Yves here. Richard Wolff gives a new vantage on settler colonialism as practiced by Israel through the lens of being descended from Holocaust survivors and victims and having made colonialism the subject of his dissertation. Wolff based on his research is optimistic that the Palestinians will eventually prevail. I am not so sure. Past colonialists either displaced the original population (see the US with Native Americans) or exploited them as a labor force. Israel is determined to exterminate Palestinians if it cannot succeed in ethnic cleansing. It’s not clear which timeline will move faster: the Israel destruction of Palestinians or Israel’s self-destruction.
By Richard D. Wolff, professor of economics emeritus at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and a visiting professor in the Graduate Program in International Affairs of the New School University, in New York. Wolff’s weekly show, “Economic Update,” is syndicated by more than 100 radio stations and goes to millions via several TV networks and YouTube. His most recent book with Democracy at Work is Understanding Capitalism (2024), which responds to requests from readers of his earlier books: >Understanding Socialism and Understanding Marxism. Produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute
My birth emerged from European capitalism’s fascistic catastrophe in the 1920s–1940s. That catastrophe also produced Israel’s experiment with settler colonialism in Palestine. This article refers to both these incidents to analyze the current Palestine-Israel catastrophe.
My reasons or qualifications to write such an article start with the fact that my maternal grandmother and grandfather were killed at the Nazis’ Mauthausen concentration camp. My father’s sister was killed in Auschwitz. My mother and her sister spent years in different concentration camps. Because of these events, my parents fled Europe and started a family in the United States. Like some other descendants of victims who witnessed such atrocities, I have tried to understand their victimization and the complex effects this had on my life directly and indirectly.
Descendants differ in their responses to what happened. Some turn inward seeking safety in a survival-focused disengagement from the larger world and its history. Some try for comfort by believing that part or all of the world has moved beyond the conditions that produced fascism’s victimizations. Some suffer long-simmering mixtures of impotence, rage, and fear that it will happen again. Among them are those who fight fascism wherever they see it reemerge and also those who perpetrate further cycles of victimization against others. Still others try to work out an understanding by writing articles and books.
Israel tried to operate settler colonialism on the pattern of earlier European settler colonialisms established around the world. That effort linked to me indirectly in a remarkably personal way. Without grasping why, I chose to participate in a program for Harvard and Radcliffe undergraduates that took 20 of us to East Africa in the early 1960s as volunteers for a summer of teaching. I began to learn there what settler colonialism meant. Further studies grew into my doctoral dissertation later at Yale based on research in the records of London’s Colonial Office and the British Museum. My resulting book, The Economics of Colonialism: Britain and Kenya, 1870–1930(New Haven, Yale University Press, 1974), tried to analyze Kenya’s settler colonialist economy.
Britain had expelled the native population and reserved the nation’s fertile highlands for a few thousand of its white émigrés. In addition to land and police protection, Britain provided its émigrés with coffee seeds, transport, and a market to operate a Kenya-grown coffee export economy. The millions of Kenyan Blacks forcibly relocated into constricted reservations found them to be inadequate to sustain their lives. Their survival thus required them to do low-wage labor on the coffee plantations of the white settlers. Taxes on those low wages helped finance the British colonial government that enforced a ruthlessly exploitative settler colonial system. This economic and racialized apartness in Kenya paralleled the better-known apartheid in South Africa.
Such economic systems provoke constant resistance ranging from desperate individual and small group acts to mass movements to organized rebellions. These acts of resistance occurred in Kenya, South Africa, and elsewhere too. Britain routinely repressed them. In Kenya, eventually, organizers gathered around Jomo Kenyatta and mobilized the so-called Kenya Land and Freedom Army to rebel. Their fight widely came to be known as the 1950s Mau Mau uprising against the British government. That uprising’s death counts included 63 British military officers, 33 settlers, more than 1,800 native policemen and auxiliary soldiers, and the widely held guesstimate of more than 11,000 Kenyan rebels. The British repressed the rebellion, imprisoned Kenyatta, and loudly declared victory.
