The Decolonization Narrative -- The Atlantic

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https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/10/decolonization-narrative-dangerous-and-false/675799/

An excerpt:

I don’t understand why so many can’t feel sorry for the people of Palestine (now and historically) AND Israeli victims (now and historically). I suppose that when it comes to tribalism people tend to dehumanize the other no matter which side of the coin they happen to fall on. In reality, it’s a false dilemma. We’re all human beings who deserve the same amount of compassion and empathy unless we’re directly responsible for harming others.

Well said TP.

I feel sorry for the Russians who get drafted into a war they want nothing to do with and get shot if they try to retreat.
I feel sorry for the German children who died when we firebombed Dresden on Mardi Gras.
I feel sorry for the poor sods who died in No Man's Land.

One can support the Israeli or Palestinian cause without justifying the horrible things that happen to real people in the name of that cause.

Thanks!

It would be awful to get drafted to fight in a war that you didn’t believe in or were opposed to. Of course, sometimes people can be indoctrinated to have specific beliefs which also makes them victims in a way, not that I really want to go there. It’s easier to think that we have total free will when that really isn’t the case.

The problem, if I dare appear to be disagreeing with you, is that you're expressing a symmetrical point of view to what has become a very asymmetrical situation. Empathy can only be expressed for Gazans and talk about the Hamas pogrom should be suppressed. For example, this man became enraged by the sight of posters about the Hamas attack, and started tearing them down.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12682085/Furious-NYC-construction-workers-confront-shameful-Queens-man-caught-tearing-posters-Israeli-hostages-held-captive-Hamas.html

I’ve seen plenty of people, even in the media, only express empathy towards Israel and anger towards Hamas. It works both ways, obviously, which is why this conflict is so polarizing. Once again, it’s related to tribalism. Evidence demonstrates that there are supporters for both sides. It seems like few are capable of expressing empathy for all people, but perhaps it’s more about the fact that when they do individuals imply that they are Hamas sympathizers or pro-colonization, etc., so they feel less inclined to state their opinion.

Hate crimes in the US are affecting both Jews and Muslims (and, quite likely, those who look like they might be Muslim) or Palestinian Americans.

https://www.politico.com/news/2023/10/2 ... r-00123684

I can see no reason to express any empathy towards Hamas per se. I don't see the point in conflating Hamas with residents of Gaza as a whole. In my opinion, Hamas should take full responsibility for suffering experienced by Gazans since their incursion. As for longer term challenges of living there, both Israel and Egypt have some responsibility but at the moment that's not the issue. Once you effectively declare war, you condemn your people to endure whatever collateral damage occurs. In fact, empathy for Israel, as a nation, is in short supply, at least in the online media I see. The fact is that the Israeli military will do what they think necessary to neutralize the threat from Hamas. What else would they have done? Israelis support this policy but take no solace from the fact that way more Gazans will suffer than Israeli Jews, but what else can we realistically expect would happen, given the situation?

EDIT as this comment has yet to receive a scathing response, I hasten to add that I hold Hamas solely responsible only from the worsening of conditions in Gaza since their attack on Israel. I do believe Israel shares some responsibility, along with Egypt and Hamas, for the usual challenges ordinarily faced by Gazans.

That may well be true in some social circles, but certainly not all and probably not even most, at least here in the U.S.A. and in the West generally. It's certainly not true here on Wrong Planet, for example.


Probably not the best example. A key detail that has been overlooked in this news story is that posters on light poles are illegal, in the first place. According to the NYC government website:


Admittedly this law gets ignored a lot, but, in general, the law in this case is on the side of the person tearing the posters down, not the person putting them up. If someone had torn down a poster on a lightpole protesting the Israeli invasion of Gaza, the law would be on that person's side, too.

On the other hand, if the man in that news story had torn down posters indoors, e.g. in a store window, in a place where they had been posted with the knowledge and consent of the owner or leaseholder, that would be a very different matter, legally speaking, and would be a much more extreme expression of animosity.

Last edited by Mona Pereth on 30 Oct 2023, 10:14 am, edited 2 times in total.

