Beyond Allozionism: Exceptionalizing and De-Exceptionalizing the Zionist Project

Author(s): Johannes Becke

Source: Israel Studies , Vol. 23, No. 2 (Summer 2018), pp. 168-193
Published by: Indiana University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/israelstudies.23.2.08

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 Johannes Becke

Beyond Allozionism:
Exceptionalizing and
De-Exceptionalizing the
Zionist Project
ABSTR ACT

Based on Zygmunt Bauman’s understanding of Allosemitism, this article

introduces the concept of Allozionism, a form of exceptionalism which
assumes that Zionism and the State of Israel are fundamentally different
from all other nationalist movements and nation-states. Instead of tracing
exceptionalist claims about the Zionist project back to its attributes or the
politics of affinity and resentment, this approach investigates the epistemic
function of Allozionism, understood here as Allosemitism in postcolonial
times: While European Allosemitism projected its anxieties about the prob-
lematic distinction between believer/non-believer and nation/non-nation
on the Jewish people, global Allozionism projects its ambivalences about
the indigenous/colonial distinction on the Zionist project as a puzzling case
of colonization in the name of indigeneity. In order to overcome Allozi-
onist exceptionalism, de-exceptionalizing the Zionist project implies the
recognition of its cultural and political ambivalence, including colonial,
anti-colonial, and post-colonial elements—both before and after 1967.

INTRODUCTION

E xceptionalist claims about nationalist movements and

nation-states are notoriously unexceptional. American exceptionalism, this
“desire not merely for difference but for a particularity beyond all other
nations’ particularity”1 may have attracted the broadest attention in the

Israel Studies 23.2 • doi 10.2979/israelstudies.23.2.08168

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 Beyond Allozionism • 169

research literature, but romantic speculations by German nationalists about

each nation’s distinctive Volksgeist have produced a rich variety of exception-
alist claims about nations, regions, and entire civilizations, both positive
and negative.2 The Israeli case stands out as a particular form of negative
exceptionalism, namely the depiction of the Zionist project (or its post-1967
expansionism) as the last, the most intense, or the most peculiar form of
settler-colonialism, namely “masquerade colonialism, parodic mimesis of
colonialism, Jews in colonialist drag”.3
As an intervention in the debate over the complex relationship
between the Jews and colonialism, this article presents a theory-guided
critique of the settler-colonial reading of Zionist and Israeli history, with a
particular focus on Israel’s territorial expansion after 1967.4 I argue that the
process which transformed a minuscule Middle Eastern state into an object
of global fascination and indignation alike might not be driven by Israel’s
coloniality, but rather by the scandalous ambivalence of the Zionist project:
As a paradoxical case of colonization in the name of indigeneity, Jewish
nationalism (both before and after 1967) threatens to unhinge the indig-
enous/colonial “ordering obsession”5 of postcolonial identity conflicts.
In order to theorize exceptionalist claims about Jewish nationalism and
the Jewish nation-state, this article introduces the concept of Allozionism
(based on Zygmunt Bauman’s Allosemitism), defined as the practice of
setting Zionism and the State of Israel apart as a nationalist movement
and a nation-state radically different from all the others, needing separate
concepts to describe and comprehend them and special treatment in all
or most social intercourse.
According to Bauman, the Jews as “ambivalence incarnate”6 challenged
both premodern (believer/non-believer) and modern (nation/non-nation)
attempts at epistemological systematization in Western thought. Bauman
himself expected Allosemitism to slowly evaporate in postmodern times
“where politics is wrapped increasingly round identity conflicts rather than
round orthodox national, class or status contradictions”.7 In contrast, this
article understands Allozionism as the logical adaptation of Allosemitism
to an age of postcolonial identity conflicts: Global Allozionism can be
understood as a proteophobia (fear of the ambivalent) driven by anxieties
over the Jewish nation-state’s location across and beyond the indigenous/
colonial divide.
The argument will be presented as follows: First, in order to concep-
tualize the phenomenon of Allozionism, the article contrasts exceptionalist
claims about Zionism and the State of Israel with other forms of (anti-)
nationalist exceptionalism. Second, the intellectual history of Allozionist

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170 • isr ael studies, volume 23 number 2

thought is discussed and linked to earlier forms of Allosemitism. Third, as

an example of Allozionist practice, the article discusses the linkage between
exceptionalizing Israel and normalizing all other states, based on a compari-
son between West Papua and the West Bank. Fourth, since both intellectual
and political Allozionism tend to de-ambivalentize,8 the article makes the
case for re-ambivalentizing the Zionist project and applies this approach to
Israel’s settlement project. The conclusion offers a preliminary outlook on
the possible decline (or at least likely transformation) of Allozionism in an
age after postcolonialism.

EXCEPTIONALISM AND ALLOSEMITISM

Claims to national distinctiveness typically refer to a nation’s unique

homogeneity (Japanese exceptionalism)9 or its one-of-a-kind diversity
(Lebanese exceptionalism)10; its unique divine (Jewish exceptionalism),11
revolutionary (North Korean exceptionalism),12 or respectively divine and
revolutionary mission (Islamic Iranian exceptionalism),13 its exceptional
nation-state (Thai exceptionalism),14 its unique national history (German
exceptionalism),15 and finally its national distinctiveness from the wider
region (Costa Rican exceptionalism),16 typically expressed in the sense of
being in, but not of the region (Singaporean exceptionalism).17
In contrast, the Israeli case might best be described as exceptionally
exceptional: In addition to a number of unique empirical characteristics
(that is, high levels of exceptionality), the Jewish nation-state also stands out
for numerous claims to moral uniqueness (in other words, exceptionalism).
When it comes to Israel’s exceptionality, scholars typically refer to its highly
diverse, yet remarkably cohesive population, governed by a state apparatus
composed of very different models of statecraft.18 In terms of Israel’s excep-
tionalism, analysts usually focus on the revolutionary or messianic nature
of Zionism, the ethical imperative (but also the complexities) of ensuring
Jewish survival after the trauma of the Holocaust or the country’s sense of
separation from the Middle East as a “villa in the jungle”.19
Similar to American exceptionalism, the Israeli case stands out for a
particularly rich literature of negative exceptionalism. From a comparative
perspective, however, this phenomenon might not be particularly unique20:
The literature described by Yakira as a “metaphysics of the Occupation”
produced by the “theoreticians or pseudotheoreticians of the Israeli com-
munity of resentiment”21 corresponds in many ways to “American anti-
Americanism” as “the upside-down narcissism of superlative badness”.22

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 Beyond Allozionism • 171

Given the long history of exceptionalist claims about Jews and Jewish
history alike,23 the overall “politics of uniqueness”24 vis-à-vis the Jewish
nation-state might not be particularly surprising. Based on the ambivalent
notion of chosenness, Jewish claims to exceptionalism have extended to
history, mission, and universality—as the most eternal, the most suffering,
and the most universal of all peoples. Zionist attempts to overcome this
deep-rooted sense of Jewish-Diasporic exceptionalism based on the nor-
malization of Jewish life within the framework of sovereign and territorial
nationhood were famously ridiculed by Martin Buber as Kleinzionismus
(small-minded Zionism), a project merely envisioning “the establishment
of a Jewish Albania, that is, a small, parochial state utterly irrelevant to the
greater destiny of humankind”.25
The real-existing State of Israel might indeed be a small and somewhat
parochial state with limited relevance to the greater destiny of humankind.
Nonetheless, the Arab-Israeli conflict transformed the Western (or rather
Euro-Mediterranean) obsession with the Jews26 into a global obsession with
the Jewish nation-state (or at least the various fantasies of the latter). This
transformation is well-documented,27 but remains undertheorized: In order
to respond to the perennial question “Is it the world, is it us, or is it both”,28
authors either focus on the distinct configuration of Israel’s attributes29
or on the politics of attraction and resentment (i.e., anti-Semitism/anti-
Zionism and Philosemitism/Philozionism),30 but rarely investigate the
epistemic function of singling Israel out in thought and deed.31
Given the important Christian and Islamic sites in the Land of Israel/
Palestine, one might speculate that any other comparably intrusive state
project in the territory would have attracted similar levels of attention,
especially if it had also become such a close ally to the US. In an intriguing
thought experiment, Penslar has argued that a German Protestant state
of “New Israel” (an enlarged version of the Temple Society) would have
become subject to similar levels of attention and most likely condemna-
tion, with one crucial exception: Both the questioning of Israel’s “right to
exist” and the messianic fantasies projected on the peace process stand out
as unique, best understood as secularized remnants of supersessionist or
messianic Christian theology towards the Jews.32
But how did Christian supersessionism become fixated with the
Zionist project—and how was this position translated into a global phe-
nomenon? A helpful framework for theorizing exceptionalist claims about
Jewish nationalism and the Jewish nation-state (both positive and negative)
might be Zygmunt Bauman’s understanding of Allosemitism: Similar to
Jacob Talmon who once described the Jews as “a barometer of the health

