I’ve been following very closely what’s been happening since October 7, since our campus has been the scene of protests ever since. I don’t think the people who organize demonstrations are antisemites. In fact, a large proportion of them are Jews. So we are talking about a conflation between Jew-hatred, ergo antisemitism, and a critique of Israel and Zionism in response to a political phenomenon carried out by a state. Off campus, some of the groups that demonstrated may have included slogans that were antisemitic. In fact, the pro-Israel right-wing demonstrations led by people like the Proud Boys and Christian-nationalist groups are quite antisemitic. But the attempt to argue that using a term like “intifada” is antisemitic is simply absurd.

Intifada simply means “uprising.” In the Palestinian case, an uprising against a fifty-six-year-old violent, illegal occupation. Now, if you believe that that Israeli occupation and control over the West Bank is God-given and that any opposition to it is antisemitic, that’s your problem. The occupier may as well be Danish, it really makes no difference. If persecuted, divinely inspired Danes were taking over Palestine, it certainly wouldn’t be anti-Christian to resist or to critique their settler-colonial project. But somehow it’s antisemitic to resist or to critique this settler-colonial project? This makes no sense.

That is, of course, correct. As I quote at the beginning of my book, when an ancestor of mine once wrote a letter to Theodor Herzl, he said: “You have an ancestral connection to this country.”

Christian and Muslim Palestinians believe in the Jewish people’s connection to this land. Does that give them a real estate deed? Do the Romans have the right to take over Libya and North Africa and Turkey because Rome controlled it once upon a time? Do the Muslims have the right to take back Spain because they controlled it once? Once upon a time, there was a Jewish minority in a part of Palestine. Does that give modern Israeli nationalists a real estate deed to the land? Of course not.

It’s a belief shared only by Israelis and, sadly, some evangelical Christians. It has weight in religious terms. Unfortunately, because of people like Arthur James Balfour as well as many American politicians, it does have political weight, as well. That’s a tragedy because it involves a violation of the rights of the indigenous population.

Zionism is not just settler colonialism. Zionism is not just a result of the European persecution of the Jewish people. Zionism is not just a reflection of an age-long longing for return to the land of Israel. Zionism is all those things — combined. And: it is a movement that consciously, explicitly, from the beginning, saw itself as a settler-colonial project. The land purchase agency for the Zionist project was called the Jewish Colonization Agency. That’s not some antisemitic fantasy by a bigoted historian trying to slander a purist national movement with biblical roots. This movement saw itself as a colonial project from the beginning: that’s what Herzl said, that’s what [Ze’ev] Jabotinsky said, and that’s what [David] Ben-Gurion said. I don’t really understand how historians can dispute this.

It was a national project. Herzl was a national founder of a national movement whose means were explicitly settler-colonial. There is historical precedent. We have the United States of America. We have Canada. We have Australia. We have New Zealand. These are all settler-colonial projects that have become national projects.

It’s been something that Palestinians have argued for from the beginning. Up until World War II, Zionists themselves never contended with this notion. Only after World War II did Israel start marketing itself as an anti-colonial project because for a couple of years they fought with the British. One of the reasons that the decolonial and pristine nature of Israel and Zionism was accepted in the West was a sense of guilt and a conviction that the Zionist understanding of the biblical narrative was correct. There’s a reading of the Bible by many Evangelicals and Protestants that lent credence to this argument. This covered up the secular colonial aspect for many Westerners.

You need to ask yourself: Is there an Israeli people, and do they have rights? Well, you have an American people. The American people’s rights are exercised at the expense of the indigenous population to this day, as happens in New Zealand and Canada and Australia. Those terrible injustices should be remedied. But there is, without any doubt, an American people. Today there is an Israeli people. The terrible injustices that were inherent in the dispossession of the Palestinians and the denial of their national existence have to be remedied. There’s no way around it.

I do think that there is something new and unprecedented. There has never been anything on this scale in terms of displacement and killing. The number of Palestinians killed in 1948 was around fifteen thousand. The number of Palestinians killed in Lebanon in 1982, Palestinians and Lebanese people, was under twenty thousand. In Gaza, we’re talking probably over forty thousand people who are dead by now. And it will go much higher when all the thousands of missing are counted and buried. In many respects, this is unprecedented.

There has to be a fundamental reorganization of the Palestinian national movement. And there has to be a unified consensus among Palestinians. This is a Palestinian problem. Israel, on the other hand, has to overcome its obsession with force when dealing with the Palestinians. It has to overcome the idea that there’s only one people with a right to self-determination in Israel.

In 2018, the Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People law, passed by the Knesset with constitutional force, stated there is only one people in this land with a right to national self-determination, which is the Jewish people. If you do not deal with that, you will never have a resolution, simply more war and resistance.

Finally, there has to be change on the part of the West. American, Soviet, later French, British, as well as German support for Israel has been indispensable to the oppression of the Palestinian people. Without that support, none of the things we see today could happen.

The United States is delivering weapons to bomb Palestinians. As long as the United States is making war on the Palestinians with its F-15s and its F-16s and F-35s, Apache helicopters and 155mm howitzers, there will be no change there, and the war on the Palestinians will continue. It’s not even a matter of pressure. It’s a matter of obeying US law and ceasing to give Israel the means to carry out this war on the Palestinians.

