Settler colonialism¶

Settler colonialism involves the de novo creation of a particular national identity explicitly for the purpose of social domination of the oppressed nations -- and vice versa, the indigenous people must be regimented into oppressed nations in order to colonize them. 🧵 https://t.co/z3sYQCn1CC This is a superstructural dynamic which simultaneously enforces and is enforced by economic forces: rampant extraction of natural resources, maintenance of a permanently immiserated labor force, guarantee of economically ennobled and culturally homogenized consumer market, etc. The Jewish people have been a persistent thorn in the side of the great-nation projects throughout modernity, and a perplexing concept for bourgeois and Marxist historians alike: are we a nation? Where do we sit within the hierarchy? Do we help or challenge national hegemony? For much of history, the answer to the Jewish question by the beneficiaries of these hierarchies has, by and large, been to treat Jews as subalterns, a rootless people comprising a geographically ambivalent, homogenous pseudo-nation that only serves to confound national relations Hence, millennia of suspicion and oppression have followed us wherever we have found ourselves. Jews have been variously ghettoized, pillaged by pogroms, given and stripped of political and economic rights, evicted, exterminated, and more. But we have also found homes throughout. However, the national question remains difficult. "Jew" refers to a diverse collection of distinct identities, cultures, ethnicities, religious expressions, languages, and geographic locales. Bourgeois conceptions of a nation cannot be applied to a monolithic "Jew." (Nor can a Marxist conception of nation contain one singular "Jewish nation," because the economic relations that govern the social identification of any given node of Jewishness are different from any other: the Ottoman Jew and the Polish-Lithuanian Jew are not one nation.) This is because the bourgeois nation is centered around the right to land and the economic exploitation of both it and its indigenous peoples. To be a "nation," you must have a set land in which you are either economically dominant or oppressed. For a diasporic people, the bourgeois concept of "nation" cannot apply without a national project that seeks to create those conditions. And of course, no one would seek to craft themselves into an oppressed nation if they have the economic means to dominate. Hence, to achieve position under a globally dominant bourgeois regime, the Zionists strove to become colonists. They aimed to erase the multifarious Jewish identities, comprised of many (generally oppressed) national identities, and find a place to be a bourgeois great-nation. But this is obviously not possible. Those Jewish nations persist, some of which are still oppressed, some of which have been economically and socially assimilated into the dominant national identity -- although there is an ascendant rejection of this by orthodox supremacists. The Zionists are not "The Jewish nation, with a Jewish nation-state." They are a singular, settler-colonial enterprise that necessarily exists apart from the historical context of all the extant Jewish national conceptions. There is no amount of propaganda that can override that. And the global ascendancy of the political movement toward a more regimented national hierarchy (what you might call the "right-fascists") puts "Zionism = the Jewish nation" as our people's greatest theoretical threat. It erases the emerging REAL national relations we face. If we cannot conceive of ourselves as "nations in situ," we cannot hope to face an enemy that already does. National consciousness is the first step to national liberation. And very soon, national liberation will be critical to the survival of our various Jewish nations.