Israel and Haiti

On the face of it, Israel and Haiti might not seem to have anything in common. Israel is rich and predominantly white, Haiti is poor and predominantly black. It is true that both Israel and Haiti have about the same population (7.5 million) and size, but the similarities would seem to end there. However, in a much more basic sense Israel and Haiti share a common feature, they are two countries that fought for their independence against incredible odds and won.
Haiti was the first black republic, in fact it was the first place in the world where black slaves revolted and defeated the armies of imperial powers, both France and Britain. In 1791, Toussaint Louverture took charge of an army of black slaves from the agricultural hinterland of the French colony of Saint Domingue and threw the French out. By 1801 he controlled the entire colony. Although he was captured and killed in France, Jean-Jacques Dessaline continued the revolt and in 1804 declared the first independent black Republic. For many years thereafter Haiti was embroiled in internecine warfare and gradually disintegrated into chaos and dictatorship.
But, the thing that characterized Haiti was the fact that in the then European dominated world of imperialism, the fact of a black-controlled state was considered anathema and culturally impossible. It had been common practice for European powers, Britain, France, Belgium, Spain, to kill millions of black slaves at will. Despite British and French attempts to recapture the colony, they were never successful. It was this distinction that represented a paradigm shift in human history. Even though Haiti did not turn out to be a model state, it nevertheless was a first, that challenged the concepts of the white European world of blacks as hardly more than children. It was a harbinger of what was to come, wars of liberation in Africa, slave revolts in the USA, the abolition of slavery and the civil war, the civil rights movement, the Declaration of Human Rights, and the election of Barack Obama as President. Everything starts small and grows, that's evolution.
If we compare the State of Israel, it too started very small, a few hundred Jews fleeing persecution in Eastern Europe, banding together to form settlements, being attacked by Arabs and British imperialists, being massacred in huge numbers by persecutors who were inured to consider them hardly human. Out of that came another pardigm shift, the concept that the Jews of Europe, a remnant after the Holocaust, could fight and establish a state against all odds. The "progressives" of the world have selective memory of this history.
In Haiti, the country was up for the strongest to take, no-one had a prior claim to it, except the Indians who had long since been massacred and died of disease. But, in the case of Israel there was a prior claim, a strong history of having come from that place. The "progressive" forces today in the West, that genuflect to the PR story of the Palestinian people, can hardly conceive of the paradigm shift represented by Jews having their own State.