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<a class="gmail-domain gmail-reader-domain" href="https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/israel-war-on-gaza-encapsulates-entire-history-european-colonialism">middleeasteye.net</a>
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<h1 class="gmail-reader-title">Israel's genocide in Gaza encapsulates the entire history of European colonialism</h1>
<div class="gmail-credits gmail-reader-credits">Hamid Dabashi</div>
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<div class="gmail-reader-estimated-time" dir="ltr">December 29, 2023<br></div>
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<div class="gmail-moz-reader-content gmail-reader-show-element"><div id="gmail-readability-page-1" class="gmail-page"><div><p>As millions of <a href="https://www.middleeasteye.net/countries/palestine" target="_blank">Palestinians</a> trapped <a href="https://www.middleeasteye.net/topics/gaza-under-attack" target="_blank">in Gaza</a> were facing starvation and <a href="https://www.middleeasteye.net/topics/israel-palestine-war" target="_blank">mass murder</a>, <a href="https://www.middleeasteye.net/countries/israel" target="_blank">Israel's</a> invading army made sure <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/idf-rejuvenation-center-israel-gaza-strip-soldiers-hamas-airstrikes-2023-11" target="_blank">to film themselves</a> enjoying “rejuvenation complexes”, where they were lavished with “concerts, massage chairs, buffet, and more”.</p>
<p>It is surreal to watch Israelis being pampered while slaughtering Palestinians in their own homeland.</p>
<p>This is the genocidal practice of settler-colonialism, dating back at least as far as Bartolome de las Casas in his <em><a href="https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/pds/amerbegin/contact/text7/casas_destruction.pdf" target="_blank">A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies</a></em>
(1552). In it, he documented for posterity the vicious brutality of the
Spanish, butchering “savage Indians” in an orgy of violence. Israelis
are doing the same to the Palestinians. </p>
<p>In North and South America, Australia, Asia and Africa, European
settler-colonialists have left behind the evidence of their psychotic
genocidal practices.</p>
<p>The European transatlantic slave trade may have halved the population of Africa, some historians believe. The <a href="https://www.middleeasteye.net/countries/us" target="_blank">US</a>,
Canada, Australia, New Zealand and many African colonies were all built
on the systematic extermination, displacement and internment of the
original inhabitants. </p>
<p>In the Israeli settler-colonialism now on violent display in Gaza and
the rest of Palestine, European colonialism is living up to its
murderous infamy and has returned to the global stage with a vengeance. </p>
<p>For decades, <a href="https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/colonial-world-9781350092402/" target="_blank">scholars of European colonialism</a>
have been working hard to document, archive and connect these episodes
of the premeditated mass murder of native people around the globe.</p>
<p>But such painstaking scholarship has been unnecessary in Gaza and the
West Bank. For there, the barbarity of the Israeli army and the
settlers has been on full display on social media, and in the mainstream
media in the global south, for anyone who cares to look for themselves.</p>
<p>Israel has put the entire history of Euro-American settler-colonialism and its genocidal instincts on full global display. </p>
<p>While the western media works tirelessly and shamelessly to whitewash
Israel's murderous activities - offering “alternative facts”,
demonising Palestinians, valorising Israelis, and sanitising Zionism to
assure the world that Israel is “the most moral army” the globe has ever
seen - the world at large has been liberated from their pernicious
journalism.</p>
<h3>Settler colonialism and genocide</h3>
<p>While Israel goes about its genocide against the Palestinians, US Congress has been busy persecuting those voicing <a href="https://www.middleeasteye.net/big-story/israel-palestine-war-us-universities-free-speech" target="_blank">opposition to Israel's actions</a> and prosecuting imaginary threats to Jews, supported by billionaires frightening university presidents out of their wits.</p>
<p>For decades, critical thinking by leading anticolonial and
postcolonial thinkers had been radically altering our perceptions of the
savageries committed around the world by Europeans and Americans.</p><p>In the US, critical race theorists and intersectional feminists have
staged groundbreaking challenges against "established" world history.</p>
<p>Israel is a microcosm of that colonial history, all jammed inside a Zionist nutshell.</p>
<p>“In a matter of weeks, a far greater number of children have been
killed by Israeli military operations in Gaza than the total number of
children killed during any individual year, by any party to a conflict
since I have been secretary-general,” said UN Secretary-General <a href="https://www.globalissues.org/news/2023/11/30/35424#:~:text=According%20to%20the%20de%20facto,to%20be%20children%20and%20women" target="_blank">Antonio Guterres</a> on 30 November 2023.</p>
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<p><a href="https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/israel-genocide-against-palestinians-colonial-tradition" target="_blank"><img src="https://www.middleeasteye.net/sites/default/files/styles/read_more/public/images-story/Debris%20flag.png.webp?itok=Eds8Gi7j" width="400" height="250" alt="" class="gmail-moz-reader-block-img">
</a></p><p>How Israel's genocidal war against Palestinians is a colonial tradition</p>
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<p>Yet Palestinians have been consistently dehumanised, their fate
de-historicised, and Israelis cast as victims retaliating against an
unprovoked attack. The entire history of the Zionist conquest of
