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The Myth of Jewish Colonialism
By bataween / December 14, 2009
In much discourse about the Middle East, there is a widespread myth that Jews are interlopers from Europe and the US – white westerners who came to ‘colonise’ and ‘steal land’ from the ‘native’ Palestinian people to whom it rightfully belongs. This myth, drawing on Marxist terminology, gained increasing legitimacy after 1967 when Israel annexed East Jerusalem and ‘conquered’ the West Bank. The notion of ‘occupation’ and the use of the word ‘settlers’ reinforce the concept of Israeli ‘colonisation’ of ‘Arab’ land.
Aside from assuming that the Palestinians must be the true natives because they look authentically ‘brown’, the colonialism myth supports another myth: Jews are not a people, deserving of the right to self-determination, but a religion. Thus anti-Zionists habitually talk about of US citizens of the Jewish faith, Germans of the Jewish faith and even Arabs of the Jewish faith. At the time of the French Revolution, Clermont-Tonnerre said of the emancipation of Jews: "We must refuse everything to the Jews as a nation and accord everything to Jews as individuals." The Jewish community would somehow disappear, leaving only French citizens of Jewish religion or ancestry. Lately, the notion that Jews are not one people but a motley collection of converts has been given a boost by Tel Aviv Professor Shlomo Sand, whose bestselling book, The Invention of the Jewish People, is now out in English. Sand’s theories build on the work of Arthur Koestler, who popularised the idea that Ashkenazi Jews are descended from the Turkic tribe, the Khazars. Both men undermine the legitimacy of Israel by inferring that Jews have no link to Palestine. Genetic studies, however, discredit Koestler’s theory: they find that Jews from East and West have more in common with each other, and are genetically closer to non-Jews of Middle eastern origin – the Kurds in particular – than they are to the non-Jewish populations they lived amongst. Last June President Obama articulated another myth: Israel was created as a penance for the Holocaust in Europe. This myth obscures the truth that every Arab state is equally a creation of western colonialism. It also ignores the fact that the institutions of a Jewish state-in-waiting were established decades before Ben Gurion read out Israel’s declaration of independence. We often hear or read about Israel being populated by pork-munching non-Jewish Russians and settlers from Brooklyn. But these groups are marginal. You almost never hear that 40 percent of Israel’s Jews trace their ancestry from Muslim and Arab lands. The vast majority of these Jews merely moved from one corner of the ‘Arab’ world to that Middle Eastern coastal sliver known as Israel. Until their expulsion 50 years ago, Jews had been settled in Iraq, for example, since the Babylonians exiled Jews from Jerusalem almost 3,000 years ago. In the early 20th century, Baghdad was the most Jewish city in the world, after Salonica and Jerusalem. The Jews can be said to have as legitimate a claim on Baghdad as Palestinians on Jerusalem. The Arabs are relative newcomers to the region; the ‘Arab’ world is a misnomer. By the time the Arabs had conquered land largely inhabited by Jews and Christians in the 7th century, the Jews had been settled there for 1,000 years. People in the West tend to apply a common misconception to all Jews, borrowing the Christian notion that Jews have been punished to wander from land to land with no country to call their own. But not only have Jews always lived in Palestine, there was continuity of Jewish settlement in the Middle East and North Africa for 2,000 years. If only native inhabitants are titled to political rights, the Jews are as indigenous as any people living in the Middle East can be. That Jewish presence came to an end in the last 50 years. The Arab League determined to wreak revenge on defenceless Jewish citizens in Arab lands if the partition of Palestine went ahead. On the day when five Arab armies invaded the new Jewish state, the Arab League secretary, Azzam Pasha announced: "This will be a war of extermination and a momentous massacre which will be spoken of like the Mongolian massacres and the Crusades."
The Arab governments actually declared two wars in 1948. The military war against the fledgling Jewish state of Israel they lost, but they declared a second war, against a million Jewish citizens. This war they won easily, through a policy of intimidation, repression, persecution and sporadic outbreaks of violence. The result is that only 4,500 Jews are left in Arab countries. Jews ‘stealing Arab land’ is an offensive inversion of reality. Jews in 10 Arab countries were stripped of their rights and in most cases dispossessed of their property. The World Organisation of Jews from Arab Countries estimates that Jews in Arab countries lost many more billions of assets as the Palestinians, and four times as much land as the size of Israel itself.
Seen in these terms, Arab antisemitism created Israel no less than the Holocaust. The Arabs owe the Jews big time. It’s time the world stopped viewing the conflict through a distorted, Eurocentric lens.
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Do the Arabs really want us to apply the logic of ethnicity as right to land? Do they want the Belgians, the Spaniards, the Germans and all other Europeans to apply that standard to the Arab communities on their countries? Boy, the European ship-building industry would receive a boost.
