Mick Hartley

Further to my post last week, here's Alan Johnson on the obscenity of calling Israel "settler colonialist":

🧵Framing Israel as a ‘settler colonialism’ erases everything you need to know to understand the I-P conflict. Why? Because it ignores everything that distinguishes the Jewish return to Palestine from White European Settler Colonialism. Here are 4 key differences. (1/10)

— Alan Johnson (@Fathom_Editor) November 25, 2024

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Full thread:

The first difference is the intimate Jewish relationship to the land. The ‘settler colonialism’ paradigm misses everything that is historically and religiously distinctive about the Jewish relationship to the land of Israel/Palestine. (2/10)

The Jews were returning to a land that had been theirs, in which their religion was born, their temple built, and their Matriarchs and Patriarchs walked. A land that was at the absolute centre of Judaism and Jewish peoplehood, and from which they had been forcibly expelled. (3/10)

The second difference is the exceptional history of Jewish persecution. The ‘settler colonialism’ paradigm erases the crushing material weight of Europe’s antisemitic history as a driver in the rise of Zionism and the creation of the Jewish state. (4/10)

The paradigm ignores: the collapse of the post-1789 liberal/emancipatory society, the backlash (‘high’ intellectual+‘low’ popular) against the ltd inclusion of Jews in Euro socs in the late 19thc, and the radicz of Euro antisemitism in the 20c culminating in the Holocaust. (5/10)

The Jewish experience of persecution over millennia, culminating in the rupture in world history and Jewish history that was the Shoah, made the creation of a Jewish state in the land of Israel nothing like the creation of ‘settler colonial’ societies such as the USA or SA. (6/10)

To call Jews who fled an antisemitic Europe or staggered out of Auschwitz, propping up their skeletal bodies on one another, ‘racist settler colonialists’ is obscene. (7/10)

The third difference is the local character of many Israeli Jews. The settler colonialism paradigm erases the hundreds of thousands of Jews who moved to Israel from Arab lands from the late 1940s, most driven out of their ancient homelands by Arab and Muslim antisemitism. (8/10)

The Jews from the Arab lands arrived in Israel as refugees, most carrying the 1 suitcase they'd been given 24 hours to pack after millennia of residence, the opposite of a ‘white’ ‘European’ ‘racist’ ‘colonialism’. To apply those labels to that trauma is obscene. (9/10)

The 4th difference is that the int. comm. birthed Israel. The ‘settler colonialism’ paradigm erases the mandates that nurtured the Jewish state into being, just as was happening for Arab peoples, same time, same region. Again, utterly unlike the ‘settler colonial’ socs. (10/10)