THE coloniser has to reduce the native to the level of an animal if the process of domination is to be maintained. 

The Martiniquan revolutionary Frantz Fanon was one leading post-war independence figure to remind us of that in the last century. 

Any doubt that this latest war by Israel on the Palestinians arises from the settler-colonial encounter of dispossession, occupation and siege is removed by considering the language of extreme dehumanisation already deployed. 

A former Israeli ambassador to the UN calmly refers to Palestinians as animals — lower perhaps than the “human animals” as Defence Minister Yaov Gallant described the enemy that he was going to destroy. 

Kay Burley on Sky News struggled to accept it when told that Gallant referred to eliminating everything in Gaza and not just to Hamas. 

Then Benjamin Netanyahu invoked a messianic passage from the Bible beloved by US right-wing evangelists who believe Israel, extended across all of Palestine through ethnic cleansing, signals the coming of Armageddon. 

He said: “We are the children of light, they are the children of darkness” and that their destruction would bring about a prophecy from the book of Isaiah. 

Manichean and genocidal in rhetoric. This is not from the fringe or from fascistic settlers but from the government. 

It is echoed in Israeli society such that there are rising attacks on those who call for peace, including members of families of hostages or those killed on October 7 who oppose their grief and captured relatives being used to fuel war. 

Announcing that Israel is at the head of a new war on terror against an evil that is less than human is part of Netanyahu’s strategy to deal with internal opposition. 

Most of it is suppressed on account of the country being at war. It threatens to boil back up if there is any prolonged cessation of fighting. 

It is Israel’s international propaganda push also in response to the reality that while there is widespread sympathy for the victims of the shocking attacks, there is mounting outrage at the horrific Palestinian death toll.

That builds on existing support for the Palestinians. It might be masked by the continued double standards of Western governments, but at a popular and global level Israel is seen as the oppressor. 

Hence the need to declare this now an existential struggle that transcends the Palestinians to become a war of civilisation. 

That imperative becomes all the stronger the more the calls for a ceasefire grow and with them pressure to address the root causes of the conflict. 

This is having a profound impact in the resurgence of anti-Muslim racism. Islamophobia was a concomitant of the first war on terror declared by George W Bush following the September 11 2001 attacks. 

In important respects, it is worse today. There was in the days after September 11 a move by Bush’s government to prevent a pogrom-like wave of racism against the varied Muslim communities in the US. 

Bush went to a mosque in Washington to signal that this was not a war on Islam. In order to win the acquiescence of Arab leaders he later said he was making a fresh push to deliver a Palestinian state. It had been promised in the Oslo Accords of 1993 but reneged upon by one Israeli government after another. 

That approach rapidly gave way, however, to the rhetoric of a war of civilisation against an “axis of evil.” It boosted what had been peripheral claims on the right that with the fall of the Soviet Union the new battle of the West was a “clash of civilisations” in which Muslims were held to be backwards, lacking our modernity and in need of a civilising force from without.  

The logic of the war on terror meant forms of anti-Muslim racism that reached far wider than the right. 

The war was a succession of invasions or efforts at regime change in one Muslim-majority country after another. It also meant from Bagram air base to Abu Ghraib to Guantanamo the suspension of the restraints that are supposed to apply under international law and the adoption of methods of terror — in the name of fighting it. 

That necessitated the dehumanisation of the victims, who numbered millions. 

Further, the global opposition to the invasion of Iraq and to the endless war did not fit with its proponents’ claims that they would liberate the Middle East and be welcomed for it.

The explanation for mass Muslim opposition became not that the war itself was a barbaric failure but that Muslims were somehow inclined to terror. There followed the battery of security laws and policies based on that lie. 

Islamophobia arising as a false explanation for global developments and wrapped in the language of liberalism was already respectable dinner-party racism before this latest Israeli war on the Palestinians. 

A second way in which the racism that is being generated today is worse is that attempts to demonise opposition to the war rest upon the instrumentalisation by various governments of the very real issue of anti-semitism. It has been weaponised against the left and effective anti-racist movements — and not only in Britain. 

Both Islamophobia and anti-semitism have been rising in recent years across much of Europe, along with racism and xenophobia in general. 

Instead of combating them, however, governments in Britain and Europe have either ignored the threat or produced false narratives that excuse their own roles and instead pit one group against another while outrageously claiming that it is the left that has the problem with racism. 

