Why does it seem like fails?

I used to work as a live-in nanny for a pediatrician.

Now, the thing about hospitals in my country is that they are massively understaffed and massively underfunded. This is especially true outside the major cities. The staff are worked to the bone and receive little to no help in things like finding accommodation or childcare, making working in rural areas a very uninviting prospect; staff come out here, get lumped with the work of three people (because there's nobody else to do it), burn out under the workload and leave, meaning that those remaining have even more work because that person is gone. It's unsustainable and the medical staff are doing their best to sustain it, because people die if they don't, so to the higher-ups it looks like everything's getting done and therefore everything is fine.

My friend (and boss) worked one week on, one week off, swapping out with another pediatrician. This was necessary because it would not be physically possible for one person to handle the workload for longer periods of time. The one single pediatrician had to hold up the entire pediatrics ward, which was not only the only public hospital pediatrics ward in our town, but also the one that served all the towns around us for a few hours' drive in all directions. I regularly saw her go to work sick, aching, tired, or with a debilitating 'I can barely make words or see' level migraine, because if she took a day off, twenty children didn't get healthcare that day, and some of these kids' appointments were scheduled weeks in advance. She'd work long hours in the day and then be called in a couple of times overnight for an hour or two at a time (she was on-call at night too, because somebody had to be), and then go in the next day. Sometimes she would be forced to take a day off because she physically could not stay awake for longer than a few minutes at a time, meaning she couldn't drive to work.

Cue my niece's second birthday coming up in Melbourne. I'd been working for her for about 3 years, and she (and the hospital) had plenty of advance warning that I (and therefore she) needed one (1) Friday off. That's fine, we'll find someone to work that Friday, the hospital said. Right up until the last week where they're like "oh, we can't find a replacement; you can come in, can't you?"

No, she tells them; I don't have anyone to watch my kid that day.

Oh, surely you can hire a babysitter for this one day, they say. Think of the children! We really really need you to work that day. I know we said it'd be fine but we need you now, there's no one else to do it.

There are no other babysitters, she told them. Unless you can find one?

That's not our responsibility, they said.

But I'm not changing my plans, she's got plans by now as well, the hospital knew about this one day weeks in advance, and with absolutely no reserve staff they're forced to reschedule all pediatrics appointments for that Friday. Not a huge deal, it happens on the 'physically too overworked to get out of bed' days too. I go to Melbourne, she goes back to her home in Adelaide for her recovery week, all should be on track.

My niece gives me Covid.

This was way back in the first wave of the pandemic, and there were no Covid vaccines yet. The rules were isolate, mask up, hope. I had Covid in the house, and it would've been madness for my friend and her toddler to come back into the Covid house instead of staying in Adelaide. There was absolutely no way that a pediatrician could live with someone in quarantine due to Covid and go to work in the hospital with sick children every day. And no support existed for finding another babysitter, or temporary accommodation, so the hospital was down a pediatrician.

The other pediatrician wasn't available to do a three-week stint. They were also trapped in Adelaide on their well-earned week off.

Meaning that the only major pediatrics ward within a several-hour radius had no pediatricians. They had to shut down and send all urgent cases to Adelaide for the week. To the complete absence of surprise of any of the doctors or nurses; of course this would happen, this was bound to happen, it presumably keeps happening. But probably to the surprise of the higher-ups. After all, the hospital was doing fine, right? Of course all the staff were complaining of overwork and a lack of resources in every meeting, but they could always be fobbed off with the promise of more help sometime in the future; the work was mostly getting done, so the issue couldn't be too urgent.

Don't stretch yourselves to the breaking point to keep doing as much as possible, and don't cut corners where customers/clients/patients/patrons won't notice. Say out loud, "Due to low funding/staffing, we can no longer do X," where X is something visible but not mission-critical.

In the library world, this is usually a small reduction in hours: we lose an employee position, we stop being open on Sundays, or we close an hour earlier every day. (And we put up signs saying exactly why, and to whom patrons can complain.)

If you say "this isn't enough resources/we're understaffed/we can't go on like this," but then you continue to go on like this? You've just proved that you can indeed go on like this.