Britain’s victory, however, sounded the death knell for its Kenya colony. Mau Mau showed the British the rising levels of resistance and rebellion they would face indefinitely from the settler colonies they had created. British politicians saw these as mushrooming costs of the colonies they could not afford. Since the end of World War II, European colonialisms had been dissolving almost everywhere. British leaders could not escape accommodating the historical reality. Shortly after Mau Mau, Britain acknowledged Kenya’s national independence, freed Kenyatta, and accepted him as Kenya’s new leader. Independence ended Kenya’s settler colonialism.
The Kenya lesson in settler colonialism deeply impacted British leaders but proved one that Israeli leaders refused to learn from. Given the particular histories of Zionism and European Jews, most Israeli leaders were determined to impose settler colonialism on the Palestinian people and to preserve it by force.
Israeli leaders’ declaration of independence in May 1948 provoked immediate Palestinian and Arab resistance that has continued to this moment. Mass movements and broad rebellions have punctuated that resistance and enjoyed increasing external support (from Arab, Islamic, and other sources). The demise of previous European settler colonialisms left a legacy of immense difficulties for Israeli efforts to erect and sustain another.
One crucial aspect of their response to those difficulties was to form an alliance with a world power that could help defend its settler colonialism. The resulting close alliance with the United States positioned Israel as its front-line agent in the Middle East, the United States’s dominant military extension to where major global energy resources were located. Undercutting Israel’s early socialist, collectivist, and kibbutzim components was facilitated by the alliance with the United States. Most Zionist leaders willingly paid the price of this alliance. Another price was Israel’s military, economic, and political dependence on the United States. Finally, Israeli leaders cultivated strong cultural and family connections to financially and politically influential partner communities inside the U.S. and Europe. In these ways, Israeli leaders hoped that settler colonialism might survive and grow despite many examples in history that proved otherwise.
For some decades it seemed, to many inside and outside Israel, that its leaders’ strategy and connections might secure its settler colonialism. But then what happened in Kenya began to repeat itself in Israel (each in different conditions). Palestinians resisted, mass movements followed, and finally, powerful, organized rebellions arose. Israeli victories over each in turn proved to be mere preludes to later, higher forms of opposition with ever more global support. Israeli victories resembled those achieved by their British counterparts in Kenya.
It is equally clear now in Israel and Palestine that the prospect of endless warfare into the future is going to likely cost ever more lives and injuries, physical and psychical damages, and economic and political losses. The victims who survived Israel’s extreme violence in Gaza are already surfacing more motivated, better trained, and with more effective weapons to take up their fight. The children of those victims will likewise include many determined to end Israel’s settler colonialism.
History, and now time itself, is on the Palestinians’ side. Even a staunch Israeli supporter like former Secretary of State Antony Blinken had to admit a stark reality (although he neither admitted its historic meaning nor its political implications). He said, “Indeed, we assess that Hamas has recruited almost as many new militants as it has lost. That is a recipe for an enduring insurgency and perpetual war.”
Britain’s dying empire forced its acceptance of Kenya’s independence in 1963 and the end of its settler colonialism. The current decline of the United States empire is forcing something similar in Israel. After the latest and the worst Gaza war, Israel’s crucial ally is inching closer to the conclusion Britain reached in Kenya after the Mau Mau uprising.
For growing numbers of United States leaders, the risks and costs of its alliance with Israel are rising faster than the benefits. Many have been persuaded, including United States citizens, that providing Israel with funds and weapons rendered the United States “complicit in a genocide” and, therefore, isolated globally. The ceasefire imposed by Donald Trump has followed. Whether and how it functions and how Israel resists and evades the ongoing criticism will matter far less than the more basic trajectory underway now. History suggests that Benjamin Netanyahu or his successors will eventually be disconnected from the United States. Their lost alliance will hasten the end of Israel’s settler colonialism.
Israel has deeply parasitized the Executive and Legislative branches of our government, and will continue to do so for years to come. The Palestinians will be exterminated and condemning that act will be seen as antisemitism, with a threat to one’s job and livelihood. America, the brain-dead giant, like a helpless tarantula, devoured from within.
