Distinguished professor of sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara:
Israel was founded on ethnic cleansing, violence, and terrorism
By Ali Amiri
Social critic
William I. Robinson, a distinguished professor of sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, is not only a scholar whose research encompasses globalization, transnationalism, political sociology, and development and social change, but also an activist, who endeavors to link his academic work with global movements striving for social justice, popular empowerment, participatory democracy, and people-centered development.
In the following in-depth interview, Professor Robinson details the influential Israel lobby within American universities, political institutions, and corporations. He then provides a profound historical analysis of how Zionists have shaped and controlled the narrative surrounding the Palestine-Israel conflict. Furthermore, he sheds light on the rise of fascism in Israel as a political tool for their overt apartheid and explores the racial nationalism inherent in Zionism and the fabricated mythology Zionists use to justify their occupation of Palestine. The interview concludes on a hopeful note, as Professor Robinson expresses his belief that as long as the Palestinians continue to breathe on their land, they are resisting the Zionists, their oppression, and their apartheid.
IRAN DAILY: As I understand, this particular book, ‘We Will Not Be Silenced’, attempts to document, frame, and contextualize the silencing of pro-Palestinian voices, as well as the voices of critics of Israel, by an entity referred to throughout the book as the Israel lobby. Is that correct?
ROBINSON: That is correct, but it’s a little more expansive than that. It has been going on for a very long time, obviously, since 1948. But this has intensified in the past 20 to 30 years, as gradually, the legitimacy of the Zionist project and the Jewish state has been challenged. The censorship and repression of anyone who criticizes Israel has been intensifying. And right now, we’re seeing a wave of censorship, a wave of repression on university campuses, public institutions, the government, the media, across the board; a wave of censorship and repression against anyone now criticizing not only Israel but also, of course, the genocide taking place in Gaza.
So, this hit me, in particular, in 2009. You may remember Operation Cast Lead, which was an earlier attack on and siege of Gaza. It was nothing compared to what’s going on now, and I publicly spoke against that on my campus. The University of California was infiltrated by this Israel lobby that we refer to — I want to get back to the Israel lobby in just a minute. They went after me and tried to get me fired from the university. That is when I became involved in Palestinian solidarity and, more broadly, in this fight against censorship and repression by the Israel lobby in the United States.
But this has been going on since before 2009, before that book, and it has intensified since then, and now it has reached levels never before seen. What I want to say about the Israel lobby is that it does exist in the United States and is a strong pressure group, which involves a lot of financial blackmail, purchasing of candidates in the political system, financing of the election of those senators or Congress members or local elected officials who are going to defend Israel politically and diplomatically, the US support for Israel, and the suppression of any solidarity with Palestine. It is an extremely strong lobby, but here is the point: it’s not just in the United States. It is what we could call the US branch of the larger global Zionist project that suppresses any critique of the project and any solidarity with Palestine. It’s not restricted to the United States and Europe at all. It’s worldwide.
For instance, the presidents of the universities of Pennsylvania and Harvard were both forced to resign. Not because they support Palestinian freedom, but because they did not crack down hard enough on Palestinian solidarity activities on their respective campuses.
Those solidarity activities were carried out especially by two organizations: one is Students for Justice in Palestine, and the other is Jewish Voices for Peace. These are anti-Zionist Jews in the United States. The younger Jewish population in the United States is increasingly turning to anti-Zionism. They’re increasingly saying “not in our name,” and they are protesting. They’re leading this mass wave of protest and solidarity with Palestine that’s taking place across the United States right now. And that, in turn, means that the Zionist lobby and all of their political representatives in the US political system and economy need to intensify their crackdown, their repression, and their censorship. So, everything laid out in that book is now multiplied a thousand times over amid this genocide.
For instance, you cannot get a job on university campuses if you have previously participated in Palestine Solidarity. The Zionist network and the Israel lobby will block you from getting a job, and if you are a professor, you won’t get tenure. Their influence comes from donating a lot of money to universities and to other organizations and, as I’ve mentioned, political campaigns. More and more, corporations are firing their employees who speak out in favor of Palestine or simply against the genocide.