Palestine with the aid of their European and American benefactors is
being consistently erased. Palestinians have no history, no humanity, no
culture. Israelis have been in Palestine since the creation of heaven
and earth. Evangelical Zionism was the paramount story of the world at
large. </p>
<p>What the Israelis are doing in Palestine is what the French did in
Algeria, the British did in India, the Belgians in the Congo, the
Americans in Vietnam, the Spaniards in Latin America, the Italians in
Africa and the Germans in Namibia, another chapter of European genocidal
history.</p>
<p>In his essay, <em>Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native</em> (2006), <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14623520601056240" target="_blank">Patrick Wolfe demonstrated how</a>, “as practised by Europeans, both genocide and settler colonialism have typically employed the organising grammar of race”.</p>
<p>Even more poignantly, the Martinique author and politician Aime Cesaire, in his 1950 seminal work <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt9qfkrm" target="_blank"><em>Discourse on Colonialism</em></a>,
described the pernicious drive of colonists to enslave the natives and
dehumanise them, while stealing their land, exploiting their labour and
vandalising their resources. </p>
<h3>Manifest destiny</h3>
<p>How dare a people do this to another people - unless, of course, they think of themselves as destined by divinity.</p>
<p>Zionism is the Jewish version of the racist US doctrine of “<a href="https://www.history.com/topics/19th-century/manifest-destiny" target="_blank">manifest destiny</a>”,
a belief in the racial superiority of white people and definitive to
the American colonial conquest of the Native Americans and other groups
they exterminated.</p>
<p>Like the American version, Zionists believe Palestine was their
promised land, that it was destined and promised to them by their God,
and that the native inhabitants were a nuisance that must be brutally
eliminated. </p>
<p></p>
<p>What the Israeli army is doing in Gaza is the Zionist version of <a href="https://immigrationforum.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Replacement-Theory-Explainer-1122.pdf" target="_blank">“the great replacement”</a> theory<a href="https://immigrationforum.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Replacement-Theory-Explainer-1122.pdf" target="_blank">,</a> which holds that people of colour are replacing white people and that the process must be reversed.</p>
<p>When such sentiments are uttered in the US, serious newspaper
columnists ridicule it and dismiss it as a conspiracy theory. But when
such views are expressed in Israel, they support, endorse and
ideologically arm and weaponise them. </p>
<p>A Christian zealotry was at the roots of the American manifest
destiny ideology, which has now morphed into evangelical Zionism, with
its drive to conquer “the Holy Land” and prepare for the second coming
of their messiah. (This figure has nothing to do with the Palestinian
Jesus Christ or Latin American liberation theology and is an entirely
fictitious construct of America's imperialist imagination.) </p>
<h3>'Exterminate all the brutes'</h3>
<p>In his classical 1893 essay, <a href="https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/pds/gilded/empire/text1/turner.pdf" target="_blank"><em>The Significance of the Frontier in American History</em>,</a> historian
Frederick Jackson Turner theorised that American settler colonialists
saw their destiny framed by the European civilisation they had left
behind and the barbarism they faced in the "new world".</p>
<p>Turner believed that the American character was shaped by those
beliefs. Through evangelical Zionism, that frontier, that fight against
"barbarism", is what drives the Israeli settler-colonial project against
Palestinian resistance.</p>
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<p><a href="https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/israel-palestine-war-racist-discourse-settler-colonial-genocide-fuels-how" target="_blank"><img src="https://www.middleeasteye.net/sites/default/files/styles/read_more/public/images-story/Gaza_0.jpg.webp?itok=58K7v27_" width="400" height="250" alt="" class="gmail-moz-reader-block-img">
</a></p><p>Israel-Palestine war: How racist discourse fuels Israel's settler colonial genocide</p>
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<p>“Exterminate all the brutes,” whispers the character Kurtz, an ivory
trader sent by a shadowy Belgian company into the heart of an unnamed
place in Africa, believed to be the Congo Free State, in Joseph Conrad's
1899 novella <em>Heart of Darkness</em>.</p>
<p>Swedish <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/jun/03/sven-lindqvist-obituary" target="_blank">author Sven Lindqvist</a>
borrowed that phrase for the title of his 1992 book, a moral meditation
on the roots of European colonialism, racism and genocide in Africa.</p>
<p>When the Haitian documentary filmmaker Raoul Peck made his 2021 HBO miniseries <em><a href="https://www.hbo.com/exterminate-all-the-brutes" target="_blank">Exterminate All the Brutes</a></em>,
in part based on Lindqvist’s book, he went around the globe documenting
the barbarity of European colonialism, but dared not go near Palestine,
except for a quick liberal Zionist cliche reference to how things there
were “complicated”.</p>
<p>Things are not complicated in Palestine. In fact, things there are
very simple: a pernicious European settler-colonial madness of conquest,
colonisation and genocide is unfolding right in front of our eyes.</p>
<p>Zionists have the loyal and unreserved support of other settler colonists from Europe, the US, Canada and Australia behind them.</p>
<p>For that reason, the entire world, long brutalised historically by European savagery, has become Palestinian.</p>
<p><em>The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.</em></p>
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