Colonialism Discourse and Why You Suck at It
Learning to talk with academic lingo is not hard; why is it that so many people are so bad it?
With the current state of The Discourse being as abysmal as it is, I shall endeavor to cast more pearls before you swine and see if I cannot elevate at least your understanding, if not your participation in the discourse.
Our topic du jour shall be no less than the Israel/Palestine situation, as thorny and intractable a problem as Britain ever bequeathed to us. Let us be clear here: I am not offering a solution, or even the suggestion of a solution, to that problem. That would require diplomacy on a scale I am neither qualified for nor likely to desire to engage.
But history, ah, now there is my mistress and muse. History I can teach you. Theory I can spell you on. And philosophy, well, hopefully I can unify social theory, philosophy, and history in a way that you can integrate into your own discussions and be marginally less ignorant.
Attend!
Ho ho, bet you thought that was going to be a paywall? Well, as a public service, I’m making this article free. Still, if you should care to support me and help me earn my gruel, please subscribe.
So first we have to define the terms that get so carelessly bandied about by charlatans, academics, pundits, and other malefactors. “Colonialism” is the one I see bandied the most, and thankfully, that’s not too heady of a concept.
We define a colonial relation as “exploitation of indigenous resources and labor for the benefit of the metropole,” or “exploitation colonialism.” This is a historical artefact that arose during our misnamed “age of exploration.”
The historical conditions that led to Europe’s colonial dominance may be stated as follows: broad, global interconnected networks arise out of the need for trade. When a country can produce most of the natural resources it needs without the need for external trade, it must look to sell its surplus in foreign markets. At various points in history, our globe has sustained these broad civilizations, such as the late Bronze Age in antiquity. Because no one nation had sufficient tin, arsenic, and copper to make bronze, international trade was necessary. Eventually, through what we now believe was a complex cascade of famines, trade network collapse, resource exploitation, and war/invasion, that Bronze Age trade network collapsed and society regressed for a thousand years, until we developed technology superior to bronze.
This led to the Iron Age, which carried us from about 500 BCE straight to the Renaissance. In this, ironworking as the dominant material paradigm and allowed us to improve our technology greatly. But eventually, the age of iron had to give way to the age of more advanced chemistry: gunpowder, coal, and eventually, steam.
The things necessary to take advantage of these emerging technological processes were highly concentrated in just a few places, mostly Northern Europe, which had sufficient deposits of iron ore and coal, plus the surplus labor necessary to effectively turn it into steel and thus exploit its technological properties.
In turn, the Northern European societies utilized technological progress to become dominant seafaring and exploratory powers, with advanced industrial capacity and the ability to support populations much larger than their home countries otherwise could. Enter the need for the colony: too many people at home, not enough natural resources remaining, and the need for new markets.
This led to two types of colonization: settler colonization and exploitative colonization. If a colony were found to be resource-rich, it would be exploited. If a colony were merely a place where agriculture could be accomplished quite easily, it would be settled.
European nations suddenly found that the way to wealth was colonizing the shit out of every place that could not, or would not, militarily resist. And in many of these places, the indigenous populations were only too happy to collaborate with their colonial masters for a taste of what Europe could provide: luxuries, guns, and a higher quality of life for the elites.
This led to the creation of caste systems, where Europeans would be on top, the Europeanized/ethnically mixed peoples would be in the middle, and the disfavored tribes/remaining natives would be on the bottom, likely exploited as slave labor.
The unique mixing of cultures and the creation of creole cultures and languages gave rise to post-colonial theory, in which people who existed in all three of those worlds at various stages of their life would try to find out where they fit into a society, and how to relate to two worlds (colonial and indigenous) which would likely reject them.
So “colonialism,” in a nutshell, becomes the complex of theories and historical facts about why, how, and where European nations set up colonies; the conduct of those colonies; and how the colonial life changed the inhabitants for better and worse, leaving our modern societies as products of the colonial structure.
The reason why this is important is that we cannot understand the historico-cultural situation of the Levant until we understand post-colonialism.
See, the region we call the Levant, being (broadly) the Red Sea in the south to the Arabian Peninsula in the east and Turkey in the north, is an area that has frequently been conquered by foreign powers.
