#Simon Sebag Montefiore | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

religion-is-a-mental-illness · 1 month

Text

By: Simon Sebag Montefiore

Published: Oct 27, 2023

Peace in the israel-palestine conflict had already been difficult to achieve before Hamas’s barbarous October 7 attack and Israel’s military response. Now it seems almost impossible, but its essence is clearer than ever: Ultimately, a negotiation to establish a safe Israel beside a safe Palestinian state.

Whatever the enormous complexities and challenges of bringing about this future, one truth should be obvious among decent people: killing 1,400 people and kidnapping more than 200, including scores of civilians, was deeply wrong. The Hamas attack resembled a medieval Mongol raid for slaughter and human trophies—except it was recorded in real time and published to social media. Yet since October 7, Western academics, students, artists, and activists have denied, excused, or even celebrated the murders by a terrorist sect that proclaims an anti-Jewish genocidal program. Some of this is happening out in the open, some behind the masks of humanitarianism and justice, and some in code, most famously “from the river to the sea,” a chilling phrase that implicitly endorses the killing or deportation of the 9 million Israelis. It seems odd that one has to say: Killing civilians, old people, even babies, is always wrong. But today say it one must.

How can educated people justify such callousness and embrace such inhumanity? All sorts of things are at play here, but much of the justification for killing civilians is based on a fashionable ideology, “decolonization,” which, taken at face value, rules out the negotiation of two states—the only real solution to this century of conflict—and is as dangerous as it is false.

I always wondered about the leftist intellectuals who supported Stalin, and those aristocratic sympathizers and peace activists who excused Hitler. Today’s Hamas apologists and atrocity-deniers, with their robotic denunciations of “settler-colonialism,” belong to the same tradition but worse: They have abundant evidence of the slaughter of old people, teenagers, and children, but unlike those fools of the 1930s, who slowly came around to the truth, they have not changed their views an iota. The lack of decency and respect for human life is astonishing: Almost instantly after the Hamas attack, a legion of people emerged who downplayed the slaughter, or denied actual atrocities had even happened, as if Hamas had just carried out a traditional military operation against soldiers. October 7 deniers, like Holocaust deniers, exist in an especially dark place.

The decolonization narrative has dehumanized Israelis to the extent that otherwise rational people excuse, deny, or support barbarity. It holds that Israel is an “imperialist-colonialist” force, that Israelis are “settler-colonialists,” and that Palestinians have a right to eliminate their oppressors. (On October 7, we all learned what that meant.) It casts Israelis as “white” or “white-adjacent” and Palestinians as “people of color.”

This ideology, powerful in the academy but long overdue for serious challenge, is a toxic, historically nonsensical mix of Marxist theory, Soviet propaganda, and traditional anti-Semitism from the Middle Ages and the 19th century. But its current engine is the new identity analysis, which sees history through a concept of race that derives from the American experience. The argument is that it is almost impossible for the “oppressed” to be themselves racist, just as it is impossible for an “oppressor” to be the subject of racism. Jews therefore cannot suffer racism, because they are regarded as “white” and “privileged”; although they cannot be victims, they can and do exploit other, less privileged people, in the West through the sins of “exploitative capitalism” and in the Middle East through “colonialism.”

This leftist analysis, with its hierarchy of oppressed identities—and intimidating jargon, a clue to its lack of factual rigor—has in many parts of the academy and media replaced traditional universalist leftist values, including internationalist standards of decency and respect for human life and the safety of innocent civilians. When this clumsy analysis collides with the realities of the Middle East, it loses all touch with historical facts.

Indeed, it requires an astonishing leap of ahistorical delusion to disregard the record of anti-Jewish racism over the two millennia since the fall of the Judean Temple in 70 C.E. After all, the October 7 massacre ranks with the medieval mass killings of Jews in Christian and Islamic societies, the Khmelnytsky massacres of 1640s Ukraine, Russian pogroms from 1881 to 1920—and the Holocaust. Even the Holocaust is now sometimes misconstrued—as the actor Whoopi Goldberg notoriously did—as being “not about race,” an approach as ignorant as it is repulsive.

Contrary to the decolonizing narrative, Gaza is not technically occupied by Israel—not in the usual sense of soldiers on the ground. Israel evacuated the Strip in 2005, removing its settlements. In 2007, Hamas seized power, killing its Fatah rivals in a short civil war. Hamas set up a one-party state that crushes Palestinian opposition within its territory, bans same-sex relationships, represses women, and openly espouses the killing of all Jews.

Very strange company for leftists.

Of course, some protesters chanting “from the river to the sea” may have no idea what they’re calling for; they are ignorant and believe that they are simply endorsing “freedom.” Others deny that they are pro-Hamas, insisting that they are simply pro-Palestinian—but feel the need to cast Hamas’s massacre as an understandable response to Israeli-Jewish “colonial” oppression. Yet others are malign deniers who seek the death of Israeli civilians.

The toxicity of this ideology is now clear. Once-respectable intellectuals have shamelessly debated whether 40 babies were dismembered or some smaller number merely had their throats cut or were burned alive. Students now regularly tear down posters of children held as Hamas hostages. It is hard to understand such heartless inhumanity. Our definition of a hate crime is constantly expanding, but if this is not a hate crime, what is? What is happening in our societies? Something has gone wrong.

In a further racist twist, Jews are now accused of the very crimes they themselves have suffered. Hence the constant claim of a “genocide” when no genocide has taken place or been intended. Israel, with Egypt, has imposed a blockade on Gaza since Hamas took over, and has periodically bombarded the Strip in retaliation for regular rocket attacks. After more than 4,000 rockets were fired by Hamas and its allies into Israel, the 2014 Gaza War resulted in more than 2,000 Palestinian deaths. More than 7,000 Palestinians, including many children, have died so far in this war, according to Hamas. This is a tragedy—but this is not a genocide, a word that has now been so devalued by its metaphorical abuse that it has become meaningless.

I should also say that Israeli rule of the Occupied Territories of the West Bank is different and, to my mind, unacceptable, unsustainable, and unjust. The Palestinians in the West Bank have endured a harsh, unjust, and oppressive occupation since 1967. Settlers under the disgraceful Netanyahu government have harassed and persecuted Palestinians in the West Bank: 146 Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem were killed in 2022 and at least 153 in 2023 before the Hamas attack, and more than 90 since. Again: This is appalling and unacceptable, but not genocide.

