#colonizers
Itβs always a little different, which is why some Native Hawaiians have taken to calling their unique version by a slightly different term: plantation disaster capitalism. Itβs a name that speaks to contemporary forms of neocolonialism and climate profiteering, like the real estate agents who have been cold-calling Lahaina residents who have lost everything to the fire and prodding them to sell their ancestral lands rather than wait for compensation. But it also places these moves inside the long and ongoing history of settler colonial resource theft and trickery, making clear that while disaster capitalism might have some modern disguises, itβs a very old tactic. A tactic that Native Hawaiians have a great deal of experience resisting.
The Jewish #colonizers knew they needed an #imperial patron to succeed and survive.
Their first patron was #Britain, which sent 100,000 troops to crush the #Palestinian revolt of the 1930s and armed and trained Jewish #militias known as the #Haganah.
The #savage #repression of that revolt included wholesale #executions and aerial #bombardment and left 10% of the adult male Arab population killed, wounded, imprisoned or exiled.
#violence #colonization #colonialism #genocide #apartheid #Palestine #history #freedom
The #Zionists β in a situation similar to that of todayβs supporters of #Israel β were aware it would be fatal to acknowledge that the creation of a Jewish homeland required the expulsion of the #Arab #majority.
Such an admission would cause the #colonizers to lose the worldβs sympathy.
But among themselves the Zionists clearly understood that the use of #armed #force against the Arab majority was essential for the colonial project to succeed.
#colonization #colonialism #Palestine #Palestinian #freedom #HumanRights
Rashid Khalidi, the Edward Said professor of modern #Arab studies at Columbia University, in his book βThe Hundred Yearsβ #War on #Palestine: A History of #Settler #Colonization and #Resistance, 1917-2017β has meticulously documented this long project of colonization of Palestine.
His exhaustive research, which includes internal, private communications between the early #Zionists and #Israeli leadership, leaves no doubt that the Jewish #colonizers were acutely aware from the start that the #Palestinian people had to be subjugated and removed to create the Jewish #state.
The Jewish leadership was also acutely aware that its intentions had to be masked behind euphemisms, the patina of biblical legitimacy by Jews to a land that had been Muslim since the seventh century, platitudes about human and democratic rights, the supposed benefits of colonization to the colonized and a mendacious call for democracy and peaceful co-existence with those targeted for destruction.
