Interview
Gadi Algazi: ‘Zionism is ever more supremacist, segregationist, colonial’
We spoke at length with the Israeli historian. ‘What comes next? I don’t know. I know this: Israel will be able to live in peace only when it respects Palestinian rights.’
“The story of my family is the story of persecuted Jews in the diaspora; my own story is that of an Israeli Jew who grew up in a segregated society but in a place where Jews and Palestinians lived side by side, living and breathing rebellion against the colonial status quo from childhood,” says Gadi Algazi, medieval historian at Tel Aviv University and veteran anti-war activist, telling the story of his life in a few sentences.
“My mother,” Algazi explains, “was born in Belgrade, fled to Budapest with her mother and sister after the Nazi invasion of Yugoslavia and her father’s murder, survived the Shoah thanks to people who hid her at the risk of their own lives and reached Israel in 1948. My father grew up in an Arab neighborhood of Alexandria; in 1953 his family left Egypt for Israel. Both my parents joined the Communist Party because it was the only binational party fighting for equal rights among all Israelis and against the occupation and colonization of the West Bank.”
Algazi’s active rebellion began in 1979, when he was eighteen. “I organized the first group of high-school students – boys and girls – who publicly declared we would not serve in the occupied territories. My repeated refusals of the enlistment order in the West Bank brought me courts-martial and stints in prison, but a strong solidarity campaign eventually secured my ‘dishonorable’ discharge from the army.”
Conscientious objection, whether total or “selective” (limited to refusing service in the occupied territories), is now widespread. Tens of thousands of soldiers – especially reservists – are refusing to fight in the occupied territories. During the current war of extermination in Gaza, their number grew more than ever before, with reliable estimates putting it at about 100,000. There are also Arab-Israeli objectors. Most Arab citizens, like ultra-Orthodox Jews, are exempt from conscription, a privilege that in their case also signals their second-class status. The Arabs who do enlist come mainly from Druze and Bedouin communities, and Druze resisters pioneered the first forms of conscientious objection in the late 1950s.
For Algazi, refusing the draft was a sort of anti-colonial apprenticeship. Does he regard Zionism as intrinsically colonial? “Zionism was largely a response to antisemitism, but I can’t view it as a movement of national liberation. You don’t defeat antisemitism and racism by colonizing someone else’s land, and enlightened voices inside early Zionism had understood this and said it before World War I. I don’t think Zionism can be considered a matter just for historians: it remains the actual ideology on which the State of Israel is founded, and it is ever more supremacist, segregationist, colonial.”
Obviously, not all Zionists are mass murderers, but the “Zionist” state of Israel is in fact involved in mass murder, in a genocide of terrible proportions, and it is therefore understandable that those who denounce this generalized crime attribute it, to borrow a phrase once used to define pro-Soviet regimes, to “real Zionism.”
The son of a European Jewish mother and a Middle-Eastern Jewish father, Algazi also rejects claims that Israel’s openly racist colonial posture today is the result of a supposed degeneration of the Zionist idea due to the prevalence of migrants from North Africa and the Middle East among Israeli Jews. “European-origin Jews ruled Israel for decades. It wasn’t the Jews from Arabic countries who expelled Palestinians, divvied up the spoils; it wasn’t them who chose to occupy and continue the occupation of the West Bank; and it wasn’t the Sephardim or Mizrahim, the non-European Jews, who founded the settler movement now persecuting millions of Palestinians and shredding Israel’s liberal institutions. The ‘evil’ of today’s Israel was built by Jews who came from Europe.”
Can Israel rid itself of that colonial imprint? Algazi is unsure. “Colonialism is a process, not a single moment. It is continuous expropriation of material goods – houses, land – and rights, creating misery and frustration on one side and profit and privilege on the other. It’s an endless social war waged not only with weapons but with bulldozers, zoning plans, bureaucracy. For years I’ve worked with Negev Bedouins trying to resist a systematic colonial push that herds them into miserable ghettos while Jewish-only towns rise on their land.”
My last question to Algazi was about life after October 7. “That day I lost my friend Oded Lifshitz, a kibbutznik and pacifist, and Cindy Flash, a beloved former student. My grief for October 7 merged instantly with the suffering of my Palestinian friends, who told me about their families being massacred. Especially in Europe, I see Gaza opening new channels for the eternal river of antisemitism. What comes next? I don’t know. I know this: Israel will be able to live in peace only when it respects Palestinian rights. Whether in one binational state, two states or a confederation is secondary. Three words alone must finally take root here: equality, freedom, democracy.”
Originally published at https://ilmanifesto.it/genocidio-e-comprensibile-attribuirlo-al-sionismo-reale on 2025-07-19