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A
This is an I Heart podcast. Guaranteed human.
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B
This is Jenny Garth from I Choose Me with Jenny Garth. History is full of mysteries like how people ever survive before modern laundry detergent. Luckily, Tide's here with boosted stain fighting for cleaner, whiter, brighter and fresher. Laundry versus Tide. Simply no wonder it was America's number one detergent in sales last year. If it's gotta be clean it, it's got to be Tide. Tide is a proud sponsor of the Elton John Impact Awards, honoring those who have helped shape a more inclusive and compassionate world with their artistry, advocacy and unwavering commitment to equality. You won't want to miss the Elton John Impact Awards podcast, available on June 1st on the iHeartRadio app and everywhere podcasts are heard Cool Zone Media
- [00:53]
C
with scenes of the genocide in Palestine plastering our screens over the past few years, and increasing analysis of the settler colonial and supremacist root of Israel's violence, it had me thinking more about the concept of settler colonialism. Many people know now about Israel's settler colonial past and its parallels with the us, Australia, South Africa and Canada. Those are common comparisons, but few know much about the settler colonial origins of Liberia, which has gained a little attention as people have begun learning more about the concept. So I'd like to take a look at Liberia, Israel and the parallels of settler colonialism. This is it could happen here. I'm Andrew sage andrewism on YouTube and I'm joined once again by It's James Again.
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D
I'm excited to learn about this.
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C
Yeah, I'm mainly looking at the parallels through the lens of analysis provided by historian Patrick Wolf in his famous article Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native with other historical resources and articles linked in the show. Notes first off, before we start making comparisons, I'll need to introduce the concept for those unfamiliar Settler colonialism is in one sentence, an ongoing structural process where outsiders permanently occupy indigenous lands to build new societies. Wolf notes that invasion is a structure, not an event. He calls settler colonialism inherently eliminatory but not invariably genocidal, and calls elimination an organizing principle of settler colonial society rather than a one off occurrence. Unlike the kind of exploitation colonialism which seeks to extract resources and leave, settlers come to stay to claim land. As Wolf quotes, Deborah Bird rose to get in the way of settler colonisation, all the native has to do is stay at home. Settlers tell various stories to justify their eliminatory ambitions race, religion, ethnicity, civilization, status, but it really comes down to territory. Settlers want to establish lasting autonomous communities by eliminating the existing indigenous way of life and replacing it with the colonizer's culture, economy, and political order. Woolf says that settler colonialism destroys to replace, pointing to the quite visceral example of Israeli settlers uprooting ancient olive trees and replacing them with foreign fruit trees or, as Israel often euphemises it, making the desert bloom. Elimination doesn't have to mean the wholesale slaughter of indigenous people, though frontier homicide tends to be a trend. But elimination seeks to dissolve indigenous people and their way of life through various expulsion, encouraged, population mixing and forced assimilation, enclosure, child abduction, missions and boarding schools, religious conversion, marginalization, labor exploitation, and more often several at once. Settler colonialism tends to remain deeply embedded in the laws and institutions of the countries founded that way. But Wolff points to a curious side effect of settler colonialism, which is the way that settler society subsequently attempts to recuperate indigeneity in order to express its independence from the mother country. He references Australia's incorporation of indigenous symbolism for one example. Australia, Canada, the us, New Zealand, South Africa, French, Algeria, Rhodesia, Latina, Liberia, and Israel are all examples of contemporary or historical settler colonial societies. But I'm focused on the parallels between just two of them, Liberia and Israel. In 1818, the American colonization Society scouted what was then known as the Grain coast and deemed it a suitable location for their planned African colony, meant to be a home for formerly enslaved people in the US following emancipation, as well as free black people that already existed in the territory. The first successful settlement was established in 1822 after an agreement with the local chiefs signed in 1821 granted the society possession of Cape Mesurado. Now, some free black Americans had advocated return to Africa projects long before the ACS was even founded, so we shouldn't erase the agency in this. But the ACS was led by a mix of white abolitionists and white enslavers who mostly just wanted to rid themselves of the free black population in the US Most free black Americans opposed the project, either initially or in time. Those black Americans that did participate came to be known as Americo Liberians. They carried on the American Colonization Society's narrative that the establishment of Liberia was was a return to the Promised Land, an exodus of formerly enslaved people returning to their ancestral homeland to establish an independent land of freedom. And as a minority in that land, the Americo Liberians would establish a government and various settlements they ruled that would attempt to expand Liberia's initial territory and bring civilization and Christianity to the natives. Those that went were clearly heavily influenced by their American background, viewing themselves culturally, socially and educationally superior to the native African ethnic groups they encountered. After a few decades of support from the American colonisation society, independence was declared in 1847, but only recognised by the US in 1862. They also very quickly fell into a deteriorating economic situation marked by heavy foreign debt obligations, culminating in multinational intervention and oversight in the early 1900s, as well as the establishment of a million acre rubber plantation for the Firestone Tire and Rubber Company, which would exploit the indigenous people in Liberia for decades to come.
