Israel-Hamas War 2023

[grumbler]

Thats a weird flip. Isn't it at the core of zionism and the general arguments of pro Israeli folks that Jews are a race?

No. Jews are a "people" is how I often see them describe themselves. Even the most hardcore Orthodox Jew doesn't think all Jews belong to the same race.

More conservative Jews do try to deny genetic similarity with the Arab population, but pretty basic science has shown there is a lot of intermixing that has occurred over the millennia. And also just like the primary way to easily distinguish an Israeli Jew from an Israeli Arab is how they are dressed, that isn't something you can say about say, black people in America.

The idea of Zionism is that all Jews collectively formed a nation (not a race). You are correct that the concept is not based on genetics.  Exactly what it is based on is a matter of some dispute, even among the Jews themselves.

[viper37]

At what point does an occupation becomes colonization?  When you remove people to put your own, is that still an occupation?  When you destroy people's home to build you own settlement is that an occupation?

A lot of times the answer is "it doesn't matter", colonization is heavily abused as a political term. It makes more sense to hit at the core issues at hand without using labels as cudgels.

It takes slightly more work but is a better framework for discussion. It isn't incredibly difficult to say things like "the Israeli occupation of Gaza and the West Bank is not morally justifiable, and exacerbates a number of regional tensions" or to differentiate it from say, the Allied occupation of Germany post-WWII, which virtually no one takes moral issue with. It isn't crazy hard to just recognize the ways in which a thing are objectionable.

Did the US, England and France intend to displace Germans to put their own citizens in place?

Did France occupy the Ruhr valley with the intention of setting up there their own business and using cheap German labor?  Did Denmark constantly move its border south?

[viper37]

Sounds like occupation.

At what point does an occupation becomes colonization?  When you remove people to put your own, is that still an occupation?  When you destroy people's home to build you own settlement is that an occupation?

What is an occupation, what is an invasion?  What is an annexation?  Did Germany annex France in WWII or did it occupy the country?  Should Churchill have shake the hand of Germany's leader and congratulate him on pacifying this troublesome country filled of dissidents posing a danger to his country?  Two wars in less than 30 years apart?  Clearly, Germany felt threatened by such an aggressive neighbour.  They declared war and lost.  Too bad for them.  England should just have ditched them, instead of fighting in the air, on the beaches, etc.

Germany didn't annex France in WW2 because no peace treaty was signed.  If you paid attention in history class you would know that.  I remind you that you live on stolen land.  Are you as interested in decolonizing Turtle Island as you decolonizing Israel?

Turtle Island belong to the Huron.  The Iroquois Six Nations conquered them with assistance from the British who gave them guns.

If the modern representatives of the Iroquois league are interested in discussing reparations to the Hurons and all the other tribes they conquered and cheated out of their lands to the British, I'm all listening.

[The Minsky Moment]

And Palestine belonged to the Ottomans, who took it from the Mamluks, who took from the Ayyubids, who took from the Crusaders, etc etc

Keep going and the Jews will have to pay reparations to themselves

[Razgovory]

Sounds like occupation.

At what point does an occupation becomes colonization?  When you remove people to put your own, is that still an occupation?  When you destroy people's home to build you own settlement is that an occupation?

What is an occupation, what is an invasion?  What is an annexation?  Did Germany annex France in WWII or did it occupy the country?  Should Churchill have shake the hand of Germany's leader and congratulate him on pacifying this troublesome country filled of dissidents posing a danger to his country?  Two wars in less than 30 years apart?  Clearly, Germany felt threatened by such an aggressive neighbour.  They declared war and lost.  Too bad for them.  England should just have ditched them, instead of fighting in the air, on the beaches, etc.

Germany didn't annex France in WW2 because no peace treaty was signed.  If you paid attention in history class you would know that.  I remind you that you live on stolen land.  Are you as interested in decolonizing Turtle Island as you decolonizing Israel?

Turtle Island belong to the Huron.  The Iroquois Six Nations conquered them with assistance from the British who gave them guns.