Although there is a strong instinct to make this a Holocaust-mirroring “genocide,” it is not: The Palestinians suffer from many things, including military occupation; settler intimidation and violence; corrupt Palestinian political leadership; callous neglect by their brethren in more than 20 Arab states; the rejection by Yasser Arafat, the late Palestinian leader, of compromise plans that would have seen the creation of an independent Palestinian state; and so on. None of this constitutes genocide, or anything like genocide. The Israeli goal in Gaza—for practical reasons, among others—is to minimize the number of Palestinian civilians killed. Hamas and like-minded organizations have made it abundantly clear over the years that maximizing the number of Palestinian casualties is in their strategic interest. (Put aside all of this and consider: The world Jewish population is still smaller than it was in 1939, because of the damage done by the Nazis. The Palestinian population has grown, and continues to grow. Demographic shrinkage is one obvious marker of genocide. In total, roughly 120,000 Arabs and Jews have been killed in the conflict over Palestine and Israel since 1860. By contrast, at least 500,000 people, mainly civilians, have been killed in the Syrian civil war since it began in 2011.)

If the ideology of decolonization, taught in our universities as a theory of history and shouted in our streets as self-evidently righteous, badly misconstrues the present reality, does it reflect the history of Israel as it claims to do? It does not. Indeed, it does not accurately describe either the foundation of Israel or the tragedy of the Palestinians.

According to the decolonizers, Israel is and always has been an illegitimate freak-state because it was fostered by the British empire and because some of its founders were European-born Jews.

In this narrative, Israel is tainted by imperial Britain’s broken promise to deliver Arab independence, and its kept promise to support a “national home for the Jewish people,” in the language of the 1917 Balfour Declaration. But the supposed promise to Arabs was in fact an ambiguous 1915 agreement with Sharif Hussein of Mecca, who wanted his Hashemite family to rule the entire region. In part, he did not receive this new empire because his family had much less regional support than he claimed. Nonetheless, ultimately Britain delivered three kingdoms—Iraq, Jordan, and Hejaz—to the family.

The imperial powers—Britain and France—made all sorts of promises to different peoples, and then put their own interests first. Those promises to the Jews and the Arabs during World War I were typical. Afterward, similar promises were made to the Kurds, the Armenians, and others, none of which came to fruition. But the central narrative that Britain betrayed the Arab promise and backed the Jewish one is incomplete. In the 1930s, Britain turned against Zionism, and from 1937 to 1939 moved toward an Arab state with no Jewish one at all. It was an armed Jewish revolt, from 1945 to 1948 against imperial Britain, that delivered the state.

Israel exists thanks to this revolt, and to international law and cooperation, something leftists once believed in. The idea of a Jewish “homeland” was proposed in three declarations by Britain (signed by Balfour), France, and the United States, then promulgated in a July 1922 resolution by the League of Nations that created the British “mandates” over Palestine and Iraq that matched French “mandates” over Syria and Lebanon. In 1947, the United Nations devised the partition of the British mandate of Palestine into two states, Arab and Jewish.

The carving of such states out of these mandates was not exceptional, either. At the end of World War II, France granted independence to Syria and Lebanon, newly conceived nation-states. Britain created Iraq and Jordan in a similar way. Imperial powers designed most of the countries in the region, except Egypt.

Nor was the imperial promise of separate homelands for different ethnicities or sects unique. The French had promised independent states for the Druze, Alawites, Sunnis, and Maronites but in the end combined them into Syria and Lebanon. All of these states had been “vilayets” and “sanjaks” (provinces) of the Turkish Ottoman empire, ruled from Constantinople, from 1517 until 1918.

The concept of “partition” is, in the decolonization narrative, regarded as a wicked imperial trick. But it was entirely normal in the creation of 20th-century nation-states, which were typically fashioned out of fallen empires. And sadly, the creation of nation-states was frequently marked by population swaps, huge refugee migrations, ethnic violence, and full-scale wars. Think of the Greco-Turkish war of 1921–22 or the partition of India in 1947. In this sense, Israel-Palestine was typical.

At the heart of decolonization ideology is the categorization of all Israelis, historic and present, as “colonists.” This is simply wrong. Most Israelis are descended from people who migrated to the Holy Land from 1881 to 1949. They were not completely new to the region. The Jewish people ruled Judean kingdoms and prayed in the Jerusalem Temple for a thousand years, then were ever present there in smaller numbers for the next 2,000 years. In other words, Jews are indigenous in the Holy Land, and if one believes in the return of exiled people to their homeland, then the return of the Jews is exactly that. Even those who deny this history or regard it as irrelevant to modern times must acknowledge that Israel is now the home and only home of 9 million Israelis who have lived there for four, five, six generations.

Most migrants to, say, the United Kingdom or the United States are regarded as British or American within a lifetime. Politics in both countries is filled with prominent leaders—Suella Braverman and David Lammy, Kamala Harris and Nikki Haley—whose parents or grandparents migrated from India, West Africa, or South America. No one would describe them as “settlers.” Yet Israeli families resident in Israel for a century are designated as “settler-colonists” ripe for murder and mutilation. And contrary to Hamas apologists, the ethnicity of perpetrators or victims never justifies atrocities. They would be atrocious anywhere, committed by anyone with any history. It is dismaying that it is often self-declared “anti-racists” who are now advocating exactly this murder by ethnicity.

Those on the left believe migrants who escape from persecution should be welcomed and allowed to build their lives elsewhere. Almost all of the ancestors of today’s Israelis escaped persecution.

If the “settler-colonist” narrative is not true, it is true that the conflict is the result of the brutal rivalry and battle for land between two ethnic groups, both with rightful claims to live there. As more Jews moved to the region, the Palestinian Arabs, who had lived there for centuries and were the clear majority, felt threatened by these immigrants. The Palestinian claim to the land is not in doubt, nor is the authenticity of their history, nor their legitimate claim to their own state. But initially the Jewish migrants did not aspire to a state, merely to live and farm in the vague “homeland.” In 1918, the Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann met the Hashemite Prince Faisal Bin Hussein to discuss the Jews living under his rule as king of greater Syria. The conflict today was not inevitable. It became so as the communities refused to share and coexist, and then resorted to arms.

