Credit Andy Singer 2024

  • chicken@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    3 months ago

    I thought this article had some interesting insight into how living in Israel can distort someone’s perspective on these issues.

    Meeting my friends in Israel this time, I frequently felt that they were afraid that I might disrupt their grief, and that living out of the country I could not grasp their pain, anxiety, bewilderment and helplessness. Any suggestion that living in the country had numbed them to the pain of others – the pain that, after all, was being inflicted in their name – only produced a wall of silence, a retreat into themselves, or a quick change of subject. The impression that I got was consistent: we have no room in our hearts, we have no room in our thoughts, we do not want to speak about or to be shown what our own soldiers, our children or grandchildren, our brothers and sisters, are doing right now in Gaza. We must focus on ourselves, on our trauma, fear and anger.

    • queermunist she/her@lemmy.ml
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      3 months ago

      That’s how colonizers always are. Think about how much Afrikaners wailed and gnashed their teeth? Or French Algerians? Or, again, the white US South which construted a whole identity around being victims?

      Settlers are settlers wherever they go. The decolonial struggle not only rehumanizes the colonized, it rehumanizes the colonizer as they are forced to recognize the pain and suffering of others. They still have to be defeated, regardless of their own whining.

      That’s also why denazification is necessary - these people need to be forced to recognize the humanity of others or they’ll just migrate to Europe and America and be racist there.

        • queermunist she/her@lemmy.ml
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          3 months ago

          Anticolonial struggles are struggles against colonialism, the decolonial struggle is the struggle for decolonisation once colonization has already happened.

          • KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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            3 months ago

            how are those significantly different?

            Anti colonialism would be against colonialism as you said. Presumably to stop encroaching colonialism, to stop existing colonialism, or to gain independence.

            decolonialism just seems like a really weird specific to use here since normally context would provide that. Also if we’re talking about palestine, wouldn’t israel be actively colonizing palestine, instead of having already colonized it? Like you can’t just start making outposts in a region that you haven’t already colonized. You can’t just make settlements in a place that isn’t already colonized.

            They wouldn’t be settlements/outposts if they weren’t colonial by nature. Like surely it can’t already be colonized if hamas exists. The end game of colonization is literally integration and assimilation. A decolonial struggle would be something like hawaii being brought back to the ownership and independence of the natives.

            • queermunist she/her@lemmy.ml
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              3 months ago

              The settlements are colonial. Resistance against already existing settlements and settlers is decolonial. Preventing more settlements is anticolonial.

              They’re both relevant in the Palestinian context, I just focused on decolonisation because it recognizes the already existing colonization. I guess it probably should be anticolonial/decolonial to recognize both.

              • KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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                3 months ago

                The settlements are colonial. Resistance against already existing settlements and settlers is decolonial. Preventing more settlements is anticolonial.

                i mean i guess in that context it would be, but then wouldn’t this be an anti/de colonial resistance? Since there are most definitely both going on.

                They’re both relevant in the Palestinian context, I just focused on decolonisation because it recognizes the already existing colonization. I guess it probably should be anticolonial/decolonial to recognize both.

                yeah this was pretty much my thinking.

                I think if you wanted to recognize the colonial aspects it’s probably better to just mention the outposts and settlements lol. Sometimes demonstrating a concept is more powerful than the concept itself.

                • queermunist she/her@lemmy.ml
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                  3 months ago

                  I also consider the so-called state of Israel to be an example of colonization, because literally it took a bunch of European Jewish settlers to come down from Europe and drive out the indigenous population during the Nakba. It’s not just the settlements and outposts.

                  • KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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                    2 months ago

                    man there is so much reading material here you could literally write a PHD dissertation on it.

                    So from the skim reading i’ve done, it seems that the early “israel” state as it exists today (it has historical roots as well, if you go back into religion the area that is referred to as “palestine” is also israel, so there’s that) but going back to the very beginning, it seems that they initially purchased land from the ottoman empire, which would’ve been a thing at that time. And probably shortly after that i would imagine, tensions rose and conflict started to become a problem, basically up until 1948 it seems there was constant conflict between palestine and israel. So that’s a thing. Unfortunately i’m not a history scholar with a PHD on the history and conflict between these two nations so i can’t really pin anything down here.

                    But just based off of what wikipedia is telling me, this is probably “colonization spurred by conflict” although more arguably “convenient colonization”

                    Idk as far as colonization goes i just consider war and conflict to be a constant within humanity, and therefore colonization follows in suit, the loser gets colonized. It’d be bad military strategy to kill an entire population, demolish their productive base, and then just, fucking leave. As well as bad for the society, colonized or not. Obviously the alternative here is not doing a war, but good luck with one.

                    It’d be nice if animals stopped killing each other over territorial disputes, but that’s just how the animal kingdom works, and i think this is basically just an extension of that for humans. Anyway, i think this is also sort of a defective argument, because depending on how “pure” your stance on colonization is, humanity should literally just roll back every modern society until nothing is left except for like, 12 people. Because i’m almost certain that war and colonization is such an influential part of human history, that it would basically end up producing a constant chain of colonization.

                    There are also other examples of colonization as well, russia invading ukraine for example, the annexation of crimea, although people cope by saying that the “public voted for it” which sure, but, idk about that one tbh. And of course theres the territory that only russia recognizes to be “russian” when it’s globally considered to be ukrainian. You also get into weird places like ownership over the sea floor, russia is especially pushing hard for this one, there has long been a massive contest on whoever owns parts of the artic circle for example. Would this be considered colonization by extension?

                    What about shit like uninhabited islands, theres snake island, there’s a few near korea, there’s also contests over who owns ocean territory and airspace (although these are more of a meme) china being a prominent example, pushing really aggressive stances on military power staging in the south china sea, claiming they own more than they do. And the classic meme of “leave the airspace immediately” “this is international airspace”

                    I feel like you could basically talk without end on this topic if you really tried, and i’m not really convinced it has productive value. Like i said in my previous comment, i would rather talk about specifics, than generics that don’t really make sense, or apply in the first place.

                    For some reason tankies like to do this, using big fancy words in places they really shouldn’t, i guess it makes them look more read up when in reality they still know almost nothing. Fascists do something tangential, they just make shit up instead though. Tankies are unique in this case for some reason.