The World Has Many Muslim States. Why Is One Jewish State Too Many?

There is something deeply contradictory about one of the most popular accusations directed at Israel today.

Jews are increasingly described as colonizers in their own ancestral homeland, while the enormous historical expansion of Arab and Islamic civilization across the Middle East, North Africa and beyond is rarely discussed in the same terminology.

That does not mean Muslims living in those countries today are colonizers. They are not. People cannot be held personally responsible for conquests that happened centuries ago. But if we want to use historical arguments to judge Israel, then history has to be examined consistently.

And history tells a much more complicated story than the slogans shouted on Western streets.

Islam originated in Arabia in the seventh century. Within little more than a century, Muslim ruled territory had expanded extraordinarily far beyond the Arabian Peninsula. Syria, the Land of Israel, Egypt, Persia, North Africa and eventually parts of the Iberian Peninsula came under Muslim rule.

Some of this expansion occurred through military conquest. Islam also spread through trade, migration, missionary activity, intermarriage, political influence and gradual conversion. Indonesia, today home to one of the world’s largest Muslim populations, is an obvious example of a region where Islamization cannot simply be explained by Arab military conquest.

The Quran itself contains passages that Muslims interpret in different ways. Quran 16:125 calls believers to invite others to God’s path through wisdom and good instruction. Quran 2:256 famously declares that there should be no compulsion in religion. Other passages, including 9:29, concern fighting and the payment of jizya, while 9:33, 48:28 and 61:9 speak of the religion of truth prevailing over other religions.

These verses have generated centuries of theological debate. It would therefore be inaccurate to reduce more than a billion Muslims, living in radically different societies, to a single political objective.

But there is no denying the historical result of centuries of Islamic expansion.

Today Islam is one of the world’s largest religions. There are dozens of countries with Muslim majority populations stretching from North Africa through the Middle East into Asia. Christianity likewise spread enormously beyond its original geographic birthplace and today dominates societies thousands of kilometers from where it began.

And then there are the Jews.

One people, with one tiny country.

Israel.

This is where the accusation of Jewish colonialism becomes historically difficult to defend.

Jews Did Not Originate in Europe

Colonialism normally involves a foreign power establishing itself in another people’s territory for political, strategic or economic purposes.

But where is the Jewish mother country from which Israel was supposedly established as a colony?

Britain?

Poland?

Russia?

Germany?

Morocco?

Iraq?

Yemen?

None of them.

The Jewish people originated in the Land of Israel. Jewish history, religion, language and national identity are inseparable from that land.

Jerusalem was the center of Jewish national and religious life many centuries before Christianity existed and more than a millennium before the birth of Islam.

The Hebrew Bible is filled with Jerusalem, Hebron, Bethlehem, Beersheba, Judea, Samaria and the Galilee because these were places in which ancient Jewish civilization developed.

The kingdoms of Israel and Judah were not European colonial projects.

The Romans did not encounter Polish colonists when they arrived in Judea. They encountered Jews.

After revolts against Roman rule, Jewish political independence was destroyed and large numbers of Jews were killed, enslaved or dispersed. Yet Jewish presence in the land never completely disappeared.

For almost two thousand years the Jewish diaspora preserved an extraordinary attachment to the same homeland.

Jerusalem remained embedded in Jewish prayer and consciousness.

Zionism did not invent that connection. Zionism transformed an ancient connection into a modern political movement for Jewish national self determination.

The Forgotten History of the Middle East

There is another uncomfortable historical reality.

The Middle East was not originally uniformly Arab or Muslim.

Long before the Islamic conquests, the region contained Jews, Christians, Samaritans, Zoroastrians and numerous ethnic and linguistic communities. Egypt had an ancient civilization thousands of years before Islam. Persia possessed powerful pre Islamic civilizations. The Levant contained numerous peoples and religions.

Beginning in the seventh century, Arab Muslim armies conquered enormous territories outside Arabia.

Over centuries, many of those societies became increasingly Arabized and Islamized.

Again, that does not delegitimize the people living there today. History consists of migrations, empires, conquests and cultural transformations.

But precisely the same historical sophistication should be applied to Jews.

You cannot reasonably argue that centuries of history establish the legitimacy of every modern Arab society while simultaneously claiming that thousands of years of documented Jewish connection to Israel make Jews foreigners.

Why Islam Is Growing

Islam’s modern demographic growth should also be discussed accurately.

It is tempting to explain it entirely through religious expansionism, but demographics provide a much stronger explanation.

For decades, many Muslim majority societies have had relatively young populations and comparatively high fertility rates. Migration has also created substantial Muslim communities in Europe, North America and elsewhere. Religious transmission from parents to children contributes further to growth.

Missionary activity, known as da’wah, exists as well, just as Christianity has extensive missionary traditions.

These mechanisms together help explain why Islam has grown rapidly as a share of the world’s population.

They do not prove that every Muslim is participating in an organized campaign to conquer the world. Such a claim would turn a legitimate discussion about religion, history and demographics into an accusation against an enormous and diverse population.

Israel’s case does not require exaggeration.

The historical facts are powerful enough.

Dozens of Muslim Countries, One Jewish State

There are roughly two billion Muslims worldwide and around sixteen million Jews.

There are dozens of Muslim majority countries.

There is exactly one Jewish majority state.

Israel represents a tiny fraction of the territory of the Middle East.

Yet somehow the Jewish return to this small piece of their ancestral homeland is described as one of history’s great colonial enterprises.

That argument becomes even stranger when Jews from the Middle East and North Africa are considered.

Israeli Jews are not simply Europeans who arrived in the Middle East. Israel’s Jewish population includes families whose roots lie in Iraq, Iran, Yemen, Morocco, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Syria and other parts of the region, alongside Jews from Europe, Ethiopia, India, the former Soviet Union and elsewhere.

They came from an extraordinary diaspora, but their shared historical center remained Israel.

This does not mean that Arab Palestinians have no history, identity or legitimate attachment to the land. Recognizing Jewish indigeneity does not require erasing someone else’s humanity or history.

It simply means that describing Jews as foreign colonizers is historically inadequate.

Israel Is Not a Foreign Outpost

The Jewish story is not the story of an empire sending citizens abroad to exploit a distant possession.

It is the story of a dispersed people rebuilding sovereignty in the geographical center of their ancient civilization.

You can criticize Israeli governments.

You can debate borders.

You can debate wars, policies and political decisions.

But denying the Jewish people’s historical connection to Israel requires ignoring archaeology, ancient texts, historical records and an uninterrupted cultural memory stretching across millennia.

The great irony is that the accusation of colonialism is now frequently directed at one of the world’s oldest surviving indigenous peoples in the very place where its national identity was formed.

Across an enormous region stand states with Muslim majorities.

Among them is one small Jewish state.

Israel does not need its history rewritten to justify its existence.

It needs its history remembered.