| Topic: | Re:Re:Re:Re:Re:Re:Re:Why is it only Israel that daily makes the news re 'genocide'? | |
| Posted by: | David Ainsworth | |
| Date/Time: | 21/08/25 09:38:00 |
| "The idea that Palestine was 'colonised a hundred years ago' is historical fantasy." Well, you should tell the early Zionists. They said that they were colonists. "Narrowing down colonisation to the period when Jewish settlers started to buy land from the Turkish owners in the late nineteenth century is anti-Semitic propaganda" Admitting that the Zionists were the latest in a long chain of colonisers over thousands of years does not make their colonisation of Palestine any more acceptable. It was only possible by an absence of democracy and by military force (thanks to Britain). Your response is reminiscent of the lecture by Richard Crossman the important Labour figure:- "in 1959, when he delivered that year’s Chaim Weizmann Memorial Lectures at the Weizmann Institute in Israel, Crossman pondered what he considered the great Zionist misfortune: their colonising effort came too late to be respectable. In the 19th century and before it had been “assumed that civilisation would be spread by the white man settling overseas”. In South America, North America and South Africa, white settlers had brought civilisation. “No one”, he writes, at least until the 20th century, had “seriously challenged their right, or indeed, their duty, to civilise these continents by physically occupying them, even at the cost of wiping out the aboriginal population”. If only the Zionist settlers had “achieved their majority before 1914, they would have been accepted without any compunction of any kind”. Instead, “they had the misfortune to come after Woodrow Wilson and Lenin had proclaimed self-determination a principle”. He actually complained, quite unfairly, about Attlee and Bevin having had a “prejudice in favour of the native and against the white settler”. "the white settler”! "even at the cost of wiping out the aboriginal population”! And Crossman was supposed to be a leftwinger, a Bevanite! |