Is Israel a “settler colonial” state? 

That charge has been the subject of fierce debate in recent months amid the continuing Israeli assault on Gaza after the October 7 attacks by Hamas. 

Colonialism is a system in which one people dominates another and uses the subjugated group’s resources for its own benefit (the British Raj in India is a classic example). Colonial projects take many forms, but Israel is accused of being the result of a specific variety: settler colonialism. 

According to the Cornell Law School Legal Information Institute, settler colonialism has “an additional criterion that is the complete destruction and replacement of indigenous people and their cultures by the settler’s own in order to establish themselves as the rightful inhabitants.” 

Settler colonialism does not have a definition under international humanitarian law (unlike many other terms used during this latest war), although Article 49 of the Geneva Convention prohibits certain actions often associated with that term; it is instead a concept that historians use to describe the system of replacing an existing population with a new one through land theft and exploitation, which is enabled by occupation, apartheid, forced assimilation, or genocide.

Historians often apply the term to the projects that founded the United States, Canada, South Africa, and others.

Within that cohort, there are scholars who apply the term to Israel’s founding, too. The argument begins with the 30-year period during which the British Empire controlled historic Palestine and facilitated the mass migration of Jews, particularly those persecuted in Europe before the Holocaust and in the wake of it. That migration, they argue, displaced the existing Arab population and launched a conflict that continues to this day.

But critics of the argument view accusing Israel of settler colonialism as a distortion of the term, in large part because of Judaism’s deep historical ties to present-day Israel. Many Jewish people who migrated from around the world and became citizens of Israel use the word “return” to describe making their home there.

The debate has echoed from college campuses to the halls of Congress. In the United States, “colonialism” is, at times, viewed as a popular buzzword used to vilify the Jewish state and a means of casting Jewish refugees as agents of empire. Among pro-Palestinian activists and in many formerly colonized communities, the term is a historical prism linking much of the Global South and through which the Palestinian struggle can be understood. 

The argument might seem academic. But it is important for understanding pro-Palestinian groups’ grievances with the international community — for failing to prevent Israel from engaging in what they view as an established settler colonial pattern of eliminating a native population through expulsion and genocide to annex Palestinian land. 

Palestine’s short but critical history as a British colony, briefly explained

Both the United States and Canada, widely viewed by historians as states founded as settler colonial projects, relied heavily on British patronage. Israel’s foundations are similar, some scholars argue.

In 1917, the British colonial period, or British Mandate, began in historic Palestine. Zionism, the ideology that Jews are both a religious group and nation whose spiritual homeland is Israel, was extant for decades before then, driven in large part by violent antisemitism in Europe. 

But that year, British Foreign Secretary Arthur James Balfour wrote what he considered a declaration of sympathy with the aspirations of Zionism.

“His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people,” he wrote in what came to be known as the Balfour Declaration. The declaration also stated, “nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine” — though, as my colleague Nicole Narea wrote, there was no specification of what those protections would be or who they would apply to. 

The letter was a powerful endorsement of the establishment of a Jewish home where the biblical kingdoms of David and Solomon once were. Priya Satia, a historian of the British Empire and professor at Stanford University, said it also marked another British foray into colonial enterprise.

“You’ve got to remember, this is against the backdrop of ongoing British settler movement into Rhodesia, into Kenya, into South Africa,” she said. “That is what the architects thought they were doing when they started this process.”

Historians argue that the British Empire backed the Zionist movement for myriad reasons, including anxieties about Jewish migration to Britain, the search for new allies in World War I, and to maintain control of the nearby Suez Canal.

“The British, before they decided to take Zionism under their wing with the Balfour Declaration in 1917, for more than a decade had decided for strategic reasons that they must control Palestine,” Rashid Khalidi, a professor at Columbia University and author of The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine, told Vox. “They needed it to defend the eastern frontiers of Egypt. They needed it because it constituted the Mediterranean terminus of the shortest land route between the Mediterranean and the Gulf.”

