The Hagaddah… Is Israel a Settler-Colonial Project?

Liberals who call Israel

“the world’s last active settler-colonialist project,”

thank God have so far failed

to have this project, which was first approved by God, checked.

His authorization for the project is

recorded in the Holy Bible,

and liberals should be sued, by those they label

settler-colonialist, for libel.

Anyone can check this out in

the Testament that Christians label Old:

paradoxically the New one

doesn’t contradict what by the Old’s been told,

but the right of Jews to settle Israel

isn’t based, as as some imply, on whiteness;

this the name of Jacob’s uncle, Laban …“White Man”—paradoxically ought to enlighten us.

An angel whom Jacob defeated in a wrestling match

changed his name to Israel.

One reason that we mention Laban

in the hagaddah’s midrashic tale

may be to tell us that descendants of the nephew

would all have the right

to colonize as settlers Israel, a policy

opposed by Laban, whose name means “A Man Who’s White.”

In “Why the Accusation of Settler Colonialism Is So Hollow,” mosaicmagsazine.com, 2/5/25.

Philologos (Hillel Halkin) writes:

The big dictionaries have announced their “Word of the Year” for 2024, based on the recorded jump in its use from 2023. Among the winners are “polarization” at Merriam-Webster, “brat” at Collier, “manifest” at Cambridge, “brain rot” at Oxford, and “demure” at Dictionary.com. Relying on my more limited reading, my own vote might be for “settler colonialism.”

All in all, this is not an unfair description of the Zionist project. It makes the important point that the Zionist settlers who came to Ottoman-ruled Palestine in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, largely from Eastern Europe, were unlike other European settlers in non-European lands in not having a government or quasi-governmental institution as their sponsor and protector. True, this situation changed when England issued the Balfour Declaration calling for a “Jewish national home” in Palestine and replaced the Turks as Palestine’s rulers after World War I. Then, too, however, Palestine’s Jews were not English as the colons in Algeria were French and the Boers in South Africa were Dutch. England, which ultimately did as much to harm their cause as to help it, was not their mother-country and they were neither considered by it, nor considered themselves, to be its overseas extension.

The Haggadah states:

צֵא וּלְמַד מַה בִּקֵּשׁ לָבָן הָאֲרַמִּי לַעֲשׂוֹת לְיַעֲקֹב אָבִינוּ: שֶׁפַּרְעֹה לֹא גָזַר אֶלָּא עַל הַזְּכָרִים, וְלָבָן בִּקֵּשׁ לַעֲקֹר אֶת־הַכֹּל. שֶׁנֶּאֱמַר: אֲרַמִּי אֹבֵד אָבִי,

Go and learn what Laban the Aramean sought to do to our father Jacob. Pharaoh condemned only the boys to death, but Laban sought to uproot everything.