Anti-Indian rhetoric helped birth Zionism's genocidal "Iron Wall" mindset
Zionism's settler colonial project needed a militarized model to impose their invasion into Indigenous Palestinian lands, so why not mimic American colonization into "Red Indian" lands?
In late December 2025, the Zionist colonial regime unveiled its so-called “Iron Beam” military weapons system, which is designed to intercept rockets, mortars, and drones with a laser. The system was created after Iran had handily slipped dozens of ballistic missiles past the supposedly impenetrable Israeli Iron Dome missile defense system during Israel’s unprovoked 12-day war in June 2025.
It’s hard to overstate how entrenched military culture is in Israeli governance and society—military service has been required by law nearly since Israel’s founding. Yet few know that American displacement and extermination of Indigenous peoples played a key role in Zionist Jewish colonization.
From the early beginnings of Zionism, its founders and acolytes used the model of Euro-American genocide of countless Indigenous groups and the conquest of their Native lands in Turtle Island to justify the Zionist settler colonial project to establish “Israel.” Every territory had a Native population that would not simply hand over their lands, so they developed a policy of Palestinian removal and replacement with a majority of white Jewish settlers.
The philosophy of militarized defense behind Israel’s Iron Beam and Iron Dome originated from the founder of modern Zionism, Theodore Herzl, an Austro-Hungarian Jew who envisioned a future Jewish State in Palestine as a European military fort defending the West against the savage “Arab” Natives. “We should there form a portion of a rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism,” he wrote in his 1917 book “The Jewish State.”
This fortress mentality was further established by Zionism’s “Revisionist” founding father, Ze’ev Jabotinsky, whose writings alarmed his fellow Jewish supremacist settlers about the inevitable Native resistance to colonization, particularly his infamous “The Iron Wall” essay of 1923.
Jabotinsky’s “The Iron Wall” encapsulated the Zionist-style of settler colonialism, and essentially argued for offensive means for the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians to take their lands—the goal at the heart of all Zionism. But to ensure Jewish colonization progresses, the Jewish majority population must be guarded “behind an iron wall, which the native population cannot breach.”
This, Jabotinsky says, is Zionism’s “Arab policy” for the Palestinians.
By looking to Spanish (Cortez and Pizzaro) and American (Pilgrim Fathers) colonization, Jabotinsky recognized that the “Aztecs” and “Red Indians” would never let the pioneer “Pale faces” take their lands without a fight, so why would the Natives in Palestine? After all, there is not enough room on the “prairies” or “ancient Mexico” for the pilgrims and the “Redskin”—as per his brilliant understanding of history.
By 1900, a couple of decades before he wrote “The Iron Wall,” tribal nations were decimated by American settler colonialism’s genocidal policies, a bloody demographic collapse that established American white domination from the Atlantic to the Pacific Oceans. White rule over the continent.
Tribal populations were often reduced by half or more in just a matter of years due to disease, genocidal war by American settlers, displacement, and starvation. Many tribes were completely annihilated.
My Mandan tribe in the western plains was reduced 209 people from several thousand. Only 547 members of my Hidatsa tribe survived from several thousand. My Diné tribe had just over 22,000, after having just lost thousands during the “Navajo” Long Walk, and hundreds before that during a war of extermination waged by US cavalry general Kit Carson, widely considered an American hero.
Across the whole country, a US census found there were just over 247,000 Native peoples left in 1910, a decline from an estimated 18 million. Yet the demographic collapse began hundreds of years ago.
A study found between 1492 and 1600—a span of 108 years—an estimated 56 million Native peoples died after European imposed contact, disease, slavery, and warfare, from around 60 million total Indigenous population pre-Columbus. This “Great Dying” was so monumental that the global climate’s surface temperature dropped by 0.15 degrees Celsius.
By 1910, the white population was nearly 82 million, 89% of the population in America, who expropriated 99% of Native territories. After the Great Dying, one could argue that there was no more successful extermination campaign and land grab than the American “Great Replacement.”
Each successive Israeli administration since 1967, historian Avi Schlaim argues, has followed the model of Jabotinsky’s Iron Wall: forcing the separation of settler Jews from Palestinians by ethnic cleansing and genocide, and through an ever-increasing accumulation of military might.
As Israel evolved over the years, the extremist Likud party took up Jabotinsky’s vision for an Iron Wall policy toward Palestinians and expanding Israel’s borders through genocidal conquest. A Likudnik himself, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government is just the latest expression of Israel’s colonial ambitions through merciless and unrestrained military force.
The American-inspired anti-Indian fantasy of a militarized Israeli outpost protecting European civilization and the Iron Wall “guard” mentality shielding white Jews directly shaped the raison d’être of Israel’s missile defense system and genocidal invasions across West Asia.
Since Oct. 7, 2023, the Gaza Health Ministry reports a conservative estimate of at least 70,000 Palestinians killed by Israel, though the true death toll is likely in the hundreds of thousands. In contrast, about 2000 Israelis have been killed since Oct. 7.
Really appreciate this work (I'm Lakota). I used to always be annoyed when settlers tried to lessen the impact of genocide by talking about how many of us died of disease. Now Palestine has showed us death by disease is part of genocide and so I see this part of the equation now as further proof of the genocides.
Powerful analysis. Jabotinsky's explicit use of American colonization as a model really shows how settler colonial projects knowingly build on each other's tactics. The Iron Wall concept being rooted in an exlicit study of Indigenous displacement makes it clear these weren't accidental parallels. When colonial powers openly borrow stratgies, it undermines any claim that these patterns emerge organically.