After the Balfour Declaration, the British facilitated the mass immigration of European Jews to historic Palestine. Per a League of Nations mandate, the British would maintain economic, political, and administrative authority of the region until a Jewish “national home” was established.  

Were Zionism and the founding of Israel inherently colonial projects? The debate, explained.

That long, tangled history planted the seeds for today’s strife — and the debate over what to call the Israeli project. 

“Zionism, of course, has a national aspect, but as early Zionists all understood and accepted and were not ashamed of, it was a colonial project,” Khalidi said. “It was a settler-colonial movement to bring persecuted Jews from Europe to Palestine, where they would establish a Jewish majority state.”

But others dispute that view. That includes scholars like Benny Morris, a member of the Israeli New Historian movement that challenges official Israeli history, who argues that Zionism is rooted in the aspirations and ideals of a persecuted group, instead of the interests of a mother country. “Colonialism is commonly defined as the policy and practice of an imperial power acquiring political control over another country, settling it with its sons, and exploiting it economically,” Morris writes. “By any objective standard, Zionism fails to fit this definition.”

Derek Penslar, a history professor at Harvard University, writes in his book Zionism: An Emotional State about the various taxonomies of Zionism and that some of its early visionaries were critical of political Zionism’s aims.

“The most famous Zionist intellectual of the early 20th century, Asher Ginsberg, who went under the pen name of Ahad Ha-am, was against the establishment of a Jewish state,” Penslar told Vox. “He was very well aware of the Arab population of Palestine, and he said, ‘look, you know, we basically can’t get these people against us. We can’t anger them, we have to live with these people.’ And so he advocated forming much smaller communities that would not antagonize the Arab populations.”

The man who came to be known as the ideological father of Israel, however, was the political Zionist Theodor Herzl. A journalist from Vienna in the late 1800s, he witnessed the rise of populist, antisemitic politicians in his city and remarked on the pervasiveness of antisemitism in Europe in a play and later his pamphlet, The Jewish State. 

Credited for galvanizing an international movement for Jewish statehood in Palestine, Herzl sought a more dignified existence for European Jews like himself and espoused a vision of the Jewish state that included universal suffrage and equal rights for the Arab population. But in private, he wrote of Arab expropriation, and in public, he placed Zionists like himself within the colonial order of the time. 

“We should there form a portion of a rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism,” he wrote. “We should as a neutral State remain in contact with all Europe, which would have to guarantee our existence.”

While under British control, Palestine saw violent clashes between Zionists and Arabs, and its demography changed rapidly, with the Jewish population increasing from 6 percent to 33 percent. In the eyes of Arab nationalists, the argument was a simple one: A foreign power took control of Arab land and promised it to another foreign group.

“For the Zionists and for Israel, it’s a lot more complicated,” said Penslar, whose work links post-colonial studies with the history of Zionism. “They wanted to be free, they wanted self-determination, and they wanted the kinds of things that colonized people in the world wanted. And the consensus was that they would realize their freedom in the Jews’ historic, biblical, and spiritual homeland in the land of Israel, which is the same thing as historic Palestine.”

(In a sign of how contentious the discussion over Zionism and antisemitism is, as part of a broader criticism of Harvard’s handling of antisemitism on campus, critics also protested Penslar’s heading of a university task force to combat antisemitism, pointing to his criticism of Israel as disqualifying — this despite Penslar’s own critiques of Harvard’s handling of antisemitism and his distinguished academic reputation.) 

Judaism’s ties to the Middle East, mentioned in both the Bible and the Quran, the Hebrew language’s origins in ancient Palestine, and the Jewish ties to the region as a motherland motivate arguments that Jews are a native group in present-day Israel. It’s why groups supportive of Israel argue that it does not fit into the settler colonialism framework.

