Because words matter and it’s driving me crazy to see them misused, Israel is NOT any of the following:
- COLONIALIST — google Balfour Declaration, British Mandate, Peel Commission, The 1947–1948 civil war in Mandatory Palestine, and The United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine and you will quickly understand that Jews did not colonize Palestine (a word which was originally used to denote an area of the Ottoman Empire, not as a description of a race, people, or a sovereign nation), they were given rights of residency by the British, who “owned” Palestine at the time. They bought land there from people willing to sell it — not a very colonial activity.
If you want to label someone a colonizer of Palestine you can apply that to the Ottomans and the British, but not the Israelis — any attempts Israel has made in the years since to expand their territory, have been based on their interpretation of original promises made to them by the British of how much of the area would be theirs.
We, here in the US, are colonizers — we walked into an inhabited area and simply took it because we wanted it — no one invited us, or sanctioned our presence.
- GENOCIDAL — there is no…