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172 • isr ael studies, volume 23 number 2

and balance of a society and age”,33 Bauman emphasizes their potential to

indicate the anxieties and obsessions of a specific society and period. Instead
of understanding Allosemitism as a form of racial resentment (heterophobia,
or fear of the other), he argues for understanding the phenomenon as a
fear of the ambivalent, in other words a “proteophobia, . . . the apprehen-
sion and vexation related . . . to something or someone that does not fit the
structure of the orderly world, does not fall easily into any of the established
categories”34—not unlike Leon Pinsker’s famous description of “Judeopho-
bia”, a fear caused by the “ghostlike apparition of a people . . . no longer
alive, and yet moving about among the living”.35
Bauman defines Allosemitism as follows:

‘Allos’ is the Greek work for other, and ‘allosemitism’ refers to the practice of
setting the Jews apart as people radically different from all the others, needing
separate concepts to describe and comprehend them and special treatment in all
or most social intercourse—since the concepts and treatments usefully deployed
when facing or dealing with other people or peoples, simply would not do.36

Allosemitism could thus be summarized as a paranoid reaction to the

“scandal of ambivalence”,37 a “proteophobic anxiety”38 triggered by the
“categorical elusiveness of the Jews who tend to sit astride all the usual
divides and elide all the criteria normally deployed to draw them”.39
Bauman traces two core features of Allosemitism back to Christian Late
Antiquity—first, the “casting of Jews as the embodiment of ambivalence, that
is of dis-order; once cast in this mold, Jews could serve as a dumping ground
for all new varieties of ambivalence which later times were still to produce”.
Second, as Bauman puts it, Christian theology produced the figure of the
“abstract Jew, the Jew as a concept located in a different discourse from the
practical knowledge of ‘empirical’ Jews”.40 The Jews as “ambivalence incar-
nate”41 therefore took on a core function for the alleviation of proteophobia:
It is difficult to fight ambivalence, and quite impossible to win the war . . .
[One] tries to reforge the diffuse anxiety into a concrete fear; one cannot do
much about anxiety, but one can do something—one can think that one does
something—about the causes of fear. The temptation is to ‘de-ambivalentize’
the ambivalence, by condensing it or focusing on one obvious and tangible
object—and then burning it down in this effigy.42

According to Bauman, premodern Allosemitism served a key epistemic

function for establishing the distinction between believers and non-believers:
All anxieties, obsessions, and logical incoherences hidden and produced by

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 Beyond Allozionism • 173

this quest for order could be projected unto the Jews as God’s unfaithful
people, “more un-pagan-like than the Christians themselves, and . . . simulta-
neously more pagan than ‘ordinary’ heathens”.43 Allosemitism thus became a
constitutive feature for the demarcation of premodern Europe: “One may say
that the Jews served as the wasteyard onto which all the ambivalence squeezed
out of the universe could be dumped, so that the self-identity of the Christian
world could be of one block and at peace with itself.”44
In the footsteps of this Christian tradition, European modernity with
its “great fear of . . . underdetermination, unclarity, uncertainty—in other
words, ambivalence”45 would produce a decidedly more deadly form of
Allosemitism in its anxious attempt to draw a clear distinction between
nations and non-nations:

Into this Europe of nations, states, and nation-states, only Jews did not fit,
having only gypsies for company. Jews were not an ethnic minority in any
one of the nation-states, but dispersed all over the place. But neither were
they locally residing members of a neighboring nation. They were the epitome
of incongruity: a non-national nation, and so cast a shadow on the funda-
mental principle of modern European order: that nationhood is the essence
of human destiny. . . . The Holocaust was but the most extreme, wanton and
unbridled—indeed, the most literal—expression of that tendency to burn
ambivalence and uncertainty in effigy; one reached by a state bent on a total
order of a made-to-measure society.46

But what would happen to Allosemitism after Auschwitz? Somewhat

surprisingly, Bauman expects Allosemitism to slowly disappear under “post-
modern conditions, where politics is wrapped increasingly round identity
conflicts rather than round orthodox national, class or status contradic-
tions”.47 However, research into Jewish-Gentile relations in contemporary
Europe not only indicates the resilience of Allosemitism48: Throughout the
process of decolonization, European Allosemitism was diffused, transformed,
and translated into the discourses and practices of global Allozionism as an
epistemic strategy of de-ambivalentizing the anxieties of a postcolonial world.

FROM ALLOSEMITISM TO ALLOZIONISM

Allozionism serves a specific epistemic function for the self-demarcation

of a postcolonial world that is struggling to define both the “post” and
the “colonial”. The curious obsession with the Zionist project and Israel’s

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174 • isr ael studies, volume 23 number 2

post-1967 expansionism as a form of “colonialism . . . finally and ironically

exposed to view before a post-colonial world”49 follows a long tradition of
deploying the Jews as an “epitome of incongruity”.50 Premodern Allosemi-
tism projected its anxieties about the believer/non-believer distinction on
the Jews as God’s unfaithful people; modern Allosemitism with its “order-
ing obsession”51 of dividing the world into nations/non-nations became
obsessed with the Jews as a non-national nation. Perhaps unsurprisingly
the core anxiety of a postcolonial world, namely the precarious distinction
into the indigenous and the colonial, would be formulated according to the
logic of Allosemitism-as-Allozionism, thereby resulting in the paradoxical
imagery of Zionists as nativist colonizers.
As a colonization project in the name of indigeneity, the Zionist project
breaks with both the taboo of “thou shalt not colonize” (established by the
political practice of decolonization) as well as with the taboo of “thou shalt
not return” (established by postcolonial theory): To anti-colonial nation-
alists, Zionism looked suspiciously similar to European colonialism; to
postcolonial theorists, Zionism seemed suspiciously close to anti-colonial
nativism, with its fear of hybridity and its futile dream of returning to a
pre-colonial past of “authentic” cultural purity.
Materialist critics of postcolonial theory like Benita Parry would point
out that not all forms of anti-colonial nativism can be reduced to a “a
mystified ethnic essentialism, . . . an undifferentiated and retrograde dis-
course installing notions of a foundational and fixed native self ”.52 None-
theless, most post-colonialists would follow Edward Said’s condemnation of
nativist ideology as the implicit acceptance of the “consequences of imperi-
alism, the racial, religious, and political divisions imposed by imperialism
itself ”.53 Said does not explicitly include Zionism in his enumeration of
anti-colonial nativism, but the parallels become obvious when he speaks of
“Senghor’s négritude, or . . . the Rastafarian movement, or . . . the Garveyite
back-to-Africa project for American Blacks, or . . . the rediscoveries of vari-
ous unsullied, pre-colonial Muslim essences”.54
The Allozionist imagery of Zionists as nativist colonizers stands out
best in Stuart Hall’s famous mockery of Jewish nationalism as:

those scattered tribes whose identity can only be secured in relation to some
sacred homeland to which they must at all costs return, even if it means push-
ing other people into the sea. This is the old, the imperialising, the hegemonis-
ing, form of ‘ethnicity’. We have seen the fate of the people of Palestine at the
hands of this backward-looking conception of diaspora—and the complicity
of the West with it.

