Post-Colonialism

 

Jewish Colonialism

 When talk about the Middle East arises there is a widespread myth that Jews from Europe and the US came to ‘colonize’ and ’steal land’ from the ‘native’ Palestinian people to whom it rightfully belongs. This myth gained a lot of legitimacy after 1967 when Israel ‘conquered’ the West Bank. Words like 'occupation' and ‘settlers’ reinforced the concept of Israeli ‘colonization’ of ‘Arab’ land. Many assume that the Palestinians must be the true natives because they look authentically ‘brown’.

 

There is a theory that Jews are not one people but a just a collection of converts. Genetic studies 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 than they are to the non-Jewish populations they lived amongst.

 In the past President Obama articulated another myth: Israel was created as a penance for the Holocaust. This myth obscures the truth that every Arab state is equally a creation of western colonialism. We almost never hear that 40 percent of Israel’s Jews trace their ancestry from Muslim and Arab lands. The majority of these Jews moved from one corner of the ‘Arab’ world to that Middle Eastern sliver known as Israel.

Until their expulsion Jews had been settled in Iraq. We can this that by when 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. The Jews can be said to have as legitimate a claim on Baghdad as Palestinians on Jerusalem! 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.

That Jewish presence came to an end in the last 50 years. The Arabs said “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 declared two wars in 1948. 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 Organization of Jews from Arab Countries estimates that Jews in Arab countries lost many more billions of assets than the Palestinians, and four times as much land as the size of Israel itself.

 

Arab anti-Semitism 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 lens.