The extermination of the Native Americans can be admitted, the morality of Hiroshima attacked, the national flag [of the United States] publicly committed to the flames. But the systematic continuity of Israel’s 52-year oppression and maltreatment of the Palestinians is virtually unmentionable, a narrative that has no permission to appear. Edward Said, The Last Taboo The ‘post’ in postcolonialism does not specify – and this point has been made well by several academicians – periodicity, as in the period after colonialism.1 Instead, the term as a whole signifies a practice of locating the colonial dimensions in the formation and experience of our modern world. Yet despite this consistent claim, few theorists have sought to direct a postcolonial critique at the state of Israel.2 Although that project has not as yet begun, theorists like Spivak and Arif Dirlik have voiced their dissatisfaction at the broader state of postcolonial theory, which has a tendency to concentrate ‘too much on past forms of colonial domination’.3 Indeed, for Rukmini Bhaya Nair, postcolonial practice is a way of returning to ‘buried memories of colonial trauma’ in an attempt to reach some kind of ‘cure’.4 Yet this delimiting of postcolonialism’s possibilities ties postcolonial theory to always assess the traumas of the past. What is needed, I feel, is an assessment of the present in postcolonial terms and the traumas that are currently in the making. That is the focus of this essay and the case at hand is of the state of Israel.
Israel is never described as a colonial state in mainstream media and only rarely in academia or non-mainstream publications. Pilger, for instance, merely implies it in his reference to Gaza as Israel’s colony in Freedom Next Time,5 while individuals like Gad Barzilai eschew it altogether by characterising Israel as a postcolonial state.6 The focus on terminology is not a pedantic irrelevance but crucial to offsetting the dominant narrative that presents Israel and Palestine as somehow equally at fault, equally terrorised (one by the terror of suicide bombings and missile attacks; the other by the aggression of a sophisticated army) or at best equally unfortunate. Yet even this latter position – seeming to offer the naïve observer some shelter from accusations of taking sides – I suggest, underscores a key element of the dominant narrative in which the occupied is cast as instigator of trouble while the occupier is guilty of being unable to control its anger in retaliation. This much was made clear by the insistence of the British Government that the words ‘state terrorism’ be removed from a UN resolution passed in the wake of the Jenin Massacre, and more emphasis placed on Palestinian suicide bombings that had ‘provoked’ Israel and ‘set off the cycle of violence’.7 This tendency to overlook the colonial dimensions of Israel’s past and present is perhaps accounted for by the problems inherent in the “post” of the term “postcolonial” when taken as a descriptive label. Joseph Massad draws attention to this problem when he suggests that the prescript of “post” before “colonial” implies a diachronic trajectory in which, first comes the era of colonialism followed by the postcolonial.8
Yet settler colonialism – ‘a variant of colonialism’ as Massad points out – disrupts this linear temporality. Massad characterises examples like the American Revolution of 1776, the formation of the Union of South Africa in 1910 and the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, as all instances of settler colonialists declaring their independence while ‘maintaining colonial privileges for themselves over the conquered populations’.9 So although these states place themselves discursively (re: their claim to gaining independence) in a postcolonial spatiality and temporality, they draw into their present vestiges of the past. Massad writes:
[these states] instituted themselves as postcolonial states, territories, and spaces and instituted their political status as independent in order to render their present a postcolonial era. Yet the conquered people of these territories continue […] to inhabit these spaces as colonial spaces and to live in eras that are thoroughly colonial.10
This is particularly true of Israel, where the declaration in 1948 of the emergence of Israel is formally recorded as The Declaration of the Establishment of Israel, but popularly termed the Declaration of Independence. Yet as Massad correctly asks – ‘from whom [..] were the Zionists declaring their independence?’11 The British had left prior to the war between the Zionists and the neighbouring (and newly established) Arab states, whose armies were not themselves occupying any Palestinian land prior to that war from whom independence could have been wrenched.12 Massad continues his penetrating enquiry by saying that neither could the Zionists have declared their independence from ‘Imperial sponsorship as they had continued to be supported by the European empires, including Britain’:
