Life was strange in the pandemic.
(It’s not a time upon which I like to dwell.)
One cool part, though, was History Club.
Once in a while, the kids and I would play a game in which they’d choose a random year, then we’d dig into what was going on in the world at the time.
I’d pull out my Art History books from grad school, we’d fire up the internet, and off we went.
Given that I got my BA in History from Duke, (with a double-major in Economics,) was an Art History TA at Pratt, and taught Art History at UNM-Taos for a year, the subject is well within my wheel house.
No matter the year, though, History always returns to the quest for power, wealth, and territory, all of which are often bundled together.
No matter where in the world you look, human history has been a tale of social groups competing.
When one power overthrows another, they often enact vengeance, or come to display the types of bad behavior they railed against in the first place.
(The French Revolution being a good example of that.)
The one part of History I’d always come back to, though, both with the kids, and at UNM-Taos, was the epochal change that began when sailors from the Iberian peninsula began the process of European colonization of Earth.
In the late 1400s.
(Columbus sailed the ocean blue in 14 hundred 92.)
It explains everything.
How those handful of societies in Europe conquered everywhere else.
Took their resources.
Exploited their people.
Or sometimes, as in the case of the African slave trade, actually took their people.
South America was mostly carved up by the Spaniards and Portuguese.
North America saw the English, Dutch, French, Spanish, and at one point Russians take turf.
Africa had French, English, Italian, German, Dutch, and Belgian invaders, and I’m sure I’m forgetting some.
Asia, more of the same.
Australia to the English.
And so on.
Like I said, it explains everything.
Over history, though, some groups never ended up with a place of their own.
Like the Roma. (Gypsies.)
Others, like the Kurds, still fight for statehood.
The Kosovars were the subject of a 90’s war, and then got their own territory.
As to the Jews, as everyone knows, we rebelled against the Roman Empire when they had colonized Israel, and were expelled from our home turf.
About 2000 years ago.
Most Jews ended up in Europe, (though not all,) and lived in segregated communities, always the minority where they settled.
Never absorbed into the main culture, except for in Germany, and we know how well that worked out.
That said, the result of the Holocaust was the colonial powers at the time, (mainly England,) allowed for the re-creation of a Jewish state in Israel.
As they’d partitioned India and Pakistan, (at a deathly cost,) they tried to partition Palestine, but a succession of wars put that idea to the sword.
(Pardon the violent metaphor.)
There are alternate versions of history in which Israel and Palestine exist concurrently, though it hasn’t happened so far in our reality.
But it needs to.
ASAP.
Because I’m so fucking sick of hearing the term settler-colonialist.
Please, make it stop.
If you want to come for the Jews for accepting a State in Israel, after 6 million of them were slaughtered by Hitler in the 1930’s and 40’s, then say what you must.
It happened.
They got their country.
They’re Israelis now.
And like the French peasants, (after their revolution,) the Israelis have not been kind, once they took power.
Israelis and Palestinians have fought for decades, and as I have written here, both sides have been awful on so many issues.
It’s not that hard to say.
Hamas sucks, and the Israeli Right wing government sucks.
The settler-colonialist shit sticks because the Right Wing Jews are actively colonizing the West Bank, and some openly covet re-colonizing Gaza. Displacing people and taking turf in 2024 is what Putin does.
It’s not OK.
(Prior Israeli settlements were abandoned when Ariel Sharon pulled Israel out of Gaza in 2005.)
The world is watching, and no one approves of this active colonizing.
Doing it, while starving the Gazans, is morally reprehensible.
As Hamas’s Oct 7th pogrom was morally reprehensible.
But Israel’s actions are provoking all these college kids, because it lines up with what they’ve been taught.
The (again) French theorists that have driven left-wing thought since the 70’s laid all this out, and the Israelis are making reality fit the mold.
So here goes the truth part:
Give up The West Bank.
Give up Gaza.
Let this coalition of wealthy Arab states rebuild, with a Pan-Arab guarantee of Israel’s border security.
Let these two societies live next to each other.
Israel and Palestine.
Each determining its own fate.
If they stay at war, it’s no different than what they have.
But the only path to true peace is for EACH historically disenfranchised people to have the right to self-determination.
Really, this shit is not so hard.
Sunshine and Olly 
Leave a comment