Using ehtnic connections to the land to justify settlement is in the 21st century simply absurd! Jews had no more birth ‘right’ to that land than the Arabs, but Jews did manage to immigrate to Canaan, and win numerous wars in defence of what became, due to the success of their efforts, THEIR land.
Elmo, if you read any history beyond the HAMAS blog, you’ll quickly realize that the Jews whom you so readily condemn for ‘ethnic cleansing’ have never actually atempted genocide against the Arabs in the region. Arabs were not kicked off their land within Israel by Jews. They did however, choose to leave their property to clear the way for the Arab armies who DID attempt genocide in 1948.
Before that, the Jewish settlers purchased land from Arab peasants who were forced to sell it by their debt to (gasp) other Arabs.
The fact that Jews didn’t coin the phrase doesn’t excuse its use for the purposes of colonization, or rather, since as you say, the Jewish Labor movement did seek to exclude Arabs from their efforts – ethnic cleansing.
The fact that 600,000 is a small number compared to modern times is a ridiculous and irrelevant argument. Senegal had a smaller population and larger land mass at the time. Would the expulsion of their indigenous people have been acceptable if jewish people living in other lands in Africa had been sent to senegal. Would it be ok to disburse the indigenous people of Senegal amongst other black people in Africa if they had no nationalist impulse at the time?Just because an idea is popular, doesn’t mean its right. And not all Arabs speak for each other.
"Net immigration"!!??? Why do you insist on treating these people as mere figures, for you to play with!?!?
And yes – believe it or not – people who face racism themselves often absorb the philosophy and repreat it back. The Jews who ethnically cleansed Palestine did so while espousing the same European, anti-semitic propaganda about the weakness of the Jew and the need for a new, stronger (read- prototypically aryan, minus the blonde hair blue eyes bit) jew. We see the redirection of racism everywhere, like in israel, where the mistreated russian population turns around and directs the same racism at the Arabs more intensely than their own oppressors in Israel.
Elmo -
In fact this expression ‘a people without a land for a land without a people’ was first coined by a Christian.
It is not true to say there was a sizeable group of non-Jewish residents. If you believe there were 600,000 Arabs in Palestine, that is the size of a small city; it is tiny considering there are now seven million people living in that area today. There is much evidence that quite a few were recent immigrants shipped in by the Turks to frustrate any Jewish aspirations to autonomy, as you put it. Zionist settlement before 1948 did not displace or dispossess Palestinians. Every indication is that there was net immigration of Arabs drawn by the better economic conditions in Palestine.
The idea of a population swap was actually popular at the time – it happened in the case of India and Pakistan and between Greece and Turkey. There is evidence a swap was advocated by both the Iraqi and Syrian governments. Arabs in Palestine did not then aspire to a separate state.
Colonialism implies exploitation of the native population, but Zionist immigrants precisely did not want to use Arab labour – in fact they created much resentment because they wanted to toil the soil with their own hands. I would not call the desire to set up your own state for your own people ‘racist.’
Thank you for a superb article.
I’ve long felt the theory of mass Khazar conversion (whether it’s true or not…who cares?) to be nothing more than a crypto-historical red herring used by racists and apologists to support their agenda. Any sensible person can easily deduce that (given the natural migrations of all human people) any historical Jewish settlements outside of Israel would absolutely have contained a certain percentage of converts.
Again…who cares?
Are all Muslims Arab? Are all Iranians Persian? Can any nations on this planet claim to be homogenous?
I’m pretty sure the answer to all of these is a resounding "no."
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In my humble opinion, if we’re going to go by the book and be real sticklers for who owns what parcel of land and who gets to be mad at whom…maybe everyone should GTFO of Palestine so that the Haredi Jews and the President of Iran can present it back to the Canaanites.
They still want it…right?
Thanks again. In your edited comment you make the key point that what occurred is a population swap – one that was never completed between fleeing Arabs and fleeing Jews. Recognition of such an exchange will be basic to a final peace settlement. It will mean that the Arabs will have to abandon their ‘right of return’ – the main sticking point to an agreement. I have called my blog ‘Point of No Return’ because the fleeing Jews are simply not capable of, nor interested in, a return to Arab countries.
Could I – if I may – please ask you not to use that expression ‘Arab Jews’ – not only redolent of the Reform concept of Judaism, but assuming that there is such a thing as the ‘Arab word’. Not only, as I have argued, are the Jews pre-Arab, but plenty of non-Jewish Middle Easterners and N Africans would deny that they were Arabs in the first place – many Egyptians, Berbers, Kurds, Assyrians, etc. The ‘Arab world’ suggests that the Arabs have proprietorial rights over the region, and therefore exclusive political rights – when they do not.
I would be interested to check out your article, thanks.
If you are looking for a profile check out my ‘normblog profile’ in the sidebar of my blog at http://www.jewishrefugees.blogspot.com.
