Bitter Canaans

After its founding, Israel worked to cultivate friendly ties with newly independent African republics hoping to gain UN votes and cultivate business ties. By 1957, Israel established diplomatic relations with Ethiopia, Liberia and Ghana. Over the 1960s, Israel sent thousands of consultants, military advisors and businessmen to the continent, hoping to start joint business ventures and showcase the jewels of its developmentalist model: the kibbutz and moshav settlements, the gadna youth battalions, the nahal outposts. For instance, following Nigeria’s independence, the Israeli Jerry Beit Halevi was Nigeria’s first football coach. It was in this era that Israel’s nascent weapons industry also grew to be an export giant. By 1966, Israel was exporting weapons to ten African countries, including Ghana, Congo, Madagascar, Tanzania and Benin.

In the United Nations, Israel remained a critic of South African apartheid in the United Nations until the early 1970s. It sent financial assistance to the Pan-Africanist Congress. In 1970, Israeli diplomats called Ian Smith’s white-minority breakaway state of Rhodesia an ‘illegal regime’. And Israel sent arms to the Angolan FNLA fighting the Portuguese. As Golda Meir wrote in her autobiography My Life, ‘Like [Africans], we had shaken off foreign rule; like them, we had to learn for ourselves how to reclaim the land, how to increase the yields of our crops, how to irrigate, how to raise poultry, how to live together and how to defend ourselves.’ She framed this drive as part of Jews and African people’s ‘shared memory of centuries-long suffering.’ On all these fronts, Africa became an indelible feature what Haim Yacobi calls Israel’s ‘moral geography’. This era lasted until Egypt’s partial victory against Israel in the October war of 1973, when many African nations broke relations with Israel to side with Egypt.

These alignments—sentimental, economic and political—were always somewhat ephemeral. Unlike pan-Africanists or Africa’s newly independent post-colonial states, Zionist thinkers saw themselves as advocates of a settler-colonial project anathema to native sovereignty. Herzl, for instance, wrote to the British imperialist Cecil Rhodes beseeching Rhodes to throw his capital behind Jewish settlement of Palestine, a project he called ‘something colonial’. Later Vladimir Jabotinksy, the revisionist Zionist, would write in quite vivid terms in 1923 of the need for the Jewish Yishuv in Palestine to build an ‘Iron Wall’ against the native Arab inhabitants, since ‘all natives resist colonists.’ It was clear who he meant by colonists: his own Zionist audience.

The Zionist choice of Palestine built on early searches for alternative colonies, many in Africa. In 1903, for instance, Herzl presented to the sixth congress of World Zionist Organization (WZO) the Uganda Plan. This implausible scheme, hatched by the British diplomat Joseph Chamberlain, aimed to resettle Jews fleeing pogroms of the Russian Empire in the Uasin Gishu plateau of modern-day Kenya, where British colonial planners were desperate to attract settlers and recoup losses from the unprofitable Uganda Railway. The plan’s failure paralleled other imperial efforts to boost Jewish ‘territorialist’ alternatives to Zionism. We can recall the Portuguese scheme from 1907 to 1913 to lure Jewish settlers to colonial Angola, the Nazi regime’s risible attempt to deport the European Jewry to Madagascar, or Mussolini’s tentative plans to resettle Jews in Italian-occupied Ethiopia to shore up the fascist regime’s new settler colony.

Did the Zionists reject these alternatives out of principled concerns for indigenous African sovereignty? No. To read the private letters of Zionist leadership or the WZO’s meeting minutes on these proposals is to read a litany of practical complaints: existing white settler opposition, costly relocation, and the enduring allure of Palestine as the site of the ancient Hebraic kingdoms. In particular, after the 1917 Balfour declaration, the Zionist choice of Palestine had become a fait accompli. Pragmatic elements of the Zionist movement even collaborated with the Nazi and Italian fascist authorities to facilitate the emigration of Jews to Palestine.

In 1933 for instance, the Zionist Federation of Germany and Anglo-Palestine Bank signed the Ha’avara Agreement with the Hitler dictatorship, allowing Jews to leave Nazi Germany and transfer a share of their assets abroad. The pact flouted a global anti-Nazi boycott and tore Jewish opinion apart (a chief negotiator, Haim Arlosoroff, was later assassinated). But it also lasted six years until the Nazi invasion of Poland, illustrating how the Zionist priority of building a populous Jewish Yishuv in Palestine could work perversely in tandem with the Nazi goal of a judenfrei Europe, ‘cleansed’ of Jews.

