By Alon Mizrahi
How it beautifully aligns with the one you do remember, and what kind of unrelated and coincidental calamity it can caution us against
Colonizers love to colonize. It is what they do and what they live for. And one of the things colonizers love to colonize most is the calendar.
In collectible memory, the year 2023, for instance, consists of just one day. The Z state colonized the rest of that year, so we don’t have it anymore. We don’t know what happened on April 6 or August 25, 2023.
Similarly, we can’t collectively recall what happened on any other day than September 11 in the year 2001. But, as I’m about to remind you, something very meaningful happened in the summer of that year, on another continent. Something that, just like the event you do remember, had a very strong and direct link to the Middle East.
Could any parallels be drawn to the present day? I will leave it to you, my intelligent and well-informed reader, to decide. But first, let me refresh your precious memory.
The struggle to legitimize Zionism in world opinion has been going on for well over a century. We don’t always think about Zionism as one of the biggest issues in the world, as we’re usually fooled into believing it is just about one small state representing one small people doing small things in a small stretch of land. This impression cannot be further from the truth.
Just like it’s driving the American empire crazy with nonstop demands, accusations, pleas, sensations, and war plans, Zionism occupied the British Empire a great deal in the decades leading up to the establishment of Israel. The Palestine Mandate arrangement was a unique thing, and so was the Balfour Declaration, which was bizarrely sent to a private citizen (albeit with the family name Rothschild).
Israel was in bed with European colonial schemes in the Arab world since the very beginning (famously in the 1956 British-French invasion and attempted regime change in Egypt), and was a main battleground between the USA and USSR in the 1960s and 1970s.
Zionism has been covered by the media extensively throughout the decades, and endless UN General Assembly and UNSC decisions have tried to contain it.
Zionism also gave rise to one of the most popular liberation movements in history: that of Palestine, making figures like Yasser Arafat and Yahya Sinwar world-famous, and emblems like the Palestinian flag and the keffiyeh globally recognized symbols of resistance.
This is not a crash course in the history of Zionism; it is to give proper acknowledgement to the central role Zionism played in shaping both world affairs and international political consciousness.
Like all wrongdoers, Zionists have always been extremely sensitive to the opinions of other people about them, and this was greatly helped by a free license to call everyone who opposed the barbaric white colonizer takeover of Palestine an antisemite.
With staunch covert and overt Western support for Zionism provided every step of the way, anti-Zionism became almost extinct in the last decades, especially after the collapse of the Soviet Union, which helped many colonized groups resist and get recognition.
There were once Jewish anti-Zionist organizations, but they are mostly gone. And, a UN where decision 3379 in the General Assembly passed is mostly a distant memory; decades of relentless American colonial-capitalism and cultural domination throughout the world made almost everyone, everyone, very careful and vague politically. Gone is the era of strong convictions and a fierce commitment to justice and equal rights for all: what we mostly have now is sheepish, quivering voices and protests that refuse to step outside their safe spaces.
Israel faking a willingness for peace and maintaining a decades-long deception campaign of ‘negotiations ‘, ‘talks‘, ‘understandings‘, and ‘summits‘ also helped put the fire out of the anti-Zionist movement: if the Jewish state was willing to make concessions and peace, after all, maybe there was no need to treat Israel as an evil merciless colonial project.
Well, misleading people to think that was Israel’s main objective in participating in the ‘peace process’ charade. And it worked beautifully, but not perfectly, as some countries remained committed to anti-Zionism.
Many Arab League countries in the years before the ‘war on terror‘ were openly anti-Zionist: Iraq and Libya were perhaps the most vocal, but others, like Tunisia and Algeria, and Sudan, spoke as well. And in the then Global South, revolutionary strongholds like Cuba maintained close ties with Palestine, and radical lefties throughout the world always identified with the Palestinian cause.
Among the countries that have always remained energetically anti-Zionist, South Africa has kept its special place, and its word carried special weight. South Africa grew out of the original apartheid; they resisted and prevailed, and had the language, approach, and credibility in the fight against racism and colonialism.
In the summer of 2001, something quite extraordinary happened in South Africa, which had never happened before. An event so powerful and intimidating, it sent shockwaves through Israeli and American establishments.
The event was titled World Conference against Racism 2001, and it took place in Durban. That event was a one-of-a-kind attempt to bring together activists, academics, and diplomats from all over the world to discuss issues of racism and colonialism.
The atmosphere and language used in that event and the declarations accepted and published by its attendants caused the American and Israeli delegations to abandon the place on the second day, outraged and aghast.
Israeli media at the time covered Durban obsessively: it was described as a major threat to the Jewish state, a celebration of antisemitism, and the biggest push for the BDS movement.
Indeed, boycotts and divestment were major issues in Durban, and it was there that the seeds of BDS as a viable strategy to combat Zionism (which was widely described as a form of racism in Durban) were planted.
While the formal main convention was bad for Israel, the NGOs summit, taking place at the same time nearby, was much worse, and its resolution adopted language that described Israel as a racist apartheid state guilty of racist war crimes, including acts of genocide and ethnic cleansing.
It was a devastating, humiliating blow for Israel, which felt like it faced, and quite rightly so, a wall of hatred from an international network of human rights activists and foreign diplomats from Scandinavia to Arabia. The shock was so great and it lasted so long, that tens of articles in Israel’s leading news sites continued to be published many years after Durban to describe the trauma and danger of that event (here is one from 2021).
In real time, Durban was seen and described not only as an orgy of unabashed anti-Zionism, but an actul strategic danger to Israel and its existence and legitimacy.
When Durban 2001 was over, its many thousands of participants went home, armed with a new or renewed consciousness and vocabulary for battling racism, colonialism. and Zionism.
But they never got to put any of that to use. Because, as fate would have it, 3 days after September 8, 2001, the day the biggest anti-Zionist event in history ended, that other thing, which you so remember well, exploded into our lives, and changed the course of history forever.
Instead of being encouraged to adopt a more critical line against Israel, the US, the West, and the whole world were thrown into a series of devastating wars. Laws passed in the US in the wake of that event contributed immensely to it becoming a paranoid and belligerent country that would eventually support open genocide. Israel gradually became the country no one was allowed to criticize anymore – that is, until 4 days ago, when European countries began sounding the alarm on what Israel was doing in Gaza.
A quarter century after Durban, anti-Zionism is back with a vengeance, and this time, too, it was South Africa that led the charge. Just like the summer of 2001, the street and activists are much more radical in their language and demands than formal organizations and governments, and the US and Israel stand against a huge wall of popular opposition to their crimes against Palestine.
I’m allowing myself to entertain one crazy conspiratorial thought: maybe the similarity between 2001 and 2025 is going to be even more perfect than this. Maybe this year, too, some huge and well-placed explosion derails a growing anti-Zionist movement and sentiment. I mean, history does tend to rhyme, right?
And, if I may, let me add that what would make this year’s event you do remember genuinely fitting in terms of magnitude and narrative, would be something like, say, a dirty Iranian atomic bomb going off in London, or New York.
I know that I must have read too many cheap espionage thrillers in my younger years. But if I were tasked with the safety and security of any major metropolitan area in Europe or the US these days, I’d go over my sticky notes once or twice more to make sure I didn’t miss any clues about what may be a very memorable Iranian plot.
Enough time has been colonized.
