Flipping anti-colonialism on its head
JVL Introduction
Here is a fascinating read from Martin Francisco Saps published by Vashti, explaining a rhetorical shift in Israeli hasbara as it seeks to couch its Zionist message in language that appeals to young progressives.
The goal, as always, is to cast Jews as the victims rather than the perpetrators of colonialism in Palestine. In this discourse, all Jews are “indigenous” to Israel/Palestine, flipping anti-colonialism on its head.
Don’t miss the link in the article to a brilliant 2021 cartoon on this subject by Solomon Brager for Jewish Currents.
Saps concludes, hopefully with full justification, that the “indigeneity” narrative will fail because now “it has never been clearer who is the oppressor and who is the oppressed.”
NWI
This article was originally published by Vashti on Tue 19 Nov 2024. Read the original here.
Hasbara’s doppelganger politics of indigeneity
Zionism in anti-colonial clothing.
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Zionists are becoming more infamous for their cultural appropriation of the oppression and resistance, struggles, terms of other groups, with every passing year. And its good to see this trend taken on it this article.
Zionist notions of ethnic entitlement are factually easily challenged, because fundamentally religion does not conform to popular established notions of race. Justin Welby – until recently – Archbishop of Canterbury is white, Rose Hudson-Wilkin Bishop of Dover is Jamaican-British and John Sentamu former Bishop of York is Ugandan-British. They’re all Protestants but few would suggest they’re the same race. Look at images of Rachel Riley, Hollywood’s Owen Wilson or the late Kirk Douglas and then do the same image search for African, Ugandan or Ethiopian Jews. Try again with Middle-Eastern Yemeni or Iranian Jews. They’re not all the same or share identical, customs, dress codes, habits etc. Hollywood Jews Kirk Douglas and Tony Curtis appeared as west-Europeans in the historical epic The Vikings (1959). And why shouldn’t they? – the idea that western Jews were not real and valued westerners was the anti-Semitic gibberish of the Nazis.
Dr Adam Rutherford (geneticist) has pointed out “all humans share almost all the same DNA – a fact that betrays all of our recent origins from Africa.” Most white people though, do not call themselves Black or claim to own Africa. Western Zionists though claim a Jewish middle-eastern DNA supports colonial entitlement in Palestine. Those same Zionists like other white people will inevitably have African DNA, so notions of colonial ownership entitlement from DNA really don’t make sense. Palestine has had dominant Arab identity since the 7th C, – from a time that is roughly halfway through the Saxon settlement of the British Isles and prior to Viking and Norman conquests.