A general view of destruction in North Gaza. Photo: Amir Cohen/Reuters.
By Louis Allday – Jun 17, 2025
Concluding the introduction to his 1967 work On Zionist Literature, the Palestinian writer and revolutionary Ghassan Kanafani remarked that he had completed his study on the basis of one central principle: “to know your enemy.” Less than five years later, that very enemy murdered both him and his 16-year-old niece, Lamiss, in a car bomb outside his family home in Beirut. The following week, Zionist agents sent letter bombs to a number of other prominent Palestinians then living in Lebanon, including Anis Sayegh, the man who, in his capacity as director of the PLO’s Beirut-based Palestine Research Center, had published On Zionist Literature. Sayegh, who also wrote the preface to Kanafani’s book, was seriously wounded in the attack, but miraculously survived.
The PRC had been established in 1965 by Anis’ brother, Fayez Sayegh, just a year after the formation of the PLO itself. Anticipating Kanafani’s sentiment, Sayegh’s proposal outlining his rationale for the establishment of the center had noted similarly that “knowing the enemy is a parallel process to knowing the self.” Thus, from its inception, the PRC placed significant emphasis on studying the history, ideology and practices of Zionism in both its research activities and its publications. The first monograph it published, released in the same year that the center was founded, was a study by Fayez Sayegh himself entitled Zionist Colonialism in Palestine. In this succinct and insightful book, Sayegh argues that the three defining characteristics of what he terms the Zionist settler-state are: (1) its racial complexion and conduct (2) its addiction to violence and (3) its expansionist stance.
Racism: Inherent in Zionist Ideology
Sixty years later, amidst the ongoing genocide in Gaza and rampant Zionist violence and expansionism in the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria and beyond, it would be an understatement to call Sayegh’s work and its conclusions prescient. With remarkable clarity, his book demolishes a number of damaging myths about the Zionist movement and the settler colony it established, myths that unfortunately remain prevalent several decades later — even among some who consider themselves to be supporters of the Palestinian cause.
Dispelling the spurious notion that at some point after its establishment ‘Israel’ became a racist entity, Sayegh explains how racism “is not an acquired trait of the Zionist settler-state. Nor… an accidental, passing feature of the Israeli scene,” but in fact “congenital, essential and permanent… inherent in the very ideology of Zionism.” He then identifies three corollaries that this explicitly racial identification gave rise to: “racial self-segregation, racial exclusiveness, and racial supremacy.” It is of course these characteristics which made the forced removal of the indigenous population of Palestine, as attempted in the Nakba, essential to the Zionist project’s actualization.
Sayegh also examines the treatment that those Palestinians who Zionist forces were unable to remove in the Nakba received at their hands from the moment ‘Israel’ was established. He argues that through its systematic oppression of this internal population, the Zionist settler-state had “learned all the lessons which the various discriminatory regimes of white settler-states in Asia and Africa can teach it.” Outlining the manifold official and unofficial oppressive measures that these Palestinians had faced — measures that have only grown ever more cruel and deeply ingrained over the six decades that have since passed — Sayegh comments that whereas “the Afrikaner apostles of apartheid … brazenly proclaim their sin, the Zionist practitioners of apartheid in Palestine beguilingly protest their innocence.” Sayegh’s explicit use of ‘apartheid’ here came six decades before a number of Western NGOs decided to apply this label that if anything falls short of fully capturing the level of violence, racism and hatred that characterizes the Zionist state’s treatment of Palestinians under its occupation.
Zionism: Addicted to Violence and Expansion
Events since the publication of Sayegh’s book offer grim and emphatic confirmation of his assertion that the Zionist settler state is addicted to violence. Since 1965, it has perpetuated a literally unbroken line of violent acts against the Palestinians too long to list here. This violence manifests in every imaginable — and often unimaginable — form, ranging from the most genocidal and apocalyptic in scale as we see in Gaza today, to more routine but insidious daily acts of aggression, humiliation, indignity, and psychological torture across all of occupied Palestine. Furthermore, the targets of this violence have not been limited to the Palestinians; throughout its short history the Zionist settler state has also committed multiple aggressions against other states in the region, including Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Egypt, Yemen, and Iran.
Sayegh’s declaration that Israel is perpetually expansionist in nature has similarly been confirmed beyond doubt, for not only has it consistently increased the territory under its occupation since he wrote Zionist Colonialism in Palestine, but it has also resolutely refused, up to the present moment, to ever officially declare its borders. In fact, the entirety of Israel’s history consists of nothing more than perpetual expansionism cynically disguised as a virtuous quest for ‘secure borders’. Writing just two years before Israel’s seizure of the West Bank (including Jerusalem), Golan Heights, Sinai Peninsula and Gaza during the June War of 1967, Sayegh argued with devastating foresight that expansion “is the ‘unfinished business’ of Zionism. It cannot fail to be the main preoccupation of the Zionist movement, and of the Zionist state, in the future. For the Zionist settler state to be is to prepare for and strive for territorial expansion.” These almost prophetic words flashed into my mind when Israel launched an immediate military onslaught against Syria and seized even more of its territory following the overthrow of the country’s government in December 2024. These events effectively marked the culmination of a multi-faceted war waged against the Syrian state for over a decade, of which Israel was a key participant.