“Jews, like Palestinians, are native and indigenous to the land,” writes the Anti-Defamation League, a mainstream Jewish pro-Israel group and also one of the US’s leading anti-extremism organizations. “The Land of Israel is integral to the Jewish religion and culture, the connection between Jews and the land is a constant in the Bible, and is embedded throughout Jewish rituals and texts. The Europeans who settled in colonies in the Middle East and North Africa were not indigenous or native to the land in any way.”

To scholars like Khalidi, who comes from a family of Palestinian civil servants dating back to the 17th century, the connection doesn’t justify the creation of a majority Jewish state under international law.

“Does that mean that the people who arrive from Eastern Europe are indigenous to the land? No, they’re not indigenous. Their religion comes from there. Maybe or maybe not their ancestors came from there,” said Khalidi. “That doesn’t give you a 20th-century right — that’s a biblical land deed that nobody believes except people who are religious. And in modern international law, that just doesn’t hold.” 

By the mid-20th century, the British, recovering from World War II and facing anti-colonial agitation from Zionists and Arabs in Palestine — not to mention from other corners of their empire — handed control of Palestine to the United Nations. In 1947, the General Assembly passed Resolution 181 to partition Palestine.

“Even though Arabs constituted a two-thirds majority of the country, more than 56 percent of it was to be given to the Jewish state and the rest was to be given to an Arab state,” said Khalidi.

For Israel, the birth of a Jewish state was a triumphant defiance of odds in the face of the Holocaust, and victory against military units from Transjordan, Iraq, Syria, and Egypt who were defeated the following year. It also occasioned the expulsion or voluntary exodus of hundreds of thousands of Jews from Arab countries. Israel soon established a Law of Return that would grant any Jew from any country the right to move to Israel and gain citizenship.

In Palestinian memory, the establishment of Israel entailed an ethnic cleansing campaign known as the Nakba, or “catastrophe” in Arabic. Fearing violence by Zionist forces or actively expelled by them, an estimated 750,000 Palestinians were displaced from their homes in present-day Israel. According to a 1948 Israeli Defense Forces intelligence report, “without a doubt, hostilities were the main factor in the population movement.” No Law of Return exists for Palestinians who were displaced by the Nakba.

The Nakba took place as independence movements in Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean gained traction. To scholars like Satia, who studies the empire that once colonized a quarter of the world, Palestine became a global touchpoint in an era of decolonization.

“All these other places do eventually get some kind of decolonization process. And in Palestine, there isn’t one,” she said. “It becomes the last bastion along with South Africa.”

The present-day charges of settler colonialism and demands to decolonize

Settler colonialism is hardly a thing of the past nor is it an exclusively Western enterprise. China is arguably practicing it by incentivizing Han Chinese migration to Xinjiang and Tibet. India’s revocation of Kashmir’s autonomous status is criticized as a Hindu nationalist effort to transform the demographics of its only majority Muslim state. 

And Israel’s continued occupation of Palestinian territories motivates charges of present-day colonialism. This includes continued settlement construction in the West Bank and control of the ingress and egress of people and goods (most notably humanitarian aid) into the Gaza Strip. 

In the West Bank, almost 700,000 Israelis are living in settlements scattered throughout the territory, which are protected by the Israeli military and often subsidized by the government. 

“It’s pretty fair to say that the Palestinians are an occupied people. And there’s no question that the settlements that Israel has set up in the West Bank since 1967 are a kind of colonialism,” said Penslar. 

As Vox’s Zack Beauchamp explained, “Most international lawyers (including one asked by Israel to review them in 1967) believe settlements violate the Fourth Geneva Convention, which prohibits the transfer of population into occupied territories.” Israel’s government disputes that its settlements violate any international law. 

The settlements obstruct the contiguity of Palestinian land and movement. Palestinians are barred from certain Israeli-only roads and forced to navigate a network of checkpoints, which invokes comparisons to apartheid South Africa. 

