Albert Memmi’s anti-imperialist credentials were impeccable.
“The refusal of the colonized cannot be anything but absolute, that is, not only revolt, but a revolution,” he wrote in his most famous book, 1957’s The Colonizer and the Colonized, published at the height of the anti-colonial insurgency against the French in Algeria. (Jean-Paul Sartre wrote an introduction.)
Nevertheless, were he alive today, he would surely be denounced as a fascist.
Born in Algeria’s neighbor colony, Tunisia, in 1920, Memmi grew up as an “Arab Jew,” to use his own terminology. Tunisia had been home to a Jewish community since antiquity, and Memmi was an enthusiastic member of it. He was fond of saying his Jewish family had been trying to blend in there since the region was ruled by the ancient Phoenicians. He wrote at length about his youthful struggle to understand what it meant to be an indigenous, Arabic-speaking imperial subject who was also Jewish.
Memmi knew quite intimately what white European racism was capable of: he served time in a Nazi forced-labor camp during the German occupation of Tunisia. Like his contemporary, the much-quoted Frantz Fanon, Memmi believed anti-colonial violence was often a necessary step toward freedom.
And yet, his status as a Jew made him an outsider in his native land. Tunisia's Jews had experienced many periods of persecution during their long history; in Memmi's time, the French colonial authority had granted Jews legal privileges that were denied to Arabs — stoking a resurgence of antisemitic resentment. But Memmi was what academics call a “Judeo-pessimist.” He believed that antisemitism was a permanent fact, a constant presence throughout history; any apparent reprieve for the Jews would inevitably end badly. Jews, he wrote, could never truly assimilate into societies harboring a deep well of Jew-hatred — which was all of them, Tunisia included.
“Jewish Arabs—that’s what we would have liked to be, and if we have given up the idea, it is because for centuries the Muslim Arabs have scornfully, cruelly, and systematically prevented us from carrying it out,” Memmi wrote in 1974’s Jews and Arabs. “My grandfather still wore distinguishing marks on his clothing; and he lived at a time when any Jewish passerby was liable to be hit on the head by any Muslim he met. That pleasing ritual even had a name, chtáká.”
Even after Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco had won self-determination, it was clear that Memmi and his community had no place in these brave new nations — or if they did, it was on the bottom. In the newly independent Tunisia, Jews were excluded from various industries, sent to prison on mysterious charges, and made to endure riots in their neighborhoods whenever Israel went to war. Matters were even worse for Jews elsewhere in the Muslim world. Jews — including Memmi — fled in droves. The French-fluent Memmi, for his part, decamped to France, where he remained.
Despite all this, Memmi remained a devout believer in anti-colonial struggle. He continued to back the North African Arabs who had fought to cast off the shackles of colonialism, and even decades later stood by his books in which he ferociously defended their cause. “I do not regret anything — neither having written The Colonizer and the Colonized, nor having applauded each time a people of the Maghreb became independent,” Memmi wrote.
Which brings us to the portion of Memmi’s ideology that is hardest for today’s anti-colonial left to process: Memmi was a passionate Zionist, and saw no contradiction in being one.
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What today’s anti-Zionists should remember — and what Memmi never forgot — is that Zionism, itself, was once a radical liberation movement composed of oppressed people and led by diehard socialists.
If life had been often difficult for Jews in the Muslim world, the Jews of Europe suffered even more: they had been regularly slaughtered, denied legal rights, and told that they did not belong in their countries of birth. As a result, many of them decided to throw off their chains at any cost.
“Like all oppressed people, Jews have the right to a specific liberation,” Memmi wrote in the introduction to the Israeli edition of his book, The Liberation of the Jew. That liberation, he wrote, took its ultimate form in Zionism. “All other courses of action,” he concluded, “are ultimately nothing but accommodations with oppression.”
In Memmi’s eyes, Zionist Jews at midcentury wanted the same thing nationalist Arabs, Africans, and Asians wanted: to establish self-rule through audacious terrorism, clever warmaking, and sheer belief in themselves.
But where were they to do it? Those Arabs, Africans and Asians could all struggle to drive their oppressors out of homelands where they themselves were the majority. But there was no place on Earth where Jews were a majority — and there had not been one since Judea was conquered by the Romans in the First Century.
Jews had suffered that colonization, but it had been 2,000 years since then and their communities were scattered around the world. The obvious choice among Zionists for a reconstituted state was Palestine: the only geographic location with universal significance for Jews: religious ones had long prayed for a return in their liturgy; secular ones at least regarded it as the historical location where the Jews were formed as a nation.
