A Fanonian Perspective on Israel and Palestine

The war on Gaza is first and foremost a colonial war. It became a colonial war from the moment Palestinians were displaced in 1948. In his book, The Question of Palestine (1979), Palestinian-American scholar, Edward W. Said, discusses how the West was directly responsible for the creation of the Israeli state through the 1917 Balfour Declaration and in the 1948 partition of Palestine, the physical creation of the Israeli state. During the First World War, the British government with the support of the United States released the Balfour Declaration in support of Jewish settlement in Palestine. Palestine then was part of the Ottoman Empire, Great Britain’s adversary in the war. After the war ended and the Ottomans were defeated, the region of ‘Mandatory Palestine’ was brought under British colonial control until 1948, allowing Great Britain to legislate the division of Palestine and the Israeli state, which the US also endorsed, bringing Israel into national existence and recognition. In that sense, Zionism and the Israeli state has been tethered to the Euro-American imperialist project since the early twentieth century. Indeed, as Said writes, ‘for although it coincided with an era of the most virulent Western anti-Semitism, Zionism also coincided…with the period of unparalleled European territorial acquisition in Africa and Asia.’