Second-to-last sentence:
Colonialism has given way to post-colonialism and neocolonialism, whatever those sweeping labels may encompass.
Imagine spending money on a NYT subscription and getting this lazy-ass article.
Ah yes, those hot new buzzwords that definitely don’t have a century-spanning body of literature attached to them. Frantz Fanon? Never heard of em, probably just some naive college kid who hasn’t figured out how the real world works
Well, you see, what Europeans did to Africa wasn’t colonialism because actually humans came from Africa so it was a fight between indigenous people.
Damn i hate when the subaltern weaponizes an old world to correctly describe my socio-historical role as a colonizer and the resulting present day economic and political oppressions that stem from that!
Early Zionists literally self-described as colonialists
It’s very inconvenient when the founders of your movement are like “we explicitly want to invade this country, drive it’s people in to exile, and steal their stuff. We’re going to say this over and over so everyone clearly understands out intentions.”
100+ years later: “the history is complicated”.
The colonialism was the their selling point to the British! Their whole sales pitch was that “hey, we’ll do colonialism in Palestine but will serve the interests of the British Empire!
They also proudly and openly call themselves settlers lol.
And the first sentence of the article is a massive fucking lie
Also
Colonialism, once equated by the West with civilizing progress, became synonymous with iniquity.
No it just got rebranded as “development” to depoliticize assimilation and genocide
Then
Israel as a colonial enterprise is “a significant category error.” It cannot apply to a conflict involving “two indigenous peoples.” It is misplaced given that the 20th-century influx of persecuted European Jews came from a historically indigenous “population of refugees not sent by any empire.”
“Israel’s creation was endorsed by the United Nations.”
In other words people love to play dumb about the UN and the international order.
What a disgusting article, so many weasel words and dancing around genocide.
On the Israeli claim to Palestine:
and an intense emotional attachment that, by 1946, had led large numbers of Jews to flee centuries of persecution and Hitler’s annihilation “solution” in Europe to head to Palestine. Jews generally tried their best to overlook the indigenous Arab presence and viewed their own indigenous claim as equally valid.
Zionists did this, not Jews. In any case, how exactly did the situation progress in say 47-48 when the contradiction between “overlooking” a people that exists came to a head, Mr Cohen? Fucking euphemistic coward.
It is misplaced given that the 20th-century influx of persecuted European Jews came from a historically indigenous “population of refugees not sent by any empire.”
Pure lies, early Zionist settlers specifically came to Israel because they were pushed by the British and other allied powers who’s rampant antisemitism was so strong that even the Holocaust didn’t cause them to go “maybe we should make our societies safe places for Jewish people”. They were armed, aided and abetted by the British empire specifically as a geopolitical proxy because Jews were less important to the British than “true” Englishmen, but the brits nevertheless had plausible deniability about it being a tool of the empire.
Why do they call themselves “settlers” then?
This article tries very hard to imply that it’s a fundamentally novel concept (adopted by naive young activists) to conceive of Israel as a colonial enterprise. He doesn’t say this directly, but this works very well with the “youth support Palestine because they’re brainwashed by TikTok” narrative.
It doesn’t seem to occur to the author that the reason he’d never heard it before is because the US has just never really seen such vocal defense for Palestine.
Anyways in case anyone encounters this bird-brained position in the wild I’m linking to Fayez Sayegh’s Zionist Colonialism in Palestine (1965)
Very inconvenient that theodore fucking herzl calls it colonization. Or it would be if liberals ever encountered history in a dark alley.
