Shtetl Colonialism

Summary

The title concept of Shtetl Colonialism: First and Last Impressions of Indigeneity by Colonised Colonisers: the Zionist colonisation of Palestine as the trading of one exclusion for another, in which settlers from the secluded Shtetl townships of Eastern Europe built a new gated, self-excluded community in Palestine and cast the indigenous people, unlike the gentiles of Europe, as foreign to the land itself (Shtetl Colonialism: First and Last Impressions of Indigeneity by Colonised Colonisers, PDF p.5-6 / printed p.43-44).

The Shtetl was traded by the settlers for a new kind of exclusion: the Zionist colonies in the midst of an indigenous people that was regarded as stranger to Jewish life, as the gentiles of Europe, but, unlike the ‘Goyim’, blamed for being foreign to the land (PDF p.6).
On Israel Shahak’s notion, as Pappé uses it, Zionism extracted and magnified the existing historical and theological drive towards separation in Judaism, and claimed to free the Jews from that existence while actually driving them back into separateness willingly and knowingly (PDF p.6, note 5).
Its cognitive form in Palestine: first impressions of the native as alien that did not change, producing demographic purity as a goal, the Conquest of Labour, Urbicide in 1948, and the transformation of Ethnic Cleansing from an idea into a strategy, a policy and a continuing vision (PDF p.9, p.18 / printed p.47, p.56).
The formidable and fierce shtetl state in the making was, in the article’s phrase for the outcome, the historical answer to the weak and poor shtetl of Eastern Europe (PDF p.9).

tags
aliases