“The contiguity of the territory of the West Bank has been completely broken up,” said Satia. “You can use analogies like ‘Bantustans,’ which comes from the South African context.”  

South African politicians, including its first post-apartheid president, Nelson Mandela, argued that Palestinians were engaged in a parallel struggle. In the wake of Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel and Israel’s subsequent siege of Gaza, South Africa is accusing Israel of committing genocide in the International Court of Justice. Israel vehemently denies the charge, calling it “blood libel,” and says it has a duty to protect its citizens from Hamas. 

As the world watches the deadliest war in the history of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict unfold on their screens, activists and academics rely on the term “settler colonialism” to explain a decades-long cycle of violence that has killed over 30,000 Palestinians and over 1,400 Israelis in the last six months.

To Penslar, who lived in Israel through two intifadas, today’s cycle of violence won’t change by identifying Israel as a settler-colonial state.

“Even if we do go through all of this and decide Israel is a settler-colonial state, it doesn’t really mean very much, because at the end of the day we have to come up with a solution which involves either Israeli Jews dominating Arabs, or Arabs dominating Jews, or the two people sharing the land or two states,” he said. “And whether you call Israel a settler-colonial state or not, it doesn’t really help us a whole lot.”

The call for decolonization is criticized by some for lacking achievable goals and denounced by others as a euphemism for expelling or killing Israelis in the name of anti-colonial resistance. Immediately after the October 7 attacks, Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh said, “the enemy has had a political, military, intelligence, security and moral defeat inflicted upon it, and we shall crown it, with the grace of God, with a crushing defeat that will expel it from our lands.” 

But academic proponents of the settler-colonial thesis say that expulsion is not a natural consequence of accepting that settler colonialism is foundational to a country. 

“You can have that conversation and acknowledge that historical reality without implying that everyone needs to leave,” said Satia, citing Australia, New Zealand, and Canada — countries that have formally apologized to their indigenous peoples for colonial atrocities and pledged reparations to certain groups. 

If the First Aliyah, or migration of the Jewish diaspora to historic Palestine, began in the late 19th century, then the descendants of those people living in Israel today are tied to the land not only because of Judaism’s history but also because of several generations living there in recent memory. 

“Those are people who now have not just a presence but certain rights,” said Khalidi, adding that Israel fits into a pattern seen in other settler-colonial enterprises. 

“You look at South Africa, or you look at Ireland, or you look at Kenya, or you look at what is now Zimbabwe — a very large proportion of the populations that were settled there by colonial powers … are now part of those populations. They have rights there. They should live there,” he said. “Now, how the relationship between them is to be worked out. That’s a question that’s not going to be easy to solve.”

Editor’s note, February 22, 10:10 am: Mexico’s former top cop, Genaro García Luna, was convicted Tuesday on five counts related to taking bribes and helping the Sinaloa cartel smuggle drugs into the US. The original story explaining García Luna’s history and trial, published January 27, is below.

This week, a federal drug trial got underway in Brooklyn that, in some ways, is an indictment against the war on drugs itself. 

The Eastern District Court of New York trial is of Mexico’s former top cop, Genaro García Luna. Prosecutors say García Luna, who led Mexico’s version of the FBI and served as public security secretary — a powerful Cabinet-level position under President Felipe Calderon — was playing a double game throughout the US and Mexico’s war on drugs. 

García Luna spent much of the 2000s being the face of a heroic crackdown on a brutal drug trade. But all that changed during cartel leader Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman’s 2018 trial in New York City, which was a hotspot for the drugs his Sinaloa cartel smuggled into the United States. At the trial, a former cartel lieutenant told the jury that he personally met with García Luna twice in a restaurant, each time delivering a briefcase stuffed with at least $3 million in cash. 

Now García Luna is charged with engaging in a continuing criminal enterprise, among other charges. His defense has told jurors that the government’s case rested on “rumors, speculation and the words of some of the biggest criminals in the world,” who were apprehended by García Luna.

