Professor Wolff professor of economics emeritus at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Quite a few of his ancestors were murdered in German concentration camps. His mother & aunt managed to survive the German concentration camps.
I chose to participate in a program for Harvard and Radcliffe undergraduates that took 20 of us to East Africa in the early 1960s as volunteers for a summer of teaching. I began to learn there what settler colonialism meant. Further studies grew into my doctoral dissertation later at Yale based on research in the records of London’s Colonial Office and the British Museum. My resulting book, The Economics of Colonialism: Britain and Kenya, 1870–1930 (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1974), tried to analyze Kenya’s settler colonialist economy.
The Brits removed the native population from the most fertile lands in Kenya. The Brits took over that land and started coffee plantations.
The millions of Kenyan Blacks forcibly relocated into constricted reservations found them to be inadequate to sustain their lives. Their survival thus required them to do low-wage labor on the coffee plantations of the white settlers. Taxes on those low wages helped finance the British colonial government that enforced a ruthlessly exploitative settler colonial system. This economic and racialized apartness in Kenya paralleled the better-known apartheid in South Africa.
In the 1950’s the Mau-Mau uprising occurred due to British policy in Kenya.
The British repressed the rebellion, imprisoned Kenyatta, and loudly declared victory.
Britain’s victory, however, sounded the death knell for its Kenya colony. Mau Mau showed the British the rising levels of resistance and rebellion they would face indefinitely from the settler colonies they had created. British politicians saw these as mushrooming costs of the colonies they could not afford. Since the end of World War II, European colonialisms had been dissolving almost everywhere. British leaders could not escape accommodating the historical reality. Shortly after Mau Mau, Britain acknowledged Kenya’s national independence, freed Kenyatta, and accepted him as Kenya’s new leader. Independence ended Kenya’s settler colonialism.
With US aid Israel is able to continue its subjugation of the Palestinians.
That aid only continues as long as the benefits of the alliance with Israel exceed the risks and costs.
And there are political ramifications to support of the current Israeli military action. American support has weaken within the nation.
Recent polls suggest that American adults are divided in their views of U.S. military aid to Israel, with a significant divergence among age groups. Support for military aid to Israel appears strongest among older respondents (ages sixty-five and older) and weakest among younger adults (ages eighteen to twenty-nine).
If that link between the Nation ends so will the settler colonialism/occupation of Gaza.
Israel Is the Largest Cumulative Recipient of U.S. Aid-over $300 billion since 1946.
The United States provided Israel considerable economic assistance from 1971 to 2007, but nearly all U.S. aid today goes to support Israel’s military, the most advanced in the region.
Most of the aid—approximately $3.3 billion a year—is provided as grants under the Foreign Military Financing (FMF) program, funds that Israel must use to purchase U.S. military equipment and services.
Israel Gaza, Syria & Lebanon adventure along with the Ukraine War has emptied the US weaponry cupboards. And the current US defense industrial is unable to keep up with the combined demand.
