The thing I don't really understand is, if so many non-native Americans and Canadians and Australians (etc) are so vehemently anti-colonial and want so badly to "decolonize" the world, why do none of them go back to where their ancestors (the colonizers) came from and give whatever land they own (and any wealth they have accumulated) to the native peoples?
Why don't any white "anti-colonial" American/Canadian/Australian/New Zealander/South African activists actually walk the walk and go back to Europe?
Just give the land back. Actually decolonize. Do it.
Why are no Americans/Canadians/Australians calling for their own countries to be wiped off the map? Why just Israel?
Why not also Italy and Greece? It is generally accepted that the Greco-Roman empires were the origins of Western thought and expansionism/colonialism. The OG Western Empires. Should THEY not pay the price for originating Western/European colonialism? Or, skipping forward a millennia or so, how about Spain? The Catholic country who paid that horrible man from Genoa to go "discover" the Americas? Spain who conquered and owned (and named) most of the Americas, should THEY not be wiped off the map for their colonial sins? Or perhaps Britain and France and Belgium?
Nobody is calling it the Hallucinated States of America. Nobody calls it Cantada. Or South NOT Africa(n). Denying their existence and/or right to exist. That treatment is reserved just for Israel. Why?
Regardless of what they say, the modern Western "anti-colonialism" activist isn't trying to undo colonialism.
They're trying to feel better about it.
Instead of confronting or giving up the colonial empire they inherited, they outsource the guilt they feel about it. They make Israel their moral scapegoat.
The scapegoat is a symbol, a Jungian archetype which is fundamentally installed in the Western mind, though many don't know its origins or history.
In the biblical scapegoat ritual (Leviticus 16), the High Priest would symbolically place the sins of the people onto a goat and send it into the wilderness to die. The people's guilt was taken from them, dumped into a sacrificial animal...and pushed out of sight. The people were freed of their sins...and all it cost them was the sacrifice of a goat.
(Jesus, in Christian theology, is often described as the ultimate scapegoat. A sinless figure onto whom the sins of humanity were placed...so others could be redeemed. Like the goat in Leviticus sent into the wilderness, Jesus is cast out, humiliated, and sacrificed to cleanse others of guilt. I'd argue this is deeply embedded in Western culture, which has been primed to believe that salvation comes from sacrifice...so long as someone else pays the price.)
Throughout history, Jews have been convenient scapegoats for relieving others of their own unpleasant feelings.
In medieval Europe, Christian debtors blamed Jewish moneylenders for their financial ruin, forgetting it was Church law that barred Christians from lending money with interest in the first place.
During the Spanish Inquisition, newly unified Christian Spain projected its anxieties about impure faith and fractured Spanish identity onto Jews and conversos, purging them to cleanse the soul of the state.
In the 19th century, Eastern European peasants, angry at feudal oppression but too afraid to blame the aristocracy, attacked Jewish communities instead and used pogroms as emotional release valves.
In Nazi Germany, the shame of losing World War I and the collapse of national pride were offloaded onto Jews, who were cast as traitors and parasites undermining the Volk.
Each time, they cast their sins, conscience, or guilt onto the Jews and had the Jews pay the price for them.
Today, many Western activists project the guilt of their colonial realities onto Israel, demanding Jews pay the moral bill for sins committed by European empires.
They live on stolen land, inside settler colonial societies built by genocide and maintained by power.
But reckoning with that would be hard...so instead they find a goat.
They heap the weight of the guilt they feel for Western sins onto Israel.
In doing so, they can imagine themselves as cleansed of their western, colonial guilt. Even better, they get to feel righteous.
It doesn't matter that Jews are indigenous to Israel. It doesn't matter that the Jews were colonized by Rome, exiled, massacred by Christian and Muslim empires, and clawed their way back to sovereignty in a small portion of their indigenous homeland. It doesn't matter that Israel doesn't meet the definition of settler-colonialism, that an indigenous people cannot colonize their own land, and that Israel is the most successful decolonizing project in history.
Jews are close enough to white, successful enough to resent, and far away enough to be disposable.
Nobody is demanding that people of Spanish descent pack up from Latin America and "go back to Spain."
There are no international calls for settler Australians to return their homes to Aboriginal nations and return to England, or for Canadians to give their land back to First Nations and evacuate to Europe.
Instead, they want the Jews to again be their goat, wandering in the wilderness, carrying sins which were never theirs to begin with.
It's the same story, played out for a modern audience with better PR and worse intentions.
Dr. Tomer Persico explains it briefly and well.
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