I think it sad that this piece has prompted so much venom. Who knew that empty barrels could read?

The problem with Zionism as it played out (whatever its history) is that it is anachronistic. The colonial ship sailed, and, once again, the Jews were not allowed on it.

Many of the colonists in these instances share characteristics too; they had perhaps endured hardship, oppression, poverty before becoming erstwhile colonial masters; they were often the victims of persecution or some form of racism in the places of their birth. Life for them at home was often unbearable, if not impossible, and so they sought a new life, new chances in another land, where they could be pioneers, settlers in a foreign land and all that that entails.

The Jews were the last people in Europe to experience this need, and so they were the last European colonists. They suffered at home what colonizers typically suffered at home, so they took someone else's land. There is nothing ahistorical or anthropologically odd about that. It's just that the rest of the world was at peace, so people had come to believe that possession of land bestowed rights of occupancy. The Jews colonized Palestine at a time when colonization was obsolescing as a way of the world.

We deride the Nazi reference to "the Jewish Problem" because we see it as the Nazi's way of euphemizing genocide. But I see the "Jewish Problem" differently. The Jewish Problem is another word for the persistence of Anti-Semitism, the fact that life for Jews in Europe was just too risky. The West did not want the Jews who were displaced by the Shoah. After seeing how the USA had behaved before the War, why would a European Jew think there was a safe place to go?

My only quarrel with this piece is the reference to "white" colonists. Asian and African history will surely provide examples of non-white peoples ordered by non-white colonists to submit, leave or die. Colonialism is simply how our species spreads in a Darwinian way. A mad-scientist case can be made that colonizers make more productive use of land, thereby keeping the Malthusian wolf at bay. (In the case of Israel, the most glaring difference was the Zionists’ ability to rid the land of malaria.) Successful colonizers arrive with more advanced technologies than those of the natives; if they did not, their colonies would fail. Colonists colonize if and only if, they can. The implications of colonists' technological superiority for the survival of the species on a static planet are too often missed.

Colonizing is and always has been about lebensraum. Albeit out of context, these words from Shakespeare's Julius Caesar capture our changing views on the meanness of our forebears:

...But 'tis a common proof,
That lowliness is young ambition's ladder,
Whereto the climber-upward turns his face;
But when he once attains the upmost round
He then unto the ladder turns his back,
Looks in the clouds, scorning the base degrees
By which he did ascend.

This, I believe, pretty much captures the anti-colonial Westerner's "modern" (post-modern?) view of colonizers.