If the modern representatives of the Iroquois league are interested in discussing reparations to the Hurons and all the other tribes they conquered and cheated out of their lands to the British, I'm all listening.

Oh, no.  What they mean when they say "Turtle Island" is the whole of North America.  Do you wish  to decolonize North America?

[viper37]

Sounds like occupation.

At what point does an occupation becomes colonization?  When you remove people to put your own, is that still an occupation?  When you destroy people's home to build you own settlement is that an occupation?

What is an occupation, what is an invasion?  What is an annexation?  Did Germany annex France in WWII or did it occupy the country?  Should Churchill have shake the hand of Germany's leader and congratulate him on pacifying this troublesome country filled of dissidents posing a danger to his country?  Two wars in less than 30 years apart?  Clearly, Germany felt threatened by such an aggressive neighbour.  They declared war and lost.  Too bad for them.  England should just have ditched them, instead of fighting in the air, on the beaches, etc.

Germany didn't annex France in WW2 because no peace treaty was signed.  If you paid attention in history class you would know that.  I remind you that you live on stolen land.  Are you as interested in decolonizing Turtle Island as you decolonizing Israel?

Turtle Island belong to the Huron.  The Iroquois Six Nations conquered them with assistance from the British who gave them guns.

If the modern representatives of the Iroquois league are interested in discussing reparations to the Hurons and all the other tribes they conquered and cheated out of their lands to the British, I'm all listening.

Oh, no.  What they mean when they say "Turtle Island" is the whole of North America.  Do you wish  to decolonize North America?

They mean the place the Huron occupied on lake Huron.  They are pretty clear on that, they were give 10 000 square miles of Ontario, reduced to 1000 square miles of Ontario (Upper Canada) by then Governor General John Simcoe.  If they want to ask Ford for more lands, they can.  Otherwise, they can re-negotiate with they US with the US where their lands were orignially situatued.  France gave them lands after the Catholics ones were expelled.  The Protestants ones came after your country was formed and you expelled them, even those who fought on your side.

If the successor to the

[Josquius]

Wait wait. Are we trying to argue here that the native Americans had it coming and don't deserve any rights in the modern day?

[Razgovory]

Wait wait. Are we trying to argue here that the native Americans had it coming and don't deserve any rights in the modern day?

No, I'm pointing out that viper lives on stolen land and that his fellow Palestinian activists want to decolonize it.  Viper is kinda dodging the question.  I think he believes himself to be "Indigenous", when clearly he is not.


The Curious Rise of Settler Colonialism and Turtle Island
The problem with shoehorning a Middle Eastern war—or American history—into a trendy academic theory

Recently, I stood on a windswept street corner in Brooklyn and watched a river of pro-Palestinian protesters move past, as police officers tracked their path. A number of demonstrators had heads swathed in kaffiyehs, and some wore face-obscuring black masks. They waved Palestinian flags and placards denouncing Israel in many different ways.

defund the settler-colonialist state demanded one. Another stated land back!, echoing the Native American movement to reclaim lost territory in the United States.

Two women held tight to a decolonization from turtle island to palestine banner as a gust tugged at it. Turtle Island alludes to the creation story of the Lenape tribe of the Northeast, and some academics and Native activists treat it as a de facto Indigenous name for the settler-colonialist U.S.

Settler colonialism—academic jargon for the violent process by which colonial empires empower settlers to push out and oppress Indigenous inhabitants and form a dominant new society—is a term much in vogue among activists and academics on the left. To talk of settler states and oppressed Indigenous people, and claim an umbilical connection between Palestinian struggles and those of Native Americans, is to construct a morality tale stripped of subtleties—a matter not of politics, but of sin.

Xochitl Gonzalez: That's not censorship

Israel, in this view, is not a flawed and contentious democracy engaged in a war with an enemy that vows to destroy it. It is a settler-colonialist state built upon the oppression and exploitation of Indigenous Palestinians. A left-wing kibbutznik who lives a few miles from Gaza and drives sick Palestinians to Israeli hospitals is no less a colonialist than a right-wing theocratic settler who brandishes an automatic rifle and insists on the annexation of stolen lands on the West Bank.

