Return the Land: A Jewish Call to End the State of Israel

My name is Amanda. I am Jewish. And I believe that Israel is a morally illegitimate entity that should be dismantled in its entirety.

Palestinian farmer cries as she hugs one of her olive trees in the West Bank in 2005. (Jaafar Ashtiyeh / AFP via Getty Images)

My name is Amanda.
I am Jewish.

And I believe that Israel is a morally illegitimate entity that should be dismantled in its entirety.

The Israeli settler-colony is predicated on the elimination of Palestinian life and liberty and as such, it cannot continue to exist.

In order to create the state of Israel in 1948, British-backed Zionist militias killed 15,000 Palestinians, expelling 750,000 people and destroying 530 villages. For Palestinians, this is known as The Nakba (Catastrophe) and for Israel – Independence Day.

But many Palestinians refer to the last 76 years as an “ongoing Nakba” in which Israel has only tightened the noose of military occupation, expanding its structural violence and land theft.

Over the last six months, Israel has murdered more than 38,000 Palestinians and displaced two million more in the world’s first live-streamed genocide — the most well-documented mass atrocity humanity has ever witnessed.

The bone-chilling depravity of Israeli politicians, civilians and soldiers is nothing new — Palestinians have documented the regime’s use of torture, rape, child abductions, arbitrary arrest and detention, medical system destruction, looting, executions of children, white phosphorous attacks, forced starvation, surveilance, sniping, and targeted assassinations since the inception of the Zionist project.

But now, the west is tuned in like never before and Israel has irrevocably exposed its barbarity.

We are not witnessing an aberration of the Zionist project, but rather Zionism in its purest form. Humanity demands an end to this bloodbath; justice demands a complete return of the land to Palestinian sovereignty.

Jews of conscience understand that the Zionist project weaponizes and bastardizes Judaism for the sake of western imperialism, serving no one but the elite. Zionism and Israel cannot be reformed, they must end entirely.

Here are a few reasons why . . .

Israel is a Violent and Insatiable Settler-Colony — Not a “Jewish Birthright” 

Colonizing Palestine to create the state of Israel was an unacceptable solution to the problem of European antisemitism from the beginning because it required invading Palestinian land and murdering/expelling them for our “refuge.”

The fundamental basis of Israel’s moral illegitimacy lies in the fact that it is another European settler-colony on stolen land and settler-colonies, rooted in indigenous massacre, do not have a moral right to exist.

All settler-colonies — including the United States, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and Israel — follow a similar blueprint. A group of Europeans seek land annexation where indigenous people already live. Those Europeans invade the land, brutally expel and kill the indigenous people, and clear the way for settlements.

From Palestine to Turtle Island, settlers seek to build a “modern, civilized” country . . . on the crushed bones of native inhabitants.

Settler-colonies are rooted in white supremacy, and punctuated with sadism and dehumanization, given that settlers must continually kill and expel in order to remain on stolen land.

Colonial regimes decimate the land’s ecosystem, pillaging resources and dispossessing the communities who have tended the land for generations. They attempt to erase the native people and their histories (in the case of Israel: “A land without a people for a people without a land” and “We made the desert bloom”) while simultaneously villainizing them as savage terrorists for resisting their own slaughter.

Despite Zionists current attempt to brand Zionism as a project of “Jewish indigeneity” founders of the Zionist movement stated clearly that their project in Palestine was colonial, not religious.

This is exemplified in how Zionists sought out different locations for their project, including Argentina and modern-day Kenya via the “Uganda Scheme.” Theodor Herzl, the Austro-Hungarian Jewish journalist, lawyer, political activist, and father of modern political Zionism, discussed this colonial impetus, as did Ze’ev Jabotinsky, a Zionist leader who wrote in 1923:

“Every indigenous people will resist alien settlers as long as they see any hope of ridding themselves of the danger of foreign settlement. That is what the Arabs in Palestine are doing, and what they will persist in doing as long as there remains a solitary spark of hope that they will be able to prevent the transformation of ‘Palestine’ into the ‘Land of Israel’. Zionist colonization, even the most restricted, must either be terminated or carried out in defiance of the will of the native population.”

