Israeli settlers

The similarities between white supremacists in the US and Zionist settlers in Israel are not coincidental. The connection between the two groups goes much deeper than a shared disdain for ‘the other’. In fact, the Israeli settlers epitomise the ideals and policies of US imperialism in the MENA region.

In May 2021, Muna al-Kurd, a young Palestinian woman, accused an Israeli settler named Jacob of stealing her family home in the Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood in East Jerusalem.

“Jacob, you know that this is not your home,” she told him in English.

The settler replied in a thick US accent: “Yes, but if I go, you don’t go back, so what’s the problem? Why are you yelling at me?”

Jacob, who gained worldwide infamy after a video of the above interaction went viral, was later revealed to be Yaakov Fauci – a Trump supporter from New York who is affiliated with the US-based settler organisation Nahalat Shimon.

No one, of course, was surprised to find out that the new poster boy of violent settler colonialism in Palestine is an Israeli American with apparent ties to white supremacist politics in the US.

Israeli American settlers have long been leading the efforts to dispossess Palestinians of their homes and land with the support of the Israeli Supreme Court and the Israeli government.

And the arguments settlers use to justify their violence – that they are the rightful owners of the land, that they are culturally superior to the Indigenous population, that they are only “defending” themselves – are almost identical to those that are being used by white supremacists in the US.

The best place to look to understand the obvious parallels between the goals and methods of Israeli settlers and US white supremacists is perhaps the life and politics of Naftali Bennett, Israel’s new prime minister.

Born to American parents who emigrated from San Francisco after the 1967 Six-Day War, Bennett was once the head of the settlers’ Yesha Council, whose objective is “to safeguard Israel’s strategic expanses – between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea”. He built his political career as the protégé of Benjamin Netanyahu and boasted of being even more right wing than the warmonger former prime minister.

To this day, he is a staunch supporter of the one-state solution and the annexation of the West Bank by Israel. “I’ve killed lots of Arabs in my life,” he once declared, “and there’s no problem with that.” Like the white supremacists in the US, Bennett is adamant that the Indigenous inhabitants of the lands his people are trying to claim for themselves are somewhat sub-human, and he is willing to imprison, abuse, and even kill them to achieve his goals. His story is an ethno-nationalist one penned in Palestinian blood and stolen soil.

Today, Israeli settlers are the “Jewish face” of US imperialism in the MENA region.

Palestinian-American intellectual and literary critic Edward Said famously talked about the connection between imperialism and Zionism.

“There is an unmistakable coincidence between the experiences of Arab Palestinians at the hands of Zionism and the experiences of those black, yellow, and brown people who were described as inferior and subhuman by nineteenth-century imperialists,” he wrote in his 1979 essay, Zionism from the Standpoint of its Victims.

Excerpted: ‘Israeli settlers: The face of US imperialism in the Middle East’

Aljazeera.com