Comment by SkipperCat
6 months ago
Israel is not the product of "the latter end of colonialism". It was the product of the Holocaust, which occurred just three years before its founding.
Should Europe have used Palestine for this purpose, that is debatable. But to lump it into the same colonial endeavors such as England's occupation of India or Belgium's occupation of the Congo just doesn't add up.
That is an oversimplification of history
https://www.britannica.com/event/Balfour-Declaration
Yes, there was a lot of factors, going back years before WWII, but I still believe that the aftermath of the Holocaust was major contributing factor to the creation of the State of Israel.
https://www.yadvashem.org/articles/academic/holocaust-factor...
The Holocaust created hundreds of thousands of European Jewish refugees and international sympathy which had an effect on the UN vote for statehood.
I don't take issue with the creation of Israel as a means to put all the displaced Jews somewhere. I take issue with that the land provided for this project was taken without the consent of any of the nations from which it was taken, which is colonialism and why it's impossible to separate Israel from the colonialist roots that helped create it. Just as it's impossible to not see it as an act of Western dominance towards the middle east to whom it was done. Like, there's no reason at all (apart from latent, extremely quiet antisemitism on the part of the Allied powers post WWII that they didn't want to discuss) that all those refugees couldn't have been subsumed into any of these countries, especially America, who at the time was boasting not only the only economy not obliterated by WWII, but also shit tons of open land. We could've absolutely made room for all the Jews that would be sent to colonize Israel (yes I chose that word on purpose).
However localizing it in an area none of them had any stake in was better politically, and yeah it meant pissing off basically every neighboring country to Israel, but that was also in line with the other priorities the West was holding: a strategic, permanent emplacement in the middle eastern region that would not ever oppose Western interests in any way, because it owed it's existence to the West.
It's a brilliant strategy overall as long as you ignore how it treated entire swaths of humanity as beneath consideration for what their own futures looked like, as long as those swaths of humanity were darker in complexion than yourself.
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Complex entities such as states can be the product of many things.