The Third-Worldist Logic

“What did y’all think decolonization meant? Vibes? Papers? Essays? Losers,” wrote Somali-American essayist Najma Sharif on X after the Hamas attacks of October 7. The line was meant as a provocation, but it captured something essential. In much of the contemporary West, decolonization has become a political theology—and, for some, an authorization of revolutionary violence. The days after October 7 showed how deeply this worldview has taken hold. Across Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States, university protests and pundits denounced Israel as a “settler-colonial state,” insisted that “decolonization is not a metaphor,” and called for “globalizing the Intifada.”

People often confuse these ideas with Islamism or with remnants of Communism. The confusion is understandable: Islamists condemn Israel in theological terms, and Communists cast global politics as a struggle between exploiters and the exploited. But today’s condemnation of Israel comes from a different lineage—a Third-Worldist conviction that the West is the permanent oppressor and that any movement arrayed against Western power is inherently righteous. This is why Western activists with no connection to the region chant in the vocabulary of decolonial struggle rather than Islamic jurisprudence or Marxist economics. They are channeling a worldview born in Paris, Algiers, and Havana, refined in Western universities, and now applied indiscriminately to conflicts framed as West versus non-West.

After October 7, this Third-Worldist moral script fused seamlessly with decolonial academic language. Anti-Israel sentiment reorganized itself around a single idea: decolonization became both the governing explanation and the desired political conclusion. Israel could appear only as the last “settler colony” of the West, and Palestinians only as the final authentic representatives of global resistance. History, politics, and the region’s internal complexities no longer mattered. The categories predetermined the outcome.

Historically, decolonization referred to the withdrawal of European empires and the birth of new states. That meaning hasn’t vanished, but it now serves as a backdrop for a far more ambitious doctrine: a global theory of power that divides the world between oppressive Western structures and the communities that resist them. Detached from chronology, it operates as a universal ideology—applied to everything from university hiring and border policy to museum curation and armed conflict.

This universal script—oppressor versus oppressed, settler versus indigenous, colonizer versus colonized—explains why accusations against Israel travel easily from Rome to London to New York. Whether the details fit the model becomes irrelevant; the model supplies the moral verdict. Israel is condemned not because of what it does, but because of what it is presumed to represent. Third-Worldism provides the emotional instinct; decolonization provides the conceptual vocabulary.

The implications matter profoundly for the United States. The same framework that condemns Israel also condemns American power: Israel as the local embodiment of Western domination, and the U.S. as the global structure that sustains it. The vocabulary used to attack Israel—settler, colonial, imperial, racial—is the same used to attack the United States. In the Third-Worldist imagination, America is the final imperial actor and Israel its most visible extension. Hostility toward Israel becomes a socially acceptable proxy for hostility toward American identity, institutions, and global leadership.

Much of the contemporary decolonial worldview can be traced to the intellectual realignments of the late 1960s, when the Marxist historian Maxime Rodinson published “Israel: A Colonial-Settler State?” in Jean-Paul Sartre’s Les Temps Modernes shortly after the Six-Day War. Rodinson did not limit himself to criticizing Israeli policies. He offered a structural reinterpretation of Zionism itself, arguing that it was a colonial movement indistinguishable from European expansion abroad. If Zionism is colonialism, Israel becomes illegitimate by definition and Palestinian violence becomes anti-imperialist by default.

Rodinson’s structural Marxist approach ignored basic history. Jews were indigenous to the region; their migration followed persecution and displacement; and Zionism was a national revival, not an extension of the European empire. Yet his template would furnish Middle East studies with a grand structural narrative. Edward Said absorbed Rodinson’s categories and extended them into a sweeping indictment of Western knowledge itself. With Said’s publication of Orientalism in 1978, “colonialism” became the master key for interpreting everything from literature to foreign policy.

Over the following decades, settler-colonial studies hardened into a discipline. Alongside it emerged the concept of surrogate colonialism. First invoked by Indira Gandhi in 1983 to describe how technological and economic dependency could mimic colonial rule, it was later repurposed by anthropologists such as Scott Atran to argue that British support for Zionist immigration made Jews “surrogate colonizers” of Palestine. If Jews were not direct colonizers, they must have been colonial proxies; if historical evidence did not support the accusation, the accusation evolved. Like settler colonialism, surrogate colonialism functioned as a tool designed to delegitimize Jewish sovereignty.

Its internal logic rested on what Atran called “the land problem”: domination begins when a people are severed from their organic relationship to the land, weakening any future claim to sovereignty. Pushed into an ethnic register, Ashkenazi and Russian Jews lacked any authentic understanding of the “Orient” they entered, while Middle Eastern Jews complicated but did not disrupt the colonial schema. The question was not indigeneity but whether Jews could be coded as foreign.

Sociologist Ran Greenstein advanced a similar view in Zionism and Its Discontents, describing the Jewish presence in Mandatory Palestine as a “surrogate colony,” with Britain as the primary colonizer and Jews as its demographic agents. In this reading, the Balfour Declaration becomes a tool of British domination rather than a diplomatic measure issued within a collapsing imperial system.

This logic underlies today’s slogans that Israel is “built on stolen land” and that Zionism is bound up with “white supremacy, capitalism, imperialism, and colonialism.” Jewish refugees fleeing pogroms and genocide are transformed into agents of elite Zionist interests aligned with London, and Mandate-era economic exchange is seen as capitalist extraction. Once Israel is defined as an imperial creation, Palestinian violence becomes legitimate anti-imperialist resistance, and Hamas can be cast as the heir to Algeria, Vietnam, Cuba, and Nicaragua.