Israel has deeply parasitized the Executive and Legislative branches of our government
I would add other institutions as well. Douglas Macgregor doesn’t strike me as someone who is prone to hyperbole, on Judge Napolitano’s program yesterday he stated that Netanyahu is in the:
driver’s seat because without enormous
2:19
support from Mr netanyahu’s agents in
2:23
the United States who are very very
2:25
wealthy I doubt seriously that President
2:28
Trump would be in the White House
The implication is that Trump is in effect a Manchurian President wholly subserviently to Israel and their “agents” in this country. This doesn’t seem to trouble Trump supporters, whose disgust with the Democrats and Biden I sympathize with, but troubles me deeply in light of the ongoing genocide and the back peddling on Ukraine.
https://www.youtube.com/live/Oowabedqnks?si=_sbSM5Ey07IMYtae
The quid pro quos continue…
https://www.thenation.com/article/world/trump-israel-collusion/
The Palestinians were rebelling against colonialism long before 1948 – there were rebellions against the Ottomans https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_Revolt the British leveraged, then the Zionists during the British Mandate in the 30s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1936%E2%80%931939_Arab_revolt_in_Palestine.
The Palestinian revolt of 1834 was before all of these.
?? So one has to go to Africa to see “settler colonialism” first-hand? One can’t see first-hand the aftermath and adverse effects of “settler” (more correctly, “invader”) colonialism by looking around Boston (or New York or even Lower Jemseg)? I’m a long-time fan of Richard Wolff, but the best I can say here is that he shares the blindness of pretty much everyone I know . . .
I know it’s not your intention, but this is an argument made by defenders of Israel. The reality is that Israel is far more exterminationist than the US ever was. In the end, the work if genocide was largely done through coerced assimilation in the US. In Israel, that is not possible. They are also displacing an urban people; the lands stolen from the Palestinians are smaller than the reservations in the US, making it all the more impossible for Palestinians to have anywhere to survive in.
Also, point to the episode in US domestic history that comes close to what has happened in Gaza since October 7. You have to go to WWII or the Middle Ages to find parallels.
Actually, it’s apples & oranges: Natives had access to rifles (as opposed to colonial militia’s muskets), frequent assistance of French, Irish or German adopted, captured or escaped colonials & slaves (the Girtys, Johnson, McKee, Croghan, Weiser). But, it was mostly indentured sod-busters pushed west of Carlisle, then down the Ohio after Pontiac’s War. Before that, the Senecas fear of contagious disease. All of this was documented by disinterested folks without any ax to grind. Makes it clear: Washington was ALL about Amherst’s wish to “..extirpate this exorable race.” Until they were needed, to fight as mercenaries? If they’d Apaches with chain-guns, cluster munitions, Lavender & Where’s Daddy, they would’ve been unable to import refugees & slaves quickly enough?
Richard Wolff seems hopelessly optimistic, verging on irritatingly insouciant.
Settler colonialism succeeded in North America.
Implicit in the article is that the emergence of an independent Kenyan state might be repeated in the Middle East, but there is no way that there can be even a one or two generational establishment of a two state solution in the Levant, nor does Wolff suggest any timescale for resolution.
There is no hint at what any long term peaceful solution to Levantine problems might look like, as it cannot be a fragmented Palestine under total IDF control in both West Bank and Gaza, as a client sub-state of Israel.
Nor were their any religious claims to absolute god given property rights from the Euphrates to the Nile, such as underpins Zionism, in East Africa. The British Empire might have called upon God for justification, but the main motive was trading supremacy.
Extreme Zionism is currently considerably emboldened, and the mindset of the visceral hatred of Palestinians as sub-human has been the subject of deliberate Israeli state propaganda for decades, to reinforce and justify the brutality of their apartheid regime to the Israeli general public.
How can peaceful co-existence emerge from this hate generating propaganda regime ?
Kenya is not really a good comparator. Nor does the decline of the British Empire provide a valid model for the establishment of a two state solution in the Levant.
Kenya was never a police state with an open door policy for settlement by Jews anywhere in the world.
Nor was there a surrounding hostile and well armed group of nations threatening the very existence of the settlers and forced a form of nationalistic statism that requires a permanently fully militarised general public on high alert.