If you were familiar with the term Hasbara, then you would know that it’s literally a branch of the Israeli Ministry of Defense, it’s public, and it’s the whole of Israel’s political diplomatic apparatus around the world. It’s systematic propaganda and systematic targeting of any of Israel’s critics around the world, and this is how it works.
It is evident that achieving such influence and control requires significant effort and strategic maneuvering. How do you explain the success of the Israeli lobby in maintaining its influence for such an extended period, considering the challenges involved in unilaterally shaping and influencing the narrative on a topic as divisive and controversial as the Israel-Palestine conflict?
That’s an extremely important question, and in order to answer it, we need to focus on the historic alliance — which continues today into the early 2020s — between the Zionist project and what has been Western imperialism, especially US imperialism (or the US Empire). The United States and Western Europe supported the formation of the Jewish state, specifically as an outpost for the expansion of world capitalism into the Middle East at a time when the Middle East was going through decolonization; when Arab nationalism and even socialist and communist and other revolutionary movements and popular mass struggles were taking off in the Middle East. Israel became the outpost to keep control over the Middle East.
That alliance was forged very early on between the larger project of US foreign policy, which has since become a policy of promoting global capitalism around the world and defending global capitalism, and the Zionist project as a representative of that US foreign policy in the Middle East at this time.
So, we cannot understand the power of the Israel lobby outside the relationship of Israel to what we can call historical imperialism and to global capitalism now in the Middle East. That’s a giant part of the story.
The other part of the story, again, is that their control over financial levers is very powerful. I can try and put forth a discourse of support for Palestine, a discourse that critiques Zionism as a right-wing, racist, and imperialist project, but I don’t have financial support behind me. So, I can’t translate my own discourse into financial leverage and therefore into political leverage. That’s not so in the case of the Zionist discourse and of the discourse of the Israel lobby.
I want to add one other point here, i.e., historically, something else has been going on. The Holocaust involved the murder of six million Jews. But before I explain to you why I’m mentioning the Holocaust, I want to say that, of course, that was not the only holocaust in the last few hundred years. There’s the holocaust of the indigenous people in the Americas with 100 million victims, and the holocaust of the victims of colonialism all around the world, et cetera, et cetera.
But when we just speak about 1939 to 1945, that Nazi Holocaust took the lives of six million Jews. And that Holocaust and the Jewish suffering around the Holocaust have been manipulated and incorporated into the Zionist project, and, on that basis, Zionism was able to move from a minor ideology in the world Jewish community to the hegemonic ideology. That takes place in 1945, and especially 1948, and on through the state of Israel.
I’m saying all of this and going into the background to answer your question of why is this discourse so powerful. The biggest reason is that the discourse is aligned with US imperialism, intervention, and foreign policy and now, the larger global capitalist interests in the Middle East. But secondly, because an unbelievably powerful lobby group has been created among the Jewish American community, by manipulating Jewish suffering around the Holocaust. That is changing now because a significant portion of young Jews, as I just mentioned, are saying “not in our name,” and turning their back on all of this. So, it’s a very interesting and important time here in the US because these battle lines are being drawn now, very, very clearly.
Based on your explanation, it seems clearer now why the term “decolonization” as it pertains to Palestine provokes such strong opposition from Zionists, leading them to coerce social media platforms like X into banning the use of terms like “decolonization” or “from the river to the sea”.