The revelations were a major scandal in Mexico, said Peniley Ramírez, a former investigative journalist at Univision and now co-host of Futuro Media’s podcast USA v. García Luna. But it was less surprising to Mexican journalists who’d been questioning how a civil servant became wealthy enough to own several luxury properties.

“There were a few people, a few journalists in Mexico that were asking too many accountability questions about him and the money that he had and the businesses that he was doing,” said Ramírez. “And those people were facing a lot of retaliation. Some of them left the country, some of them received death threats. And some of them are here [in New York] now covering the trial.”

Below is an excerpt of the conversation between Ramírez and Today, Explained host Sean Rameswaram, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so find Today, Explained on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you listen.

Sean Rameswaram

Help us understand how this guy who’s close to the DEA and working with the US government is now on trial in New York City for being a part of the drug trade. 

Peniley Ramírez

One of the leaders of the Sinaloa cartel said [in a US federal court trial] that, “Yeah, I was working with El Chapo” — he was the leader of the Sinaloa cartel — “but guess what? We were bribing top Mexican officers to smuggle drugs here.” And in the middle of that, he drops García Luna’s name. 

You can imagine that was a huge scandal in Mexico. So García Luna, who by then was living in Miami, took the first flight back to Mexico, and he gave a bunch of interviews saying “No! Oh, my God, I’m going to sue this person. How can he say that? He’s a criminal. I was the leader of the government trying to capture these people and extradite them.” 

But less than one year after that, so December of 2019, he was arrested here in the US. And now he is going to be on trial before the same judge, Brian Cogan, and in the same place where El Chapo was on trial. So it’s the most important case derived so far from this big trial that was in the news a lot here in the US in 2018 and 2019.

Sean Rameswaram

And tell us his story. Where does it begin? 

Peniley Ramírez

Well, he was born in Mexico City in 1968. It was a working-class neighborhood, his father had a moving business. [García Luna] wanted to be a soccer player, so he tried to become a professional soccer player but he couldn’t make it because he was not good enough. But then he moved to another career and he started studying engineering, and in the middle of that, he became a low-ranking spy. He entered the equivalent, in Mexico, to the CIA. 

This is like the late ’80s, and really soon, just in about a decade, the guy becomes the head of the Mexican equivalent to the FBI. And then after that, just in six years, he becomes the head of the Mexican equivalent to the DHS, plus the NSA, plus the CIA. So he became [one of] the most powerful people in the civilian government of Mexico. And also he became one of the closest people in Mexico to the US government — especially to the DEA and to the FBI.

Sean Rameswaram

Was he good at his job? 

Peniley Ramírez

Well, he was good at selling himself, that we can tell. He advanced really fast in his career, and he became this person that was, at some point, managing millions of dollars from US taxpayers that were sent to Mexico to fight the war on drugs. From 2001 to 2012, he was a top officer. So the guy was all the time in the news in Mexico. He was meeting with really important people from the US. He has pictures with Hillary Clinton, with Joe Biden. He was like a top, top officer. He was in a lot of bilateral meetings. He was receiving awards from the CIA, saying, “Thank you for helping us.” But the crazy thing is that now he’s being accused, here in New York, in the US Eastern District Court in Brooklyn, of helping El Chapo Guzman and the Sinaloa cartel smuggle the drugs to the US while working with the DEA and the Mexican government. 

And at the same time, he was seeing himself as a top spy. So this guy was obsessed, for example, with James Bond. When he turned 50 years old, he organized a party with a James Bond theme. And for example, his work email was AFI01, so he was “agent number one” of the agency that he was leading. And he was also obsessed with a lot of things American. For example, he had a secret basement in his house with a lot of records from Donna Summer and he was also obsessed with CSI. So he received part of the money from the US and he created a show, a TV show that was called The Team.

Sean Rameswaram

Wait, he had his own TV show in Mexico?!

