This past spring at the University of Michigan, the Shut It Down Party swept the Central Student Government (CSG). The party ran on a single-issue platform, vowing to shut down student government operations until the university divests $6 billion in holdings in the military industrial complex, and Israel by extension. Immediately, the Shut It Down Party’s success was challenged through the student government’s legal apparatus, a challenge it eventually prevailed over. In the limbo between the Shut It Down student-electoral sweep, and the conclusion of the student-court proceedings, a CSG meeting convened, during which it accepted comments from the public. One commenter, in an off-script moment during her rehearsed tirade against the Shut It Down Party, uttered the following:
“...Something I’ve noticed that is really interesting, that I’d like to point out, is that a lot of you are queers, are “Gays for Palestine”. And that’s really funny because you know that the [inaudible] literally stone you.”
The rest of her speech was laughable, empty whining aimed at insulting the integrity of the Shut It Down candidates, implying that by being voted into control of CSG, an extracurricular that primarily serves as resumé padding for politically ambitious undergraduates, they were engaged in, her words, “white-savior narcissistic groupthink”. Overall, an uninteresting and shallow critique unworthy of serious attention.
However, the commenter’s notion that “you”, meaning queer activists in support of Palestine, “would be stoned there”, struck me as particularly insidious piece of rhetoric, sticking with me long after the Shut It Down Party cleared the first round of its student-judiciary concerns. Here follows the fleshed out analysis of that commenter’s notion: “You Would Be Stoned In Palestine.”
What exactly does the Zionist refrain, “if you’re queer, you would be oppressed in Palestine”, meant to entail? Partially, it is to imply that queer anti-Zionist activism is not motivated by queer self-interest, and thus must be motivated by something else. Many find that this implication is easily debatable in the light of the oft-cited truth that queer Gazans’ lives are ruined or ended by the outcomes of Zionist ideology at a rate that dwarves the violence resulting from intra-cultural homophobia. Genuine activists showing solidarity with queer Palestinians realize they must start with stopping the literal bombs raining down upon them. However, the ground Zionists seek to gain with this particular implication seems to be that queer anti-Zionists, instead of being motivated by queer identity-politics, must be motivated by antisemitism or left groupthink, which is ultimately perceived by those of us who know better as a clumsy projection of the Zionist’s cognitive dissonance.
This form of Zionist rhetoric belongs to a broader propagandistic tendency called pinkwashing, which is the cynical tactic of pointing to a group’s relative legal or cultural tolerance of queer lifestyles to provide broad justification for that group's conduct towards a “less tolerant” other. Even as Israel refuses to legalize same-sex (or interfaith) marriage within its borders, pinkwashing frequently surfaces as a popular rhetorical strategy amongst Zionist ideologues. I think it’s both interesting and necessary to push this line of thought to its conclusions. Suppose that queer Palestinians do, in fact, experience a disproportionately high amount of hate and violence. How would a Zionist, like the CSG commenter, explain this phenomenon?
The ideology of Zionism insists that there is something fundamentally true of Palestinians, or Arabs in totality, that serves as grounds for their expulsion and subjugation at the hands of Israel; meanwhile Zionism’s broad range of adherents struggle to find consensus on the moral implications of their history or the character of the reality it has directly imposed. Many cite religious justifications, extrapolating justification from textual sources, while others hunker themselves into the present moment, simultaneously co-opting progressive language and insisting that they’re pragmatic humanists who only want what’s best for everyone now, while waiving thorough understanding of the history of how this moment came to be. As Zionism evolves its genocidal reality, its self-justification increasingly depends on the willful ignorance of recent history. Those who subscribe to Zionism often extend the basis of their beliefs beyond the reach of their critics by fixating on biblical history, or by stripping historical context from contemporary elements of resistance to Zionism, a category that extends further than the very existence of indigenous Palestinians.
It is from these anachronistic fixations that the layman Zionist notion of categorical Arab “backwardness” is derived. Paired with contemporary liberal values, the commenter’s peculiar critique of Palestinian homophobia becomes possible. However, in asking a Zionist to explain the existence of any negative cultural quality that they might ascribe to Palestine, they are likely to immediately cite something like fundamentalism or Islamism. If you ask them why these currents are relevant in Palestine, or elsewhere, Zionists are confronted with two options: they must either attribute these currents to a coherent historical basis, or to something inherent to the “kind of people” Palestinians/Arabs are. Many do a spectacularly awful job at pretending to choose the first, while many others simply opt for the latter.