Over time, the accusations multiplied. Israel was no longer merely a settler or surrogate colony but, in the eyes of various scholars, an extractive colony exploiting resources; a legal colony imposing foreign jurisprudence; a racial colony manufacturing hierarchy; and even a biopolitical colony regulating life through surveillance. The model generates these interpretations almost automatically. Every new label reinforces the underlying metaphysics: oppression as a total structure expressed in overlapping forms. The more categories one can attach to Israel, the more completely it appears to embody the architecture of Western domination.

The academic environment encourages this accumulation. In a university culture shaped by poststructuralism and critical theory, adding concepts is treated as deepening analysis. Once Israel is positioned as the embodiment of oppressive power, every available term becomes an instrument of critique, even when philosophically incompatible with other terms. Political incentives point in the same direction: a total indictment is easier to moralize than a partial one, and collapsing distinctions strengthens mobilization. The result: a conceptual fog that obscures rather than clarifies, generating an illusion of intellectual depth while producing confusion about what is being described.

This expanding catalog rests on an older revolutionary formula that took its most influential form during the Algerian War of Independence from 1954 to 1962. The Front de Libération Nationale (FLN) defeated France militarily; it also transformed how Western intellectuals spoke about power, legitimacy, and violence. Beginning in the late 1950s, the FLN’s presentation of the conflict as a struggle between a foreign settler population and an indigenous nation electrified French and European thinkers. Sartre embraced this narrative in 1960, describing FLN violence as a cleansing force, and Franz Fanon canonized it in The Wretched of the Earth (1961), portraying revolutionary violence as the sole path to psychic and political liberation.

Their writings established the ideological foundation of Third-Worldism. The categories they articulated—the illegitimate settler, the pure native, the dismantling of the colonizer’s institutions, and the inherent morality of resistance—shaped generations of postcolonial scholars in France, Britain, and the United States.

By absorbing this FLN-derived vocabulary, decolonial theory symbolically defines Israel as the new France and Palestinians as the new Algerians. Once a conflict is cast this way, negotiation becomes impossible: the settler can only be dismantled, never recognized. This is why contemporary calls to “decolonize Palestine” echo the rhetoric used against France in 1961, and why the experience of Algeria—not Iran—guides both academic theory and activist instinct.

The FLN narrative aligned neatly with the sensibilities that came to dominate U.S. Middle East studies. As the field expanded, departments adopted Rodinson’s structural binaries as methodological defaults. Said’s claim that Western knowledge was itself a colonial enterprise encouraged scholars to treat Israel not as a normal state but as a distilled expression of imperial ideology.

This climate shaped figures such as Karen Brodkin at UCLA, who denied the historical continuity linking Jews to the land of Israel and portrayed the state as inherently racist; and Joseph Massad at Columbia, who cast Zionism as a European racial ideology. These scholars and kindred scholars collapsed the complexities of the Middle East into the moral certainties of decolonial thinking. The FLN model, moralized in the 1960s, was naturalized in American classrooms in the 1990s and 2000s.

In this viewpoint, a terrorist organization like Hamas comes to be seen as the armed expression of a national liberation struggle. Judith Butler made this logic explicit when she described the October 7 attacks as “an act of armed resistance,” rejecting both the terrorist and anti-Semitic designations and depicting the assault as an uprising against “a violent state apparatus.” The question ceases to be what Hamas actually did and becomes what Israel is presumed to represent. And because Israel is positioned as the forward post of American imperial power, defending Hamas becomes, almost automatically, a moral gesture directed against the United States itself.

Politicians and activists formed in these intellectual environments emerged fluent in the idiom of settler colonialism and Third-Worldist liberation. By October 7, the decolonial imagination had migrated from the margins of academia into public life. The slogans that appeared within hours of the attacks were the product of an intellectual system built over decades. Rodinson’s structural Marxism, surrogate-colonial and settler-colonial theories, and the legacy of the FLN coalesced into a political language in which Israel functions as a condensed symbol of Western domination.

A figure like Zohran Mamdani is the outcome of a generation shaped by postcolonial theory. He is neither an Islamist nor a Communist. His politics are rooted in a formation produced by the marriage of Third-Worldist sensibilities and postcolonial theory, forged in the afterglow of Algiers and Paris, and institutionalized in American graduate programs. He is part of the first cohort of American politicians formed by the intellectual ascendancy of this worldview.

His politics follow directly from it. Everything is interpreted through the contrast between empire and liberation: the FLN model universalized. Israel becomes the imagined center of Western power, Palestinian militancy a replay of anti-colonial revolt. The focus is not on Israeli policy but on Israel’s symbolic utility. When Mamdani speaks about Israel, he is not making a local argument but delivering a civilizational critique of the West through the most convenient example at hand.

In decolonial thought, the United States is not merely Israel’s ally but also the structure that makes Israel possible—the master empire, the global settler republic, the architect of racialized modernity. Israel gains its ideological charge by being characterized as the extension of this American project. When politicians like Mamdani describe Israel as colonial, they condemn the United States as the deeper engine of injustice. It’s no surprise, then, when decolonial rhetoric moves quickly from Gaza to policing, capitalism, immigration, borders, and the Constitution.

For the same reason, the decolonial imagination cannot register October 7 as an atrocity on its own terms. Acknowledging Israeli victimhood would disrupt the narrative that casts both Israel and the United States as inherently oppressive. The interpretive system decides in advance what facts may signify. Recognizing moral complexity in Israel’s case would require admitting complexity in America’s—and the Third-Worldist worldview cannot absorb that possibility.

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