Even more preposterous than the “colonizer” label is the “whiteness” trope that is key to the decolonization ideology. Again: simply wrong. Israel has a large community of Ethiopian Jews, and about half of all Israelis—that is, about 5 million people—are Mizrahi, the descendants of Jews from Arab and Persian lands, people of the Middle East. They are neither “settlers” nor “colonialists” nor “white” Europeans at all but inhabitants of Baghdad and Cairo and Beirut for many centuries, even millennia, who were driven out after 1948.

A word about that year, 1948, the year of Israel’s War of Independence and the Palestinian Nakba (“Catastrophe”), which in decolonization discourse amounted to ethnic cleansing. There was indeed intense ethnic violence on both sides when Arab states invaded the territory and, together with Palestinian militias, tried to stop the creation of a Jewish state. They failed; what they ultimately stopped was the creation of a Palestinian state, as intended by the United Nations. The Arab side sought the killing or expulsion of the entire Jewish community—in precisely the murderous ways we saw on October 7. And in the areas the Arab side did capture, such as East Jerusalem, every Jew was expelled.

In this brutal war, Israelis did indeed drive some Palestinians from their homes; others fled the fighting; yet others stayed and are now Israeli Arabs who have the vote in the Israeli democracy. (Some 25 percent of today’s Israelis are Arabs and Druze.) About 700,000 Palestinians lost their homes. That is an enormous figure and a historic tragedy. Starting in 1948, some 900,000 Jews lost their homes in Islamic countries and most of them moved to Israel. These events are not directly comparable, and I don’t mean to propose a competition in tragedy or hierarchy of victimhood. But the past is a lot more complicated than the decolonizers would have you believe.

Out of this imbroglio, one state emerged, Israel, and one did not, Palestine. Its formation is long overdue.

It is bizarre that a small state in the Middle East attracts so much passionate attention in the West that students run through California schools shouting “Free Palestine.” But the Holy Land has an exceptional place in Western history. It is embedded in our cultural consciousness, thanks to the Hebrew and Christian Bibles, the story of Judaism, the foundation of Christianity, the Quran and the creation of Islam, and the Crusades that together have made Westerners feel involved in its destiny. The British Prime Minister David Lloyd George, the real architect of the Balfour Declaration, used to say that the names of places in Palestine “were more familiar to me than those on the Western Front.” This special affinity with the Holy Land initially worked in favor of the Jewish return, but lately it has worked against Israel. Westerners eager to expose the crimes of Euro-American imperialism but unable to offer a remedy have, often without real knowledge of the actual history, coalesced around Israel and Palestine as the world’s most vivid example of imperialist injustice.

The open world of liberal democracies—or the West, as it used to be called—is today polarized by paralyzed politics, petty but vicious cultural feuds about identity and gender, and guilt about historical successes and sins, a guilt that is bizarrely atoned for by showing sympathy for, even attraction to, enemies of our democratic values. In this scenario, Western democracies are always bad actors, hypocritical and neo-imperialist, while foreign autocracies or terror sects such as Hamas are enemies of imperialism and therefore sincere forces for good. In this topsy-turvy scenario, Israel is a living metaphor and penance for the sins of the West. The result is the intense scrutiny of Israel and the way it is judged, using standards rarely attained by any nation at war, including the United States.

But the decolonizing narrative is much worse than a study in double standards; it dehumanizes an entire nation and excuses, even celebrates, the murder of innocent civilians. As these past two weeks have shown, decolonization is now the authorized version of history in many of our schools and supposedly humanitarian institutions, and among artists and intellectuals. It is presented as history, but it is actually a caricature, zombie history with its arsenal of jargon—the sign of a coercive ideology, as Foucault argued—and its authoritarian narrative of villains and victims. And it only stands up in a landscape in which much of the real history is suppressed and in which all Western democracies are bad-faith actors. Although it lacks the sophistication of Marxist dialectic, its self-righteous moral certainty imposes a moral framework on a complex, intractable situation, which some may find consoling. Whenever you read a book or an article and it uses the phrase “settler-colonialist,” you are dealing with ideological polemic, not history.

Ultimately, this zombie narrative is a moral and political cul-de-sac that leads to slaughter and stalemate. That is no surprise, because it is based on sham history: “An invented past can never be used,” wrote James Baldwin. “It cracks and crumbles under the pressures of life like clay.”

Even when the word decolonization does not appear, this ideology is embedded in partisan media coverage of the conflict and suffuses recent condemnations of Israel. The student glee in response to the slaughter at Harvard, the University of Virginia, and other universities; the support for Hamas amongst artists and actors, along with the weaselly equivocations by leaders at some of America’s most famous research institutions, have displayed a shocking lack of morality, humanity, and basic decency.

One repellent example was an open letter signed by thousands of artists, including famous British actors such as Tilda Swinton and Steve Coogan. It warned against imminent Israeli war crimes and totally ignored the casus belli: the slaughter of 1,400 people.

The journalist Deborah Ross wrote in a powerful Times of London article that she was “utterly, utterly floored” that the letter contained “no mention of Hamas” and no mention of the “kidnapping and murder of babies, children, grandparents, young people dancing peacefully at a peace festival. The lack of basic compassion and humanity, that’s what was so unbelievably flooring. Is it so difficult? To support and feel for Palestinian citizens … while also acknowledging the indisputable horror of the Hamas attacks?” Then she asked this thespian parade of moral nullities: “What does it solve, a letter like that? And why would anyone sign it?”

The Israel-Palestine conflict is desperately difficult to solve, and decolonization rhetoric makes even less likely the negotiated compromise that is the only way out.

Since its founding in 1987, Hamas has used the murder of civilians to spoil any chance of a two-state solution. In 1993, its suicide bombings of Israeli civilians were designed to destroy the two-state Oslo Accords that recognized Israel and Palestine. This month, the Hamas terrorists unleashed their slaughter in part to undermine a peace with Saudi Arabia that would have improved Palestinian politics and standard of life, and reinvigorated Hamas’s sclerotic rival, the Palestinian Authority. In part, they served Iran to prevent the empowering of Saudi Arabia, and their atrocities were of course a spectacular trap to provoke Israeli overreaction. They are most probably getting their wish, but to do this they are cynically exploiting innocent Palestinian people as a sacrifice to political means, a second crime against civilians. In the same way, the decolonization ideology, with its denial of Israel’s right to exist and its people’s right to live safely, makes a Palestinian state less likely if not impossible.