Peniley Ramírez

Yeah, yeah. They paid up to $11 million to create a TV show, and one of the helicopters that was donated by the United States to Mexico to fight the war on drugs was in the trailer of the TV show saying “Oh, these are the good cops from Mexico that are fighting the war on drugs.” And then in 2012, the guy left office, left the Mexican government, and he moved to Miami to a $3 million house. It was like a super luxury lifestyle. It’s hard to believe that you can pay all of that with just, you know, your salary as a public servant. The salary of a public servant in Mexico is less than the middle-class salary in any part of the US. So I think it’s hard to believe that you can afford that. So he was living in Miami all that time after he left office until he was arrested in 2019. So he got a pretty cool life. But now he’s in jail in Brooklyn.

Sean Rameswaram

What charges is García Luna facing? 

Peniley Ramírez

Well, he’s facing several charges. Most of them are for conspiring with a cartel to bring the drugs. They’re also charging him with lying to the DHS, because as he moved to Miami when he left office in Mexico, he became a resident and then he was seeking American citizenship. And as you know, when you are trying to become a citizen, you need to respond to a questionnaire. One of the questions is, “Have you ever committed a crime?” And he said no. Now they’re accusing him of lying, saying, “Oh, yeah, you did.” So let’s see if they prove it.

Sean Rameswaram

You’ve been in the courtroom. What’s it like in there? 

Peniley Ramírez

First, it’s a high-security case. So reporters during the jury selection weren’t allowed to be in the same room where the jury was being selected. The jury will remain anonymous. So we know their numbers, but we don’t know their names and they’re partially sequestered. 

Sean Rameswaram

How is García Luna’s team defending him? 

Peniley Ramírez

The narrative is … he was a Mexican “good cop,” [the] top good cop, the guy who was saving Mexico. So the defense right now is playing this card of saying, first, that most of the potential witnesses against him are people that are taking revenge because he apprehended them and he extradited them, and now they’re just coming back for him. And the second thing [they’re saying is] “He couldn’t be corrupt because he was working with the US. He was working with the American government.”

Sean Rameswaram

What’s the prosecution saying so far? 

Peniley Ramírez

They’re saying so far that they will have more than 70 witnesses. So that’s huge. That’s way more than a typical trial. They have been delivering more than a million pages of documents related to the case to the defense. So the defense has been trying to go over all these documents to try to find out, what’s the prosecution’s smoking gun, if they have it. We know that a lot of the witnesses are going to be cooperating witnesses — people that were with the Sinaloa cartel or with other cartels, and they allegedly knew something about García Luna. And now they are able to testify what they know and try to get some good treatment from the prosecution in exchange for saying what they know. So we are expecting big, big names in the narco industry and people that were really crucial to understand why this so-called war on drugs has been mostly a failure so far. 

And I think this is the important part for the US audience, because I think it is important to say that this is not just a trial of a wild Mexican politician that liked Donna Summer and James Bond and CSI. It’s something really American, because most of the money that is involved, it’s money from the US taxpayers that went to Mexico to help fight the war on drugs. Most of the victims of the violence are in Mexico. But the victims of these drugs, the hundreds of thousands of people dying from overdoses, are here in the United States. They are not in Mexico. So that’s why I think it’s important to tell the story here, because it’s not just a story about Mexican politics. 

Sean Rameswaram

It sounds like the outcome of this trial will mostly just affect García Luna. But has the American government addressed how embarrassing these revelations so far have been?

Peniley Ramírez

Oh, of course not. They have not addressed it at all. 

[In fact], they have been trying to prevent the defense from presenting any evidence that García Luna was close to the United States. For example, the prosecution asked Judge Cogan to prohibit the defense from presenting any evidence [like] “Here is a picture of him with Hillary Clinton… here is the award that he received from the CIA,” because as you said, it is embarrassing. García Luna is accused of helping the Sinaloa cartel since 2001. So in 2012, 11 years after that, he received this fancy award from the head of the CIA, David Petraeus, saying, “Thank you in recognition for your effort and your help to the United States.” And you know, I think that you used the correct word, which is: it’s embarrassing. 