In March the German authorities reported a 5 per cent increase in race hate crimes in 2022 on the previous year. 

Anti-Muslim and anti-Jewish crimes including physical attacks were both up. The security service found incidences of anti-semitism were overwhelmingly the work of the far right. 

Yet the fascistic AfD, running second in the polls, faces little media and political challenge to its lie that anti-semitic attacks are principally down to Germany’s Muslim minorities and the left. That somehow anti-semitism has been imported into Germany by immigration... into Germany.

The centre-left government has announced a major deportation drive. This week the leader of the centre-right CDU said that a new citizenship law should include an oath legitimising the state of Israel. 

German Jewish groups have warned for three years that the fascist right was exploiting the energy crisis, economic downturn and squeeze on ordinary people to promote classic anti-semitic conspiracies deflecting blame from corporate capitalism onto Jewish people. 

But we have instead the false claim entering the mainstream that the driver is Muslims and support for the Palestinians. And we have had the absurd interventions by politicians in Germany, France and Britain that anti-capitalist politics produces anti-semitism, perversely embracing the lie that capitalism is somehow to do with Jews and vice versa. 

It is a European conceit that the twin racisms of Islamophobia and anti-semitism are an outwash of events generated within the Middle East. 

They are both produced within the imperial metropolis. Rampant anti-semitism in eastern Europe cannot be explained by the presence of Muslim migrants, as governments have refused entry. 

The prime minister of Hungary, Viktor Orban, wholesales anti-semitic lies and is a personal friend of Netanyahu and strong supporter of Israel. 

What is true is that the eruptions in the Middle East do have an effect on domestic politics and mass thinking in countries such as Britain with its long imperial history in the region that has contributed to so much of the disaster of today. 

But this is not some spontaneous upsurge of communalism just waiting to break out. Some 76 per cent of people in Britain favour a ceasefire and that is why hundreds of thousands have taken to the streets in solidarity with the Palestinians. 

The government’s response has been to demonise the protests and argue that expressions of support for Palestine are in some way anti-semitic. Again, a refusal to deal with the social reality. 

In so doing, it has to erase the considerable body of Jewish opinion that is with the Palestinian plight. 

Imprinting false communalist explanations upon a social revolt that is based on universalist values means knocking out those whose presence refutes the lie. 

Worse than that, the war that the government and the leader of the Labour Party have been conducting against the left and our anti-imperialist, internationalist politics is a further way to invite in opposing and dangerously false thinking. 

The radical left’s understanding of Israel as a product of imperialist division of the Middle East, and of both Islamophobia and anti-semitism as variants of the general racism that capitalism produces, has been critical in Britain to undermining those who would say Israel-Palestine means Jew-Muslim. 

Identifying the apartheid nature of Israel and its occupation, as Human Rights Watch and similar bodies now do, has meant locating the Palestinian struggle in a history of anti-racism and universal values. 

Seeking to ban the word apartheid and the peaceful tactic of boycott sends the wrong message that there is something special about what Israel does that lifts it above criticism and outside of comparison. 

There is the same double standard when public buildings are told to fly the flag of Ukraine but the police are told that the flag of Palestine is suspicious. 

In fact, there is a single standard for the British government and Nato which is at war in Ukraine for its interests and with the Israeli state against the Palestinians for the same reason. 

The mass, multiracial movement for Palestine with its strong socialist core is the opposite of inflaming communal division. It is an anti-racist answer to such division. 

Those who wish to exploit the Palestinian cause to whip up religious sectarianism and anti-semitism have so great a problem with the movement that they urge Muslims to boycott it. 

And then you find supporters of Israel in this war amplifying these tiny groups as if they represented hundreds of thousands on the street. 

Our opponents want no movement and they definitely don’t want an educated one. We have to build both elements. 

There is something else. It is nothing short of enraging that the likes of Suella “send ’em to Rwanda” Braverman feels she can pose as defending anyone against any form of racism — including Jewish communities in Britain.

Anti-racists should hit back and be clear that a mass, democratic movement for Palestine provides an expanded anti-racist space. 

It is also the way to marginalise those who would wrongly blame Jewish people in Britain for Netanyahu in Israel and seek to divide Muslims, Jews and all victims of racism from each other in the fight against growing reaction at home. 

We need more anti-imperialism and anti-capitalism, not less. It is on that basis that racism of all kinds is most effectively fought.