Of course, not everyone is in a position where you can make decisions like this--reducing hours, or suspending a particular service; the reason we learn this in library school is that we usually have a clear bright line between operational management and funding. However, you can still ask. Management says, "For now this store is going to have to get by with 6 employees instead of 7," you say, "Okay; what are we going to stop doing, to make that work?"

And if the answer is, "Nothing," you just...let the problems happen. Someone gets sick, and they really need you to come on your day off? Sorry, but you made plans that you can't break (even if those plans are "lay in bed and eat ice cream"). But they can't open the store if you don't come in? Sounds like the store isn't going to be open. Hopefully we'll be able to get up to full staffing before this problem comes up again!

In the story above, the COVID quarantine situation was, of course, unpredictable, but if management had taken the lesson any of the times when appointments had to be cancelled because a doctor called off due to physical exhaustion, perhaps they would have had some options when both of their pediatricians were unavailable due to a global health emergency; who can say?

Shipping 5 Years Ago: hey guys let’s just ship whatever the hell we want and leave each other alone about it all right? cool

Shipping 2 years ago: Please write a minimum five-page feminist critique of your ship, examining any and all problematic aspects through the lens of queer and marxist theory, double spaced, 12-point font, MLA style citation, and wait 7 to 10 business days for council approval before shipping the thing

A colony is a group of people who settle in a distant territory to establish ties with their mother country, usually with the purpose of sending resources back. Carthage was a Phoenician colony established by merchants from Tyre. The Thirteen Colonies of America were English colonies established by settlers from Britain. French Algeria was a French colony established by France. A colony always has a metropole which directs it and to which it’s sending resources. For example: Britain in India, France in Algeria, Spain in Mexico, Turkey in Cyprus, USSR in Kazakhstan, Tibet in China.

As an aside, admit you were surprised by the inclusion of non-European powers. Funny how they always get a pass from modern academia. I wonder why…?

So, if Israel is a colony, whose colony is it? Who is Israel’s metropole? 

There is no single country from which the majority of Jews who immigrated to Palestine came from. Most arrived as immigrants and refugees without any support from the countries they left, often fleeing violence and oppression. 

Their goal was never to enrich a distant metropole. Rather, it was self-determination in a territory with deep historical and religious significance to the Jews. Israel’s indepdence occurred during a period of decolonization, not colonization.

Clearly, Israel doesn’t match the modern definition of a colony. However, the early Zionists sometimes used the term. Why?

Because words change meaning over time. 

The people who came from distant lands to form new settlements in swamps and deserts were colonists in the same sense that people moving to Mars would be colonists, but they were not colonizers. 

They used the word “colony” to describe quite the opposite of what is called a colony today, which is a form of occupation. Surely, even the worst critic of Zionism can’t accuse them of occupying anything in 1880…

So what is Israel? I’d argue that the best terms would be a “diaspora return.” While it’s a term one rarely hears these days, it’s hardly unique. 

The closest examples that comes to mind are Liberia and (to a lesser degree) Pakistan. 

Creating Israel was a reaction to antisemitism in the same way creating Liberia was a reaction to racism and Pakistan to religious prejudice. Israel is similar to Liberia in the sense that a persecuted group moved to a distant land to which it has historic ties to create a nation in which it would be free from persecution. Pakistan, much like Israel, was created by migration born from a partition of an area with mixed population.

The thread connecting all three national projects is that mistreatment and statelessness drives people to demand a territory of their own. The goal is not to enrich a foreign mother nation but to create a place where people can live with dignity.

Now we’re left facing the modern invention of “settler colonialism” which has nothing to do with the original definition of colonialism but instead combines two words leftists teach us are scary to create something very, very scary.

This is a 1919 American artist poster created to promote the “Palestine Restoration Fund” for the Zionist Organization of America.

Basically, settler colonialism means that a more powerful nation is expanding into the territory of a weaker nation, displacing the original inhabitants. At first glance it seems more suitable, but just like calling Israel a colony, it falls apart even at the most cursory examination.

Jews have a continuous, documented presence in the Land of Israel going back thousands of years. The modern Arab population is descended from various waves of migration and conquest over centuries. They certainly have some native blood, but they also have a lot of foreign blood. 

