Israel and the Sad Colonizer

You can tell Israel is a colonizer because it sees itself as Kurtz

Zionists (whether Christian or Jewish) bristle at the idea that Israel’s occupation of Palestine is an example of colonialism. Arguments generally circle around the question of whether Israelis can be considered indigenous or whether it’s possible to be a colonizer when your people have been persecuted in the past.

I’ve engaged with these discussions on other occasions. But I think it’s worth thinking about colonialism as an imaginative as well as a material relationship. In other words, colonizers justify and legitimize themselves in certain predictable ways, and there’s a strong argument that Israel picks up on those and deploys them in its understanding of and defense of its occupation of Palestine.

In particular, Israel has long been an enthusiastic diseminator of sad colonist tropes.

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Sad colonists

The “sad colonizer” trope is I think my own coinage, or at least if I’ve lifted it from somewhere I can’t find the source. But the phenomenon it describes is well known. Colonial texts or movies tend not to focus on the suffering of colonized people experiencing violence, displacement, and genocide. Instead, they center the spiritual or emotional pain that colonizers feel when they are forced (forced!) to murder people in large numbers, steal their land, or perform other colonial functions.

The two classic statements of the sad colonizer ethos are Kipling’s “White Man’s Burden” and Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness.” Kipling’s is (as you’d guess, given Kipling) more straightforward.

“The White Man’s Burden” was written to encourage the US in the Phillipine-American War, and it argues that colonization is good and heroic even though (or perhaps especially because) it is a misery for the colonizers. Kipling believes that colonizers must colonize despite the pain it causes them because it’s to the benefit of the stubborn colonized, who are childlike and foolish and don’t know what’s good for them.

Take up the White Man's burden—
And reap his old reward:
The blame of those ye better,
The hate of those ye guard—
The cry of hosts ye humour
(Ah, slowly!) toward the light:—
"Why brought ye us from bondage,
Our loved Egyptian night?"

Take up the White Man's burden—
Ye dare not stoop to less
Nor call too loud on Freedom
To cloak your weariness;
By all ye cry or whisper,
By all ye leave or do,
The silent, sullen peoples
Shall weigh your Gods and you.

There are lots more stanzas, but you get the idea.

Heart of Darkness is more ambivalent, and has been arguably even more influential. Conrad’s novel is about a European ivory trader, Kurtz, who travels to Central Africa/the Congo. His personality is so magnetic and his technology so superior that he is able to single-handedly conquer a large territory; the people treat him like a god and offer him vast quantities of treasure.

Though Kurtz initially has a white man’s burden kind of ambition for the Africans, and imagines uplifting them, the encounter with the interior ultimately corrupts him, turning him greedy, cruel, and possibly insane. One of the signs of Kurtz’s degeneration, Conrad suggests, is that he has betrayed his pure fiancé back in England by sleeping with a Black woman.

It’s not clear in Conrad whether Kurtz is corrupted by his own power as a colonizer, or whether spending time with “uncivilized” people is supposed to turn him uncivilized. In any case, the book is a sad colonizer tale because it’s entirely focused on the spiritual, moral, and emotional state of Kurtz. The tragedy of the novel is the tragedy of Kurtz’s soul; the violence Kurtz does to African people (including, it’s implied, sexual violence) is hinted at around the edges, but you are never asked to sympathize or empathize with the people who suffer at Kurtz’s hands.

The main victim of Kurtz, from this perspective, is Kurtz. When he whispers as his last words, “The horror! The horror!” we are invited to contemplate the ruin of his soul, which is before us, rather than the experience of those he’s tortured and murdered, which is offstage.

Heart of Darkness was a huge influence on Apocalypse Now and is arguably the blueprint for the canonical disillusioned Vietnam war films of the 70s and 80s, such as Platoon, First Blood, Jacob’s Ladder, Full Metal Jacket, and on and on. What critic Viet Thanh Nguyen says of Casualties of War could apply to all of them: they are “not about the Vietnamese at all…but about American guilt only.” Vietnamese people have no voice in these movies, which “allows Americans to talk on [their] behalf.” Colonized people are uninteresting in themselves and so are “transformed into perpetual victims interchangeable with their traumas, visible to Americans only when they stimulate American guilt.”

