The False Promise of Settler Colonialism

A BUS RIDE TO JERUSALEM

On July 6, 1989, a crowded commuter bus made its way from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. The mundane journey took a horrifying turn when a young Palestinian man seized control of the wheel. Screaming Allahu akbar (God is great), he plunged his fellow passengers over a cliff. The perpetrator, an Islamic Jihad operative from Gaza named Abd al-Hadi Ghanim, murdered 16 people and injured dozens more that day. Among the survivors, Ghanim was hospitalized and later sentenced to life in prison. Palestinian terrorists had targeted civilian buses in the past, but the Number 405 Egged Bus Attack has a grim distinction. It was the first in a long line of Palestinian murder-suicide operations.

The 405 Egged Bus attack is an instructive analogy for the war Jews and Arabs have been fighting in the Land of Israel/Palestine during the past hundred years. Like passengers on a bus, Jews and Arabs share a common and constrained geographic space. They did not, however, choose their fellow passengers. Some offend each other for reasons real and imagined, while others fantasize about more space (if only the person in the next seat would move or disembark). Notwithstanding the ill will some passengers harbor for their travel companions, the fact of their shared space means that what happens to the bus impacts all of them. When Ghanim drove over the cliff he condemned everyone irrespective of their political beliefs, identities, or actions. He also condemned himself. It was an indiscriminate attack that necessarily entailed an act of self harm.

When the Palestinian national movement practices violence against Israelis within the space both nations share, that violence constitutes a form of self harm not unlike Ghanim’s act of murder-suicide. Supposedly carried out in the name of Palestinian liberation, terror operations elicit a predictable Israeli security response, which usually compounds – rather than alleviates – Palestinian suffering. The Israelis, for their part, find themselves in a trap. While any military response runs the risk of further radicalizing the Palestinian population by deepening their sense of grievance, it is doubtful whether Israeli restraint would discourage the very attacks that create the demand for an Israeli response. That is because Palestinians are fighting for more than security, dignity, or better borders for a future state – all things that could be achieved through peaceful diplomatic negotiations.

Since the intifada of 1936, Palestinians have fought to prevent the establishment of any Jewish state no matter how small. During the pre-state era, the Palestinian national movement simultaneously fought against an alternate solution that would have granted Jews recognition as equal partners in a shared binational state in which both peoples’ legitimate national aspirations were recognized in state institutions. These maximalist positions continue to live on in the actions and ideologies of Hamas, other Palestinian factions, and their radical supporters abroad, precluding a negotiated peace. After all, Israel may be able to negotiate on boundaries or land swaps, but it cannot negotiate on its existence.

Reaching for a goal with which Israel cannot peacefully reconcile, Palestinian factions have continued to resort to war and terrorism. The tragedy, which Hamas’ October 7 War illustrates all too well, is that the more Palestinians have fought the more they have lost. One might say that the Palestinian story is a history of violent miscalculations backfiring again and again. Why, then, persist in violent struggle to achieve maximalist demands that are unrealistic and arguably immoral? Why has the Palestinian national movement – like Abd al-Hadi Ghanim – continued to steer the bus closer and closer toward the cliff?

THE SETTLER COLONIAL FRAMEWORK AS A FALSE OFFRAMP

Part of the answer is related to the settler colonial framework in vogue among many academics and left wing activists. Fayez Sayegh was a prominent Palestinian intellectual and the inaugural director-general of the PLO’s Palestine Research Center in Beirut. Many credit Sayegh with developing the critique of Zionism as settler colonialism, which is a core pillar upholding the self-destructive logic driving Palestinian terrorism. He outlined his arguments in Zionist Colonialism in Palestine (1965):

1. Jews are a religious community only. Jewish national/ethnic identity is a modern invention, which developed under the influence of European nationalism.
2. The State of Israel constitutes an “alien body” transplanted into the Middle East through a process of settler colonialism.
3. As the supposedly colonial project of a fabricated foreign people, Palestinians and their allies can dislodge the State of Israel and reverse the progress of Zionism by persisting in an anti-colonial struggle, which includes the calculated application of violence targeting Israeli civilians to achieve political ends (terrorism).

The allure of Sayegh’s anti-colonial frame stems partly from its simplistic oppressor-victim narrative, particularly powerful in an information ecosystem dominated by social media and influencers who lack depth or context. The anti-colonial frame is also tempting because it feeds a fantasy that many Palestinians want to believe: that they do not need to share the bus with Jewish passengers. This fantasy is the fundamental driver fueling the conflict and is reflected in chants such as “We don’t want no two states, we want all of it” and “From the water to the water, Palestine is Arab.” Taken together, these popular chants channel the original position of the Palestinian national movement: no to partitioning the land (“We don’t want no two states”) and no to sharing the territory with Jews as an equal national community with deep ties to the land (“Palestine in Arab”). Anti-colonial struggle assumes that these are realistic and moral positions.