Such sponsorship and alliance, it may be recalled, was to lead to the tripartite Israeli, French, and British invasion of Egypt in 1956 and the Israeli occupation of the Sinai Peninsula following Gamal ‘Abd al Nasir’s nationalisation of the Suez Canal.13
Massad concludes that this can only be interpreted therefore as an attempt by Israel to recontextualise its establishment as occurring against colonialism and not in tandem with it.14
Alan Dershowitz, however, takes exception to such a characterisation of Israel, arguing that it is a misdescription to call it a colonial state. In his book The Case for Israel, Dershowitz argues that the Jews who settled in Palestine were refugees escaping the anti-Semitism of Europe and Russia and cannot therefore be classified as colonialists. Yet he seems to overlook the historical data showing correspondence between leading Zionists and European and Russian statesmen. Indeed, such was the embroiled nature of the idea of Israel with Imperial intentions in the region that Ernest Laharanne – Napoleon III’s private secretary – wrote in his book, La nouvelle question d’Orient: Reconstruction de la nationallite Juvie, that Jewish settlement in Palestine would open up ‘new highways and byways to European Civilisation’.15 Similarly, Herzl – the father of Jewish Zionism – offered Imperial Britain multiple benefits if it sponsored Jewish colonisation. ‘It is surely no exaggeration’, he wrote, ‘to say that a Jew would rather purchase and propagate the products of a country that has rendered the Jewish people a benefaction than those of a country in which the Jews are badly off’.16
Deaf to such evidence, Dershowitz goes on to ask, ‘for whom were [the Jews] working? Were they planting the flag of the hated czar of Russia or the anti-Semitic regimes of Poland or Lithuania?’17 By pointing out the absence of a state for which the Jews may be said to have been working, Dershowitz aims to acquit Israel of its coloniality. Yet this is a rigid pedanticism which obscures the malleable and composite nature of colonialism. As it happens though, in the case of the Zionists and their identification of Jewry with the state of Israel, one can replace a colonialising state with a colonising collectivity. In effect then, the appeal Zionism makes to Jewry as a bound identity and collectivity may be seen as replacing the “necessary” component of a state to account for colonisation/colonialism.
What’s more, the Zionists that pushed for the establishment of a Jewish homeland, were largely (if not entirely) European to begin with, and they framed their petition to the powers of Europe in colonial terms. Herzl, for instance, proclaimed somewhat ambiguously in the fourth Zionist Congress held in London in 1900, that England ‘with her eyes on the seven seas, will understand us’.18 What this understanding would be is left unsaid but the implication is that England – the then dominant colonising power – will appreciate our desire for, as Herzl wrote elsewhere, creating beyond Europe ‘an outpost of civilisation as opposed to barbarism’.19 In fact the European identity of the Zionists in some respects trumps their identification as Jews and strengthens the case to see Israel – pace Dershowitz – as a colonial state.
Concretising that case further, Massad makes a solid observation by noting that Herzl never thought of demanding territory for a Jewish state in Europe. Instead, the territories that he considered (amongst them, Uganda and Argentina) were always located in the colonised world, or at least beyond the parameters of Europe. ‘Such a proposal,’ he says, ‘would never have been considered by the European empires, who would have never agreed to the displacement of gentile Europeans for the purposes of erecting a Jewish state.’20 This becomes explicit in one of Herzl’s own dairy entries where he writes, ‘…if I could show [Chamberlain, the British Secretary of State for the Colonies] a spot in the English possessions where there were no white people as yet, we could talk about that’ (my emphasis).21 The displacement of ‘other’ people was for the Zionists (as for their European-colonialist-counterparts) acceptable and even seen as somehow benevolent. The dominant colonial narrative in which all these people were embedded, was one that saw Europe at the apex of civilisations and therefore as bound to a civilising mission involving the more “backward” races of the world. This narrative was necessary to mask the brutalities of colonialism as – in Israel’s postcolonial transmutation – the narrative of the persecuted refugees seeking self-determination is necessary to deflect criticism from its periodical pogroms.