We know that in antiquity, these were largely pastoral kingdoms caught between the great Bronze Age powers: Egypt, Mycenae, the Hittites, and the Akkadians. At various points going back to the time of the Sumerians, these more powerful neighboring civilizations might conquer the shit out of the Levantine region and displace its peoples, see, e.g., the Babylonian Captivity in the 6th century BCE as a good example.
This pattern more or less continues throughout history, with the Achaemenids coming next, then Big Alex G., then the Romans, then the Byzantines, etc… all the way through the medieval period.
During the medieval period, of course, there happened to be a merchant and trader in the Arabian peninsula who visited Jerusalem and thought, “oh yeah, this shit right here,” and then proceeded to (according to his followers) ascend to Heaven, copy a holy book at the direction of Gabriel, and come back to tell his followers God wanted Arabia under his rule. His followers proved very, very good at enforcing God’s will that way, and soon, the succession of caliphs from the Rashidun, Ummayad and Abbasid dynasties would come to rule the area.
That is, until Europe found itself with a problem circa 1050 CE. See, the empire of Charles Magnus was crumbling, and this left a bunch of well-trained warriors with nothing to do and no one to fight but each other. And Pope Leo IX wrote to Patriarch Mikey I of Constantinople and said “hey, wyd, wanna be a single church under my rule?” and Mike was like “lol no way, ur gay and can’t be in my church any more,” so Leo responded with “no UR gay and you can’t be in MY church anymore.” Things got steadily worse until in 1095 CE, when Pope Urban II thought he had a solution: he would call for a holy war to retake the Levant from the Seljuk Dynasty, and in so doing, shoulder out those Eastern Rite bastards because the one true and holy Western Catholic Church would thereby control access to Christianity’s holiest sites.
This set up a few hundred years of fighting back and forth over various territories in the region, eventually resulting in a return to Islamic control of the region circa 1260 CE by the Mamluks. The Turkic Muslims would control the region thereafter for some time, mostly as the Ottoman Empire, until just after the first World War, with more or less no real trouble except for that bit that led to Russia, France, and the UK fighting over Crimea, but that’s a story for another time.
Suffice it to say that since about 600 BCE, the area we call “the Holy Land” had not been in the hands of its indigenous people and had, more or less, been tossed around by a game of international hot potato between whoever was the great potentate of the age because, in addition to being sacred to four or five of the world’s major religions, it’s also a uniquely-situated crossroads between said major powers and in a time of sea-faring and land travel, an important nexus.
Enter post-World War I Europe. The Jewish people had never quite found a good home in Europe, because while many of them were respected as people of learning like doctors, lawyers, financiers, and scholars (due in large part to Jerusalem and Baghdad being centers of learning in the time between 400ish CE and 1095 CE), the people of Europe were by and large small-minded racists who, at the merest suggestion of trouble, found it convenient to blame the Jews for everything. So Europe’s Jewish population would flock to whatever state was ruled by an enlightened leader that promised them safety, and then flee a generation or two later when that particular leader had died and his descendants decided to play Europe’s national pastime of blame the world’s problems on your Jewish minority.
Tired of this, and the constant threat of pogroms, many Jewish people, particularly in the UK, started talking about just fucking off out of Europe forever for the old country. And since Britain had acquired that particular portion of land from the Ottomans after WW1, many British Jews were like “oi, can we have it back?”
And so the British government thought, “we get rid of all the Jews in Britain and gain an allied nation in the Levant? Sounds marvelous, when do you move?”
Problem was, Britain was also trying to administer an exploitative colony with the (mostly Muslim) population who actually lived there, in the former Ottoman province called (in English) Palestine. See, as I’ve said above, Muslims, Jews, and Christians all love Jerusalem, because it’s sacred to all three religions, and the same can largely be said of the whole region to the Druze, Yazidis, Samaritans, Mandaeans, Manicheans, etc. So lots of people have, at times, wanted to come down to check out Jerusalem. The Ottomans were largely pretty good about this, letting Eastern and Western Christians, Jews, Muslims, etc., all access their holy sites without too much internecine violence (see above about Crimea). But the British were pretty shit at it. Nominally a Protestant nation, the Brits had little love for the Catholics and had just finished fighting a war with the Ottomans/Muslims, had problems with Muslims in India, and were not on super good terms with the Eastern Christians either.
So to placate the Palestinians living in the Holy Land, the British promised that they would allow the creation of an Arab state in the same region, which bought them allies in the colonial government.
