Reclaiming Indigenous Planning: Fill & Download for Free

Arabs cannot stand the fact that one of the many indigenous peoples that they have abused for 14 centuries has been able to re-assert their sovereignity. Arabs are indigenous in only timy portions of two nations: Saudi Arabia & Yemen. Yet they posses 21 nations stretching from the Atlantic coast of West Africa all the way to the gates of Central Asia on the Iranian border.Arab Muslims also have relgiius views that projibit any non Muslims from ever reclaiming any portion of land that any Muslim(s) has ever lived upon at any point of time via the Edict of Khalifa ‘Umar ibn Khatib, the Caliph Omar.The Qu’ran though lists the entire territory as Jewish in at least 3 Sura and 4 Ayah. It never mentions Jerusalem or the land.Jews (and Samaritans) are the land’s only indigenous people. When the very first Arab stepped onto the historical stage in 853 BCE -in their native land- the Jews and had had a continous presence AND sovereignity that was already at least half-a-millena old already. When Arabs first INVADED the land in 636 CE Jews had just under 20-centuries on the labs. Arabs were violent invaders.Jews agreed to share the land with Arabs in 1946 but a year later when the UN offered a Partition Plan Arabs refused to accept this. That was despite 77% of Mandatory Palestine having been severed so that Jordan could be created. Some would describe Arab attitudes in this dynamic as selfish, and thar is about the kindest label that can be applied.

There were several instances in which plans to move African-Americans from the U.S. to a new land became a reality.Liberia was founded in West Africa in the 1820s by the American Colonization Society as a haven for African-Americans - particularly freed slaves - to have their own homeland. [1] These people and their descendants were known as Americo-Liberians. [2]During the early Colonial and Antebellum times, many slaves and freed men migrated in large groups to Nova Scotia, Canada, to a town known as Africville, Nova Scotia. These people were the Black Nova Scotians. [3]Similar to Liberia, there was another movement to repatriate ex-slaves from the UK, the Caribbean, and the United States into Sierra Leone. [4] Freetown, Sierra Leone was the main destination. Their descendants became the Sierra Leone Creoles. [5]There was a "Back to Africa" movement led by Marcus Garvey in the 1910s-1920s. Garvey encouraged African-Americans to educate and empower themselves, and repatriate in Liberia. [6][7][8] His Black Star Line was a fleet of ships that would conduct trade around the Caribbean and provide transport to and from West Africa.The greatest problem with these plans was the sheer cost and time required to move millions of African-Americans to a new land. When transporting slaves to America, safety was never a priority. Traders could pack slaves into a boat like sardines, give them the bare minimum to survive, and simply throw the sick, insolent, or dead overboard without any concern because it was expected that many wouldn't survive the trip anyway. Cost wasn't an issue because slavery was so profitable.Slave Ship DiagramIt was much more difficult to humanely transport people to a new land for no profit. As a result, all of those movements stalled because of time and cost. Combined, each destination only ended up with a few thousand African-Americans.Another significant hurdle was educating people to survive on their own in a foreign land. This was one of the chief failures of the Sierra Leone movement. The new settlers were not equipped for survival out there and they struggled in the new environment. Freetown, Sierra Leone and its people endured many hardships before finding stability.Integrating African-Americans into African society was a troublesome task. African tribes were unwilling to accept the newcomers in Sierra Leone, so the settlers were forced to live in their own colonies and towns. In Liberia, the Americo-Liberians were given land and political power while the indigenous Africans were marginalized. The unintended consequence of this was extreme resentment from the indigenous people. This was a major contributing factor for the coup in 1980 in which Samuel Doe - of indigenous descent - overthrew the political elite and became the first non Americo-Liberian leader in the country's history. [9] His seizure of control and subsequent annihilation of opposition was a part of a chain of events that precipitated the Liberian Civil War, one of the bloodiest wars in African history. [10][11]Ultimately, most African-Americans didn't move abroad en-masse because they all were aware that America was the land of opportunity, and it would be much more difficult to uproot and establish themselves in a foreign land than it would be to integrate into American society.Notes:Page on loc.govThe Black Past: Remembered and ReclaimedBlack Nova ScotiansHISTORY OF SIERRA LEONESierra Leone Creole peopleBack-to-Africa Movement AAME : imageGarveyism: Early 1900s philosophySamuel K. DoeLiberia - First Civil War - 1989-1996Liberia - Second Civil War - 1997-2003

