What is meant by colonialism when discussing Israel/Palestine?

[Lithos]

10. Ok...

You must not have read the article, or my highlighting of Jewish history. You must not know, or choose not to know, the actual history of the Jewish people as indigenous to their current homeland.

Yes, I read it - I have read many articles like that - it repeats many tropes and at the same time omits facts and avoids a serious examination.

Let me fall down the rabbit hole of your article and show why it's missing a few things.

I know the Israelites to be one of the many groups which descended from the ancient Canaanites. I also know Palestinians are another group descended from the Canaanites. This is hard archeological and biological (DNA) fact. Both groups share a very similar history and claims of being indigenous to the lands which form Israel, the West Bank and Gaza. For most of recorded history the lands were never homogeneous - but with villages belonging to one group adjacent to villages of other groups. The Roman expulsion did not leave the land of Judea vacant - but rather removed people from specific neighborhoods and from specific villages. Adjacent neighborhoods and villages were untouched.

And yes, many colonial powers flirted with the idea of a Jewish homeland in Israel/Palestine. They also at various times worked against such a concept. The logical fallacy here though is that if you are going to claim Jews have had a long standing claim to the lands, then it was never the colonial power's right to give as the Jews already had that right. Similarly, it was not within their right to take away any other group with similarly long standing claims.

As your article points out during the war for Israeli independence (1947/8) the neighboring countries attempted to dispose and evict the Jewish settlers who, as you pointed out, had indigenous claims to the area. After much fighting, the State of Israel was born and foreign domination of most of the lands was over. Jewish settlers in the West Bank were evicted and sent to Israel. Many Palestinians also were evicted as well, some ending up in Gaza, West Bank, Lebanon and Syria. Maybe not the cleanest outcome, but at least the groups with historical claims were at least sharing the territory.

Post 1967, Israel took over the West Bank and the Gaza. Increasingly Israeli policy has been to promote the settlement by Jews of these territories along with the corresponding eviction of Palestinians. I think it is extremely crass to try and play the indigenous card to claim one group of people descended from the Canaanites has more right to the land than another group descended from the very same Canaanites. Even so, there has to be a description when a government enacts a policy where a preferred group of people are given eminent domain and allowed to evict another group of people in order to achieve a permanent settlement.

Now this is where your article loses focus.

At this point, I think it is rather obvious other factors are in play - much more modern beliefs involving Nationalism and identity politics. So, using "history" is just an emotional excuse to justify and deflect from extremely nasty business. Evidence strongly suggests the current leadership within both Israel and Palestine view themselves in modern Nationalist eyes in an "us" vs "them" mentality where "us" is 1st class and "them" is 2nd class. In the case of the West Bank settlers, because the "2nd" class people currently live in an area of desired settlement, the attempts to evict them really follow the settler-colonist metaphor in the same manner that the US settlers (1st class belief) evicted the Indigenous natives (viewed as 2nd class). And if you have not picked up on this - being 1st class means being not only more powerful, but also "superior" thru some sort of manifest destiny (which your article tries to support by citing "history&quot . Real history of course says the truth is a bit different.

And as witnessed in the current situation in Gaza - when given a chance, the Palestinians chose to treat Israelis as 2nd class in their treatment and the current Israeli response similarly so in how they treat the Palestinians. Only the stare by the rest of the world has caused either side to act with any niceties.

And yes, finally to our single point of agreement - I support Biden's approach here. It is pragmatic.

Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler - Einstein