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 Beyond Allozionism • 175

Zionism is thereby depicted as both too nativist and too colonial; not
by coincidence the Zionist project is juxtaposed with the Caribbean as
“the beginning of diaspora, of diversity, of hybridity and difference”.55 The
return of colonized and dispersed natives as colonizers and nativists indeed
represents a challenge for an epistemic framework based on separating the
world into the indigenous and the colonial: Kimmerling described Israeli
society as a “settler-immigrant” society,56 but to truly capture the “uncanny,
mind-boggling and spine-chilling incongruity”57 of the Zionist project
(at least under postcolonial eyes),58 we might have to speak of a settler-
immigrant-indigenous society in order to capture Israel’s location across
and beyond the indigenous/colonial divide.
As a complex and multi-layered discourse and practice of exceptional-
ism, Allozionism tends to encapsulate earlier forms of Allosemitism: The
denial of Jewish indigeneity in the Land of Israel/Palestine (Allozionism)59
frequently appears wrapped in a denial of Jewish nationhood (modern
Allosemitism)60 and sprinkled with Christian speculations about the Jews
as an unfaithful people of God or instead Islamic speculations about the
Jews as the killers of the prophets (premodern Allosemitism).61 Building
on the pattern of earlier forms of Allosemitism, Allozionism stands out for
three aspects—ambivalence, projection, and abstraction.
First, as a profoundly ambivalent form of exceptionalism, Allozionism
is “essentially non-committal . . .; it does not unambiguously determine
either hatred or love of Jews, but contains the seeds of both, and assures
that whichever of the two appears, is intense and extreme”.62 Indeed, few
national movements have produced similar redemptive-messianic fantasies
vis-à-vis a mere state (sacralized as “the first flowering of our redemption” in
the Prayer for the State of Israel),63 and few national movements have been
denounced wholeheartedly as “a form of racism and racial discrimination”
(according to UN General Assembly Resolution 3379 from 1975)64 or, to
be more precise, as “racist and fanatic in its nature, aggressive, expansionist
and colonial in its aims and fascist in its methods” (according to article 22
of the 1968 Palestinian National Covenant).65
Second, Allozionism operates as a form of projection that transfers the
ambivalences of the precarious indigenous/colonial distinction to Israel as
the postcolonial “wasteyard onto which all the ambivalence squeezed out
of the universe could be dumped”.66 This logic stands out most clearly
in Western depictions of Israel as “a typically European ‘colonial project’,
characterized by ‘racial’ superiority and territorial expansion”.67
In addition, the classic Arab nationalist understanding of Israel as the
“usurping entity” (al-kiyān al-muġtas.ib) similarly points to a displaced Nero

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176 • isr ael studies, volume 23 number 2

complex68 vis-à-vis the Zionist “dhimmi rebellion”.69 The Zionist claim

to indigeneity (and even ultra-indigeneity) uncovers the Arabization and
Islamization of the Land of Israel/Palestine as usurpation—at least within
the epistemic framework of structuring political legitimacy according to
the indigenous/colonial distinction.70 According to Memmi, the colonizer
who becomes conscious of his coloniality develops a Nero complex, named
after the Roman emperor who did not just kill the legitimate heir to the
throne (Britannicus), but who also destroyed every remainder of his status
as a usurper:

[To] possess victory completely he needs to absolve himself of it and the con-
ditions under which it was attained. This explains his strenuous insistence,
strange for a victor, on apparently futile matters. He endeavors to falsify his-
tory, he rewrites laws, he would extinguish memories—anything to succeed
in transforming his usurpation into legitimacy.71

Third, Allozionism functions as a form of abstraction, transforming the

real-existing Israel into an abstract Israel, heir to the abstract Jew of Allose-
mitic lore. The real-existing Jewish nation-state might share key features
with its neighbors72 and many Israelis (both Jews and Arabs) might agree
that their state firmly belongs into the Middle East,73 but the abstract Israel
produced by Allozionist fantasy seems condemned to an enclave existence
as a “villa in the jungle”74 or as an “island of Enlightenment”.75 The real-
existing Israeli occupation might be yet another case of ethno-nationalist
expansionism, as banal and as brutal as Indonesian, Chinese, Moroccan, and
Iraqi irredentism—but the abstract occupation (often capitalized as Occupa-
tion) has served generations of pro-, anti-, and more generally: Allozionists
as a never-ending source of wonder and theoretical speculation.
Following earlier forms of Allosemitism, Allozionism encompasses
both an exceptionalism of thought and deed, namely the need for “separate
concepts to describe and comprehend” Jewish nationalism and “special
treatment . . . in all or most social intercourse”.76 Regarding the dimen-
sion of intellectual exceptionalism, the Zionist project might be the only
national movement that produced two separate research fields (Israel Studies
and Palestine Studies) while at the same time preoccupying an entire dis-
cipline, namely Middle East Studies.77
In terms of political exceptionalism, Allozionism has become ritualized
in petty symbolism (like the absence of Israel on Arab maps) and global
politics alike. Palestinian Arab refugees are treated differently from all other
refugees (a pattern described by Kagan as “Palestinian exceptionalism”)78;

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 Beyond Allozionism • 177

among the large number of stateless nations,79 only the Palestinians enjoy an
“International Day of Solidarity”80 and a UN committee on the exercise of
their “inalienable rights”81; decades after the Oslo peace process, the Israeli-
Arab conflict continues to attract an exceptional amount of political, journal-
istic, and academic interest: Western conflict tourists can choose from a wide
selection of NGOs and travel agencies to explore the occupied West Bank,
while no similar tourist packages (and of course no similar interest) exist in
the occupied Western Sahara. Western Sahara, after all, is far away from the
touristic hotspots of Morocco, and the mechanisms of coercive Moroccaniza-
tion make any pro-Sahrawi tourism virtually impossible. In contrast, a one-
week vacation in Israel/Palestine can easily combine the beaches of Tel-Aviv,
the churches of Jerusalem, and the checkpoints of Ramallah.

ALLOZIONISM: THE DYNAMICS OF

EXCEPTIONALISM AND NORMALIZATION

The global diffusion of Allozionism is intimately connected to the process

of decolonization. Like earlier forms of Allosemitism, Allozionism responds
to a core anxiety of its era—the distinction between the indigenous and the
colonial. Postcolonial thinkers (frequently residing in the former imperial
metropole) might celebrate Creolization and Diasporism, but for most soci-
eties emerging from colonial rule, nativism and its “myth of authenticity”82
served as a more appealing framework for the establishment of legiti-
mate political and social order—and for this nativism, the distinction
between the indigenous and the colonial was crucial. However, similar to
the demarcation of faith and nation, the question of indigeneity/colonial-
ity gets intensely complicated wherever an “ordering obsession”83 (such
as anti-colonial nativism) transforms it into a meta-epistemic principle
capable of producing historical knowledge and political rights alike84: Does
indigeneity represent an essentialist category or can it be acquired? Should
indigeneity, the status of “being the first inhabitants of a given territory,
or at least to have occupied it prior to successive waves of settlers” produce
a different category of rights than autochthony, a term usually used “with
reference to agricultural or industrial populations, who are not necessar-
ily marginal, but rather believe that their resources, culture or power are
threatened by ‘migrants’”?85
What distinguishes “settlers” from “migrants” and “colonization” from
“colonialism”?86 Should salt-water colonialism be treated any differently
than the very same practices as carried out by a neighboring country?87

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178 • isr ael studies, volume 23 number 2

In addition to these categorical questions, the process of decolonization

added another layer of political complexity: Decolonization not only trig-
gered the “colonization in reverse”88 of the former imperial metropole
by millions and millions of “settler-immigrants” from the former colo-
nial periphery. In large parts of the world, decolonization also consisted
of recolonization, replacing European colonialism with the “Third World
colonialism”89 of neighboring countries. Young describes this process of
decolonization/recolonization as resulting in “comparable, but somewhat
different kinds of anti-colonial struggles”90 in Kashmir, Tibet, Western
Sahara, and the West Bank.91
It was the Algerian civil war that turned “settler-colonialism”, “anti-
colonial struggle”, and “decolonization” into easily available (and adoptable)
scripts diffused via the mechanisms of what sociological institutionalists
would describe as “world society”92: Indeed, the Palestinians described their
nationalist struggle as anti-colonial, but so did the Kurds,93 the Sahrawis,94
and even the South Tyroleans.95 At the same time, settler-colonial imagery
was deployed in order to warn about the effects of mass migration into the
former imperial metropole, especially by Jean Raspail’s infamous “Camp
of the Saints”, a violently dystopian depiction of civil war in France caused
by the arrival of one million Indian refugees.96
At least some of these postcolonial anxieties about the indigenous and
the colonial could be de-ambivalentized with the help of Allozionism. As
Bauman points out, all exceptionalism ultimately serves the purpose of
normalization: While Allosemitism was deployed to demarcate the bound-
aries of faith and nationhood, Allozionism could be deployed in order to
demarcate legitimate indigeneity as opposed to illegitimate coloniality.
Unruly minorities like the Maronites and the Kurds could be disciplined
as Zionist sympathizers intending to create “a second Israel”, expansionist
neighbors could be accused of behaving like Israel in the occupied terri-
tories.97 In contrast, anyone who saw himself as an indigenous national-
ist struggling against a colonial entity would at some point discover his
sympathy for the Palestinians—whether in Western Sahara or in Northern
Ireland.98
This close entanglement of exceptionalizing Israel and normalizing all
other postcolonial states (including their expansionist projects, whether in
Tibet or in Western Sahara) goes back to one of the founding moments
of tricontinentalism. Indonesia’s irredentist claims to West Papua played
a key role for organizing the 1955 Bandung Conference,99 to which Israel
was not invited out of fear of an Arab boycott despite initial support by the
co-organizers Burma and India.100