Post the Oslo failures, the progressive weakening of the left in Israel, (not that left-right duality has ever prevented prejudice), has frozen any meaningful development in two state options since the assasssination of Rabin, himself hardly a moderate, but notably … killed by a far right Zionist.
That spirit of Jabotinsky, first active and emerging in Wolff’s parental home area in Eastern Europe, is very powerful in sustaining the “divine right” mindset and militant insurrectionism. There will always be a violent Zionist push back against anything less than the total conquering of the area perceived to be Greater Israel that will sadly prevent the emergence of an independent self governed Palestine.
The final wrecking ball is the damage four years of Trump v2.0 might do internationally, let alone in global trouble spots like the Middle East.
My father served in Palestine 1946-48, prior to his post war demobilisation. Ostensibly this was to over see the peaceful immigration of European Jews and prevent their brutalisation. In practice it worked out that the Brits ended up defending themselves against the Zionist terror gangs, and had to protect the Palestinian villagers from kind of killing sprees that the Nazis had perpetrated against the Jews in Poland barely five years earlier. Only connect.
Kenya was never a police state
Oh, but it was, just like every other colony. Search for “kipande”.
Please get the quote right.
“Kenya was never a police state with an open door policy for settlement by Jews anywhere in the world.”
Yes, we all know how repressive British rule was in the colonial era.
The context is crucial.
So that “open door” must mean Jewish people from around the world are crowding onto the self described “lifeboat” with a resulting need for the territory of their neighbors.
The reality of course is that has never been true and today–with world population having ballooned to 8 billion–there are about 9 1/2 million Jewish citizens with and estimate this may expand to 15 million by 2048. If demographics are destiny then Israelis are on the wrong side of history. Israel as a purely Jewish state is not much bigger than South Carolina.
Israel and the US are both settler colonial states but that’s where the comparison ends. And the above article is spot on.
The other point to make about Kenya is that the settler population never accounted for more than a trace element: by 1945 it was a mere 23,000 out of a population of 5.2m. In Southern Rhodesia by contrast, when the European population was at its height (1975), it was only about 300,000 out of 6.1m.
Moreover, the European population in Kenya was concentrated overwhelmingly in the Highlands. During the Mau Mau period, the Highland Europeans were especially ferocious in promoting the Draconian policies of Evelyn Baring’s administration, perhaps because of their concentration in that region, but the lowland Europeans (led by Michael Blundell) were much more accommodating of nationalist opinion, as they had to be because of their comparative scarcity. Thus, when Kenyatta gained power, his ire was directed at the former, but definitely not at the latter (whom he perceived as soi-disant allies).
Moreover, as long ago as 1923, the British government had put the Europeans in Kenya on notice that in any contest between African and European interests, African interests would prevail. This was the Devonshire Declaration (or white paper), strongly informed by Frederick Lugard, who felt that it was simply implausible to expect that such a vast majority of Africans would accept perpetual subjection and eviction at the hands of such a small minority of Europeans. This was an abrupt reversal of the colonisation policies applied so aggressively by past British proconsuls in Kenya, such as Charles Eliot, or promoted even as late as 1919 by Alfred Milner. Indeed, it was Eliot (incidentally an outstanding polymath and polyglot, whose ‘Turkey in Europe’ (1900) and ‘Hinduism and Buddhism’ (1921) are still very well worth reading) who promoted Jewish immigration into Kenya, at the expense of the Maasai, in 1902-03. The Devonshire Declaration therefore made it impossible for Kenya to become another Southern Rhodesia.
So the policy of 1923 subverted the legitimacy of settler dynamics in the Highlands, both within Whitehall and in Kenya itself, and once the ‘prestige’ of British arms had supposedly been restored by Erskine and the Highland Europeans had eroded the goodwill of politicians and officials in London (which they more or less had by the time of the Hola affair in 1959), they were discarded by their British patrons with scarcely a thought.
The big difference between Israel and Kenya is the percentage, and the fact that Israeli influence in Washington is vastly greater than that of a few transplanted aristocratic and former landed gentry families ever was in Westminster (much of whose influence in the UK evaporated as soon as they swapped their British acreages for land in Kenya).
