kittybecca

kittybecca wrote

As a Jew who lives on Seneca land (because my ancestors had to escape persecution in Hungary and Germany somehow), I think "settler colonialism" is a particularly un-nuanced way of looking at the founding of the state of Israel. Israel was founded by people who, after being expelled from Palestine, lived as constant others throughout the entire world, never being considered full members of their society, always serving as scapegoats, for millennia until the Zionist movement decided (wrongly) that a state was the answer. Israel was founded by people who experienced traumas on top of traumas on top of traumas, and inherited traumas on top of traumas on top of traumas.

European Jews were never real Europeans; we have never been full members of European societies. Not only that, but around 50% of Israelis are either Sephardic or Mizrahi, meaning that their ancestors most likely came there to escape persecutions elsewhere in the Middle East.

Israel is an apartheid state, as it fits the legal definition of apartheid, but to call it "settler colonialism" is to equate Jews with British and Dutch capitalists who colonized the world for purely financial benefit, which is patently false. Jews went there because they were fighting for their lives, to escape from their persecutors. There was no equivalent of the Dutch or British East India Company; there was simply a desire to escape constant and intense persecution.

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kittybecca wrote (edited )

The important thing is it's not up to a bunch of people on the internet how Palestine should manage itself, it's up to Palestine.

This is exactly one of the arguments Israel uses to shut critics up: it's not up to the rest of the world to determine how they manage themselves. This fails to take into account the victims of Israel's alleged "self-government", and the same is true of any form of statism.

And it's important to remember that the overwhelming majority of Israelis did not move to the area out of a desire to colonize and rule over "the natives", but rather out of a desire to escape brutal persecution and often certain death in the West, the Middle East and North Africa. They were escaping intense persecutions of the sort that no white Western gentile can understand. This doesn't justify apartheid, but it does put the whole "settler colonialism" argument in perspective, adding a lot of cruel irony to the way that actual white Western colonizers conceptualize Israel. Unlike the colonizers of the Americas, Israelis were mostly refugees.

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kittybecca wrote (edited )

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