The Decolonization Narrative Is Dangerous and False --

[ancianita]

-- It does not accurately describe either the foundation of Israel or the tragedy of the Palestinians.
By Simon Sebag Montefiore

excerpt]... At the heart of decolonization ideology is the categorization of all Israelis, historic and present, as “colonists.” This is simply wrong. Most Israelis are descended from people who migrated to the Holy Land from 1881 to 1949. They were not completely new to the region. The Jewish people ruled Judean kingdoms and prayed in the Jerusalem Temple for a thousand years, then were ever present there in smaller numbers for the next 2,000 years. In other words, Jews are indigenous in the Holy Land, and if one believes in the return of exiled people to their homeland, then the return of the Jews is exactly that. Even those who deny this history or regard it as irrelevant to modern times must acknowledge that Israel is now the home and only home of 9 million Israelis who have lived there for four, five, six generations....

But the decolonizing narrative is much worse than a study in double standards; it dehumanizes an entire nation and excuses, even celebrates, the murder of innocent civilians. As these past two weeks have shown, decolonization is now the authorized version of history in many of our schools and supposedly humanitarian institutions, and among artists and intellectuals. It is presented as history, but it is actually a caricature, zombie history with its arsenal of jargon—the sign of a coercive ideology, as Foucault argued—and its authoritarian narrative of villains and victims. And it only stands up in a landscape in which much of the real history is suppressed and in which all Western democracies are bad-faith actors. Although it lacks the sophistication of Marxist dialectic, its self-righteous moral certainty imposes a moral framework on a complex, intractable situation, which some may find consoling. Whenever you read a book or an article and it uses the phrase “settler-colonialist,” you are dealing with ideological polemic, not history...

Hamas’s atrocities place it, like the Islamic State and al-Qaeda, as an abomination beyond tolerance. Israel, like any state, has the right to defend itself, but it must do so with great care and minimal civilian loss, and it will be hard even with a full military incursion to destroy Hamas. Meanwhile, Israel must curb its injustices in the West Bank—or risk destroying itself—because ultimately it must negotiate with moderate Palestinians.

So the war unfolds tragically. As I write this, the pounding of Gaza is killing Palestinian children every day, and that is unbearable. As Israel still grieves its losses and buries its children, we deplore the killing of Israeli civilians just as we deplore the killing of Palestinian civilians. We reject Hamas, evil and unfit to govern, but we do not mistake Hamas for the Palestinian people, whose losses we mourn as we mourn the death of all innocents.

In the wider span of history, sometimes terrible events can shake fortified positions: Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin made peace after the Yom Kippur War; Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat made peace after the Intifada. The diabolical crimes of October 7 will never be forgotten, but perhaps, in the years to come, after the scattering of Hamas, after Netanyahuism is just a catastrophic memory, Israelis and Palestinians will draw the borders of their states, tempered by 75 years of killing and stunned by one weekend’s Hamas butchery, into mutual recognition. There is no other way.

https://archive.ph/HXoPM

[jaxexpat]

1. The list of bad actors is long and does not necessarily place........

either of the current adversaries at the top.

[Beastly Boy]

2. This is but one of many false narratives being pushed into the media,

and it appears they are carefully orchestrated and coordinated, with plenty of useful idiots helping along.

[ancianita]

3. I just wonder who pushes them, and how they are could possibly

benefit from destabilized, even destroyed, Israel. None of the major state haters contribute to the global economy, so I can only think this comes from nazi anti-semites.

And why any colonial imperialist framing just triggers revolutionary or accelerationist types who themselves have offered nothing for future generations to look forward to — is what I just don’t get.

[Beastly Boy]

4. It's not Israel alone that is the target of destabilization.

This is not the conflict between israel and Palestine, it is a region-wide struggle for power, which as been going on for centuries, most recently between Iran and Saudi Arabia with Israel being the only regional military power capable of opposing Iran. The Iranian fingerprints are all over the anti-Israel, and, frankly, antisemitic narratives being pushed onto the media and amplified by the proverbial useful idiots. The goal of Iran is not just to neutralize Israel, but to destabilize various Sunni Arab regimes, like Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt, etc. Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthie rebels in Yemen are all Iran's useful tools.

With this historic and geopolitical reality in mind, it should be clear that, at least in this case, it is not colonial imperialist framing (unless Iran is assumed to play the role of the colonial imperialist) that triggers the revolutionary accelerationist types. It is militant Islamist struggle for domination that literally purchases the revolutionary accelerationism.

[ancianita]

5. Absolutely. Once a sect/ideology is uniform, it's then about jockeying for control of land base resources and money.

The Saudi Sunni/Iranian Shia divide foments all other forms of destabilizing, because the Sword of Islam and the Quranic 'doctrine' of jihad are twisted by both sects to include forced conversions as cover for other wealth/power/religion building motives.

Glad you note accelerationist types, because they're all over the West, too. Why any of them promote any form of accelerationism in the ME shows that they are clueless about who their friends and enemies are.

The only thing they have in common is the bloody destruction of Israel, Jews and the West -- Europe, North America, and Australia.