I was not doing that in my post. That’s not what I meant by any means. I have never conflated Hamas with Palestinian residents in any of my posts on this topic, nor have I suggested that Hamas was deserving of empathy. You missed my point entirely which was that this is not occurring (at least not on the all or nothing scale you’re suggesting): One can find information to support any position, but broadly speaking, empathy can and has been expressed towards all victims in the media and elsewhere. Most people are not pro-Hamas by any stretch of the imagination. Many continue to speak out about the atrocities Hamas has committed.

With that being said, Israel is responsible for the incursion. They could make different choices. I don’t believe in removing responsibility or culpability based on someone else’s actions. Claiming self-defense is a challenge when the greatest loss of innocent life is occurring in Palestine. It seems more like vengeance than self-defense.

I dislike the term “collateral damage.” The reality is that Israel is killing huge numbers of innocent people. They are mostly killing civilians. They could try something else. They’ve not tried anything else. Many suggestions and possibilities have been stated by many people. They’ve not tried any of them. Most countries and humanitarian organizations in the world are against this war and for good reason.

It is difficult to feel empathy for a nation who is busily engaged in killing thousands of innocent people. I do feel empathy for the victims of Hamas attacks, though, as well as for their friends and families. I also feel empathy for the huge numbers of people who’ve been victimized in Palestine. I don’t usually see the world in terms of the lines that divide one country from another. People are what matter to me. It is true, however, that Palestine has experienced an inordinate amount of oppression at the hands of Israel. This fact does not excuse Hamas’s behavior. Hamas’s behavior does not excuse Israel’s.

Hamas and the Israeli government are both deserving of scrutiny as well as repercussions for the war crimes they’ve committed.

This somewhat misrepresents the argument. calling Israeli migrants what they are, colonialist settlers, is not dehumanizing. What is dehumanizing is treating their lives as expendable because of what they are.

Israel is indeed an imperialist and colonialist force. It is backed with billions of dollars by the west who just wanted jewish people to stop being a target after WWII, so they just threw a dart at a map (did you know Madagascar was once considered as a place for jews?) and decided 'that's where they can stay.'

Israel is at its heart an ethnostate based on racial exclusion. "A land without a people for a people without a land" the problem was, Palestine already had people. Israel didn't care. Instead of relying on living peoples' land grants and deeds, they cited a vague historical connection to the land as justification for ousting Palestinians.

As far as I can tell, the vast majority of Palestinian sympathizers today do not advocate the mass killing of Israeli Jews. Nor do they advocate the mass expulsion of Israeli Jews, at least not beyond the withdrawal of treaty-violating settlements.

Instead they advocate either (1) for Israel to end its occupation of the West Bank or (2) for the current Israeli and Palestinian governments to be replaced by a single democratic, secular, non-ethnic-oriented state.

"Stop saying Israelis are oppressing Palestinians! Stop saying those settler-colonizers invaded lands where Palestinians had lived for thousands of years! Even if Israel is built on genocide and apartheid, you shouldn't say so, because then their victims might feel vindicated in fighting back! And that would be the real injustice here!"

Israelis do not want to be called out for exactly what they are for the same reasons white South Africans didn't want to be called out. Because then it would mean acknowledging that they never have had and never will have the moral high ground. Remember when people were opposing apartheid in SA, and white South Africans accused black South Africans of just "hating whites" or "calling for Boer genocide". Or the identical arguments made by whites in the American south who treated the possible end of segregation as an existential threat to the white race.

The racist oppressor always always always ALWAYS frames calls for an end to their oppression as if it is a call for they themselves to be subject to ethnic cleansing and second-class citizenship. It is projection. Period.
It really helps that narrative if you go out of your way to subject the people beneath your boot to excessive violence and repression, so then more of the people you oppress become radicalized. Then, when your oppression makes them radical, you paint them as unhinged and bloodthirsty! The playbook is unchanged.


