by Amuna Wagner

When Israel began its destruction of Gaza after Hamas’ attack on October 7, my younger sister called me and said: “I used to be conflicted because of the Holocaust, but by now there’s only one possible stance.” 

Our family's history is a complex tapestry of identities. We are Germans of Jewish descent with the majority of our maternal family wiped out in the Shoa (The Holocaust). Our father is Sudanese, but growing up, our first experiences of alienation were not due to our Blackness in a white country, but rather our mother’s fear that Nazis could strip us of our right to live in Germany. We didn’t know much about Israel (or even where it was), but we knew that we had a right to return if necessary. My aunts had gone on holidays that would later become Birthright trips, a free ten-day visit to Israel for young adults of Jewish heritage, and fallen in love with the country. Their stories sounded like American summer camps; youth romance, sun, and adventure. Ironically, one of these aunts ended up falling in love with a Palestinian activist years later and renounced her so-called birthright. Her partner would sometimes ask me “But is it really okay to take somebody else’s land?”, and leave it at that. The family avoided further conversation, the rift was already too deep. 

Black Arab & Jewish?

My Jewish heritage was only present when learning about the Holocaust. To this day, I have deeply internalised the Third Reich as the most horrific state in history. In high school, we extensively analysed German crimes against Jews, Communists, and Eastern Europeans - never against people of colour. We briefly discussed the Middle East conflict, learning about wars that had been started by Arabs. At the time, it was fashionable to wear the “Palestinian cloth” as a scarf; nobody knew what it meant, it just looked cool. 

I decided to study International Relations and Arabic in London. The course I chose required me to spend a year in an Arabic-speaking country, an exciting prospect (I was torn between Egypt or Palestine, surprising the part of my family that had suggested I study in Israel) as I wanted to get closer to my Sudanese roots. Some people in my family took this decision as a betrayal. “How could you go there when your grandfather was a Jew?”, they asked as if Arabs are the enemy of Jews, and as if my Sudanese heritage didn’t already coexist with my Jewish heritage. This reaction opened the first cracks in the narrative I was raised in. Why would my desire to learn more about Sudanese culture, which in the case of my family is mostly Arab culture, offend my dead Jewish grandfather? 

Anti-Semitism vs Anti-Colonialism 

In my second year at university, a spokesperson of the state of Israel was invited to give a lecture, sparking protests amongst the students. Palestinian flags were raised around campus, to my family’s strong disagreement. They’re anti-semitic, they said. They never protest as strongly against anyone else, only against Jews, they said. But the protesters’ argument was rooted in anti-colonialism. They didn’t criticise the Jewishness of Israel, they criticised its practice of stealing land from those who have inhabited it for centuries. 

Colonialism had been absent from my prestigious German high school curriculum. When I learned about it at university, my world was reordered; I felt like I had been given glasses for the first time. To see How Europe Underdeveloped Africa; to see the origins of German systemic cruelty which didn’t start with the Holocaust, but with the genocides and concentration camps in German colonies that we never learned about. It sounds silly now, but I only realised at the age of 19 that genocide had not only happened to Jews. The German education system teaches the Holocaust in isolation, consciously divorcing it from a wider context of imperialism, racism, and capitalism. This intentionally paves a direct path to minimising every other atrocity, because we’re taught that, in comparison, it’s not as bad as the Holocaust. The Nakba is one of these atrocities. 

 Much Needed Context 

I was torn between my discomfort of hearing Israel critiqued, because it somehow felt like an attack on my family’s safety, and my new-found anti-colonial convictions. My Palestinian uncle’s words echoing in my head, I immersed myself in the history of the so-called Middle East conflict, and discovered Theodor Herzl (1860 – 1904), the father of modern Zionism.

Herzl was an Austro-Hungarian Jewish journalist who believed that Jews could not assimilate into European societies which had discriminated against and terrorised them for centuries. In an 1896 pamphlet entitled Der Judenstaat, The Jewish state, he proposed an independent Jewish homeland in historic Palestine (he also considered Argentina and Uganda). Herzl established Zionism as a political movement, encouraging European Jews to buy Palestinian land from absentee landlords, and lobbying the British and Ottoman Empires to back his cause. It is true that the trauma of anti-semitic violence in Russia and Europe built the foundation of Zionism. It is also true that the foundation of Zionism was constructed in the golden age of white supremacist colonial expansion, in collaboration with the British Empire, by white European men with colonial mindsets. Herzl envisioned a “New Society” in which modern, left-leaning, secular European Jews would bring nothing but benefit to the Arabs of Palestine who he disregarded as uncivilised and not worth consulting. 

Here’s a fact: early Zionists called themselves colonisers. They first organised themselves under the Jewish Colonisation Association in 1891, before renaming themselves the Palestine Jewish Colonisation Association in 1924. They rebranded their conquest when explicit colonialism went out of fashion after WWII. However, the intention to expel Palestinians from their land was clear from the start. In 1895, Herzl himself wrote that “we must expropriate gently the private property on the estates assigned to us. We shall try to spirit the penniless population [i.e. Palestinians] across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries, while denying it employment in our own country. [...] Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly.” 

Half a century later, in 1940, Joseph Weitz, Head of the Jewish Agency’s Colonisation Department, wrote that “Between ourselves it must be clear that there is no room for both peoples together in this country … We shall not achieve our goal of being an independent people with the Arabs in this small country. The only solution is a Palestine, at least western Palestine (west of the Jordan river) without Arabs … And there is no other way than to transfer the Arabs from here to the neighbouring countries, to transfer all of them; not one village, not one tribe, should be left … Only after this transfer will the country be able to absorb the millions of our own brethren”. In 2023, we witness the continuation of this colonial project, with illegal settlements sprouting across Palestine and a firmly established Apartheid system. 

In short: an anti-colonial critique of Israel is based on historical facts and entirely unrelated to Judaism. Judaism is a religion, Zionism is a political ideology that appropriates Judaism to gain legitimacy, just like other European colonial projects legitimised their violence through Christianity. Both times, religion is interchangeable with European civilisation which the coloniser offers as a gift or justification to the colonised. What makes the Zionist state unique amongst colonial projects is that it also appropriates German/European guilt for the atrocities of the Holocaust and feeds on legitimate Jewish fears. In reality, the “Jewish problem”, that Herzl was concerned with, was never solved by the creation of the Zionist state, it was outsourced and Europe never addressed its rampant anti-Jewish hate.

No More Complacent Victimhood 

If my white family read Herzl’s colonial intentions and learned about the violence of the Nakba, Israel as their imagined safe haven, a place they can project on as long as they don’t look at it too closely, would come into question. They would have to rethink their racist prejudice against Arabs (who are they if they are not terrorists and Jew-haters?), their Islamophobia, and, ultimately, our capitalist society that steals resources and land all over the world, so that we can live in affluence. This would complicate their victimhood and shake their imagined sense of safety, so instead they stand with Israel, allegedly in honour of my dead grandfather who will never be able to tell us what he thinks of the genocide in Gaza. 

When my sister said “by now there’s only one possible stance”, she meant that nobody will be free until we’re all free. Freedom first and foremost means land return as a building ground for peace. She meant that to be a Black feminist means standing up against western imperialism and the anti-semitism that legitimises Zionism. To be a descendant of Holocaust survivors means that no genocide should ever take place against any people. There’s only one possible stance: liberation and justice for the Palestinian people. 

SOLIDARITY WITH PALESTINE - A RADICAL BLACK FEMINIST MANDATE: A READING LIST