Dude, who even knows.
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Thinking about how Kiwis are the Commonwealth country* that least displaced the previous locals yet the most poncy about it – can’t remember the last time I saw a young one actually call it “New Zealand” rather than “Aotearoa”
* including the non-white ones! Jamaica wasn’t always Afro-Caribbean
Then parsing that through the distinction between the North Atlantic settler colonies and India/Africa as administrators of a land they weren’t of – South African apartheid started with less invested British colonials being politically eclipsed by Boers – Dutch settlers who considered it their land
I guess NZ is the karmic balance to Rhodesia, the British African colony that developed its own national identity
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The thing that really set my thinking on Israel was… wait
I guess I really even first noticed it in the 90s via the first intifada, when the Palestinians still had the benefit of a solid Cold War-era propaganda apparatus, like the IRA and Mandela’s terrorists
And they did a good pose of taking their licks and still biting hard, the rock-throwers AND the suicide bombers, you gotta respect that
So okay, but the thing that really set my thinking on Israel was an article in maybe 2003, later 1st or early 2nd term of Bush the Younger.
And it was like “today’s settlements tilt religious and conservative, but in a milder way Americans would recognize, these commuter suburbs of Tel Aviv aren’t hilltop messianic outposts anymore”
and I was like oh my god, you’re doing this occupation to cultivate culdesac-dwelling JAG viewers?!?
I wouldn’t approve of petting a kitten to that end!
But then the article continued, and as it did it reversed everything I knew and hated about that kind of person
they were like “yeah SUVs and soccer and middle-class jobs but also everyone comes together to prepare for the real possibility of defending this street with rifles”
they were like “locals disdain gratuitous jingoism, because they appreciate they’re the ones to catch pushback from provocation”
someone was like “you know you can’t get too pissy about someone painting his shutters the wrong color and letting his yard overgrow when he literally has your back in a firefight”
and I was like
OH MY GOD
it is the 21st century and these guys get to live in the Wild West
OH MY GOD
So, as a capital bolded-A American, settler-colonial solidarity. If Alaska is America’s wild frontier, Israel is its bloody frontier. Respect. And if Long Islanders head over there to do that, fuckin’ A, it’s an improvement.
So my regards, until and unless they get it together to explode in your preschools again, or at least until they kidnap another soldier and you trade away the store under pressure from some snotty-faced dam all “WAAAH, WAAH, MAH BAAABY, YOU GOTTA SAVE MAH BAABY!”, that’s unrespectable