The problem in our countries is easier to fix: Civic society and the shocked majority should now assert themselves. The radical follies of students should not alarm us overmuch; students are always thrilled by revolutionary extremes. But the indecent celebrations in London, Paris, and New York City, and the clear reluctance among leaders at major universities to condemn the killings, have exposed the cost of neglecting this issue and letting “decolonization” colonize our academy.

Parents and students can move to universities that are not led by equivocators and patrolled by deniers and ghouls; donors can withdraw their generosity en masse, and that is starting in the United States. Philanthropists can pull the funding of humanitarian foundations led by people who support war crimes against humanity (against victims selected by race). Audiences can easily decide not to watch films starring actors who ignore the killing of children; studios do not have to hire them. And in our academies, this poisonous ideology, followed by the malignant and foolish but also by the fashionable and well intentioned, has become a default position. It must forfeit its respectability, its lack of authenticity as history. Its moral nullity has been exposed for all to see.

Again, scholars, teachers, and our civil society, and the institutions that fund and regulate universities and charities, need to challenge a toxic, inhumane ideology that has no basis in the real history or present of the Holy Land, and that justifies otherwise rational people to excuse the dismemberment of babies.

Israel has done many harsh and bad things. Netanyahu’s government, the worst ever in Israeli history, as inept as it is immoral, promotes a maximalist ultranationalism that is both unacceptable and unwise. Everyone has the right to protest against Israel’s policies and actions but not to promote terror sects, the killing of civilians, and the spreading of menacing anti-Semitism.

The Palestinians have legitimate grievances and have endured much brutal injustice. But both of their political entities are utterly flawed: the Palestinian Authority, which rules 40 percent of the West Bank, is moribund, corrupt, inept, and generally disdained—and its leaders have been just as abysmal as those of Israel.

Hamas is a diabolical killing sect that hides among civilians, whom it sacrifices on the altar of resistance—as moderate Arab voices have openly stated in recent days, and much more harshly than Hamas’s apologists in the West. “I categorically condemn Hamas’s targeting of civilians,” the Saudi veteran statesman Prince Turki bin Faisal movingly declared last week. “I also condemn Hamas for giving the higher moral ground to an Israeli government that is universally shunned even by half of the Israeli public … I condemn Hamas for sabotaging the attempt of Saudi Arabia to reach a peaceful resolution to the plight of the Palestinian people.” In an interview with Khaled Meshaal, a member of the Hamas politburo, the Arab journalist Rasha Nabil highlighted Hamas’s sacrifice of its own people for its political interests. Meshaal argued that this was just the cost of resistance: “Thirty million Russians died to defeat Germany,” he said.

Nabil stands as an example to Western journalists who scarcely dare challenge Hamas and its massacres. Nothing is more patronizing and even Orientalist than the romanticization of Hamas’s butchers, whom many Arabs despise. The denial of their atrocities by so many in the West is an attempt to fashion acceptable heroes out of an organization that dismembers babies and defiles the bodies of murdered girls. This is an attempt to save Hamas from itself. Perhaps the West’s Hamas apologists should listen to moderate Arab voices instead of a fundamentalist terror sect.

Hamas’s atrocities place it, like the Islamic State and al-Qaeda, as an abomination beyond tolerance. Israel, like any state, has the right to defend itself, but it must do so with great care and minimal civilian loss, and it will be hard even with a full military incursion to destroy Hamas. Meanwhile, Israel must curb its injustices in the West Bank—or risk destroying itself—because ultimately it must negotiate with moderate Palestinians.

So the war unfolds tragically. As I write this, the pounding of Gaza is killing Palestinian children every day, and that is unbearable. As Israel still grieves its losses and buries its children, we deplore the killing of Israeli civilians just as we deplore the killing of Palestinian civilians. We reject Hamas, evil and unfit to govern, but we do not mistake Hamas for the Palestinian people, whose losses we mourn as we mourn the death of all innocents.

In the wider span of history, sometimes terrible events can shake fortified positions: Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin made peace after the Yom Kippur War; Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat made peace after the Intifada. The diabolical crimes of October 7 will never be forgotten, but perhaps, in the years to come, after the scattering of Hamas, after Netanyahuism is just a catastrophic memory, Israelis and Palestinians will draw the borders of their states, tempered by 75 years of killing and stunned by one weekend’s Hamas butchery, into mutual recognition. There is no other way.

Simon Sebag Montefiore is the author of Jerusalem: The Biography and most recently The World: A Family History of Humanity.

Intersectionality and Postcolonial Theory have always been bogus and fraudulent, even just at the level of US society, where they were concocted by ignorant idiots and ideologues. The fact people are using them to interpret geopolitics - but not, for example, Syria or Nigeria - is idiotic and a failure of education. Or, more accurately, the capture and corruption of education, as this is not accidental.

11 notes · View notes

nicklloydnow · 6 months

Text

“Whatever the enormous complexities and challenges of bringing about this future, one truth should be obvious among decent people: killing 1,400 people and kidnapping more than 200, including scores of civilians, was deeply wrong. The Hamas attack resembled a medieval Mongol raid for slaughter and human trophies—except it was recorded in real time and published to social media. Yet since October 7, Western academics, students, artists, and activists have denied, excused, or even celebrated the murders by a terrorist sect that proclaims an anti-Jewish genocidal program. Some of this is happening out in the open, some behind the masks of humanitarianism and justice, and some in code, most famously “from the river to the sea,” a chilling phrase that implicitly endorses the killing or deportation of the 9 million Israelis. It seems odd that one has to say: Killing civilians, old people, even babies, is always wrong. But today say it one must.

Very strange company for leftists.

(…)

Those on the left believe migrants who escape from persecution should be welcomed and allowed to build their lives elsewhere. Almost all of the ancestors of today’s Israelis escaped persecution.

