the_dunk_tank

Early Zionists literally self-described as colonialists

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)

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.

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.

Why do they call themselves "settlers" then?

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!

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.

However, for Yuval Shany, a professor of international law at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, dealing with the establishment of 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.” It cannot be applied to the many other Jews from Muslim North African and Middle Eastern countries who arrived in Israel after they suffered expulsion.

I was prepared to do an elaborate dissection, but lol, I am just rant

Were all the american settlers sent by empire?

It's not important if your father or grandfather was persecuted and expropriated, you still don't get to rob other people of land! I thought a professor of law knows that? And they were not kicked out of fucking Palestine! They were kicked out of other arab countries! Why do the Palestinians have to pay for the Iraqi Ba3th's/Egypt's/Marocco's deeds? How does it make a mizrahi indigenous to Tel Aviv?

The Mizrahim are only brought up as a thought terminating clichee when the question is whether Gazan families get bombed and Palestinian kids have to grow up in some horrible refugee camp, land gets stolen etc or if they get the right to return and democracy! If the mizrahim as a the majority block wouldn't vote genocidal fascists into power, you could get some right to return to their grandparents' country of origin worked out (as if they wanted to)! You just want your critics to shut up!

By the way, the Pantherim Skhorim (Mizrahim) had things to say about Israel's character as a colonial entity...

“The idea of an imposed power is wrong,” Professor Shany said. “Israel’s creation was endorsed by the United Nations.”

Oh, we are talking about the UN? Thought that was an antisemitic cabal? There is a bunch of stuff they also decreed...

The problem with this horseshit is that all major figures of Zionist history have been proud colonialists and Europeanists, their openness with fascism and white supremacy undermines liberal Zionism

The point of articles like this of course isn't to describe history, it's to lie and extol western ignorance in defense of the indefensible, it's modern day germanic aryan studies in both form and conception

New York Times: How a word, new, stayed the same old weapon

Um actually sweaty it’s not colonizing when we do it.

Good. Let me stab America in the heart with this new weapon.

Trump is going to win the zoomers just by shit-talking Netanyahu

You are. Duh.

“We are witnessing neocolonial instincts in the West,” Sergey V. Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, said last month

There's scores of people you could quote to discuss neocolonialism, but let's make a snide effort to make anti-colonialism seem like a Russian thing.

Good thing that a huge amount of settlers in settler colonial projects weren’t the poor or people from oppressed minorities. Then this entire argument about being ‘sent by empire’ might seem ridiculous.