Second-to-last sentence:
Colonialism has given way to post-colonialism and neocolonialism, whatever those sweeping labels may encompass.
Imagine spending money on a NYT subscription and getting this lazy-ass article.
Ah yes, those hot new buzzwords that definitely don’t have a century-spanning body of literature attached to them. Frantz Fanon? Never heard of em, probably just some naive college kid who hasn’t figured out how the real world works
This article tries very hard to imply that it’s a fundamentally novel concept (adopted by naive young activists) to conceive of Israel as a colonial enterprise. He doesn’t say this directly, but this works very well with the “youth support Palestine because they’re brainwashed by TikTok” narrative.
It doesn’t seem to occur to the author that the reason he’d never heard it before is because the US has just never really seen such vocal defense for Palestine.
Anyways in case anyone encounters this bird-brained position in the wild I’m linking to Fayez Sayegh’s Zionist Colonialism in Palestine (1965)
One thing I’ve noticed with liberals is that when they hear about something they’ve never heard before, they assume it must be brand new and no one else has ever heard of it either. They can’t imagine that someone else knows more than they do.
Early Zionists literally self-described as colonialists
It’s very inconvenient when the founders of your movement are like “we explicitly want to invade this country, drive it’s people in to exile, and steal their stuff. We’re going to say this over and over so everyone clearly understands out intentions.”
100+ years later: “the history is complicated”.
The colonialism was the their selling point to the British! Their whole sales pitch was that “hey, we’ll do colonialism in Palestine but will serve the interests of the British Empire!
