Thoughts
Regardless of other points, I can’t take anyone who views the Israeli-Palistine conflict as a colonizer/indigenous people conflict seriously
The Israeli people are similar to colonizers in the way that they have taken resources from other places and have used them to fight a war that has driven Palestinian people out of a region that they have historically occupied.
But it is very different in that a) the Israeli and Jewish people also have been living in the disputed area for literally 1,000s of years and b) the Israeli people are not a “colony” of any other country. During the colonial period, European would actually enter into areas where they had never historically lived and create colonies that were actually an extension of the country that they originated from.
And it’s really unnecessarily reductive to equate those things. I recognize that it’s a rhetorical tool, but I think it’s also indicative of a tendency to appeal to historical right and wrong as a substitute for evaluating the actions of current events for their own sake.
This reminds me of my criticism of shallow literature analysis. There’s a tendency when reading fiction literature to ‘figure out’ what each element in the book represents in real life. And it looks like that same tendency extends to trying to ‘figure out’ what each element of a modern day conflict maps to in a historical conflict. And first of all, the mapping is never that clean, there’s always additional nuance. And second of all, that assumes that the thing that you’re comparing to is a solved problem without nuance itself.
And so I think that it’s a rhetorical tool, but I also think there are people that really think that Israel is a “colony” because it’s more comfortable for them to just assign familiar labels to unique scenarios and then stop thinking about it. For these people, what they mean when they say “Israel is a colonizer” is that they have the same opinion on Israel as they do on European colonies during colonial times. And I think they should put in the thought to come up with a different opinion for it because it is not the same.