(…)

Since its founding in 1987, Hamas has used the murder of civilians to spoil any chance of a two-state solution. In 1993, its suicide bombings of Israeli civilians were designed to destroy the two-state Olso Accords that recognized Israel and Palestine. This month, the Hamas terrorists unleashed their slaughter in part to undermine a peace with Saudi Arabia that would have improved Palestinian politics and standard of life, and reinvigorated Hamas’s sclerotic rival, the Palestinian Authority. In part, they served Iran to prevent the empowering of Saudi Arabia, and their atrocities were of course a spectacular trap to provoke Israeli overreaction. They are most probably getting their wish, but to do this they are cynically exploiting innocent Palestinian people as a sacrifice to political means, a second crime against civilians. In the same way, the decolonization ideology, with its denial of Israel’s right to exist and its people’s right to live safely, makes a Palestinian state less likely if not impossible.

(…)

“The idea in this case is “settler colonialism,” a term that appears often in the pro-Hamas statements collected by the Anti-Defamation League. Various chapters of the Democratic Socialists of America have decried “settler-colonial, Zionist apartheid” and called to “decolonize Palestine—from the river to the sea,” a slogan that, by invoking the Jordan River and the Mediterranean, calls for the elimination of the state of Israel. Mondoweiss, an anti-Israel online publication, has called the Hamas attack “part of the Palestinians’ century-long struggle for liberation” from “Zionist/Israeli settler colonialism.”

Like all theoretical terms, “settler colonialism” can mean different things to different people. But most who use it would probably agree with the definition offered by Cornell Law School’s Legal Information Institute: “a system of oppression based on genocide and colonialism, that aims to displace a population of a nation (oftentimes indigenous people) and replace it with a new settler population.” The paradigm case is the European colonization of the Americas, where over centuries many indigenous peoples were displaced or killed as Europeans took their land.

(…)

What makes settler colonialism a potent political concept is that, as the Cornell definition says, it is “a system rather than a historical event.” In other words, the displacement of the indigenous population is not something that happened centuries ago but something that is still being perpetrated today, by all the non-indigenous inhabitants of the land and by the culture and institutions they have created.

The Southern Poverty Law Center makes this point clearly in its magazine Learning for Justice: “Understanding settler-colonialism means understanding that all non-Indigenous people are settler-colonizers, whether they were born here or not. Understanding settler-colonialism as both a historical position and a present-day practice helps students see how they fit into a settler-colonial system—and how that system shapes the impact of their actions, regardless of their intent.”

This principle makes today’s anticolonial ideology more radical than the anticolonial movements of the post-World War II era. At that time, national liberation struggles in Africa and Asia were directed mainly against European powers that did not settle the territories they ruled. When the Viet Minh fought the French in Vietnam, or the Congolese National Movement fought the Belgians in Congo, they wanted to reclaim national sovereignty from foreign rulers who had no connection to the country other than the right of conquest.

Freeing a settler-colonial society is a very different prospect, since it would presumably mean expelling many millions of people who were born in the land they are said to have colonized. Modern Jewish settlement in what is now Israel began in the 1880s, English settlement of North America in the 1600s. If the descendants of those first arrivals are still considered settlers in 2023, then the word no longer has its ordinary meaning. Instead it is a permanent, inheritable marker of guilt, like “bourgeois” as a class label in the Soviet Union.

Under the workers’ regime, a bourgeois was not a person who owned a certain amount of property, but anyone whose background indicated that they might be hostile to the working class. That put them outside the realm of moral concern, and they could be killed for any reason or none. The reaction of many anticolonial activists to the massacre of Israelis suggests that a similar logic is at work today.

Even advocates of anticolonial ideology know that there is no prospect of actually “decolonizing” the U.S. The most they hope for is symbolic expressions like Native American land acknowledgments, which have become standard practice at many academic and arts institutions. These statements are often historically ill-informed, but they are not really about historical facts. They advance a political thesis: that in a just world, every territory would be occupied only by the people who belong there.

Ironically, while anticolonialism conceives of itself as a progressive, left-wing ideology, this understanding of the relationship between people and land is similar to that of fascism, which was also obsessed with the categories of native and alien. The Nazi slogan “blood and soil” conveyed the idea that German land could only truly belong to its primeval inhabitants.

Anticolonialists would of course reject this analogy. But they are proudly indebted to Frantz Fanon, the Martinique-born French writer whose analysis of anticolonial struggle was born from the Algerian rebellion against French rule in the 1950s. For Fanon, a psychologist, anticolonial movements must be violent, not only because they lack other means of achieving their goals but because violence itself is redemptive and therapeutic. “The colonized man finds his freedom in and through violence,” Fanon wrote in his classic 1961 book “The Wretched of the Earth.” “For the colonized people this violence, because it constitutes their only work, invests their characters with positive and creative qualities.”

When Western sympathizers excuse or endorse the actions of Hamas, it is because they see it in these terms, as a liberation movement fighting a settler-colonial regime. And it is true that Hamas frames its struggle in terms of indigenous rights and redemptive violence—though sympathizers usually overlook the fact that it understands these things in religious fundamentalist terms, which are totally incompatible with other left-wing commitments like LGBTQ rights.

The group’s charter, adopted in 1988, declares that only Muslims are indigenous to the land that is now Israel, so Jews can never belong there: “The land of Palestine is an Islamic endowment consecrated for future Muslim generations until Judgment Day.” Likewise, it states that “peaceful solutions…are in contradiction to the principles of the Islamic Resistance Movement” and that “there is no solution for the Palestinian question except through Jihad.”

Hatred of settler colonialism, like hatred of capitalism among communist revolutionaries, believes that it is morally impeccable because it is grounded in genuinely moral instincts: indignation at violence and oppression, hope for freedom and equality. It seems perverse that such instincts should lead to approving the mass murder of children and the elderly.

But like other totalizing ideologies, anticolonialism contains all the elements needed for moral derangement: the permanent division of the world into innocent people and guilty people; the belief that history can be fixed once and for all, if violence is applied in the right way; the idea that the world is a battlefield and everyone is a combatant, whether they realize it or not.

Most observers of the conflict in Israel-Palestine, regardless of whose “side” they are on, don’t fall into these traps. But those who do are increasingly vocal—a bad sign for the future of peaceful coexistence, and not only in the Middle East.”

“Since the “decolonization” agenda is meant only to target Western nations and peoples, you rarely hear of the conquests and empire-building of the non-Western world, which is conveniently forgotten behind a narrative of pervasive victimization.

