[Marxism] "There are Colonists" (a rebuttal on Gaza and colonialism)

["Ivan D. Drury" <ivanddrury@xxxxxxxx>]

"There are Colonists"
A reply to Avishai Ehrlich's essay: Stop the War, January 2009 

Ivan Drury

âThere are neither good nor bad colonists: there are colonists. Some of them 
reject their objective reality: carried along by the colonial apparatus, they 
do each day, in deed, what they condemn in their dreams, and each of their acts 
contribute to maintaining oppression.â 

- Jean-Paul Sartre, Introduction to Albert Memmi's âThe Colonizer and the 
Colonizedâ


In a collection of essays, Colonialism and Neocolonialism, published for the 
first time in English in 2001, Jean-Paul Sartre deals with colonialism as a 
system of dominance and domination. He argues that, like Marx's proletariat, 
colonized people too carry inside of them the secret of the destruction of the 
system that oppresses them. He argues, âwhen a people's only remaining option 
is in choosing how to die, when they have received from their oppressors only 
one gift â despair â what have they got to lose? Their misery will become 
their courage; they will turn the eternal rejection that colonization confronts 
them with into an absolute rejection of colonization.â 

I'd like to compare Sartre's collection of essays, directed against the French 
colonialists in Algeria, with a article written in the face of the January 2009 
Israeli siege on Gaza by an Israeli colonist in Palestine, Avishai Ehrlich. 
This article,Â"Stop the War Now" 
[http://www.socialistproject.ca/bullet/bullet178.html]Âwas published by 
Socialist Project (SP), a publication that I maintain friendly association with 
in Canada. I understand that this article was published because, even if the 
editors of SP do not wholeheartedly endorse it, they see some merit in it â 
perhaps because it was written by an Israeli colonist who has been active in 
the Peace movement in Israel for some decades. In general I agree with this 
approach, but I find no redeeming merits in this particular article. In my 
opinion, it stands in the Zionist camp that seeks to contain the Palestinian 
resistance and broker a âPeaceâ on terms of maintenance of the Zionist 
colonial
 project. It is important to recognize that SP regularly publishes a range of 
decidedly anti-Zionist articles about Palestine and about Israel â the 
article by Ehrlich stands out as an exception. (...)

//continued here: 
http://www.antiimperialista.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=5973&Itemid=150
<http://www.antiimperialista.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=5973&Itemid=150>
orÂhere:
http://ivandrury.wordpress.com/2009/01/24/colon/
<http://ivandrury.wordpress.com/2009/01/24/colon/>


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