This is something I’ve wondered about but never really seen an official leftist position on, and it’s gotten a lot more relevant with the ongoing Palestinian uprising. Also curious if there is any good reading out there on this subject.
Decolonization does not require sending settlers back to their country of origin and implying it does feeds into settler myths about decolonization. It requires the upending of the settler-colonial state structure.
The cool thing though is that settlers will take care of themselves and leave once they lose their privileged status. I’m thinking specifically of South Africa where once apartheid ended, many white South Africans left the country of their own volition. In fact many went to Israel, which makes special exceptions to grant citizenship for white South Africans that convert to Judaism.
I’m thinking specifically of South Africa where once apartheid ended, many white South Africans left the country of their own volition.
Idk if I’d necessarily describe that as “self-deportation”. The accumulated resentment of the native peoples made living as a white person in South Africa increasingly difficult, especially without a large militant police force to shield civilians from backlash and whip recalcitrant locals into line.
The plantation owner cannot simply role up his sleeves and take to the fields without fear of reprisal from the folks he spent a lifetime flogging. No civilization can be subjected to a century of humiliation and just let it roll of their backs. Especially when the last years of a failing regime are often the most reckless and brutal.
the point being the state didn’t have to deport them, not that there was no real impetus pushing them to leave. Loss of privileged status, and being reviled, or even chased out by the locals both can play a role, but it isn’t really a problem that you have to mobilize state power to fix.
state didn’t have to deport them
Not everything has to be a state policy.
it isn’t really a problem that you have to mobilize state power to fix.
At some level, reconciliation is a function of the state. People need healthy productive outlets for their enthusiasm after a colonial government fails. Otherwise, it all descends into tug of war over increasingly scarce resources.
China handled this well, in the wake of the civil war. Cuba did, too. Haiti didn’t. France didn’t. And here we are.
Yeah. I agree, state policy probably needs to assist reconciliation. But they don’t need to decide the ultimate fate/living arrangements of settlers, and they don’t need to attempt to deport them all.
There wasn’t any systematic deportations as far as I know, so I don’t see how else to categorize it. I understand what you mean about social pressures leading to them leaving, but ultimately leaving is an individual decision without a central mandate. Like with Cuban land reforms, the gusanos left because they lost economic privilege, there was no order to deport them and some still stayed and integrated into the new Cuban society. I’m saying all this to support that decolonization doesn’t mean “whitey go home”, but some whiteys will go home anyway.
ultimately leaving is an individual decision without a central mandate
That’s horseshit. Might as well tell the folks in Greensboro or Tulsa as much.
Like with Cuban land reforms, the gusanos left because they lost economic privilege, there was no order to deport them and some still stayed and integrated into the new Cuban society.
A much better example, but it can’t be understated what the backlash looked like immediately after the Revolution. And then again, following the Bay of Pigs fuckup. People were angry and rightfully so. You didn’t need a government policy to organize a lynch mob or freeze out untouchables.
decolonization doesn’t mean “whitey go home”, but some whiteys will go home anyway.
Accumulated trauma among locals can make peaceful coexistence impossible, at least in the short term.
Might as well tell the folks in Greensboro or Tulsa as much.
Just to be clear, I’m talking entirely in the context of decolonization. POC leaving under a white supremacist settler state is different due to the state having an interest in them being displaced. Palestinians may make “individual choices” to leave under the Israeli state, but that’s the goal of Israel and its various state apparatuses which ultimately makes it systematic.
And yes, I agree social tensions don’t evaporate overnight and are inevitably the cause of violence in a new society.
POC leaving under a white supremacist settler state is different due to the state having an interest in them being displaced.
The Palestinian state has a real interest in removing settlers from disputed territory. And practically every inch of Israel is in some kind of dispute. The negotiated territory lines were all compromises made while Palestine was in a weakened state.
Even then, all of this is functionally a moot point, given that the Israeli response appears to be going full Korean War on the Gaza Strip. If the rest of the Middle Eastern states stand back and let this happen, its going to be a full blown genocide on national television.
The cool thing though is that settlers will take care of themselves and leave once they lose their privileged status.
I think you can look at the people that left Cuba to corroborate this as well.
It happened in Algeria too. The French settlers fucked off back to France once they can’t grow fat off the backs of the Algerians.
deleted by creator
The leftist position is don’t do settler colonialism
the backup leftist position is don’t be such a murderous fuck that reconciliation becomes impossible.