All of human history is a story of never-ending layers of conquest and defeat and of migration and exile. If it were to be undone, we’d need to extirpate almost all peoples everywhere, including those who are currently portrayed as the hopelessly oppressed.

The earliest phase of the seventh-century Arab expansion was truly explosive, and then it continued at a slower but still impressive clip.

Indeed, it is one of the most sweeping acts of conquest and successful exercises in colonialism in world history. This wasn’t the Mongols driving all before them and then receding to leave little in their trace, or the Normans getting absorbed into the England they conquered. No, the Arabs followed up their military conquest with a cultural imperialism still felt today.

The Arabs would gobble up Syria, Palestine, Egypt, and Mesopotamia. They chipped away at the Byzantine Empire and launched a no-kidding effort to conquer it wholesale that fell short after two epic sieges of Constantinople. They basically took all of the Persian empire. Eventually, they assembled an empire with the greatest territorial extent since the Romans, encompassing 80 percent of the population of the Middle East and North Africa and reaching to the south of France.

(…)

Its armies “appeared everywhere from central Asia, through the Middle East and north Africa, throughout the Visigothic Iberian Peninsula, and even into southern France.” Everywhere they conquered, they put in place “Islamic governments and introduced new ways of living, trading, learning, thinking, building, and praying.”

And of speaking and writing. The caliph Abd al-Malik imposed Arabic as the official language of the empire, an act of the highest cultural significance, since Arabic and Islam were so intertwined. “Arabization,” Jones writes, “was gradually followed by conversion across the Muslim-held territories—a shift that can still be seen, felt, and heard in almost every part of the old caliphate in the twenty-first century.”

Once they had Islam foisted on them, these territories, by and large, never went back, except in the cases of Spain, Portugal, and Sicily.

In the Levant, in particular, as the archaeologist and historian Alex Joffe writes, there was an imperial project that included bringing in new people. Settlers came of their own volition or were moved there by political authorities, Joffe notes, including Egyptians in the early 19th century and Chechens, Circassians, and Turkmen at the hands of the Ottomans later in the century.

A Hamas official once said, “Half of the Palestinians are Egyptians and the other half are Saudis.”

Should all this shuffling of population be reversed? Should the land conquered by the Arabs so long ago go back to the Byzantines or Persians, or their legatees? What do Ben and Jerry think?

Obviously, the decolonizers don’t care about any of this, or the fate of the Kurds, Assyrians, and Amazighs, peoples who have suffered more recently from the Arabization of the broader region.

What they really favor is another act of Arab colonization to eliminate the Jewish people, who must succumb, finally and completely, to the long tide of Islamization and Arabization “from the river to the sea.” This isn’t a principled adherence to the rights of indigenous people or a respect for ancient homelands, but Lenin’s notorious formulation, “who whom,” in a different context.”

#israel #gaza #hamas #palestine #war #antisemitism #anti zionisim #racism #wokeism #decolonisation #montefiore #simon sebag montefiore #Lowry #rich lowry #settler colonialism #fanon #franz fanon #marx #karl marx

9 notes · View notes

veryslowreader · 2 years

Photo

Young Stalin by Simon Sebag Montefiore

The Sex Lives of College Girls: "Le Tuteur"

#young stalin #simon sebag montefiore #the sex lives of college girls #amrit kaur

10 notes · View notes

miskeit · 2 months

Text

Monarchia jednak przypominała tort weselny z misternie co prawda zdobioną polewą, ale pusty w środku. Było to samowładztwo bez samowładcy.

— Simon Sebag Montefiore

#simon sebag montefiore

0 notes

lesparaversdemillina · 2 years

Text

Sashenka de Simon MONTEFIORE

Vous l’aurez compris, je me suis lancée dans ce beau pavé avec très peu d’attentes et surtout l’idée que j’allais être dépaysée. J’étais encore loin de me douter que ce livre malgré ces petits nuages est un beau gros coup de cœur.

NE LIRE QUE LES HUIT PREMIERES LIGNES ! Fragment en guise de mise en bouche : « Personne n’avait jamais parlé à Sashenka comme le faisait Mendel. Sa mère voulait faire d’elle une bécasse qui gaspillerait sa vie en bals mondains, en mariages désastreux et adultères minables. Quant à son père, elle l’adorait mais il remarquait à peine son « petit isatis » et ne la considérait au mieux que comme…

View On WordPress

#Appréciation #éditions pocket #coup de coeur #Histoire #révolution #Russie #Sashenka #Simon Sebag Montefiore

0 notes

legasovas · 1 month

Text

My Peseach book haul 2024 💜

3 notes · View notes

boyswanna-be-her · 2 years

Text

i SO wish bland cishet white men were capable of writing a nonfiction book without constantly making it about them and their experience

#except for you simon sebag montefiore!!!! i love u boo

6 notes · View notes

hero-israel · 3 months

Text

I tremendously appreciate everyone who is taking this opportunity to learn more about the Jewish people, our history, and how we withstand the threats we have faced - then and now.

Multiple good sources here.

If you already like Bassem Eid, consider Khaled Abu Toameh.

Histories of Arab and Muslim antisemitism can be found in "The Dhimmi" by Bat Ye'or and "In Ishmael's House" by Martin Gilbert.

"Jerusalem: The Biography," by Simon Sebag Montefiore - one of the very best books I have ever read, on any subject

"Six Days of War," by Michael Oren

Everything by Benny Morris (especially "Righteous Victims")

Everything by Tom Segev (especially "One Palestine, Complete" and "The Seventh Million")

Everything by Einat Wilf (especially "The War of Return")

"Empire of Refugees" - Ottoman colonialism

I invite other readers to post their own suggestions in replies / reblogs.

#book recommendations #jumblr

277 notes · View notes

inky-duchess · 4 months

Note

Hello !

If you don't mind me asking,can you recommend some books that you have read that bettered your knowledge of historical things and such and at the same time were interesting?

These are just a few, Im not near my bookshelves at the moment so these are the ones I could remember.

