What 3,000 Years of Population Records Reveal About Who Belongs in Israel

Opinion

Israel is often described today as a settler-colonial project: Europeans implanted on land that was never theirs. It is a serious charge, and the useful thing about it is that it can be tested without appealing to anyone’s politics. Just follow the people. Colonialism leaves a demographic signature — settlers arrive from a mother country, displace the natives, and stay tethered to a distant metropole. Run the Jewish presence in the Land of Israel against that template, and it fails to fit at every point.

Begin at the beginning. The Israelites did not arrive from anywhere. The archaeological consensus — set out by Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman in The Bible Unearthed — is that they emerged from within the highland population of Canaan around 1200 BCE: an indigenous people forming a new identity in place. By the eighth century BCE the Israelite kingdoms held roughly 400,000 people (Broshi and Finkelstein, 1992). This is where Jewish peoplehood, language and religion were born. There is no homeland behind the homeland — no mother country to which these “settlers” belonged.

The population reached its ancient peak under Roman rule, when, by most scholarly estimates, somewhere between 600,000 and a million Jews lived in the land. Then came the genuine colonial power. Rome crushed two Jewish revolts, killed and enslaved enormous numbers, barred Jews from Jerusalem, and pointedly renamed the province Syria Palaestina to scrub the Jewish name off the map. The diaspora that critics now treat as the Jews’ natural address was not chosen. It was imposed by an empire — the textbook coloniser of the story.

What happened next is the part the colonial framing cannot explain: the Jews never fully left. The numbers fell catastrophically, but they never reached zero. The twelfth-century traveller Benjamin of Tudela found small Jewish communities scattered across the country. After the Mongol raids around 1300, Jerusalem was reported as having almost no Jews — yet communities persisted in the Galilee and the other holy cities. A permanent remnant of perhaps 7,000 endured the medieval centuries. When Ottoman officials surveyed Safed in 1553, their tax registers counted 716 Jewish households — a thriving town of several thousand (Cohen and Lewis, 1978). These are not the records of a people that abandoned a homeland. They are the records of a people reduced to a remnant who refused to disappear.

Meanwhile, the people who actually arrived by conquest were others — Romans and Byzantines, Arab and Turkic dynasties, and the Crusaders, who massacred the Jews of Jerusalem when they stormed the city in 1099. If “coloniser” means anything, it means the armies that conquered the land and displaced its inhabitants. By that definition the Jews are not the colonisers of this story. They are among the colonised.

The modern chapter is, demographically, a return. From a base of about 6,500 in 1800, the Jewish population climbed to roughly 59,000 by 1914 (McCarthy, 1990), 630,000 at independence in 1948, and about 7.15 million today (DellaPergola, 2024). Settler colonists move outward from a homeland; these people moved back toward one. A French citizen settling in Algeria in 1900 was extending France. A Jew stepping ashore at Jaffa was completing, in reverse, a journey his ancestors had been forced to make eighteen centuries earlier.

None of this means the land was empty, or that other peoples have no claim to it. Honesty about the data cuts both ways. The same records show that for most of the past 1,500 years Jews were a small minority here, and that the Palestinian population has roots of its own — including, very likely, descent from the land’s ancient inhabitants, among them Jews and Samaritans who converted over the centuries. Indigeneity in this place is shared, not exclusive. It does not by itself settle the political questions of the twentieth century — statehood, borders, or the displacements Jews and Arabs in 1948 and after. Those are real, and they deserve their own honest reckoning.

But on the narrow question — are Jews foreign colonisers in the Land of Israel? — the demographic record is clear. A people that originated in a place, was scattered from it by empire, held on through every dark century, and finally came back is doing the opposite of colonising. It is coming home.

Evidence drawn from peer-reviewed and standard scholarly works: Broshi & Finkelstein (BASOR 287, 1992); Finkelstein & Silberman (2001); Cohen & Lewis (1978); McCarthy (1990); DellaPergola (2024). Full citations available on request.