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 Beyond Allozionism • 179

Consequently, the final communiqué of the Bandung Conference

voiced support for both Palestinian nationalism and Indonesia’s irreden-
tist claims to West Papua in the same section, sheepishly entitled “Other
Problems”.101 While the Egyptian-influenced phrasing of the paragraph
on Israel/Palestine predated the doctrinal orthodoxy of the settler-colonial
paradigm as it was formulated in the 1960s and 1970s,102 the close juxtapo-
sition of Palestine and West Papua foreshadowed the rise of Allozionism, the
successor of Bauman’s Allosemitism, as a mechanism of de-ambivalentizing
the anxieties of a postcolonial world.103
Based on creative translations of irredentist nationalism (or as Greek
nationalists called it: the Megali Idea, the great idea104), both West Papua
and the West Bank would be conquered and colonized in the name of,
respectively, Greater Indonesia and Greater Israel,105 thereby vividly illus-
trating the continuities of predatory statecraft in allegedly “post”-colonial
times.
However, following a long tradition of Allosemitism, only one of these
two conflicts would produce a literature of “transcolonial identification”106
and a symbol that could be burnt down in effigy (quite literally in the case
of the Israeli flag) to resolve all vexing questions over the troublesome
indigenous/colonial distinction.

ALTERNATIVES TO ALLOZIONISM:
RECOVERING THE AMBIVALENCE OF THE
ZIONIST PROJECT

The comparative literature on Jewish nationalism and Israeli statehood

has developed different paradigms in order to overcome exceptionalist
claims, including re-historization (the re-integration of the Zionist proj-
ect into global history),107 and de-exceptionalization (the theory-guided
comparison of allegedly exceptional features like Israeli demographic
engineering).108 Since Allozionism tends to de-ambivalentize,109 this sec-
tion makes the case for an additional (or rather complementary) approach,
namely re-ambivalentizing the Zionist project, here applied to Israel’s settle-
ment project.
When it comes to the settler-colonial reading of the Zionist project
(or the “colonialist school” in Israeli historiography)110 and its under-
standing of Israel’s post-1967 expansionism, three paradigms can be dis-
tinguished regarding the causal linkage between state establishment and
state expansion: continuity, revelation, and transformation. The continuity

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180 • isr ael studies, volume 23 number 2

paradigm sees no fundamental difference between Zionist settlement

before and after 1967, but focuses on similarities in terms of land acquisi-
tion, segregated labor markets, exclave colonization, and military rule.111
The revelation paradigm agrees with the logical and institutional continu-
ity of settler-colonial expansion, but emphasizes the difference in terms of
anti-colonial consciousness and resistance: “[After] 1967 . . . on the ground
so to speak, it was the contest between an openly colonialist movement
(which Zionism had always been; now the colonialism was finally and
ironically exposed to view before a post-colonial world) and a nationalist
insurgency.”112
In contrast, the transformation paradigm carefully retraces the ambiva-
lence of the Zionist project pre-1967, but agrees that Zionism shifts into
full settler-colonial mode post-1967: “The Zionist project was historically
and conceptually situated between colonial, anti-colonial, and post-colonial
discourse and practice. . . . After 1967, however, Israel underwent a rapid
evolution into a colonial state. . . . Indeed, one could argue that post-1967
Israel became not only a colonial state, but also an imperial one.”113
The approach suggested here combines all three paradigms: In order
to carefully recover the ambivalence of the settlement project, the trans-
formation paradigm’s hybrid understanding of colonial, anticolonial, and
postcolonial elements of Israeli statecraft should be extended beyond the
landmark of 1967. After all, as forcefully argued by the continuity para-
digm, Israel’s policies of coercive rule and demographic engineering did
not undergo any fundamental changes in 1967. Instead, the revelation
paradigm is correct in its understanding that the main change post-1967
consisted of the successful framing of Israeli expansionism (and, to an
extent, Israel’s initial establishment) as an exception, a form of colonialism
in postcolonial times.
However, in contrast to this deeply Allozionist understanding, Israel’s
post-1967 expansionism might rather be classified as belonging to a broader
category of postcolonial state expansions which share the contradictory
features of a decidedly colonial disregard for national self-determination,
an anti-colonial obsession with redeeming usurped ancestral homelands
(or ethnoscapes, as Smith would describe them),114 and the postcolonial
monumentalism inherited from high modernism. From this perspective,
the “utopian miniaturization”115 of Israel’s settlement project looks much
less like French Algeria (as in Ian Lustick’s classic comparison)116 and
much more like other cases of “authoritarian high-modernist schemes”117
in the postcolonial world, a miniature version118 of the architectural bru-
talism of “new cities” like Brasília and Chandigarh,119 Malaysia’s frontier

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 Beyond Allozionism • 181

villagization120 in the 1960 and 1970s, and Morocco’s monumentalist

reconstruction of La’ayoune in occupied Western Sahara, tellingly rebuilt
around a “square of allegiance”.121
This decidedly more ambivalent understanding of Israel’s occupa-
tion should be understood as a rejection of exceptionalism, not as a form
of apologetics or trivialization: One would be hard-pressed to ignore the
colonial logic behind 50 years of coercive rule, demographic engineering,
and the systematic suppression of national and basic human rights in the
occupied territories.122 A comparative perspective should not deny the
colonial aspects of postcolonial state expansions (whether in the West
Bank or in West Papua), but rather explore the ruptures and continuities
of colonial and often imperial statecraft in allegedly postcolonial times, a
phenomenon described by Weldemichael as “Third World colonialism” or
“secondary colonialism”.123
a more ambivalent understanding of Israel’s occupation should neither
deny the truly unique aspects of Israel’s settlement project by projecting
the logic of coercive exclave colonization to other parts of the world, for
instance by imagining an alleged Indonesian “settlement project” in East
Timor.124 A careful comparison between Greater Israel and Greater Indo-
nesia should not result in an excessive form of analogical imagination125 by
making the whole world (or at least West Papua) look like the West Bank,
it should rather focus on the idiosyncrasies of Israel’s rule in the occupied
territories: Exclave colonization, covenantal irredentism, and a relatively
successful outcome of political resistance against expansionism (that is:
more successful than in West Papua, yet less successful than in East Timor).
In contrast to Tibet’s wide-ranging Sinicization, Israel’s demographic engi-
neering created ethnic exclaves. And in contrast to Indonesia’s republican
irredentism, these exclaves were shaped by a covenantal understanding of
exclusive ownership of the land (in the words of Chaim Gans, proprietary
Zionism).126
Given the close geographic proximity between Israel and the occupied
territories, the security question might be another relatively unique feature
of Israel’s occupation. Throughout the first decades of Israel’s occupa-
tion, security considerations like the acquisition of “strategic depth” clearly
trumped ethno-territorial irredentism and a messianic attachment to the
biblical land. However, the security argument for the occupation largely
collapsed in the Yom Kippur War when Israel’s weakest military perfor-
mance coincided with its largest territorial expansion.
In a postcolonial world, the colonial dimension of territorial expan-
sion stands out most clearly, whether in the case of Israel or Morocco.