Sex with Kings by Eleanor Herman

Sex with the Queen by Eleanor Herman

Royal Art of Poison by Eleanor Herman

Love and Louis XIV by Antonia Fraser

Marie Antoinette by Antonia Fraser

Charles II by Antonia Fraser

Six Wives of Henry VIII by Antonia Fraser

Dynasty by Tom Holland

SPQR by Mary Beard

Crusaders by Dan Jones

The Hollow Crown by Dan Jones

Game of Queens by Sarah Gristwood

The Royal Wardrobe by Rosie Harte

Do Let's Have Another Drink by Gareth Russell

Young Damned and Fair by Gareth Russell

Four Sisters by Helen Rapport

After the Romanovs by Helen Rapport

The Romanovs by Simon Montefiore Sebag

#ask answered

79 notes · View notes

deadpresidents · 5 months

Note

Are there any specific historical figures that you wish there was a better all out biography about it? For example I know there are millions of books about Sir Winston Churchill but I have never found one that I feel stands out (also if you know of one please let me know!!!!!!) Same with stalin

I actually do think that Churchill and Stalin have definitive biographies that stand out amongst the scores of books written about them.

William Manchester's The Last Lion trilogy is the best biography I've read about Churchill. The entire trilogy is available in a boxed set (BOOK | KINDLE). The individual volumes that make up the trilogy are: •The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill: Visions of Glory, 1874-1932 (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO) •The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill: Alone, 1932-1940 (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO) •The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill: Defender of the Realm, 1940-1965 (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO) -- The third and final volume of the biography was finished after William Manchester died by Paul Reid, using much of Manchester's research and prep work. While one author stepping in to finish the work of another can sometimes be an issue, Reid's work and writing blends seamlessly with Manchester's.

As for Stalin, I think that Simon Sebag Montefiore's Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO) is the best single-volume biography published about the Soviet leader. Stephen Kotkin's two-volume biography on Stalin -- Stalin: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928 (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO), and Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929-1941 (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO) -- is excellent and also stands out amongst other books about Stalin's life.

When it comes to some other historical figures that I think are in dire need of new, updated, deeply-researched, definitive biographies, I think number one on my list would be Fidel Castro. It's not that there aren't any books written Fidel (or any other historical figures I mention), it's just that I don't feel like there's been a full-fledged, great biography yet written about them. I have a bunch of books about Fidel, but I think the most recent one was written in the mid-1980s. I also would be interested in a better biography of Saddam Hussein. Con Coughlin wrote a pretty good book about Saddam, but the most up-to-date edition of the book was published shortly after Saddam was captured and before he was tried and executed. I imagine that there's a significant amount of new information and research from the past 20 years that could go into a definitive Saddam biography.

I've also been waiting for years for a good biography about Muammar Qaddafi. All the books I have about Qaddafi are from the 80s when he was Ronald Reagan's nemesis as the "mad dog of the Middle East". None of those books cover his attempt to normalize relations with the West after 9/11 when he was seemingly scared straight by what happened to Saddam, and then his epic downfall during the Arab Spring and Libyan Revolution, when his convoy was bombed by NATO as he tried to flee his crumbling country and he ended up being brutally killed by the people he had terrorized for 40 years after they found him cowering in a drainage ditch with his gold-plated gun. Qaddafi was such a weird and fascinating character that I'm shocked that there haven't been more documentaries about him. Honestly, if I still knew how to write, I'd absolutely write a book or film about Qaddafi. Unfortunately, I forgot how to write somewhere around 2014 or 2015.

#Biographies #Definitive Biographies #Winston Churchill #Joseph Stalin #Stalin #William Manchester #Simon Sebag Montefiore #Stephen Kotkin #Saddam Hussein #Saddam #Muammar Qaddafi #Qaddafi #Fidel Castro #Cuba #The Last Lion

12 notes · View notes

princesscatherinemiddleton · 17 days

Text

Catherine and Pippa Middleton attend the book launch party of The Young Stalin: The Adventurous Early Life Of The Dictator 1878-1917 by Simon Sebag Montefiore at Asprey | May 14 2007

#mine #royaltyedit #kate #pippa #kate and pippa #pre 2011 #stalin

14 notes · View notes

religion-is-a-mental-illness · 6 months

Text

By: Simon Sebag Montefiore

Published: Oct 27, 2023

Very strange company for leftists.

According to the decolonizers, Israel is and always has been an illegitimate freak-state because it was fostered by the British empire and because some of its founders were European-born Jews.

Those on the left believe migrants who escape from persecution should be welcomed and allowed to build their lives elsewhere. Almost all of the ancestors of today’s Israelis escaped persecution.

Out of this imbroglio, one state emerged, Israel, and one did not, Palestine. Its formation is long overdue.

One repellent example was an open letter signed by thousands of artists, including famous British actors such as Tilda Swinton and Steve Coogan. It warned against imminent Israel war crimes and totally ignored the casus belli: the slaughter of 1,400 people.

The Israel-Palestine conflict is desperately difficult to solve, and decolonization rhetoric makes even less likely the negotiated compromise that is the only way out.

Since its founding in 1987, Hamas has used the murder of civilians to spoil any chance of a two-state solution. In 1993, its suicide bombings of Israeli civilians were designed to destroy the two-state Olso Accords that recognized Israel and Palestine. This month, the Hamas terrorists unleashed their slaughter in part to undermine a peace with Saudi Arabia that would have improved Palestinian politics and standard of life, and reinvigorated Hamas’s sclerotic rival, the Palestinian Authority. In part, they served Iran to prevent the empowering of Saudi Arabia, and their atrocities were of course a spectacular trap to provoke Israeli overreaction. They are most probably getting their wish, but to do this they are cynically exploiting innocent Palestinian people as a sacrifice to political means, a second crime against civilians. In the same way, the decolonization ideology, with its denial of Israel’s right to exist and its people’s right to live safely, makes a Palestinian state less likely if not impossible.

Hamas’s atrocities place it, like the Islamic State and al-Qaeda, as an abomination beyond tolerance. Israel, like any state, has the right to defend itself, but it must do so with great care and minimal civilian loss, and it will be hard even with a full military incursion to destroy Hamas. Meanwhile, Israel must curb its injustices in the West Bank—or risk destroying itself— because ultimately it must negotiate with moderate Palestinians.

The current moment is what happens when you get your information from courses ending in "Studies."