Now you may realize that this is a classic sitcom setup, where Britain has agreed to go the school dance with both the British Jews and the Palestinian Arabs, and it goes off about as well as you’d imagine.
British Zionist Jews begin moving to the Holy Land in large numbers, which upsets the Arab natives, but Britain just says “hey it’s cool, don’t worry, would I lie to you?” And the answer is yes, Britain absolutely lied through their teeth to the Jews and Arabs both. But as the situation in Europe for Jews got worse (see, the 1920s and 30s) and more and more Jewish people moved to the area, there started to be even more divisions.
See, some Jewish people moved down because they wanted to live in their ancestral land, and start community farms. Others wanted to create an explicitly socialist Jewish state. Others wanted to create an explicitly anti-socialist Jewish state. And all of these groups brought lots and lots of guns, because, well, wouldn’t you?
And the neighboring Arab-controlled states looked around and thought, “huh, sure are a bunch of foreigners with a lot of guns moving in. Britain, you know anything about that?”
And the UK responded with a “who, me? Nah mate, we’re gettin’ out of the colonial business. Kind of a shit thing to do, innit?” But then WW2 started, and everyone forgot about it because we were all too busy murdering each other.
Except… one day WW2 ended. And now Britain was absolutely fucking bereft of resources and needed to rebuild its own society after being bombed by Ze Germans. And so the fledgling United Nations came up with a solution: they were going to make the Holy Land a divided state, with a Jewish state, an Arab state, and a special neutral regime governing Jerusalem and Bethlehem.
But the partition plan kind of sucked. Arabs would control most of the area around Jerusalem and Acre, with an additional set of land with a port in Gaza and along the Egyptian border. Jewish control would extend over a much larger, but far emptier, area, with a capital in Tel Aviv. Pretty much no one liked it. For the Jewish people, their state would have a sizable Arab minority that would object to living in and being governed by a Jewish government, and the Arabs objected that the Jewish state had the best farmland and it would result in a transfer of a sizable portion of their population into a Jewish state. It was setting up to be Europe 2.0, where the Jewish people were again a disfavored minority.
And the Jewish survivors of the Holocaust were quite keen on that never fucking happening again, so the right-wing and left-wing Zionists formed a truce and said we can sort out this “how to run a country” business later, because they knew the safest way to prevent another Holocaust was to have a safe nation to which all Jews could flee in case of Hitler 2.0. Which naturally led, in 1948, to the Zionists deciding they were tired of Britain’s bullshit, and seizing power and declaring a state of Israel just after the British colonial mandate ended.
This led to a war with the neighboring Arab states, but the Zionists won. Naturally, when you’re fighting a war, you can’t have a potential bunch of fifth columnaries living in the middle of your home territory, and so many of the Arab Palestinians evacuated the territory that is now Israel, withdrawing to enclaves they called Palestine that largely bordered nearby Arab states of Egypt, Lebanon, and Jordan. In 1949, the belligerents signed armistice treaties that created ad hoc states of Israel and Palestine, sort of along modern borders but not really. The Arab states mostly acquiesced to keep from having to deal with the British and Americans, who were largely on the side of the fledgling Israel, and the Israelis were running out of manpower and testing the will of their allies to support them.
But this had lasting problems: the war had depopulated many Arab settlements within what was now Israel, and Israel was wishy-washy about whether the Palestinians could return. Over a million Palestinians were forcibly displaced from their homes and put into refugee status, either inside Israeli territory, in the Palestinian enclaves (militarily occupied and administered by Israel) or refugee camps in Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria. But Arab states adopted a policy of not naturalizing and bringing Palestinian Arabs into their own countries, because they maintained (and still do!) an official policy that these displaced persons should be returned to their homes in what had been Mandatory Palestine.
That brings us more or less to the current day, save and except for an Arab-started 1967 war which saw their territories shrink even more, but that is an exacerbation of the current situation and not a new factor.
So tying this history lesson back to colonialism, we now have two states that exist in post-colonial form in an area that has been continually conquered and colonized for the past 300 years. One of those states is explicitly Jewish and swings between left-wing and right-wing politics. Despite political differences, most Jewish people agree that there must be a Jewish state to safeguard the welfare of the Jewish people, and even anti-Zionist Jews would agree to that, disagreeing only in the location of that state. Given the roughly century of time that the State of Israel has existed, the notion of a purely Arabic state in the region and the relocation of the Jewish state to elsewhere seems a dim possibility.
