Natives naturally resist settler colonization of their land irrespective of the settlers’ history

Evidence

As it happens, an Israeli delegation headed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visited Uganda on the fortieth anniversary of the Entebbe Operation (in which Israeli commandos stormed an Entebbe-bound airplane hijacked by a group of Palestinian and German guerrillas and rescued the passengers). The Ugandan president, Yoweri Kaguta Museveni, addressing the delegation on July 4, 2016, gave what media outlets reported as a bizarre speech in which he referred to Israel as Palestine several times. But the president said something of great importance, even if grounded in erroneous historical facts. He said that Balfour, as a foreign minister of the British Empire (he served as foreign minister between 1916 and 1919), suggested that Uganda be the homeland of the Jewish people. The president thanked the Jews for not accepting the idea and said to the Israeli delegation at the ceremony: “Fortunately, the Jews did not accept Balfour’s idea – which was a good thing, otherwise we would have been fighting you now.” See Danan (2016); Museveni (2016). This is indeed a simple but revealing statement made to an Israeli prime minister and his delegation point blank, showing that it is only natural to expect natives to resist Zionist settlement in their land. … It was Herzl, the first president of the World Zionist Organization, who made this proposal in 1903. The proposal was voted down by the same organization in 1905, after Herzl’s death. See Kornberg (1980). The Balfour Declaration issued in 1917 as a letter to Lord Rothschild was about Palestine, not Uganda. — Nadim N. Rouhana and Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, When Politics Are Sacralized, 529

Categorization

• XREF: Uganda Plan as counterfactual thought-experiment connects well to my documented reading on settler-colonial dynamics (Mamdani cited here) and to the wider ‘manufactured external enemy’ project — a hypothetical where the theological sacralization layer is absent and so the colonial nature would be exposed. — connects to: Settler occupation can never be complete against a place’s deep local historicity — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 1850
• SEED: The Uganda counterfactual is a powerful lever for an essay on what happens to colonial legitimation when the religious-sacral veneer cannot be invoked — a control case for sacralized claims to land.

Broader Connections

• Settler occupation can never be complete against a place’s deep local historicity #corroborates (0.75) — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1850