Sham nation: Eretz Israel or Ersatz Israel? (Part 1/3)

Some time ago, my wife’s sister-in-law told me about an exchange she saw on social media, apparently between an Israeli man and two women from China.

The Israeli was mocking China for being known for producing fake goods.

The Chinese citizen’s sharp reply was: “What are you saying? Your entire nation of Israel is fake!”

It is incredible how, since October 2023, the popular mind is grasping the sense of illegitimacy of the state of Israel.

‘Eretz Israel’, literally ‘the Land of Israel’, became a rallying cry of the Zionist nationalist movement in late 19^th Century Europe. The claim was that historic Palestine belonged by right to the Jewish people regardless of the indigenous Palestinians who lived there. And even that it was promised to the Jews by God over 3,000 years ago.

With God apparently on its side, brutal violence was used to displace the indigenous Palestinians, culminating in the declaration of the state of Israel in 1948.

This was despite the fact that Zionism was not a religion but a largely secular nationalist movement, one that admitted that the Bible provided “the myth for our right over the land” (see below).

Ersatz means fake, not genuine. The above already starts to smell like a sham. 

We shall see why Eretz Israel may aptly be read as Ersatz Israel.

Sham no. 1 – “A land without a people for a people without a land“

This was an outright lie. Historical Palestine was not a land without a people.

Yet Zionist propaganda deceptively portrayed it as empty and thus available for takeover and occupation by Jews, particularly those from Europe. 

In fact, historical Palestine was not simply a geographical territory between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River, together with its adjoining areas. It was a land of indigenous Palestinians with deep historical roots who had an identity, a language and a plural culture that had flourished from the Late Bronze Age (approx 1,200 BCE) till the modern era.

The name Palestin has been recorded since 3,200 years ago and is a name that has been in frequent use from around 450 BCE. (See Nur Masalha’s magisterial Palestine – A Four Thousand Year History.) 

This disproves the assertion that one still (tiresomely) encounters – that there is no such thing as Palestine or Palestinians, implying that Israel did not take anything from anyone.

It is telling that such claims have continued to thrive, from being asserted by former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir in 1969  (“There was no such thing as Palestinians“) to Israeli Finance Minister, Bezalel Smotrich, in 2023 (Smotrich says there’s no Palestinian people, declares his family ‘real Palestinians – Times of Israel).

In fact, by the time the first organised Zionist immigration to Palestine began in 1882, there was already a long-established thriving Arab society: majority Muslim, with Jewish and Christian communities living alongside it.

Far from being a desolate desert, Palestine had vibrant coastal ports and towns, trade connections with Europe, a rich agricultural economy, deep cultural traditions and historical cities.

Beyond crude propaganda, there is another explanation for why early Zionists could so readily invoke the falsehood that Palestine was “without a people” – racism. Indigenous Palestinians were not white Europeans. They could therefore be treated as lesser beings – dehumanised, dismissed, and not regarded as the people of the land. 

The dehumanising logic has continued to be reflected through the last century into the present. Israeli leaders and officials have publicly employed terms such as “grasshoppers”, “human animals”, “beasts on two legs” and “drugged cockroaches” to describe Palestinians.

You could say this reveals more about the nature of the Israelis than it does about the indigenous Palestinians they were displacing.

In Palestine, Zionism took the form of settler colonialism. An outside population settles on indigenous land by dominating, removing and replacing the native population.

It shared key traits with European colonialism – rapacious, genocidal, oppressive, dispossessing. It also reproduced the racism of the European colonial worldview.

An irony developed out of that. Theodor Herzl is generally regarded as the founder of modern political Zionism in the late 19^th Century. He was an assimilated secular Jew based in Vienna. 

Yet the antisemitism he witnessed in Europe drove him to argue for a Jewish national-political solution in his 1896 pamphlet The Jewish State.

The irony was that Herzl responded to the antisemitism suffered by Jews in Europe by embracing Europe’s own racialised colonial worldview and directing it against an “uncivilised Asia”.  He presented a Jewish state in Palestine as serving European imperial interests.

He wrote:

For Europe we would there form a part of the wall against Asia; we would serve as the outpost of civilisation against barbarism [emphasis mine].

That is racism. Europe is cast as civilised, while Asia is cast as barbaric. The same racial logic continues to shape Israeli social and political culture today. The state so often called “the only democracy in the Middle East” is, in reality, a state structured by apartheid and racism.

Check out these references:

• Apartheid – B’Tselem
• World Court Finds Israel Responsible for Apartheid – Human Rights Watch
• Israel’s apartheid against Palestinians: Cruel system of domination and crime against humanity – Amnesty International
• The Legal Architecture of Apartheid; Israeli Apartheid – Palestine Portal

Right up to the present time, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu repeats the racist trope of civilisation versus barbarism.

In short, “the only democracy in the Middle East” is a sham.

Sham No. 2 – Israel was promised by God to the Jews over 3,000 years ago

This is not even a rational argument that can be meaningfully engaged. 

As seen above, the claim that Palestine was “without a people” was a lie, meant to imply that the land was simply there for the taking.

Here, the claim is one of divine promise: that the land could be taken because it had been promised to the Jewish people over 3,000 years ago – by none other than God. But this supposed promise comes at the expense of the indigenous Palestinians who, presumably, are also God’s creation.

The irony is that many of the early Zionist leaders, such as Theodor Herzl, Chaim Weizmann, David Ben-Gurion and Ze’ev Jabotinsky, were not religiously observant Jews.

But they still invoked God because doing so served the secular nationalist ideology of Zionism. 

As Ilan Pappé notes in Ten Myths About Israel, a socialist Zionist once described the Bible as providing “the myth for our right over the land”. Thus, as Pappé puts it, “though they did not believe in God, He had nonetheless promised them Palestine.”

In effect, the victims of Zionism were made to bear the consequences of a religious claim they did not share. In that sense, a theological belief was imposed on them as political reality. 

Some would even call it a superstition – in which case Palestinians were robbed, killed, forcibly displaced and had their land occupied based on a superstition.

A cruel sham.

In any case, contemporary statehood is governed by international law, not by biblical entitlement or ancient religious claims.

A biblical promise may matter to believers as theology. But it is not a legal title to sovereignty under modern international law.  

Contemporary statehood rests on factors such as population, territory, government, capacity for international relations, self-determination, sovereign equality, and the prohibition of territorial acquisition by force – not on a claimed divine grant from antiquity.

Many peoples have ancient connections to lands from which they are now absent or dispersed. If ancient history alone created a right to exclusive sovereignty, much of the modern world would collapse into competing ancestral claims.

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