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182 • isr ael studies, volume 23 number 2

However, while states may still colonize on a massive scale (as they have
done, of course, before settler-colonialism), expansionism is no longer
guided by any civilizing mission, European or non-European: In postco-
lonial state expansions (whether in the West Bank or in Western Sahara),
land is no longer claimed, it is reclaimed with a fervent sense of self-
righteousness, an irredentism described by Weiner as the “Macedonian
syndrome”.127 It would therefore be simplistic (if not tendentious) to
understand the Jewish resettlement of Nablus and Hebron as the Zion-
ist version of French Algeria: Unlike European settler-colonialism, the
settler movement of Gush Emunim did precisely not aim at the coercive
demographic and cultural Europeanization of the occupied territories, but
rather at the de-Europeanization and de-Westernization of the allegedly
Hellenized Zionist project.128
Despite frequent and obvious emulations of colonial statecraft as well
as the decidedly Western architectural style of the increasingly Americanized
suburban settlements,129 Israel’s expansionism (not unlike its Indonesian
and Moroccan counterparts) was paradoxically shaped by a deeply anti-
colonial sense of restoring a lost sense of honor, of recovering a lost sense of
pre-colonial authenticity. Of course, this anti-colonial nativism had already
shaped the “Megali Idea” of post-Ottoman Greece, the “first country under
the rule of an ethnically alien colonial people to break free to become [an]
independent nation in modern times”.130
A closer look at the idiosyncrasies of the settlement project from this
perspective might reveal the relevance of Edward Said’s scathing critique
of anti-colonial nativism:

[Often] this abandonment of the secular world has led to a sort of mille-
narianism if the movement has had a mass base, or it has degenerated into
small-scale private craziness, or into an unthinking acceptance of stereotypes,
myths, animosities, and traditions encouraged by imperialism.131

At the same time, these expansionist projects were shaped by postcolonial

high modernism imbued with authoritarian state power and a cult of fea-
sibility. Instead of the Allozionist dogma of “settler-colonialism” (which
follows the logic of Palestinian nationalism) and the counter-paradigm of
“messianism” and “fundamentalism” (which follows the logic of the settler
movement), from this perspective the settlement project should rather be
categorized among the “number of huge development fiascoes in poorer
Third World nations and Eastern Europe”.132 As James Scott points out,
“The history of Third World development is littered with the debris of huge

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 Beyond Allozionism • 183

agricultural schemes and new cities (think of Brasília or Chandigarh) that

have failed their residents.”133
The approach of re-ambivalentizing the Zionist project therefore
consists of a double rejection of de-ambivalentizing nativist claims to
authentic indigeneity: Denying the colonial elements of the State of Israel
is as intellectually dishonest as reducing the Zionist project to a mere form
of settler-colonialism. The Israeli settlements in the occupied territories
do not just resemble the segregated living quarters of the colons in French
Algiers, but also the brutalist “new cities” like Brasília and La’ayoune as well
as the fortified seclusion of the Maronite mountain stronghold Bcharré and
its “ideology of the mountain”.134

CONCLUSION

If Allozionism can be described as proteophobia (the fear of the ambivalent),

any attempts to overcome Allozionism should be guided by proteophilia, the
love of the ambivalent. Based on a discussion of the shift from premodern
and modern Allosemitism to Allozionism (or postcolonial Allosemitism),
this article suggests such a proteophilic reading of Jewish and Zionist his-
tory, namely an understanding of Israel as a settler-immigrant-indigenous
society.
The approach of recovering the ambivalence of the Zionist project
should especially be extended to Israel’s seemingly more colonial aspects:
The attempt to re-ambivalentize Israel’s settlement project recovers its para-
doxical amalgamation of an anti-colonial nativism, a colonial disregard for
national self-determination, and a post-colonial monumentalism derived
from high modernism. The approach of re-ambivalentizing Israel might
be linked to other proteophilic research agendas, particularly in terms of
transcultural comparisons: The Zionist project might not be the only state
project where anti-colonial nationalism, post-colonial state formation,
and patterns of “secondary colonialism” or “Third World colonialism” are
closely intertwined. The same case for a more hybrid categorization could
be made for most nation-states in the Middle East (and beyond), particu-
larly when it comes to the Arabization of Kirkuk, the Moroccanization
of La’ayoune, the Turkification of Northern Cyprus, and the Sinicization
of Tibet.
Two recent examples of writing exemplify how such a
de-exceptionalizing, re-ambivalentizing research agenda could look: In
a volume edited by Haklai and Loizides and a monograph authored

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184 • isr ael studies, volume 23 number 2

by Barak, the authors move beyond the settler-colonial straitjacket and

compare the Israeli case to Turkish, Moroccan, Lebanese, Indonesian,
and Sinhalese expansionism.135 In contrast to the “post-post Zionist”
turn towards cultural history, this approach might herald a fourth wave
of Israeli historiography as prophesized by Likhovsky, namely “a pendu-
lum swing away from cultural history and back to a more ‘political’ and
scientific approach to historiography”.136 Typically, the members of this
emerging cluster of authors (some of whom are affiliated with the Forum
on Regional Thinking137) are social scientists, often with training in Arabic
and a specialization in Middle Eastern politics.
In contrast to Zionist, post-Zionist, and post-post-Zionist scholarship,
the focus on Israel tends to be both comparative and strongly regionalist,
thereby reconnecting to earlier works by Migdal and Barnett.138 Should
this approach succeed in turning into a larger wave, both the comparative-
regionalist focus and the detachment from Allozionism might justify the
characterization of said wave as neo-Canaanite.
But what about the future of Allozionism? Zygmunt Bauman described
Allosemitism as a highly dynamic phenomenon, and it might be worth-
while to speculate whether Allozionism represents its final form or merely
an intermediate stage: If Allozionism indeed forms one of the constitutive
elements of postcolonial identity politics by responding to its peculiar
anxieties vis-à-vis the indigenous/colonial distinction, what happens to
Allozionism (and its twin phenomenon of Palestinian exceptionalism) after
postcolonialism, understood here in the double sense of a political practice
(tricontinentalism) and its intellectual critique (postcolonial theory)? Liter-
ary critics have been debating the question “What was postcolonialism” for
over a decade139; both the post-imperial order of the Middle East seems as
much in tatters as the once proud movement of tricontinentalism. If the
assumption is correct that global Allozionism represents an adaptation of
the uniquely Euro-Mediterranean phenomenon of Allosemitism to the
postcolonial era, one can only wonder about the relevance of the “Palestin-
ian Question” in a truly post-Western world. After postcolonialism and its
epistemic order of the colonial and the indigenous, in a Pacific Century
the “Palestinian Question” might indeed be “erased, like a face drawn in
sand at the edge of the sea”.140 Zygmunt Bauman, of course, would have
disagreed: A new epistemic order will undoubtedly be accompanied by a
new “ordering obsession”141 and a new desire to “‘de-ambivalentize’ the
ambivalence”.142 Having produced paradoxes such as the unfaithful people
of God, the non-national nation, and the nativist colonizers, the long arch
of Allosemitism might not yet have reached its final point.

