights: the Jewish people.”
These two events effectively made the Jewish Zionist movement a junior partner of Western imperialism. Zionist colonization of historic Palestine was given the full blessing of western capitalist ruling classes who sought to push Jews out on their own nations, while creating a foothold of western power and influence in the Middle East.
Western capitalist states also sought to have one group of people it backed (the white Zionists) repress another it did not (the Brown Arabs). It was this arrangement that brought the great Black radical James Baldwin to write in 1979: “the state of Israel was not created for the salvation of the Jews; it was created for the salvation of the Western interests.”
Almost 100 years later, Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza represents more than any single event of our time the violent legacy of western imperialism. The world is now divided in two: between a majority who understand Israel as the settler colonial project “created for the salvation of the Western interests,” and Zionists and their supporters who seek to defend settler colonialism and imperialism.
Put another way, the genocide of Palestinians is a primary weapon being used now to defend and carry out western imperialism. Every Palestinian murdered in Gaza and the West Bank is its victim.
At the same time, every student, worker, mother, child, socialist, teacher, laborer who stands up for Palestine is standing up against the force of western imperialism.
Antisemitism is one of the foundational and most horrific ingredients in the development of the world racial system, that was created in and reached its most barbaric stage of mass violence and genocide in the different countries of Europe in the 20th century. As one study of antisemitism concluded, “the late-19th and early-20th century witnessed a high-water mark in hatred against Jews, especially in western Christian societies.”
The gravest threat of antisemitism today comes from white supremacist political parties and fascist movements that operate openly in European and European-colonized settler states like the United States—the same states backing and conducting the genocide of Palestinians through their Israeli proxy. Virulent anti-Arab and anti-Palestinian racism, and Islamophobia also operate through imperialism and Zionism to legitimate war, violence and dehumanization against the people of the Middle East and Africa as a whole.
There is bitter irony in the fact that a feigned and falsely-placed opposition to antisemitism is now being used to defend imperialism and repress those opposing genocide, fighting settler colonialism, and taking action for Palestinian liberation. US and European support for Israel's crimes is not being done out of defense of Judaism or Jewish peoples, but rather Zionism is an instrument to advance their own imperialist aims. Zionism is the ideological vehicle of imperialism that enables the greatest perpetrators of antisemitic violence in history— the European capitalist states and the United States—to invert the concept and weaponize it against those resisting the genocidal violence being carried out by these same states against another racialized population. This explains why the US, European states, and Israel are carrying out a wholesale extermination of Palestinians, bombing Arab and Muslim peoples across the region, while simultaneously carrying out violent repression of Palestine solidarity and human rights activities within their own societies.
This is one reason why we as revolutionary socialists always distinguish between anti-Zionism and antisemitism: to remind people that it was Zionism—not Judaism—that has always been imperialism’s junior partner, and why in siding with Palestinians we are taking a stand against 100 years of capitalist and imperialist history.
We also know that until we help defeat the Zionist entity in Israel, and liberate Palestine, we will not have defeated imperialism, or liberated ourselves.