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D
Anytime you're setting up a rubber plantation, I feel like that should be a massive red flag that you're one of the bad guys.
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C
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
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D
People who have been subject to settler colonial violence and to like racially motivated. Sound like a cop when I say racially motivated violence. Like the violence inherent in racism and capitalism. The idea that the way to kind of right those wrongs is to become the one doing the violence, not the one subject to the violence. It's seen in Myanmar. Right. Like a country that was brutally colonized by the country that I was born in, but in which essentially today the state of Myanmar is itself a colonial entity.
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B
Right.
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D
We have a number of different ethnic groups, dozens of ethnic groups within Myanmar. And we have one ethnic group which has dominated governance and which has dominated the military and which has used the tool of the state to extract resources, labor, human bodies from the other ethnic groups. Right. Like they've gone from being colonized to effectively being like a contiguous empire and they've adopted the logic of the colonizer in doing so.
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C
Yeah. Unfortunately this is a very common phenomenon. You know, this is why I tend to view nationalism, even so called third world nationalisms, as dead ends, as explicitly counter revolutionary, as against the liberation of all people.
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D
Yeah.
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C
Because that construction of the nation state, or really of states in general, tends to come with the establishment of certain superiors and inferiors, you know, subordinates and rulers.
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D
Yeah.
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C
And the privileging of certain religions, ethnic groups, skin tones, whatever the case may be, even within so called ethnically homogenous societies.
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D
Yeah.
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C
You can even look at Japan, Right. Which is touted by, you know, supremacists of all flavors as an ethnically homogenous society. Even within that society there's, you know, colorism.
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B
Yeah.
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C
And there's also the exploitation and marginalization of certain groups within that territory, such as the Ainu.
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E
Yeah.
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F
Happy Pride from the outspoken podcast network. All month long and all year round, we're celebrating being loud, proud and always original. It's me, Brandon Kyle Goodman, host of the podcast Tell Me Something Messy. Check out my show for unfiltered takes on dating, relationships, and adulting. The more you get comfortable with someone,
- [09:58]
C
the more their real self comes out. They're gonna be gross.
- [10:00]
F
What's the grossest thing about a man burping?
- [10:02]
G
Shut it down.
- [10:03]
F
Listen to High Key for the best pop culture takes. And there are no girls on the Internet. For all your tech news for your favorite celebrity, Kiki's, check out outlaws with T.S. madison.
- [10:13]
C
Wait, so Luke was the star of Vader?
- [10:15]
F
Yeah. And Vader was turned by RuPaul. Yeah, well, somebody turned him some old, old, old witch. Learn to love yourself unapologetically with BFF Black Fat Femme. And start your day with intention with Waking up with Ryan. Coming in July. Celebrate Pride with the outspoken Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Open your free iHeartRadio app. Search Pride and listen now.
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H
What did black music, food and culture teach us about who we were becoming?
- [10:44]
A
2016 was sort of that last era
- [10:47]
E
of monoculture where we still consumed things
- [10:51]
H
in community, from Beyonce and Rihanna. Everybody wanted to be Beyonce.
- [10:56]
A
I don't think we'll ever see another
- [10:58]
H
re to soul Food, memory, identity, and the stories we carry through black culture.
- [11:03]
A
What does it mean to be black and eat in America? So we were this group of people
- [11:08]
I
who knew how to work the land, who knew how to live with the land.
- [11:11]
A
We make it do what it do.
- [11:13]
H
Therapy for black girls is bringing together the conversation, shaping black life right now.
- [11:17]
I
You will never make me feel bad
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A
for being a black girl or for
- [11:20]
I
being a black American girl ever.
- [11:22]
H
Therapy for black girls is bringing it all to the mic. Listen to therapy for black Girls on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
- [11:32]
I
Every story has a point where it's balanced on a knife's edge.
- [11:35]
E
That's where we begin.
