>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."
(((((((((
CB: Surely you are not saying that the examples you give were not colonialism .
Yes, that's what I'm saying, since I think it is useful to distinguish colonialism from the broader rise of Western capitalist dominance of the globe.
We may be entering definitional land, as with the debate on fascism, and maybe colonialism is too multi-faceted in meanings to bother using, but I think its worthwhile to distinguish it from settlement, genocide and the other measures benefitting the West.
Colonialism was a specific mechanism for dominating another nation from a minority position, as with the British Raj or other economic mechanisms to extract an economic surplus from the dominated population to the advantage of the colonial state.
In the cases above, most obviously with settlement of the US, the settlement population through sheer numbers and mass murder where necessary became a majority rather uninterested in extraction of surplus from the indigenous population.
The dominance of oil in the Middle East has colonial aspects, from the deals cut with the Sauds and in Kuwait, but those all preceded the creation of Israel, which at times as much threatened specific economic interests in the region through messing with those deals - a point made by some conservatives for many years. Israel had less of a traditional colonial use to the West than a military counterweight in the proxy war of the Cold War, but that was actually a relatively late-breaking alliance that became significant only after 1967 as a number of countries in the region were drifting into the Soviet orbit.
--- Nathan Newman