The Expanse Shows That, Yes, Israel Is A Colonial State

Precedence is less important than power

You can’t watch The Expanse in 2024 without being forcibly reminded of Israel and the current horror in Gaza. The series, especially in its last seasons, chronicles a brutal, unforgiving colonial war, in which terrorist violence murders millions, and prompts an equally violent retaliation. Marcos Inaros (Keon Alexander) is a charismatic resistance leader of the (asteroid) Belt, who speaks stirringly of freedom while treating every setback as a personal narcissistic affront and cheerfully bombing his own people or condemning them to starvation. He functions, today, as a biting caricature of Hamas—while the leaders of Earth, who Marcos opposes, look disturbingly like Israel’s government, as they furrow their brows and blithely plan to destroy entire occupied planetary bodies, civilians and children and all, in a supposed show of strength.

There are of course differences between the tv drama and the real world. The war in the Expanse kills millions and probably billions. That’s far more than Hamas or even Israel has managed to murder, despite their best efforts.

On the other hand, the prospects for peace on the show end up looking a lot better than those in intractable, miserable reality. Chrisjen Avasarala (Shohreh Aghdashloo), the President of the United Nations and the leader of Earth, is committed to peace and rejects prejudice, in stark contrast to the genocidal bigots and religious fanatics leading Israel’s campaign of war crimes and ethnic cleansing. Marcos is a delusional megalomaniac, but there are numerous other Belt leaders—particularly Camina Drummer (Cara Gee)—who are willing and able to oppose him and work with Chrisjen to establish a better world. The Expanse may show the worst war crimes in human history but when you compare it to the current nightmare in Gaza it still manages to look quaintly optimistic.

The biggest disconnect between The Expanse and Israel of course is that The Expanse is made up and takes place in an imaginary future; it’s not real. But the constructed nature of the conflict—the fact that the colonial dynamics are divorced from history—is arguably the show’s most important insight.

No history in space

Again, The Expanse pretty clearly references, and portrays, a colonial situation. In the future, the people of the Belt, who live on space stations and small planetary bodies, are reliant on the people of Earth and Mars, collectively referred to as “Inners”, for air, food, and water. Belters work for Earth companies, risking injuries and death for low pay. When they rebel, Earth-funded police forces and Earth’s military shoot them and put them in their place.  As one angry Belter puts it, “Every time we demand to be heard, they hold back our water…ration our air… until we crawl back into our holes…and do as we are told!”

This looks like colonial exploitation, and is pretty clearly meant to look like colonial exploitation. But that colonial exploitation exists without, in this case, anyone that can really be described as an indigenous population. No human beings have an ancestral tie to space. When humans arrived in the Belt (perhaps a century or two before the start of the series), there was no one there.

The people of the Belt are colonists from Earth, who are now being exploited by the metropole, just as the English colonists in the America’s eventually saw themselves as being exploited by England. The difference being, again, that the people of the Belt did not murder native peoples, because there were no native peoples in space.

Zionists will sometimes argue that Israel cannot be a settler-colonial power, or cannot be engaging in colonial exploitation, because Jewish people are indigenous to Palestine and have ancient roots in the region. The Anti-Defamation League’s (embarrassing) explainer reiterates the talking points.

Jews, like Palestinians, are native and indigenous to the land. The Land of Israel is integral to the Jewish religion and culture, the connection between Jews and the land is a constant in the Bible, and is embedded throughout Jewish rituals and texts. The Europeans who settled in colonies in the Middle East and North Africa were not indigenous or native to the land in any way.

The argument here is that to be a colonizer is a kind of genetic inheritance. If you have an ancient claim to be in a certain place, then you can’t be engaged in colonial exploitation. By this metric, the Belters can’t claim to be a colonized people; they aren’t ancestral owners of the land. They’re colonizers themselves, so how can they be colonized?

Colonialism is a structure

As you’d expect, most actual scholars of colonization don’t believe colonization works in this way. Elizabeth F. Thompson, for example, defines colonialism as “the institutionalization of practices that perpetuate the subordination of one people to another in a differentiated space.” Historian Patrick Wolfe adds that under settler colonialism “invasion is a structure not an event.” (Wolfe then quotes Theodore Herzl, the father of Zionism, who said, “If I wish to substitute a new building for an old one, I must demolish before I construct.”)

Colonialism, in other words, is a relationship and a structure which is dependent on what people do, not on their ancestry or on the genuineness of their relationship to a particular area of land. No humans are indigenous to the Belt. But Earth still has a colonial relationship with the Belt because Inners treat the resource and humans of the Belt as theirs to do with as they will. Belter lives and Belter resources exist for Earth. If Belters object, they are punished.

Similarly, Israeli arguments that their ancestors lived on the land are largely irrelevant to colonial dynamics. What is relevant is the fact that Israel sees itself as arbiter of resources and of life within Gaza, which is why it, for example. is willing to cut off desperately needed food aid from the territory, starving civilians to advance Israel’s agenda, or just because they feel like it. “On Earth, I once put a Belter up on hooks ... to suffocate him, to make him tell me things he wouldn't have otherwise,” Chrisjen confesses late in The Expanse. “I did it because I could.”

Gazans, like Belters, possess their land, their homes, their resources, and their lives only on sufferance, which means that they do not possess anything. Dispossession is not a single act—it is not a one time event in which a colonizer comes in and steals stuff. It is a relationship of subordination, and the creation of a system in which what is owned by the colonized, in the past, present, or future, becomes the property of the colonizer.

Colonialism expropriates time and chronology as well as resources. In the colonial context, the Israeli assertion “we were here first” isn’t an exculpation, but a part of the colonial system itself, which justifies and enables expropriation as a timeless, ongoing truth, with no beginning and no end. What was yours was always and will always be mine—which is why European settlers were able to “discover” all that land that was already inhabited.

Who has full weight?

European settlers stripped America of most of its inhabitants through entwined acts of imagination and genocide. The people of the Belt too become attenuated. In the novels, they have actually adapted to zero G, so that their bodies are long and thin, visibly different from people of Earth or Mars. In the TV show, though, the special effects budget was limited, and Belters look just like humans. They’re called “skinnies” as a pejorative, but they don’t actually look skinnier than anyone else.

Everyone on the show can instantly tell who’s a Belter and who isn’t. For viewers, though, the distinction seems completely arbitrary. Who is human and who isn’t, who has full moral weight and who doesn’t—you have to imagine the things that separate people, or that make some people less there on the land than others.

That’s how colonialism works. The core of colonialism isn’t a violation of ancestral land claims. It’s the ability to decide, through force, whose weight anchors the land, and whose bodies can simply be brushed away. The Belters in The Expanse aren’t all good or moral, and they aren’t even the show’s protagonists. They are, nonetheless, in a position of colonial subjugation, because their needs, their lives, and their selves are held to be thin, and to have no weight that Inners need to respect. In space, no one is indigenous. But the Belters are still oppressed. So are the people of Gaza, no matter who lived in Palestine thousands of years ago.