- [11:36]
I
For some, it's a confrontation no parent ever expects. They finally admit, we're here to take your children. The department has taken custody, and we're here to take your kids. It was just shock and horror and desperation.
- [11:50]
E
For others, it's surviving the unthinkable as
- [11:54]
I
they're having this gun battle thousands of feet up in the air, many of the bullets start to puncture the aircraft. I thought we were going to die then. The Knife is a podcast about real people whose lives were upended in an instant.
- [12:08]
E
We talked to the people who lived it, unpacking what happened, how they got through it, and what came next.
- [12:14]
I
And on our off record, Episodes, we go even deeper into the reporting and answer the questions you. You can't stop thinking about.
- [12:21]
E
New episodes drop every Thursday on the Exactly Right Network and the iHeart Podcast Network.
- [12:26]
I
Listen to the Knife on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
- [12:31]
A
Here's something that should not be as complicated as it is getting a racist statue removed. And here's something that should be a whole lot easier than it getting a new one put up in its place.
- [12:42]
C
As long as there's a politics of race in America, there's gonna be a politics of remembering the Civil War. To get to school, I had to go down Robert E. Lee Boulevard, get
- [12:50]
D
to the grocery store, I had to go down Jefferson Davis Parkway.
- [12:53]
I
If you're a historian and you leave out half of what the history is, you're not doing your job.
- [12:58]
A
I'm Akilah Hughes, and Rebel Spirit Season 2 goes deep on both of those things. The fights, the politics, the people who won, and my personal campaign to add something to the Kentucky State House that's actually worth the wall space.
- [13:11]
H
We are more than our bodies. We contain essence, we contain spirit. How do you represent that? They are just fueling a fire that is really catching.
- [13:21]
A
You'll see what I mean. Listen to Rebel Spirit Season 2 on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
- [13:36]
D
I think a lot about, like, nationalism now. There was a time when there was a movement to try and use nationalism as a positive thing. Like the idea of a brotherhood of nations, right? It existed within Catalan anti fascism in the 1930s. Like, we are a nation which has been suppressed by the state, so we will build a nationalism that doesn't suppress people, right? We saw the same thing with Kurdish people, right, with the Kurdish freedom movement. Their understanding, I would say, was more advanced than the Catalans in that like their. Their analysis was, we are a nation that has been suppressed by multiple states and therefore we will build society without the state in order to create a world where there is no boot. So we can't trade on people, right? I still believe that that is possible. But like, in the last six months, you know, I've seen people back away from that within Kurdistan, right. And start talking again about the brotherhood of peoples was a mistake. They feel betrayed. I don't think those people consider themselves to be superior, but they feel that that project didn't work. That really makes me sad. Ultimately, the brotherhood of nations, like, didn't succeed in Syria, right? And we've seen it effectively. Syria is still called the Syrian Arab Republic after hundreds of thousands of people gave their lives for it to be a place where everyone could be free. And, yeah, it really saddens me to see that. That, like, I really hoped for something better. This idea of, like, brotherhood of nations, which acknowledges people's difference but doesn't create a hierarchy. But we're not. We haven't made it quite work yet, I guess. And I guess we live in a world right, where the. Where the appeal to nationalism and bigotry and the idea, like, specifically in Syria, I think, that, like, Arabs should not be equal to Kurds was appealing. Through making that appeal, this project was able to be sabotaged, I guess.
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C
Yeah. I think that while we're still forging different approaches to liberation, trying to figure out what that looks like, we've seen the track record of nationalism is my point.
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D
Yeah, yeah, No, I think it's fair. Like, it's. It's been used much more as a force for dividing us and making us hate each other than it has been for creating a world where we can all live together alongside each other.
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C
Yeah, this is a digression, but in my experience in Trinidad, what I've noticed is that there are efforts to kind of construct, and they have been since the establishment of Trinidad as an independent country, Transbago as an independent country in 1962, first led by Dr. Eric Williams, there were efforts to kind of build this kind of cross racial, like, overarching, like Trinidadian Trinbagonian identity, which, I mean, I use that term, Trinbago in some of my work. But Tobago is kind of attached to Trinidad against their will. And even now there are people who try to push that Trinbago unity. But there are also people who will assert, particularly people from Tobago who will assert that, yeah, no, we want greater autonomy, we want even independence from Trinidad. And so for maybe certain people unifying purposes, I would use the term, but I try not to give off that impression that I'm using it for a kind of unifying nationalism. Because I think with the nationalism of such a young, quote, unquote nation, a nation of nations of various people from all over the world, mostly brought here against their will.
