In a blistering piece on The Daily Show, he blasts Joe Biden and his administration for their hypocrisy in using high-minded language while avoiding doing anything meaningful to stop Israel from slaughtering tens of thousands of Gazans and laying their entire community to waste. He also focuses on something that is not being talked about much and that is how Palestinians in the West Bank are also being killed by Israeli forces and settlers and their lands taken, even though they had nothing to do with the October 7th attacks. It is clear that Israel is using those attacks to justify yet another land grab, even though those violate international law.
Mano Singham
Just another Freethought Blogs site
It’s always blown my mind how willing people have been to pretend that Israel is anything but european post-ottoman settler colonialism. Let’s see, the French tried to relocate an Alsatian population to Algeria, to colonize it -- generally acknowledged as a bad idea that did not work. The British and French carved up the Middle East and decided to colonize Palestine with peoplr from Poland, and Russia (mostly) -- another bad idea that they are still pushing on. When the French tried to colonize Algeria they actually used a remarkably familiar play-book, including claiming that nobody lived there, and that Algerians weren’t a people, anyway. Also, loud declarations that if France had to cut and run, its colonists would face genocidal revenge. France pulled the same shit in Vietnam but managed to transition the bag-holding denouement to the US before it blew up; maybe they were learning.
I know that contextualizing Israel as another experiment in European colonialism would raise eyebrows or cries of “antisemitism” in some corners, but history will eventually be written in that way. Will Israel survive? So far, not so good. British Africa, Belgian Congo, French Indochina, French Algeria, and British Palestine -- not a full-blown disaster, yet, but it took more than 75 years for most of those colonies to fail. You’d think the European powers would have gotten the memo that this kind of maneuver causes more trouble than it solves.
Since I am going full-on incorrect, here’s a radical idea: the Europeans should have confronted and dealt with their own antisemitism rather than trying to export it so they could continue the practice. The establishment of Israel is an antisemitic project the same way that the US’ establishment of Liberia was racist -- “hey y’all leave now” so we don’t have to deal with the downside of our long-term racist project.
I am deeply sympathetic to the plight of Europe’s jews and was, literally, sick to my stomach several times while reading Tim Synder’s Bloodlands but we (and I suspect history) need to recognize that Israel is not some divinely mandated state, it’s just another brief genocide-inspired genocide that will end in more genocide. It’s how ethnostates play out, and political leaders need to fucking get the memo and stop playing that playbook, it’s ugly and it does not work.
Well, yeah -- an awful lot of those settler extremists are Americans: How American citizens are leading rise of ‘settler violence’ on Palestinian lands.
Marcus Ranum @1 beat me to it.
I’ve been noticing the last couple times Israel and the actions of its government came up here, the usual people who call others antisemites seem to have grown quiet. That’s actually considerably more disturbing than if they were still ready to fight anyone on the topic.
Along similar lines, I’ve been slowly reading Machiavelli’s The Prince lately. I’m pretty sure he’d have told Israel to ease up on their occupied territories decades ago. I don’t think he’d have liked colonialism either. Not because it stomped all over other people or established a colony in another realm. That he would have thought was fine. Unless I’m reading wrong, what he meant by establishing a colony was putting a local in charge. The problem with European colonization as I’ve understood it is they kept putting Europeans in charge and the only thing they were in charge of was maximizing extraction. What put off the American revolutionaries was they’d begun to realize that in large numbers and they’d thought they were somehow immune.