At a time when the prime minister of Israel is citing biblical precedent to justify genocidal slaughter ("Amaleks"), this column is about how the left has dangerous ideas about returning to a mythically un-mixed past:
It's true that people exist, on the left, who divide the world into "two kinds of people," the colonizers and the colonized. But this column cites a tweet and loosely references some protest signs. Meanwhile, the prime minister of Israel is citing biblical precedent to justify genocidal slaughter.
But: *is* this belief being taken literally? Do people on the left, and in the pro-Palestinian solidarity movement, want to literally expel (all?) Jews from the region? No real sources cited. (Meanwhile Israel is currently expelling Palestinians from the region using genocidal violence)
This column is laser-focused on detecting on the left, "a utopian politics that believes the past answers all the questions of the present," even as a literal state, with the support of US government and media (nowhere more than the NYT) is the most literal and genocidal version of exactly that.
The word "Implicit" jumps out here. No examples of actual expressed desires of this kind, only *implications* that, taken to some extreme, might result in exactly the thing that is CONCRETELY HAPPENING RIGHT FUCKING NOW.
This use of Tuck and Yang is weird, frankly. Their point in that article is that people--especially academics--often use "decolonization" as a metaphor as a way to avoid making concrete reparations for settler crimes. It's a good article, but it's contextually specific.
Does it therefore follow from the argument that they were making that they were demanding "a promised restoration"? Why does she seem to read "the repatriation of Indigenous land and life" as a "a utopian politics that believes the past answers all the questions of the present"?
There is a difference between "a people who have been the subject of historical crimes must be made whole through concrete reparations" and "we must go back to some imaged utopian, unmixed past by expelling all the settlers." The former is real; the latter is made-up fearmongering.
Meanwhile, the state currently, literally doing a genocide is using the specter of Palestinian desire to expel Jews from the land as rationale for doing it to the Palestinians first.
This sentence asserts that people's anger at Israel is a desire to expel them, not anger at a genocidal state.
This sentence adds to that fearmongering. It matches the broader intensely anti-Palestinian bigotry of the paper in which it is published, asserting that people have irrational prejudices against Israeli Jews, and "implying" that they are the people in danger we must guard against, worry about.
But wait! After ten paragraphs of this, she talks with a Palestinian, who quite clearly, precisely, and vehemently isn't like this at all. He tells her "Don't take those people seriously."
Later, she cites another Palestinian, the late Edward Said, who ALSO is not a backwards-looking reactionary with a mythical utopian politics that believes decolonization means going back to the 19th century.
So where exactly are all these people whose dangerously reactionary understanding of decolonization made this column necessary? Would it be too much to ask to question how prevalent, how representative, and how powerful they are?
If I was writing a column in the NYT about a tweet that bugged me, I might take on the burden of proof to show that it represented something more real and more dangerous than a crank meme on the internet.
I don't exactly disagree with the place she lands in this essay, though I DO think that variations on "we must look forward, not back" is something people who don't want to think about the crimes of the past (or their continuation in the present) often say.
