Gabe Ende: Settler Colonialism and all that Shit…
Living in Israel has placed me at a distance from the polemic concerning “settler colonialism” and I am still trying to comprehend its difference from the classical variety held in utter disrepute when I was an activist on liberal campuses in the Sixties. It appears that there are two salient features in the “settler” category: it seeks to replace the dominant group—hence the dominant culture—in the land and it employs “genocide” to achieve this end.
But what makes this unique? This was not only the policy of conquerors in the Americas, Australia, and New Zealand. The Arabs and Turks and Japanese—not to mention the Babylonians and Vikings and Biblical Israelites—employed it long before them. The history of Muslim Spain, in fact, is a classic example of such “settler colonialism”, characterized by rampant expressions of what progressives and their hyped fellow travelers would currently label as “genocide”.
The flexibility of the “genocide” variable is outrageously problematic. The term, coined during World War II to refer to a systematic campaign to wipe out entire peoples, was precisely formulated to emphasize its distinction from the characteristic use of “excessive violence” in the course of war. What idiot—even at prestigious Ivy League universities—can’t understand that? So nothing is unique in the current lurid campaign against Israel except for the egregious rape of the English language and the obsessive focus on “the Zionists”.
For those committed to this alternative reality of wild trope-smearing, however, is not the mass Arab-Muslim immigration to France a very real example of contemporary “settler colonialism”? Should current demographics prevail in the next generation, French Christians will become a minority in the land of their fathers. There are already figures and movements within the immigrant community who proclaim a “Muslim France” as their goal and not a few Jihadists plotting “genocide” to promote the cause. One would have expected the Progressives to vocally support the deportation programs of le Pen and her counterparts in other Western European states…
But once we liberate ourselves from this intoxicating though deceitful and vicious mindset and focus upon the centrality of human conditions and values, we realize that the campaign against “Zionist Israel” is fundamentally a campaign against prospects for a better human future. However faulted, Israel has been thrust into a war of survival against elements who couldn’t be less interested in the well-being of their own people. The war has been prolonged and taken far too many lives precisely because of this reality. And if the Palestinians “aren’t going anywhere”, the seven-and-a-half million Jews in Israel certainly are not. Take note: Israel has no program of “genocide” and fascists such as Ben-Gvir and Smotrich would much more easily be contained and delegitimized if they couldn’t point to this wall of hatred and violence surrounding us. The slandering horse-shit of the progressive radicals only buttresses their rhetoric
The war will not last much longer and the Israeli public will enter into a period of agonizing self-reckoning. Would it be too much to expect the progressive community to do the same?
