Claire's Brother
speaker
2,353 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Jun 2026
last heard 20 Jun
Claire's Brother’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 2.
Appearances
And Palestine was not initially the only territory under consideration.
Various proposals included Argentina, Uganda, and other locations before Palestine became firmly established as the movement's focus.
Not all Jews agreed with this political Zionist cause.
In fact, many Jewish socialists, particularly those associated with the general Jewish labor bond, rejected Zionism altogether.
They argued the Jews should fight for liberation where they lived rather than establishing a separate nation-state.
Nevertheless, Zionist colonial settlement efforts began and expanded in Palestine through the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
aided by wealthy benefactors, land purchases from absentee landlords, and growing immigration.
The movement received a major boost in 1917 when the British government issued the Balfour Declaration, expressing support for the establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine, despite the fact that Palestine's Arab population constituted the overwhelming majority of the inhabitants at the time.
As settlements expanded, Zionist narratives increasingly emphasized the idea of return.
The Jews were not colonizing a foreign land, but returning to an ancestral homeland from which they had been dispersed centuries before.
And the State of Israel was officially established in 1948, accompanied by the Nakba, or catastrophe, when more than 700,000 Palestinians were displaced or expelled from their homes across Palestine.
Like Liberia before it, Israel emerged as a state founded by a population claiming a historic connection to the territory.
And like Liberia, its legitimacy would be built upon narratives of return, civilization, and nationhood, while the indigenous inhabitants found themselves excluded from the political order being constructed on top of their home.
Now, already, these situations aren't exactly one-to-one, but they don't need to be to apply a settler-colonial analysis.
The key questions for ascertaining settler colonialism are if the settlers established permanent residence, if they claimed political sovereignty, if they dominated indigenous populations, if they created institutions that privileged settlers.
Basically, what was the political and social order that emerged after they arrived, and who was elevated and degraded by it?
For Liberia, the answer becomes pretty clear once we look at how the new state was organized.
Over the course of the 19th century, Americo-Liberian settlements expanded their territory through a mixture of politices, treaties, coercion, military expeditions, and outright warfare with indigenous peoples, who made up the overwhelming majority of the population but were largely excluded from political life.
For generations, they lacked meaningful representation in government and were treated as subjects to be administered.
The settler elite monopolized state institutions and eventually established what was effectively a one-party state under the True Wake Party, which ruled Liberia for over a century.
Showing 801–820 of 2,353 · page 41 of 118
← Previous
Next →