Absolutely. Actually, what we are seeing inside Israel now is fascism, and I don’t use the term lightly — just like we don’t use the term genocide lightly. Genocide, however, has a specific definition: it’s the attempt to eliminate, in whole or in part, a people. So, it’s correct to use the term genocide regarding what Israel is doing in Gaza. But the other term I want to use, which is fascism, has an intellectual, analytical, and scholarly history as well. And everything indicates that fascism is now a project that is gaining domination, or hegemony, inside Israel, and it means political suppression. Our colleagues in Israel tell us you can be arrested if you talk inside Israel about the genocide going on in Gaza. But if you make Nazi-like statements about the need to totally wipe out Palestinians, call them animals, and so forth, you’re within the hegemonic discourse. So, there’s actually fascism emerging in Israel, and we have had the inklings of a fascist project here in the United States as well. I’m mentioning all of that because it’s true that speaking about decolonization, about apartheid, about genocide, will run you into big trouble with the powers that be, both in the US and especially in Israel.
I want to note something else as well: I want to go back to the point I was previously making that one of the key strategies in the Zionist lobby, and the US government, is to equate anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism. I just want to hammer home that point again: the reason they can try and make that equation is because they’re manipulating the Holocaust and the feelings around the Holocaust, of course, and no one wants to be anti-Semitic. People who believe in justice, freedom, and equality don’t want to be anti-Semitic. So, Israel’s whole legitimating discourse, the discourse that legitimizes the existence of a Jewish state, is based on manipulating the Holocaust and the feelings around it. So, if you keep hammering home that criticizing Zionism is anti-Semitic and is embracing the Holocaust, then you have a very powerful propaganda instrument.
Now that you’ve mentioned the rise of fascism in Israel, it seems like a good starting point for our audience to understand why Israel is often referred to as an apartheid state. Could you please elaborate on the pillars of apartheid and the similarities between today’s Israeli apartheid and the historic apartheid in South Africa?
Yes, apartheid is considered a crime against humanity, and there’s an international convention against it. In fact, early on after South Africa became liberated from apartheid in 1994, they sent delegations to Israel. They studied Israeli apartheid and discovered that it has four pillars. One is the systematic segregation of different populations; then there’s the subordination of one of those populations through its segregation, a different set of rights for two different groups. So, Israeli Jews have a whole set of rights that Palestinians — either in Israel or in the occupied territories — don’t have, i.e., one set of legal, civil, political, and social rights that are given to one group and not to the other. All of the pillars of apartheid are defined in international conventions against apartheid. All of those pillars are in place in Israel. What is remarkable is that the South Africans who have now sent multiple delegations to Palestine have repeatedly pointed out that Israeli apartheid is worse than South African apartheid ever was.
I want to go back to fascism because, of course, the only way you can maintain a system of apartheid, a system of settler colonialism, a system of Zionist racism and exclusion is through permanent repression at all levels. That includes, of course, the repression of free speech and political mobilization, political organization, and civil and political rights that we’ve been discussing, but it also means actual permanent physical repression. So, Israel has always been a police state. It’s been a police state right from the start. It was founded on ethnic cleansing, violence, and terrorism, and that is all documented.
When we talk about fascism in Israel, we want to say that the only way this system can be reproduced from one day to the next is through an all-out police state. And that police state really came into existence in 1948, and it has never gone anywhere. Now, it’s evolving from a police state into an outright fascist system. So, you’re getting even the breakdown of democratic constraints for the Jewish population itself.
One of the definitions of fascism is extra-democratic or extra-legal mechanisms of ruling when democratic or consensual mechanisms break down. So, of course, there were always extra-legal terroristic mechanisms of control over the Palestinians, but Israeli Jews enjoyed within their own Jewish rights minimal amounts of democracy, and that’s being broken down. I’m not just referring to removing the power of the Supreme Court in Israel to control the executive — which is the actual government in Israel, and the current government is the most extreme rightwing fascist we’ve ever seen, literally, since 1948. But the other thing going on, I want to reiterate, is that the civil and political rights of Israeli Jews are now simply being undermined. As I pointed out, you can be arrested for simply condemning the genocide. For any dissent right now, mobs of people will attack you.
Could you please explain the concept of racial nationalism, which Israel was built upon and centered around right from its inception? How did this ideology come to be and what does it entail, particularly in terms of creating an ethnically homogeneous nation?
