I keep asking why Israel—and not the United States or England or France or Canada—is the enthusiastic target of today’s colonial protests?
Israel has become the standard reference point because it offers activists something that the United States does not: a plausible target. It is hard to imagine America or Canada being truly decolonized, with the descendants of the original settlers returning to the countries from which they came and Native peoples reclaiming the land. But the armed struggle against Israel has been ongoing since it was founded, and Hamas and its allies still hope to abolish the Jewish state “between the river and the sea.”
So, instead of applying our righteous objections fairly to every nation’s colonialism policies, only tiny Israel is targeted in the fight against settler acquisition of territory. (I’m not even going into the thousands of years Jews were already there.) It’s never gonna be fixed in the streets. Wars and leadership have failed since Moses—And he could part seas.