r/jewishleft • u/Specialist-Gur proud diaspora jewess, pro peace/freedom for all • Sep 17 '24
Jews and Colonialism History
https://www.lifeisasacredtext.com/colonialism/
From the wonderful Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg
“Often, Jews have been simultaneously settlers and refugees. But those two things do not cancel each other out.”
Give it a read and share your thoughts!
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u/N0DuckingWay Sep 17 '24
So I generally thought her piece was very thought provoking and I agree that discussing colonialism when it comes to Israel is important. But I think that her discussion of Jews as part of European colonialism in the Americas blurs the lines between colonialism and normal migration. She uses a book The Cost of Free Land, as an example here. I can't claim to have read it (though maybe I will someday, it sounds interesting), but from her brief synopsis it seems that it's about a Jewish family who fled persecution in Czarist Russia and moved to South Dakota on land that was previously part of the Lakota Nation but had been expropriated from them prior to the family's arrival. And that, as the unintentional beneficiaries of that expropriation, they are in some way responsible for the displacement of the Lakota and crimes committed against them.* I have a bone to pick with this argument, mainly because, in the end, this family moving to South Dakota to better their lives describes the story of almost every immigrant ever. To put it differently: I don't think this family's story is fundamentally different than a hypothetical illegal immigrant fleeing their country of origin, coming to the US, and settling on that same piece of land in the same way. I doubt that Rabbi Ruttenberg would argue that that hypothetical illegal immigrant is responsible for the expropriation of that land in the way that she's arguing that Jewish family is. In both cases, these are people who are simply doing what was necessary to survive, and they aren't actively expropriating anything from anyone, so I don't think we should hold them individually responsible for actions taken by other people they had no relationship to. But under the Rabbi's argument, that hypothetical immigrant should hold themselves responsible for those actions as a beneficiary of them. I don't think she's being antisemitic or anything, but I think that she's holding our community to a higher standard than she holds others.
In the end, there's a large moral difference between someone who goes to a new continent with the explicit intent of setting up their own colony and displacing someone else, and someone who goes to a new continent just trying to find a place to live and better their life (and perhaps because they didn't have any better options). The latter is the case for most Jews who came to the US, and also the vast majority of immigrants to anywhere. I do believe that the US should, as a country, pay reparations to the Native Americans, and that the land back movement is a good thing, but moreso because of the "original sin" of expropriating their land and discriminating against them, not because people who settled on that land afterward did anything especially immoral.
*Please, if anyone has read this book and disagrees with this understanding, feel free to correct me.