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Since when is allowing Israel to crush the Palestinians against the principles of the west? Last time I checked the west has long been a colonizing power. I am not going to accept that because some academist and leftist are against it that the west is anti-colonialism. I’m very pro-colonialism and believe that fits with the deep roots of the west.
I think western values are perfectly in-line with full eviction of Palestinians from the region which is my preferred path at this point. There is no reason we should keep fighting this war and we should end it for all time.
I don't particularly mind colonialism, but I think colonialism is not the appropriate term for what Israel is doing here. The central example of colonialism is when you turn up somewhere and bribe the authorities with shiny trinkets until they willingly relinquish their power to you, whereupon you are now in charge of their former subjects. Nothing delta-immoral happened unless you claim a moral right to be ruled over/oppressed by your coethnics rather than someone else. When you turn up to someone's home and violently seize it with force of arms, that's not colonialism but invasion. To come back to an example I mentioned earlier - would a bunch of Harvard graduates with PhDs, accepted to be moral and socioeconomic superiors by most Westerners, seizing the house of some redneck and building highly civilised institutions like a Gender Studies study circle in it be an instance of colonialism that you cheer for?
I do recognise that the Spanish seizure of the new world looks more like that, but if you magnify it enough even there the usual mechanism was actually more that they insinuated themselves with some local faction in the shiny-trinkets way, helped that faction defeat all the others, and then bought up what was left of the faction's autonomy with more shiny trinkets. Spaniards might not have violated the law of the locals directly that much at any point.
The majority of settled land in the white settler colonies (US, Canada, Australia, NZ, South Africa, Argentina) was not directly purchased from natives. Even prominent supposed historical sales, like the purchase of Manhattan, are not actually confirmed, just rumors written about later by other travellers. In Israel much land was purchased by Jewish settlers, much wasn’t. As in the other settler colonies, much of the territory was also simply claimed, or was purchased from absentee foreign landlords, or allocated by or purchased from other colonial authorities at that time. The Jews did insinuate themselves with ‘various local factions’, not least the legal administrators of the territory (the British) under the legal treaties that ended the First World War and which determined the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire.
British Jews played an extremely prominent role in the expansion of the British Empire and ultimately in victory in WW1. Cecil Rhodes and other highly prominent British imperialists were agents of British Jewish families like the Rothschilds. British Jewish financiers funded the expansion of Empire and in part the defeat of the Triple Alliance powers. On the eve of the defeat the British began the process of agreeing to an eventual Jewish state in Palestine. This does not appear too dissimilar from those Spanish American examples.
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Didn’t the Jews buy their land from the Arabs so it’s essentially trinkets for land? (Granted often absentee landlords).
Colonialism honestly wouldn’t be bad for the Palestinians. The end result is they would the richest non-oil Arabs.
Jews clearly have some right to exists in Israel and it certainly seems like the Palestinians are blocking that.
The traditional way western society would deal with this is kill them all. We wouldn’t have a conflict if Palestinians didn’t believe the west had gotten soft. They would fall in-line.
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