Indeed, the essentially racist component of colonialism is present in Israel’s treatment of Arab Israeli’s and its perception of Palestinian’s more broadly. In 1982, when Israel launched a bloody invasion of Lebanon resulting in the death of eighteen thousand people – mostly Palestinian refugees – Menachem Begin’s (Israel’s sixth Prime Minister) response to talks of civilian deaths was dismissing. ‘Not for one moment,’ he said, ‘would I have any doubts that the civilian population deserves punishment’22 and described elsewhere the Palestinians as ‘two legged beasts’.23 Such histories, though, are rarely recorded in national memories. There one valorises the past, as Dashowitz does when he says, ‘[these early Zionists] came to Palestine without any of the weapons of Imperialism… [T]heir tools were rakes and hoes’.24 The reference to the tools of farming evokes the doctrine of Avodah Ivrit which teaches reliance on one’s self and doing one’s own hard work.25 The incoming Zionists are cast as cultivators of the land, of people who, unlike the Imperialist British, do not exploit others but do the work themselves. Yet as Maxime Rodinson has argued,
…if direct exploitation of the native population occurs frequently in the colonial world, it is not necessarily always characteristic of it. It was an exception to the rule for the English colonists settling the territory that was to become the United States to have native Indians working for them. The English in the East Indies were not land-owners who exploited peasants, anymore than they were in Australia or New Zealand… Are there those who would, as a result, entertain the idea that British expansion into all these territories was not colonial in nature?26
Recognising Israel as an existing settler colony casts all the wars it has been involved in with the Palestinians as colonial wars waged against anti-colonial freedom fighters. The brandishing of the term terrorist for Palestinians therefore is problematic because although their tactics maybe terroristic – as of certain groups in colonised India – they cannot be termed terrorists in a straightforward sense. Indeed, if the media of the western world continues blindly to throw around the term, it will be party to the colonial project and be fulfilling the role that pro-Empire papers served during the heyday of British Imperialism.
Furthermore, recognising Israel as a settler colony spells a chilling prospect for all sane and humane minds, for a settler colony can never attain a peaceful existence until it recognises itself for what it is and sets to redress its ingrained inequities. Until then it operates within a mentality where exterminating the native populace of the lands that are colonised – as in the case of the Australian Aborigines and Native Americans – is deemed necessary to the survival of the self. Where this is not possible, it will constantly move to impress upon the subjugated population its might through harsh and severe actions so that the physical onslaught translates into a symbolic gesture of unchallengeable power. It is hoped that by such degrees the native population’s hostility may be turned into docility.
So long as Israel continues its colonial mentality it will be locked into conflict with the Palestinians until such a time as the Palestinians are either wiped out or then driven into complete submission – the only possibilities within the dynamics of settler colonialism’s as taught by history. The ball therefore is indeed in Israel’s court, and in the court of her allies too, since they have a moral duty to air this alternative narrative (which represents the reality of these recurrent conflicts better) for the sake of the Israelis as much as the Palestinians.
[donationbanner]
[2] There are of course exceptions, most notably (and the one that I have drawn heavily on), Joseph Mossad’s “The ‘Post-colonial’ colony: Time, Space, and Bodies in Palestine/Israel”, in, The Pre-Occupation of Postcolonial Studies, ed. by Fawzia Afzal-Khan and Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks, (London: Duke University Press, 2000), pp311-346. Others include, Elia Zureik, Palestinians in Israel: A Study in Internal Colonialism, (London: Routledge, 1979), the impressive contribution by Maxmime Rodinson in Israel: A Colonial-Settler State?, (New York: Monad, 1973), and more recently, Gershon Shafir, “Settler Citizenship in the Jewish Colonisation of Palestine”, in, Settler Colonialism in the Twentieth Century, ed. by Caroline Elkinson and Susan Pedersen, (New York: Routledge, 2005).
[3] Stephen Morton, Gayatri Spivak, (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007), p2.
[4] Ruhmini Bhaya Nair, Lying on the Postcolonial Couch, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pxi.
[5] John Pilger, Freedom Next Time, (London: Transworld Publishers, 2007), p104.
[6] Gad Brazilai, Communities and Law, (Ann Abror: University of Michigan Press, 2006), p42.
[7] John Pilger, Freedom Next Time, (London: Transworld Publishers, 2007), p105.
[8] Joseph Mossad’s “The ‘Post-colonial’ colony: Time, Space, and Bodies in Palestine/Israel”, in, The Pre-Occupation of Postcolonial Studies, ed. by Fawzia Afzal-Khan and Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks, (London: Duke University Press, 2000), p311.
[9] Ibid, p311.
[10] Ibid, p311.
[11] Ibid, p318.
[12] Ibid, p318.
[13] Ibid, p318.