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 Beyond Allozionism • 185

Notes

The author would like to thank Derek Penslar, Jonathan Gribetz, Shelley
Harten, Anna Sunik, and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful
criticism.
1. Daniel T. Rodgers, “Exceptionalism,” in Imagined Histories. American His-
torians Interpret the Past, ed. Anthony Molho and Gordon S. Wood (Princeton,
NJ, 1998), 21.
2. On American exceptionalism, see Seymour Martin Lipset, American
Exceptionalism. A Double-Edged Sword (New York and London, 1996); Deborah
L. Madsen, American Exceptionalism (Edinburgh, 1998). On the Herderian notion
of the Volksgeist, see Royal J. Schmidt, “Cultural Nationalism in Herder,” Journal
of the History of Ideas 17.3 (1956): 407–17.
3. Daniel Boyarin, Unheroic Conduct. The Rise of Heterosexuality and the Inven-
tion of the Jewish Man (Berkeley, 1997), 309.
4. Ethan B. Katz, Lisa Moses Leff, and Maud S. Mandel, eds., Colonialism and
the Jews (Bloomington IN, 2017).
5. Zygmunt Bauman, “Allosemitism: Premodern, Modern, Postmodern,”
in Modernity, Culture and “the Jew”, ed. Bryan Cheyette and Laura Marcus
(Cambridge, 1998), 154.
6. Ibid., 147.
7. Ibid., 155.
8. Ibid., 149.
9. Peter N. Dale, The Myth of Japanese Uniqueness (London, 1986).
10. Steven Seidman, “From the Stranger to ‘the Other’: The Politics of
Cosmopolitan Beirut,” in Contesting Recognition: Culture, Identity and Citizenship,
ed. Janice McLaughlin, Peter Philimore, and Diane Richardson (New York, 2011), 114.
11. William R. Hutchison and Hartmut Lehmann, eds., Many Are Chosen.
Divine Election & Western Nationalism (Minneapolis, MN, 1994).
12. Han-Shik Park, “Chuch’e: The North Korean Ideology,” in Journey to North
Korea: Personal Perceptions, ed. Eugene Kim and Byung-Chul Koh (Berkeley, 1983),
84–98.
13. Kamran Scot Aghaie, “Islamic-Iranian Nationalism and Its Implications
for the Study of Political Islam and Religious Nationalism,” in Rethinking Iranian
Nationalism and Modernity, ed. Kamran Scot Aghaie and Afshin Marashi (Austin,
TX, 2014), 181–204.
14. Benedict Anderson, “Studies of the Thai State: The State of Thai Studies,”
in The State of Thai Studies: Analyses of Knowledge, Approaches, and Prospects in
Anthropology, Art History, Economics, History, and Political Science, ed. Eliezer
B. Ayal (Athens, OH, 1978), 193–247.
15. Georg Steinmetz, “German Exceptionalism and the Origins of Nazism: The
Career of a Concept,” in Stalinism and Nazism: Dictatorships in Comparison, ed.
Ian Kershaw and Moshe Lewin (Cambridge, 1997), 251–84.

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186 • isr ael studies, volume 23 number 2

16. Kirk S. Bowman, “Review: New Scholarship on Costa Rican Exceptionalism,”

Journal of Interamerican Studies and World Affairs 41.2 (1999): 123–30.
17. “Singapore is an odd country. . . . It is in Southeast Asia but not, some might
say, of Southeast Asia,” Eric C. Thompson, “Singaporean Exceptionalism and Its
Implications for ASEAN Regionalism,” Contemporary Southeast Asia 28.2 (2006): 183.
18. Sammy Smooha, “The Model of Ethnic Democracy: Israel as a Jewish and
Democratic State,” Nations and Nationalism 8.4 (2002): 475–503; Yehezkel Dror,
Israeli Statecraft—National Security Challenges and Responses (London and New
York, 2011).
19. Jonathan Adelman, The Rise of Israel: A History of a Revolutionary State
(London and New York, 2008); Idith Zertal, “Yellow Territories,” in Israel’s Holo-
caust and the Politics of Nationhood (New York, 2005), 164–208; David Tal, “Israel
in or of the Middle East,” in Israeli Identity: Between Orient and Occident, ed. David
Tal (London and New York, 2013), 1–12.
20. For an exceptionalist understanding of “Jewish Judaeophobia” see Evyatar
Friesel, “On the Complexities of Modern Jewish Identity: Contemporary Jews
against Israel,” Israel Affairs 17.4 (2011): 504–19.
21. Elhanan Yakira, Post-Zionism, Post-Holocaust. Three Essays on Denial, Forget-
ting, and the Delegitimation of Israel (Cambridge, 2010), 87, 167.
22. Robert Stam and Ella Shohat, “Transnationalizing Comparison: Uses and
Abuses of Cross-Cultural Analogy,” in Comparison. Theories, Approaches, Uses,
ed. Rita Felski and Susan Stanford Friedman (Baltimore, 2013), 124.
23. Ben-Zion Dinur famously described six core elements that allegedly made
Jewish history exceptional, namely endogamy, a national religion, a complex social
structure, the connection to the Land of Israel, the Hebrew language, and the
search for sovereignty, Ben-Zion Dinur, “Yichuda Shel Ha-Historia Ha-Yehudit.
Al Yesodotav ve-Retsifuto (The Exceptionalism of Jewish History. On Its Origins
and Continuity),” in Generations and Records (Jerusalem, 1978), 3–16 [Hebrew].
24. Michael N. Barnett, “The Politics of Uniqueness: The Status of the Israeli
Case,” in Israel in Comparative Perspective. Challenging the Conventional Wisdom,
ed. Michael N. Barnett (Albany, NY, 1996), 3–25.
25. Paul Mendes-Flohr, Divided Passions. Jewish Intellectuals and the Experience
of Modernity (Detroit, 1991), 291.
26. Nirenberg’s definition of “Western” anti-Judaism encompasses both shores
of the Mediterranean, i.e., including the Islamicate world, see David Nirenberg,
Anti-Judaism. The Western Tradition (New York and London, 2013).
27. Joshua Muravchik, Making David into Goliath. How the World Turned
Against Israel (London and New York, 2015).
28. Emanuel Adler, “Israel’s Unsettled Relations with the World: Causes and
Consequences,” in Israel in the World. Legitimacy and Exceptionalism, ed. Emanuel
Adler (London and New York, 2013), 10.
29. For a careful configurational analysis of the Western/Middle Eastern ele-
ments of Israel see Sammy Smooha, “Is Israel Western?,” in Comparing Modernities.

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 Beyond Allozionism • 187

Pluralism versus Homogenity, ed. Eliezer Ben-Rafael and Yitzhak Sternberg (Leiden
and Boston, 2005), 413–42.
30. Jeffrey Herf, ed., Anti-Semitism and Anti-Zionism in Historical Perspective
(London and New York, 2013); Jonathan Karp and Adam Sutcliffe, eds., Philosemi-
tism in History (Cambridge, 2011).
31. A convincing depiction of intellectual Allozionism (described as “Israelism”)
can be found in Hassan A. Barari, Israelism: Arab Scholarship on Israel, a Critical
Assessment (Reading, UK, 2009). For a deplorable assemblage of Allosemitic clichés
(both premodern, modern, and postcolonial) see M. Shahid Alam, Israeli Excep-
tionalism: The Destabilizing Logic of Zionism (New York, 2009).
32. Derek J. Penslar, “What If a Christian State Had Been Established in
Modern Palestine?,” in What Ifs of Jewish History: From Abraham to Zionism, ed.
Gavriel D. Rosenfeld (Cambridge, 2016), 142–65.
33. Jacob Leib Talmon, The Nature of Jewish History - Its Universal Significance
(London, 1957), 28.
34. Bauman, “Allosemitism,” 144.
35. Leon Pinsker, “Auto-Emancipation: An Appeal to His People by a Russian
Jew [1882],” in The Zionist Idea. A Historical Analysis and Reader, ed. Arthur
Hertzberg (Philadelphia, 1997), 184.
36. Bauman, “Allosemitism,” 143.
37. Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and Ambivalence (Cambridge, 1991), ch. 1.
38. Ibid., 144. Bauman argues against understanding “animosity towards the
Jews” as heterophobia (“resentment of the different”) and instead suggests to speak,
ibid., 144.
39. Ibid., 144.
40. Ibid., 148.
41. Ibid., 147.
42. Ibid., 149.
43. Bauman, “Allosemitism,” 148.
44. Ibid., 148.
45. Ibid., 149.
46. Ibid., 153–4.
47. Ibid., 155.
48. Eliezer Ben-Rafael, Confronting Allosemitism in Europe: The Case of Belgian
Jews (Leiden, 2014).
49. Edward W. Said, “Introduction,” in Blaming the Victims. Spurious Schol-
arship and the Palestinian Question (London and New York, 1988), 8 (emphasis
added).
50. Bauman, “Allosemitism,” 153.
51. Ibid., 154.
52. Benita Parry, “Resistance Theory/Theorising Resistance or Two Cheers
for Nativism,” in Colonial Discourse/Postcolonial Theory, ed. Francis Barker, Peter
Hulme, and Margaret Iversen (Manchester, 1994), 180.