The settler colonial frame and the logic of anti-colonial struggle posit that a colonizing population has a home country to which they can return. If the Palestinian national movement makes the bus sufficiently inhospitable for Jewish passengers then the Jews will eventually disembark and catch transfers to final destinations in New York, Warsaw, Sana’a, or Baghdad. While Ghanim drove himself and his victims over an actual cliff, the Palestinian national movement does not believe they will need to plunge their entire nation into the abyss. Things may get uncomfortable and dangerous for Palestinians during their campaign to eject the Jewish passengers. Hamas counts on it. Before approaching the guardrails, however, the Jews will disembark with enough time for Palestinian leaders to steer away from the cliff. The Jews’ departure from the scene as a sovereign people is an off ramp the anti-colonial strategy counts on. But what if the offramp is nothing more than wishful thinking?

The Jews in the Land of Israel are not the French in Algeria or the Spanish in Florida. While modern political Zionism is a 19th century movement, it draws on ancient traditions and a shared collective identity that stretches back millenia. Jewish ancestry, culture, and history are all deeply rooted in the land. While archeological digs in the American southwest will ever unearth ancient Spanish or Latin inscriptions, such excavations in Israel often turn up Hebrew inscriptions, evidence of Israelite material culture, and even letters written by a Jewish general fighting Roman occupation in the second century. Furthermore, Jews did not return to the Land of Israel/Palestine as agents of a colonial mother country. Most returned to the Land of Israel – the only place on earth where Jews as Jews are indigenous – to escape persecution in the countries they fled. More to the point, most Israeli Jews do not have foreign passports. There is no metropol or mother country to return to. Israel is the final destination, and if the Jewish return to that land is a form of colonialism then it is a very peculiar form of colonialism in which an indigenous people colonized their own ancestral lands.

There is therefore a mismatch between Palestinians’ anti-colonial tactics and the opponents against whom they are applying those tactics. Since anti-colonial struggle is predicated on fighting an enemy who can and will flee to a homeland abroad, anti-colonial struggle will continue to backfire against the Palestinians just as it has for the past one hundred years. Rather than prompting a mass Jewish exodus, such violence will continue to reproduce stiffer Israeli public opinion and a stronger resolve to fight. Arabs and Jews in the Land of Israel/Palestine are trapped on the bus together. They can find a way to share or divide the land, but extremists on both sides would do well to discard the delusion that either will be leaving.

LIVING WITH THE LEGACY OF THE 405 EGGED BUS ATTACK

There is, unfortunately, a second act in the horrific 405 Egged Bus attack. After serving 22 years of his life sentence, Abd al-Hadi Ghanim was released from prison in 2011 as part of the prisoner exchange that secured the freedom of Gilad Shalit from Hamas captivity. Like Ghanim, many of the Palestinian prisoners freed in the deal had planned or executed heinous attacks targeting Israeli civilians. They were responsible for bombing pizzerias, cafes, buses, and even a Passover festival meal. One particularly notorious name on the list of freed Palestinian prisoners was Yahya Sinwar. Upon his release, Sinwar resumed activities on behalf of Hamas and eventually became the group’s leader in Gaza. On October 7, 2023, Sinwar sent Hamas death squads into Israel, breaking a ceasefire that had been in effect since the end of fighting in 2021 and initiating the devastation of the current war.

Why do Palestinian leaders and their supporters continue to advance a cycle of self-destruction that dooms both Palestinians and Israelis to the kind of suffering we have witnessed in Israel and Gaza? We do not need to grope blindly for an answer. We can simply listen to Hamas leaders’ public statements. In an October interview with Al-Arabiya, Khaled Mashaal was asked about the war’s toll on Palestinian civilians. Mashaal insisted that his organization was not caught off guard by Israel’s response to the Hamas invasion and that his organization was “fully aware of its consequences.” He then encouraged Palestinians to sacrifice their lives in even larger numbers, pointing to insurgencies in Afghanistan, Vietnam, and Algeria – which cost millions of lives – as inspiration for martyrdom. Two years earlier, during the 2021 Israel-Hamas conflict, another senior Hamas official, Musa Abu Marzouk, told Russia Today that the outbreak of violence was “not the final war.” Anticipating that his organization would violate future ceasefire agreements, Marzouk promised that Hamas would continue to wage war after war against Israel until achieving its goal to ethnically cleanse the Jewish population. Marzouk may be a monster, but he is an honest one. True to his word, Hamas did break the ceasefire when they declared war last October. Most recently, Hamas has rejected the latest ceasefire proposal because it would include mechanisms that would make it difficult to rearm and according to some reports its new leader may even be seeking to expand the conflict further. While Hamas’ statements and actions are dangerously absurd, they seem rational from within the closed logic of a misapplied anti-colonial paradigm.

The combination of political authoritarianism, religious fundamentalism, and a radical anti-colonial framework makes for a toxic brew. No matter how many people die, those partaking of the poison will keep reassuring themselves that they are just a few more dead Palestinians and Israelis away from ensuring an Arab Palestine from the water to the water. They believe that if they simply inflict and endure a little more suffering it will all be worth it in the end. Israel is not perfect. Israelis have their own extremists and political dysfunction, which have contributed to the conflict in ways large and small. The settler colonial narrative that is hegemonic among Palestinians, however, is the single biggest obstacle preventing peace. That narrative all but ensures future wars in Gaza irrespective of Israeli policies or negotiating positions. If we do not disrupt the narrative then Hamas and its allies will continue saying, “just a little more suffering” even as the bus’s smashed skeleton is engulfed in flames at the bottom of the ravine.