The Brooklyn protesters chanted: "We don't want no two states! We want '48!" This was a radical cry to rewind 1948, the year of Israel's founding. The yearning was to dissolve Israel so that the Palestinians might inherit the land, as the slogan goes, from the river to the sea.

Language is ever contested in wartime. Israeli officials are assiduous in referring to Hamas leaders and fighters as terrorists. That description is rigorously accurate, given the horror that Hamas perpetrated on October 7, even as the application of the term can make it too easy to rationalize the vengeance and death that have fallen on a far broader number of Palestinians.

Many supporters of the Palestinian cause insist on using the terms settler colonialism and Indigenous, the better to render Israel and Israelis as an oppressive other. To assail a colony of outsiders with an "imagined" connection to Palestine, as some left-wing scholars put it, makes it all too easy to brush aside the practicalities of coexistence with an Israel that is now 75 years old and has about 9 million citizens, including about 2 million Arabs.

Settlers, the theory goes, are mere pawns of imperial patrons, and impermanence is implied. Settlers can be uprooted, sojourns violently terminated. What matters is that Indigenous people reclaim their rightful inheritance.

The Australian historian and anthropologist Patrick Wolfe, who died in 2016, is widely seen as one of the intellectual founders of settler-colonialism theory. This form of colonialism, he wrote, is premised on "the elimination of the native" through genocide and coercive policies that turn survivors into "white people." This process, Wolfe explained in a 2012 interview at Stanford University, is a "'winner take all,' zero-sum game whereby outsiders come to a country and seek to take it away from the people who already live there, remove them, replace them."

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Any reasonable measure of European colonial empires and the westward trail of American settlers can locate exploitation, racism, and bloody conquest. Wolfe's theories resonate deeply in left-wing corners of academia. Prominent American universities from UCLA to Yale offer courses in settler colonialism; British universities have research centers devoted to it; papers in journals debate its finer points and expand the discussion to include the subjugation of native people as a laboring class. Many divine in settler-colonialism theory a global explanatory power, applying it not only to the U.S. and Wolfe's native Australia—where Europeans dominated and marginalized the Aboriginal population—but to Indonesians in West Papua, Indians in Kashmir, and Moroccans in Western Sahara.


Wolfe and many of his fellow theorists tossed down a final desultory intellectual move. Surveying a worldwide tapestry of colonial oppressions and conquests, they insisted that a single nation offered the sharpest and most troubling example of settler colonialism: Israel. Never mind that Australia and the U.S. are both hundreds of times larger. Wolfe wrote that Israel was unique for its Jewish founders' deceptive ideological sleights of hand, their "self-hatred," and the denial of its oppression and "extirpation" of the Arabs. "Zionism rigorously refused, as it continues to refuse, any suggestion of Native assimilation," Wolfe wrote. "Zionism," Wolfe insisted, "constitutes a more exclusive exercise of the settler logic of elimination than we encounter in the Australian and U.S. examples." To single out the Jewish state in this way is to echo ancient and ugly tropes.

The prospect that "Indigenous people" might drive out the Israeli settler colonialists strikes settler-colonialism theorists as just and inescapably stirring. "Israel is a stolen land, and that's what the Zionists don't want to think about or accept," the UCLA history professor Kyle T. Mays, an Afro-Indigenous scholar and a member of the Saginaw Chippewa tribe, told me. He said he does not personally condone violence. But he added, "Until that land is returned to Palestinians, you will continue to feel the violence that they experience."

The notion that Indigenous violence is inevitable, even liberatory, has gained chilling traction on the American left. "One could (and should) very well argue that in a settler colonial context, there are not such things as civilians," the Palestine-issues committee of the Democratic Socialists of America wrote in June on X (formerly Twitter). "It's total folly to compare settlers perpetrating pogroms to resistance groups deploying violence to liberate themselves."