TL;DR Decolonization in the context of Israel means returning the land to the descendants of its original indigenous inhabitants (the Jewish People) - a point which the descendants of previous waves of colonizers (who arrived during the Muslim conquest of the Levant) have been doing their best to obscure for the last 50 years, with the help of the former USSR, whose propaganda themes were adopted after its demise by various ‘pro-Palestinian’ NGOs.Given all the historical effort that’s been put into establishing the assumptions behind this question as truisms, a proper answer is going to require quite a bit of unpacking. So I hope you’ll bear with me.Executive SummaryColonialism was a historical system in which an external culture took over an area by force with one or more of several aims: to exploit its resources and/or to convert its population to its particular form of dogma and/or to control it politically/strategically for its own benefitSome historical examples of colonialism include the Roman empire, the Spanish Empire, the British Empire, the Muslim Conquest, the Turkish empire and the Soviet blocThe League of Nations Mandate system after WWI (including the Mandate for Palestine) was an example of decolonization , not colonization - Soviet propaganda to the contrary not withstandingDestroying Israel became an explicit Soviet goal as a way to combat its main opponent in the Middle East (the USA) so that it could control the oil rich area.To this end, the USSR and its allies in the Arab world sought to discredit Israel (and by proxy the US) and foment conflict by portraying Israel as a colonialist oppressor instead of (as is actually the case) the first instance in modern history in which an indigenous people reclaimed control over its ancestral land after it had been completely colonizedThis necessitated creating a historically false ‘narrative’ in which Jews are European colonizers with no connection to the land while ‘the Palestinian people’ are the indigenous group. (This same narrative is currently being aided by ‘new historians’ such as Ilan Pappe, who openly admit that ‘the struggle is about ideology, not about facts’[1]and repeated incessantly by Abbas [2] [3] [4] who is himself a former KGB operative[5] )Substantiation for the above follows. To begin with, we must first discuss what colonization is.What is Colonization?Colonization was a historical process that happened when various peoples who were indigenous to one area expanded out of that area and invaded, conquered, and ruled other areas, building a unified empire out of their colonies.Sometimes the colonizers were mostly interested in exploiting the colonized area by extracting natural resources such as wood, minerals and slaves from it or in controlling strategic trade routes and land. Sometimes the colonizers were ideologically motivated by the opportunity to spread their particular dogma among the colonized populations. In these cases the colonizers employed various methods to assimilate colonized peoples into their own culture in order to destroy any remnant of the previously existing cultures that might threaten them over the long term. Often some combination of the above motives prevailed.Historical Examples of ColonizationColonization of parts of Europe and the Middle East by the Greek and Phoenician Empires primary motivated by the quest for resources and slavesColonization of Europe and the Middle East by the Roman Empire primarily motivated by the quest for resources and slavesColonization of North America, Australia and New Zealand, and parts of Asia and Africa by the British Empire primarily motivated by the quest for resources and control over strategic trade routesColonization of North and South America by the Spanish Empire primarily motivated by the quest for resources, slaves, control over strategic trade routes and the opportunity to ‘save the souls’ of the ‘heathen’ populationsMuslim conquest of the Levant by the Muslim Caliphate native to Arabia primarily motivated by the quest for resources, slaves, control over strategic trade routes and the opportunity to spread IslamColonization of the Middle East and parts of Europe by the Ottoman Empire primarily motivated by the quest for resources, slaves, control