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188 • isr ael studies, volume 23 number 2

53. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York, 1993), 276.
54. Ibid., 275.
55. Stuart Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” in Identity: Community,
Culture, Difference, ed. Jonathan Rutherford (London, 1990), 235.
56. Baruch Kimmerling, “Jurisdiction in an Immigrant-Settler-Society: The
‘Jewish and Democratic State’,” Comparative Political Studies 35.10 (2002): 1119–44.
57. Bauman, “Allosemitism,” 147.
58. Efraim Sicher and Linda Weinhouse, Under Postcolonial Eyes: Figuring The
“Jew” in Contemporary British Writing (Lincoln, NE, 2012).
59. Seth J. Frantzman, Havatzelet Yahel, and Ruth Kark, “Contested Indigene-
ity: The Development of an Indigenous Discourse on the Bedouin of the Negev,
Israel,” Israel Studies 17.1 (2012): 78–104.
60. For the instructive example of the PLO Research Department and the
heavy influence of Christian theology on its understanding of Jewish identity, see
Jonathan Gribetz, “When the Zionist Idea Came to Beirut: Judaism, Christianity,
and the Palestine Liberation Organization’s Translation of Zionism,” International
Journal of Middle East Studies 48.2 (2016): 243–66.
61. On Islamist perspectives on the Zionist project, see Uriya Shavit and Ofir
Winter, Zionism in Arab Discourses (Manchester, 2016), ch. 1.
62. Bauman, “Allosemitism,” 143.
63. Jonathan Sacks, The Koren Siddur, ed. Jonathan Sacks (Jerusalem, 2009), 522.
64. UN General Assembly Resolution [hereafter: UNGAR] 3379, November 10,
1975 (revoked with UNGAR 46/86, 16 December 1991).
65. Yehoshafat Harkabi, Palestinians and Israel (Jerusalem, 1974), 65.
66. Bauman, “Allosemitism,” 148.
67. Efraim Sicher, “The Image of Israel and Postcolonial Discourse in the Early
21st Century: A View From Britain,” Israel Studies 16.1 (2011): 8. Some of this
rhetoric echoes a long tradition of Zionist Orientalism towards the Middle East,
see Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin, “The Zionist Return to the West and the Mizrahi
Jewish Perspective,” in Orientalism and the Jews, ed. Ivan Davidson Kalmar and
Derek Jonathan Penslar (Waltham, MA, 2005), 162–81.
68. Albert Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized (London, 2016), 96.
69. Mordechai Nisan, Minorities in the Middle East (London, 2002), 268.
70. For two recent texts that follow this line of reasoning to its polemical conclu-
sion, see Allen Z. Hertz, “The Aboriginal Rights of the Jewish People,” Tablet, 2017,
http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/224256/aboriginal-rights
-jewish-people; Alex Joffe, “Palestinian Settler-Colonialism,” BESA Center Perspec-
tives Paper No. 577, 2017, https://besacenter.org/perspectives-papers/palestinians
-settlers-colonialism/ (both last accessed 15 October 2017).
71. Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized, 96.
72. Assaf David, “What Is Israel’s Place in the Middle East?” (6 September,
2016), +972, http://972mag.com/what-is-israels-place-in-the-middle-east/121739/.
Last accessed 8 December 2016.

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 Beyond Allozionism • 189

73. In a 2016 survey, 30% of Israeli Jews (Israeli Arabs: 24%) responded that
Israel belonged more in the Middle East while 23% argued that Israel belonged
equally in both Europe and the Middle East (Israeli Arabs: 23%). Only 26% of
Israeli Jews (Israeli Arabs: 25%) answered that Israel belonged more in Europe.
Mitvim, The 2016 Israel Foreign Politicy Index of the Mitvim Institute (September
2016) (Ramat Gan, 2016).
74. Eitan Bar-Yosef, Villa in the Jungle: Africa in Israeli Culture (Tel-Aviv, 2014)
[Hebrew].
75. Alexandra Kurth, Island of the Enlightenment: Israel in Context, ed. Alexandra
Kurth (Giessen, Germany, 2005) [German].
76. Bauman, “Allosemitism,” 143.
77. Martin Kramer, Ivory Towers on Sand: The Failure of Middle Eastern Studies
in America (Washington, DC, 2001).
78. Michael Kagan, “The (Relative) Decline of Palestinian Exceptionalism and
Its Consequences for Refugee Studies in the Middle East,” Journal of Refugee Studies
22.4 (2009): 417–38.
79. James Minahan’s “Encyclopedia of Stateless Nations” covers “350 . . . of the
many national groups that are now emerging to claim roles in the post-Cold War
world order”, James Minahan, Encyclopedia of the Stateless Nations. Ethnic and
National Groups Around the World (Westport, CT, and London, 2002), xi.
80. UNGAR 32/40 B, 2 December 1977.
81. While the Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the
Palestinian People was established in 1975 by UNGAR 3376, the UN Division for
Palestinian Rights (initially the “Special Unit on Palestinian Rights”, established
within the Department of Political Affairs of the UN Secretariat) followed two
years later, established by UNGAR 32/40 B in 1977.
82. Gareth Griffiths, “The Myth of Authenticity,” in The Post-Colonial Studies
Reader, ed. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin (London and New
York, 2006), 165–8.
83. Zygmunt Bauman, “Allosemitism: Premodern, Modern, Postmodern,”
in Modernity, Culture and “the Jew”, ed. Bryan Cheyette and Laura Marcus
(Cambridge, 1998), 154.
84. See “The Uses and Abuses of Indigeneity and Autochthony,” Social Anthro-
pology 19.2 (2011).
85. Quentin Gausset, Justin Kenrick, and Robert Gibb, “Indigeneity and
Autochthony: A Couple of False Twins?,” Social Anthropology 19.2 (2011): 136,
139; Adam Kuper, “The Return of the Native,” Current Anthropology 44.3 (2003):
389–402; Alan Barnard, “Kalahari Revisionism, Vienna and the ‘Indigenous Peo-
ples’ Debate,” Social Anthropology 14. 1 (2006): 1–16.
86. Ran Aaronsohn, “Settlement in Eretz Israel - A Colonialist Enterprise?
´Critical´ Scholarship and Historical Geography,” Israel Studies 1.2 (1996): 214–29.
87. Ian G. Baird, “Indigeneity in Asia: An Emerging but Contested Concept,”
Asian Ethnicity 17.4 (2016): 501–5.

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190 • isr ael studies, volume 23 number 2

88. See British-Jamaican poet Louise Bennett’s poem “colonization in reverse”

in her “Colonisation in Reverse,” in Writing Black Britain, 1948–1998—An Inter-
disciplinary Anthology, ed. James Procter (Manchester, 2000), 16–17.
89. Awet Tewelde Weldemichael, Third World Colonialism and Strategies of Lib-
eration: Eritrea and East Timor Compared (Cambridge, 2013).
90. Robert J. C. Young, Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction (Oxford,
2001), 3.
91. Young integrates the Palestinian territories (in fact only the West Bank) into
an extensive list, ranging from East Timor to the Untouchables in India, adding
that Israel proper might belong into this category according to Maxime Rodinson’s
seminal argument (ibid., 3) put forward in his Israel: A Colonial Settler-State? (New
York, 1973).
92. John W. Meyer, John Boli, George M. Thomas, and Francisco O. Ramirez,
“World Society and the Nation-State,” American Journal of Sociology 103.1 (1997):
144–81.
93. For the PKK perspective on the colonial occupation of Kurdistan, see Joost
Jongerden, The Settlement Issue in Turkey and the Kurds: An Analysis of Spatial Poli-
tices, Modernity and War (Leiden, 2007), 54.
94. For the POLISARIO perspective, see Proclamation du gouvernement de la
République Arabe Sahraouie Démocratique du 4 mars 1976, Centre national de
la recherche scientifique. (1977)—Documents—Sahara occidental. Annuaire de
l’Afrique Du Nord, 16 : 917 (translation by author).
95. See South Tyrol in the 20th Century: the Life and Survival of a Minority
(Innsbruck, 1997) [German].
96. Jean Raspail, The Camp of the Saints (Paris, 1973) [French].
97. On Maronite and Kurdish nationalism as an aspiration for a “second Israel”,
see Itamar Rabinovich, The War for Lebanon, 1970–1985 (Revised Edition) (Ithaca,
NY, 1985), 47; Ofra Bengio, “Surprising Ties between Israel and the Kurds,” Middle
East Quarterly 21.3 (2014). On the nexus between Kashmir and the occupied terri-
tories in Pakistani discourse, see P.R. Kumaraswamy, Beyond the Veil: Israel-Pakistan
Relations (Tel-Aviv, 2000).
98. On Sahrawi sympathies for Palestinian nationalism, see Tony Hodges,
Western Sahara: The Roots of a Desert War (Chicago, 1983), 164.
99. Dewi Fortuna Anwar, “Indonesia and the Bandung Conference: Then and
Now,” in Bandung Revisited: The Legacy of the 1955 Asian-African Conference for
International Order, ed. Amitav Acharya and See Seng Tan (Singapore, 2008).
100. “Nehru admitted that ‘We felt that logically Israel should be invited, but
when we saw that the consequences of that invitation would be that many others
would not be able to come, then we agreed’,” Benjamin Rivlin and Jacques Fomer-
and, “Changing Third World Perspectives and Policies Towards Israel,” in Israel in
the Third World, ed. Michael Curtis and Susan Aurelia Gitelson (New Brunswick,
NJ, 1976), 334.
101. Republic of Indonesia, The Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Asia-Africa Speak
from Bandung (Djakarta, 1955).