More assumptions flow from this conceptual fountainhead. If Israel is a violent settler colony, to propose a two-state solution would enshrine injustice. Even a rump Israeli state would rest on stolen land. "What do you want the Palestinians to do? It's not like they'll say, 'We'll split our land 50–50,'" Mays told me. "Condemning people for violently resisting oppression makes no sense."

Just by way of concentrating the mind, let's remember the specific nature of the violent resistance practiced by Hamas, whose fighters began the morning of October 7 by breaking a cease-fire with Israel and ended by killing children, raping women, and slaughtering parents in front of their children. Decolonization turns out not to be metaphorical.

I put the question of settler colonialism to Roger Berkowitz, the academic director of the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College. He said he is taken aback both by the speed with which the ideological construct of settler colonialism has entered the global discourse and by how intently people who espouse the theory focus on Israel. Berkowitz was careful to say he does not see them all as anti-Semites, although the word anti-Semitism does keep leaping to his mind.

In invocations of settler colonialism, Berkowitz hears progressives giving up on effecting change through political means. "The left has replaced its faith in proletarian subjects and utopian solutions with a view of the Indigenous as innocent and oppressed. It's an ethics rather than a politics."

In the late 1960s and early '70s, prominent radical American Indian activists saw in Israel a symbol of an Indigenous people regaining their land and reviving their language. Since then, however, many Native American activists came to strongly embrace the Palestinian cause alongside anticolonial struggles in Algeria, Ireland, and South Africa. If their "Indigenous cousins" can liberate Palestine, the underlying logic suggests, so Indigenous Americans might set free Turtle Island tomorrow.

"We want U.S. out of everywhere. We want U.S. out of Palestine. We want U.S. out of Turtle Island," the University of Minnesota professor Melanie Yazzie, who is Navajo, said at "From Minnesota to Palestine," a panel in December sponsored by Red Nation, whose politics run sharply left. "The goal is to dismantle the settler project that is the United States."

To talk of dismantling an American settler state of 330 million people is to take a rhetorical flight of fancy. It is less a program than a millenarian dream––a "prophecy," as Nick Estes, a University of Minnesota historian who is a member of the Lower Brule Sioux Tribe and a co-founder of Red Nation, has written. Unlike Hamas leaders who explicitly and repeatedly call for Israel's violent elimination, Native activists and academics say they have in mind not a bloody Indigenous uprising but a socialist revolution against liberalism and capitalism, to demolish national borders and police forces, and upend a racist system that, in Estes's words, seeks "to kill us off, confine us to sub-marginal plots of land, breed us white." This might occur in concert with sympathetic descendants of settlers. As Estes told me: "I can imagine a world where we can live together in a common project that does not require my people to be dominated."

Yair Rosenberg: The right-wing Israeli campaign to resettle Gaza

Morality tales offer poor stand-ins for politics, and discourage an honest engagement with history, which is often messy and fractured. The question of who is Indigenous in Israel and Palestine involves layers of complication. One of the holiest sites in Islam, the venerable al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, was built in the seventh and eighth century and sits atop the Temple Mount, the holiest site in Judaism. The first temple was completed there in the 10th century B.C.E. and predates the foundation of Islam by 1,500 years.

In the modern era, Jewish refugees fled Europe during the rise of fascism in the 1930s and then with the hot breath of the Holocaust at their backs. Many potential havens, not least the United States and Australia, barred all but a relative handful of Jews. The British colonial territory known as Palestine loomed as a sanctuary. A smattering of Jews had lived there in villages—Indigenous settlements, in today's argot—continuously for millennia. At the same time, a much larger Arab majority had lived in Palestine for generations piled atop generations.

The writer and historian Sol Stern, who once was a man of the left and has moved rightward, told me he would not deny that early Zionists were colonial settlers. But he balks at any comparison with a British colonial living a raj lifestyle in India or a French pied noir settler running a farm in Algeria just a day's journey across the Mediterranean from metropolitan France. Jews fleeing death had few choices and nowhere to return. "You're on a burning ship, and so you jump and land on a raft," Stern said. Other people were displaced, he added, and they deserve consideration. "What do you do? You try to come to a settlement with them."

