In Part I, you were asked to keep a simple question in mind: “is this really self-determination?”

You have sat through the history of the French-Indian War, Pontiac’s War, U.S. Independence, and have stewed on what it all truly meant in terms of “self-determination” for a day.

We now could take this in any direction to continue to see the devastating effects of “self-determination” when it is for an in-group and not for everybody. We could look at Australia, and how in May of 1787 (almost three years to the day after the Treaty of Paris was ratified) the “First Fleet” departed in New South Wales as their new penal colony, having lost their original penal colony in North America.

European settlers would not be on Australian land until 1788, themselves not under their own free will. Yet, by 1901, Australia had a “White Australia” policy that restricted Australia from non-European immigration.

Australia was considered “terra nullius”, meaning the land belonged to “no one”.

Aboriginal Australians already lived there.

But to Great Britain, Australia provided another opportunity to send settlers to expand their reach and empire. It mattered not who lived there before; the land was British and her settlers.

At least, that’s how Britain saw it.

To the Aboriginal Australians, they saw an invading force taking their land, flooding it with their own people and destroying their way of life without much in the way of stopping it or defending themselves. Australia was not empty, and yet Britain treated the Aboriginals as though they were not human.

There was not even the farce of signing and breaking treaties; the Aboriginal Australians were considered a conquered “people”, at best.

Is this really self-determination?

We could move onto South Africa, New Zealand, Rhodesia, or any other settler project in the English-speaking world that we might be able to better recognize.

Mind you, this is not an attack specifically on Great Britain; they are merely the European country of focus as the direct continuation of the history of the United States and thus the simplest to look at.

We could move onto Algeria and France, move onto Hawaii, or South American settler expansion in Argentina or Chile.

However, there is one example that cannot be ignored. While the rest of the examples pertain to historical wrongs and sins we can map to and say “this was wrong”, there is an example that one actively should be saying “this is wrong”.

Part I ended with this:

“So what happened? Great Britain allied with a native population to fight a war and immediately turned their backs on them and gave their land away to the settler colonial project without their knowledge, and which the settlers claimed is their God-ordained right to have, leading to apartheid and genocide.”

That brings us to our subject, properly.

On New Year’s Day 1882, Leon Pinsker, in response to pogroms against Jews in Russia, released Auto-Emancipation, advocating for a Jewish state.

Fast forward to 1897, the First Zionist Congress takes place in Basel, Switzerland, headed by Theodore Herzl, head of the now-named World Zionist Organization. The goal of the Zionist Organization was to create a “Jewish homeland”, in which Jewish settlers would come to Ottoman Palestine, specifically, but other ideas were discussed. Palestine was selected for being the “biblical homeland” of the Jewish people.

Waves of Aliyah, or Jewish settlers to the Levant, would follow; from 1881-1939 there would be five Aliyahs.

Then, an ally makes itself known.

During World War I, the Entente of Great Britain, France, Belgium, Russia, later the USA and others, sent young men to die fighting the young men sent to die from the Central Powers of Germany, Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria and, more pertinent to the story, the Ottoman Empire.

Britain and France, once again aiming to expand their empires, began to plan how they would split up the Ottoman Empire upon victory. First, to achieve victory, Britain would promise the Arabs of the Ottoman Empire their recognized independence and Arab state during the McMahon–Hussein correspondence.

Meanwhile, Britain would also promise Lord Rothschild, the most prominent British Zionist at the time, that Britain would support their fight for a Jewish homeland. This was announced in the Balfour Declaration.

After the successful Arab Revolt and the war won, the Ottoman Empire was partitioned according to Britain and France’s Sykes-Picot agreement, giving us what will become modern-day Middle Eastern borders, breaking their promise to the Arabs, and carving out what would be named “British Mandatory Palestine” as a Jewish National Homeland.

The Arabs who allied with Great Britain and the Entente found themselves subjects of the British and French, while Arabs living in the Levant would see the area slowly transformed into a Jewish state.

So what happened? Great Britain allied with a native population to fight a war and immediately turned their backs on them and gave their land away to the settler colonial project without their knowledge, and which the settlers claimed is their God-ordained right to have, leading to apartheid and genocide.

Germany would go on to blame Jews, among others, for the Central Powers defeat in WWI, directly leading to persecution and the rise of antisemitism in Germany, itself leading to the rise of the Nazis.

In 1933, Nazi Germany and Zionist organizations came to the Haavara Agreement, in which approximately 60,000 German Jews would take the opportunity to leave for Palestine. With WWII’s start in September 1939, Britain and Germany would be at war and Britain would cut off Jewish immigration to Palestine from Germany.

Six million Jews would go on to die in the Holocaust, a systematic genocide against the Jews of Europe.

By 1944, a year before the official end of WWII, Zionist extremists would grow angry with and violent against the British for their limiting of Jewish migration to Palestine. The Irgun, a Zionist terrorist organization, would bomb the King David Hotel in Jerusalem.

By 1947, the Jewish settlers would declare the Jewish state of Israel, Arab states would intervene and lose in 1948, and Palestinian Arab Muslims would be ethnically cleansed from their lands. Settlers claimed they were “promised this land.”

Is this really self-determination?

When looking at Zionism, we see what was essentially a nationalism of the oppressed. Jews were facing oppression, discrimination and persecution from European states, and the Zionist solution was for them to have a state themselves and “self-determination”.

