Nathan Schneider
One thing I have been noticing is people denouncing the language of "colonization" around Israel-Palestine as an oversimplification, or that it dehumanizes Israelis as nothing but colonizers.
This doesn't do justice to what the clearest articulations of decolonial theory actually say. Of course there are abuses and excesses. But decoloniality at its best both recognizes the profound complexity of asymmetric occupations and calls for the humanization of all involved.
Nathan Schneider
I don't think colonization is the only or the perfect language for what is going on. But especially after spending time in the West Bank about a decade ago, I felt that I came to understand US colonialism better than I had from living in its wake.
Nathan Schneider
Consider Franz Fanon, the canonical defender of violent anti-colonial resistance. He was also a psychiatrist who saw both French and Algerian patients. He saw the symptoms of the colonial illness among both groups. Ending that regime was a matter of healing all involved.
Although he embraced very different methods from those of, say, Martin Luther King or Gandhi, he shared the recognition that asymmetric occupations harm the occupier and the occupied alike.
Nathan Schneider
A great deal of his work also stressed the lack of clean lines between the two. So much of what he wrote on was about differing cultures and responses *among* colonized people, recognizing that this is not sole simple, homogeneous category. Everyone involved is human, and oppression does not grant anyone infinite moral or epistemic authority.
Nathan Schneider
Or consider other canonical figures. Anibal Quijano, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Edouard Glissant, Ann Stoler, Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Edward Said: they are all deeply concerned not just with breaking shackles but developing more just forms of relation across cultures and communities. Their call is not the elimination of the colonizer (though that temptation sometimes understandably surfaces) so much as repair. They pursue a theory for the good life, not just calls for resistance.
Nathan Schneider
In that sense, the claim that decolonization is dehumanization is akin to right-wing claims that anti-racism is anti-White-identified-people. This is a caricature and is belied by the writings of the leading thinkers of the movements. The claim is either a purposeful or ignorant obfuscation.
Nathan Schneider
Colonization is always ambiguous and hidden from view; that is how it functions. The East India Company colonized India, not at first Britain per se, largely through local proxy governments run by Indians. As any Western movie shows, the subjective experience of White settlers was not of power and dominance, but of fear and victimhood from violence that targeted civilians. Such acts of what would now be called terrorism by Natives were always what justified events like the Sand Creek Massacre.
Nathan Schneider
I am a settler descended from settlers, who were fleeing oppression in their earlier lands. I honor my ancestors who made that journey just as I mourn the larger processes they were part of. I see decolonization as something I need to heal that wound in me, just as I bear some responsibility for helping others heal, and for reversing processes of asymmetric oppression where I can.
To me, decolonization has been a freeing language, a path forward where there wasn't one before.
Nathan Schneider
*Sorry, "Frantz"
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