The following is a translated thread from 2024 by e_rewhon

I can’t be the only one reminded of Zeta Gundam by the recent news from the Middle East. The series is ostensibly built atop the template of student movements, yet the fuel that drives its “movement” is not adolescent idealism but the cold logic of power and capital; ideologically, it is not communism but Zionism that lurks beneath. In the giddy optimism of the era in which it aired, the mere fact that such a work was made feels astonishing. I suspect many first encountered proper nouns tied to Israel, “Gaza,” “Adenauer,” not in the headlines, but in the Gundam universe after Zeta. When one considers the kinship between Zeonism and Zionism, the Nazi-inflected design language of Zeon’s machines begins to feel almost too laden with implication.

How much of this “story of recognizing reality” have I truly grasped? When I followed Zeta through Char’s Counterattack in real time, I too believed that “anti-Zionism equals antisemitism,” that Israel was a victim state, that West Germany was the model pupil who had overcome its past. Only now do I understand that reality is nowhere near so simple. It has become difficult, perhaps impossible, to watch the latter half of Zeta, in which “the people of Zeon, driven from their homeland, surge forth as a vast horde of mobile suits bearing the name ‘Gaza,’” and pretend it exists in a vacuum, sealed off from the real world. It was while reading the transcript of the February 2024 Kyoto University public seminar, The Death of the Humanities: The Genocide in Gaza and Five Hundred Years of European Colonialism, that I found myself once more dwelling on the name of the politician who, in the name of “peace,” handed Zeon its greatest weapon, Axis.

https://www.chosyu-journal.jp/heiwa/29322

Mari Oka writes, “What is happening in Gaza now is a decolonization struggle, a colonial war in which an indigenous people fights for liberation from a state founded through settler colonialism, one that maintains a regime of Jewish supremacy through apartheid.”

https://www.chosyu-journal.jp/heiwa/29260

Reading her keynote address makes one burn with shame at one’s own ignorance. To learn, for example, that “there was never a historical fact in which all Jewish residents were expelled from Palestine,” or that “Palestinians are descendants of the Jews who lived in Palestine two thousand years ago”, such facts force one to confront how ignorance breeds folly. Israel at first mocked Holocaust victims as “Jews emasculated by diaspora,” even as it instrumentalized them in constructing national identity. After the war, it reversed course, elevating the Holocaust as a “unique and unparalleled evil,” and wielding it as a resource of self-legitimation. Oka notes that under the extraordinary logic that the Holocaust is a singular evil and that Israel is the only state capable of representing the Jewish people, West German Foreign Minister Adenauer (later Chancellor) pressed forward with reparations, difficult to justify under international law, and secret military support that violated constitutional constraints.

https://www.chosyu-journal.jp/heiwa/29293

Tatsushi Fujiwara writes, “With the military supplies sent from West Germany, Israel seized and occupied Palestinian homes, and took Palestinian lives. Contributing to Israel’s militarization also served West Germany’s purpose of reviving its own arms industry and rebuilding its economy.” He further points out that beyond the militaristic nature of the West German–Israeli relationship, West Germany’s denazification had not, in reality, advanced as claimed. Fujiwara, too, asserts that “Zionism is the crystallization of Western European colonialism.” The most terrifying truth is that this is not sealed within the past; it is ongoing reality.

When Zeta aired in 1985, I was an elementary school child. Colonialism, I believed, was “history.” Except for a backward few, humanity had already secured peace and prosperity, and they would never be lost. Ignorance is a dreadful thing. I feel that now with all my heart. As a child, I took Yoshiyuki Tomino’s remark that “Gundam is a story of recognizing reality” to mean something akin to the confessional mode of the I-novel. Despite the brazen vocabulary, space colonies and the like, I failed to recognize it as a tale of colonial war. I admired it because “even the enemy has its ideology and circumstances,” because it was not a simple morality play of good vanquishing evil. How naïve that was.

Human beings commit ugly deeds in the name of beautiful ideals, or in defiance of them. Gundam’s story begins, quite literally, with that truth. Zeon, proclaiming “colonial autonomy and independence,” first committed a colony drop, massacring the very colonists it claimed to liberate. Even when people tremble in horror at their own actions, war does not end.