If “indigenous” means “first inhabitants,” the answer is deeply ambiguous in a land that has been conquered and resettled dozens of times over millennia. Basically, everyone in the region is a mutt at this point.

Currently, Israel is the sovereign state of the people who settled there. The Jews who settled in Palestine became a self-governing nation, not an outpost of a foreign empire. 

The conflict between Jews and Arabs in Israel started as a civil war and in a way, this is still what it is, even if it had transformed into something unique due to Israel’s unique insistence not to kick out the hostile population like everyone else had during the previous century.

This is how most nations formed throughout history: migration, displacement, and sovereignty. Russia, Turkey, Britain, France, Spain—all were formed this way yet not a single one of them is referred to as a colony.

If Israel is a settler colony than all countries are, making the term meaningless.

Then, there is the issue of intent.

Settler colonialism involves a deliberate state-sponsored elimination of the native population in the service of the colonizing nation. Zionist immigration was not state-sponsored. 

Jews bought land privately and built institutions from scratch. Their intent was survival and self-determination, not the elimination of the Arabs living around them. Most early Zionists explicitly envisioned coexistence even though very few Arabs shared their vision.

The displacement was a consequence of a war fought between two nations, the collision of two conflicting national ambitions. This is hardly unique for a period that saw millions of people displaced as part of vast population exchanges in Europe and Asia, none of which were called settler colonialism by academics.

We saw this in Algeria, Indonesia, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Turkey, Greece, Cyprus, Bulgaria, Bhutan, and countless other places. All of these events are largely forgotten because entire populations were expelled and the issue was resolved.

Finally, settler colonialism is driven by power: a dominant group expanding at the expense of a weaker one. 

Jews arriving in Palestine, especially post-Holocaust, were among the most persecuted and powerless people on earth, not an expanding empire projecting power outward.

Their victory over five invading Arab armies was nothing short of a miracle. Their decision not to do what everyone else had done in the 20th century and transfer the hostile population was nothing short of insane.

Nevertheless, Israel is not a colony. It’s a diaspora return.

How many palestinians did Hamas kill claiming "they're collaberators" without trial again?

Oh and while your looking that up, could you also look into how many times hamas has been caught deliberately making shit up, and how many times they admit that they add their own soldiers to "civilian" death tolls?

By the by, if you wanna claim ethnic cleansing you need to explain the sizable population of palestinian arabs living with full citizenship rights in israel, alongside the practice of roof knocking, where they literally warn people inside of buildings to get out of them because they are about to be bombed, an act no other nation on the fucking planet does.

That’s it.

That’s what Zionism actually is.

If anyone else is telling you that Zionism is some sort of right wing authoritarian Nazi like colonizer thing…

That person is either lying, ignorant, or a Nazi trying to smear the Jews.

Oh also, what Israel (the government) does is not reflective of what Israel (the general population) wants and believes. Stop condemning an entire country for the ignorance of the few. If you can make that distinction for the people of Palestine and Hamas, you can do so for the Israeli government and people. Don’t be a sheep.

however, the problem, at least as far as I can tell, is that the antizionist movement is a good representation of horseshoe theory in practice

both communists and nazis can agree on the destruction of the Israeli state, but for two different reasons

and when you have two political movements agreeing on one thing, elements of one are going to spill into the other, hence why actions like this are taking place

as far as I can tell, there’s been a general understanding (in the leftist community, at least) that the antizionist movement was never about hating Jewish people and culture, only about dismantling the state of Israel

Yeah, it's just about destroying a sovereign nation that just happens to be the world's only Jewish-majority country and then leaving it to the tender mercies of the terrorist groups who have the stated goal of driving all the Jews into the sea, how is it that so many Nazis are seeing that and thinking it's about killing all the Jews?

"You can't listen to these people because the source once said a bad thing about my side. I am totally not looking for any excuse to ignore my side's flaw."

as far as I can tell, there’s been a general understanding (in the leftist community, at least) that the antizionist movement was never about hating Jewish people and culture, only about dismantling the state of Israel