But it has also created an Arabic de facto state in Gaza and the West Bank, with its own post-colonial culture, and a refugee/diaspora culture of Palestinian Arabs abroad and in the refugee camps, which, yes, exist to this day.
The problem remains intractable largely because both sides have legitimate grievances and make good points about why their state should exist. The Arab states in 1947 weren’t necessarily wrong to object to the UN plan, and the 1948 Jewish Zionists can at least be understood as to why they seized land rather than face the possibility of a second Holocaust, and whatever legitimate grievances the Arabs had with the Nakba, the 1967 war certainly undercut their position, as did their October 2023 attacks and the 2007 dissolution of the PLO following the death of Yasser Arafat.
The reason post-colonial theory has to inform our understanding is that it contextualizes the actions, responses, and views/attitudes of the people in the region, Jewish, Arab, Palestinian, Christian, etc. Regardless of of the ethno-religious nature of the citizen, or his country of origin, or his political beliefs, he exists in a world defined for him by powers outside of his control, for which even his great-grandfathers had no say, and exists in a world today carefully managed by international hegemony. Decisions are made in the UN, in America, and in the Knesset which affect the lives of Israel and Palestinian citizens alike, and those citizens have relatively little impact in their own destiny. The legacy of colonialism continues.
And this isn’t even bringing in newer concepts like ideological colonialism, whereby American Protestant thinking continues to shape American policy toward Israel, a factor with which Israelis must contend, make alliances with, and prepare for the inevitable betrayal that will come at the end of the alliance.
No one in the Levant, not Jewish Zionist, not Palestinian nationalist, not Israeli socialist peace activist, can escape the central fact that the historico-material conditions that define their present are the result of centuries of colonial exploitation, and those forms are iterated.
That is what people mean when they call Israel a colonizing state, even though Israel does not maintain Gaza and the West Bank as colonies, the form of government imposed upon the Palestinians is seen as a continuation of Mandatory Palestine and a betrayal of promises made by the British. And to the extent that these states are not permitted full self-governance, their continue to be the sorts of oppressive problems that arise between a subject people and their military governors.
Likewise, the Palestinians living with refugee status in neighboring Arabic countries face problems; culturally, they are not being integrated into their host countries because of political posturing. If Palestinian refugees became ordinary Egyptian, Lebanese, or Jordanian citizens, then it would be tantamount to announcing acquiescence to the the UN partition plan (as modified by 80 years of history) and the end of the dream of a Palestinian state of their own… which means now these other states would have to contend with a cultural and ethnic minority in their own midst they’ve spent nearly a century not assimilating. Again, more post-colonial problems as the third-culture children try to find out where exactly they fit.
One of the greatest problems in post-colonial theory is how to conceptualize and think of the third-cultural products. We don’t want to commit cultural genocide by erasing an entire people. But oftentimes, as a political reality, they must be absorbed into another population to integrate with that country. And the unique post-colonial culture that has arisen during the occupation, the diaspora, and exile will naturally expire when those conditions expire, but how are the people who grew up in such a culture supposed to change or assimilate?
In short, there’s no good answer to the problems of a former colony gaining independence, except to move forward, to evolve, grow, and change, as new material conditions arise. But in doing so, necessarily, some of the old will be abandoned or modified to fit the new reality.
And this then presents a new political challenge: that of conservatism. Conservatism says we should not lightly throw away the political and social structures of the past generation, even if those were the result of colonial oppression and wartime disturbance and dispossession. That kind of hardline thinking, when taken in its pathological form, results in greater epicycles of violence and reprisal, which is what we are seeing at the moment.
So what does post-colonial theory say about that? Well, revolutionary left-wing post-colonial theory says that the armed struggle for independence and self-determination vitiates a number of bad actions in the service of liberation. Revolutionary right-wing post-colonial theory says that God says its OK if we kill the people we perceive of as enemies. If you know a way to successfully navigate the waters between “revolution!” and “God wills it!” then I am all ears to hear your proposal, because right now the only thing I can think of is that God does not want me to kill my neighbors, and mixing blood into the mortar of your revolution is a surefire way for it to fall once external enemies no longer satiate your lust for conquest and domination. I can only pray that wisdom and peace find our hearts before it’s too late.