The events of 1948 offered yet more complications. Arabs and Jews exchanged slaughters. Many hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were left stateless even as Arab governments expelled many hundreds of thousands of Jews from homes across the Arab world. Today the Mizrahi Jews, as the Indigenous Jewish residents of the Middle East are known, comprise slightly more than half of Israel's population.

No one now holds a monopoly on pain. For a Palestinian family in 1948 to have lost a treasured family home, a farm, a business was a grievous wound. Nor can the horrors of October 7 justify the continuing Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the deadly vigilante violence with which Israeli settlers there enforce their writ. Yet the answer to injustice won't be found in slogans that wish away the existence of Israel or, for that matter, the United States.

The passage of time and much violence and cohabitation speaks only to the poverty of using loaded terms such as settler colonialism and Indigenous to locate moral certainty in the Israeli-Palestine dispute. A land of contention and suffering is not a promising place in which to claim such rhetorical clarity.

[Josquius]

Wait wait. Are we trying to argue here that the native Americans had it coming and don't deserve any rights in the modern day?

No, I'm pointing out that viper lives on stolen land and that his fellow Palestinian activists want to decolonize it.  Viper is kinda dodging the question.  I think he believes himself to be "Indigenous", when clearly he is not.


[rical clarity.uote]

That sounds insane. I don't think anyone believes north America can be handed back to the natives.
The whole of Palestine going back to the Palestinians isn't quite on that level of lunacy, but it's up there. I don't think viper or really anyone sane in the west believes that's a remotely possible or desirable outcome.

However, though white people buggering off "back" to Europe from the americas just isn't happening, that doesn't mean we couldn't recognise the historic crimes and seek to make sure the natives get fair compensation for this.
Actually keeping some of the later treaties that gave them drastically stripped back holdings for instance. Or just financial compensation for illegally taken land. Or hell, just letting them have full and equal rights in the country where they live.

This is a lot more realistic an approach for Palestine.
Israel did steal vast swathes of Palestinian land.
This was now generations ago and the prospect of handing it all back is daft (though some, especially more recent seizures very definitely can and should be returned) .
However the crime was committed in living memory and compensation of some form is very possible - as is some level of rights for Palestinians across the whole of Palestine, even if you're into a strict 2 state solution.

Also it's worth remembering negotiating 101 - even amongst those who insist on Israel ceasing to exist and rewinding the clock. Most of this minority are idiots.
But many don't actually think this is possible... But it is what they see as their legal entitlement so it's the starting negotiating point. To demand any less would be to cede ground for zero return. Mutual recognition of each other's right to exist was a pretty core part of the Oslo accord.

[Razgovory]

Plenty of very sane people are demanding the One-State solution.  Tyr, you need to come to grips that the far-left see that as a desirable outcome.

[Josquius]

Plenty of very sane people are demanding the One-State solution.  Tyr, you need to come to grips that the far-left see that as a desirable outcome.

One state solution. ! = genocide the other side.

[Jacob]

No, what Viper is doing is arguing semantics about the term "Turtle Island".

Seems that Viper's argument is that the term is unique to the Huron, and is evaluating Minsky's throwaway line about "decolonizing Turtle island" in that light. Minsky - and others - are using Turtle Island to mean all of North America, which seems in line with what First Nations advocates themselves are doing these days.

[Razgovory]

Plenty of very sane people are demanding the One-State solution.  Tyr, you need to come to grips that the far-left see that as a desirable outcome.

One state solution. ! = genocide the other side.

What do you think will happen to the Jews in a Palestinian controlled state?

[The Minsky Moment]

No, what Viper is doing is arguing semantics about the term "Turtle Island".

Seems that Viper's argument is that the term is unique to the Huron, and is evaluating Minsky's throwaway line about "decolonizing Turtle island" in that light. Minsky - and others - are using Turtle Island to mean all of North America, which seems in line with what First Nations advocates themselves are doing these days.

I think that was Raz, not me.
I never heard of the phrase Turtle Island until reading the stuff posted here.

[Iormlund]

One state solution. ! = genocide the other side.