Excellent article; thank you. I very much appreciated your systematic portrayal and debunking of several myths.
You make a keen observation that anti-Zionists rely on the Reform Jewish innovation that Judaism is only a religion. Myself, every time I hear from anti-Zionists that the Jews ought to go back to Russia, I have two replies: (1) Not all Jews are from Russia – some are from Iraq or Greece!, and (2) Even if we are all from Russia (which we aren’t!), we have our own national aspirations and rights to national self-determination; even if we are all from Russia (which we aren’t), why should we have to go back?
As regards the Khazars: in "The Gene Wars", by Diana Muir Appelbaum and Paul S. Appelbaum (Azure Winter 5767 / 2007, no. 27, http://www.azure.org.il/article.php?id=30), we read two arguments:
1) The Khazar theory is false (the authors there note, as you do, that Jews of all types and ethnicities are all most similar to the Kurds), and
2) Even if the Khazar theory were true (which it isn’t), it would not matter, for a person’s cultural identification is more important than his genes. If (hypothetically) the Jews of today are not genetically linked to Biblical Jews, what of it? Today’s Jews nevertheless maintain the same religion and culture as the Biblical Jews, which is far more important than whatever genetic link they may have. Put in traditional terms: a convert to Judaism is no less Jewish than a born-Jew. A Khazarian convert is as Jewish as one who stood at Sinai or served in Joshua’s army.
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I’ve long known that the Arab Jews lost billions of dollars, real estate four times in excess the size of Israel, and that there were at least as many of them as there were Palestinian refugees. Moreover, whereas the Palestinian refugees fled at the behest of their leaders, in order to clear the way to sweep the Jews into the sea, and with the expectation of returning to plunder the property of the deceased Jews, by contrast, the Arab Jews fled against their wills, due to intimidation. All of this cannot but be significant to any Arab-Israeli peace accord. I’ve suggested that since the Arabs gave us all our Arab Jews, let us (the Jews) give the Arabs all their Israeli Arabs – let’s have a population swap. The Jews had to flee from Iraq to Israel, so let the Palestinians flee in the reverse direction, as it were. It worked for Germany and Frances’ disputed territories, and it can work again.
But you crucially go further. You make the excellent point that Jews have been in the Middle East for longer than the Arabs have, and that therefore, the Jews have title to Baghad more than the Arabs do to Jerusalem. I hadn’t thought about this, but it’s true; if the Palestinians can claim ownership of the West Bank, then the Jews can claim ownership of the entire Middle East, since we were there before Muhammad’s army left the Arabian peninsula. I might add that Yemen used to be ruled by Jews – not only did Jews live there, but they were the governing political power! (This ended when Ethiopian Christians conquered Jewish Yemen. All this was long before Muhammad.) If the Palestinians are given the West Bank, then the Jews should be given Jordan, Egypt, Syria, Iraq, and Iran, etc. An excellent argument you make, one which I hadn’t thought of using. I’ll put this to good use in my own debates; thank you.
We might further note that Jews never abandoned their claims to Israel. Throughout the years of the galut, Jews never ceased pining for Zion.
Whether in our prayers (a Jew who prays thrice-daily probably mentions Zion and the Temple at least ten or fifteen times daily, not counting his mentions in the birkat ha-mazon), or in our ethical and philosophical literature (Jewish messianism is distinguishable from Zionism only in that the latter is concrete and temporal, whereas the former is idealistic and depends on G-d), we never forgot Israel.
The shadarim (sheluhei d’eretz yisrael – the fundraisers from Israel who traveled throughout the Jewish world) were far more than mere fundraisers; they were usually the greatest rabbis of their generation, and they were actually seen as the Messianic dream embodied. When a shadar came to a Diasporic city, it was if Zion came to town.
Attempts at resettling Israel occurred often, whether RambaN (Nachmanides) reinvigorating settlement in Jerusalem, or Dona Nasia and Rabbi Haim Abulafia resettling Teveria (Tiberias), or Rabbi Haim Benattar (the Ohr ha-Haim) founding a new yeshiva in Jerusalem. Rabbi Ya’akov Beirav tried to reinstitute Sanhedrin-ian rabbinical ordination, and Lurianic Qabalists saw mitzvot as a way to theurgically bring the redemption, which included a return to Israel. We never forgot Zion, and thus, we never lost ownership over it. As Rabbi Tzvi Yehuda Kook used to ask rhetorically, "After how many years does a thief gain title to that which he has stolen?".
Of course you are right that the Jewish people don’t need to prove they are genetically related in order to share a common culture and sense of peoplehood, but people like Sand try to prove the obverse: that Jewishness was a 19th century ‘ethnic concoction’ created out of nothing by ‘Zionist’ historians.
You are also right – and your erudition is impressive – that Jews never abandoned their claims to Israel and Jerusalem. Thus even while weeping by the waters of Babylon they remembered Zion.
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