Waves of Jewish Zionists may have left their home countries in Europe as refugees but when they reached Palestine, they arrived as settlers and colonizers.

Some Palestinian families welcomed European Jewish refugees into their homes after the Holocaust, and Palestinian families recall how those same “refugees'' stole their homes out from under them. Just as Jewish people did not want to be kicked out of their homes in Europe due to pogroms and genocide, so too do Palestinians not want to be kicked out of theirs.

Palestinians should not be forced to pay the price for European antisemitism and displacement: Palestinians continual resistance to settler invasion is decolonial, not antisemitic.

Jews from outside of Palestine who settle on the land claiming “indigeneity” are squarely incorrect. As Abdaljawad Omar, Palestinian writer and lecturer at Birzeit University in the West Bank, rightly notes,

“The entire history of Palestine is our history. When people mention that Jews were here — yes, Jews were here. And we are their descendants. We’re the descendants of the Christians who were here, the Jews that were here . . . The Jewish history that is here is our history. It’s part of our blood, it’s part of our make-up, it’s part of our culture, it’s part of our dialect . . . We’re the inheritors of that. It’s not anybody coming from Europe. Even if you have religious connection to the land doesn’t mean that the land is in any way theirs.”

Zionists decimate Palestine’s natural ecosystem, uproot trees, pour cement into the wells, blast the earth with bombs, kill the animals, and level ancient historical and cultural landmarks.

Is this how indigenous people treat the land and its inhabitants?

No. This is how colonization functions, not indigeneity.

And colonization is an insatiable beast, always seeking more death, destruction, and depravity so long as we allow it to exist. Israel’s colonial nature, continual expansionism, and decades of ongoing brutality invalidates the Zionist project in its entirety: all settler-colonies must return the land to indigenous sovereignty. 

Israel is a Western/U.S. Military Base

Israel exists not as a benevolent haven for Jewish people, but as a strategic military outpost for western imperialism. 

The Zionist project in Palestine never could have come to fruition without political backing, military training, and weaponry from Britain to Zionists. Western colonial powers — and the U.S. in particular — provide unwavering financial and political support for Israel, an outpost from which they extract resources, spread western economic hegemony, and politically destabilize the region.

Israel provides the west with a slew of imperial benefits including access to oil and gas reserves, a testing ground to build and experiment new weapons and surveillance technology on Palestinians, and a proxy to launder foreign military intervention.

As James Baldwin noted in 1970:

“To me it was obvious why the western world created the State of Israel, which is not really a Jewish state. The West needed a handle in the Middle East. And they created the state as a European pawn . . . I’m not antisemitic at all, but I am anti-zionist. I don’t believe they have the right, after 3,000 years, to reclaim the land with western bombs and guns on biblical injunction.”

Western powers fundamentally benefit from a destabilized Middle East that is economically dependent on the west, and destabilizing countries is the U.S.’s speciality.

An estimated 68% of imported weaponry Israel deploys to kill Palestinians is made in the U.S and NPR recently reported that there are “some 23,000 [U.S. citizens] currently serving in the Israeli military.”

This is as much the U.S.’s genocide on Palestine as it is Israel’s — the two entities move as one with Israel operating as the U.S.’s attack dog or client state. 

Both countries were founded on violent European settler-colonialism and are deeply invested in their “shared western values” of killing Black and Brown people for financial and political gain.

Israel cannot maintain its occupation of Palestine without the backing of the U.S., and while the Middle East is littered with invasive U.S. military bases, Israel is its crown jewel.

As Joe Biden stated in 1986 and again in 2023, “If Israel didn’t exist, we’d have to invent one.”

Image of a US military base in Israel

Israel is an Antisemitic Project

As a Jewish ethnostate, Israel needs a constant flow of settlers to maintain its demographic dominance over Palestinians, so it both relies on and cultivates global antisemitism. Zionists historically and currently partner with antisemitic western forces because the parties share a common interest: removing Jews from our countries to make us settlers in Palestine. 

