Faced with the massacres in Gaza, the increasing number of murders and the destruction of homes in the West Bank, the rampant settlement activity there since Hamas's war crimes of October 7, 2023, and the statements by Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir calling for the murder of Gaza's inhabitants, we cannot help but be appalled. Clearly, a crime of genocide is being openly perpetrated, and its perpetrator, the Israeli government, must be prevented from carrying out this policy to its conclusion.
Let's be clear from the start, this isn't a Jewish issue. Besides, what are we even talking about when we talk about Jews?
Obviously, Jewish men and women do not constitute a race. In fact, no human race exists, and Jews are no exception. The article " How the Jewish People Was Invented" by the Israeli Jewish historian Shlomo Sand, published in Le Monde Diplomatique in August 2008, explains that " contrary to popular belief, the diaspora did not originate from the expulsion of the Hebrews from Palestine, but from successive conversions in North Africa, Southern Europe, and the Near East. This shakes one of the foundations of Zionist thought, namely, that Jews are descendants of the Kingdom of David and not-God forbid!-the heirs of Berber warriors or Khazar horsemen ."
Moreover, Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, the second president of the State of Israel, and David Ben-Gurion, one of the founders of this State, mentioned on several occasions in their writings - at least until 1929, the year of the great Palestinian revolt - that " the peasants of Palestine are the descendants of the inhabitants of ancient Judea ."
This is also the thesis of the Israeli Jewish historian Tsvi Misinai, as reported on the French-language Jewish portal jforum.fr , in an article dated December 7, 2010. This historian states " with the utmost certainty: nearly 90% of Palestinians have Jewish ancestors. And about half of them know it ," he specifies .
Regardless of the credence given to these theories, we can be certain of one thing: Jewish communities, like any human group, are constantly the site of phenomena of genetic and cultural mixing.
Nor is the issue at stake a question related to Jewish culture, which is also impossible to define unequivocally, as Ashkenazi, Sephardic, and Mizrahi cultures do not form a uniform whole. There is, of course, a cultural foundation built upon a religious tradition. But being Jewish today does not mean adhering to that religious tradition. Many Jews today are atheist or agnostic. And today, 44% of the Jewish population of the State of Israel identifies as secular , according to the website jerusaleminstitute.org.il
Ultimately, in 2,000 years of Jewish culture, for example within Europe, racist, supremacist, and genocidal ideas have never held any sway within Jewish communities. On the contrary, they have far too often been subjected to mechanisms of discrimination, cultural contempt, and racist massacres. Thus, the situation in Palestine, since the creation of Israel in 1948, is largely a direct consequence of European antisemitism and its most extreme form: the extermination of European Jews carried out by the Nazis and their allies, in which the Palestinians played no part.
The infernal mechanics of colonialism
" The only good Indian is a dead Indian ," U.S. General Philip Sheridan is said to have remarked. While the veracity of this quote is disputed, it nonetheless embodies the brutal scorched-earth tactics this general employed against Native Americans, who suffered a veritable genocide. These ideas were, moreover, part of a pervasive racist ideology within American colonial society.
As for the Jewish supremacists currently members of the Israeli government, their statements fully correspond to the logic that a good Palestinian can only be a dead Palestinian.
In colonial expansion in the United States, as in this Jewish colonial expansion in Palestine, the goal is to appropriate land inhabited by another people. In both cases, this process is rooted in an asymmetrical military power dynamic, with, on one side, a people whose land and ability to build their future are confiscated, and on the other, settlers financed by one or more imperialist powers. And the settlers, regardless of their culture or origin, ultimately see the other only as an obstacle to be destroyed in order to build their own future.
Today, in Israel, " a strategy of terror has taken hold, now embraced by the settlers and covered up by the army, " as historian Vincent Lemire stated in Le Monde on August 18, 2026. " The Israeli settlers' government proxies are fanning the flames, like the Minister of National Security, Itamar Ben-Gvir, who, since October 7, has issued 250,000 gun permits and purchased 10,000 assault rifles for the settlers ."