How then to reconcile the colonizing ambitions of Zionist discourse with any of the intellectual currents which have historically moved African peoples? Consider a likely candidate, the Back to Africa movement. Over the 19th and early 20th centuries, hundreds of thousands of Black people left the Americas and liberated slave ships to resettle what is now Sierra Leone, Ghana, Ivory Coast and Liberia—its most politically successful instance. Similar to Haiti’s 1816 constitution and Israel’s Law of Return for the Jewish diaspora, Liberia enshrined in its nationality laws the principle of refuge for ‘free people of color’. Black advocates of return, such as Marcus Garvey, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Edward Blyden, saw in their Atlantic movement a Zionist parallel—a political entity established by émigrés whose basis for shared kinship and national identity were forged in the fires of exclusion and exploitation abroad.

Akin to the reluctant Jewish Zionist collaboration with the Nazis, the Black pan-Africanists found themselves with strange bedfellows. White planters, many from the Virginia piedmont, also liked the idea of shipping off the ‘black poor’ to a purported African homeland. Back to Africa, as understood by the slaveholder, promised to remove a ‘racially inferior’ caste from America. Conveniently, it would foreclose the trouble of integrating free Black people, all under ‘the garb of pretended philanthropy,’ wrote Jermain Loguen acidly in 1853.

For these reasons, slavery abolitionists (both white and black) generally opposed the colonization societies, as did the overwhelming majority of ordinary Black people.  One finds their arguments recapitulated in William Lloyd Garrison’s Thoughts on African Colonization (1832), Frederick Douglass’ The Colonization Scheme (1852), and the letters of Gerrit Smith or James Forten. The discourse on Back to Africa presaged the polemics against a Jewish nation-state in Palestine made by Jewish non-Zionists, such the Reform rabbi Judah Leon Magnes or the Polish Bundist Marek Edelman. Their challenge to Zionism was similar to the abolitionist challenge to Back to Africa. As an old slogan of the Jewish labour bund once said, ‘Where we live, there is our country!’

Yet beyond this surface resemblance in the discursive landscape, Zionist and pan-Africanist thought shared little in terms of history and goals. For one, no pan-Africanist notion advanced by any serious advocate has, in the words of Michael W. Williams ‘made a claim to land outside or inside Africa that required the eventual expulsion or political and economic subjugation of its indigenous inhabitants.’ This is a testament both to the pan-Africanist project’s egalitarian commitments and to the simple fact that emigration was never a central object for its political success. Hundreds of millions of Africans still remained on the mainland, unlike Jews in Ottoman or Mandate Palestine. Here is Garvey in 1923: ‘It will not be to go to Africa for the purpose of exercising an overlordship over the native, but it shall be the purpose of…brotherly co-operation which will make the interests of the African native and the American and West Indian Negro one and the same.’ To return to Africa meant Black émigrés should accept the continent’s traditions and peoples, not replace them.

We may juxtapose this call against the many statements by Zionists, varying in their explicit racism, of the need to replace the native Arab inhabitants of Palestine with Jewish émigrés.  Herzl, for instance, wrote of the indigenous Arabs of Palestine in his diary, that ‘we shall try to spirit the penniless population across the border…while denying it employment in our own country.’ Lord Balfour, the foreign secretary who declared the British Empire’s official backing for the cause of a Jewish nation-state in Palestine, remarked in 1922 that Zionism was ‘of far profounder import than the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land.’ For Chaim Weizmann, Palestine contained ‘a few hundred thousand Negroes [כושים], but that is a matter of no significance.’ One challenge for Zionists was what to do with these Palestinian ‘Negroes’. Two options were foreseeable, either the transfer of Palestine’s non-Jewish Arabs elsewhere or their rule within the bounds of a territorially contiguous Jewish state—the latter arrangement representing what Ben-Gurion in 1967 and Yitzhak Rabin in 1976 prophetically warned would become ‘apartheid’. Which to choose?

Here analogies to settler colonial states in Africa (not, tellingly, its anti-colonial movements) were useful. In 1941, the head of the Jewish National Fund, Menachem Ussishkin perceptively remarked on South Africa, ‘the blacks are eighty percent and have no rights at all . . . do you want that the Jews who are twenty percent should rule in Palestine?’ He ruled this option out, hoping that Jewish emigration would eventually give the Jews of the Yishuv a majority. ‘First, a Jewish state, and second, equal rights for the Arabs, and third, transfer of the Arabs only if they consent, as Mr. Ben-Gurion has written, is squaring the circle. It is impossible.’

Among these three choices, Zionists committed to the first one—a Jewish state ruled by a Jewish majority. Alternative formulations, such as Martin Buber’s proposal for a binational, federated state in Palestine, remained on the margins of Zionist discourse. Yet because the Yishuv did not enjoy a critical mass of Jews, creating and maintaining a Jewish state in Palestine required imaginative acts of demographic engineering and governance.

