That just means they were good/reformed colonizers.
But that means I have to live with the colonizer label forever! WAAAAAH!
Wow, for a second there I really felt… fragile.
Well, I’m sorry reality doesn’t align with your desires.
Actually, to be more charitable, maybe you mean “colonizer” in a way not consistent with what the word actually means. Or used to mean. Who knows; it’s now a sensationally overused word that seems to mean whatever people want it to mean.
I mean people who settle in a colony, and their descendants who continue to benefit from being in a dominant power relationship with the colonized peoples.
Which is exactly how it was meant when I did my geography courses at uni.
But what about the fragile fee-fees of my people? Who will speak for us against the tyranny of university course language??
Jews can be colonists in one place and not colonists in another. The white colonists of South Africa wouldn’t be colonists in England or Netherlands, no?
How long does that label hold for? Are Arabs in Morocco colonizers of the Amazigh people to this day, for example?
As long as it fits.
Yes.
Sure.
Are they coming in and establishing hegemony over the indigenous population of England/Holland? No? Then no.
Which of the two situations is Israel more like?
Maybe this gets a little silly, but what about those relatively small number of Israeli Jews (and their descendants) who have lived in Israel since ancient times?
They’re not colonizers?
They don’t make the overall Israel project not colonial, though.
But Arabs in Israel are not colonizers of the Jews because…?
If the answer is “because in the 1100s onwards a series of devestating European crusades intentionally wiped out the Jewish population the area so the Arabs didn’t have to genocide the Jews themselves” that seems a bit unfair. I’m super sympathetic to Berberism (and to the Kurds and to the Assyrians and so on) because, as a Zionist, I see echoes of my own history in theirs.
They’re not the dominant group in the current unequal hegemonic relationship?
They were the colonizers. But not anymore.
I mean, yes, they did. The English people who came to South Africa descend from Anglo-Saxon colonists who displaced the native Brythonic peoples of England.
So if in 1948 Palestine was established as an Arab state with dominion over the whole place, then the Palestinians would be colonizers of the Jews?
I am asking these questions because I think if the term “colonizer” is that broad it becomes less meaningful. To me, colonization requires exploitation of local resources and populations for the good of the home country. If that eventually turns into a self sufficient and independent country, that doesn’t change the colonial history of that nation. But I am open to having my mind changed.
Sorry, the South African Whites did what?
It was more complicated than just replacement, but in any case, South African Whites of British descent are of quite diverse descent. Plenty of Welsh and Scottish here as well. Also, lots of French, and German and others.
But I see the asinine point you’re trying to make now. No, Britain and the Netherlands are no longer colonies. Because they blended their populations (in a way that South Africa and Israel explicitly did not allow.) so who can say nowadays who’s A-S and who’s Norman and who’s British?
No, because the Palestinians didn’t move there from Europe, America and MENA countries. Indigenes can’t be colonizers in their own place.
Settler Colonialism is a legitimate category of colonialism that doesn’t require continued relations with a metropole.
They moved there from the Arabian peninsula during the Arab conquests; they didn’t blend with the local population of Jews, though they did blend with the local population of Roman/Hellenic colonists who were ruling over the land.
I don’t think the term “indigenous” works well for a region where multiple groups have been living side by side and churning together for thousands of years. Hell, “Indigenous” is a very Eurocentric term in general. Native Americans for example have a rich and diverse pre-European history, with plenty of their own warfare, genocide, imperialism, and colonialism. Yet all of that is compressed to nothingness by the term “indigenous” that implies the Aztecs sat around from the beginning of time until Europeans showed up.
That doesn’t mean it isn’t a useful term, when looking at the relationship between Europeans and the people who lived in the lands that they colonized at the time that Europeans showed up. Without that moment in time to use as a snapshot, though - in a place like the Middle East where all these people, including Europeans, have lived side by side for as long as sedentary societies have existed - “indigenous” is a bit of a hollow term.
No, they did not. This is some revisionist bullshit. The genes (and the archaeology) show that Palestinians are as indigenous to Israel and Palestine as Jews.:
Archaeologic and genetic data support that both Jews and Palestinians came from the ancient Canaanites
I mentioned in another thread Oz Almog’s interesting book about the “Sabra” generation [second-generation Jewish settlers who grew up in Israel c. 1930–1960]. One cannot paint everyone with the same brush, but