OPINION
In the first part of this series debunking the lies of the ‘pro-Palestinian’ lobby, we dealt with perhaps the most loathsome: feting the rapist butchers of Hamas as ‘resistance fighters’. In this second part, we’ll look at the most self-evidently silly: that Jews are somehow ‘settler colonialists’ in their own ancient homeland. To anyone with even the faintest grasp of history, such a notion is so obviously stupid that it takes a truly spectacular ignorance to believe it.
Unfortunately, spectacular ignorance is the ‘Palestine’ lobby’s stock-in-trade.
Let’s start with the term, settler colonialism. What does this even mean? It is, naturally, a Marxist buzzphrase. Marxists, more than even most academics, routinely hide behind smokescreens of arcane jargon and buzzwords, because, if they were forced to state their ideas in plain language they’d be exposed for the illogical nonsense that they really are. Crank academic Patrick Wolfe coined settler colonialism apparently to get around the inconvenient fact that the conquering and settling of other peoples’ lands was the default organising principle of civilisations around the globe for thousands of years, and that the Marxists’ preferred ‘victim’ groups, most notably Islam, were particularly vigorous conquerors and colonisers.
So, Wolfe and his ovine academic followers decided that Western colonialism was, somehow, qualitatively different from the bloody conquests and slavery of, say, Arabs or Aztecs. The same academics who loudly decried ‘Western exceptionalism’ thus argued that the West was indeed exceptional (such obvious self-contradictions are common to Marxist ‘theories’). Unlike the millennia of colonisation, conquest and enslavement by non-Western empires, Western colonialism was ‘different’, because, supposedly, it sought to not just conquer the colonised but exterminate them entirely.
This claim of ‘genocidal’ ‘settler colonialism’ doesn’t hold up to scrutiny, of course. In almost every area colonised by Europeans, indigenous populations remain by far the majority. The rare exceptions are those lands that were sparsely populated at the time of colonisation, such as Australia or North America (contrary to claims by Marxist academics, most of the land north of Mexico was as empty as Australia still is, before Europeans arrived).
So, settler colonialism is a nonsense buzzphrase and devoid of historical accuracy. But how do the ‘pro-Palestine’ left even apply it to the ancient Jewish homeland of Israel? How can Jews possibly be ‘settler colonists’ in the lands of their ancestors?
There are many things wrong with these claims, most glaringly the fact that there has never been a country called “Palestine,” and that Jewish people were the original inhabitants of this territory.
While it’s true that many Jews migrated to the British Mandate Palestine in the aftermath of pogroms in the 1930s and then the Holocaust in the 1940s, there has been a continuous Jewish presence in Israel since the beginning of recorded history – centuries before the birth of Muhammad and the advent of Islam. Jerusalem is mentioned 667 times in the Hebrew Bible and zero times in the Koran. Not one.
On the other hand, the records of Jewish people in Israel go back millennia, even to prehistory.
The further back in history one goes, the less accurate the term “settler” is when applied to Jews living in Israel. King Solomon’s Temple, built sometime between the 10th and 6th century BC, and destroyed by Babylonian invaders in 586 BC, the Second Temple was built between 538 and 516 BC, rebuilt around 20 BC, and then destroyed by the Romans in 70 AD.
Even before that, archaeological evidence establishes the presence of the Israelites as early as the Late Bronze Age. It is thought that the Israelites branched off from the even more ancient Canaanites (rather than the semi-mythical narratives of conquest in the Jewish scriptures). Another people who appeared in the area at the time were the Philistines, the “Sea People” of ancient record, who are believed to have emigrated from the Aegean. The Philistines and Israelites were ancient antagonists, so, when the Romans crushed the Bar Kokhba revolt, they renamed the ancient Israelite kingdom of Judea to “Syria Palaestina” (ie the Philistines), a Roman province.
It is, in fact, Muslims who are the ‘colonisers’. As the bloody tide of Islam swept across the Middle East, Israel (then occupied by the Byzantine descendants of the Romans) was quickly conquered.
Muslims built the Al-Aqsa mosque on the site of Solomon’s temple as an expression of their triumphalism. Academics who universally condemn European colonialism and American imperialism rarely acknowledge Islamic imperialism, especially when it comes to Israel.
As the Muslim conquerors were wont to do, they left behind an empty ruin (for instance, Malta in the eighth century was all-but depopulated of its indigenous inhabitants, while its churches were literally stolen and the stones ferried to Tunisia to build Muslim fortresses).
