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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 13, 2024

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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.

helped that faction defeat all the others

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.