The fate that befell the PRC itself offers further and especially direct evidence of Sayegh’s tragically accurate foresight. After the center was looted wholesale by Israeli military forces during their invasion of Lebanon in 1982 and then bombed by a terrorist group acting as a proxy for Israel the following year, it was forced to close, and, like so many Palestinian institutions and individuals of that era, left Beirut never to return. A word here is needed on Israel’s assault on Beirut in 1982, a crime that in many ways foreshadowed its genocidal offensive on Gaza that began in October 2023.
In the summer of 1982, West Beirut was encircled by Israeli forces — with all water, fuel and food blocked from entering — then pounded mercilessly by artillery, aerial and naval bombardment for weeks on end. Hospitals, charities, residential buildings, refugee camps, embassies, clinics and hotels were all targeted and thousands of Lebanese and Palestinian civilians were slaughtered. The destruction was so comprehensive that the Canadian Ambassador to Lebanon at the time, Theodore Arcand, said it made “Berlin 1945 look like a tea party.” The siege was part of Israel’s broader assault against Lebanon that was so violent and destructive that most of the members of an international commission formed to study Israel’s violations concluded that not only had the invasion entailed multiple breaches of international law, but also in fact constituted “a form of genocide.”
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Zionism: “Not the Concern of Palestinians Alone”
Though Sayegh’s book stresses that Palestine’s liberation must be spearheaded by the Palestinians themselves, he states clearly that the “problem of Palestine … is not the concern of Palestinians alone,” since Israel’s commitment to expansion also threatens the security and territorial integrity of the Arab states as a whole. This understanding of the Zionist project and the threat it poses to the entire region has been advanced and built on by an array of figures since Sayegh. For instance, the martyr Husayn Muruwwah, then the foremost ideologue of the Lebanese Communist Party, wrote in 1985 that the:
… cause of liberating Palestine is the absolute basis of all Arab struggles … [w]hen we refer to the Palestinian cause, we might very well be referring to that of Lebanon, or any other Arab country — and vice versa. When we mention the Lebanese resistance, we might very well be referring to the Palestinian resistance – and vice versa …
More recently, the martyr Sayyid Hassan Nasrallah regularly stressed in his speeches and analysis that Israel constituted an existential threat not only to Palestine and the Palestinian people, but in fact to Lebanon itself and to the peoples of the Islamic and Arab worlds in their entireties.
Knowing the Enemy Today
Sayegh concludes his excellent book by stating that as an entity “animated by doctrines of racial self-segregation, racial exclusiveness, and racial supremacy” that translates those doctrines into “ruthless practices of racial discrimination and oppression,” the political systems erected by Zionism in Palestine must be recognized as a menace to all who are “dedicated to the safeguarding and enhancement of the dignity of man. For whenever and wherever the dignity of but one single human being is violated, in pursuance of the creed of racism, a heinous sin is committed against the dignity of all men, everywhere.” It is sobering to read these words in the middle of the ongoing genocide in Gaza. Sayegh’s sentiment and analysis are being proven painfully correct in front of our eyes every day.
As Sayegh saw and understood his enemy with such clarity sixty years ago, we must do so today. Zionism is not a redeemable movement gone awry; it did not become an occupying power only in 1967 but is so inherently and inescapably. Its appetite for extreme violence and expansion is insatiable and facilitated without limits or red lines by what Sayegh calls its “vital and continuing association” with imperialism. Since Sayegh wrote, the Zionist settler-state has consolidated its role as the attack dog and vanguard of US imperialism in West Asia. US support for Israel, Joe Biden stated unashamedly in 1986, “is the best $3 billion investment we make. Were there not an Israel, the United States of America would have to invent an Israel to protect her interests in the region.” Israel’s violence, although portrayed by some as taking place against the wishes of the US, invariably aligns with American interests and strategic goals, while at the same time providing it with plausible deniability as to its own involvement. The recent (and at the time of writing, ongoing) Israeli attacks against Iran are no exception to this broader phenomenon.
Those who argue that peace with the Zionist entity is desirable, or even possible, deny the stark historical track record and present genocidal reality staring them in the face. There is no better or more palatable version of Israel that can or will ever exist. Netanyahu is not an outlier or unrepresentative of the whole, but in fact the perfect embodiment of the racism, violence and expansionism that Sayegh understood was inherent to Zionism over half a century ago, traits that are supported by the overwhelming majority of the settler population. Then as now, the only just and lasting solution remains the complete rejection, isolation and eventual military defeat and dismantlement of the Zionist settler-state. Re-visiting the work of vindicated and principled scholars like Sayegh can help us hold on to that certainty and be cognisant of the historical continuity that doing so represents.
