Time to nail the ‘coloniser’ myth: if there is colonising, it’s not by Israel
The allegation that Israel is a “colonizer” has really taken root among the ignorant and indoctrinated, so it’s time to nail the myth – and not just because the idea of Jews as colonisers is utterly false, offensive to justice and cruelly ironic, but because it is a complete inversion of reality. If there are “colonizers” in the Middle East, the evidence points firmly in another direction.
The idea of Jews as “colonisers” was a key plank of the “narrative” cobbled together by the KGB and their PLO cronies in the 1960s. It claimed – entirely erroneously – that Jews “suddenly” turned up in “Arab” Palestine to displace the “indigenous” population. It borrowed the idea of Jews as “colonizers” from an equally erroneous campaign in the 1920s, ‘30s and ‘40s by Arab nationalists whose resistance to Jews being given even a tiny slice of Palestine took many violent forms, including the slaughter of Jews all over Palestine, but also, less egregiously with chants of “Jews Go back to…” Poland, Russia, etc which we now hear echoed on UK streets or see in social media posts.
For credibility, the allegation contained – as always with that largely fictitous narrative – a tiny grain of truth, insofar as Jews were arriving in greater numbers in Palestine from places like Poland and Russia – due primarily to revolution and antisemitic pogroms, But there was no truth to the idea that they were displacing any of the indigenous population.
But the allegation – also as always – wilfully ignored all inconvenient historical facts such as that Jews had been a continuous presence in Palestine from Bible Times with significant Jewish populations in towns and villages throughout Palestine, even if – for socio-economic reasons – they were usually a minority. Except for Jerusalem, where Jews were almost always a majority – until 1948, when the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan ethnically cleansed Jews from Jerusalem, which – somewhat ironically – is the Jews’ holiest city. The Jordanians also, incidentally, “cleansed” Jews from Hebron and the rest of Judea and Sameria which they swiftly renamed “the West Bank” to strip it of its Jewish identity, but I digress.
So the “coloniser” allegation not only ignores the continuous presence of Jews in Palestine for 4,000 years. And ignores the fact that Jews and Arabs co-existed there productively – and for the most part, peacefully – for hundreds of years, but it also wilfully ignores the reality of the Jewish community which is that it is ethnically diverse, comprising Black Jews and Brown Jews as well as White Jews.
Not only is that “Go back to…” Poland/Russia, etc, wildly inaccurate and bitterly ironic because it ignores the fact that Jews were exiled from Judea/Palestine and had no choice but to settle elsewhere, including in Russia/Poland, etc, but even more disgracefully, it plays the race card. It egregiously and deliberately misrepresents the Jewish community as “White” to amplify the perception of Jews as imperialists and colonisers, when the reality is that the Jewish community is ethnically diverse, and the Black, Brown and White members of the “Tribe” are at least as indigenous to Palestine as those who drifted in to this bit of the Levan from Syria, Iraq or Egypt over the centuries.
We then come to the popular trope which suggests that the Jews legitimate claim to Palestine has timed out; that they lived there so long ago it would be like the descendant of a Roman claiming Bath as his/her city . In fact, you may even have seen the invidious video made by Palestinian activists, in which an “Italian” woman (i.e a person of Roman descent) knocks on the door of a Bath resident and tells him it’s “her” house before shooting him dead. The symbolism is obvious but would be dismissed as total nonsense by anyone who spent the briefest time looking at documented history, international treaties, population censuses, contemporaneous newspaper reports, etc.
The ”coloniser” allegation served another useful purpose in the 60s – especially when combined with the erroneous idea that Jews were “White.” It allowed the Palestinian “liberation movement” to forge links with all the other “anti-imperialists,” “freedom fighters” and “liberation movements” burgeoning at the time leading to lethal “collabs” between Palestinians and Germany’s Baader Meinhof Group and Japan’s Red Army Faction for the third-party slaughtering of Jews.
But the “coloniser” allegation doesn’t just ignore history.
It ignores geography, too. Israel covers a land area of a little under 22,000 square kilometres (just to be clear, that figure is twenty-two thousand) compared with the region’s Islamic nations, which occupy some eight million square kilometres (again, just to be clear, that figure is eight million) which might suggest that if there is any colonising in the region, it is not by the Jews or Israel.