over strategic trade routes and the opportunity to spread IslamSoviet expansionism into East Europe and attempted expansion into the Middle East primarily motivated by the quest for resources, control over strategic trade routes and oil producing areas and the opportunity to spread CommunismDecolonization of the Middle East via the League of Nations MandatesThe view that the various League of Nations Mandates which ended the Ottoman empire in the Europe and the Middle East after WWI were another example of imperialist acts by evil Western colonizers was first put forward by Stalin when he gave it as a reason why the Soviet Union would not join the League of Nations:the Soviet Union is not a member of the League of Nations and does not participate in its work, because the Soviet Union is not prepared to share the responsibility for the imperialist policy of the League of Nations, for the ‘mandates’ which are distributed by the League for the exploitation and oppression of the colonial countries …[6] (Source: Questions and Answers, A Discussion with Foreign Delegates by J. Stalin, Moscow, November 13, 1927.)‘Pro-Palestinians’ would especially like you to believe Stalin’s take on history, as it strengthens the ‘Palestinian narrative’ which states that the British took the land from its ‘indigenous people’ and gifted it to undeserving foreign invaders.However, per the above definitions and examples, it is clear that precisely the reverse is true (as was often the case with Communist versions of history). All over the Middle East, Asia and Africa, the League of Nations mandates took power away from colonial empires that had previously conquered and ruled those areas and returned it to the indigenous inhabitants. The Principal Allied powers referred to this job of nation-building as ‘a sacred trust of civilization’.For example, they took Lebanon away from the Ottoman Turks and handed it over to the Maronite Christians, Rwanda away from Belgium and handed it back to the Hutu and Tutsi, Tanzania away from the British, New Guinea away from the Germans and so on and so forthIn Palestine, they did likewise. They took political power away from the Ottoman Turks and returned it to the original indigenous group - the Jewish People. The problem (from the point of view of the Arabs living there) was that in Palestine they carried the decolonization process several steps further back. There they returned power not to the Arabized and Islamized population descended from Arab and Turkish conquerors who had intermarried with locals during the Muslim Conquest and Ottoman Empire’s rule of Palestine, but to the original indigenous inhabitants of the land - the Jewish People.The Principal Allied Powers explicitly recognized this historical connection when they stated in the preamble of Mandate for Palestine:Whereas recognition has thereby been given to the historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine and to the grounds for reconstituting their national home in that country;[7]How then, did Israelis come to be viewed by so many as European colonizers oppressing an ‘ indigenous people’ (an ‘indigenous people’ that no one had even ever heard of in 1920 when the post war spoils were being divided)? For substantiation of that claim, see Gail Ellis's answer to Palestinians: What do you think of people who say "Palestinians don't exist" or "Palestinians are just Arabs"? and Gail Ellis's answer to Were Jews living in pre-Israel Palestine "Palestinians", and if so, what were Palestinians called?)It’s a sign of just how effective this reversal has been that the Palestinians are able to portray themselves as ‘David’ fighting ‘Goliath’ without anyone batting an eyelash over the fact that David was Jew and Goliath was a Philistine - the people the Palestinians claim to be descended from[8] , or over the fact that there are 6.7 million Jews in Israel and hundreds of millions of Arabs/Muslims in the nations on the other side of the conflict. How did that switch happen?Soviet Expansionism in the Middle East Makes Destruction of Israel a PriorityA new book by Russian exile Pavel Stroilov, who fled Russia in 2003 after stealing 50,000 top-secret Kremlin documents from the Gorbachev Foundation archives sheds light on how this happened.Though his book focuses on Soviet machinations throughout the Middle East, the parts that touch on Israel are particularly revealing.The dominant narrative of modern Middle East history emphasizes the depredations visited upon the region by European colonization and accepts as a truism that the former colonial powers prioritized the protection of their material interests—in oil, above all—above the dignity and