The failure of Israel’s two most important allies, the US and UK, to put an end to the slaughter of the civilian population in Gaza in 2023-2024 and the American and British mainstream media’s refusal to contextualize the 7 October attack raises questions about their status as democratic states. What many independent journalists and academics have described as Israel’s genocidal policy in Gaza has a parallel in America’s “Indian removal” policies in the 19th century and British colonialism in India, where violent imperial rule brought about tens of millions of excess deaths between 1880 and 1920 (Sullivan & Hickel, 2022). The racist underpinnings of settler colonialism have thus been present in Western, specifically Judeo-Christian, political culture since Europeans first explored continents beyond their own. Modern day Zionism is a retrograde form of colonialism and imperialism that is rooted in 19th-century nationalist, militarist, capital-expansionist, and racist practices and outlooks of Western Europe from which it sprung.
