The Inevitable Logic of the Zionist State

There is huge effort by the establishment to reduce the crimes of genocide to the actions of a few rotten apples around Netanyahu, but as Nicky Coules argues, the reality is that it is an outworking of the logic of Zionism itself.

written by Nicky Coules December 11, 2025

The Israeli genocide in Palestine has an inevitability to it that comes from the nature of the political Zionist project itself. Political Zionism is, in turn, an outcome of European antisemitism. To see this, we need to look at history. Antisemitism has been around for millennia. In antiquity Jews and later Christians were persecuted because at that time multiple gods were revered and Jews and Christians worshiping a single deity were considered disloyal. In the Middle Ages Christians regarded Jews as alien because they repudiated Christ and his church.

In Europe down to the early 20th century Jews were segregated into ghettos. This and other constraints created a cohesion among them that might otherwise not have been. They were prohibited from owning property, so they engaged in trade, banking and moneylending. This othered them while also engendering envy. With the emergence of nationalism in Europe in the nineteenth century Jews began to be viewed as ethnically homogenous rather than the religious community that they are. Into this stepped the founder of Zionism, Theodor Herzl, who made a case for the establishment of a Jewish state in a pamphlet published in 1896. Political Zionism was born based on the belief that antisemitism always was and always would be.

The Jewish National Fund was established in 1901. This operated much like the Catholic charity, Trócaire. Older readers may recall Trócaire collection boxes in Catholic households.  Similarly, the blue JNF tin boxes could be found in Jewish households throughout the world. Following the Balfour Declaration of 1917 and the granting of the British mandate, the funds collected were used to buy land in Palestine often from absentee Arab landlords. The hapless and often bewildered Palestinian tenants were evicted and replaced by Jewish immigrants. This was the seed of apartheid Israel.

 

Colonialist racism

The first substantial influx of settlers comprised Ashkenazi Jews from Europe. As Rob Ferguson notes, it was their secular Labour Zionism, a variant  of social democracy that laid the basis of the state. Like all colonisers the Ashkenazi saw themselves as a superior people on a mission. They would bring a higher civilisation to a ‘backward’ land populated by ‘ignorant and lazy’ Arabs. To get a flavour of this, recall the attitude of the colonisers from across the Irish Sea towards the native Irish. We too were supposedly backward, ignorant and lazy.

As the numbers of Ashkenazi immigrants declined, Mizrahi and Sephardic Jews were encouraged to settle in Israel. These people came from North Africa and the Middle East. With their similarity in appearance to Arabs they were looked down upon and discriminated against by the Ashkenazi. But what they all had in common was a bitter hostility towards Palestinians. The coming of Netanyahu to power, alongside the two fascists Smotrich and Ben-Gvir, is in large part the working out of the political tensions in Israel arising from its inter-Jewish discriminations and further shaped by Palestinian resistance as well as hostile countries in the region.

Even when more ‘liberal’ governments held sway Palestinians were personae non gratae. One such ‘liberal’ was Golda Meir, prime minister from 1969 to 1973, who infamously said: “There was no such thing as Palestinians….It was not as though there was a Palestinian people in Palestine considering itself as a Palestinian people and we came here and threw them out and took their country from them. They did not exist.” So much for the Palestinian homeland or identity.

The current genocide is not an aberration, therefore. It is a fundamental feature of the Zionist project. It is the continuity of a necessary compulsion to extinguish all Palestinian resistance. The Nakba of 1948 was not one single event: it  is always ongoing.

 

Two state: corralling resistance

The reality of Palestinian resistance in the form of the PLO gave the lie to the idea that there is no Palestinian nation. Apologists for Zionism choose not to see this. They – and the Irish government would happily join them at the first opportunity – would have us believe that were a more amenable regime to be elected in Israel a Palestinian state could come into being. It wouldn’t.

When the PLO was defeated, the Oslo Accords were designed as a way to corral resistance, holding out the chimera of a possible future two-state solution while creating the Palestinian Authority to police its own people. Divide and rule was the Israeli watchword. Repression continued with routine attacks by the Israeli military coming to be referred to by its army general staff as “mowing the lawn”. Israel’s hope for uninterrupted control of historic Palestine ran up against continued Palestinian resistance, especially during the mass uprisings of the first and second intifadas.

More land grabbing and repression was Israel’s answer as it searched for the knockdown blow that would finally and permanently extinguish resistance. While Palestinians are continuously fighting back, on a daily basis, the period before Hamas struck on October 7 was comparatively quieter. The subsequent genocide is a logical conclusion of a Zionist project that can’t comprehend that Palestinians will always resist.

 

International barbarity

Let us now turn to the bigger picture. The US and its allies have a strategic interest in sponsoring the Israeli project. The Zionist state acts as their agent in the Middle East keeping it in a state of tension and instability. Israel is hailed as the only democracy in the Middle East when it is no more democratic than was apartheid South Africa. Naturally, Israel sought to dress itself up in a cloak of respectability and the whole thing was going wonderfully. The despots running the adjacent Arab states were on the point of exchanging ambassadors with the Zionist state. Now all that is sprung into the air. Israel is a pariah, and the never-ending war has reached new levels of barbarity.

While Israel is undoubtedly an apartheid state there is an important difference to be noted between the Zionist state and the apartheid South Africa state. In the case of the latter the native population was vital to its economy. This gave the non-white South African workers a powerful lever. Such is not the case with Israel, which has built a national system based on the exclusion of Palestinians. Therefore, it will have to be external forces – the working classes across the neighbouring Arab states and the global Palestine movement –  along with Palestinian resistance that will extinguish the Zionist state.