Israel’s genocide is the terminal stage of a settler-colony in crisis

Earlier this month, the French government announced a new agreement on the future of New Caledonia, its embattled Pacific settler-colony.

The deal redefines the territory as a new “state within the French Republic” and expands voting rights to settlers who have lived there for just 10 years.

It is a renewed attempt to neutralise the demographic threat posed by the Indigenous Kanak population. The move, widely seen as undermining the Kanak struggle for independence, follows a long-standing settler strategy to preserve colonial dominance.

In Gaza, meanwhile, Israel has accelerated its nearly two-year-long genocidal campaign through mass starvation and slaughter of the Indigenous Palestinians. As I have argued previously, it aims to restore the Jewish settler colony’s lost demographic majority – one achieved through mass killings and expulsions since 1948.

Israel is now one of three settler-colonies – along with New Caledonia and Northern Ireland – where white supremacy faces a demographic threat. This is not for lack of effort on the part of the settlers to outnumber the native population.

In each case, the settler-colonial regimes and their mother countries have concocted ruses masquerading as final resolutions to settler-colonialism, while preserving white-settler supremacy as the non-negotiable core.

This applies as much to the 1993 Oslo Accord between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization, in which Israel refused to recognise the Palestinians’ right to self-determination or a state – leading to the current Israeli genocide in Gaza – as it does to the 1998 Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland, let alone this month’s French arrangement in New Caledonia.

Indeed, since the onset of European settler colonisation in the 16th century, two types of white settler-colonies have emerged: those that survived into the 21st century and those that did not.

Today, of the three contemporary settler-colonies facing a demographic threat to white supremacy, only Israel has chosen genocide as its path to survival

The key distinction between them is demographic.

Colonists who succeeded in annihilating the Indigenous population, importing massive numbers of European settlers to outnumber the survivors, or both, were able to secure their supremacy and remain in place. The most obvious examples are the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, where white-supremacist rule remains intact to this day.

Today, of the three settler-colonies facing a demographic threat to white supremacy, only Israel has chosen genocide as its path to survival. The ongoing destruction of Gaza is but the latest episode in a long chain of colonial horrors, in which genocide represents the terminal stage of a settler-colonial project in crisis.

Settler legacies

Unlike the surviving European settler-colonies that established a white demographic majority, those in Africa and Asia – including Morocco, Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, Rhodesia, Namibia, Kenya, South Africa, Tanganyika, Congo, Ethiopia, Somalia, Eritrea, Indonesia, and most of Russian Asia and the Caucasus – saw the colonists lose their grip on power.

Among white settler minorities, most refused equality and were repatriated to Europe. Those who remained sought a system whereby, under pressure from Indigenous resistance and international scrutiny, they accepted political equality in exchange for racialised economic dominance. This remains the case in Kenya, Zimbabwe, Namibia and South Africa.

Settler-colonies in Latin America occupy a somewhat intermediate category. European colonists in what became Latin America mixed with Indigenous populations and the enslaved Africans they brought with them.

Their racially mixed descendants – called Mestizos in South America and Ladinos in Central America – formed a demographic majority and continue to dominate the Indigenous population. The exceptions are Bolivia and Guatemala, where Indigenous peoples constitute over 40 percent of the population.

In Bolivia, the election of Evo Morales in 2006 and his tenure through to 2019 introduced a form of political equality between the natives and settlers.

By contrast, in Guatemala, the Ladino-dominated regime continues to control a majority-Indigenous population, more than 200,000 of whom they massacred between the 1960s and 1980s.

Demographic veto

In Ireland, the colonial obsession with demography took institutional form, shaping the very terms of sovereignty and partition.

The Ireland Act, passed by the British Parliament in June 1949, gave the Protestant settlers a veto over independence or unification with the Republic of Ireland. It effectively ensured that the settler-colony would remain bound to the British state.

It was drafted as a direct response to the Republic of Ireland Act, signed in December 1948 and enacted in April 1949, which finally granted independence to most of the island, two months before the British retaliated with their own legislation.

Such Protestant veto power was justified by the gerrymandered demographic majority that the Protestant settlers and their descendants constituted in the six counties that comprised Northern Ireland.

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In 1951, the population of the British-annexed part of Ireland stood at just over 1.37 million, of whom slightly more than a third – 34.39 percent – were Catholic and 60.55 percent were Protestant (Presbyterian, Church of Ireland and Methodist).

It was the history of British gerrymandering that made this demographic majority possible. Although the settlers would not maintain their majority in the decades to come, they did so initially, despite higher Catholic birthrates, as many fled systemic Protestant discrimination.

