The other day, I was arguing with someone israel and Palestine, and they brought up the whole “everybody has done settler colonialism before” trope. While it’s an idiotic argument even if true (directly contradicting their whole “rules based international order” sthick), it did get me wondering.
I’ve assumed up until now that settler colonialism is a phenomena unique to the capitalist phase of history, but how true is that exactly?
Perhaps everyone did but the Palestinians surely didn’t, so why are the Palestinians being punished for the crimes of other nations?
Ben-Gurion wrote:
The fellahin are not descendants of the Arab conquerors, who captured Eretz Israel and Syria in the seventh century CE. The Arab victors did not destroy the agricultural population they found in the country. They expelled only the alien Byzantine rulers, and did not touch the local population. Nor did the Arabs go in for settlement. Even in their former habitations, the Arabians did not engage in farming … They did not seek new lands on which to settle their peasantry, which hardly existed. Their whole interest in the new countries was political, religious and material: to rule, to propagate Islam and to collect taxes.
Source: David Ben-Gurion and Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, Eretz Israel in the Past and in the Present