This program has a name: Greater Israel , which advocates its expansion across the entirety of the ancient Kingdom of Israel, including, beyond all of Palestine, southern Lebanon, the Golan Heights, and part of present-day Jordan. While Jewish supremacists are divided on the necessity of annexation beyond the Jordan River, they are not divided on the issue of southern Lebanon and the Golan Heights, which have recently been subject to renewed occupation by the Israeli army.
Greater Israel now has a legal basis since the adoption on July 19, 2018 by the Israeli parliament (62 votes against 55 and two abstentions) of a " basic law " making Israel " the historical homeland of the Jewish people ", in accordance with all the propaganda speeches on Greater Israel, dramatically accentuating discriminatory policies.
This country would be " the nation-state of the Jewish people ," which leads to the denial of the existence of at least 25% Arabs among Israeli citizens, the vast majority of whom are Muslim, but also Christians, Druze, and others. This law defines Jerusalem as the " complete and unified " capital of Israel, endorsing the annexation of East Jerusalem. It demotes Arabic, which until then had been the second official language of the state, making Hebrew the sole official language. It affirms that " the right to exercise self-determination within the State of Israel is reserved solely to the Jewish people ." It calls for immigration from the Jewish diaspora.
This program has a government at its service, because all the policies pursued by Benjamin Netanyahu have only one purpose: Greater Israel. Furthermore, the " political alternatives ," which could lead to the current leader's removal from power in the next elections, express no desire to break with his logic. As the newspaper Le Monde headlined on August 21, 2026, " In Israel, before the October parliamentary elections, ending the war is absent from both minds and political platforms ."
And this article observes that " Israeli society is ' addicted ' to war ." " The campaign for the parliamentary elections, scheduled for October 27[2026], could have opened new perspectives, following the Hamas terrorist attack of October 7, 2023, which led Israel to devastate the occupied Palestinian territories and then extend the war to six countries in the region (Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Qatar, and Iran). Yet, all Israeli political factions refuse to offend public opinion by proposing anything different ."
What is at issue is therefore not " the Jews ", but this criminal colonialism which would transform any people into a collective oppressor allowing an ongoing genocide to continue.
The complicity of Western states
All of this is done in broad daylight, even though the Israeli army tries to cover up its most criminal actions, for example by specifically assassinating journalists in the Gaza Strip and southern Lebanon.
At the worst moment of the massacres in Gaza, as today in the face of the massive colonization underway in the West Bank, the best that Western governments have been willing to do amounts to convoluted statements to regret the " excesses " of the genocide in Palestine.
When the French government recognized the State of Palestine, followed by the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and Portugal, this did not lead to an end to economic cooperation with Israel nor did it call into question the association agreement between the European Union and Israel.
As for the United States, whether under the presidency of Joe Biden or Donald Trump, they established a virtual airlift to supply the Israeli army with bombs and ammunition to crush the population of the Gaza Strip. The invasion of Lebanon, the massacres of civilians, and the resulting population displacements have not altered this support.
But to fully understand what is happening in Palestine, it is necessary to revisit some demographic data. And to put them into perspective, let us give two sets of figures based on the work of Roberto Bachi, founder of the Central Bureau of Statistics of Israel , first concerning the year 1914, that is to say before the drafting in 1917 of the " Balfour Declaration " by which the British government strategically lent its support to the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine; then concerning the year 1947, that is to say just before the declaration of independence of Israel.
In 1914, the total population of Palestine was 0.689 million, of which 13% were Jewish, 10% Christian, and 76% Muslim. By 1947, the population had risen to 1.970 million, of which 32% were Jewish, 7% Christian, and 60% Muslim.
Since the creation of the State of Israel in 1948, and in order to achieve this, Jewish militias forced hundreds of thousands of Arabs to flee the territories that now comprise Israel. This is known as the Nakba. More than 700,000 Palestinian Arabs fled or were expelled from their lands, and a significant number of them sought refuge in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, or Egypt.
