This is an edited version of the talk given by Moshé Machover to the regular TAS fortnightly Zoom discussion on Monday 10 March 2025. The full discussion can be watched here.
I am going to address the cardinal aims of the Israeli state. In fact, they are the long-term aims of Zionist colonisation. They are rooted in the fundamental nature of the Zionist project. It is not as if these aims have been invented recently. They are a work in progress but the regime has been consistent in its aims and methods and in adapting opportunistically to changing circumstances. It has to be admitted that it is one of the most successful projects in recent history. If you look at the discourse of Zionism from its very beginning you can clearly see the seeds and the reasons for what is happening long after.
First, ethnic cleansing. I think every discussion of the Zionist project and its interaction with its victims must begin with a Marxist characterisation. It is often said that Zionism is settler colonialism. This characterisation is borrowed from academic post-colonial discourse. It is partially correct but it is not precise enough from a Marxist point of view; it can be confusing. The question you have to ask is: does the characterisation of a colonial project as settler colonialism apply to South Africa, for example? If you look at the academic discourse you will see it often is applied to South Africa. For a Marxist, the point is to look at the political economy and if you look at the colonisation from this perspective you will see that there is a vast difference between the Zionist project and the colonisation of South Africa. The question is who are the direct producers? In the case of South Africa, Indigenous people did the bulk of the direct production.
The Zionist project aimed from the beginning at the creation of a Jewish nation-state in Palestine. This implied that it would not rely on the labour-power of the Indigenous people. In this respect, Zionist colonisation is what Kautsky characterised as a ‘work colony’, in that direct production is done by the settlers themselves. I prefer the term ‘exclusion colonisation’. This type of colonisation does not rely on the labour-power of the Indigenous people; they are surplus to requirements. The settlers take over their land and resources. Indigenous people are not just unnecessary and a nuisance, they are a definite hindrance to the project of creating a Jewish nation-state. You could not create a Jewish nation-state of a modern capitalist kind with a large part of the population being non-Jewish.
A lot of people who have not studied the history of Zionism believe that ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians as in Gaza is something new. People do not realise that if you look at the internal discourse of the Zionist movement, the documentation, and the major figures of the Zionist project made numerous references to the need to get rid of the Palestinian Indigenous population from the land of Israel. So, this is nothing new. What is new is the huge scale of what is going on before our eyes in Gaza.
What is less reported in the media is that the moves towards ethnic cleansing are taking place not only in Gaza, but in the West Bank where there’s a much larger population of Palestinians. For example, in the refugee camp near Jenin, 40,000 people have been uprooted and made homeless, while the refugee camp has been destroyed. The term ‘refugee camp’ is misleading. These camps that are all over the occupied territories of the West Bank, and also in Gaza, Lebanon and other neighbouring countries, started as people living in tents or temporary accommodations but over the years have evolved into shanty towns and more recently they have developed into neighbourhoods or suburbs of towns. They are mostly brick buildings as you would find in every badly planned town. Imagine a town of 40,000 people that is de-populated, destroyed and its people just thrown out to find a place to sleep wherever they can. This has been happening in recent days in the West Bank and it has been little reported. This is a replication of what you can see on your screens from Gaza. The methods are the same. People are made homeless in this way. In the rural areas, Palestinian farmers and shepherds are subjected to increasing attacks from settlers accompanied by Israeli soldiers, almost daily pogroms against small settlements and villages. This is accompanied by deliberately provocative acts, for example, the historical An-Nasr mosque in Nablus has been vandalised. The holy books of the Quran have been deliberately vandalised, burnt and thrown on the floor. It is not shown on the BBC, of course, but if you follow events on Al Jazeera you will see acts that strike you as deliberately provocative.
What is the point of this huge displacement of tens of thousands of people in the West Bank? What is the purpose of perpetrating deliberately provocative acts? It is pointing in a very clear direction. If you go back historically, the major acts so far of ethnic cleansing of Palestinians by the Zionist project was during the 1948 Nakba, when about 750,000 Palestinians were ethnically cleansed from what became Israel. This was a huge proportion of the Palestinian population. The second wave of ethnic cleansing, not remembered too well, was during the 1967 war. Also, a majority of the Syrian population of the Syrian Golan Heights annexed to Israel were ethnically cleansed. These acts were perpetrated in a time of war, which provides a convenient context where ethnic cleansing can take place. Indeed, Israel was planning to do a major ethnic cleansing in 2003 when it was aware that an attack on Iraq was under consideration.