Shooting and Crying

Nguyen’s book, Nothing Ever Dies, argues in part that colonialism’s material violence is intertwined with epistemological or imaginative violence. American movies are part of the project of American global domination—or as Nguyen puts it, Hollywood is “a component of the military-industrial complex,” which justifies real world hegemony and enacts it through shaping and dominating not just the way we think about colonialism, but who we think about when we think about it. “The ultimate goal of this industry [Hollywood] is to reproduce power and inequality, as well as to fulfill the needs of the war machine.”

Colonialism relies on and generates colonial propaganda. As such, if Israel is a colonial state, you would expect it to rationalize or explain colonial dynamics in line with the traditions of colonial literature. Among other things, you’d expect to see sad colonizer tropes.

And sure enough, Israeli discussions of Palestine and Palestinians are very similar to American and Western literature of colonialism.

One famous example is former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir’s statement from her 1973 autobiography:

When peace comes we will perhaps in time be able to forgive the Arabs for killing our sons, but it will be harder for us to forgive them for having forced us to kill their sons. Peace will come when the Arabs will love their children more than they hate us.

This is still frequently cited to demonstrate Meir’s (and Israel’s) compassion and righteousness. But put it next to Kipling’s “White Man’s Burden,” and it’s pretty clear that Meir is simply restating the colonial verities. The blameless colonizers are acting out of altruism even when they are “forced” to kill Arab children. The tragedy of dead children is a tragedy for their killers, not their parents. Just as Heart of Darkness is a story about Kurtz and his inner turmoil, so Meir turns the Palestinian occupation into a story about her and her sadness, with the Palestinians as, at best, bit (nefarious) players in their own lives and deaths.

Nor is Meir alone. Per Dan Schindel of Hyperallergenic:

Within Israeli culture, there is a whole category of hand-wringing media focusing on soldiers or former soldiers grappling with the psychological impact of their actions during their army service. (Any criticism of the legality, validity, and/or morality of the treatment of Palestinians is optional.) This sub-genre is often called “shooting and crying,” and it’s a proven magnet for prestige — Ari Forlman’s 2008 Waltz with Bashir was Oscar-nominated, while the Netflix series Fauda is an international hit. It can be thought of as the Israeli version of a trend that Scottish comedian Frankie Boyle wryly observed in American film: “Not only will [they] kill all your people … they’ll come back … and make a movie about how killing your people made their soldiers feel sad.”

The current horrific assault on Gaza has been justified through open dehumanization and calls for genocide; Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is now explicitly saying he wants to clear Gaza of all Palestinians. But just below that bloodthirsty chorus, you can still hear the supposedly more compassionate snuffling of sad colonizer tropes.

On social media this week, for example, physicist and cosmologist Chanda Prescod-Weinstein commented on an email she’d received “saying that Gaza is the biggest spiritual crisis for Jews since the Holocaust.” Prescod-Weinstein added pointedly “the problem in Gaza isn't a Jewish spiritual crisis you guys, it's a fucking colonial genocide.”

Centering the qualms and misgivings of people committing violence, or even (in the case of American Jews) people who simply feel implicated in the violence,) is a way to displace Palestinians from their own stories even as Israel (with US help) displaces them from their own land.

To seize a land is to seize a memory

Sad colonizer stories are such a popular way of remembering colonial violence precisely because, under cover of regret or reassessment, they both erase and reenact the colonial dispossession they commemorate. Colonialism is an act of occupation and expropriation; land that was yours is taken as mine—and not just the land’s present, but it’s history. The colonized people have no culture or past or legacy worth preserving; the colonizer is righteous because they are at the forefront of history.

The sad colonizer stories follow through on that logic by insisting that the only story of colonization worth telling is a story about the inner state of colonizers. Atrocity is bad not primarily because of the pain it inflicts on victims, but because atrocities corrupt Kurtz and all his avatars. As Gold Meir suggests, the important part about the fact that we’re killing your children is not that they are dead, but that we’re weeping while we do it.

Colonialism is a relationship of power and a program of conquest. But it’s also a project of ideology, memory and imaginative erasure. Thus the sad colonizer must schlep along wherever colonialism goes, passionately declaring his innocence and his empathy as he shoots people despite himself in the Philippines, in the Congo, in Vietnam…and in Palestine as well.