II think we drastically under-estimate how much environmental conditions, including factors like disease did the work for the colonists in the Americas and Australia.
There’s few other examples of successful projects of extermination and replacement outside those specific spots. Lord knows it was tried in lots of places around Africa and Southeast Asia. The most ideal spot in Southern Africa, where the conditions are ripe for European crops and animal husbandry STILL didn’t yield results from the standard of extermination and replacement.
And that’s with the technological gap at its widest!
II think we drastically under-estimate how much environmental conditions, including factors like disease did the work for the colonists in the Americas and Australia.
Indeed, but we should not just think about introduced diseases (such as smallpox): colonialism, by forcing natives to work in insalubrious places, transferring workers from one region to another to build railway lines, harbours, or work in plantations, employing porters across vast distances, and even displacing entire populations, resulted in spreading endemic diseases and causing continental pandemies.
The most notable case is sleeping sickness in Africa. In the early 20th century, it was already out of control, and infection rates eventually exceeded 40% in some regions.
All in all, Africa lost a third of its population in the quarter of century following the beginning of the “scramble”, with some stark variations — thus, Congo lost half of its population. Some parts of the continent had suffered a demographic collapse earlier — such as Algeria, which is estimated to have lost 30% of its population from 1830 to 1870 — and started recovering sooner.
Hope this happens in my lifetime. The sooner the better.
There are basically three outcomes for a colonial endeavour:
1) The settlers wipe out the native population, or reduce it to such marginal numbers that it can be easily kept subjected and segregated. This is what happened in America (best examples: Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Cuba, Hispaniola, USA) and Oceania (idem: Australia, Hawaii, Tahiti, Tasmania). There are many cases where genocide or ethnic cleansing cannot be carried out to completion and native populations rebound to a level that cannot be ignored, leading to enduring tensions (America: Bolivia, Guatemala; Oceania: New Caledonia).
2) The natives revolt, and after a protracted conflict, the settlers are beaten or exhausted, give up, and depart. Occurred in Asia (British Raj, Dutch West Indies, French Indochina, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen) and Africa (French North Africa, Kenya, Portuguese colonies). In most cases, political attrition by nationalist movements, recurrent (if unsuccessful) insurrections, and economic exhaustion of the metropole lead to decolonization, frequently concluded by having friendly native leaders take over (Asia: Malaysia, Philippines; Africa: Cameroon, Congo, Madagascar).
3) The settlers merge with the native population, intermarry, adopt their language, possibly their religion. After several generation, the settler population has been assimilated.
Case (1) is typical when settlers manage to get a demographic superiority on the natives (by whatever means, including epidemics). Case (2) is typical when settlers are in such limited numbers that they never manage to maintain their supremacy. Let us remember that in former African and Asian colonies, percentage-wise the white population rarely exceeded, if it managed to achieve, single digits (the only one I am certain of that was greater is the Italian population in Libya, about 13%). Case (3) is typical of Greek colonies in the antiquity, when they got entirely cut off from the metropole.
In Palestine, Jewish settlers constitute about 50% of the population, natives (Palestinians, Beduins, etc), the other 50%. This unusual ratio may also explain why the Israelis are proceeding with such unbriddled ferocity — for them, the survival odds of the zionist colonial endeavour are literally a head or tail matter.
Very helpful, thanks!
It is worth adding in that the effects on native populations of diseases to which they had no immunity was a crucial factor in settler/native population dynamics, though there were two way impacts, such as in the disastrous Darien scheme.
Settler introduction of imported slave labour is another complicating dynamic.
Settler introduction of imported slave labour
or indentured labour, once slavery was abolished. The British and Portuguese transferred a significant number of their colonial subjects from India to Africa, for instance (resulting in additional problems at decolonization time).
It’s also worth considering “The State” in these different situations. Where a state structure or least a local hegemon exists, the colonists can either displace or co-opt the local rulers and take over the state structure more or less intact. Cortez didn’t conquer Mexico so much as steal Montezuma’s throne. In India and China, the British took over from failing dynasties, but in North America and Australia, they created new state structures where none existed before. (The Dawn of Everything, Graeber and Wengrow, has some interesting things to say about America in this regard).
