Countering the BDS Settler Colonial Narrative

by S. Ilan Troen

Ben Gurion University of the Negev, emeritus

Stoll Professor of Israel Studies,
emeritus (Brandeis University),

Academic Engagement Network

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This resource provides the full transcript of Professor Troen’s speech about countering the settler colonial narrative at the root of the BDS movement.

EXCERPTS:

…the battle against BDS is not merely to be won at the annual meetings of academic organizations or in response to boycott and divestment campaigns on campuses. What we really need to do is to engage in enhancing literacy; this is the central issue. You can confront a whole list of topics – human rights, who’s responsible for the various wars, why there isn’t peace, why Israelis behave poorly towards the Palestinians despite having endured the Holocaust – but ultimately the original topic, the most fundamental topic is the right of the Jews to claim a natural place in the Land of
Israel.

The facts are that the original notion of settler colonialialism, not only by Frederickson, but by Rodinson and others, was actually an economic analysis, an extension of Hobson and Lenin’s books on imperialism and colonialism, adapted to the present. It fits nicely with Marxism because the analysis is that what motivates people are material interests. However, the fact is that Zionism never paid; it was, to use the words of Baruch Kimmerling, economically irrational. … There was no mother country or father country hoping to reap the profit from the money that came from Europe to the “colony,” as it were; it didn’t go back from the colony to Europe.

This reminds us why the settler-colonial paradigm doesn’t work. In
every other case that we know of, settlers took Europe with them to
their new homes. For instance, outside the University of Sydney there is a community called Piccadilly, reminiscent of London. I was born in the United States – in a New England that contains a multitude of place names that resonate with the names of the places of origin of the settlers. There are also genuine American place names, which is what the word “Chicago” is: some say it’s a version of a local Native American word that means garlic or smelly onion.

But what did the Zionists do? In Israel there is no New Bialystok, there is no New Moscow, there is no New Berlin, there is no New Europe. Nor is there a New Baghdad or New Casablanca. Their place names came from their history, often from the Bible. The people who came did so to rediscover themselves. They were a p

Are Jews really outsiders to the Middle East? Through the sixteenth century, most of the Jews of the world lived in the Middle East, beyond the Mediterranean. Even the Jews who came to Palestine in the early periods of Zionism came from lands that were proximate
to the Ottoman Empire. The distance between Odessa and Tel Aviv is the same as the distance between Sana’a in Yemen and Tel Aviv. If you think about the extent of the Ottoman Empire, the Turks almost conquered Vienna in 1683. At that time, if you were a Hungarian, a Bulgarian, or a Romanian or lived in some parts of the Ukraine, or were a Greek Jew, you would have been a resident of the Ottoman Empire.

…

Additionally, Palestine was a marginal backwater in the nineteenth century. The population of Palestine was 250,000 in 1800. By 1900 it was half a million. By some estimations, there were up to six times as many people in Palestine 2,000 years ago than there were in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, perhaps up to 3,000,000 people. This area had once been an important part of the Roman Empire.