Practice followed theory here. In 1948, more than 85 per cent of Palestine’s Christian and Muslim Arabs within the borders of the declared state of Israel were expelled as stateless refugees. The few who remained, many in northern cities such as Nazareth and Haifa or the southern Bedouin, lived under military rule until 1966. Upon winning the 1967 war against its Arab neighbors, Israel then occupied the Sinai, Golan Heights, Gaza and the West Bank—subjecting large, urbanized populations of Palestinians in the latter two regions to a regime of military rule that has lasted now more than half a century. Since the 1970s, the Israeli government has also permitted (and with its various subsidies encouraged) the expansion of a Jewish settler movement in the occupied territories. From the Gush Emunim settlers of the 1970s to the contemporary Knesset party space (Tkuma, Otzma Yehudit, Jewish Home) the most influential voices in settler politics embrace an irridentist, messianic, theocratic, and far-right vision of Jewish supremacy at any cost. Settlers live under different laws, hold different IDs, drive on different roads, attend different schools, and vote in different elections than their Palestinian native neighbors.

There were a few hiccups in this arrangement of course. The Sinai Peninsula, for instance, was swapped for peace with Egypt in 1978. In 1980, Israel formalized its annexation of East Jerusalem, conferring on Palestinian residents of Jerusalem a special ID status short of full citizenship and voting rights. In 1981, Israel effectively annexed the Golan. With the Oslo Accords of the 1990s, Israel outsourced the governance of major Palestinian cities in the occupied territories to the newly created Palestinian Authority but retained about two-thirds of the land, called Area C, for its own military and settler enterprise. After 2005, the Israeli military built a separation wall through its West Bank territories, peeling off the Palestinian suburbs of east Jerusalem from the city’s heart. In 2005, Israel, under fire from Hamas, also withdrew from Gaza, swapping a direct land occupation for a crippling blockade by air, land, and sea.

The purposes of the Separation Wall and disengagement from Gaza were many, but included the creation of a security architecture that would allow Israel to divide-and-conquer the West Bank and Gaza, prevent the emergence of a Palestinian state, and repress any serious resistance to its rule. Thus, the last 20 years of occupation record what analyst Tareq Baconi called a ‘violent equilibrium’. Israel maintains an indefinite occupation and ever-more refined apartheid system, punctuated by periodic, devastating wars in Gaza. The implicit wager of Israel’s right-wing rulers was that the costs of these wars will be small enough to be ignored by the Israeli public. It remains to be seen whether the Hamas attack on October 7 and the invasion of Gaza has left this illusion unscathed. Or whether the conflict is indeed in unchartered territory.

If pan-Africanist enterprise differed from the Zionist discourse in rhetoric, it certainly did in practice. Liberia, for instance, had its own history of oppression unlike Israel in both degree and kind. It is true that Americo-Liberian settlers formed a ruling elite, that they rarely inter-married with native African peoples, that they fought periodic skirmishes with surrounding tribes, and adopted the English language, Western dress, plantation-style homes, and evangelical Christianity. The indigenous Kru and Grebo were excluded from birthright citizenship until 1904. Even Du Bois counseled the Black colonists to take a ‘high hand’ with the natives, lest ‘the tribal chiefs take matters in their own hands.’ To describe Liberia as a settler-colonial state along Zionist lines seems accurate, as many of Liberia’s own pan-Africanist advocates made clear. Edward Blyden for instance, in his treatises From West Africa to Palestine (1874) and The Jewish Question (1898) eagerly developed the Zionist-Liberia analogy.

Yet Liberia, like Sierra Leone, was also an immensely impoverished resource colony of American and British capital interests, where nearly half of Black émigrés died from disease. As the American pan-Africanist Martin Delany bitingly wrote in 1852, Liberia was a ‘poor miserable mockery—a burlesque on a government—a pitiful dependency’ of the ‘slaveholding’ colonization society, whose ‘deep laid scheme’ was to ‘exterminate the free colored of the American continent.’ For much of its 20th century history, Liberia operated as a de facto one-party state under the suzerainty of the United States, which gained a naval post in West Africa while the Firestone Tire Company turned Liberia into a vast rubber fiefdom to be worked by the sweat and blood of unfree labour.  ‘Black Zion’ as I.K. Sundiata titled his book, was also ‘Black Slavery’. Exploitation of indigenous labour, not its eradication through ethno-nationalist forms of ethnic cleansing, was at the heart of Liberia’s pre-Civil War enterprise.