For example, British-Israeli historian Avi Shlaim wrote about how Zionist agents bombed Iraqi Jewish sites in the early 1950s to instill fear in the Jewish community so that they would flee to Israel. Without antisemitism, there would be no need for Israel, so Zionism requires that Jews be perpetual victims globally while ethnically cleansing Palestine.

Zionism cultivates antisemitism by incessantly claiming to act on behalf of all Jews while committing crimes against humanity. Zionism exploits Jewish trauma to both annihilate Palestinians with impunity, and keep Jews feeling unsafe enough to stay loyal to a morally unjustifiable nation.

There is no “Jewish liberation” in ethnic cleansing. Zionists degrade and distort the very definition of antisemitism by hurling the accusation at Palestine’s advocates — including Jews — completely destroying antisemitism’s real meaning and weight.

Defense of Israel from western world leaders often sound like thinly veiled threats. Biden repeats the refrain, “Without Israel, there would be no safe Jew in the world.”

But is this true? Shouldn’t we feel safe in our own countries? Why is the answer to western antisemitism a U.S. military base on stolen land? And most importantly, what about the Palestinians who are slaughtered daily for our so-called “safety”? 

Of course we know that countries like the U.S. — that turned away European Jewish refugees during the Holocaust — don’t support Israel because of a soft spot for Jewish people. Instead, Jews act as human shields for western empire in Palestine, and in exchange for manning their military base, Zionists get to have a European-style colony next to an occupied death camp, settlements atop the mass graves of Palestinians.

Jewish people need to understand that carrying water for empire in the form of Israel will not save us — we are only killing Palestine and ourselves through this violent and irredeemable project.

The safety offered by Zionists to Jews is a false safety because it is rooted in racial supremacy, land theft, and ongoing Palestinian genocide.

Real Jewish safety lies not in aligning with racist colonization in the form of Zionism, but in solidarity with oppressed people of the global majority, resisting white supremacy and imperialism together.

All liberation struggles are connected and Jewish people are not separate from this enduring truth. Our shared opponent is white supremacy. When Palestine frees itself, it will also free Judaism from the stranglehold of violent nationalism.

Israel is not ‘reformable’

Settler-colonialism cannot be reformed, it must be uprooted. “Liberal zionists” and the mythical, non-existent “Israeli left” whitewash Israel’s ongoing Nakba by speaking empty platitudes of co-existence and peace while squatting in stolen Palestinian homes.

Liberal Zionists wave Israeli flags in the street to protest Netanyahu, but refuse to relinquish their colonial privilege and fight for the Palestinian right of return.

Liberal Zionists are just another force that normalizes the crimes of the colony they benefit from and within which they wish to maintain. Regardless of who leads Israel: Palestinians die. Israel steals more land.

Netanyahu is not an anomaly. He is arguably the most honest representation of Zionism in Israel’s history. He is upfront about his genocidal nature instead of seeking the “quieter” slaughter that allows Israelis to more easily ignore their blood-soaked complicity.

Liberal Zionists don’t like the negative public spotlight this massacre brings to their cherished colony — they yearn for the “good old days” when Israel systematically annihilated Palestinians with less fanfare and attention.

This, to a liberal, is peace.

Palestinians meanwhile, whose lives are defined by ever-encroaching military occupation, will never taste peace without justice, which means material restitution and dissolution of the occupier by any means necessary.

The ideology of Zionist colonization and the existence of Israel has always required mass extermination and expulsion — a fact that has never been more true than it is today.

If an entity needs to kill this much just to exist, it should not exist at all.

Return the Land

Anyone who has been paying attention for the last six months — let alone 76 years — can see that Israel will go down in history as one of the most morally bankrupt and sadistic regimes the world has ever witnessed. This is not a reformable entity, it must end. All of us have a responsibility to help make it so. 

Palestinians will never stop fighting for their liberation, nor should they. Palestinians deserve to live in peace and dignity throughout the entirety of their ancestral homeland. They are entitled to return home and design their own liberated future. All of “Israel” is occupied Palestinian land and should be returned to indigenous sovereignty.