Absolutely. Racial nationalism is an ideology that swept through Europe in the late 1800s. It’s an ideology that says that all peoples on the planet are divided into biologically determined racial groups and that each biologically determined racial group has its historic homeland, its historic territory, a place from where it has always been from and evolved, and that these territories should be biologically or racially pure. So, this was an ideology that, of course, underpins Nazism. That’s the first example that comes to mind. The Nazi program said there was a biologically pure German race that belongs to German soil. So, here’s the whole ideology of blood and soil and defending that soil with blood, and the mythology that the pure-blooded German Aryan race goes back to Teutonic tribes thousands of years ago.
This is known as racial nationalism, and it swept Europe. It was not just limited to the most egregious example of Nazism. There was also French racial nationalism, which said there’s a biologically pure French group that belongs to the French soil and dates back to the Gauls and the Roman times. Then there’s the Saxons, of course. The Anglo-Saxon racial nationalist ideology first emerged in England and then in the United States. We had our own version of racial nationalism in the 1800s, which became known here as the Manifest Destiny, claiming that the Anglo-Saxon race transplanted into the Americas was destined to create its racial national empire.
But here’s the point: Zionism grows out of, and is an integral part of, this racial nationalism. Zionism is the Jewish version of this historic racial nationalism. We have studied the whole history of Zionism and have all the historical records. It says that Jews are a specific race, a biologically distinct race. And now, before we continue this explanation, I want to fast-forward to the second decade of the 21st century and point out its absurdity: right now, Zionists are becoming desperate and are talking about a Jewish gene, as if human beings are biologically categorized into biological races on the basis of genes. So, they’re absolutely desperate to perpetuate this absurd Zionist ideology.
But let me go back to the story. So, early Zionism says that Jews are a particular race of people, and they’re a race that, just like racial nationalism calls for, needs their own land and their own territory. Let’s remember that Theodore Herzl, the founder of the Zionist movement, once said that they needed a territory anywhere in the world, and he first proposed Argentina. He also proposed Uganda. The only reason that Zionists then focused specifically on Palestine was that other early Zionists of this racial nationalist movement said, “Well, we need to somehow legitimate creating a nation for a Jewish race, and the way we can find that legitimation is through the Old Testament.”
This mythology that Jews all over the world originally occupied and owned and lived in Israel and were displaced by the Romans and then wandered the world until they would come back home is the Zionist mythology. It actually has nothing whatsoever to do with the historical record. First of all, we know that Judaism is an ancient religion originating in what was today’s Palestine and other parts of the Middle East. But Judaism spread through conversion from 200 BCE to 300 AD — that 500-year period — into the larger Mediterranean area into North Africa, into what is today southern Yemen, into Iran, and so forth. It spread through conversion. So, you never had a single Jewish tribe or anything of the sort. And then, in the eighth century, the Khazar Empire, which ruled the land between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea, converted to Judaism.
The empire had Slavic origin. Today’s Russians, Slavic and Eastern Europeans, and Ukrainians are their descendants. The rulers of the Khazar Empire adopted Judaism completely through conversion because they wanted to carve out their political autonomy as an empire, and, in order to do so, they wanted to distinguish themselves from the Arab empires, the Persian empires, and the Byzantine empires that were Christian and Muslim. Therefore, they adopted Judaism, and that’s the biggest way that Judaism spread around the world. Judaism has always been a faith community, not a people, much less a race. Human races don’t exist. We’re all the same biological race.
So, the Zionist project was to create the myth of the Jewish people, a Jewish race, which then, through this racial nationalist ideology, needed a specific homeland. The legitimating discourse for all of that became the Old Testament and, therefore, specifically Palestine.
Let’s shift the focus back to the present. When discussing Zionism and its seemingly absurd ideology, there appears to be a sense that the US’s unwavering support for Israel should have been reevaluated at some point. Is it fair to say that the world is finally realizing the absurdity of this unconditional support and that it’s time for it to stop? Or do you believe this support will continue for a while longer?
