Scarless_Surgery

In this video, @travelingclatt claps back to Macklemore’s song referring to Israelis as “white colonizers.” When are we going to retire this? Never mind that statistically, the majority of Israelis are Mizrakhim (Middle Eastern Jews who were forced back to their ancestral homeland as refugees after being ethnically cleansed from every corner of the globe and to escape the subjugation of Islamism that has continued through Oct. 7), but “colonization” by definition is when a “home” or “host” country sends a colony to invade a foreign land. Everyone has accepted by now that Jews lived on the land before the various conquests and colonizations that brought in transient populations, satisfying the definition of indigenous. It’s therefore not possible to colonize land that you are indigenous to. Perhaps there is a different term for this division of land between two people, but colonization isn’t it. Second, and importantly, there was no colonizing home/host country that sent a “colony” to invade. People on the ground who legally owned the land in pre-existing Jewish neighborhoods are the ones who established it as a state in 1948. A country of refugees built with sweat and muscle. This is exactly the same thing that was happening all across the ME/WA region at the same time at the collapse of the Caliphate. Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Bahrain, Iraq etc were all established through western mandates at the time. Each of them divided land and created borders based on their national/cultural/ethnic identities that had once co-inhabited the same (colonized) lands, and indeed, fought for wider borders before trading maximalism for sovereignty and accepting compromise. Are they all white colonizers, too? I know, I know, everyone is angry that the land also absorbed the Ashkenazi Jews who managed to escape the Holocaust that gassed 6 million of them in the single largest genocide in all of history, because if it were you, you would’ve all jumped off of the boat and took your own life to spare being called a “white colonizer” by the children of white colonizers in the future, right? If you’re angry at violent governments that identify as religious states, there’s tons of Christian and Muslim states to rail against, including one that literally refers to itself as the “Islamic” Republic (in fact, several do). And yet, I see no protests despite the daily slaughters and decades of Islamist imperialism that “anti-imperialists” conveniently ignore. I know it’s hard to believe, but you can legitimately be pro-Israel and pro-Palestine at the same time. You can hold two truths at once. You can believe in co-existence. You can protest the current Israeli government, politicians, extremist officials, occupied territories, settlers, war policies etc and still not call for the end of the only Jewish state in the world. It’s hard to believe that such a movement is not inherently antisemitic, as Macklemore’s lyrics would imply.