Sean Rameswaram

When the trial is over, this war on drugs will not be over. But is there a way it could be conducted better in a way to avoid embarrassing incidents like this with García Luna? 

Peniley Ramírez

I would truly expect that after this trial, especially if he’s declared guilty, that the United States does a deep revision of their international allies. So how many other García Lunas are out there? If he is declared guilty, how many other people that the US government is trusting right now with money, with information … are receiving awards from the US government and nothing is actually happening? Because the numbers are really clear, you keep seeing drugs coming into the border every day. You keep seeing people dying from overdoses of fentanyl, of cocaine, every day. So the war is not over, because people are still dying from overdoses in the United States. People are still dying from the violence in Mexico. So I would love to see some accountability regarding not just this guy. What other people are out there that, right now, should be fighting the drugs [coming] in and they are not doing it? 

In the lead-up to Christmas, the climate action group Just Stop Oil is expected to disrupt life in London to draw attention to their cause. Their tactics range from scaling bridges to gluing themselves to busy roads to defacing famous paintings.

It’s a form of nonviolent protest that’s heavily reliant on shock value and has drawn the ire of UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and his government, who have vowed to crack down on disruptive climate protests. While most protesters who’ve been arrested have been released on bail after a relatively short period, the sharpest legal response has come in the form of a new Public Order Bill, which would punish the act of gluing oneself to objects or buildings, or blocking transport by six months in prison. 

Rights groups have regarded the bill as authoritarian and regressive, but a UK government spokesperson told Vox that it served the interests of the public. “The right to protest is a fundamental principle of our democracy,” the spokesperson said, “but those protesters that disrupt public life, delay our emergency services, and drain police resources cost the taxpayer millions and must face proper penalties.”

Just Stop Oil came on the world’s radar last fall when two activists, Phoebe Plummer and Anna Holland, threw tomato soup at van Gogh’s Sunflowers in London’s National Gallery of Art. 

The painting, which is encased in glass, wasn’t harmed, but the gallery said the frame suffered minor damage. The use of tomato soup might seem absurd — after all, the group is trying to make a point about the harmful effects of oil on the climate, so why not deface the painting with fuel or even petroleum jelly? But the group’s spokesperson, Emma Brown, told Vox’s Today, Explained that the soup was a nod to Britain’s cost-of-living crisis, which has resulted in the proliferation of food banks around the country, where tomato soup is a staple product but often too expensive to heat up. 

“We wanted that dramatic, slightly bizarre protest,” Brown said of throwing soup on van Gogh’s beloved painting. “Because by targeting something that is precious and valuable, the people feel a sense of shock and discomfort when they see that being threatened. That is really the emotion that we need to be feeling when we are seeing the decisions our governments are making and the devastation being wreaked by the climate catastrophe.”

Time will tell whether Just Stop Oil’s protests will help save the planet, but their tactics are not new. Art destruction in the name of political or social change can be traced back to the dawn of time, according to David Freedberg, who wrote the 1989 book The Power of Images, which is often cited by art historians studying the use of images for propaganda, pleasure, and destruction. 

“Obviously, they will draw attention to the cause. They may make some people reflect more on the problem of oil and fossil fuels,” said Freedberg in an interview with Today, Explained host Noel King. “But it’s really not clear to me that it’s going to achieve very much.”

Below is an excerpt of the conversation between Freedberg and King, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get your podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, and Stitcher.

Noel King

How effective is the destruction of art in the advancement of a political or social cause?

David Freedberg

Well, I am afraid to say it’s usually very effective … acts of rebellion against power or acts of insults to power are effective at the start. Whether they actually end up effecting regime change is another matter.

Noel King

I wonder if you could give me a brief history of people destroying art to make a point. 