[14] An example of this type of narrativising can be seen in Alan Dershowitz’s The Case for Israel: “The Jewish refugees who came to live in Palestine had to overcome Turkish, British, and Pan-Arab imperialism in order to achieve self-determination”.
[15] Cited in, Regina Sharif, Non-Jewish Zionism: Its Roots in Western History, (London: Zed, 1983), p53, quoted in, Joseph Mossad’s “The ‘Post-colonial’ colony: Time, Space, and Bodies in Palestine/Israel”, in, The Pre-Occupation of Postcolonial Studies, ed. by Fawzia Afzal-Khan and Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks, (London: Duke University Press, 2000), p313.
[16] The Complete Diaries of Theodore Herzl, ed. by Raphael Patai, trans. Harry Zohn, vol. 4, (New York: Herzl, 1960), p1367, cited in, Joseph Mossad’s “The ‘Post-colonial’ colony: Time, Space, and Bodies in Palestine/Israel”, in, The Pre-Occupation of Postcolonial Studies, ed. by Fawzia Afzal-Khan and Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks, (London: Duke University Press, 2000), p314.
[17] Alan M. Dershowitz, The Case for Israel, (New Jersey: Wiley, 2003), p14.
[18] Protocols of the fourth Zionist Conference (London 1900), 5, cited in, Joseph Mossad’s “The ‘Post-colonial’ colony: Time, Space, and Bodies in Palestine/Israel”, in, The Pre-Occupation of Postcolonial Studies, ed. by Fawzia Afzal-Khan and Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks, (London: Duke University Press, 2000), p314.
[19] James L. Gelvin, The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p51, cited in, Syed Haider, “Fires of the Past: Israel”, https://www.islam21c.com/british-affairs/the-fires-of-the-past-israel.html, viewed 07 Jan. 09
[20] Joseph Mossad’s “The ‘Post-colonial’ colony: Time, Space, and Bodies in Palestine/Israel”, in, The Pre-Occupation of Postcolonial Studies, ed. by Fawzia Afzal-Khan and Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks, (London: Duke University Press, 2000), p315.
[21] The Complete Diaries of Theodore Herzl, ed. by Raphael Patai, trans. Harry Zohn, vol. 4, (New York: Herzl, 1960), p1361, cited in, Joseph Mossad’s “The ‘Post-colonial’ colony: Time, Space, and Bodies in Palestine/Israel”, in, The Pre-Occupation of Postcolonial Studies, ed. by Fawzia Afzal-Khan and Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks, (London: Duke University Press, 2000), p315.
[22] Patrick Seal, Asad of Syria, pp377-378, citing Israel Home Service, August 12, 1982, and BBC summary of World Broadcasts, August 14, 1982, quoted in, John Pilger, Freedom Next Time, (London: Transworld Publishers, 2007), p111.
[23] Amnon Kapeliouk, Sabra and Shatilla: Inquiry into a Massacre, AAUG, 1984, p34, cited in, ibid, p111.
[24] Alan M. Dershowitz, The Case for Israel, (New Jersey: Wiley, 2003), p14.
[25] Joseph Mossad’s “The ‘Post-colonial’ colony: Time, Space, and Bodies in Palestine/Israel”, in, The Pre-Occupation of Postcolonial Studies, ed. by Fawzia Afzal-Khan and Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks, (London: Duke University Press, 2000), p319.
[26] Maxime Rodinson, Israel: A Colonial-Settler State?, (New York: Monad, 1973), p88, quoted in, ibid,p319.
10 Comments
Whatever our views on the re-creation of the Israeli homeland, and the subsequent terrible treatment of the Jordanian and other Arab occupants as a result, it is undeniable to any honest observer that even if every Jew in the world and Israel disappeared tomorrow, it would make NOT ONE JOT OF DIFFERENCE to the violence, lack of democracy and dysfunctionality that is the norm in the Muslim world (which was largely created as a result of the same type of violent occupation that Israel is accused of, magnified by thousands), as a result of dogmatic religious domination and control of the political processes, corrupt monarchies, murdeous military (Muslim) regimes and the Sunni-Shia rift, all of which makes Islam, the religion of peace, nothing of the sort. Jews are nothing to do with the sickness at the heart of Islam, just a convenient scapegoat. Non Muslim areas don’t blame their problems on small external enemies that are insignificant in the overall picture, even if they are violent in their own protection.
