this post was submitted on 26 Nov 2023
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As intended.
Israel's strategy with the West Bank is masterful. Wholly and completely evil, but masterful.
Either the Palestinians just accept their lot, in which case Israel incrementally takes their land through their "settler" proxies, or the Palestinians (entirely justifiably) try to fight back, in which case the IDF goes in and kills a bunch of them, and Israel takes their land anyway.
It's fucking despicable, but it works, and if one is devoid of morality, empathy or simple human decency, that's all that matters.
Modeled perfectly after the settler-colonial tactics of the US taking over native land.
Nope.
Don't get me wrong, they're both genocides.
But America just kept pushing the survivors west a couple thousand miles at a time, and at least they got some land. Even if there was no where to displace them to, America would have just killed them all.
Israel is compacting people in a box, physically and psychologically it's torture. Then, when some snap and do some crazy shit, they kill a bunch of people and make the box smaller
They've been doing it for the whole 70 years Israel has existed.
And it gives right wing extremist politicians a constant Boogeyman and without any real threat to themselves, and keeps them in power. So its never going to change.
That's an analysis I hadn't considered. I was thinking about instances like Wounded Knee, the 1862 Sioux Uprising, etc and the aftermath of US colonialism that resulted in the small plots of land they were forcibly exiled to.
Well it seems like they're trying to push Gaza's refugees into Egypt, so they might have a final solution to the Palestinian question.
Modelled after the settler colonial tactics of the Americans, British, French, Portuguese, Spanish, Boer, Australians, Canadians, New Zealanders, Chinese, Germans etc etc
Settler colonialism is an old evil, we saw it do immense damage in the 18th and 19th centuries. Many of us live with its legacy and are still picking up the pieces.
That's actually not how modern China gained territory. The settlements in Xinjiang were explicitly designed to not step on the traditional Uyghur economic/cultural center of Kashgar. Instead, settlement surrounded Urumqi, a place that used to be a backwater of backwaters (the name meaning "beautiful pasture"). Even today, Kashgar and it's surrounding areas are majority Uyghur (by far), while Urumqi is majority Han.
@zerfuffle cherry picking "backwaters" to settle isn't the same as not colonizing at all, nevertheless I wasn't talking about Xinjiang in particular.
Here is a good example of classic settler colonialism by the Chinese.
That just isn't true, the majority of the population of American Indians died via disease without ever meeting a European. Also, Americans on many occaisons had virtually no qualms with just committing outright genocide, whereas Israel actually needs "tactics" to try to cover it up.
Israel doesn't have qualms about committing genocide, they just don't want to piss off their neighbors or make their allies uncomfortable.
That doesn't really change the main point though.
If the rest of your family dies and you live alone in your house, then I come and force you out and steal your house. I still stole it.
I agree, but just for clarity's sake most of the deaths due to disease weren't strictly intentional until long after we were genociding them. I'm not saying it's a mirror image of the US genocides, I'm saying that the Israeli government is modeling their methods after the US, and playing politics about their genocide.
It was done all over the world for millennia long before that.
No it wasn't. Stealing land? Sure. Forced religious conversion? Sure. Invasion and occupation? Sure.
Genocide, though, only really started in this millennia. Before that, land conquest would just involve replacing the government and institutions, not killing/displacing the local population to have them replaced with settlers. It just didn't make sense for most of human history.
Not to say things were good! Instead of genocide, the more common tactic throughout history was mass enslavement.
@queermunist
Er, I think you mean the last millenium, not this one!
lol okay yeah, started within the last 1000 years
“Started this millennia” is not the same thing as “USA was the first to ever do that”. Of course groups expanded into territory held by others and pushed them out and killed them. I mean, there’s tales of similar things in the Bible. It’s also not really the same as what is happening in Gaza at all.
I would say the concept of genocide didn't really exist before the concept of the nation-state, which is a relatively recent development that happened to coincide with the so-called "discovery" of the New World. That's hardly the USA's invention though! Europe pioneered the concept and used it to colonize all over the world.
Some days, you know, it's not always all about American indigenes.
I love that you name-drop the US when it was the English, Spanish, Dutch, and French that raped every continent and genocided entire cultures before the idea of the United States even existed.
Ok. But the US did exist during westward expansion. America is a pretty modern look at colonialism. The "USA" territory was originally untouched by westward expansion. It therefore functions as a super recent, unmuddied, look at colonialism. It's a good example.
So basically they had enough examples to learn from, but completely ignored it and do the same?
Oh, and don't forget that the IDF have been reported on (and even video taped themselves) stealing money, jewelry, and anything else valuable they can grab in Gaza while they're there.
It's funny, it's pretty similar to what the US government did when they sent in settlers out to the west. Once over enough settlers staking out clams of land, it ended up crowding out the native Americans which led to conflict, and then you ended up with Custer killing bison on the Great plains.
I think the significant part there though is that it's what the US government did almost 200 years ago. Not that that excuses it, but it was a much more primitive and ignorant world then, and at least some of it can be ascribed to that primitiveness and ignorance.
Doing the same thing in the modern world though - that's just pure, unmitigated evil.
@Rottcodd I agree with this. We know now how bad that stuff back then was and we know the generations of misery it creates.
Doing it now would be like going back to legalising spousal rape and handling plutonium without protection.