In fact, hundreds of Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank since October 7, 2023. I think these things are very closely connected. The link can be found in the statements of senior ministers in the current Israeli government like Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir, but also many other ministers in Likud. They’ve made no bones about the fact that they hope to ethnically cleanse both the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. They’ve made no bones about the fact that they want to expand the land controlled by settlers and to restrict the land controlled by Palestinians. They’ve even talked about resettling the Gaza Strip.

I’m not suggesting it’s a realistic scenario, but if you want to understand what they’re doing and why, this is the logic behind it. Changing the demographic balance in Palestine in favor of settlers, at the expense of Palestinians, has always been the intention of the Zionist project — from Herzl, through [Chaim] Weizmann, up to Ben-Gvir — not to create a bi-national state. The conviction of those early Zionists was that Europe would not let them live in safety. Their vision of a Judenstaat required a demographic transformation. A process of ethnic cleansing, of squeezing the indigenous population into smaller and smaller areas, similar to what happened in Ireland under Oliver Cromwell or with the Indian reservations in North America. That’s what’s attempted here.

I think that Germany and Western countries obviously bear a huge responsibility for the Holocaust and for the suffering of the Jewish people. And not only Germany. Before the “final solution” was decided in 1942, people could have escaped, but were often not able to do so because Western countries closed their doors. The United States and Britain with its enormous empire could have saved hundreds of thousands of people. France, too. But many Jews could not get into those countries because of racist, antisemitic immigration laws. There’s no reason why the Palestinians should suffer for the sins of Germany. They’re not the authors of the Holocaust. Today Germany and Western European countries, in different ways, seem to transfer their historical responsibility to Palestinians.

Mainly in the form of a virulently anti-Palestinian discourse. Germany is likely the most extreme example. But it’s essentially the same in the United States and many other Western countries. You hear this when mention is made of what happened on October 7 in connection to the Holocaust. It’s an invocation of the terrible suffering of the Jews in Germany and in Chişinău and the pogroms in the Russian empire as a comparison to what has happened in Palestine. But what happens in Palestine happens because of violent settler colonialism and because of resistance to it. That resistance was violent and created horrible atrocities. This is undebatable. But this is not a result of age-old European antisemitism.

Hamas rose because the PLO [Palestine Liberation Organization] moved away from armed struggle when it formally renounced violence, recognized Israel, and accepted to negotiate with it on the basis of the United Nations Security Council Resolution 242 beginning in the late 1980s. Hamas took up, in other words, the torch of armed struggle. If the PLO had achieved what it was trying to achieve, which was a Palestinian state on a tiny fraction of about 20 percent of Palestine, Hamas would not be with us today.

Hamas opposed this process, and it was successful in doing so, partly because under no circumstances could a fully independent, sovereign Palestinian state be realized under the Oslo process. This process led to a strengthening of Israeli occupation and colonization, an immiseration of the Palestinian people, a chopping of the West Bank into tiny little Bantustans. That’s what turned Hamas into a popular movement.

To determine how popular a group is, you can look at elections, of which there were only a couple, in 2005–6. In 2005, Hamas lost the presidential election. In 2006, they won the parliamentary election, with about 44 percent of the vote. They didn’t get a majority of the vote, but they got a majority in the Palestinian Legislative Council. Ever since, opinion polls have gone up and they’ve gone down.

Continued occupation and continued colonization will inevitably produce continued resistance. Whether it’s armed and violent, whether it produces these kinds of atrocities that we’ve seen on October 7 or not, occupation and colonization will inevitably produce resistance. If this conflict is to be resolved, it will have to be resolved between whoever is in power on each side. I don’t get to say that I will not sit down with this Israeli government because this general or that minister have blood on their hands. This is the elected government of the state of Israel. Whoever the Palestinians end up deciding is their representative, hopefully democratically, are the ones that Israel and the world are going to have to deal with.

The British and the Irish would never have come to terms if Britain had not agreed to negotiate with Sinn Féin in 1921, and with the Irish Republican Army [IRA] during the Good Friday peace process in the 1990s after the IRA killed hundreds of British soldiers and police and many civilians in Northern Ireland. The South African apartheid system would not have ended if South Africa had not negotiated with the African National Congress [ANC], an armed, violent group. The same is true of the French and the National Liberation Front [FLN] in Algeria. The Israelis and the Americans want to pick their own so-called representatives of the Palestinians and pretend that that’s a negotiation. That’s not a negotiation. That’s a diktat. And that’s not going to lead to a resolution.

There has been a discursive shift, absolutely. Today we are talking about apartheid, genocide, settler colonialism, and accountability. Never in the history of this conflict have you had such an open debate. Might that be reversed? Sure, it could. There was a similar shift in 1982 because of what Israel was doing in Lebanon. Israelis managed, with supporters in the United States, to repair that. There was another shift during the First Intifada. Can the current shift be reversed? I don’t know.

There is certainly a ferocious effort to reverse it on the part of the Western politicians and media. I hope that in spite of these rearguard efforts of an unjust status quo, this discursive shift will lead to serious accountability and reflection on part of those Western countries whose support is so indispensable to these atrocities, to this genocide in Gaza. It could not happen without you, Europeans, and us, Americans. We are responsible. Not just the Israelis.