@John Smith
Dear John,
In some respects, I agree. The problems of the middle east and of Muslim majority countries cannot be reduced singularly to Israel. Israel, for all its inequities, is also a reality which we must recognise. In its current form, Israel began life as a settler colony, but like so many (settler) colonies in history, it cannot now be undone without inflicting yet more misery. What is necessary is for Israel and its supporters to recognise its ‘true’ nature: Like Australia, America and South Africa, it is a country created at the expense of those who were already settled there. To NOT acknowledge this is to add insult to injury and one cannot begin reparations with insults on top of injuries. And yes, before someone points out, there are plenty of injuries and insults to go round – on both sides, by both sides. That shouldn’t stop us from acknowledging that the state of Israel is colonial, and it is from this position that we must begin – this is why all my articles on Israel touch on colonialism.
I do not propose that the problems in Islamdom will be solved with the resolution of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict; but its resolution will be better for all and that is not a contradiction.
whats happened to the comments
why is the website not allowing comments anymore
Response to BG
Pull the other one mate!…. the Bible….a book of history?? Even Israel’s own historians dont believe that…
Israel Finkelstein, chairman of Tel Aviv University’s archaeology department, rejects any use of biblical sources to corroborate the identification of archaeological discoveries….. Far from being the fabulous city described in the Bible, King David’s Jerusalem “was no more than a poor village,” Finkelstein told The New York Times.
But even so, according to the bible, Palestine existed:
The Hebrew name Peleshet (פלשת Pəléshseth)- usually translated as Philistia in English, is used in the Bible to denote the southern coastal region that was inhabited by the Philistines to the west of the ancient Kingdom of Judah
And even before this, Ancient Egyptian texts of the temple at Medinet Habu record the existence of an ancient Palestine.
Compared with Palestine, Israel’s existence is historically negligible.
Further to this, the vast majority of the current Jewish occupants of Israel, who are claiming to be the “original” inhabitants of the land are not even Semitic! They are mostly Caucasian Europeans originating from a historic European Jewish kingdom. Another Israeli academic from Tel Aviv University, Professor Shlomo Sand exposes this in his well known book “The Invention of the Jewish People”.
The claims made by BG in the post below are just the same old tired zionist lies which have been debunked so many times that even israeli academics are now rubbishing them.
Absolute nonsense.
Go read the Quran, The Bible and the history books. palestine as a state never existed until 1947. Israel on the other hand has been in existence for thousans of years. Its there in the history books. We only have to see what Mohammed did to the Jews at Khayber
Flying the flag?
JazakAllahu khairan for the well-written and -researched article.
Something that needs to be reported again and again – Israel is an illegal state, a colonial state, an occupying state.
Right to exist? OK, could have a right to exist in Europe where most Isarelis were born and where they were persecuted, but doesn’t have a right to exist on the land that has been that of the Arabs for over 14 centuries.
Rather you didn’t fly the Israeli flag on the website though…
To agree is better than to disagree.
Then add one qualification: Ruthless.
Reply to Rizwan part 2
5) Colonial for me is not mild and certainly not benign. The fact that colonial history is not well taught in our schools is one reason why this may appear to be the case, but in reality, colonialism was insidious, subjugating not only bodies but minds. It was also violent – the Jallianwala bagh massacre, the extermination of Native Americans, the brutalism of the projects regarding Aboriginals, the way in which revolt against the British was put down following the 1857 revolution in India. It is estimated that almost 10 million Congolese died as a result of Belgium’s programs of forced labour and mass murder in the early 1900s. Up to a million Algerians died in the war for independence from France in the 1950s and 1960s. The British gassed, bombed and massacred indigenous populations from Sudan to Iraq, from Sierra Leone to Palestine and Malaysia. Few seem to remember the name of the Andaman Islands that were penal colonies where 80,000 Indian political prisoners were routinely tortured and experimented on by British army doctors, or the huge Hola internment camp in Kenya where prisoners were beaten to death in the 1950s. European colonialism’s ingenuity was in its control over the masking of history. The fact that we do not educate the masses on these forgotten histories is a problem while to deny the use of the word colonial is merely burying the past even more.
