Credit Andy Singer 2024
It would definitely require a process similar to denazification in Germany, where the people are reeducated and all members of the previous administrative apparatus are removed from power. Like the radical reconstruction in the South after America’s Civil War (before white terror overthrew their multiracial democracy I mean)
But Jews live in Germany now, and Germany is a great friend of Israel. Much like Black people in the US and whites, things can change.
We’re all human, I have no idea why you think “they just experience the world differently over there” like they’re aliens. I’m not making a 1-1 comparison but like, there ARE similarities!
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.
The decolonial struggle
shouldn’t this technically be anti-colonial instead?
It would definitely require a process similar to denazification in Germany, where the people are reeducated and all members of the previous administrative apparatus are removed from power.
maybe, personally i’m hesitant to throw shit like that around as it’s really extreme, but i’m not the collective UN governing body so i can’t make that decision lol.
But Jews live in Germany now, and Germany is a great friend of Israel. Much like Black people in the US and whites, things can change.
well i mean yeah, but that’s after literally every country except for like japan, went to war with them. They fucking imploded. Though granted germany would’ve eventually collapsed in on itself after trying to expand too aggressively anyway. Fascism is a silly thing.
We’re all human, I have no idea why you think “they just experience the world differently over there” like they’re aliens. I’m not making a 1-1 comparison but like, there ARE similarities!
they literally do in the same way that someone with color blindness experiences the world differently to someone with schizophrenia, to someone with tinnitus, to someone with a physical disability, everybody experiences the world differently, there’s nothing inherently bad about that. Eastern culture is different from western culture, it doesn’t take more than like 5 minutes to discover that places like japan have vastly different cultural and social experiences of the world. Thinking anything otherwise is just modern western elitism if we’re playing the funny words game. Realistically it’s probably just western people being uneducated about different cultures and being stuck in a very individualistic line of thinking.
The middle east is very Islamic, and they tend to have a pretty hard-line religious conceptualization of the world. Israel being situated in the middle east and jewish, is kind of innately opposed to this, since they’re a different religion and are in the middle east, so it sort of provides grounds for conflict there. At least that’s my western educated and “uninformed” take on it so take it with a grain of salt.
Thinking that you can take someone from china, the middle east, asia more broadly, or even just a remote tribe and then plop them into america and expect them to immediately adapt is just wild. I mean there is SO much study on this in psychology/sociology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_shock
like to be clear, there are similarities, for example, we’re people. But that’s sort of the primary one, even ignoring global culture, you and i have completely different views on a lot of things, Israel Palestine for example are one thing where we would probably vehemently disagree. I also experience socialization and interaction with other people much differently to normal people as well. I’m aro/ace and neurotic so i don’t really care about relationships at all, and i wish to simply fuck off and stop existing in the broader humanity. Most people would consider that insane, but i don’t really care.
I think the internet tends to have a really shallow effect on how people perceive others, which can be good in some cases, but it’s also bad in others. It can be equally as bad to assume that others are going to be the same as you, as to assume that others are going to be different to you. People are different in a lot of ways, and they are similar in a lot of ways. It’s important to keep that in mind when talking about things that are cross cultural.
The grounds of conflict are colonial! It’s not a religious conflict, it’s Europeans invading Palestine and ethnically cleansing the land of Palestinians. Zionists around the turn of the 1900s openly called it colonialism when they were discussing it and in their writings.
Obviously the conflict has evolved since that initial infusion of Europeans, so now most Israelis are born in the region, but they’re still the descendents of those colonists. That’s why my initial comparison was with the US because it’s very similar - a bunch of racist Europeans invaded the land for colonization and expelled the indigenous people already living there.
Thinking that you can’t learn from historical examples because everybody is too different to ever compare anything is nonsense.
The grounds of conflict are colonial! It’s not a religious conflict, it’s Europeans invading Palestine and ethnically cleansing the land of Palestinians.
i didn’t say it was religious, if i did point me to it so i can fix that lol.
Also they aren’t europeans, they’re jews? Who historically inhabit the same lands that palestine sits on, that’s why israel was put where it was originally. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jews
Zionists around the turn of the 1900s openly called it colonialism when they were discussing it and in their writings.
what you think nobody lived in palestine prior to this? That’s literally how making new countries works. People are everywhere, the governments around them change, the bodies around them change, colonization is a thing that has happened throughout all of human history. Not trying to defend colonialism, but it’s just something that has existed throughout history, it’s been done now, if palestine were to “decolonize” israel, that would also be colonization. You might be able to justify it in your mind, but at the end of the day everything pretty much just boils down to colonization.
Thinking that you can’t learn from historical examples because everybody is too different to ever compare anything is nonsense.
do you think i’m talking about the conflict specifically? I’m not, i don’t think i did once. If you think i do you’re either wrong or misreading something. Or you’re trying to deflect from the point i was making in order to bait me into a line of reasoning i didn’t intend on getting into.
Did i ever say that you can’t learn from historical examples? It sounds to me like you’re just making shit up here, but maybe i’m wrong and went into a fugue state and wrote a three hundred page report on this. I’m so baffled as to why you’re trying to tell me this right now.