Question that I'm asking in good faith because I really do want to know about it: why does Herzl describe israel as a colony if it isn't one?
(All good faith questions are welcome, Anon - thanks for this one!)
TLDR: Because words change meanings over time and Herzl wasn't psychic.
In the 1890s, "colony" just meant a planned settlement or concentrated community. This included Jewish agricultural colonies in the Pale, temperance colonies in Colorado, and utopian communes everywhere.
It was basically the Victorian word for "intentional community," with absolutely no imperial baggage required.
The specific meaning activists now deploy (colony as racial domination, metropole extraction, indigenous suppression) is a 20th century framework that didn't exist when Herzl was writing in 1896.
So a reader of the 21st century finds the word "colony" in an old text and assumes it carries a technical definition that was coined decades later.
It's a little like finding the word "trauma" in a Civil War field report and concluding the surgeon was diagnosing PTSD.
Meanwhile, 'settler colonialism' as applied to Israel isn't a neutral analytical tool that happens to fit badly. It's a framework specifically constructed to exclude the features that distinguish Jewish return from actual settler colonialism...and it still fails on its own stated terms.
Jewish immigrants to the Levant were never agents of any empire. They were overwhelmingly refugees from empires who were fleeing Russian pogroms, Eastern European persecution, and later Nazi Germany. No metropole sent them. No metropole would take them back if the project failed.
That's not a minor quibble about definitions, either - it's the primary distinction between settler colonialism and every other form of large population movement in history.
There's also the matter of indigeneity. The Jews returning to the Levant weren't arriving in a place with which they had no connection.
Jewish presence in the region is documented continuously from ancient history, including in Egyptian records dating to roughly 1210 BCE.
The religious, linguistic, and ancestral connection to the land is what distinguishes this case from the British in Kenya or the French in Algeria, who had no such ties - and it is some of the best-documented, most indisputable history humans have ever gathered. (This is why they're so constantly engaged in historical revisionism.)
So when proponents of the settler colonialism framework of accusation encounter these objections, what do they do?
They move the goalposts.
The absence of a metropole gets explained away as an "exception."
The indigenous origin of the Jewish people to the Levant gets ahistorically dismissed or ignored, despite the fact that the Jewish people are the only group whose national identity, language, and religion originated in and remained oriented toward that specific land throughout their entire existence.
The framework gets rewritten and the history is revised until Israel fits the allegation.
So, one word in Der Judenstaat doesn't settle* any of this.
From The Atlantic: The False Narrative of Settler Colonialism (paywall bypassed)
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1997, Never Again:
“David Duchovny is responsible for getting Tarantino interested,” Morgan stated. “David was at the Emmys the year before, and he tapped Tarantino and said, ‘When are you going to direct one of our episodes?’ I think David auditioned for Reservoir Dogs and Tarantino said to him, ‘You know what? I really like what you do, I just don’t want you to do it in my movie.’ So I think they’d known each other, and David said, ‘Come do one.’ And Tarantino’s the one that called Chris.” The Director’s Guild of America had other ideas about Tarantino’s directing an episode of The X-Files. Membership in the DGA is required of all directors working on prime-time television, and Tarantino is not a member. The DGA had granted him waiver to direct an episode of ER, with the expectation he would join, but he never did, and the DGA refused to issue a second waiver for The X-Files. Tarantino was off The X-Files as a result [...]
October 26 1997, Memento Mori:
Duchovny asks to make changes in script or emotional content when a scene seems wrong. When Scully first tells Mulder in last season’s “Memento Mori” episode that she has brain cancer, the writers wanted him to cry. He objected.
“That’s not interesting to me,” Duchovny says. “It may be true, some people may react that way. But in my life, most people try not to feel. I see actors trying to feel. To me that’s unreal. We go through life trying not to cry.”
Instead of crying, Duchovny played composed but struggling. “Who cares if I’m crying. Are you crying watching?”
Wikipedia, Kill Swtich:
Wikipedia, Travelers:
Wikipedia, Mind's Eye:
Wikipedia, All Souls:
July 30, 1998:
VOX: Did you implant that mythical level into the show?
