I wanted to outline my understanding of the West’s relation to Zionism since it’s been on my mind a lot lately. I’m interested in feedback for any details I might have wrong or lacking context.
So, we have Christianity being born out of Judaism and then being syncretized into the Roman Empire, which propagates its version of Christianity throughout its territory as part of its imperial structure. The empire wanes and leaves behind the politico-religious concept of Christendom or “the Christian world”.
By the time that capitalism became Europe’s dominant mode of production, Western Christianity was largely separated from Eastern Christianity and thus Eastern Christendom, and was relatively united under Catholicism. Importantly, papal bulls had established the Doctrine of Discovery, which set out instructions for (implicitly Western if I understand correctly) Christian countries to cooperate in the mission of subjugating and Christianizing non-Christian peoples. Even as the Reformation birthed Protestantism and wars were fought within (Western, but this is the last time I’m going to note that distinction) Christendom, the Doctrine of Discovery was mainly respected as something like property law among European Christian nations, including Protestant ones.
Notably, Europe is white as hell and the people they colonized were not. Through various means including pseudoscience and theology, European colonial powers reinforced their ideology with a new system of racism that would become the white supremacism we can recognize today. Tied in with the notions of Whiteness and Christendom, Europe (including the Russian empire in this instance) also forged the variety of antisemitism that would ultimately be advanced by the Nazis.
To this day, the successor states of former European colonies including the US cite the Doctrine of Discovery as their root source of legitimacy. This is reinforced by white supremacist ideology outrageously insisting indigenous peoples had no “civilization” in the first place, so that instead of unjustly plundering the world, the White Christian West was merely building civilization where none had been before. It follows the same racist reasoning, then, to claim that disparities in wealth between the West and its colonies were due to intrinsic differences in peoples and/or some need for a people to “mature” for generations under Christianity.
By the early 1900s, antisemitism remained homogenous across the West. Most notably it helped fuel the rise of Nazi Germany, which left the US in a privileged position to capitalize on WWII and centralize bourgeois power under its own flag. Still homogeneously antisemitic, the West, led increasingly by the US and witnessing the deterioration of the traditional colonial relationship, determined to concentrate much of its Jewish population in Britain’s colonial territory in Palestine. The status of Jews as non-white was leveraged both to drive Jews out of the imperial core and to encourage an impression that they could only become and remain liberated by forming a “homeland” in the fashion of the West. This both gratified antisemites by voluntary deportation of Jews, and solved the problem of holding on to an increasingly unprofitable colony.
The present result would seem to be a near-universal Zionist stance within the Western bourgeoisie (which is the bourgeoisie in the global sense) and its institutions, and an Israeli ethnostate that is nominally Jewish but is in fact syncretized with White Supremacism as evidenced by their treatment of black Ethiopian Jewish immigrants.
Fascinating, and that book is now on my e-reader. It sounds more detail oriented than my usual but frankly I could stand to pay more attention to detail
All of that is news to me, though I’d like to clarify that when I said the Doctrine is cited as a root source of legitimacy, I did think that it had more impact in its time than it sounds like it really did, but I particularly mean it gets affirmed in relatively recent court cases. For instance, Justice Ginsburg name-drops it in Sherrill v. Oneida Indian Nation
it getting name-dropped in the US supreme court was definitely not something i expected when i was looking it up, there’s something to that modern usage in jurisprudence but i don’t know very much about it. it seems totally removed from it’s original context, to be honest—but it’s well in keeping with the thesis about judges working backward with their justifications for theft.
Yeah, the present context is the only one I’m familiar with in anything resembling depth, but it’s the only name I know for “The thing where European nations only respected each other as equals to do traditional war and commerce with, while all others were slated for genocide and enslavement.”
I’m looking forward to reading Uncommon Dominion. Anticolonial theory beyond “it’s plainly evil and any mystification of that fact is plainly racist” is very new to me, and at this rate I only have about a week left before I finish Wretched of the Earth