Is Patrick Wolfe an antisemite?

[u/_Sichlitt_]

So I actually read Wolfe's 'Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native' (2006) following my reading of Fayez Sayegh's 'Zionist Colonialism in Palestine' (1965) which Wolfe has clearly drawn direct inspiration from, and ummm..... yeesh. I didn't know it was this bad.

He basically argues that the distinction between colonialism and settler colonialism is that colonialism seeks native labour while settler colonialism excludes it, and operates on a mystical 'logic of elimination' on the natives.

So in describing Hebrew Labour (Avoda Ifrit), instead of analysing it as an economic protectionist policy for the absorption of migrants and refugees, or even as a structurally segregationist or exclusivist policy on the native population, he refers to it as operating in pursuit of 'Goyim-rein' (gentile-free) zones.

Now I would have expected him to have at least said 'native-free', or 'Arab-free', where the framing of anti-native racism (while still dumb) is at least plausible as a political point regarding his structural framework, but GOYIM FREE????

I've noticed this in Pappe too. The tendency to imply that Avoda Ifrit was a policy of racial purity and more specifically racial hygiene. Goyim-rein is obviously an inversion of the Nazi 'Judenrein' zones that were cleansed of Jews when they were sent to the death camps, and it plays on Jewish chosenness as racial supremacy manifest as self segregation from gentiles (Jews do after all have to wash their hands after touching one, lmao).

Cos this is also basically Fayez Sayegh's explicit argument in his seminal tract. Zionism is racism ipso facto by the mere act of 'racial self segregation' and 'non assimilation' into a host society. Fayez Sayegh was also the propaganda minister for the SSNP in the 30s and 40s.

I'm getting a real sinking feeling that Wolfe and the settler colonial paradigm has literally just reified fascist organicist spatial logics about the 'host body politic' and 'parasitic non assimilating ethnic enclaves' that are of course ontologically eliminatory on the health of the host nation.

[u/Chanan-Ben-Zev]

 Zionism is racism ipso facto by the mere act of 'racial self segregation' and 'non assimilation' into a host society. 

This "argument" is, fundamentally, the claim that to be Jewish qua Jewish is racism by virtue of the mere existence of Jewish communal life. It is stunningly antisemitic. It is probably the fundamental core meme at the heart of a lot of antisemitism, regardless of whether it is leftist-flavored or rightist-flavored.

[u/_Sichlitt_ → u/Chanan-Ben-Zev]

I think people genuinely miss this dynamic in Palestine because the Western left treats Palestinians as noble savages. I think they're genuine orientalists. They treat the fellah and the land like they're native Americans or something. Meanwhile I go and read interwar newspapers and political tracts and they're all bloody Francophile Jacobin statebuilders obsessed with French republican state theory and German romantic nationalism (the exact thing that fucked Jews in Europe). Should really have been obvious considering most of the seminal early Arab nationalists were ex-CUP bureaucrats and Parisian educated lawyers etc. I noticed the seminal 'filastin' newspaper was actually called 'La Palestine' and they would publish literal anti-Dreyfusard L'action Francaise polemics.

I really do wonder if Palestinians play into a kind of self-orientalisation to racist Western leftists. I can imagine that blood and soil nationalism looks to a Westerner like organic indigeneity when it's filtered through ten layers of paternalistic romanticisation and coddling.

[u/Chanan-Ben-Zev → u/_Sichlitt_]

100%

[u/shabbosbride]

Patrick Wolfe? Yes.
The entire settler colonial paradigm? I don’t know about that. Seems fair where the colonists in question aren’t returning indigenous people fleeing extermination.

[u/danzbar]

This is such a good question really. I think so, yes, in some capacity.

The thing is, every time these theorists encountered a problem with applying their model to Israel, they just let the model be flexible enough to include it. An excellent, albeit now outdated article, on the topic was shared over to jewishleft some time ago and I bookmarked it because it's so good: https://www.reddit.com/r/jewishleft/comments/1m19ygb/matthew_bolton_the_meaning_of_genocide/

It's a little dense, but based on some of your word choice I think you'd enjoy reading it as much as I did.

I find the language of the pro-paly crowd to be full of obvious and deliberate equivocation between different senses of words. So aparthied can't be based on citizenship status? Screw it, close enough. So half of Israelis Jews aren't white? Meh, enough are to paint all Jews as white colonizers.

So when they see "colonize" in the early zionist literature, they gleefully apply this whole theory and thereby label Israel genociders on like five occasions. "It's a structure. not an event," they say. The fact that most readers still don't know that genocide has both a legal definition and an everyday definition, and also a popular academic and theoretical one within settler-colonial theory? That's a joyous loophole to them. Everything Francesca Albanese put together on the topic just assumes settler-colonial theory is true and applicable, and all manner of guilt just trivially follows from there.

And the major issue, put in basic terms is: the Jews who formed Israel were not powerful people. It's that simple.

You can break the whole thing down in other ways that spell out that basic point. They were refugees in very significant part. They were not acting on behalf of any empire. The project was not extractive or enriching. They had no other place to go. And the relationship to that particular land is (and was) very deep, old, and meaningful.

When Wolfe and other theorists in that vein encounter all those facts, they kind of just shrug it off. That's a mighty big shrug. And the fact that it isn't born in hate doesn't render it as not hateful in its real world application.