In the second work, Zeta, the motif of colonial war, of Palestine, does not fade. If anything, it sharpens. Zeta is a story of factional military strife, yet regarding the ideology of the shadowy figure Melanie, who sets such events in motion, a Tomino memo reportedly states:

“He intends to raise all people on Earth into the colonies in order to reclaim the Holy Land for his people. He is but a businessman bearing one end of that ethnic movement. In the TV version, this part must never be touched.”

According to the official setting materials, he is described as “a Jew made a refugee by the Middle East conflict, who went to New Hong Kong and learned how to conduct business there.” Of these details, the notion of “reclaiming the Holy Land for the [Jewish] people” was, in the end, never mentioned on television. Yet the other aspect, “raising all people on Earth into the colonies”, echoes repeatedly in the series through the phrase “eliminating those whose souls are bound by Earth’s gravity.”

Regarding these settings, Rimo has asked pointedly: “If it was such delicate material that you later erased it, why include it at all?” If it were trivial, there would have been no need to include it. Why, then? I suspect Tomino regarded it as something lying at the very root of war. And why erase it? The problematics of Zionism, of racism, are too legible, especially to racists. The impact of a setting in which “the founding of the protagonists’ organization was linked to a Jewish tycoon’s conspiracy to reclaim the Holy Land” would risk whitewashing all the other, intricately entangled causes of war.

Let us attempt to sort through the causes of war in the Gundam world after Zeta. A colossal corporation stands at its center: Anaheim Electronics (AE). This setting remains strikingly fresh. In the real world, what exists in Anaheim? The Magic Kingdom, Disneyland, opened in 1955. I have often wondered whether Disney was one image-source for AE. In 1984, during Ζ’s planning stages, Disney appointed its first Jewish CEO, Michael Eisner, a figure both lauded and criticized as greedy or arrogant, yet undeniably the man who revived its faltering businesses, accelerated diversification, and ushered in a golden age.

But to return to the point. Zeta presents three causes of war.

First: the logic of capitalism, the existence of those who wish to profit from war, to keep the economy turning. AE invests in anti-establishment factions, kindles the spark of conflict, and once war erupts, sells weapons to both sides. From this angle, it is the worst kind of merchant of death. Yet given that AE manufactures everything “from spoons to space battleships,” it feels incongruous that it would willingly embrace that role. As one commentator notes: “For Anaheim, cooperating with AEUG entails enormous risk with almost no return.” And this is not merely fan interpretation; the setting consistently supports this direction. Until the Jegan appears, AE’s weapons hardly sell at all. Commercially, they are constant flops. And yet AE never ceases supplying the anti-government side.

I once thought, on a meta level, that AE symbolized the toy industry, even the broader content industry, demanding wars (anime) to sell both hero and villain robots. The name “Anaheim,” evoking Disneyland, seemed to confirm it. Those implications remain valid. But it is mistaken to believe AE operates solely on capitalist logic. AE, or at least its chairman, Melanie, does not support the anti-government faction merely for money. Tomino himself emphasized this in the novelization of Zeta. According to Blex, Chairman Melanie is a philanthropist prepared to bankrupt his company to aid AEUG, indeed, “a man who created the company with the intent of giving back.” What, then, is this philanthropy?

Here we arrive at the problem of Melanie’s identity, the reason the Zionist setting was born and erased. Whether he is a Zionist is unknown to anyone within the story’s world, unknown even to the staff, save perhaps Tomino, and there is no need for them to know. What Zeta depicts clearly, and from an early stage, is that Melanie’s AE is based on the Moon, and that the faction he supports upholds as its ideal the relocation of all Earth’s people into the colonies. That is all that is known of his “philanthropy,” and it is enough.

In a world where Spacenoids, migrants to space colonies, stand opposed to Earthnoids, the ruling class who remained on Earth, Melanie’s AE supports the Spacenoid side. This becomes the driving cause of war from Zeta through Char’s Counterattack. His professed philanthropy, his public good, his justice, can be further untangled in two directions.

Spacenoids must resist those “whose souls are bound by Earth’s gravity.” AE, as a “lunar corporation,” that is, as Spacenoids, deliberately takes a perilous path. The act can be called justice because it aligns with the interests, the common good, of the Spacenoid community. Within this “as Spacenoids” there is no longer the impurity that once clung to nationalism or racism. There remains only a community rooted in daily life, and a consciousness of belonging to it. One might call it a justice purified into its most distilled form of communitarianism.