tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7163441833245663827.post7444412585416623145..comments2024-03-28T10:49:14.510-05:00Comments on Horizons: No Commentary Required 11/19/12Nancy LeTourneauhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12614317154146836694noreply@blogger.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7163441833245663827.post-7127254282698909692012-11-19T11:00:22.492-06:002012-11-19T11:00:22.492-06:00Well, I'll give you my take on Gaza. I view Is...Well, I'll give you my take on Gaza. I view Israel primarily through the lens of "settler colony."<br /><br />http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Settler_colonialism<br /><br />What you see in Gaza is the ineluctable result of the fact of settler colonialism. Take any example, from North America, to Southern Africa, to Palestine, and you see the same thing.<br /><br />1. A better armed population wrests land from already-present inhabitants.<br />2. Political and legal structures are created which legitimate the fact of expropriation.<br />3. An ideological structure, racism, develops, taking the contours of the political and legal structures and in the process legitimating them.<br />4. Racism produces policy developments which in their turn reinforce the basic, colonialist contours of the political and legal structures, and which as likely as not magnify them.<br /><br />The logic of the process cannot on its own terms avoid genocide, which is not simply the killing of a group of people, but, by the UN Convention, any policy which would dis-integrate a people as a people. Only some external force can reduce or stop this process. To be clear, there is a lot to be hopeful about in the US, but this process has not stopped here, however it may have modified with passing time.<br /><br />So, what you see in Gaza is par for the course, in its specific way, for a settler colony. The younger Sharon in his piece in the Jerusalem Post<br /><br />http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Op-EdContributors/Article.aspx?ID=292466&R=R1<br /><br />simply articulates the underlying logic of the project. Our form here was Manifest Destiny and then Indian Schools. There, it's bombing Gaza into the Middle Ages. This is what happens when one group of people takes another group's land.<br /><br />I don't expect US policy to modify quickly. It would be unconscionable to me to fund Israel's genocide if it wasn't actually what my tax dollars are doing. As such, I have to recognize it as a fact. We also need to stop pretending that "two-state solution" is anything other than a contradiction in terms.<br /><br />When I was young, and when I learned that Israel restricted citizenship based on religion (yes, there are Arab citizens, but the fact of their exceptionalism demonstrates the larger restriction) I was shocked, because I'd been raised to think that Israel was one of the "good guys" and that, at the same time, "freedom of religion" was one of the distinguishing factors of the "good guys." I was told that this arrangement was necessary, because of the Holocaust.<br /><br />The Zionist colonial project was very much under way before Hitler, and should not be seen as a result of that genocide. To view it that way is not only factually wrong but totally disrespectful of those who died as well as those who survived.<br /><br />Billhttp://freeandeasywandering.com/noreply@blogger.com