In anticipation of the demographic threat to Protestant colonial rule, the British and Irish governments signed the Good Friday Agreement on 10 April 1998.

It introduced a devolved, power-sharing government, cross-community cooperation and provisions for disarmament, while stipulating that any change to Northern Ireland’s constitutional status must be based on popular consent.

The agreement reiterated support for the disarmament of paramilitary groups. It further affirmed the Northern Irish people’s right to self-determination, acknowledging their choice to remain part of the UK, with no promise of future Irish unity, but rather the right of Catholics to aspire to a possible unity.

By 2001, Catholics and Protestants had reached demographic parity in Northern Ireland. In the 2021 census, Catholics outnumbered Protestants for the first time since partition, constituting 42.31 percent of the region’s 1.9 million people, while the three main Protestant sects made up less than 30 percent.

Notably, 19 percent of the population reported no religious affiliation – a figure that has steadily grown since 1971, partly due to the presence of four percent of the population with Indian and Chinese ancestry.

The agreement has held thus far, but it remains fragile and often ineffective. With Northern Ireland outside the EU and the Republic of Ireland still within it, Brexit has jeopardised the accord’s power-sharing framework.

It has also reignited unionist-led protests, while sectarianism continues to define the settler-colony, with no resolution in sight.

Demographic engineering

In New Caledonia, despite being nearly annihilated by the French, the Kanak partially recovered their numbers and remained a majority due to the small settler population.

However, following the post-Second World War influx of French settlers, the Kanak lost their majority after the 1956 census and have consistently remained below the 50 percent threshold ever since.

This demographic shift can be traced to French colonial authorities, who deliberately sought to prevent the Kanak population from becoming a majority, driven by fears of uprisings and electoral dominance once they obtained greater voting rights. Such concerns dated back to the early years of colonisation and reflected a broader settler strategy to neutralise Indigenous political power.

On 19 July 1972, France’s Prime Minister Pierre Messmer outlined this demographic strategy in a letter to the secretary of state for overseas departments and territories:

The French presence in Caledonia can only be threatened, barring a world war, by a nationalist claim by the indigenous populations supported by a few possible allies in other ethnic communities coming from the Pacific. In the short and medium term, the massive immigration of French citizens from mainland France or coming from the overseas departments (Réunion) should permit us to avoid this danger, by maintaining and improving the numerical ratio of the communities.

This explicit racist stance underscores the historical context of immigration policies designed to maintain French colonial-settler hegemony in New Caledonia.

As a major nickel exporter, New Caledonia experienced another wave of settlement during the nickel boom from 1968 to 1971. Between 1968 and 1976, some 15,000 to 20,000 settlers arrived, including many former European colonists fleeing the prospect of equality in newly independent Algeria.

It was against this backdrop that, in 1984, the Kanak saw through French proposals for elections and recognised them as a colonial strategy to undermine their demands for independence.

Less than a month after the Good Friday Agreement was signed in Northern Ireland, French and Kanak officials signed the Noumea Accord on 5 May 1998.

The accord envisioned a 15- to 20-year process that would devolve governing powers from Paris to New Caledonia, allow for the possibility of independence and narrow the pool of eligible settler voters. Only those with New Caledonian citizenship who had resided in the archipelago between 1988 and 1998, or were the direct descendants of those residents, would be eligible to vote.

The process through which the Kanak obtained voting rights was contingent on containing their demographic threat. Whereas an ordinance was issued in 1945 extending voting rights to certain categories of Melanesians – veterans, customary chiefs, ministers of religion and teaching monitors – it was only in May 1951 that this right was more broadly expanded.

Finally, on 26 July 1957, all Melanesians were granted the right to vote. It was no coincidence that universal suffrage was extended to the Kanak only after they had lost their demographic majority due to the growing number of white settlers – a shift that ultimately undermined their struggle for independence.

This is evident in France’s latest “compromise”, which includes establishing a “New Caledonian” but not a Kanak “nationality”, and laying the groundwork for future voter manipulation – easily facilitated through increased white French settlement as a long-term strategy.

Majority by massacre

Israel is the third settler-colonial state where the demographic threat posed by the native population to the colonists has culminated in genocide.

The leadership of the Zionist Organization collaborated with the British government to ensure that, under the British Mandate – and in violation of League of Nations regulations – the Palestinian population would not be granted a parliament or a vote for any form of local government.

The Zionists feared that, as Palestinians constituted the vast majority of the population, any political rights afforded to them would obstruct the settler-colonial project that sought to dislodge them from Palestine.

