I thought this article had some interesting insight into how living in Israel can distort someone’s perspective on these issues.
Meeting my friends in Israel this time, I frequently felt that they were afraid that I might disrupt their grief, and that living out of the country I could not grasp their pain, anxiety, bewilderment and helplessness. Any suggestion that living in the country had numbed them to the pain of others – the pain that, after all, was being inflicted in their name – only produced a wall of silence, a retreat into themselves, or a quick change of subject. The impression that I got was consistent: we have no room in our hearts, we have no room in our thoughts, we do not want to speak about or to be shown what our own soldiers, our children or grandchildren, our brothers and sisters, are doing right now in Gaza. We must focus on ourselves, on our trauma, fear and anger.
That’s how colonizers always are. Think about how much Afrikaners wailed and gnashed their teeth? Or French Algerians? Or, again, the white US South which construted a whole identity around being victims?
Settlers are settlers wherever they go. The decolonial struggle not only rehumanizes the colonized, it rehumanizes the colonizer as they are forced to recognize the pain and suffering of others. They still have to be defeated, regardless of their own whining.
That’s also why denazification is necessary - these people need to be forced to recognize the humanity of others or they’ll just migrate to Europe and America and be racist there.
Anticolonial struggles are struggles against colonialism, the decolonial struggle is the struggle for decolonisation once colonization has already happened.
I thought this article had some interesting insight into how living in Israel can distort someone’s perspective on these issues.
That’s how colonizers always are. Think about how much Afrikaners wailed and gnashed their teeth? Or French Algerians? Or, again, the white US South which construted a whole identity around being victims?
Settlers are settlers wherever they go. The decolonial struggle not only rehumanizes the colonized, it rehumanizes the colonizer as they are forced to recognize the pain and suffering of others. They still have to be defeated, regardless of their own whining.
That’s also why denazification is necessary - these people need to be forced to recognize the humanity of others or they’ll just migrate to Europe and America and be racist there.
shouldn’t this technically be anti-colonial instead?
Anticolonial struggles are struggles against colonialism, the decolonial struggle is the struggle for decolonisation once colonization has already happened.