The Man Who Made Zionism Into Settler Colonialism
Antoun Sa'adeh, Fayez Sayegh, and the Intellectual Genealogy of Anti-Zionism
How did Zionism come to be understood as the paradigmatic case of settler colonialism—indeed, as racism itself? Before we seek an answer from postcolonial theory, perhaps it’s important to unearth a forgotten genealogy linking contemporary academic discourse to explicitly interwar Nazi-inspired Arab fascism. This essay traces that genealogy through two pivotal figures: Antoun Sa’adeh (1904-1949), the Syrian ideologue who established the first cohesive fascist movement in the Arab world by consciously imitating German National Socialism, and his protégé Fayez Sayegh (1922-1980), who ultimately created the scholarly framework of “settler colonialism” that would capture the post-1968 New Left and became the principal author of 1975 UN Resolution 3379 which declared that “Zionism is racism.” What today passes as liberationist theory in elite universities began, in earnest, as propaganda for a party that called its leader “the Führer,” modeled its flag on the swastika, and defined Jews as the absolute evil to be eradicated. Understanding this intellectual lineage is essential for grasping how ideas originating in the most sinister currents of twentieth-century totalitarianism became academic orthodoxy, how the Left became the unwitting heir of much of Nazism’s legacy, and why the question of whether it is too late for the American university grows more urgent each day.
