Does the swagger of the Israeli state contain within it the envious rage of the settler towards the indigenous: the destruction of Gaza City under the guise of eliminating terrorist buildings, the targeting of negotiators in Doha, the giddy tiktoking of its soldiers (somewhat in abeyance now), the pointed cruelties of West Bank settlers—all of it and more? For Zionism, the envy is doubled because the movement has now adopted the notion that Jews are the indigenous people of Palestine. But you can’t be indigenous to a land, based on the guarantee of a book. To do so, is to put the written sign, the abstracted signifier, as the foundation of your claim. A codified sign can never ground itself. A book must be interpreted. So the settlement of Israel becomes an act of contract, of concession, of settlement by claim. Indigeneity is by contrast continuous association with pre-linguistic connection—children born of women and given life by the land. Such a relationship can never be completed.
Tellingly, the claim to Indigeneity was not actually a part of Zionism for several decades during its political origins. Theodor Herzl and others toyed with ideas of Uganda as Zion, and of a free state in Europe. The Revisionist Zionist, Ze’ev Jabotinsky’s argued that it could only be Palestine, but this was based on the strategic idea that Palestine alone would be capable of guaranteeing the possibility of holding and defending to death. He was tempted by the Ord River scheme as the only feasible alternative, but concluded that if and when the locals (namely, us) turned on them, they would be defenceless.
Zionists imagined an agrarian socialist society, whose solidarity and grounding would be a project of the future not the past. It would be achieved by the material practice of working the land. The orthodox Judaism associated with the older Jerusalem population—many of them anti-Zionist—was to be held tightly in check and limited by secular and modernist education systems. Claims to Jewish ‘indigeneity’ emerged as Palestinian nationalism crystalised in the 1960s, and as the agrarian socialist vision was steadily abandoned, first for industrialism, and now for a hyper-modern hyper-tech society-state. The opening of the settlements brought in a flood of American Jews fleeing not pogroms in Cleveland, but the crushing anomie of American life. These settlers wanted to live wrapped in the mythos of the Torah, and the sharp sense of life given by the contestation with an enemy. They honoured a three-thousand-year-old tradition in walled Miami-style condos built among the thousand-year-plus worked olive groves of the Palestinians. Israel’s neoliberal turn in the 1990s intensified this contradiction, destroying the last vestiges of social democratic solidarity, and requiring nationalist unity to be mediated through ever-more imposed symbolic acts, such as forcing a loyalty oath to the Jewish state on Israeli Arabs, the destruction of Bedouin culture, and more.
None of it has worked, because it never can. The temptation is to say there is a Zionist rage at play at this failure. The high-tech route is alienating society from the land which which sought to become one. The place is now dependent on the cyber-industries that have been developed from the tech used to devise the surveillance and weapons systems used on the Palestinians.
So too are many settler societies. We (Australians) live in a suburban society that used to rely on the Anglo myth of the Bush, and now try to nick Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander indigenous culture to substitute for the connection to Anglo culture many can no longer claim. Migration has turned us outwards, made us thalassic, coastal. Philip Drew’s book of several decades ago The Coast Dwellers, has proved prescient to what we are becoming. But we had enough of a run, enough of the ‘quality of sprawl’ to develop a sense of being here—one that we did not stress by claiming to be indigenous (because we could not). Ditto with Canada, New Zealand, etc. One’s suspicion is that there was simply neither time nor space for this to take hold in Israel before that version of the Zionist project was abandoned, turning kibbutzes into heritage/retro-chic.
But does a notion of ‘rage at indigenous envy’ explain anything? I don’t mean is it cogent and plausible. I mean is it just another novelty idea to attach to Gaza, to be able to say something about it that is neither ‘oh the humanity’ greeting card handwringing, or more of the endlessly recirculated and well-established facts: starvation used as a weapon, children used as target practice, killing the people you had agreed to negotiate with, and levelling the anchor city of Gaza block-by-block. There is nothing more to say, but we keep saying it. Israel has put itself at the centre of the fascist attitude—Goering’s ‘when I hear the word “culture”, I reach for my Browning [machine pistol]’. It becomes a celebration of mute force, prosecuted without dialogue, or any attempt to offer a justification remotely plausible.
The seventh trumpet has sounded, and the heavens have not opened. Gaza, this several-millennia city and region of the Abrahamic tradition and many peoples, is gone. Not merely its modern blocks, but its ancient churches, its mosques, its universities, its archives, its antiquities. Yes, indigenous envy surely, a rage at its very audacity to be, the standing affront of its reality, to Zionism, a movement that made itself into fantasy by its decision to abandon its own intent to become truly and incommensurably of the land.
But well, so what? What does one offer? Clyde Hotel fortune-cookies about the abyss staring back, smart remarks about IDF conscripts going crazy, and what Israel will become when they all have to come back? Decolonisation pollyanna-cope nonsense about Palestine’s eventual victory? There is the obvious fact that anyone with a shred of humanity on the Centre or the Right no longer even believe themselves as they mutter the mantra ‘Israel has a right to defend itself’. They’re like the Argentinian Nazi Borges encountered, crowing about the 1940 fall of France: ‘I realised he was as terrified as I was’.
The only honest response remaining appears to be an honesty about oneself and one’s thoughts. And these have turned, simply to revenge. Not now, not in five years, not the pathetic press-conference cosplay when two Palestinians shoot two Jewish Israelis at a bus stop, and the PFLP comes kitted out, wrapped in keffiyehs like boiled puddings, and claims it like they hijacked another 747. Not the lame response of the Arab petro-states when their own cities are bombed, squeezing mutterings of revenge between trips to Harrods. No, not now, but in ten, twenty years, should geopolitical forces recombine in new ways and a real response become possible. Do I wish for the annihilation of Israel? No, but I wish it very ill indeed, as an entity. Do I offer this as any sort of political programme? No. Do I feel any shame at it? Really, no. At most a distaste for myself, for what is in my heart. What makes it worth listening to, is that of the eight billion on this planet, seven billion are the descendents of people colonised by the ancestors of the other billion. China, Pakistan, India’s governments may all make accommodations with this ‘colony of special character’, though I don’t have much doubt that their people feel otherwise. In a world where everyone gets contact with a smartphone before they get running water, I have no doubt that such a sentiment is multiplying by the day.
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By this logic, none of the peoples who considered themsleves Indigenous to the Levant are Indigenous – Assyrians, Coptics, Amazigh, etc., because they had language and books. Hebron, Safta, Tiberius and Jerusalem – plenty of evidence of Jewish continuity since antiquity. But never let facts get in the way of denial of Jewish connection to the Holy Land. I didn’t think you were such a woke blue hair, Guy. Or are you going to start cosying up to the woke right? Even Fuentes, the hater of Jews with the biggest megaphone in late 2025, recognises Jewish ontology’s inseparability from Israel.