Yet, in practice, the Israel settler colonial project, which is something prominent early Zionists like Theodore Herzl or Ze’ev Jabotinsky would not have denied, has led to the displacement of native populations and turned them into second-class citizens. Jewish settlers are granted the rights of first-class citizenry while Arab Muslim Palestinians live in apartheid conditions.

The following is a quote from Abdullah Öcalan in his book Democratic Confederalism:

“The Palestine conflict makes it clear that the nation-state paradigm is not helpful for a solution. There has been much bloodshed; what remains is the difficult legacy of seemingly irresolvable problems. The Israel-Palestine example shows the complete failure of the capitalist modernity and the nation-state.”

The nation-state with a preferred people or in-group will never be a just cause. Nationalism of the oppressed still ends in such a predicament in practice.

One must realize nationalism of the oppressed is still nationalism. The plight of the oppressed must be addressed and rectified, but to answer with “give them their own country” is not the solution one should seek.

Sikhs have historically oppressed and persecuted, and they call for the Sikh nation-state of “Khalistan”. The Kurds were spliced up in their homeland and left to be a minority in four nations without moving an inch and robbed of their own “Kurdistan”.

It’s hard not to feel sympathetic towards the Sikhs and Sikh self-determination, or the Kurds and Kurdish self-determination, and we in the US Pirate Party wholeheartedly do hold such sympathies, but if the answer is simply “give them a nation-state as well,” ask yourself the question of “is this really self-determination?”

It is not because they are undeserving of self-determination and liberty; all peoples are. But they say the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. If we wish to truly stop the violence perpetrated by the nation-state, is answer is to create more, regardless of pure intention?

This is also not to compare the Khalistan or Kurdistan movements to explicitly settler movements like Manifest Destiny or Zionism; this is to say that the path to hell is paved in good intentions.

There are models to explore outside of the nation-state. It is not a sacred concept, and other methods of self-rule must be explored and implemented if we can ever hope for true peace and self-determination.

The Rojava project stands as an example better suited for a model of self-determination, but this does not serve as an explicit endorsement of said model. That is, self-determination does not need to come from the nation-state and the Kurds have already proven that.

The nation-state, one with a set in-group, as history has shown, can quickly devolve into a harborer of violence, no matter how just the cause.

“The history of the last two centuries is full of examples illustrating the violent attempts at creating a nation that corresponds to the imaginary reality of a true nation-state.” – Abdullah Öcalan, also from Democratic Confederalism

In the pursuit of having a “Jewish nation”, the historically oppressed Jews have turned into oppressive settlers in their own right. Israeli settlers did not just force Palestinians from their home at gunpoint historically; they are still actively forcing Palestinians from their home at gunpoint.

West Bank settlers/settlements should sound off alarms just as much as the genocide in Gaza; the displacement of native populations by settlers to create a new first-class citizenry has not been left behind in the 19th or 20th centuries.

That is ethnic cleansing, and it is actively happening today.

The world watches and, while many protest and boycott, the highest powers in the land continue to let sins of the past happen in the present.

So I ask, if it is self-determination only for the Jews, is this really self-determination? If the Palestinian way of life is irrevocably changed due to the influx of new settlers and violence allowed and often carried out by the state, is this really self-determination?

Even if one could argue the Zionist idea started with good intentions, if one granted the benefit of the doubt, it has, in practice, become an ideology of apartheid and genocide.

The United States continuously finds itself the strongest ally of Israel, and one has to wonder: Is that all ideological and geopolitical, or does addressing the wrongs committed by Israel towards Palestinians open the can of worms of how the United States treated, and still treats in many ways, Native Americans? Is the United States willing to address our own apartheid? Can we reckon with the idea that the most impoverished counties in the U.S. are all American Indian-populated counties and reservations?

How can there be justification in 2026 to still call Zionism a “self-determination” project? After witnessing the death and destruction it has caused, it becomes a detached-from-reality position to maintain.

For if self-determination doesn’t include everyone, is this really self-determination?

Regrettably, in the Pirate movement overseas, mainly in Europe, there are folks who take a pro-Israel stance and claim Zionism is Jewish self-determination.

To our “counterparts” in Germany and elsewhere in Europe, and to an international whose leader is intimately involved with the World Zionist Organization, you have lost the plot.

We are not members of Pirate Party International, and we do not stand with those who stand in defense of the bastardization of self-determination.

We are the United States Pirate Party, and in our platform, we advocate for the right to free association and self-determination. People living in a political entity should have the right to maintain, alter or conclude their relationship to larger entities, or join in union, if it is the will of the people.

The will of one cannot be the will of all. So long as the will of the people is ignored, so long as displacement, genocide and apartheid persists, and so long as one’s concept of self-determination fails to answer to true freedom for all individuals, we will never be truly free. You are free to move and live wherever you wish, a person moving from one place to another does not make you a settler, but your moving should not come at the expense or destruction of others.

Not if your end result is the apartheid and genocide of the Native peoples, like how Manifest Destiny led to the ongoing apartheid and genocide of American Indians, and like how Zionism has led to the ongoing apartheid and genocide of the Palestinian people.

Ask yourself, before defending any movement that claims it is: is this really self-determination?

uspirates.org/through-the-spyg…