With regards to Palestine, there was a Ottoman state, a brief British mandate, and then a bunch of Cold War hegemony politics. Now Israel and Palestine are caught between an failing European economic sphere, a threatened Russia, a resurgent Turkey, a dozen ME states trying to re-invent themselves, and whatever the US is becoming. Demographics will not resolve the issue one way or the other.
Is there a variation of #3 (merging of the populations) that would entail a partial rather than complete assimilation? In other words, establish a unified commonwealth where different cultural/religious identities are recognized and accepted rather than submerged. Two potential examples to study: the Swiss Canton system and Kurdish Rojava, whose “democratic confederalist” ideology calls for peaceful, multicultural co-existance. This is the direction I’d like to see.
You left out 4) countries with a huge, agricultural indigenous population. The colonizers decapitate the elites but mostly leave the common people alone except to extract wealth (but not at a too much higher level than the previous elites). Then over centuries some kind of cultural hybridization occurs and it becomes less an issue of settlers and indigenous people than an issue of class, race, regions and urban vs rural. That is, most of Spanish-speaking Latin America, especially Mexico and Peru. Maybe somewhat the case with Arab conquests in the 7th century and the Norman conquest of Britain.
Not a model for Israel, though. They might have had it if they had kept the settler population small or confined to a couple of urban centers but too late now.
Israel has irreparably damaged its reputation by its war crimes in Gaza. Even if it succeeds in ethnically cleansing the territory, it will never recover respectability in the eyes of the world. Religious fanaticism is a self-limiting problem, and it will eventually burn itself out in Israel. The only question is how many more must die before this tribal pathology runs its course.
Pakistan is nuclear armed. Iran may soon be nuclear armed and has a defense pact with Russia. China has no wish to see further turmoil in the Mideast. The U.S. is a fading military and economic power. There is no practical defense against a large-scale attack by modern missiles. All these developments point toward the end of the Zionist colonial project.
My bet is the speculation of Israel fading out and ending is unlikely.
IF it does, it will likely be the scenarios you paint— nukes from Iran or Pakistan, or perhaps a black swan actor— or heaven forbid (or heaven endorse), a collaborative wholesale effort by many actors.
Regardless, if that occurs, the end of Israel will hardly be limited to Israel, or the mid-east .
Perversely, there are more than a few folks who just got into power positions that would find all of the latter scenario Rapturous and Awesome, who seem to be overtly and actively working toward that end.
Under The Banner of Heaven. The Ultimate Rationalization.
Israel has irreparably damaged its reputation by its war crimes in Gaza.
Is it a problem for Israelis? Because, as the adage goes:
Ist der Ruf erst ruiniert, lebt es sich ganz ungeniert.
Once the reputation is ruined, it’s free and easy living.
Given they are tiny colonial outpost dependent on billions from the Empire and its EU vassals, I would say it’s big problem for them. It’s why they bother with all the propaganda and pushing various censorious laws in the west. You don’t even need to put sanctions on them, just pull the plug on the subsidies and they would be unable to bomb Gaza or Lebanon.
Yes, their reputation has been destroyed with Americans under 30, badly damaged with Americans under 60, and if the country weren’t a gerontocracy and a plutocracy, the plug would have been pulled already. Even worse in the UK and EU ex-Germany.
Also, they’ve ruined the One Weird Trick for shutting up your enemies, at least among those age groups.
To paraphrase Wolff, the $64,000 question here is: Can Israel exterminate the Palestinians before the state collapses?
I’m hoping for no, and dreading yes.
Wrapped in victory are the seeds of future defeat. Paradoxical logic of war and peace.
>”It’s not clear which timeline will move faster: the Israel destruction of Palestinians or Israel’s self-destruction.”
If I had to bet real money, unfortunately I´d bet against Palestinians.
Nationstates are a dark beast in the nuclear age.
p.s. US Stratcoms´s 1995 nuclear posture which was calling for a serious madman theory was inspired by Israeli concepts of the 1950s according to N. Chomsky, who is referring to the Israeli Labour government under Moshe Sharett who in his diary “was warning, we will go crazy”. See his “New Military Humanism” p. 145. Important historic footnotes today more than ever. History has caught up with us.
