"Postcolonial studies" is the name of a discipline that has become enormously popular at American universities in recent years, not without irony because the era of colonialism ended in the 1960s and apartheid was abolished in South Africa in the early 1990s.

The founder of "postcolonial studies" is considered to be the American-Palestinian literary theorist Edward Said, who in 1978 with his book "Orientalism" established the idea that colonialists assert their power not only with guns and cannons, but by defining what the "Orient" is in order to dominate it. Decolonization, in this logic, is not just the withdrawal of colonial states from Africa and Asia (which had largely happened by then), but the consequent "decolonization" of the Western canon of knowledge.

Those who think postcolonially see in the empiricism and rationalism of the Enlightenment not ways to generate knowledge but cudgels in the hands of a white and male ruling caste. This is patently absurd. Artificial fertilizers and penicillin have saved the lives of millions in Africa and Asia, even if they are the product of Western research. And Sharia law does not become better by refusing to accept the Western understanding of law. But unconditional respect for everything that does not conform to "Eurocentric thinking" is an axiom of postcolonialism - and the reason why its adherents and adepts overlook the worst crimes.

Israel is a prime case for postcolonial theorists because the country supposedly extends the era of colonialism into the present: settlers from Europe who set out to subjugate the indigenous population. The idea was full of errors from the beginning: Israel is not a colonial state if only because its existence also goes back to a decision of the UN. And the idea of a white ruling nation is also full of holes because there are about two million Arabs with Israeli passports living in Israel, about one-fifth of the population (just as an aside, these Arabs make up the majority of doctors in Israel, strange in an apartheid state, isn't it?). In addition, there are about 170,000 Jews with Ethiopian roots, who cannot by any stretch of the imagination be declared White Supremacists.

But postcolonial thinking generously overlooks these contradictions.