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D
Yeah.
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C
There are these competitions, I think, over the proportionality of the representation of different racial ethnic groups, the competitions over who gets to define what this Trinidadian nation is, what it means to be a Trinidadian, and efforts to kind of balance or imbalance the proportion of representation depending on which government is in power. You know, our current government is very much oriented toward A kind of Indo Trinidadian Indian focus and have in many ways marginalized all other groups, maligned all other groups, disrespected all other groups within the country to kind of elevate this sense of or get back for the Indian people in Trinidad. And I don't want to go too much down that road talking about that, but it's just another example to me of the frustration and misdirection that comes with investment in nationalism, which currently holds a monopoly both here and in much of the world on narratives of liberation and anti colonial resistance. It's almost treated as if anti colonial resistance is synonymous with nationalism, as though the two cannot be distinguished.
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D
It should be a relic of the 20th century. Right. Like it was heavily tied to state socialism. Right. The idea of the way that we fight the wrongs of colonialism is through creating post colonial nation states and ignoring the fact that many of those states, many of the boundaries they find themselves within, include a diverse range of identities, like you said of many people, including those brought against their will to those places. And that many of those identities don't line up with the national identities and it almost always results in a change of the oppressor rather than the absence of oppression.
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C
Yeah. I mean, you could literally just look at the entire history of independent Nigeria.
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B
Yes.
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C
For one very clear example of that.
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D
Yeah.
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C
But getting back to the comparisons. Right. I don't see an explicitly titled ideology behind the founding of Liberia beyond settler colonialism, I suppose. But the implicit ideology was the supremacy of the elite Americo Liberian way of life and the right to that territory and the label and the resources of its people. While the elite would themselves be subordinate to the global capitalist order dictated particularly by America and Europe. So the supremacy of the Americo Liberian elite did not place them in a position of supremacy on the global stage. They were still in a subordinate position in some ways. Turning now to Israel. The political Zionist movement emerged into late 19th century Europe amid pogroms and failure to achieve equality for Jews in many countries. Its most influential early theorist, Theodor Herzl, argued that Jews constituted a nation and that anti Semitism could not ultimately be solved through integration into European societies. Instead, they required a state of their own. And Palestine was not initially the only territory under consideration. Various proposals included Argentina, Uganda and other locations before Palestine became firmly established and 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 labour bond, rejected Zionism altogether. They argued that 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 settlement 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.
- [22:43]
F
Happy Pride from the Outspoken Podcast Network all month long and all year round, we're celebrating being loud, proud, and always original. It's me, Brandon Kyle Goodman, host of the podcast Tell Me Something Messy. Check out my show for unfiltered takes on dating, relationships and adulting. The more you get comfortable with someone,
- [23:00]
C
the more their real self comes out. They're gonna be gross.
- [23:02]
F
What's the grossest thing about a man burping?
- [23:05]
G
Shut it down.
- [23:05]
F
Listen to High Key for the best pop culture takes. And there are no girls on the Internet for all your tech news. For your favorite celebrity Kikis, check out outlaws with T.S. madison.
- [23:15]
C
Wait, so Luke was the son of Vader?
- [23:18]
F
Yeah, and Vader was turned by RuPaul. Yeah, well, somebody turned him. Some old, old old witch. Learn to love yourself unapologetically with BFF Black Fat Femme and start your day with intention with Waking up with Ryan. Coming in July. Celebrate Pride with the Outspoken Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Open your free iHeartRadio app. Search Prime Pride and listen now.
- [23:42]
H
What did black music, food and culture teach us about who we were becoming?
- [23:46]
A
2016 was sort of that last era
- [23:50]
E
of monoculture where we still consumed things in community.
- [23:55]
H
From Beyonce and Rihanna. Everybody wanted to be Beyonce.
- [23:59]
A
I don't think we'll ever see another Rihanna.
- [24:01]
H
To Soul Food, memory, identity, and the stories we carry through black culture.
- [24:05]
A
What does it mean to be black and Eat in America. So we were this group of people
- [24:11]
I
who knew how to work the land, who knew how to live with the land.
- [24:13]
A
We make it do what it do.
- [24:15]
H
Therapy for black girls is bringing together the conversation shaping black life right now.
- [24:19]
I
You will never make me feel bad
- [24:21]
A
for being a black girl, for being
- [24:22]
I
a black American girl ever.