6) I agree, today Israel puts forward little pretence at its presence bettering the ‘natives’, but this is precisely because it has inaugurated itself as some how post-colonial and denied its colonial history and continuing coloniality. In the early days, the leading Zionists did preach a betterment of the native as a result of Jewish settlement in Palestine. Today, they distort their own history and attempt thereby to present Israel as somehow always and already existing. Indeed some – like Joan Peter’s attempted to re-historicise Palestine by arguing that Palestinians were the true colonisers who arrived in the mid-late 19th century seeking better economic opportunities that Jewish settlement brought about. By not insisting that Israel recognise what it is (that is, a colonial state), the pretence that was there in the beginning has been replaced by a stubborn dictum of their right to existence.
7) The advantages to using the colonial narrative and generating a discourse on Israel’s coloniality are many, least of all a redressing of history and the problematisation of Palestinian’s as militants or terrorists in the light of that (colonia) context.
My humble thoughts, as per your advice.
Reply to Rizwan
1) Not criticising Pilger – just saying that even someone who is so sympathetic to the Palestinian cause and a great activist/advocate for them doesn’t use the term. It is nowhere in his index (Freedom Next Time) or his contents and, I could only find one reference to it. I think that in a book of some 300 pages, to not draw attention to Israel’s coloniality is a little odd. For me it supports my position that Israel is rarely seen or spoken of as a colonial state.
2) Of course you may say this is because it is anachronistic – but that is in itself an interesting word. Isn’t it precisely the ruse of modernity to erase the colonial dimensions of the present? To convince us that Colonialism and Imperialism somehow ended with the advent of the post-colonial era (ie. the era that followed the decolonisation movements of the mid 20th century). My point is that this is a masking of our present realities. Sometime in the late70’s/early80’s, Maryam Jameelah used a diet-deficient-regions’ chart to highlight that all the well-fed countries (with the exception of Greece) were white and Western while the hungry countries were non-white and non-Western (with the exception of Japan). These inequities are not coincidental, they are deeply indicative of the colonial/imperialist structuration of our present. Therefore, colonial is not anachronistic; in fact, it is the case that the present discourses within the realms of International Relations or Politics use this word less and less and therefore it has dropped from our cognitive matrices. Yet I suspect this is not due to the anachronous nature of the term but because of the need to hide the continuing colonialism in the present.
3) Apartheid emerged from colonialism! Apartheid does not exist independent of the legacy of colonialism. Indeed in some ways, the Apartheid state is an intensification of colonial inequities. But Apartheid surely describes the state of Arab Israeli’s as opposed to the state of affairs between Israel and the occupied territories. There, the term colonial is better – indeed, Colonial helps us foreground the history of the whole of Palestine which was taken over by the settler colonialists. In fact, I feel that colonial helps draw out the structured nature of the state from its administration, politics, economy, historicisation, to even it’s aesthetics. To call it colonial is to draw attention to the underlying socio-intellectual world-view which lies beneath the reality we see. Apartheid evokes this upper/apparent level, while colonial evokes the subtler/hidden level and for me it is this latter (hidden) level which animates the apparent.
4)“Traditional colonial state”? The whole point is that because we see British India as the quintessential colonial state, to speak about Israel’s coloniality is difficult. But if we retrieve other colonial histories – of Australia and America for instance – we will start to see the parallels better. Hence my stress, picking up from that of Massad’s, is on settler colonialism.
(The message was too long, hence part two!)
Bruv…
I think criticism of Pilger is off key. In fact the whole critique needs to be redressed. To say Israel is a a colonial state is equally problematic. It smacks of an anachronistic usage hence, the problem. However, if qualified as an Apartheid colonial state we get cloer to the truth but even therein, we have to admit, we do not encapsulate it’s nature. It is not a traditional colonial state. In essence it is an altogetr new state and not similar to. for example occupied Iraq or India. It has ethnoically cleansed and displaced the original inhabitants and is expansionist. Colonial is actually a mild , if not benign term for such activities. Would you call Serbia a colonial state, for Serbia is perhaps acloser example than India, which was colonised? The Palestinians have been killed/dispelled and a few assimilated (Apartheid style). There is little pretece of this being for the ‘natives’ greater benefit. Colinail s totally wrong, it is negative and a recognised racist term but has few real advantages in today’s age. Keep thinking!