Displaced Nations: Israeli Settlers and Palestinian Refugees

Abstract

There can be no undoing the effects of settler colonialism; in the postcolonial world the politics of settler colonialism is inescapable. Even in places such as Ireland, South Africa, or Algeria, where direct colonial rule came to an end as a result of nationalist struggles, the legacies persist. That said, settler colonialism as an explicit policy of land expropriation and the plantation of colonies now belongs to another not-so-distant historical era, an era when European powers celebrated colonial conquest and settlement in the name of national aggrandizement. Even in the post-World War II context, the assumption that great nations must be imperial found expression among philosophers and politicians. For example, Raymond Aron wrote in the inaugural issue of Les Temps Modernes (October 1945) that the autonomy and future development of France depended on its negotiating power, which in turn depended on securing its national integrity and preserving French colonies in Africa: