Given This Reality

The Foundations of Zionism by Sabri Jiryis, translated by Fida Jiryis. Ebb Books, 614 pages. 2025.

In August 2025 Tom Barrack—founder of the private equity firm Colony Capital, the U.S. ambassador to Turkey, and the “special envoy” to Syria and Lebanon—told a group of Lebanese journalists at a press conference that they needed to stop acting “animalistic,” otherwise he would go. The preceding meeting had included Lindsey Graham, who told the current Lebanese president—functionally appointed by Saudi Arabia and the United States—that there would be neither negotiations about Israeli withdrawal from occupied Lebanese lands, nor any discussion of Israel’s daily bombing of Lebanon, until Hezbollah, the only armed group in Lebanon who could meaningfully confront Israel, is disarmed. In a word, sus. The idea is that Israel might reconsider its expansionist dreams in Lebanon once the only measurable barrier to realizing these dreams is neutralized; the last time an armed group was disarmed in Lebanon for Israel’s sake was in 1982, when the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) withdrew from Beirut. What followed was the Sabra and Shatila massacre, as though the Israelis were mocking their enemy’s naiveté, and asserting their ruthless dominance. What endured was the occupation.

In response to Barrack, no one in the room said anything. Muntadhar al-Zaidi, the Iraqi journalist who once threw his shoes at George W. Bush, tweeted that, had he been there, things would have gone differently. While many outside the press hall found the U.S. envoy’s statement dripping with orientalist condescension unbecoming of a diplomat, some in Lebanon willfully misheard Barrack, insisting he’d instead said anomalistic. The anomalists are “civilized.” They still speak French through the streets of the former “Paris of the Middle East.” Their parents and grandparents, patriots, had resisted the occupation of Lebanon—by Palestinian refugees. They did this by allying with the Israelis, co-slaughtering Palestinians and Shia Lebanese. The anomalists are not Arabs but Phoenicians, hail from the Caucasus mountains, adhere to race theory, Huntington’s clash of civilizations thesis, and—perhaps more embarrassingly—misrecognize themselves on the side of Europe. Tom Barrack, the grandson of Lebanese immigrants, belongs to them.

The anomalists are delusional. They have a grip on the past as loose as their grip on the present. Their psychology is typical of a colonized elite: their colonizer is benevolent; when told to eat shit they enjoy it. (If he said animalistic, one wrote on X, it’s because they were behaving like animals!) It takes a historical memory that extends past a single country’s imposed borders and spans at least one average lifetime—or the tenure of the state of Israel—to arrive at Zionism as the cornerstone of the region’s ongoing instability. The beginning of a solution, Zionism’s dismantling, requires a more granular understanding of its founding logic. A new edition of The Foundations of Zionism by the Palestinian lawyer and scholar Sabri Jiryis, translated into English for the first time, provides a comprehensive account of Zionist history, spanning from “its inception in the mid-19th century” in Europe “until the early period of the British mandate over Palestine in 1923.” Jiryis offers the reader the “inner story of Zionism,” written in the spirit of know-your-enemy.

Sabri Jiryis, born in Fassouta, Galilee, Palestine, was ten years old when he witnessed people from neighboring villages fleeing their homes to Lebanon at the start of the Nakba. His majority-Christian village was one of the few that was not depopulated; his family numbered among the 160,000 Palestinians who remained on their land. He grew up under strict Israeli military rule, where discrimination was standard. An Israeli citizen, he learned to speak Hebrew as he did Arabic. He studied law at the Hebrew University. Looking around, certain questions troubled him: “Who are these people? Why did they come here?”

Maybe they didn’t know better. In law school, Jiryis cofounded al-Ard (the Land), a national resistance movement that urged Arabs in Israel to organize. Despite its explicit willingness to work with Israeli progressives (a relative term), al-Ard was refused a publishing license for its newspaper because it was perceived as a security threat to Israel—forcing each subsequent issue to be printed under a different name. When al-Ard wrote a letter to the UN secretary general describing life for Palestinians under Israeli occupation the organization was banned. When Jiryis tried to run for the Israeli Knesset in 1965, hoping to influence policy, he along with the other Palestinian candidates were expelled to various, distinct parts of occupied Palestine and placed under administrative house arrest until the elections were over. It was in his ethnically cleansed town that he “chanced upon a bookstore that sold the works of the founding fathers of Zionism.” He started reading.

In 1966 he published The Arabs in Israel in Hebrew, taking a legal angle (the project was seeded by his graduate school thesis) to try to “inform the Jews on the plight of the Palestinians in the Zionist state.” The book was later translated into other languages. In a 1977 review for the Middle East Research and Information Project, the Palestinian American scholar Ibrahim Abu Lughod critiqued the book’s framing for “implicitly accept[ing] the Zionist construction of the Israeli [Palestinian] reality” dividing society into Jews versus Arabs, despite many Jews also being Arab (even if assimilation into the dominant Ashkenazi culture might mean future generations wouldn’t be perceived as Arab). No one in Israel would publish Jiryis’s book, so he did it himself.

Jewish Israelis’ minds didn’t seem to change. Jiryis redirected his energy. For his next book, again on Zionism, Jiryis chose to write in Arabic, for Palestinians. In 1967, he joined Fatah. After spending the next three years in and out of prison and under house arrest, in 1970, he was exiled to Lebanon. He had a sense he’d be gone for a while; “I took the notes that I had made on Zionism with me.” In Beirut he worked for the Institute for Palestine Studies before joining the Palestine Research Center (PRC), which had been founded by the PLO in 1965. He served as its director for twenty-six years. His wife, Hanneh Shaheen, was trained in economics and worked alongside him as a writer and researcher. In 1977, the PRC published the first volume of A History of Zionism, which spanned 1862 to 1917 and traced Zionism’s early years as a nascent European ideology through its formal sponsorship by Britain and its transformation into a political movement with concrete, nationalist aims dead-set on Palestine. The book did well. Jiryis, with the continued help of Shaheen, began work on a second volume.

In June of 1982, Israel invaded Lebanon. Its alleged mission was to rid the country of the PLO after an assassination attempt against the Israeli ambassador to London (by a gunman for hire who worked variously for Saddam Hussein, the CIA, and the Mossad). Before withdrawing from Beirut later that year, the Israelis, alongside their anomalists, committed the Sabra and Shatila massacre. That month, September, Israeli soldiers also raided the PRC. At what the New York Times called the “P.L.O. research center,” troops stole some 25,000 volumes in Arabic, English, and Hebrew, along with a printing press and its archive of manuscripts and microfilm, smashed the desks and filing cabinets, and made off with telephones, heaters, and electric fans. In a 1985 interview, Jiryis recalled that the most valuable of the PRC’s documents had been shipped out of Lebanon in anticipation. (In a prisoner exchange with the PLO in November 1983, Israel returned many of the stolen items—although, because Israel had also stolen the inventory lists, it’s impossible to know what it kept.)

In February 1983, the PRC was targeted by a car bombing by a group calling itself the Front for the Liberation of Lebanon from Foreigners (FLLF). A front indeed, it was set up by Israeli intelligence in the late 1970s to carry out covert ground operations, often in coordination with Israeli air raids. (It is safe to assume, since 1948, that any party talking about liberating Lebanon from foreigners without mentioning Israelis is at least funded by Israel.) The FLLF found stable allies in the anomalists. While it once attempted to assassinate a U.S. diplomat cooperating with the PLO, mostly its targets were Palestinians and Shia Lebanese: sometimes, PLO officials and centers, other times, in standard Zionist fashion, densely packed movie theaters. An Israeli intelligence officer later described the campaign to the Israeli journalist Ronen Bergman (who has himself served in the intelligence section of the Israeli military) as “mass killing for killing’s sake, to sow chaos and alarm,” with approval all the way up the Zionist chain of command to the prime minister’s office. On February 5, the FLLF detonated another car bomb, this one in front of the Palestine Research Center’s main offices, destroying much of the center. Among those killed in the attack was Shahin. Jiryis relocated their children to Cyprus. There, he and several employees reestablished a partially operating PRC. In 1986 he finished the second volume of A History of Zionism, called The “Jewish National Home” in Palestine, 1918–1939. A third volume never materialized.

These first and second volumes of A History of Zionism together comprise The Foundations of Zionism. Edward Said once called Palestinians the “victims of the victims.” Their grievances could not be addressed—not, at least, from the standpoint of the West—without also recognizing the fears of those who had sought refuge from Europe, in Palestine. When Said was writing, the Holocaust was both the worst thing the West could fathom and the worst thing it understood itself to have done. I wonder if Said would still use that language today. Jiryis wrote The Foundations of Zionism for a world where fewer people recognized the heart of Zionism. Perhaps it was less obvious at the time of its composition just where Zionism came from, that it was born not out of the trauma of the Holocaust but the supremacy of colonialism. Today the logic of Zionism has been laid bare: it is not “never again” but ethnic cleansing and genocide, it is conquest, might makes right, an extension of the West.

Jiryis dispels the idea that things started in 1948, 1940, or 1917. Zionism emerged in the mid-nineteenth century as a European response to European questions. By the time of the first Zionist Congress at the turn of the twentieth century, Zionism had reached a convergence on a Jewish national home in Palestine. But Jiryis tracks the lesser known role of various European actors, Jewish and non-Jewish, in making this possible, exposing possible turning points decades before Theodor Herzl wrote Der Judenstaat. What we encounter today as impenetrable reality is in fact a long series of decisions deliberated over time, none inevitable. What comes together can come apart.

It is fitting that this English-language edition is published by Ebb Books in their series Liberated Texts, which includes in everything it prints this quote credited to the CIA’s head of covert action, from 1961:

Books differ from all other propaganda media, primarily because one book can significantly change the reader’s attitude and action to an extent unmatched by the impact of any other single medium . . . this is, of course, not true of all books at all times and with all readers— but it is true significantly often enough to make books the most important weapon of strategic (long-range) propaganda.

In The Foundations of Zionism, Jiryis is uninterested in the indignity of persuasion. Given that it was written decades ago, it is clear he has, since his law school days, decided to no longer address those who refuse to see his humanity. The text reads less like a catchy advertisement for, say, a table and more like an extremely thorough YouTube video on how to build said table—and how it might be disassembled. The anomalist, a glorified table leg, is the opposite of the book’s imagined reader. Jiryis, in the book’s preface, explains who it’s written for instead:

When I began working in Lebanon, I became even more aware of the serious gap in Palestinian knowledge about Zionism—or, in fact, about Israel. The blow of the Nakba and its dispossession of the Palestinians had left little room for accessing first-hand material on the Zionist movement, and Palestinian refugees had no knowledge of Hebrew. A few people like myself, who had grown up in Israel and acquired the language, had left to join the PLO in Lebanon, and we attempted to fill this gap.

The Foundations of Zionism mostly adopts an academic’s distance. It is five hundred and fifty merciless pages of interwoven fact. The introduction and conclusion, both written since 2023, give the reader a small sense of our author. That Jiryis’s wife was killed by Israel slips through as a single sentence. Jiryis’s is a clinical study of Zionism, and if his life doesn’t belong here it is because Zionism does not accommodate the Palestinian—it cannot. The first of the most consequential decades for Zionism took place in Europe before the first settlers arrived in Palestine. After, they continued to face only themselves. Structurally, it is fitting that the Palestinian appears before and after, presiding over the main text, seemingly preserved in a fantastic, self-enclosed world. Zionists, like all colonizers, have labored to convince the colonized of their omnipotence, and here is a reminder that, as they see us and pretend not to, we too see them.

The book’s conclusion is titled “Zionism in the service of colonialism.” In it Jirvis introduces what he calls Israel’s “Balfour Declaration mindset,” which requires alliance with a committed superpower. Before, it was Britain. Today, it’s the United States: “President Truman announced his country’s recognition of Israel seven minutes after the announcement of its establishment on the evening of May 14, 1948.” Things change and stay the same:

The bottom line, in this story of Zionism, is the West’s colonial quest to control the Arab Levant. This quest began in the mid-19th century, with the decline of the Ottoman Empire, and has continued to this day. Britain led this activity, only to be replaced by the United States in the 1960s. The Palestinian people paid a heavy price for those policies, and lost their homeland to the Zionist state. Those colonial plans have not been exhausted. Rather, they have a more dangerous sequel, as noted above: to impose Israel on the Levant, as a deterrent force and agent of the American colonists along with their European partners, and normalize the settler colony as a part of the Middle East on the road to liquidating the Palestinian cause.

In our mainstream media, we’ve come to recognize a familiar pattern: Palestinians reveal something about Israel. Months or years pass, Israelis confirm it finally, long after it is inconsequential, and they are celebrated in places like the New York Times for their bravery, by people who have no right to wash the blood off of each others’ hands. Jiryis is a scholar; he witnessed the start of the Nakba and its consequences, and is not writing for those who won’t listen. If the anomalists appease the colonizer as they demean the colonized, Jiryis faces the colonized as he dissects the colonizer.

What must come next, for Jiryis, is clear: “Given this reality,” he writes in a new conclusion for the English-language edition, “there seems to be no solution except to eliminate this Western influence in the region, by strengthening and unifying the national forces that resist colonialism and Zionism.” The “vile genocidal war against Gaza and its people is nothing but a flash in this direction,” the telos of the West. “Hamas has placed its finger on the wound.” Gaza, Palestine, has exposed for the world a fork in the road, and too many of us are satisfied to stand at this crossroad, recognize that a decision must be made, and stare at our feet in shame.