Zionists who choose the first option face a problem, in that any honest historical analysis of the roots of fundamentalism/etc in Palestine lends itself to the rationalization of these currents in the face of the pressures that produced them. An obvious example can be found in the rise of Hamas, which the Zionist entity deliberately leveraged against the PLO, due to the threat posed to Israel by a secular Palestinian nationalist coalition. This is example is one of countless historical instances that shape the present reality in the Levant, including the absence of “progressive” attitudes, and if you trace them back to their root causes you arrive squarely at the feet of imperial dominance and colonialism.
In order to dodge this damning conclusion, Zionists often jump thousands of years further backwards, and say that the historical causes of the conflict between Israel and Palestine is actually an even more fundamental conflict: that between Jews and Arabs. Ironically, any historical basis for this argument also relies on some degree of biblical literalism, which has obvious overlap with the fundamentalism Zionists take such violent issue with. Never mind that this specific Zionist contention is not reciprocated, officially or otherwise, by their adversary. Hamas’s present charter reads:
“Hamas affirms that its conflict is with the Zionist project and not with the Jews because of their religion. Hamas does not wage a struggle against the Jews because they are Jewish, but wages a struggle against the Zionists who occupy Palestine.”
When anyone abstracts the conflict between Israel and Palestine to be a fundamentally religious conflict, they are simultaneously engaging in antisemitism and islamophobia. The notion that Jews and Arabs have Tom and Jerry DNA, or some set of inherent qualities that prevent them from coexisting, is simply racist. It reflects the attitudes that emanated from the dominant political-economic forces on the global stage as they took it: it is a thoroughly imperialist phenomenon. This simultaneous bigotry towards both Muslims and Jews is the ideological byproduct of the European, and incidentally Christian, world that felt threatened by the perceived encroachment of Judaism and Islam. That the “Christian” world has gotten its way in entrenching this bigotry has little to do with its theological qualities, but rather the brutal successes of European colonialism, and the development of its extractive political and economic relationships, or Imperialism. The ideology that justifies both the Imperialist’s and the Zionist’s antisemitism and islamophobia is the pseudoscientific, racist ideology that accompanied the West as it developed the institutions necessary to “study” the outside world, and itself: orientalism. In order for its ideologues to justify themselves, Zionists must ignore, or unilaterally alter, their conceptions of colonialism, imperialism, and orientalism, disregarding rigorously established definitions for what these systems are, and how they work, and how they apply to historically analogous examples. Simultaneously, they cede profoundly hateful arguments to Western antisemites, or make them themselves, in order to glean as much political power as they can from their role as an instrument, a colonial outpost, of Western Imperialism.
Zionism clings to this joint antisemitism/islamophobia because it protects its political state of affairs, meanwhile Zionists accept the orientalist Western perspective on Jews and Arabs until they start taking contradictory positions, sometimes bordering on Holocaust denial. This is especially evident in a common Zionist talking point, one that insists that the animosity between Jews and Arabs not only transcended the violence of the Holocaust, but directly caused it: the story of the meeting between Hitler and the Grand Mufti. Zionists, including Prime Minister Netanyahu, cite this meeting as the moment that a Palestinian encouraged and convinced Hitler to exterminate the Jews of Germany, rather than expel them. This is simply a historical fiction: it did not happen, not least because the policy of extermination was well underway by the time the meeting between Hitler and the Grand Mufti was held. Zionists citing this fiction deny that the Holocaust started at the time that it did and for the reasons that it did. They waive the indisputable truth that the Holocaust was the product of European fascism, and European antisemitism, all to throw the greatest travesty ever suffered by the Jewish people at the feet of Palestinians, who were under the colonial control of the British in that very same moment.