Palestine was the only place Jews could, with a shred of plausibility, call an ancestral homeland — and every nationalist movement needed one of those. When the Zionist community — having first settled in Ottoman Palestine, then lived under British colonial rule — seized the territory from the UK, they set about inventing a unified Jewish culture.
"The oppressed’s first need is to return to himself, in other words: to his language, be it sick; to his tradition, be it a phantom," Memmi wrote in 1966. "In this restoration of himself he is obliged to utilize the stones of his past. It is as much a question of reconstruction as of construction. In our case we also had to put an end to the exile."
He was not uncritical of the state of Israel as it wielded its power. He denounced the racism that white Israeli Jews deployed against darker-skinned ones. He was dubious about the religious language that Zionists relied on to prove their tenuous entitlement to the land. He hated that Israel drifted away from its early socialist ideals. And, unsurprisingly, he was critical of Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians.
“It is impossible and dangerous to continue to overlook the Palestinian situation,” Memmi wrote in 1974. “[The Israelis] know, or at least I hope they do, that the Palestinian phenomenon is also a national phenomenon, and that a solution along national lines has to be found."
And yet, he wrote, “Israel’s intention is also a national one; it was born of misery and oppression, it is comparable to that of the Arab peoples, and it is no less honorable than theirs."
Perhaps this was a false equivalency, perhaps not; either way, it remains a prevalent view in the media and the electorate, one that must be reckoned with. At the end of the day, Memmi and his fellow Zionists desperately wanted Israel to continue existing, if only because a Jew could be free of bigotry there, which is the goal of all such national liberation movements.
The trouble was that the freedom from bigotry was won through relentless oppression. This is the trouble that all militant national-liberation movements face if they are lucky enough to win a country.
We would do well to dwell on the words of another Judeo-pessimist, Robert Fine: he pointed out that, while antisemitism is the notorious “socialism of fools” (that is, anger at the ruling classes which is misdirected toward powerful Jews, specifically), anti-Zionism all too often becomes the “anti-nationalism of fools.
The problem isn’t that Jewish nationalism is uniquely pathological (a deeply antisemitic assertion); it’s that, as Memmi put it, “a people can very well free itself from oppression and in turn become an oppressor itself, oppressing, for instance, its own minorities."
Jews had suffered in ethnostates where they were the minority; the only solution Zionists saw was to establish an ethnostate of their own, in which they would be free and someone else would fill the role of the oppressed. It's a depressingly familiar pattern wherever colonialism has receded and left conflict in its wake. “We see this happen with so many new nations,” Memmi wrote.
I don’t think Memmi, who died at age 99 in 2020, would have been on board with the mass murder of the Gaza Palestinians, nor the audacious land theft being carried out in the West Bank. Unlike Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, Memmi did not frame the conflict with the Palestinians as a holy war, nor as one against Arab Nazis. He understood that the Palestinians had a legitimate national claim. But he saw no obvious way out of the quagmire. In this, he was not unlike most true experts on the region today.
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Nationalism has killed millions of Jews in its time. Now we wield it for ourselves, and the results are just as tragic as they have always been, everywhere and every time that one people has decided that another must be subjugated or driven out. Or killed en masse. It is always a tragedy. We cannot make it come out right or just by citing our own history of grief.
And yet without that history, it's impossible to find a way out. Albert Memmi didn't find one, but if there is one, it must lie beyond nationalism. Memmi believed too much in the underlying validity of the idea of ethnostates — but we don't have to. What if there was a way to be safe, and free, and just?
There is no way to even begin that discussion — to persuade Zionists that the deaths of Palestians are as tragic as the deaths of Jews — without an analysis of the trauma that brought Zionism to refashion Jews as colonizers in the first place. And there is no way to discuss the ongoing catastrophe in Gaza, or a future beyond zero-sum annihilation, without understanding that Jews are just as susceptible to fear and rage as any other people who once longed for self-determination.
Without that analysis, anti-Zionist arguments will always fall blindly into antisemitic tropes; and Zionists, hearing those tropes, will be assured that antisemitism is what really motivates anti-Zionists. This in turn further reinforces the Zionist view of Jews as a perpetually persecuted minority who need and deserve self-determination — even at the cost of Palestinian lives.
And without understanding the motivation of anti-Zionists, Zionists will be unable to comprehend the moral injury they do themselves when they oppress Palestinians — something Memmi understood too well.
“Colonization can only disfigure the colonizer,” he wrote. “For the colonized just as for the colonizer, there is no way out other than a complete end to colonization.”
