Unraveling the false branding of Israel as a settler-colonial state - opinion

The mantra of the demonstrations and campus activists supporting Palestinians – as represented by Hamas, including its actions on October 7 – is that Israel is a “settler,” “colonialist” regime. Therefore, the rape, torture, and murder of Israeli civilians are not criminal acts but expressions of resistance “by all means necessary.” Furthermore, because Israel is a colonialist, settler state, it has no right to defend itself against any form of attack from the indigenous population that it oppresses and whose land it occupies.

Hamas’s stated goal of obliterating the Jewish state and expelling or killing its Jewish population is not morally wrong. Whatever the oppressed do, their behavior is justified by their status of being oppressed. The oppressed (or their representatives) can do no wrong, just as the oppressor/occupier can do no right. Settler/colonialists’ lives are forfeit. All governments and peoples are authorized to wage war on them until they are destroyed, like with the pirates of earlier centuries.

This platform is built on two fundamental falsehoods to justify atrocities, at least against Jews. Furthermore, the moral standard adopted concerning the behavior of the oppressed repeats a suspension of justice and morality that has corrupted many liberation movements in recent centuries. This betrayal of morality has led to the deaths and suffering of hundreds of millions and inflicted another round (or multiple rounds) of abuse on the very people who were to be liberated.

Looking back to history to set the facts straight 

TRUTH #1: The Jews are not colonialist, Johnny-come-lately invaders of the land of Israel. This land was the home of the earliest tribes of Israel dating back to the 13th century BCE (probably earlier). The major books of the bible were written by Jews in the land of Israel or nearby nations to which Jews were exiled.

Despite the exile of Jews inflicted by the Roman Empire, Jews never stopped living in the land. Throughout the 2,000-year hiatus between sovereign Jewish states, there was never a time when some Jews did not live within the boundaries of the current Jewish state or neighboring territories – usually as second-class, often-mistreated inhabitants.

The name “Palestine” was imposed by the Romans on the area to erase the Jewish historical presence in the land. Jesus was not a Palestinian. He died as a Jew in Judea, a Roman protectorate/colony. This was before the Romans changed the name.

Muslim Arabs did not live in the area until it was conquered by Arab armies. This occurred a century after the birth of Islam in the seventh century, almost 2,000 years after the first Jews moved into the area. During the following millennia, at no time was there an independent Arab state known as Palestine. This discrepancy accounts for the Palestinians’ attempt to claim descent from the Canaanites, among whom Abraham (and later King David) and their followers settled. This same ‘embarrassing’ historical fact of belated arrival led Yasser Arafat to deny the incontrovertible historical reality that there had been a Jewish Holy Temple on Mount Moriah for hundreds of years, long before the al-Aqsa and Dome of the Rock mosques were built there in the Middle Ages.

In the pantheon of the radical Left, the indigenous people are the heroes, while the people who replaced them are the original sin colonialists who should feel only guilt and owe reparations to the original population. In the progressive lexicon, a 75-year occupation does not remove the indigeneity of the local population or establish the right of the occupier to suppress local self-government. However, neither should a 1,200-year occupation remove the indigeneity of the Jewish people nor bestow on the Arabs the right to suppress Jewish self-rule. The Jews are the indigenous people in the Holy Land.

The main difference between the Jews and the Aboriginals in Australia or the Eskimos in Canada is that the other colonialists decimated the indigenous, so they could not come back. However, the Jews refused to disappear in the Exile. They kept their religious rituals that focused on the homeland. They constantly prayed for and dreamed of return. In the 19th and 20th centuries, they returned. The Jews purchased all the land they cultivated and did not seize or annex it by force as did colonialists elsewhere.

Not only are Jews the true indigenous people. There is some evidence that most of the Arab population in Israel and the West Bank moved to the area in the 18th and 19th centuries, many of them attracted by the rising economy generated by the Zionist settlements. None of the Arabs were Palestinian nationalists. In fact, Palestinian nationalism did not emerge until the second half of the 20th century, and much of the emerging spirit was influenced or inspired by exposure to Israeli nationalism.

TRUTH #2: The Jews are not settlers. Almost 50% of Israel’s current population is Ashkenazi. Most of them are descendants of Jews who lived in Europe before 1948. Ashkenazim are the indigenous people who survived the exile and chose to return. They should be treated as the heroes of the anti-colonialist narrative.

More important, more than 50% of Israeli Jews are Sephardim – Arab Jews who lived in the Middle East for millennia. Most were driven out or expelled and their possessions confiscated by the newly independent Arab nations (such as Iraq, Syria, Algeria, Libya, etc.). They, too, are indigenous people. Unlike colonialist settlers, they have no home countries to which to return. Need I add that they are just as much people of color as the Palestinians? Their skin hues are pretty much the same as the Arabs in the area.

The only genuine association of Israel with colonialism is that Israel and India were the first nations to throw off the rule of colonial empires through determined revolt and popular resistance. The two nations provided important models of successful decolonization for the wave of decolonization that swept through Asia and Africa. Israel should have become a leading nation in the neutralist bloc of third-world countries, as did India.

The bloc emerged to give an outlet to the new nations that wished to stay distanced from their erstwhile controlling empires and/or avoid joining one side or the other in the Cold War.

However, the new Arab nations were still trying to destroy the Jewish state. They pushed Israel out of the bloc as the condition for their participation. Thereafter, Israel, needing allies to survive, joined the Western democratic bloc.

The morally grotesque “by any means necessary” phrase repeats the ruthless immorality that turned liberation movements of the past century into the most abusive political regimes in history. The Bolsheviks who overthrew a cruel, reactionary Czarist rule proceeded to kill opponents, mass murder rich peasants, and establish secret police and a totalitarian system.

This was done in the name of turning Russia into a socialist/communist utopia with economic security for all. The Nazis used their ideology of national unity, socialist economic equality, and eugenic improvement of humanity as justification for the genocide of the Jews, the oppression and slave labor exploitation of conquered people, as well as a police state with a totalitarian regime over the German people.

Similarly, the suspension of law and human rights and the justification of absolute rule in order to achieve liberation led to corrupt dictatorships in many third-world countries. The moral blank check given to liberationists by various elites, combined with the powerful utopian ideals of the revolutionaries, allowed the rulers to inflict endless cruelty and denial of human dignity on billions of people. Institutional checks and balances on the exercise of power were removed, even as morality was suspended in the name of the need for freedom and independence.

The condemnation of settler/colonialists to death is an unmistakable symptom of the totalization of liberation ideology. It promises a repeat of the systemic oppression, the killing of innocents, and the rule by terror that marked the Chinese Communists, the Khmer Rouge, and the Iranian Revolution, and also in the terror mini-states of ISIS and Hamas. The collaboration of the “progressive” human rights NGOs, enabling abuse and murder in the name of independence, is the moral scandal of the 21st century. Unless confronted and checked politically and militarily, this ideology promises to repeat the greatest abuses and genocides of the 20th century. The Palestinians’ fellow travelers have consigned them to a regime of dictatorship and death.

The writer is an oleh, president of the J.J. Greenberg Institute for the Advancement of Jewish Life, and a senior scholar-in-residence at the Hadar Institute.