Let's turn to today, or more precisely to 2020-2021. The population of the occupied Palestinian territories (West Bank and Gaza Strip) is estimated by Wikipedia at 5.1 million inhabitants (3.1 million in the West Bank including East Jerusalem and 2 million in the Gaza Strip).
As for the total population of Israel, as published by the Central Bureau of Statistics, it is 9.45 million. Of this, the proportion of people considered Jewish is 74.1%. A simple calculation shows that in 2020-2021 the Jewish population represented only about 48% of the total population in the combined " Israel plus Occupied Territories ," which corresponds to the smallest area claimed within Greater Israel.
Moreover, this proportion continues to decrease, particularly within Israel. While in 1950, just after the Nakba, the Jewish population represented 87.8% of the total population of Israel, it has been steadily declining ever since, reaching 74.1% today.
This is partly explained by the difference in birth rates. It is 19.6% for Jewish populations, while it reaches 23.5% for Muslim populations. Finally, an article in Le Parisien on October 21, 2025, reminds us that in 2019, for the first time, the number of emigrants exceeded the number of immigrants; in 2020, the balance was negative by 11,000 people, and a 2023 opinion poll shows that a third of Israelis are considering leaving their country.
Israel is a country founded on a Zionist ideology of settler-colonialism, supported by Western countries. This has necessarily resulted in the dispossession of Palestinian lands. Demographics in Palestine show how, in a country that has become perpetually at war, the survival of the "nation-state of the Jewish people " is becoming increasingly precarious.
Although Arab governments are quite comfortable with the ethnic massacres suffered by Palestinians, the actions of Jewish supremacists, as well as the policies of Benjamin Netanyahu, and also the violence committed against neighboring countries, are increasing hatred against Jewish Israelis among Arab populations, just as they are increasing anti-Semitism across the globe.
Historically, unconditional Western support for Israel stems from its role in the international balance of power in the Middle East. Created after the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the discovery of vast hydrocarbon deposits in Iraq, Iran, and the Arabian Peninsula, Israel has been a key factor in Western, and particularly American, dominance over the Middle East. However, shifts in geopolitical balances, such as the rise of China, have begun to weaken this dominance.
Finally, while almost all Western governments have no qualms about maintaining economic and military support for Israeli colonialism, the spectacle of the massacres in Gaza has shocked populations in Western countries, including the United States.
This is beginning to have electoral repercussions in the United States, fueling the rise of " socialist " factions within the Democratic Party. These factions are starting to achieve electoral successes, such as the election of Zohran Mamdani as mayor of New York City. And as the website jforum.fr, already mentioned, points out, a third of New York's Jewish population, mostly young people, voted for him. The divide also runs through the diaspora.
Socialist movements in the United States are calling for a break with policies of support for Israel. Yet Israel remains a small, isolated country in the heart of a vast Arab world whose populations are largely hostile to it.
Since its creation, and even more so today, Israel's survival fundamentally depends on the military and economic support of Western countries, and in particular the United States.
Jewish supremacists pose an immeasurable risk to the Jews of Israel.
The unlikely future of peace between peoples
Combating the colonial logic that underlies the creation of the State of Israel always triggers fantasies about seeing " Israeli Jews thrown into the sea ." This is obviously not our perspective. The majority of them were born there and are destined to live there. This is simply about offering some perspectives and reminding ourselves of our own responsibilities as " European citizens ."
Peace among nations is our goal. But Jewish nationalism makes a peaceful future in the Middle East impossible. It is not a question of rewriting the past, but of charting a course for the future.
For Jewish supremacists, the project is Greater Israel. This project implies, in order for Jews not to find themselves in the minority, either the extermination or the deportation of the vast majority of the inhabitants of the occupied territories.
The extermination of 5 million people appears impossible. Oh! Not for humanitarian reasons, but simply for political ones. As for Donald Trump's statements about deporting the two million inhabitants of Gaza, they simply demonstrated that it was impossible. The Greater Israel project is impossible. Pursuing it will exacerbate the violence and could plunge the entire region into a conflagration from which it is not certain that Israel would emerge victorious.