- [24:24]
H
Therapy for black girls is bringing it all to the mic. Listen to therapy for black Girls on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.
- [24:34]
I
Every story has a point where it's balanced on a knife's edge.
- [24:37]
E
That's where we begin.
- [24:39]
I
For some, it's a confrontation no parent ever expects. They finally admit, we're here to take your children. The department has taken custody and we're here to take your kids. It was just shock and horror and desperation.
- [24:52]
E
For others, it's surviving the unthinkable as
- [24:56]
I
they're having this gun battle thousands of feet up in the air, many of the bullets start to puncture the aircraft. I thought we were gonna die then. The Knife is a podcast about real people whose lives were upended in an instant.
- [25:10]
E
We talked to the people who lived it, unpacking what happened, how they got through it and what came next.
- [25:17]
I
And on our off record episodes, we go even deeper into the reporting and answer the questions you can't stop thinking about.
- [25:23]
E
New episodes drop every Thursday on the Exactly Right Network and the iHeart Podcast Network.
- [25:28]
I
Listen to the Knife on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
- [25:33]
A
Here's something that should not be as complicated as it getting a racist statue removed. And here's something that should be a whole lot easier than it getting a new one put up in its place.
- [25:45]
C
As long as there's a politics of race in America, there's gonna be a politics of remembering the Civil War. To get to school, I had to go down Robert E. Lee Boulevard.
- [25:52]
D
Get to the grocery store, I had to go down Jefferson Davis Parkway.
- [25:55]
I
If you're a historian and you leave out half of what the history is, you're not doing your job.
- [26:00]
A
I'm Akilah Hughes and Rebel Spirit Season 2 goes deep on both of those things. The fights, the politics, the people who won, and my personal campaign to add something to the Kentucky State House that's actually worth the wall space.
- [26:14]
H
We are more than our bodies. We contain essence, we contain spirit. How do you represent that? They are just fueling a fire that is really catching.
- [26:24]
A
You'll see what I mean. Listen to Rebel Spirit Season 2 on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
- [26:38]
C
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 establish 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 organised. Over the course of the 19th century, Americo Liberian settlements expanded their territory through a mixture of purchases, 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 monopolised state institutions and eventually established what was effectively a one party state under the True Whig Party which ruled Liberia for over a century. The Liberian state extracted taxes and tribute from indigenous communities that relied on indigenous labour, and by the early 20th century International investigations were uncovering systems of forced labour and human trafficking so severe that they generated an international scandal. While the settlers themselves had once been victims of slavery and racial oppression, they recreated similar class and ethnic hierarchies in their state. Liberia, of course, differs from many other settler colonies, but they retained the basic framework of a settler population, clearing sovereignty over territory inhabited by indigenous peoples and concentrating political and economic power in its own hands. Now compare this to Israel. From the late 19th century onward, Zionist organizations acquired land through purchases and violence following the Nakba, which created one of the largest refugee populations in the modern world. The Palestinians which remained within Israel were subjected to military administration for years, while Palestinians in the occupied territories continued to live under a different legal regime than Israeli settlers. The 1952 citizenship law and the 2018 nation state law cemented the Jewish supremacist heart of the Zionist project. And since 1967 settlement expansion in the west bank has steadily increased, accompanied by land seizures, home demolitions, restrictions on movement and the fragmentation of Palestinian communities. And Gaza has been an open air prison where settlers occasionally mow the lawn aka slaughter the population. Since 2007. It's worth noting a major difference between the two cases, which is the demographic element. Americo Liberians remained a small minority ruling a much larger indigenous population for the entire history of Americo Liberian ruled Liberia. Those kind of demographics are more akin to settler societies Like South Africa, Rhodesia and French Algeria, which leaned heavily into the exploitation aspect of colonialism. Israel developed differently intentionally to ensure that Jewish people became the demographic majority within its territory. So it's more comparable to settler societies like the us, Canada and Australia. Such demographics necessarily led to a difference in how indigenous peoples were managed between projects. Liberia's system depended upon indigenous labour, while Israel's project has generally prioritized securing land while minimising dependence on Palestinian labor. In many periods of Zionist history, Palestinian labor was actively displaced in favor of exclusively Jewish labour. But again, settler colonialism operates according to a logic of elimination that might often be expulsion and extermination, but it can also mean assimilation, confinement and whatever else. Again, the settlers want the land, the native becomes an obstacle, and different settler societies develop