Palestinians might become what the Jewish exile has featured as the national story of diaspora.
May be it´s this unbelievable incompetence and stupidity that makes me a pessimist:
Germany new resolution:
gag for universities
Bundestag resolution against anti-Israel sentiment at universities threatens to restrict freedom of teaching and research
By Annuschka Eckhardt
https://archive.is/GbOFR
The problem with monotheism is that ideals are not absolutes.
Truth, beauty, platonic forms are ideals. The core codes, creeds, heroes, narratives at the center of every culture are ideals.
The universal, on the other hand, is the elemental. So a spiritual absolute would be the essence of sentience from which we rise, not an ideal of wisdom and judgement, from which we fell. The light shining through the film, than the stories playing out on it.
If I may use sports as analogy;
For Judaism, it is the team.
For Catholicism, it is the referees.
For Islam, it is the rules.
For Protestantism, it is the players.
While the US Army was intent on exterminating Native Americans, it was small pox and not small bullets from Army rifles that did the work. The North American continent was believed to support 20-30 million Native Americans in 1492. By the time of Little Bighorn the US population was below 1 million. (The pop. estimates vary widely.) The US is pretty efficient at de-population of nations, to this day.
The simple fact is that while British settlers in Kenya could return to Britain, Jewish settlers have no choice but to remain in Israel.
Do you mean this with a /sarc tag?
“Settler colonialism” varies greatly in character according to whether it retains or eliminates the native population as a labor force. You can’t talk about it meaningfully without a class analysis. I’d have hoped for that from Wolff the Marxist, but suppressing class is the norm on this topic, whether its Joseph Massad, Gerald Horne, or young race-first activists.
At least Wolff doesn’t consider his own parents to be settler colonialists of the Americas but rather immigrant refugees. Good for him. However, one glaring omission is that the Israelis also defeated a British colonial government. But if it makes Wolff feel better, Israeli workers did seize the means of production. Although the number the Israelis who still have as much faith in Marx’s flawed Labor Theory of Value that Wolfe does has dwindled.
Most irritating is his revolutionary deportment; it’s easy to talk “victory” by the Palestinians as inevitable without defining the term; his audience also takes it for granted. (Hey, they marched, what is there left to do?) There is no Hamas grand strategy. What does not count as strategy is superglue-ing together their once fractious opponent by committing a) outrageous atrocity; b) constant blind, random rocket fire into neighborhoods; c) trading hostages to i) return to power in Gaza when clearly they’ve been hiding underground while the people must fend themselves for months and months ii) re-establish the Qatar money channel; d) taking cash from Iran to open a Middle Eastern front for their and Russian’s ambitions.
Let’s talk unity of command: the highest ranking Hamas commander is only at the brigade level. If one were to believe Hamas, it had 18 brigades when the war started. Then commanders of 17 other brigades are dead or have fled. At the operational level, there has only been one strategy for months: IED’s, cameras, and just waiting in tunnels while Netanyahu ran up the scoreboard of bodies and used the war to his political advantage. Israel is more unified than ever.
Ok fine, Israel is isolated but do you see anybody offering material aid to Hamas? Well, other than Israel assisting Hamas by ceasefire-ing. Without the ceasefire, Hamas had no control, as if the Muslim Brotherhood were the settler colonialists doing the bidding of Persian clerics, just another faction of many shooting it out for food.
Alastair Crooke, who is very well connected, says Hamas fighting forces are as high or higher than at 10/7, so they’ve been able to replace losses and then some. That means the some of the many men in the Middle East who relished at the idea of being able to fight the IDF were able to join and be trained. That further means there have to be ways into Gaza despite the Israel efforts to keep it cordoned. I would assume some of those tunnels into Egypt remain open.
Also as Crooke and many others pointed out, for Hamas to “win”, it merely has to survive. He and a former Israel ambassador said that Israels were shocked by the extremely good condition of the prisoners that had been released, and that the Hamas men with them were very well kitted out, as in fit looking, clean uniforms. That apparently had a big impact on opinion in Israel, as in it demonstrated that Hamas was in good shape.