No, sorry, you don’t get it to lump the Jewish people into this. It’s incredibly dishonest on your part to even go in that direction and you should feel embarrassment for trying to steer it towards that.
Anti-semitism has nothing to do with the movement to create a homeland for the Jewish people (which then tried to garner the support of various governments, which is where the Balfour Declaration comes in)? It has everything to do with it.
Were there various colonialism-related issues involved too, of course. But pretending like that's the entire story is quite disingenuous.
This is clearly colonialism by definition. It’s the entire story because there is no justification for oppressing and colonizing others, even if the people doing it also face discrimination. It’s not an excuse and shouldn’t be part of the conversation.
> And even if it is "the definition of colonialism", what does it have to do with anything now?
It’s literally the basis for every problem we’re discussing. Israel didn’t magically become not a colony, it’s enforced its apartheid state since it was created by western superpowers.
That's you interpreting Balfour / Zionism the way you see fit, there were movements in Zionism that wanted to split the land, in fact the main movement wanted to split the land since 1937 for sure (agreeing to the Peel committee split plan) and maybe even before that. But the declaration itself just says - a national Jewish home in Palestine. There were unoccupied territories in Palestine 100 years ago. In fact there still are, even when this tiny land inhabits 15 million people and not just 1.5 millions like 100 years ago. If Balfour wanted to say explicitly that all of Palestine is to become Jewish he would have said so. It doesn't even say a state or a country, just a "national home". You're attributing to Balfour more than what was written.
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Balfour_Declarati...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_history_of_Palesti...
Just because it wasn’t a dense urban area, it doesn’t mean it was “unoccupied”.
Is that an accurate representation of your views? If not, what is?
If that relocation involves creating a new state or otherwise taking power over the region, then yes that’s my definition of colonialism.
Creating a new state is what the right to self-determination is all about, yes.
It sounds like we have some fundamental disagreements on definitions here, though I would be interested in your take about how you feel the right to self-determination can be meaningfully exercised by a geographically dispersed group, if at all.
I think a humanitarian route would be to lobby for open immigration in existing democracies. For instance, I think we all would have been a lot better off if instead of creating the state of Israel, we offered US citizenship to anyone who needed it after WWII. I’m also a proponent of a modern day open border policy for the US (where I’m a citizen).
1) You allow open immigration.
2) You then allow a democratic vote, including by the new immigrants, to partition the existing state (the essence of self-determination).
which comes back to pretty much my original premise: that the only way for a geographically dispersed population to have self-determination is to be able to move to a single area where they can them democratically vote to have that area become autonomous or sovereign...
Needless to say, the pre-existing population of that area would likely not perceive this process favorably.
The other option I see is to posit that in modern democracies the principle of self-determination is unnecessary. I suspect a number of people in Catalonia and Scotland would disagree...
For geographically dispersed people? Yes, sovereignty is impossible and undesirable as you’d have to take it from the locals wherever you were getting the land from.
For people living under an oppressive regime (or one they view that way), it’s a different story. They are the locals and thus should have a government that fits the local population.
You can’t create sovereignty out of thin air. You have to take it from someone if you’re going to give it to someone else. All the land on this planet has been accounted for for some time now.
The atrocities of WWII are more recent than the start of Jewish history, but it's called “World War II” for a reason. Think of the impact of the Geneva Conventions, for just one example.