#Simon Sebag Montefiore #Israel #Hamas #Palestine #islam #jihad #islamic terrorism #terrorist organizations #religion #decolonization #decolonize palestine #decolonize #decolonise palestine #defund gender studies #religion is a mental illness

18 notes · View notes

nicklloydnow · 6 months

Text

“Josef Stalin oversaw the death of thousands of Georgians. Of the 38,679 named in Stalin’s lists who were to be shot or imprisoned from 1937-1938, 3,485 were from Georgia. That was more than any other Soviet republic, aside from the Russian and Ukrainian republics (both of which had millions more than the tiny Caucasian nation). And that purge was primarily of political personas; we do not know how many others were killed in Georgia throughout his reign. He destroyed both the Georgian intelligentsia and the traditional Georgian peasantry, replacing the former with elites permitted by the government and the latter with industry. He wanted to bring Georgia—the country in which he was born—to heel. And so he did.

And yet, sixty years ago this week, Georgians took to the street to protest Nikita Khrushchev’s policy of moving away from Stalin’s cult of personality—of disentangling the Soviet Union from the man who was synonymous with it. Sixty years ago today, tanks and troops bloodily dispersed the crowd. To this day, nobody knows exactly how many were killed.

Why would a people that had been crushed by a man risk their lives to defend his memory? There are several theories. Some say that Georgians were (and are) proud that Stalin had been one of them. Others argue that the protest was less for Stalin and more against Soviet rule—who, exactly, was Nikita Khrushchev to tell Georgians in whom to believe?

Here is another: Georgians took to the streets in part because a cult of personality is just that. A cult. And cults are not so easy to leave. They protested for the same reason that people across the Soviet Union wept openly and wondered how they would live without their leader on news of his death.

(…)

And it is perhaps also worth remembering that the reverse is true, too: that cults of personality of individuals cannot exist without the support of millions who watch the news uncritically and choose not to think of the people unlike (or, perhaps, like) themselves who are hurt by those in power. That even people who take power do not simply take power. It is always, to some extent, given to them. Or at least left to them.” - Why Georgians Protested for Stalin

“Inspired by historian Simon Sebag Montefiore’s theory of there being “two Stalins” – the “Koba” of his Georgian youth and the larger-than-life Soviet dictator – Japaridze defines a third Stalin, a fluid figure existing in the minds of post-Soviet generations, viewed through the prism of nostalgia. This third iteration of Stalin continues to hinder efforts by those living in the post-Soviet space to reckon with the dictator’s record of repression, in particular his use of terror to advance his policy priorities.

(…)

TJ: Once the Soviet Union collapsed, the legacies continued to live on unaddressed and some continued to take pride in certain aspects that are extremely problematic. …

I think it was very easy for many in the Soviet era to position themselves as victims, because they did not want to deal with the notion of guilt and what their role had been, even as bystanders. And I think we are seeing that in Russia today, where many people continue to be quiet because they say, “I’m going to end up in jail and my family is going to end up in trouble.” I genuinely wonder if 30 years from now, those arguments are going to stand the test of time.

I feel more empathy for those who were silent (during the Soviet Union) because they also did not have the same platforms that exist today. I have struggled to maintain some friendships in Russia with people that I know are wonderful people, and I do understand to a degree why they are silent. But it is very difficult for me to understand when I see their social media feeds. They were partying it up in the weeks and months following the start of the war.

How are those relationships we once had going to survive the war? What about those (Ukrainian) civilians who went to bed at night and never woke up? And meanwhile, we are talking about the hottest restaurant in Moscow. I am not trying to say that I am a better person, but I think there is just a certain level of morality that is completely out of whack. And yes, we can put the blame on the Russian authorities. But this is not just Putin’s war. It is also about many of the Russian people who continue to be silent.

When all is said and done on the battlefield, Ukrainians and Russians will have to coexist, to live with that trauma, for decades to come. It is been over 30 years since the collapse of the Soviet Union, and we still have not even touched the tip of the iceberg in terms of repairing the damage that was done. So, if we do not start addressing the current issues soon, I do not know if we will be able to engage with each other.

The Russians’ trauma is going to pale next to what Ukrainians are going through. Their children will have to deal with what their parents did or did not do. Russia is going to wake up to a very difficult reality one day.

(…)

We will have to re-engage with them probably sooner than many would like to think. If nothing else, because of the sheer size of the country, its natural resources. … I think numbers will eventually speak louder than words. It is difficult to ignore Russia, the Russian authorities know it and have taken advantage of it. But the timeline for Russian isolation turned out to be a lot longer than the Russian authorities thought. And we can wean Western countries off Russian commodities to a certain degree, but at some point, those conversations will need to happen. It will take decades.

(…)

The majority of Georgians are siding with Ukrainians and condemning Russia, because they remember what it was like being invaded by Russia in 2008. But even back then, there was a certain polarization among the people that has persisted. As for the Georgian government, it has been sending very mixed signals. I admire the Ukrainians for having come together. One of the goals of the Putin regime was to break the Ukrainian identity and weaken the nation at its core. I think the Georgian people have been weakened much more than the Ukrainians over the years by disinformation, polarization. Russia can then take advantage of it. We are still in this process of trying to unify as a nation. I was very glad to see how the country came together [to oppose] the Russian [-style] foreign agent law in March. Fortunately, people stood up, young people stood up. I hope that we will be able to learn from our Ukrainian friends.

(…)

I was one of the Georgians that initially said, “We cannot turn the Russians away. They escaped the Putin regime.” I am, by the way, a Georgian that went to Russia in 1993 as a kid with my family during the Civil War in Georgia, and Russians welcomed me. So, yes, on the one hand, I am grateful and I have not forgotten the good and the kindness and the warmth that I got from Russians when I moved there and escaped the war in Georgia. But on the other hand, I think it is the behavior that many Georgians find very problematic. Many Russians act like Georgia is still one of their provinces and Georgians should make them feel at home because at the end of the day, they are kind of still at home. And that is very, very difficult for Georgians to deal with. They do not act as guests. And I think that will change Georgia as a country that was often applauded for being a fantastic host. Hospitality has been one of our national sources of pride. … I think a host nation should be treated as a host, and guests should remember, even if they are there for a long time, that they are guests and not occupiers.” - Q&A with Georgian author Tinatin Japaridze

#stalin #stalinism #communism #soviet #russia #georgia #ukraine #montefiore #simon sebag montefiore #koba #japaridze #emily talkin

1 note · View note