There’s no resolution to this problem that’s going to let you sleep at night. All the options now are different kinds of nightmares. The time for some kind of peaceful outcome was almost a century ago when the small factions calling for a secular state made up of Jews, Arabs, and Christians in the former Mandate of Palestine were wiped out to keep them from getting in the way of the Zionist project.
Also; There are lots of Jewish Israelis who don’t have a “mother country” to go back to. When the Europeans declared the state of Israel many of the arab kingdoms forcibly dispossessed and exiled Jews living in their borders, sending hundreds of thousands of refugees to Israels. shore. The predominately European and Ashkenazi Israelis didn’t want them, viewed them as religiously and ethnically inferior with all the vitriol you’d expect from European colonizers. Those people don’t have dual citizenships and if they went anywhere it would be as refugees. Many of them were completely impoverished and decades later their descendants their descendents make up a lot of the Hasidic demographic that is often poor and often vehemently religious Zionist, which is in turn partially due to a policy on the part of the still mostly European and Ashkenazi political class placing them in settlements on the frontier as a buffer between Palestine and Israel proper.
Shit’s fucked. And it’s important to realize that none of this was fait acompli. hard right-wing and fascist Zionists worked very, very hard and murdered a shocking number of people to make sure that peace was impossible. They killed other Jews, both zionist and non-zionists, especially Leftist jews. They killed secular Palestinian leaders, leftist Palestinian leaders. They killed or otherwise neutralized all kinds of people, factions, and movements who could have moved things towards some kind of detente or peaceful resolution. Their goal has been domination and a Zionist ethnostate for a long, long, long time.
None of this just happened. We arrived at this extreme situation because right wing ethnonationalists worked very hard to make sure no other outcome was possible. Now many people will suffer horribly because all other avenues have been closed off.
It’s going to be really funny if all the foaming at the mouth pro-Israel libs change their tune once Israeli refugees start flooding their countries.
The original conceit of Israel was as a release valve for antisemitic countries to deport their Jewish diaspora. I guarantee you that the UK and France and Germany and the rest of Eastern Europe (and big chunks of the US, for that matter) aren’t going to want to take them back.
But also, a bunch of these people - Netanyahu included - are dual citizens anyway, so its less of an issue for the folks with the financial privilege to depart. What’s going to be more problematic are the folks who got dragged out to Israel by their parents and left in lurch when the political forces propping the region up begin to fall apart.
But then the answer for the Israelis is no different than the answer for every other large economically stratified community facing a collapse in foreign subsidies and cheap foreign labor.
-
Socialism
-
Barbarism
Choose wisely.
-
If Ukraine is any example the racist fucks won’t care when the refugees are the “right” color.
their descendents make up a lot of the Hasidic demographic that is often poor and often vehemently religious Zionist, which is in turn partially due to a policy on the part of the still mostly European and Ashkenazi political class placing them in settlements on the frontier as a buffer between Palestine and Israel proper.
Makes it all the more infuriating that Zionists accuse anyone who opposes them of antisemitism. It doesn’t get much more antisemitic than using Jews as ablative armor for your genocidal settler colonial project.
Yeah. That and the 'all Jews and Zionists, all Zionists are Jews" thing are prime bullshit. Senior politicians in Israel, including Bibi, have been happy to work with foreign fascist organizations to essentially force the hand of Jewish people by making wherever they live so dangerous that Israel starts to seem attractive by comparison. Reading up on how Mizrahi and Beta Israel Jews were and are treated by the Israeli state is really illuminating as to what Zionism really is as an ideology.
In case anyone doesn’t know:
Israel has admitted for the first time that it has been giving Ethiopian Jewish immigrants birth-control injections, often without their knowledge or consent.
The government had previously denied the practice but the Israeli Health Ministry’s director-general has now ordered gynaecologists to stop administering the drugs. According a report in Haaretz, suspicions were first raised by an investigative journalist, Gal Gabbay, who interviewed more than 30 women from Ethiopia in an attempt to discover why birth rates in the community had fallen dramatically.
One of the Ethiopian women who was interviewed is quoted as saying: “They [medical staff] told us they are inoculations. We took it every three months. We said we didn’t want to.” It is alleged that some of the women were forced or coerced to take the drug while in transit camps in Ethiopia.