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 Beyond Allozionism • 191

102. “Israel was not reduced to imperialism and Nasser’s approach matched the
international consensus on Israel, which was to recognize it as a legitimate—if
errant—state in the region,” Ewan Stein, Representing Israel in Modern Egypt. Ideas,
Intellectuals and Foreign Policy from Nasser to Mubarak (London and New York,
2012), 51.
103. Bauman, “Allosemitism,” 149.
104. On the origins and consequences of the “Great Idea” of restoring Greater
Greece in its Byzantine borders (including Istanbul), see Dimitri Pentzopoulos,
The Balkan Exchange of Minorities and Its Impact upon Greece (Paris, 1962), ch. 1.
105. On Indonesian colonization efforts in West Papua, see Richard Chauvel,
“Refuge, Displacement, and Dispossession: Responses to Indonesian Rule and
Conflict in Papua,” in Conflict, Violence, and Displacement in Indonesia, ed. Eva-
Lotta E. Hedman (Ithaca, NY, 2008), 147–72.
106. Harrison defines the “‘transcolonial identification’ with Palestine” as “pro-
cesses of identification that are rooted in a common colonial genealogy and a shared
perception of (neo)colonial subjection”, Olivia C. Harrison, Transcolonial Maghreb.
Imagining Palestine in the Era of Decolonization (Stanford, 2016), 2.
107. Derek J. Penslar, Israel in History: The Jewish State in Comparative Perspective
(New York, 2007).
108. Oded Haklai and Neophytos Loizides, eds., Settlers in Contested Lands. Ter-
ritorial Disputes and Ethnic Conflicts (Stanford, 2015).
109. Bauman, “Allosemitism: Premodern, Modern, Postmodern,” 149.
110. Avi Bareli, “Forgetting Europe: Perspectives on the Debate about Zionism
and Colonialism,” in Israeli Historical Revisionism. From Left to Right, ed. Anita
Shapira and Derek J. Penslar (London, 2003), 99–120.
111. Gershon Shafir, “Zionism and Colonialism: A Comparative Approach,” in
Israel in Comparative Perspective. Challenging the Conventional Wisdom, ed. Michael
N. Barnett (Albany, NY, 1996), 227–42.
112. Edward W. Said, “Introduction,” in Blaming the Victims. Spurious Scholar-
ship and the Palestinian Question (London and New York, 1988), 1–19, 8 (emphasis
added).
113. Penslar, Israel in History, 91, 111 (emphasis added).
114. On the term ethnoscape, see Anthony D. Smith, “Nation and Ethnoscape,”
in Myths and Memories of the Nation (Oxford, 1999), 149–59.
115. James Scott, Seeing Like A State. How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human
Condition Have Failed (Yale, 1998), 130.
116. Ian S. Lustick, Unsettled States, Disputed Lands. Britain and Ireland, France
and Algeria, Israel and the West Bank-Gaza (Ithaca, NY, 1993).
117. Scott, Seeing Like A State, 257.
118. For an architectural reading of Israel’s occupation and the settlement project,
see Eyal Weizman, Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation (London and
New York, 2007).
119. Ibid., Ch. 4.
120. Ibid., 188–91.

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192 • isr ael studies, volume 23 number 2

121. For the reconstruction of La’ayoune under Moroccan occupation, see

Akbarali Thobhani, Western Sahara Since 1975 Under Moroccan Administration:
Social, Economic, and Political Transformation (New York, 2002), 108–26.
122. Chaim Gans argues that the Zionist project did not become more colonial
after 1967, but rather that its coloniality became less morally justifiable: “It is . . .
not the colonialism of the post-1967 settlements that implies their corruptness,
but the other way around: it is because the post-1967 settlement project is corrupt
that its colonial nature is corrupt”, Chaim Gans, A Political Theory for the Jewish
People (Oxford, 2016), 110.
123. Weldemichael, Third World Colonialism and Strategies of Liberation.
124. Ehud Eiran, “The Indonesian Settlement Project in East Timor,” in Settlers
in Contested Lands. Territorial Disputes and Ethnic Conflicts, ed. Oded Haklai and
Neophytos Loizides (Stanford, 2015), 97–113.
125. Arie M. Dubnov, “Notes on the Zionist Passage to India, or: The Analogical
Imagination and Its Boundaries,” Journal of Israeli History 35.2 (2016): 177–214.
126. Gans, A Political Theory for the Jewish People, 60.
127. Myron Weiner, “The Macedonian Syndrome: An Historical Model of Inter-
national Relations and Political Development,” World Politics 23.4 (1971): 665–83.
128. Founding document of Gush Emunim, Gideon Aran, Kookism, The Roots
of Gush Emunim, the Culture of the Settlers’, Sub-Culture, Zionist Theology, Contem-
porary Messianism (Jerusalem, 2013), 13–15 [Hebrew].
129. On the impact of American Jewish immigrants on the settler movement,
see Sara Yael Hirschhorn, City on a Hilltop. American Jews and the Israeli Settler
Movement (Cambridge, 2017).
130. Myron Weiner, “Matching Peoples, Territories and States. Post-Ottoman
Irredentism in the Balkans and in the Middle East,” in Governing People and Ter-
ritories, ed. Daniel J. Elazar (Philadelphia, 1982), 106.
131. Said, Culture and Imperialism, 276.
132. Scott, Seeing Like, 3.
133. Ibid., 3.
134. Albert Hourani, “Ideologies of the Mountain and the City: Reflections on
the Lebanese Civil War,” in The Emergence of the Modern Middle East (London,
1981), 170–8.
135. Haklai and Loizides, Settlers in Contested Lands. Territorial Disputes and
Ethnic Conflicts; Oren Barak, State Expansion and Conflict: In and Between Israel/
Palestine and Lebanon (Cambridge, 2017).
136. Assaf Likhovski, “Post-Post-Zionist Historiography,” Israel Studies 15.2
(2010): 1–23.
137. http://www.molad.org/en/projects/items.php?fields=208 (last accessed 14
October 2017); see also Hilo Glazer, “Israelis Telling the Middle East Like It Is,”
Ha’aretz, 2015, https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-1.663021.
138. Joel S. Migdal, Strong Societies and Weak States (Princeton, NJ, 1988);
Michael N. Barnett, Confronting the Costs of War (Princeton, NJ, 1993).

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 Beyond Allozionism • 193

139. Vijay Mishra and Bob Hodge, “What Was Postcolonialism?,” New Literary
History 36.3 (2005): 375–402 (emphasis added).
140. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things. An Archaeology of the Human Sciences
(London and New York, 2005), 422.
141. Bauman, “Allosemitism: Premodern, Modern, Postmodern,” 154.
142. Ibid., 149.

JOHANNES BECKE is Assistant Professor for Israel and Middle East

Studies at the Center for Jewish Studies Heidelberg. His recent publications
include: “The Favela in the Jungle. On Israel’s Self-Perception as a Western
Enclave,” Jüdischer Almanach (2018) [German]; “Land and Redemption: The
Zionist Project in Comparative Perspective,” Trumah 23 (2016); “Towards
a De-Occidentalist Perspective on Israel: The Case of The Occupation,”
Journal of Israeli History 33.1 (2014).

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