David Freedberg

It’s there from the beginning of time. We have the destruction of images of hated rulers in ancient Babylon, we’ve had image destruction in the late Roman Empire when Christianity came on the scene. And we shouldn’t forget that some acts of destruction are simply ways of replacing the symbols of a hated past of the ancient regime, of old regimes, as took place in the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, with the fall of the Iron Curtain. People pulled down images of hated leaders because they never wanted to see them again. That actually fell into an old class of image destruction, which was the so-called damnatio memoriae, the damnation of memory.

The instances can go on and on: When the Shah of Persia was replaced, images in Tehran came down. There was the famous removal of the statue of Saddam Hussein in 2003. It was supposed to be an outbreak of popular resistance to Saddam, but actually we discovered later that it was orchestrated by the American troops. And then, of course, the Islamic State was radically Islamist. The Islamic State took this to its extreme by its actual performances of image destruction. When you saw these acts of destruction, you shook in your bones; you realize that these were accompanied by assaults on real human bodies. 

Let me say something about what is the history of attacking images for the sake of publicity, into which class obviously the actions by Just Stop Oil falls: People have always attempted to break images for the sake of publicity, either personal publicity or for a political cause. The Irish Republican Army, from its beginnings, pulled down images or defaced images of English heroes. This is a well-known strategy. This is not a new thing at all. 

Noel King

We talked to a spokeswoman from Just Stop Oil. Her name is Emma Brown, and she told us that the group did not get much attention from blockading oil terminals, which is an action that is explicitly tied to their goals. But they got a lot of attention when they threw tomato soup on a painting, a thing that is not explicitly tied to their goals. Why do you think that is? 

David Freedberg

Any assault on a loved object gains attention. One of the interesting things about great paintings is that they’re housed in museums, which are the equivalent of the ancient temples — people go and stand in front of them in hushed silence. And there’s another issue: People don’t love oil terminals. I think what you don’t want to forget is that most people have some kind of aesthetic sense. People like Sunflowers not only because it’s a famous picture, but because they are moved by the painting. It means a great deal to them.

Noel King

When you ask Just Stop Oil members, why are you doing this? They will say very openly, it is ridiculous to protect art and museums and not protect the earth. What do you think about that? 

David Freedberg

I would respond by saying it’s ridiculous to invest so much in oil. We should stop oil. But what’s the connection with allowing people to go on enjoying works of art that they love, which means something to them? There’s no conceivable connection between the two claims. It’s a kind of logical absurdity, you know, to do away with one great salvation of civilization for the sake of saving civilization from climate change. Seems to me a confusion of aims. 

Noel King

One gets the impression that Just Stop Oil is betting that artists would understand their actions in some sense, or that at least artists would work to try to interpret what they are doing. She [Brown] said the group picked tomato soup specifically because it’s an allusion to Britain’s high cost of living — people cooking soup in cans. Is there any way to look at these protests as art themselves, or is that a bridge too far for you? 

David Freedberg

There’s no doubt that many artists are radical; artists are supposed to be radical. Thank god they are radical. And I’m sure there are plenty of artists who are not especially opposed to the throwing of tomato soup on Sunflowers by van Gogh. I do think that the question of bringing in sympathizers from a group in our society who are reduced to having to make meals that consist of tomato soup … I think that’s the most ridiculous idea I’ve ever heard. Because these are people who are reduced to such straits that they are really not going to be worried about van Gogh or anything at all in the context of such an attack. I think that’s one of the most spurious connections you could imagine. It appeals to intellectuals and artists, maybe, but that’s a small section of our society. 

I think we should leave things in our museums alone for the most part. Britain, after all, is a society which until very recently had museums that were free for everybody to attend, and that was one of the great things about Britain, because it made it clear that art was available for all. 

As I speak, I’m becoming stronger in my feelings about this that I anticipated — to deprive people of pleasures which now have become increasingly only available to the rich would be a great shame.