errata, nm
No, colonization has always been colonization. It’s just that it carried a noble connotation during the period of time that the colonizers wrote history and dominated public consciousness.
Nothing about colonization has changed. It’s just that it sounds different to hear how colonized people experienced it.
If you’re correct, I disagree with Jabotinsky on whether this was “colonisation”.
Agreed – this was my point.
Read the essay, decide for yourself.
Jabotinsky was well aware of how the colonized experienced it - he even quotes their newspaper saying it. That’s why he advocated the strategy he did.
Migrate somewhere you can accumulate power, then shift your security problems onto those people?
Again, all this wallowing in “what were we supposed to dooooo” would be a lot more convincing if it treated the problem of what Palestinians were supposed to do, people guilty of nothing except living where their parents lived for a thousand years.
I will, thanks. But I’ll just make the point again that this doesn’t conflict with my other main point – that early Zionism was primarily motivated by a desire for long-term safety and security for Jews. That’s the lens that the creation of Israel should be looked at through, at least when looking at the actions of those Jews. That doesn’t justify everything (or anything, really). But I think it explains the actions of most of those Jews.
Did you read my OP? None of this justifies the decades of oppression and mistreatment of Palestinians. It’s just a fact that the early Jews that created Israel were motivated by the reasonable desire for long-term safety and security. That’s the main point I’m making. It doesn’t justify everything they did, or everything done by those that followed.
Just bringing this back for a moment – it seems pretty clear that HMS Irruncible is faulting them.
This is why it’s impossible to have a clear discussion about this, it’s impossible to critique any part of it without it being cast as an attack on Jews, and from there it’s a short hop to accusation of anti-Semitism and wanting all the Jews to disappear and die. That’s already been on display multiple times in this thread, and I’ll spare quoting it because everyone here knows exactly who and what I’m talking about.
It can be simultaneously true that Jews needed a safety and security solution, and Palestine could reasonably seen as the best fit for geographical and demographic reasons, and that it was very much a colonizing effort, and this similarity is why the major colonizing powers were so eager to jump on board and add their support to it, and the occupation now follows the same tragic path that plays out in so many colonized parts of the world.
The bit where you describe using a post-holocaust historical lens to understand how things developed as petulant wallowing is 100% an attack on Jews.
I don’t disagree with any of this except the “colonizing effort” part, at least from the perspective of (most of) the Jews at the time. Alternately, it’s just a semantics disagreement. But this seems pretty different from what you were saying before – which seemed to be entirely dismissive of the reasonable desire at the time for Jews to have long-term safety and security.
No one in our conversation is faulting them i.e. I’m not faulting them any more than you are.
I can believe both that they were colonizers, as well as that they had some good reasons for their colonizing, even if (with the benefit of my hindsight) I don’t agree those reasons are impervious to criticism.
Fair enough. Thanks.
I believe that a lot of colonization involved people dispossessed from their land moving to a new land where they would be safer from an oppressive ethnic majority. Scots-Irish immigration to the Appalachians involved this sort of behavior.
One significant difference is that the imperialist power of England actively encouraged this migration of its citizens from one area it controlled to another area it controlled.
Is it possible that Israel was a non-imperialist colonial project, in a way that was, if not unique, pretty rare?
Seriously, this is how you characterize the Jewish response to the Holocaust? Are you kidding?
Your OP claims that Israel was not a colonial project, something it doesn’t define, and then fails to demonstrate that in any way. You provide a definition of colonialism crafted to fit your argument that is a simplification that ignores the history of colonialism and it’s widespread and varied practice. But following that you don’t counter the argument in any way, you simply prevent a political explanation that justifies the establishment of Israel but ignores the colonial history that it is the backstory of the entire Middle East region without addressing how some unsupported and undefined claim that Israel was a colonial project. Then you wrap up your argument with some nonsense about the ‘good cause of Palestinian freedom and determination’ which ignores the fact that this is Arab colonialism that uses the people we call Palestinians as fodder to fight Israel.
The very purpose of the colonial argument is to muddy the entire issue and ignore a century of conflict that defines the reality there today. Historic European colonialism has long been over though it’s effects echo throughout the world still. Pretending that didn’t happed supports the enemies of Israel who have created an effective propaganda campaign portraying the Palestinian people as victims of Israel and want use the conflict between two groups of people who want control of the region of Palestine. I could go on about the reality of the situation but it would have nothing to do with your OP. I would counter that there is no definition for a ‘colonial project’, if it means anything at all it can be denied with the fact that Zionism was not established for the benefit of a colonial power, and the effects of colonialism had as much to do with the existence of the Palestinian people as an identifiable group and the political organization of all the Arab states in the region.
Zero quotes and zero cites. I guess we disagree, but I’m still not entirely sure on what.
Well, they stopped it by converting everyone to Catholicism, and between the Crusades and the Inquisitions it is very possible that far more people would be brutally killed in the name of God than would have been killed in the name of Nahuatl gods.
In hindsight, Catholics mellowed out - but the Nahuatl could have done the same thing if the Spanish had not intentionally rooted out and destroyed the native faiths of the Americas.
I think you are deeply underestimating how significantly anti-Semetism was weakened by the whole “stateless parasite” myth being dispelled by Israel. I think American anti-Semetism would be far worse if Israel did not exist.
That would definitely have been Colonialism.
No, but they foolishly and complacently say “It can’t happen here”, which is laughable. Of course it can happen here. Here are the people who would happily carry it out:
I don’t think the Americans would have allowed the mass migration of all the Jews that went to Israel to go to America instead. My grandparents, for example, would have likely had to stay in Morocco - where they had their store burned and lives threatened on a routine basis.
Do you know what Europeans historically did to Jews who ‘accumulated power’? Your little game plan there is how Europeans (who did not want “our security” to be their problem") decided that Jews are parasites who should be wiped out.
No, no. No one is wallowing. That was the lesson of the Holocaust. We do not need your permission or your blessing to defend ourselves. You don’t like it? Too bad. That’s why we have an army now.
I don’t think you want all Jews to die, but I do think that you’d have no problem with the Jewish people keeping the old status quo, where the Jews are a defenseless and stateless Peoples who must rely on the kindness of other nations for survival and who is entirely at their mercy, waiting for the next Pogrom. I mean, you said yourself that this is how the Jews should have remained:
First the Dreyfus Affair and then the Holocaust showed us that this does not work. Not matter how loyal we are, not matter how well we serve our nations, we always remain Othered. Even if we seem completely integrated and successful for a couple generations, all it takes is one bad election and people who didn’t even know they had Jewish grandparents are dragged off to the gas chambers.
Fuck.
That.
Never again.
I’ve reading the whole thread trying to figure what’s wrong with calling the creation of Israel a colonial project, and this question clarifies it all. I’ve been conflating colonialism with imperialism. The two processes are deeply connected, but they are distinct.
I shed a tear every time I read “Semetic”. 