Josh Marshall is a thinker I admire, precisely because he's a trained historian who took up journalism and not a communications or English major who read a history book once. His understanding of the current faux history of Israel is correct. There's a leftist academic theory about "colonizers" which can really mean anything the theorist wants it to mean. This is the critical paragraph:
One of the features of this variant of the “settler colonialism” construct is that any resistance by definition is justified. The purpose of this is to collapse any idea that the current round of violence began with or was triggered by the October 7th attacks. One side of the conflict (Israel) is incapable of acting in self-defense because they are inherently the aggressor — by definition and in all cases. The ubiquitous claims of “genocide” are fruit of the same totalizing ideology. As argued a few weeks ago, claims that what is happening today in Gaza is “genocide” not only conflict with the most basic definitions of the word and the relevant parts of international law. They amount to a premeditated slander, one among many examples of equating Zionism, for all its flaws, with some of the greatest tormentors and torments Jews faced in the 20th century. It is understandable that some people unfamiliar with the details and definitions may gullibly buy into that formulation given the now lopsided number of fatalities on each side. But it is worth noting that the “genocide” claims began in the first 48 hours after October 7th, when the distribution was reversed.
I'd go a bit further. The very idea of settlers and colonizers and such is a recent invention, stemming from studies of the Global South and 19th century imperialism. When imperialism collapse from 1945-1965, the expectations were that the post-imperial parts of the world would rapidly catch up. That hasn't exactly happened. Latin America and Asia have made the most progress in the last 60 years.
Latin America mostly threw off imperialism in the early 19th century. It was incredibly poorly governed until recently, at which point - surprise! - things got better. If your perspective is that the Global North is irredeemably evil, then Latin America's poor governance is likely caused by US neo-imperialism or maybe the intergenerational trauma of colonialism. What it does in effect is excuse poor choices made by those governments. Take import substitution industrialization. That turns out to be a pretty poor way to develop your economy, yet - through no moral fault of their own - many Latin American countries chose that and the results were bad. If you want to foist the responsibility for that poor decision onto the United States, then you exempt those governments from the necessary introspection and reforms needed to see the sort of progress we are currently seeing in places from Mexico to Chile.
Asia chose better economic development models (and benefitted from American largesse during the Cold War) and saw better outcomes. India chose poorly, but then started to choose better about 25 years ago and their economy has taken off. What did they choose? Economic liberalization, which Leftists hate. Look, neoliberal economics can be absolutely brutal, but it works. It's exploitive, but it also raises billions from grinding poverty (which was also exploitive, by the way). Neoliberals are "bad people" but they also know what they are doing, and it turns out various forms of economic liberty do work. Keep an eye on China - the noteworthy counterexample - as it contends with the limits of its own economic model.
The "settler/colonist" model of thinking of the developing world is a pernicious way to infantilize and excuse bad decisions made by ruling elites in those countries. Africa is the clear example, and Africa faces a host of geographic problems that makes everything harder, but the Middle East has managed to take a stranglehold on the world's most important commodity and turn it into indoor ski resorts in the desert while exploiting what is essentially slave labor.
If your great great grandfather was "Palestinian" (no such label really existed until recently) and therefore you're a Muslim Arab, you'd much rather be living in Tel Aviv than the West Bank. You live in a democracy with a thriving economy; you can vote; you have civil rights, albeit you face a shit ton of prejudice. For various reasons, very much including Israeli behavior, living on the West Bank is worse.
As Marshall notes in his essay:
It is also one of the most common attributes of such conflicts that the losing or weaker party often holds the most maximalist narratives and aspirations. It is almost part of communal identity. Deficiencies of power in the present are compensated with claims of grandeur and power in the future. This is one of the many reasons why the stronger power usually has to take the first step. Resolving things requires setting most of those narratives and aspirations to the side to arrive at some way to live together in the present. But if that’s the baseline set of assumptions then no resolution is really possible at all.
Maximalist demands helped derail plans for a Palestinian state in 1998 and 2007 (along with the untimely death of Israeli leaders willing to "take the first step."
The ultra-Zionist argument is repellent. It's ethnic cleansing mixed with actual genocide. The ultra-Palestinian argument is also repellent for exactly the same reason. The only possible peaceful solution is the two-state solution. However, as long as maximalists are making demands based on poor understandings of history, everyone is trapped in a cycle of violence.
Look, human history - from the very, very beginning - is a history of migration and conflict. No one - and that includes indigenous populations - has held their land since the beginning of time. Native Americans fought and killed and moved people off their land well before 1492. Yes, the scale was different afterwards, but the fundamental dynamic is that stronger groups seize lands from weaker groups. The only way to short circuit this historical dynamic is through boring, establishment liberalism.