Duchovny: When you start to do a show, when Chris starts to write the show, really what exists is that first script and in that first script all that exists about Mulder is that he´s interested in aliens. Life began when he went under hypnotic regression and came to believe that his sister was abducted by aliens when he was 12. This is really all we had. The rest of all the stuff we had to create because we had to make more shows. Chris never had it in his mind, certainly I never assumed that anything like that existed. Just like in “Twin Peaks", the first show is “Who killed Laura Palmer?" - David Lynch didn´t know who killed Laura Palmer, that just happend. He had to say as he went on. So, we had to do more shows, we had to explain the past, we had to dramatize the past in certain ways. I wanted to be involved in that because it was my character and I wanted to be able to play interesting things. So there were certain kind of moves and certain kinds of movements mythological that I like in other stories like starwars, Joseph Campbell´s writings or pick and choose from anywhere wich is what we do. The idea I had was in that movie, Sophie´s Choice, they are taking Sofie´s boy and just impulsively she gives them the girl. So I thought what if that happened to Mulder - if they came to abduct him and his mother as they were taking Mulder away gave them the girl. We haven´t seen that episode yet, but I would like to have that play and all these little things that we steal. There is stuff we still haven´t done, that I enjoyed like being involved and figuring out how it all happened.
Wikipedia, Milagro:
Wikipedia, The Unnatural:
Originally, Darren McGavin was set to reprise his role as Arthur Dales; the character had previously appeared in the fifth-season episode "Travelers" and the sixth-season episode "Agua Mala". Unfortunately, two days into filming, McGavin suffered a stroke, forcing Duchovny and the producers to scrap the few scenes he had shot, rewrite the script to explain his absence, and replace his character with M. Emmet Walsh.
Wikipedia, Amor Fati:
Wikipedia, Closure:
Wikipedia, Deadalive:
Wikipedia, Alone:
Wikipedia, Existence:
What part of the mythology didn't David Duchovny contribute to??
Wikipedia, William:
Also relevant:
David Duchovny's Contributions to the Mythology
DD McGuyvering S8 and S9 Together
Other posts: here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.
BONUS
The Official Guide to The X-Files, Vol 1:
Part of Duchovny's goal has been to flesh out the character of Fox Mulder-which, he points out, was understandably vague when the show began-in order to make the part more enticing for him as a performer. "It's definitely been exciting, just something added to my experience, in terms of being able to guide the destiny of the character," he explains. "Because the character had no destiny. Like any TV show, you're forced to eventually create a history for the character that it never had."
Once The X-Files had survived the initial Nielsen weeding-out process and he and Carter realized the show was going to be around for a while, Duchovny offers, "it became important to me as an actor to make that history as interesting as I could."
The second-season finale, entitled "Anasazi," and revelations about Mulder's family played out in the two opening episodes of the third season, offer such mythic highlights, exploring Mulder's character and family history, down to his father's role in alien experimentation. Those episodes also shed light on the abduction of Mulder's sister, Samantha, which figured prominently in the character's motivation. From Duchovny's perspective, those mythic qualities can be found as well in movies ranging from Star Wars to Raiders of the Lost Ark.
Those episodes, he maintains, coupled with earlier story arcs have "created a unique mythology for television in the character, and I'm really proud of that fact-that I was conscious enough to say to Chris, 'Look, I have some ideas, I want to be involved with the creation of this myth."
Duchovny contends that Anderson's pregnancy and brief absence unwittingly contributed to that emotional resonance. Having Mulder search for her echoed the loss he felt in losing his sister, while Scully's abduction gave her an experience to draw upon-all of which, in Duchovny's eyes, provided "raw material to use in the future."
According to the actor, the depth of those episodes stands above "a kind of formula that we were drifting into in the middle of last year" with stand-alone installments dealing with whatever monsters and/or paranormal phenomena the writers could dream up. In terms of producing those hours, he contends, The X-Files was "maybe an interesting show, maybe better than most shows...but as an actor, not so interesting to play."
Now the show can go back and forth, delving into it mythology, then pulling back to do more standard and self-contained episodes. "The intensity's too much, and it can get melodramatic," Duchovny says regarding the need to break up the mythology segments, adding that the producers have achieved a "nice balance now" between the two.
Seeming as much of a perfectionist as Carter, Duchovny acknowledges that he occasionally bristles when he's presented with a deluge of gobbledygook dialogue-those sequences where Mulder launches into remarkably detailed explanations about some event or series of events from the past. "At first it was almost impossible-it's kind of a muscular thing," he says. "You try and make it interesting from an acting point of view...[But] sometimes it's just like you memorize...and spit it out."
At times, Duchovny admits, he worries that the longer narrative exercises can become "the Fox Mulder bedtime story," and he'll occasionally ask the writers, "Can we tell the story a little better?" He also concedes that it's not easy crafting the equivalent of a movie each week in the time available, and that he realizes there are times when such exposition becomes necessary. As a result, Duchovny has served notice to the writers that he'll wrestle with those speeches, "but you better give me a nice scene later on to pay me back," he says.
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