What the recent war in Gaza has shown is that you do not need a war to happen for other reasons and use it as a cover for ethnic cleansing. You can make use opportunistically of any event that is seen as a major terrorist attack and use that to trigger off a major ethnic cleansing. This is what has been happening since October 7 2023, in the case of Gaza. And it seems ominously clear that what Israel is trying to do is deliberately escalate the conflict with the Palestinian population in the West Bank to engage in a major provocation hoping that this will trigger a reaction of resistance, armed resistance. Sooner or later, there will be an incidence that can be depicted as a major terrorist attack accompanied by atrocities, and this can be used to perpetrate a major ethnic cleansing in the West Bank. This I think is the only rational explanation of what Israel is doing now in the West Bank because it cannot be explained by any short-term considerations of security. You don’t make 40,000 people homeless and destroy their whole town or suburb in order to fight resistance, you do it in order to generate resistance. This is the point, contrary to the excuses that you hear made by Israeli spokespersons on the BBC that what they are doing is fighting terrorism. In fact, they are not fighting terrorism. They deliberately provoke terrorism because they can use it as an excuse for ethnic cleansing.
I want to now turn to the other major goal of Zionist colonisation that also follows from its nature. One of the unique features of the colonisation of Palestine if you compare it to similar processes in Australia, for example, is that the settlers did not come from the metropolis. What I mean is the settlers in Australia had Britain as their mother country. The same applied to North America and other cases of settler colonialism. The Zionist colonisation project did not have a mother country. It had to look for a surrogate mother from the very beginning. You can find it in the discourse of the first leader of Zionism, Theodor Herzl. Surrogate mother is not his expression but that is the essence of what he was saying and what subsequent leaders have referred to. The Zionists have had to get the sponsorship and assistance of a major world power and make a deal with it and get the protection of that power as a surrogate mother country in exchange for services rendered: to become an arm of imperialism in the Middle East.
In the beginning, the Zionist movement tried to solicit Germany and Herzl himself tried to get a deal with a German Kaiser, but this did not work. The first deal that did work was with Britain and it was formalised in the Balfour Declaration of 1917. This was a deal whereby Zionist colonisation of Palestine was supported, in exchange for what the first British governor of Jerusalem, Sir Ronald Storrs, described as having “a little loyal Jewish Ulster in a sea of potentially hostile Arabism”. It did not last longer than the late 1930s because Britain was by then losing its hold on the Middle East. For a brief period, France was the surrogate mother – in an episode that has been forgotten – in exchange for Israeli assistance against Nasser’s Egypt, whom the French thought was giving too much help to the Algerian Uprising. So, in connection with confronting the Algerian resistance, France gave its sponsorship to the Zionist project.
By the late 1960s and continuing until this day, the surrogate mother has been the United States. In order to secure its role as the attack dog of imperialism in the area, Israel needs to be hegemonic and to be the undisputed power in the region. This it has almost succeeded in doing although there have been one or two impediments to Israel’s total hegemony, notably Iran. Israel has therefore been working hard to provoke a regime change in Iran – preferably by military means. A war against Iran – if Israel gets the necessary green light from the United States – would have the double benefit from an Israeli point of view of getting rid of an obstacle to its hegemony but at the same time provide a smoke screen for major ethnic cleansing.
A recent development is that a new obstacle to Israeli hegemony is possibly arising and this is happening in Syria. It would seem Turkey is making a serious bid to dominate Syria. HTS, the organisation that has taken hold of Damascus and is making a bid to become the government is strongly supported by Turkey. According to well-informed sources, it is acting as Turkey’s ally. This would mean that Turkey will insert itself as a strong power next to the Israeli border. The Israeli reaction has been to immediately occupy a sizeable chunk of land adjacent to the long-annexed Golan Heights and to declare the whole area south of Damascus as a no-go area for the Syrian army. If you look at the map, Damascus is not far from the Israeli border and the area that Israel wishes to control militarily reaches up to 5km south of Damascus, so the capital of Syria is now in danger of being besieged from the south by Israel. This is, in my opinion, a way of forestalling a new Turkish challenge to Israeli hegemony.
This is a focus of a possible major confrontation, as a Turkish challenge to Israel would be qualitatively different from the Iranian one. Turkey has well-known ambitions under the present regime of Erdogan to extend its influence in the Middle East. The significant difference between the position of Turkey and Iran is that Turkey is a member of NATO, so Israel could find itself in possible conflict with NATO.