self-determination of the region’s inhabitants. Thus did botched decolonization result in endless instability. The most intractable of the regional conflicts to which this gave rise, that between the Arabs and Israelis, is attributed in this narrative to Israel’s unwillingness to accede to Palestinian national aspirations. …What if this conventional wisdom is nonsense? Russian exile Pavel Stroilov argues just this in his forthcoming book, Behind the Desert Storm. “Not a word of it is true,” he writes. “It was the Soviet Empire—not the British Empire—that was responsible for the instability in the Middle East.”From the close of World War I, the great prize of the Middle East has been the Persian Gulf. During the Cold War, America and its allies in Europe and Asia depended upon its oil for 90 percent of their energy needs; developing countries would be instantly crippled by a sharp hike in oil prices. But for the Soviets, attaining control of the Gulf could be achieved only by direct military aggression. Following the return of British forces to Kuwait in 1961 to defend the Emirate from Iraq’s Abd al-Karim Qasim—whose ambitions for Kuwait were subsequently, if temporarily, realized by Saddam Hussein—it became clear to the Soviets that the West would go to any length to defend the oil. “And so the comrades postponed the conquest of the Gulf,” writes Stroilov, “although some of them were sorely disappointed with that decision.”What, then, was Plan B? It was “the subversion and eventual destruction of Israel.”Though not as good as the Gulf oil fields, Israel would also be a big prize. It was the only democracy in the region, the strongest military power in the pro-Western camp and, indeed, the bridgehead of the Western world. Even more importantly, the very process of crusading (or jihadding) against Israel offered fantastic political opportunities. A besieged Israel effectively meant millions of Jewish hostages in the hands of the comrades, and the threat of genocide could intimidate the West into making great concessions in the Gulf or elsewhere. On the other hand, by making the Israeli-Palestinian conflict the central problem of the Middle East, the Soviets could exploit Arab nationalism, anti-Semitism, and even Islamic religious feelings to mobilize support for their policies. Indeed, under the banner of Arab solidarity, the socialist influence in the region grew far beyond the socialist regimes and parties.… In a National Review article, Pacepa recalls a conversation he had with KGB chairman Yuri Andropov, who envisioned fomenting “a Nazi-style hatred for the Jews throughout the Islamic world. … We had only to keep repeating our themes—that the United States and Israel were ‘fascist, imperial-Zionist countries’ bankrolled by rich Jews.”[9]Palestinian Terror War Reframed into a ‘Struggle for Human Rights’To this end Russian handlers and their various proteges all gave Arafat the same advice:“Stop talking about annihilating Israel and instead turn your terror war into a struggle for human rights. Then you will have the American people eating out of your hand.”At the same time that he was getting advice from General Giap, Arafat was also being tutored by Muhammad Yazid, who had been minister of information in two Algerian wartime governments (1958–1962): wipe out the argument that Israel is a small state whose existence is threatened by the Arab states, or the reduction of the Palestinian problem to a question of refugees; instead, present the Palestinian struggle as a struggle for liberation like the others. Wipe out the impression that in the struggle between the Palestinians and the Zionists, the Zionist is the underdog. Now it is the Arab who is oppressed and victimized in his existence because he is not only facing the Zionists but also world imperialism.To make sure that they followed this advice, the KGB put Arafat and his adjutants into the hands of a master of propaganda: Nicolai Ceausescu, president-for-life of Romania.