different methods for dealing with that obstacle. The US had its ethnic cleansings, removals, reservation system and boarding schools. Australia had frontier wars, stolen generations and land dispossessions. Canada had assimilation policies like reservation schools. South Africa under white rule couldn't expel the black majority, so they maintained apartheid, controlled reservations and extracted labour. But again, what matters for defining settler colonialism is that indigenous sovereignty is displaced and settler control over the land is secured. Of course, indigenous people in all cases do not take this abuse lying down. From the very beginning of Liberian settlement, indigenous peoples resisted. The kru, Grebo Vai and numerous other ethnic groups fought against territorial expansion, taxation, forced labour and attempts by the Liberian state to extend its authority into the interior. And despite generations of Americo Liberian dominance, indigenous resistance never entirely disappeared. Eventually, the political order that had governed Liberia for over a century began to crack. Economic crisis, corruption and growing resentment towards settler domination culminated in a military coup in 1980 led by Samuel Doe, overthrowing the government of President William Talbot and ending more than a century of uninterrupted Americo Liberian political dominance. Now, that coup clearly did not create a free or egalitarian society. Liberia would soon face dictatorship, civil war and immense suffering. But it did mark the collapse of the old settler elite's monopoly on state power. And efforts at recovery in the country are ongoing. Palestinian resistance, on the other hand, faced a very different trajectory. From the beginning of Zionist settlement, Palestinians resisted displacement and land loss through protests, strikes, political organizing and armed revolt. The Great Arab revolt of 1936-1939 saw Palestinians launch a massive strike and uprising against both British colonial rule and Zionist settlement. Decades later came the first and second Intifadas, mass movements that combined protest, civil disobedience, community organizing and armed resistance. Palestinians have built a number of institutions alongside international solidarity movements in an effort to sustain their efforts under occupation, siege, exile and apartheid. Even today, amid the destruction and genocide of Gaza, passe and resistance continues. Liberia and Israel are both settler colonial projects, but they are different enough in scale and goals and methods and historical development that obviously treating them as equivalent would be misleading. The point of the comparison is to identify what these societies have in common since the coup in Liberia, the old Americo Liberian elite has lost its monopoly and power, but in Israel, the settler colonel project is alive and well with ever expanding settlements, occupation, displacement and brutality. Whether settler dominance in Israel remains or falls is yet to be seen. In Liberia, the end of settler rule do not automatically bring justice, equality or freedom. Their liberation through state power has not brought their relief, especially in the context of a global capitalist order. The replacement of one ruling class for another has not ended the struggle, but maybe put a semicolon on that struggle. I believe the aim of decolonisation must be not merely the fight against the people at the helm of the system, but the very helm of the system itself, dismantling the structures that make domination possible in the first place. For Palestine and for all peoples struggling against oppression, ending settler colonialism is only the beginning in the pursuit of liberation. And that's all I have for today. All power to all the people. Peace.
- [35:12]
A
It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, Visit our website coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can now find sources for It Could Happen here, listed directly in episode Descriptions. Thanks for listening.
- [35:30]
H
This is Dr. Joy from therapy for Black Girls. A fresh, sparkling kitchen. Yes please. The scrubbing it takes to get one Not a favorite. That's why you'll love dawn powerwash. Just free from everyday dishes to the toughest messes, it makes cleanup twice as fast. Less scrubbing, more living. Find Dawn Power Wash Dish Spray at your favorite retailer. Dawn is a proud sponsor of the Elton John Impact Awards, honoring those who have helped shape a more inclusive and compassionate world with their artistry, advocacy and unwavering commitment to equality. Don't miss the Elton John Impact awards podcast, available June 1 on the iHeartRadio app and everywhere podcasts are heard.
- [36:08]
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I'm Jake Stauch, co founder and CEO of servl. We built servl to automate the IT work that slows companies down. Onboarding password resets, access to applications. My laptop stopped working. While employees wait for help, their real work is put on hold. It desperately wants to automate this work, and that's why they need Serval. You just tell Serval what you want to automate in plain English and it's built. No drag and drop workflows, no expensive consultants. Employees get unblocked and IT teams go from drowning in tickets to building what actually matters. With Cervel, it becomes the AI engine powering the entire company. This is a new way to run it. We guarantee you'll automate 50% of all tickets and we'll prove it to you in a free four week pilot. Go to cervel.comtickets that's S E R V A L.com tickets.
- [37:08]
A
This is an iHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human.