Book Review of Tareq Baconi's Hamas Contained The Rise of Palestinian Resistance
Hamas Contained: The Rise and Pacification of Palestinian Resistance
Preface Page 1:
You typically see this claim by Palestinians and their supporters, that the Israeli/Palestinian conflict is a "Colonial" issue with the Palestinians the supposed natives and the Israelis/Jews as the colonizers. This claim though has the following problems:Sitting in the darkness of the theater, I thought of Palestine. Lacking the clarity of historical hindsight, the Palestinian struggle for self-determination seems frozen in time, in many ways an interminable anticolonial struggle unfolding in a postcolonial world. It is a world that has confronted the carnage of decolonization. But the battle is still raging in Palestine, with ever-present urgency. The simplistic binaries that frame conversations of Palestinian armed struggle evoke the condescension expressed by colonial overlords
- 1) There was a time when Israel was an undisputed Jewish country.
2) There was no homeland of Jews that sent its citizens to Israel in order to conquer and control it for the benefit of the homeland. This would be the normal/only definition of "colonize".
3) There was a country, England, that did colonize Israel. England left the country to Jews and Palestinians to fight over.
4) England was more helpful to Arabs than Jews during The War of Independence.
Joseph
The New Porphyry