…. Pacepa later recorded a number of sessions during which Arafat railed against Ceausescu’s injunctions that the PLO should present itself as a people’s revolutionary army striving to right wrongs and free the oppressed: he wanted only to obliterate Israel. Gradually, though, Ceausescu’s lessons in Machiavellian statecraft sank in. During his early Lebanon years, Arafat developed propaganda tactics that would allow him to create the image of a homeless people oppressed by a colonial power. This makeover would serve him well in the west for decades to come.Whether or not Arafat’s homosexuality was the key to the Soviets’ control over him, it is clear that by the early 1970s the PLO had joined the ranks of other socialist anti-colonial “liberation” movements, both in its culture and in its politics; and had reframed its terror war as a “people’s war” similar to those of the other Marxist-Leninist terrorist guerrillas in China, Cuba, and Vietnam. Thanks to input from Ceausescu, General Giap, and the Algerians, Arafat gradually saw the wisdom of jettisoning his fulminations about “throwing the Jews into the sea,” and in its place he developed the images of the “illegal occupation” and “Palestinian national self-determination,” both of which lent his terrorism the mantle of a legitimate people’s resistance. Of course, there was one ingredient missing in this imaginative reconfiguration of the struggle: There had never been a “Palestinian people,” or a “Palestinian nation,” or a sovereign state known as “Palestine.” [10]And, indeed, this advice worked extremely well. You can now find BDS supporters on campuses all over the world chanting ‘Palestine will be free, from the river to the sea’ (which is actually a call for the elimination of the State of Israel[11] and one that is not infrequently accompanied by actual calls to ‘slaughter the Jews’[12] [13] ) to the same beats that students in the 60s chanted ‘One, two, three four, we don’t want no f***ing war’ (which was a call for the cessation of violence). In countries where people used to chant ‘Jews go back to Palestine’ they now chant ‘Get the f**k out of Palestine’Historical Revisionism: ‘The Palestinian Narrative as a Means to the EndHowever, in order for this to work, it was necessary to create a narrative in which ‘the Palestinian People’ had existed in Palestine for centuries, while portraying the Jews as European colonizers with no connection to the land - a claim often repeated by Arafat, Abbas and other Palestinian leaders.Part of the reframing of the conflict, along with adopting the identity of an “oppressed people” and “victim of colonialism,” then, was the creation, ex nihilo, of “historic Palestine” and the ancient “Palestinian people” who had lived in their “homeland” from “time immemorial,” who could trace their “heritage” back to the Canaanites, who were forced from their homeland by the Zionists, and who had the inalienable right granted by international law and universal justice to use terror to reclaim their national identity and political self-determination.That this was a political confection was, perhaps inadvertently, revealed to the West by Zahir Muhse’in, a member of the PLO Executive Committee, in a 1977 interview with the Amsterdam-based newspaper Trouw:“The Palestinian people does not exist. The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for continuing our struggle against the state of Israel for our Arab unity. In reality today there is no difference between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese. Only for political and tactical reasons do we speak today about the existence of a Palestinian people, since Arab national interests demand that we posit the existence of a distinct “Palestinian people” to oppose Zionism. [Emphasis added.]Arafat himself asserted the same principle on many occasions. In his authorized biography he says, “The Palestinian people have no national identity. I, Yasir Arafat, man of destiny, will give them that identity through conflict with Israel.”But even these admissions—that the concept of a “Palestinian people” and a “Palestinian homeland” were invented for political purposes to justify and legitimize terrorism and genocide—could not stem the enthusiasm of western leaders. Within the space of a few years, the Middle East conflict with Israel was radically reframed. No longer was little Israel the vulnerable David standing against the massive Goliath of the Arab world. As the PLO’s Communist-trained leaders saw the inroads that Vietnam, Cuba, and other “liberation struggles” had made in the west, Arafat promoted the same script for the Palestinians. Now it was Israel who was the bullying Goliath, a colonial power in the Middle East oppressing the impoverished, unarmed, helpless, hapless, and hopeless Palestinians.