The genocidal process in Gaza has appeared to be largely tolerated within contemporary Israeli Jewish society. The causes of this situation are numerous. Beyond the logic of colonization, the trauma of the Nazi extermination of the Jews weighs heavily. And the war crimes committed by Hamas on October 7, 2023, by reactivating this trauma, facilitated the genocidal intent of the Israeli government.
On the Palestinian side, the memory of the Nakba, the massacres, the deportations of the population, and the confiscation of Palestinian property has also created a similar trauma. The genocidal acts committed in Gaza, as well as the terror imposed by Jewish supremacists on the inhabitants of the West Bank, bring these memories back to the forefront of Palestinian consciousness.
This should not lead us to consider a solution based on a false symmetry of responsibility in the situation. There is an aggressed people, the Palestinian people. And there is an aggressor, Israeli Jewish nationalism. But obviously, a solution cannot exist without overcoming these two fundamental traumas within the framework of a political solution. To this end, we must base our actions on supporting all actors, in Palestine and in Israel, who favor such a political solution.
For despite the widespread acceptance of the Israeli government's logic of violence, Israeli society is deeply divided. While today, by " preventing any political horizon ," the war " allows the right wing to maintain its grip on power ," as Mairav Zonszein, an analyst with the NGO Crisis Group , explained on France Info , the situation is not yet final. Faced with a " peace camp in tatters ," the left is " trying to reunite supporters of a two-state solution ." But for this to happen, Israeli nationalism must suffer a major political, or even military, defeat.
On the Palestinian side, the war long prevented any criticism of Hamas's crimes. Hamas, for its part, also used the war to consolidate its control over the population of Gaza, and even to try to seize power in the West Bank. Its perspective has never been a political solution. Hamas has been a de facto ally of Netanyahu, who is only concerned with his own political survival.
But within the Palestinian population, there are many supporters of a political solution. We are not thinking specifically of the discredited and corrupt Palestinian Authority. We are thinking first and foremost of the Palestinian people themselves.
In 2021, a survey conducted by the Palestinian Center for Policy Research and Survey showed that, faced with the current deadlock of a two-state solution, only 39% of Palestinians still supported it. 29% of Palestinians favored a one-state solution, in which Palestinians and Jews would be equal. The genocide has likely, and temporarily, altered the landscape, but the fundamentals remain. A vast majority of Palestinians support a political solution, and once Jewish nationalism and organizations like Hamas are defeated-a point that seems largely a given today-they will then be able to organize themselves to achieve it.
In this situation, our fundamental responsibility, in Europe as in the United States, is to secure an end to unconditional economic and military support for Israel. Any further support must be contingent upon concrete actions demonstrating a willingness to reach a political solution. This is the core of our struggle for peace in the Middle East, which is based on a portion of the Palestinian demands-the very demands from which we can exert pressure on Western governments.
Firstly, we must aim to force Western states to respect the ceasefire by Israel, both in Gaza and in Lebanon; the same applies to the cessation of warfare in Syria, Yemen, and Iraq; and we must also continue to oppose the war in Iran.
We must advocate for a definitive halt to all Jewish settlements in the West Bank and the dismantling of settlements illegally built beyond the 1949 " Green Line ," which constitutes Israel's internationally recognized borders. This also means the reintegration of East Jerusalem into Palestine, the return of the Golan Heights to Syria, and the complete evacuation of southern Lebanon.
We must explain the Basic Law of July 19, 2018, so that the broad movement in support of the Palestinian cause compels our governments to pressure Israeli parties. The goal is to achieve its repeal, as well as that of all other previous legal provisions that establish discrimination and political inequality among citizens within the State of Israel.
In short, we must break the colonizing and aggressive dynamic towards its neighbors that characterizes the State of Israel today. We must not " destroy the State of Israel ," but rather destroy what makes it a colonizing state.
PclWebLetter]Lettre N° 39 du Réseau "Les ami.es de la Plateforme Communiste Libertaire"
https://plateformecl.org/israel-du-colonialisme-au-genocide/
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Source: A-infos-en@ainfos.ca
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