In summation: the dilemma that falls upon Zionists is that either the claim “Palestine has x negative quality” can be explained using evidenced historical relationships, and thus point strongly towards anti-imperialist/decolonial conclusions, or it can be explained using anti-Arab racism. This anti-Arab racism, of course, becomes muddled in the co-occurring bigotries of orientalism and Western imperialism that formed the basis for Israel’s foundation, including an insidious and virulent antisemitism.
The Zionists’ dilemma can be traced all the way from the “you would be stoned in Palestine” comment, as it is itself a microcosm of that dilemma.
Stone-throwing is a symbolic act associated with Palestinian resistance, declared as such on the volition of Palestinians themselves. The symbol is a frequent motif in Palestinian poetry and artwork, leading it to be reflected upon by an American intelligence officer, who identified stone-throwing as the symbol that “transformed (Israel) from the tiny, brave nation surrounded by hostile Arab nations to the oppressive state that condoned killing children in the street.” In 2015, legislation was passed by Israel to set a minimum sentence of three-years for stone-throwing, along with punishment for the parents of convicted children. The salience of the symbol is undeniable, immediately recognizable to anti-Zionists and Zionists alike.
“Stone-throwing” is distinct from “stoning”, which is a form of capital punishment referenced in the Bible, Torah, and Quran. Traditionally, stoning was inflicted on adulterers and sexual deviants, participants in “illegal sex”. Throughout Islam’s history, stoning (Rajm) has occurred only sparingly due to the stringent conditions on which the punishment is permissible. The practice is, undeniably, the product of a violent consolidation of patriarchal power justified by theology. However, it would be remiss for us to forget that the rampant rape culture documented in the IDF is also a violent consolidation of patriarchal power, as is the growing rightist push for the prohibition of abortion in the United States. These examples aren’t intended to be “whataboutisms”, rather a reminder that patriarchy is a yet unvanquished enemy of liberation everywhere, and that how its violence manifests depends on the full historical context in which it occurs. The Bible and Torah, just like the Quran, contain passages that have been referenced as justification for patriarchy, and yet no one should maintain that any and all religious practices informed by these texts are inherently misogynistic.
A liberal Zionist would maintain that they are not implying that all of Islam is fundamentally misogynistic and homophobic, but its derivatives co-occurring with Islamism, and Sharia Law, are. Even ignoring the fact that stoning is not a legal punishment anywhere in Palestine, asking
a Zionist to explain how fundamentalism gained prevalence subjects them to reason in the same fashion as described in Part I, where they must either submit themselves to historical rigor, or seek ahistorical (timeless) answers about the fundamental character of Islamic societies. That stoning is only a single, seldom implemented capital punishment, used to punish adulterers (not “queers”), and a punishment that isn’t even legal in Palestine, makes the Zionist argument substituted by its reference entirely incoherent. We must then ask why Zionists tend to detract from queer anti-Zionists by making this reference.
It is possible that in referencing stoning they produce a counter-symbol, one that emulates stone-throwing, but transforms its connotations. The image of a Palestinian with a stone-in-hand is stripped of symbolism on the Palestinians’ terms: no longer is the image allowed to reembody the tale of David and Goliath, re-contextualized in Palestine’s fight against Western Zionism. That version of the image, projected into the global imagination, is not only rhetorically useless to Zionism, but also dangerous. So instead Zionists invoke the term “stoning”, primarily as a textual reference due to its lack of contemporary prevalence, and thus they work to strip the original resistance symbol of its relevant historical context. This does not mean that Zionists are doing this consciously, but rather that the use of stoning as a counter- symbol to stone-throwing holds a natural poignance among many Zionists, whose conception of the history of their political movement is, necessarily, steeped with theological salience. It is a piece of the ahistorical ideological mosaic that summarizes the Zionist attitude towards Arabs: that Arabs are categorically primitive religious bigots whose behavior they must avoid rationalizing with recent history, lest they find themselves too uncomfortably close to the truth.
This piece presents a two-pronged evaluation of a specific instance of Zionist rhetoric: “You would be stoned in Palestine”.