[14]Are ‘the Palestinian People’ Indigenous?In order to be considered indigenous according to the international definition, a group must meet the following conditionsOccupation of ancestral lands, or at least of part of themCommon ancestry with the original occupants of these landsCulture in general, or in specific manifestations (such as religion, living under a tribal system, membership of an indigenous community, dress, means of livelihood, lifestyle, etc.)Language (whether used as the only language, as mother-tongue, as the habitual means of communication at home or in the family, or as the main, preferred, habitual, general or normal language)Residence in certain parts of the country, or in certain regions of the worldReligion that places importance on spiritual ties to the ancestral landsBlood quantum – that is, the amount of blood you carry of a specific people to identify as that people. The concept was developed by colonialists in order to eventually breed out native peoples. [15][16]This definition fits the Jews (who share culture, religion, language, tribal structure and genetics with the pre-Roman conquest population), not the Arabs who were living in Palestine when the British arrived (who share culture, religion, tribes and language with the Muslim invaders from Arabia, not with a pre-invasion culture.) For a detailed explanation of why, see Israel Palestine: Who’s Indigenous?).That is why Jews are on this List of indigenous peoples as indigenous to Canaan while Arabs are listed as conquerors of the region. [17]Genome-wide comparisons further support this view. In these studies Jews squarely overlap Druze and Samaritans, and Lebanese Christians and Druze. The Palestinian population is closer to known populations from Arabia such as Saudis, Bedouin and non-Palestinian Jordanians than to Lebanese (who share 90% of their genes with ancient Canaanites - a known Levantine population ), and Druze and Samaritans (who can be assumed to represent original Levantine populations as they don’t intermarry).[18]Photo source: The genome-wide structure of the Jewish people | Semantic ScholarPhoto source: Genome-Wide Diversity in the Levant Reveals Recent Structuring by CultureAs indigenous rights activist Ryan Bellerose, a Métis from Northern Alberta, explains:Now you might ask, why is this important? It is important to indigenous people because we cannot allow the argument that conquerors can become indigenous. If we, as other indigenous people, allow that argument to be made, then we are delegitimising our own rights.If conquerors can become indigenous, then the white Europeans who came to my indigenous lands in North America could now claim to be indigenous. The white Europeans who went to Australia and New Zealand could now claim to be indigenous. If we, even once, allow that argument to be made, indigenous rights are suddenly devalued and meaningless. This is somewhat peculiar, as those who are arguing for Palestinian “indigenous rights” are usually those who have little grasp of the history, and no understanding of the truth behind indigenous rights. [19]ConclusionSo now, having briefly covered colonialism and how Israel came to be viewed as a colonial project (and why that is wrong) we can finally answer the question: what does decolonization mean in the context of Israel?In 1920, in the eyes of the Principal Allied Powers, decolonization meant recognizing the rights of the original indigenous group - the Jewish People via The Palestine MandateToday, ‘decolonization in the context of Israel’ means accepting that the Mandate for Palestine DID decolonize the area when it returned sovereignty over it to its original indigenous group (the Jewish People), while at the same time guaranteeing the civil and religious rights of the other segments of the population.It means seeing the claim that Israel is a foreign European colonizer which ‘stole’ the land from ‘the indigenous Palestinian people’ for what it is: propaganda whose origins lie in a Soviet era plan to advance USSR’s own imperialist interests in the Middle East at the expense of peace and stability for all its inhabitants.And it means, if you support the rights of indigenous peoples, you should be supporting Israel.Footnotes[1] BACKGROUNDER on Professor Ilan Pappé: When Ideology Trumps Scholarship[2] MUST WATCH: Mahmoud Abbas’ Vile Antisemitism And Historical Negationism[3] Rewriting history, Abbas calls Israel a ‘colonial project’ unrelated to Judaism[4] “Peace Partner” Mahmoud Abbas Goes Full Antisemite[5] Does Abbas’s KGB Past Matter?[6] http://>(Source: Questions and Answers, A Discussion with Foreign Delegates by J. Stalin, Moscow, November 13, 1927.)[7] The Palestine Mandate[8] The Counterfeit Arabs[9] The Cold War’s Arab Spring: How the Soviets Created Today’s Middle East - Tablet Magazine[10] The Communist Roots of Palestinian Terror[11] BDS: In Their Own Words[12] A Call For Genocide[13] Israeli minister calls for action over insult[14] The Communist Roots of Palestinian Terror[15] Israel Palestine: Who’s Indigenous?[16] A working definition, by José Martinez Cobo[17] List of indigenous peoples - Wikipedia[18] Genome-Wide Diversity in the Levant Reveals Recent Structuring by Culture[19] Israel Palestine: Who’s Indigenous?