Blood Is Not the Structure

Structuralism is useful because it refuses the lazy comfort of judging history by costumes. In Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad arranges the imperial binary in its Sabbath finery: Europe/Africa, civilized/savage, light/dark. He then makes the supposedly civilized side murderous until the categories begin bleeding into one another.

Lévi-Strauss supplies the question underneath the plot: what relationship makes the terms mean what they mean? A category does not float alone. It acquires force through its position inside a system—through whatever has been made its opposite, whatever institutions enforce the division, and whoever benefits when the map begins masquerading as nature.

It clarifies Israel/Palestine better than racial mythology does. Calling Israeli Jews simply white Europeans is historically absurd. Israeli Jewish society includes large Middle Eastern, North African, Ethiopian, European, and mixed populations. Even Ashkenazi histories combine Levantine and European ancestry. Ancient-DNA research likewise finds that the great majority of present-day Jewish groups and Levantine Arabic-speaking populations are consistent with deriving substantial ancestry from peoples related to the Bronze Age Southern Levant and Chalcolithic Zagros (Agranat-Tamir et al.). Jews and Palestinians are not two biologically sealed species imported from opposite planets. Migration, conversion, endogamy, religion, and empire produced difference from overlapping regional histories.

None of this settles the political question. That is precisely the point.

A colonial analysis of Israel does not require pretending Jews are foreign to the land. Settler colonialism is a structure of power, land, law, movement, and domination—not a blood test. Indigenous people can participate in colonial structures. Yesterday’s persecuted minority can become tomorrow’s governing majority. European Jews were racialized as alien, filthy, unassimilable, and politically dangerous. In America, and differently in Israel, Jews later acquired forms of structural whiteness and sovereign power that many of their ancestors did not possess.

Put brutally: we Jews were always the niggers of Europe.

The European hierarchy cast Jews outside secure Christian whiteness while manufacturing other racial systems through slavery and empire. The word ghetto itself entered political geography through Venice’s compulsory Jewish quarter, locked at night and governed by segregation. Europe did not nearly destroy its Jews because it regarded them as comfortable members of a white Christian family.

Whiteness later moved. It always does. The United States expanded its boundaries for some Jews while continuing to organize citizenship, wealth, policing, and residence through anti-Blackness. Zionism, born partly as an answer to European persecution, acquired a state and enough of Europe’s colonial apparatus to learn the controls. No moral exoneration follows. This is a history of positional change inside a structure.

Ancestry cannot become the moral escape hatch. The oldest skeleton does not decide who controls borders, courts, land registration, policing, military force, or another population’s freedom of movement. Hagar Kotef’s The Colonizing Self examines Israel/Palestine through precisely these structures of home, dispossession, normalized domination, and the violent production of belonging.

Structuralism saves criticism from blood-and-soil nonsense. It asks where everyone stands inside the machine—and who is allowed to move.

Works Cited

Agranat-Tamir, Lily, et al. “The Genomic History of the Bronze Age Southern Levant.” Cell, vol. 181, no. 5, 2020, pp. 1146–57.e11, doi:10.1016/j.cell.2020.04.024.

Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness. 1899.

Kotef, Hagar. The Colonizing Self: Or, Home and Homelessness in Israel/Palestine. Duke UP, 2020. JSTOR.

Lévi-Strauss, Claude. Structural Anthropology. Translated by Claire Jacobson and Brooke Grundfest Schoepf, Basic Books, 1963.