The first prong seeks to strip down that piece of rhetoric to its implied presumptions, laying bare a sort of dilemma, or contradiction. This contradiction reflects that which exists between the system of values described by contemporary Liberal humanism and its orientalist roots. While this contradiction lives buried within much of Liberal ideology, it is given a unique opportunity to manifest in the context of Zionism. That context is the full Zionist project. Laid bare, the Zionist project is a colonial endeavor, with its theoretical coherence entirely confined to the Western tradition of imperialism. While Zionism gradually developed material leverage over Palestine through this tradition, its consolidation as a Zionist state was irrevocably catalyzed by the rise of European Fascism, which applied a genocidal selective pressure on Europe’s Jews. This produced a deeply traumatized class of settlers, one that has internalized centuries of victimhood at the hands of the Church and its inoculated European societies. However, the practical avenue for their settlement in the Levant was entirely built by Western imperial dominance, and thus the justification for that avenue necessitated an ideology capable of balancing the simultaneous threat and lifeline that the profoundly antisemitic and orientalist West offered. In hindsight, it is unsurprising that the result, Zionism, eagerly accepts the conceits of antisemitism and orientalism as fundamental to its very premise.
However, the security of the Zionist project, as is true of all nascent colonial projects, is tenuous. The security of the rest of the West, which varies but has been able to maintain itself as the hegemonic pole of the global economy for the entirety of Israel’s existence, has allowed it to develop certain progressive, liberal stances that the Zionist project is expected to reflect. The insecurity of the Zionist project drives the contradiction between its purported liberal values and its colonial reality to the forefront, as the Zionist project is driven to flagrantly disregard these values in order to protect its security.
The rhetoric employed by Zionists paves over this dissonance by constructing an alternative historical narrative. This narrative is untenable, and in times of strife for the Zionist project it routinely fails to strike a stable balance. Essentially, the first prong of my evaluation is meant to demonstrate the ease with which one can “see through” this piece of Zionist rhetoric. The question that remains, then, is why this piece of rhetoric is so prolific, if upon deconstruction it appears to be making a nakedly hateful and incoherent point?
I am not confident enough to propose a definitive answer. However, the second prong of Orienting Resistance proposes a possible explanation as to why the rhetoric in question finds such purchase among Zionists. That proposal is that the declaration that “you [a queer person] would be stoned in Palestine” serves a propagandistic purpose by manipulating a symbol of resistance: the stone, the same stone that entered the iconography of the Israel-Palestine conflict as it was hurled at Israeli tanks by Palestinian children. I avoid asserting that individual Zionists work to transform this symbol consciously. Rather, the transformation manifests as a trend in ideological discourse.
This explanation, if valid, could hold a number of implications. Namely, it could suggest that colonial ideology, generally, has a tendency to privilege rhetoric that competes with anti-colonial symbols via the decontextualization and appropriation of the same symbolic object. Maybe it alludes to an even broader tendency, observable when ideologies attached to a material, sociological imbalance come into conflict. On the other hand, it could be a phenomenon truly unique to the historical conditions wrought by the Zionist entity. What I assert with utmost confidence is that this piece of Zionist rhetoric, one that could be said to center a contested symbol, has a unique kind of efficiency: it works to disarm the intended connotations of anti-colonial symbolism while simultaneously substituting a salience that reinforces a justification of the colonial relationship.
Four months after I originally wrote this piece, I have come to accept that the critique it articulates is likely to fall on deaf ears. Anti-zionists, especially Palestinians and anti-Zionist Jews, tend to have an intuitive familiarity with the hateful conceits of Zionist ideology. Zionists, of course, are unlikely to have the foundations of their belief systems shaken by a single anonymous article. So, who was this piece written for?
The truth is that it is that this piece exists mostly to satisfy myself, written as an exercise in fleshing out my understanding of Zionism, an ideology to which I find myself opposed. Perhaps naively, the exercise offered me glimmers of hope: that maybe if I understood Zionism thoroughly enough, I could help the Zionists personally know challenge their beliefs. Today, I find solace in the knowledge that it is material relationships that inform ideology, rather than the opposite, and that the resistance of Palestinians and the struggle waged in solidarity with them is irreversibly transforming those relationships. Doomed to reaction, Zionism will evolve its orientation towards resistance long after its relevancy dies, in a world where the vast majority of its subjects and its victims are freed from its influence.
Originally published April 27th, 2024. Last edited July 17th, 2024.
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