It is the combination of mass killings and ethnic cleansing that established Jewish demographic superiority in Israel between 1948 and 1967

To pre-empt this possibility, the Zionists implemented a programme of expulsion that began on 30 November 1947 and continued throughout the 1948 war and beyond.

On the eve of the war, Palestine had a Jewish colonial population of 608,000 (about 30 percent), most of whom had arrived in the country over the preceding two decades, and a Palestinian population of 1,364,000.

During the conquest of 1948, the Zionists killed upwards of 13,000 Palestinians – around one percent of the population – and expelled approximately 760,000 people, or more than 80 percent of those living in the territory that the Zionists would declare a Jewish state.

It is the combination of mass killings and ethnic cleansing that established Jewish demographic superiority in Israel between 1948 and 1967.

By November 1948, only about 165,000 Palestinians remained in Israel, while the Jewish population had risen to 716,000, increasing their share from 30 to 81 percent almost overnight.

In the lead-up to Israel’s 1967 conquest of three Arab territories, the state’s population had reached 2.7 million, of whom 2.4 million were Jewish colonists and their descendants, maintaining their demographic dominance at 89 percent.

Demographic death drive

Since its conquest of the West Bank and Gaza in 1967, when it expelled around 350,000 Palestinians, Israel has failed to resolve its demographic problem, which continues to threaten Jewish supremacy.

After the expulsion, in September 1967, the Israeli census recorded the population of the West Bank as 661,700 and of Gaza as 354,700. The population of East Jerusalem stood at 68,600 Palestinians.

This meant that the total Palestinian population in Israel and the occupied territories was 1,385,000, reducing the Jewish share from 89 percent to 56 percent.

Israel’s genocide in Gaza is a war on demographics

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The decline in the Jewish share continued until 1990, fuelling growing anxiety among Israelis. Despite the immigration of one million Jews – or claimants to Jewishness – from the USSR between 1990 and 2000, this influx was no match for the steady rise of the Palestinian population.

By 2000, the population of Israel had reached 6.4 million, including 5 million Jews and nearly 1.2 million Palestinians. The West Bank’s population reached 2.012 million and Gaza’s 1.138 million, reducing the Jewish proportion to no more than 52 percent.

In 2010, Israel’s population had reached 7.6 million, including 5.75 million Jews and 1.55 million Palestinians, while the West Bank’s population was 2.48 million and Gaza’s numbered 1.54 million. This rendered the Jewish population a minority of no more than 49 percent for the first time since the massive ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in 1948.

By 2020, Israel’s population had grown to 9.2 million, including 6.8 million Jews and 1.9 million Palestinians, while the West Bank’s population grew to 3.05 million and Gaza’s 2.047 million. This further reduced the proportion of Jewish colonists and their descendants to just 47 percent of the total population.

This is the demographic background that made genocide the only option left for Israel and its US and European sponsors.

The failure of the current talks to halt the genocide is rooted in the so-called US and Israeli “compromise”, wherein Israel’s terms are that it would stop the genocide, expel the surviving Palestinians, and take over Gaza for further Jewish colonisation, in exchange for the complete surrender of the Palestinian resistance and its self-annihilation.

Genocidal undoing

While the French attempt yet another ruse to counter the demographic threat through their recent agreement on the future of New Caledonia, and the British remain apprehensive about the unresolved situation in Northern Ireland despite the Good Friday ruse, it is Israel’s Jewish minority status that drives the ongoing genocide in Gaza and the plans to expel its surviving Palestinian population outside the Strip.

Among the three settler-colonies fighting to uphold their white supremacist settler privileges, the Israelis are the only ones committing genocide.

Precedents to such exterminatory violence include Germany’s genocides in Namibia and Tanganyika in the early 20th century, carried out to secure German colonial settler supremacy.

They also include the German Nazi mass murder of millions of Polish Catholics and Jews, and the displacement of millions more for the purpose of German settler colonisation – not to mention the murder of 26 million Soviets whom Hitler likened to “Redskins” and whose annihilation he sought so that Germans could settle their territory.

France’s postwar genocide in Algeria was similarly aimed at maintaining white settler dominance in the face of native resistance.

Israel’s genocide is the latest chapter in this bloody history. The Germans and French were ultimately dislodged, with most of their settlers repatriated. The Israelis and their sponsors, in contrast, believe that their current genocide augurs well for the survivability of the racist settler colony.

Palestinian resistance is determined to prevent that outcome.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.