Beginning in the 1940s, countries in Asia and Africa began to liberate themselves from direct and indirect Western rule. The process was broadly termed “decolonization” by witnesses and historians alike. In an extraordinary twist, this simple word used to describe a major fact of modern history – one that is vital to a majority of the world’s population – is now being demonized by U.S. elites, just when the West can least afford such willful ignorance.
In humanities departments across the U.S., scholars have long argued that disparities of power exist not only between the Global North and South; they have stressed the need for decolonization in cultural and intellectual realms as well. And they have elaborated theories connecting their endeavour to domestic racial justice movements, such as the civil rights movement and Black Lives Matter.
Many students exposed to these theories use them, fervently and often indiscriminately, to condemn Israel as a colonialist state. This in turn is provoking even many of their liberal and centrist elders to join an already fierce Republican campaign against “wokeness” in academia.
A much-circulated article in the Atlantic claims decolonization theory is a “toxic, inhumane ideology,” a “nonsensical mix of Marxist theory, Soviet propaganda and traditional anti-Semitism from the Middle Ages.” X Corp. owner Elon Musk has gone further, declaring a ban on the word “decolonization” itself, which according to him is one of the “euphemisms” today that “necessarily imply genocide.”
The uproar reached a new pitch of absurdity last week at a confirmation hearing for appointees to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit. Republican senators demanded to know whether a Muslim-American lawyer thought Jews were “colonial settlers” in Israel.
As global support for Israel leaks away, its supporters are trying to fight off a potent accusation: that Zionism is an expansionist project resembling and traditionally allied to the racist Western colonialism that conquered and exploited Asian and African lands.
As a matter of fact, a range of Zionist leaders, from Theodor Herzl to the revisionist Vladimir Jabotinsky, explicitly saw their project as a settler-colonial movement. They tried to link its fortunes to those of the British Empire, offering Israel as a strategically located asset to Western imperialists.
Moreover, harsh British crackdowns on Arab nationalists after 1917 unquestionably benefited Zionist migrants. This is why an Asian anti-colonialist such as Mohandas K. “Mahatma” Gandhi declined to support Zionism despite being personally sympathetic to the Jewish demand for a homeland.
Many of those who call for Israel’s decolonization today are not seeking genocide, only fulfillment of the policies of several U.S. administrations: to dismantle illegal Israeli settlements that make impossible a continuous Palestinian state.
At the same time, Israel’s defenders are quite correct in several respects. The terms many young American protesters use to denounce the Jewish state – “colonialism” and “settler-colonialism” – fail to consider the roots of Jewish nationalism in the vulnerability and violent persecution of Russian and Eastern European Jews in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Nor do activists acknowledge the fact that Israel was the only safe refuge in the late 1940s for the few survivors of Europe’s monstrous crimes against Jews. Or that Israel’s majority population consists of descendants of non-European Jews who emigrated en masse from Middle Eastern and North African countries in the 1940s and 1950s, often driven out by anti-Jewish prejudice and discrimination.
Most of those denouncing Israel for its supposed “settler-colonialism” are deploying the term merely for its pejorative connotation. As it happens, an anti-colonialist stance is no guarantee of virtue: The Afrikaners of South Africa, credited with fighting the first major anticolonial war, went on to pioneer apartheid.
In any case, bitter disagreements over Israel in the U.S. should not obscure the broader importance of decolonization to most of the non-Western world.
Rather than a theory spawned by the “woke mind virus” Musk so often decries, the term describes world-historical shifts of power in Asia and Africa that need to be understood now more than ever. However imperfectly, it serves as a shorthand for describing the way many non-white people, including many African Americans and immigrant populations in the West, locate themselves in a longer historical continuum – the way they see their past and measure their potential in the future.
Preoccupied with the battles against Nazism and then Soviet communism, U.S. leaders largely missed the biggest story of the 20th century: the physical and intellectual liberation of the non-Western world. They have been consistently slow to read the chapters that keep getting added to this narrative: the intransigence of Vietnam, the revolt of Iran, the resourcefulness of Chinese nationalism, and, more recently, the assertiveness of rising powers such as India, Indonesia, and South Africa.
It’s easy to see why U.S. elites are tempted to stigmatize and banish the words that offend their preferred image of a still-dominant, liberal-democratic West. Those who remain indifferent to the irresistible momentum of decolonization must each day find the world a disconcertingly more unfamiliar place.
But such intellectual self-harm in journalism, education and policymaking can only undermine a task that has become increasingly urgent for the U.S. and its Western allies: to see and understand the world the way others do.
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