There are many reasons to dislike Sam Kriss, but his essay “Why Zionism Is Antisemitism” (CW for disability slur) hits the mark.
Zionism had to effect a dual colonialism: it had to seize, with violence, the land of Palestine, while also seizing the Jewish diaspora.
Never heard it put like that before, damn.
deleted by creator
You do what South Africa did. Settlers get integrated, and the racist ones that refuse scurry off to their European country of choice.
Yeah, that makes sense. I really need to set aside some time to learn more about the liberation of South Africa because it sounds like a fascinating subject. So much theory to read, so little time.
Although South Africa today is still a highly segregated and racist country. You don’t see many whiteys in the townships.
For sure. Decolonization is unfortunately a bit longer of a process than just a simple overthrow of the old regime.
Morally, settlers don’t deserve a country based on birthright or your great-grandpa or whatever. Go wherever will take you for all I care.
Practically speaking, I would explicitly want to disperse the settlers so they will have a more difficult time with a revanchist project or clinging to a “culture” that is just appropriation and their own racial supremacy. Disperse and then integrate. If settlers “go back” to, say, only 3 countries based on where their grandparents lived, I would not be surprised if they took every effort to create a government in exile and harass the indigenous that “took their homes” (they would believe this unironically).
Edit: I should note that there’s no reason to think colonized people will kick out all settlers. Didn’t happen in SA, for example.
I understand that it’s not done in actual practice, but since you brought up the hypothetical, I’m wondering about its viability. The plan only works if there is somewhere that will take them. There are 10 million stateless people in the world today, which is quite a lot of people that literally nobody wants.
deleted by creator
Send me back to Czechia it’s so expensive to move continents 😔
I’ve been saying this, right of return for all Czechs
Back when I actually watched breadtube I saw the conversation come up a few time in regards to indigenous landback.
was arguing that pro-landback people were advocating for white genocide while the landback folks were like 
. In the end the argument I heard in response basically that settlers need to stop worrying about thinking the people they oppressed will be as bad as they know they’re being and that generally people would just have to submit to a different government. There were some parts about how it might be necessary to press on Europe to take their settlers back as well, but a lot of this assumes that landback in the Americas is even a plausible reality which with our current reality, is a distant dream, in Palestine who really knows. The stage of settler-colonialism in Palestine is very different than the Americas and like others have said, I’d be willing to believe that those that can’t leave but are willing to submit to a new government would be able to stay in some capacity.I saw a video on Telegram back during the first day of the uprising and some fighters were returning home and dumped a corpse of a soldier onto the ground where a crowd then ran up and started stomping it into the dirt. It’s very obvious none of them knew the person, in that moment, the corpse was a symbol of the genocide and oppression of their people, I feel like if the power of the occupiers wanes and they can no longer hold that sort of power that the general animosity might decrease, though it’s pretty clear that violence will continue even in more individualist ways for a while should the Palestinians win this fight.
yeah i think a lot of this is based on a settler brained distortion of decolonization/landback as like reverse colonialism with the ultimate goal of instating some kind of bizarro ethnostate for the colonized. literally just isn’t what it’s about. especially in the US where we don’t have the same kind of hyper violent concentration camp thing happening (anymore) revenge really doesn’t seem to be a priority of any Indigenous people.
After starting the new state, unequal rights aiming for the material development of the historically oppressed. Considering that real life colonialism is being coordinated by capital, that would mostly just mean good ol’ dictatorship of the proletariat.
Edit: to be more clear, regarding your question, the settlers would be integrated, but their violence and plunging would be directly countered by state forces. Their workforce and whatever they developed during their terror wold be used by the state for the development of the (now collectively owned) means of production and the work force (education, better food etc.)
As someone who’s been priced out of the housing market and property ownership, it’s fun arguing with libs about landback. They can’t appeal to my sense of fairness (thieves don’t deserve to keep their stolen goods) and they can’t appeal to my selfishness.
deleted by creator
Counterpoint: The capitalists are thieves who steal our surplus value
deleted by creator
Oddly enough China, but they have to be re-educated into becoming hardcore Maoists
Mecklenburg Vorpommern.
That’s my favorite Harry Potter character
blöder sachse…du …ist doch was andres…
They can swap places with the native population for starters