Well, US support is going to go on for a lot longer. But what is correct is that the pressures against that support, the opposition to that unconditional support, is growing very rapidly. It has already exceeded the bounds of anything we have previously seen. I mean, ever since I was a teenager, as soon as I learned about this, I’ve been in solidarity with Palestine. But it was really in 2009 when I actually became involved in it. And of course, that was the year of the book, ‘We Will Not Be Silenced’. But since 2009, and even prior to that, I’ve never seen anything like what’s taking place right now in the United States, in Europe, and of course, all around the world in the former Third World, Africa, Latin America, and, especially, the Middle East. There’s always been rock-solid support for Palestinians, for the decolonization of Palestine, for Palestinian liberation, but I’ve never seen anything like what’s taking place in the United States and in Western Europe right now.
So, there is great pressure to end unconditional US and Western support for Israel, but that’s not going to have any effect in the short term, absolutely not, because you’re trying to peel away at something that goes to the very core of US foreign policy establishment ever since the 1940s and, especially, since 1967.
What is going to happen, though, is that as this rock-solid support for Israel and, more generally, for interventionist and aggressive US foreign policy around the world is increasingly challenged, you’re going to have more and more political crises in the United States. You’re going to have the system continue losing its legitimacy. President Biden has already jeopardized his possibilities for reelection next November because he’s lost so much legitimacy due to his administration’s association with genocide. Of course, the South African suit in the International Court of Justice is aggravating all of these contradictions.
So, in essence, you’re suggesting that there might be no hope for Palestine due to this undying support.
It’s very important what you’re asking, but let me first say there most certainly is hope for Palestine. If I gave that impression, it is because, first, we have to make an objective analysis of what’s going on. Then, we can have a political assessment of where the hope lies. There absolutely is hope for Palestine, and that’s what I was trying to get at with the mass uprising here in the United States, the likes of which we’ve never seen in support and defense of Palestine and against genocide.
Secondly, we have to remember that even though Palestinians in Gaza are being subjected to genocide right now, the military resistance to the Israeli siege is quite significant. It’s not clear that Israel is going to win the military battle. Even if it wins the military battle, at what cost?
Ultimately, I want to make this point crystal clear: the source of all the hope for Palestine is the resistance of the Palestinians themselves. And I’m not just talking about Hamas, and I’m not just talking about the military resistance. Every single Palestinian with every single breath they take in Palestine is resisting the occupation, is resisting Zionism, is resisting genocide. That’s where it starts. If Palestinians laid their hands down and said, “Oh, well, we’ve lost and we’ll march to Jordan and to Egypt and elsewhere,” sure, then there would be no hope. But Palestinians aren’t doing that. It’s Palestinians’ steadfast resistance that sparks Israel to commit genocide, which, in turn, spurs solidarity with Palestine worldwide.
Right now, Israel and the United States are losing. They have lost the war of legitimation. They’ve lost legitimacy. Their policy, their practices, the genocide. They have lost legitimacy in world public opinion. They might temporarily be winning on the military battlefield, but they’re losing on the political battlefield. So, there is a lot of hope here.
Now, something else may take place. We are seeing plenty of resistance in the West Bank, but we haven’t seen a full-scale Intifada yet. But the pressure is building. The West Bank is under complete siege, and resistance there is growing. But if this breaks out into an all-out Intifada, and if Palestinians inside Israel are pressured to the point where they join an Intifada, then you would have another change in the political-military equation or, at least, the political correlation of forces in the political equation.
The battle for legitimacy has already been lost by the Zionists and by Washington, and there most certainly is hope for Palestine. The role of us, who are not Palestinian and not directly struggling inside Palestine, is to step up our support for Palestinian freedom in every way possible because what’s at stake in Palestine right now is all of humanity. The Palestinian resistance has become a symbol that has touched a raw nerve all around the world because we see ourselves in it, and this crisis imposed on us by global capitalism is reflected in what’s happening in Palestine.