>the 'analogy' (or general category, really) for political zionism is not
>'third world' nationalism (of which modern Pan-Arab nationalism is one
>manifestation), but colonialism. third world nationalism was a reaction
>against colonialism, while pol. zionism was colonialism itself.
Ridiculous unless "colonialism" is stretched to mean every form of population transfer in history. Settlement is not colonialism. Most colonialism was never about mass settlement but about maximum economic exploitation with minimum settlement.
The reasonable analogy to Israel is the Afrikaners, who notably battled both indigenous peoples and the British as well. Or the analogy to the US itself in displacing native americans while again battling the British. Or hispanic Spanish settlers in the 19th century who were dispossessing indigenous people of their rights and property even as they gained independence from Europe. Africa was wracked with ethnic migrations where entering populations then dominated the former occupants, creating states oppressing minorities upon "decolonization."
Every form of third world nationalism, tied to colonial borders and colonial-influenced population migrations, is then as much a form of colonialism as Zionism was. Now the particular history of Jews fleeing to Palestine has unique aspects but then so do most peoples' stories. And in the context of the Cold War, Israel end up allying with the US and European powers, so there is a history of left animus to it, but to collapse the latter-day Cold War issues into earlier colonial phenomena makes little sense either. The Middle East is littered with states that are manifestations and have been shaped by earlier European colonialism and by post-war Cold War maneuvering; Israel is no different from Jordan, Kuwait or Saudi Arabia on that basis. And notably, Kuwait has an even more recent history of mass expulsion of Palestinians - after the Gulf War - that is rarely mentioned by many activists who maintain the uniqueness of Zionism.
-- Nathan Newman