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Comment by dartos | Hacker News Reader

> Colonialism is a leftist ideology created by college professors in the 1970s

And that matters because…?

> Furthermore, there is no colony without a mother country.

I think you’re picking and choosing a definition of colony that fits your argument. Here’s a more applicable one:

“ a body of people who settle far from home but maintain ties with their homeland; inhabitants remain nationals of their home state but are not literally under the home state's system of government”

Instead of making ad hominem attacks and playing semantics, why not argue against the actual ideas?

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I’m sure the people of Israel would have loved to maintain ties with their homeland but they have been run out of Europe and the Middle East. so where is this Jewish homeland that the colonists in Israel are maintaining ties to?

I don’t know that I see a particular difference between ideas and semantics when the assertion is “Israel is a European colonialist project”

There are some great answers in r/askhistorians

Here is one : https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/17ika73/why_...

Read it and you get a much more nuanced idea of the topic.

> I’m sure the people of Israel would have loved to maintain ties with their homeland but they have been run out of Europe and the Middle East. so where is this Jewish homeland that the colonists in Israel are maintaining ties to?

Much better.

I personally wouldn’t call Israel a European colonization effort. I don’t think Jews really had a homeland per se. AFAIK they were a nation without any land. It seemed like Israel was part reparations for the holocaust and part installing a strategic ally in the Middle East.

Maybe that’s a thin line.

I can absolutely see how someone could make that argument, though, when framed like this:

A fairly western style country, funded by wealthy western countries, taking and keeping hold of some land in a very not western style part of the world.

The IDF has been entirely dependent on US and European armaments and funds for all of its battles, with the only exception being the '47 independence war. Since then, Israel has been a Western military-industrial client state. The current genocide is entirely funded by the US.

It seems foolish, because giving the defense industry a free subsidy via Israel annoys our Arab oil suppliers and our oil companies, but there must be enough corporate welfare to go around because the defense companies and the oil companies haven't gone to war with each other directly, yet.

> I’m sure the people of Israel would have loved to maintain ties with their homeland

Oh yeah, there's definitely no ties between the two. EU states definitely didn't send 1.76 billion euros ($1.9bn) (in arms) to Israel in exchange for the "security" Israel offers. /s

But also

> Israel is a society of immigrants and their offspring: 23 percent of the Jewish majority as of 2018 was foreign born, 32 percent was comprised of the second generation (Israeli born to immigrant parents), and 47 percent was third generation (Israeli born to Israeli-born parents).

https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/israel-law-of-return...

So like... not only does Israel have ties with it's "mother country" but even the Israelis themselves do have ties to their own personal homelands.

In Sweden, 21% of the population is foreign born. 35% is second generation. The department for statistics did not publish numbers for third generation. The wast majority of immigration are done for economical causes.

Those numbers are to my knowledge fairly similar in many other European countries.

> 23 percent of the Jewish majority as of 2018 was foreign born

You know what population is usually foreign born? Refugees!

> even the Israelis themselves do have ties to their own personal homelands.

What ties do Yemenite Jews who fled to Israel have to a Yemen that is ruled by the Houthis, an almost comically Nazi-like group whose flag literally has "a curse on the Jews" written on it in big letters?

These people are refugees, not "colonists"

Do you have any evidence that a large percentage of that population is refugees?

What was Yaakov Fauci fleeing from?

> These people are refugees, not "colonists"

Many settlers in America were fleeing religious prosecution in Britain, that doesn't make them not colonizers.

> Do you have any evidence that a large percentage of that population is refugees?

Have you not heard of the Holocaust? The majority of Israelis descend either from refugees from Europe (Ashkenazim), or refugees from Arab/Muslim countries (Mizrahim) whose homes were stolen by Europeans or Arabs, respectively.

> What was Yaakov Fauci fleeing from?

American born Israelis are a small minority.

> Many settlers in America were fleeing religious prosecution in Britain, that doesn't make them not colonizers.

So if a Palestinian from Gaza gets asylum in the US, does that make that Palestinian a colonizer of Native American land?

1) I gave you hard data, I don't count "You don't remember the holocaust" as hard data.

2) Prove it. Give me data not just your opinion.

3) Not really and I fail to see how this is even important. The US is not engaging in active colonization, it has fully colonized the US. You could even argue we've moved in the direction of decolonization by giving back some land to the indigenous population.

Can we agree an American-Israel dual citizen stealing the house someone is currently living in is different than someone fleeing ethnic cleansing?

Like if the US invades Greenland and that Palestinian fled to America and then participated in the colonization then yes they would be a colonizer.

The flip side of this double hypothetical is that Israel is actively building illegal settlements on Palestinian land so anyone who immigrates and isn't under legitimate duress to do so is a colonizer.

> The US is not engaging in active colonization, it has fully colonized the US.

The history lesson here is that if Israel were to just finish colonizing the territory and completely subjugating any opposition, like the US did, they will win in the long run. Meaning, the settlers are right, if not in moral terms, then in practical terms.

The US may pay lip service to indigenous land rights in flyover country, but nothing suggests it would consider handing over control of huge swathes of strategically critical territory to a hostile group of natives. That idea would be laughable, yet it is pretty much what many people believe Israel should do.

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