Precisely.
Or they just act like the Palestinians actually have no history in Palestine, and they are all just Arabs who came later. Or, some (mainly the right-wingers who care less about the veneer of respectability) will acknowledge they have lived there as long as Palestinians of any other religion, but that they do not deserve that land because they converted to that dirty, inferior, brown people religion.
So you either believe a blatant historical lie, or you openly admit to yourself and others that you think Muslims are subhuman and deserve treatment as such.

This is a ridiculous simplification, although I'm glad you don't think Israelis are expendable.

Nobody "threw a dart at a map". Israel is the historic home of the Jewish people, it had a large Jewish population, and large numbers of Jews were already moving there due to persecution in Eastern Europe and the Middle East long before the Ottoman Empire collapsed. It wasn't like the Jewish Autonomous Oblast that the Russians invented in Siberia (and which is now 0.6% Jewish), it was a place chosen by Jewish people for themselves with the support of the League of Nations.

And that's another important thing to remember - the area wasn't locally governed until suddenly Israel showed up. Between the World Wars it was British-ruled, before that it had hundreds of years of struggle between the Ottomans and the Egyptians, before that it was part of the Mamluk Empire, and the further you go back the more conquest you get. It's not a simple part of the world like, I don't know, the Torres Strait Islands, it's an area with a very chequered history that to all intents and purposes has never had self-rule, and certainly not liberal democracy of a free people.

How, in your worldview, does one distinguish between a "settler" and a "migrant"? To me, any argument that "you don't deserve to live here because your grandparents weren't born here" is both racist and blatantly ridiculous (and also more or less the legal situation in most of the world). I presume there's slightly more to it than that... but when you're not just saying that illegal settlements in the West Bank are colonialism, but all of Israel is colonialism despite it existing for 75 years then you're really getting into that territory. Is Tel Aviv fine because the first wave of migration happened 150 years ago, or are people whose grandparents' grandparents were born there still "settlers"? Is it OK if your ancestors built a town in the desert where nobody was displaced? Where is it sensible to draw the line?

For me the ideal place is the 1948 borders and the realistic one is probably the 1967 borders, because that's the recognised territory of Israel and Palestine. I'd rather anyone could settle wherever they liked, but if we're going to give people the right to exclude people from land then let's not rely on impossible arguments like "who has the genetic right?" and instead use something that, while inevitably flawed, can at least be referred to by all and would minimise the amount of displacement that enforcing it would entail. "Revert Israel to the Palestinians" is just as stupid as saying that America should be for Native Americans or Australia should be for Indigenous Australians, or indeed the obviously ugly claim that Britain should be for the Britons. We don't have proper homes encoded in our DNA.

What makes the Israeli government itself settler-colonialist is the following:

1) The forcible expulsion and seizure of the homes of majority of Palestinians at the founding of the state of Israel -- for the mere crime of fleeing (temporarily, they had every reason to believe) for their own safety.
2) The ongoing evictions of Palestinians in East Jerusalem.
3) Enabling settlers in the Area C of the West Bank, contrary to the Oslo Accords. Not only is this a treaty violation in its own right, but it has pretty much completely torpedoed the two-state solution, because -- guess what -- the settlers in the West Bank want Area C to remain part of Israel, which means that the West Bank can never become a contiguous land mass governed by the Palestinian Authority.

All of this is settler-colonialist behavior. Mere "migrants" don't do things like this.

There were only ten thousand Jews in Palestine prior to WWI.

The Soviet Jewish Austonomous Oblast had fifty thousand Jews at the peak of Jewish presence.

The largely secular Jewish zionist were interested in places like that, and like Madagascar, as a pontential Jewish homeland. It was their Gentile religious Christian Zionist allies that pressured them to focus on "the Holy Land" as a homeland..

Ongoing evictions - sure.
The West Bank - likewise.
Neither of those are, however, relevant to broader Israel. The specific language used was not about Israel's government, but about "Israelis" and "Israeli migrants".
Displacement in 1948 - a humanitarian disaster, but harder to accept that as an ongoing issue or an argument against the existence of Israel and the right of Israelis to live there. This would lead to the conclusion that, for example, all Pakistanis are colonialists because of the partition of India. And of course the entire New World is colonialist. It's too caught up in an academic definition to actually look at the reality of life in those places.