For most of the 19th century, the land was sparsely populated and in ruins. When Mark Twain traveled there in the 1860s, he found it largely abandoned. In his book Innocents Abroad (1869), he called it “desolate and unlovely,” declared it “a silent wilderness,” and mourned that “renowned Jerusalem itself, the stateliest name in history, has lost all its ancient grandeur, and is become a pauper village.”
When the last Islamic Caliphate, the Ottoman Empire, was dismantled at the end of WWI, the precursor to the UN, the League of Nations, turned the land over to Britain in order to re-establish the Jewish national homeland and renamed it “British Mandate Palestine”. The name “Palestine” referred, not to a country, kingdom, or nation-state, but a mere administrative district. No Arab called themselves ‘Palestinians’, any more than residents of Dunedin would call themselves ‘Otagans’. The Arabs only started calling themselves ‘Palestinians’ after losing the Six Day War in 1967.
Tellingly, too, no one accuses Jordanians of being ‘settler colonialists’ in a ‘fake country’, even though no such country as Jordan existed until 1922, when Britain excised three-quarters of British Mandate Palestine and unilaterally called it a new country, Jordan (the deal was a sop to those Arab tribesmen who had helped overthrow the Ottomans).
Far from ‘illegal’, the modern state of Israel was established by UN Resolution 181. Nor did Jews living there ‘steal the Arabs’ land’.
In fact, they bought it.
As Robert Spencer points out, Jews who returned to Israel “in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries didn’t come as armed marauders, seizing land from its owners by force. They obtained the land in a far more conventional and prosaic way: they bought it.” Spencer quotes one British government report from 1930 that smugly notes they overpaid for it.
The only people who were dispossessed as a result of UN Resolution 181 were, in fact, Jews living in the Arab Middle East and North Africa. Thousands, even millions, were violently expelled by enraged Muslim rulers. Their assets were confiscated and their bank accounts frozen. None were compensated by the Arab governments.
Few were permitted to take their belongings with them. They were forcibly exiled and sent to the nascent state of Israel, which the new occupiers of their homes and property said would soon become “the big graveyard of the Jews” in the war to come as five Arab nations invaded and sought to strangle the Jewish state in its cradle. But the Arab nations lost the war.
But not before Arabs in Israel inflicted unspeakable atrocities on their Jewish neighbours. The so-called “Nakba” was not a case of the new Jewish rulers of Israel forcibly expelling ‘Palestinians’: most of the Arabs in fact left voluntarily. Some, because they were terrified that the victorious Jews would treat them with the same barbarity they had Jews, others because neighbouring Arab countries told them to, to make way for the invading Arab armies. Once the Jews were wiped out, they were told, they could return in triumph.
But the Jews were most emphatically not wiped out. Despite being genuine refugees, those Jews forced to flee to Israel are never referred to as refugees by the ‘pro-Palestine’ lobby. Nor is any so-called ‘right of return’ to the Arab lands they were evicted from ever even considered.
As for the endlessly parroted claims of ‘occupation’, almost all of the ‘Palestinians’ in the West Bank are governed by the Palestinian Authority. Gaza has been solely ruled by Hamas since Israel unilaterally withdrew two decades ago.
And, having created the modern state of Israel where the ancient kingdoms of the Jews were founded millennia ago, the UN has now become aggressively anti-Israeli.
A 2016 Wall Street Journal article documented 530 General Assembly references to Israel is an “occupying power” versus zero for Indonesia (East Timor), Turkey (Cyprus), Russia (Georgia, Crimea), Morocco (Western Sahara), Vietnam (Cambodia), Armenia (Azerbaijan), Pakistan (Kashmir), or China (Tibet). UNESCO’s “Occupied Palestine” document uses the phrase “Israel, the occupying Power” 13 times.
The Investigative Project on Terrorism
Despite all this, there has never in history been an independent state, kingdom or nation named ‘Palestine’. The name, like the identity ‘Palestinians’, is a very modern invention.
On the other hand, there was an independent Jewish kingdom for thousands of years. Despite millennia of invasion and conquest, the Jewish presence in their indigenous lands continued, just as indigenous British, Scots and Irish remained in their homelands despite millennia of invasion and occupation.
The idea that Jews in Israel are ‘settler colonists’ is so laughably false that only a leftist could believe it.