The Decolonization Story No One Wants to Tell

In a time when global conversations are dominated by the language of decolonization and indigenous rights, it is astonishing how one people remain curiously excluded from these narratives: the Jewish people.

Across continents, movements rise to celebrate native cultures and restore historical lands to their original inhabitants. These efforts are applauded as moral victories and historical corrections. Yet when it comes to the Jews—perhaps the most historically documented case of an indigenous people returning to their ancestral homeland—the response is not celebration, but condemnation. The rebirth of Jewish sovereignty in Israel, a land where Jewish history is carved into every stone, is framed not as a triumph over exile, but as an act of colonial aggression.

How did this remarkable reversal of truth take hold?

It didn’t happen in a vacuum. Over recent decades, an aggressive campaign has recast the story of Israel from one of homecoming to one of oppression. In this revisionist version of history, Jews have been stripped of their identity as a native Middle Eastern people and recast as foreign invaders. This false narrative conveniently removes any obligation for the world to confront its own role in Jewish suffering—and to acknowledge the legitimacy of Jewish self-determination.

For centuries, Jews lived as the archetype of the powerless refugee—dispersed, stateless, and vulnerable to the whims of host nations. That version of Jewish existence was unthreatening and easy to pity. But when Jews reclaimed agency—reviving the Hebrew language, rebuilding a devastated land, and asserting their right to live as a free people in their historical homeland—the world’s sympathy curdled into resentment.

One of the earliest photographs of Jews praying at the Western Wall of Herod’s Temple, 1870s (Photo by Félix Bonfils – Getty Villa)

This is not a question of disputed borders or policies. It’s a struggle over the very right of Jews to define their own story.

The anti-Israel movement depends on denying Jewish indigeneity. If the world were to recognize Jews as a people indigenous to the Land of Israel—people who survived exile and genocide to return home—the entire narrative of “settler colonialism” collapses. The slogans of liberation and decolonization lose their moral force when applied to a people whose ancient identity is inseparable from places like Jerusalem, Tzfat, and Hevron.

And so, a new myth has taken hold—that Jews are simply “white Europeans” implanted in the Middle East. This lie ignores the reality that over half of Israel’s Jewish population comes from families expelled from Arab and Muslim countries after 1948. It ignores overwhelming genetic, historical, and cultural evidence connecting Jews to their ancestral homeland across millennia.

This intellectual dishonesty is not a harmless academic exercise—it fuels a dangerous modern antisemitism. Cloaked in the language of human rights, it seeks to deny Jews the most basic right of all: the right to exist as a free people in their own land.

If the world truly believes in decolonization, then it must recognize that the Jewish return to Israel is perhaps the most extraordinary and peaceful example of it in modern history. After two thousand years of forced exile and unimaginable suffering, the Jewish people did the unthinkable: they went home. They revived a land, a language, and a culture long thought lost.

The Merneptah Stele. While alternative translations exist, the majority of biblical archeologists translate a set of hieroglyphs as “Israel”, representing the first instance of the name Israel in the historical record (Photo by Webscribe)

This is not a story of colonialism. It is a story of survival, of resilience, and of an indigenous people refusing to vanish.

History is filled with peoples who were conquered and erased, their cultures destroyed and their homelands lost forever. The Jews did what almost no one else has done: they reversed that fate.

If that uncomfortable truth challenges prevailing narratives, so be it. But honesty demands we call it what it is.

Israel is not a colonial outpost. It is the final chapter of a long and painful journey out of exile. And the Jewish return to their homeland is not a historical injustice to be corrected—it is a historical triumph to be honored.