Occupier's Mindset

An old argument that used to be rolled out to justify colonialism and occupation in Africa is still being used by Israeli settlers. In this video from a couple of years back, an Israeli settler is confronted by a Palestinian woman whose house he stole. When she takes him to task about this, he responds by saying that if he hadn’t stolen it, someone else would have.

It’s a pretty pathetic ‘justification’ but one that used to be frequently heard. The same mentality was exhibited by the British, the Dutch, the French, the Portuguese and others as they ran rampage across Africa, grabbing and occupying territories in (what are now) Algeria, Angola, Kenya, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa, Uganda, Zambia, Zimbabwe and elsewhere. They ‘excused’ their actions by claiming that if they didn’t occupy these places, other European powers would.

Some even went as far as claiming that the territories they occupied had been empty when they arrived there. The theory - known as "The Empty Land Myth" - was the creation of missionary and writer W. C. Holden, and was popular among White South Africans in the 19th century. He claimed that when Europeans established the first settlement at the Cape of Good Hope - now Cape Town - in 1652, there were no settled Bantu communities there. Without evidence, he asserted that Africans only arrived from present-day Zimbabwe more than a century later.

Despite strong archeological and historical evidence against this theory, the apartheid government used it to justify the stealing of African lands. According to the regime, the land had been empty, so the European settlers had more rights to it than the Africans who, it claimed, only arrived from the central part of the continent much later. It sounds very similar to some arguments that are put forward by those who have occupied Palestinian lands.