Colonialism

 As we face the end of the year with the IDF still conducting its campaign in Gaza, with so many hostages still not released, and with the support of the world waning by the minute, we could all use a bit of shoring up. I am speaking of myself as well, by the way: despite my abiding confidence in the innate tolerance of Americans, I continue to feel shaken by the ferocity of the anti-Zionism, anti-Israelism, and anti-Semitism that seems to have arisen almost from nowhere in the wake of Israel’s response to the Simchat Torah massacre.

This week, I would like to address a specific aspect of that ferocity, the accusation—by now almost a commonplace among the haters—that Israel is nothing but a last-gasp outpost of colonialism. And, as a result, that the Jews of Israel have the same right to Palestine that the Belgians had to the Congo, the Dutch to Indonesia, the French to Algeria, the British to India, and the Germans to Namibia: none at all. (It is interesting how few of those who regularly tar Israel with that brush feel the same way about Australia or Canada, not to mention our own nation, which actually were founded by overt colonialists who saw nothing at all wrong with moving onto other people’s turf and declaring their independence in that place. About that paradox, I will write on another occasion.)

Colonialism, sometimes called imperialism, surely was one of the most pernicious avenues of political theorizing ever devised to justify the conquest of other people’s countries and the addition of those conquered lands to the conquerors’ self-proclaimed empire. And this is so much the case that, at least for most of us, even the rationale behind the concept seems impossible to grasp. It is true that decades of mini-trade-wars between Dutch, British, and Portuguese set the stage for the eventual absorption of India into the British Empire, but the larger picture is the one that survives of a rapacious Empire ignoring the fact that it had no conceivable right to a country thousands of miles away from Britain with which it had no history of enmity, let alone of overt hostility or warfare, and unilaterally making that place part of its Empire, and then using the full force of its own Armed Forces to stifle dissent and to prevent any serious movement on the part of the people whose country it actually was towards self-rule. This was the story of the British in India, but it was also the story of many other nations struggling to annex the maximum number of overseas territories without regard for the wishes of the people who actually lived there.

I have to assume that most colonialists were motivated by pure greed. But there were others who were motivated not by rank acquisitiveness or covetousness, but by the supremely arrogant assumption that they were actually doing the native people’s whose nations they occupied a huge favor by exposing them to Western ways and beliefs. The prize for the most grotesque expression of that idea, even after all these years, has to go to Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936), whose famous poem, “The White Man’s Burden,” depicted colonialism not as venal or brutal, but as virtuous. “Take up the White Man’s burden,” he wrote to his fellow Brits. “Send forth the best ye breed. / Go bind your sons to exile / to serve your captives’ need: / To wait in heavy harness / On fluttered folk and wild / Your new-caught sullen peoples, / Half devil and half child.” It’s really hard to know what to say to that! (The poem goes on at length along similar lines. To read the full poem, click here.)

But what could any of this have to do with Israel?

The history of Israel is recorded in the historical books of the Bible and confirmed by archelogy: there have been Jewish people, or the ancestors of what we reference as the Jewish people, in the Land of Israel since the beginning of the 2^nd millennium BCE and there has never been a day since then that there was not a Jewish presence in the land. That’s about 3000 years of continued residence in the land and that is at the core of the Jewish claim to consider Israel as the national homeland of the Jewish people. The nations they replaced have long since vanished: there are no surviving Girgashites or Kenites to negotiate with. But where did the Arabs come from?

As the seventh century dawned, the world’s two great super-powers, Byzantium and Persia, were at war. Things were calm in the Holy Land for a while, but then, in 613, the local Jews joined with the Persians in their ongoing campaign against the Byzantines. In 614, the Persians, now fighting alongside about 20,000 Jewish supporters, captured Jerusalem. It was a bloody war. According to some ancient historians, the siege of Jerusalem resulted in the deaths of about 17,000 civilians. Another 4500 or so, taken first as prisoners of war, were eventually murdered by the Persians at the Mamilla Pool, then a man-made lake just outside Jerusalem and today the site of a very popular upscale shopping mall. Another 35,000 or so were exiled to Persia.

But the tide eventually turned. By 617, the Persians determined that their best interests lay in making peace with the Byzantines even if it meant betraying their Jewish allies. And that is just what they did. In 628, the shah of Iran, King Kavad II, made peace with his Byzantine counterpart, a man named Heraclius. The Jews surrendered and asked for the emperor’s protection, which was granted. That lasted about twelve minutes, however: before the ink on the treaty was dry, a massacre of the Jews ensued throughout the land and Jewish residency in Jerusalem was formally forbidden.

And now we get to the relevant part. Just ten years later, in 648, the Byzantine Empire was invaded again, this time by the Islamic State that had grown up after Mohammed’s death in 632. The Byzantines retreated, the Muslims took over, and Israel was then ruled by Muslim Arab colonialists until the Crusaders arrived a cool four and a half centuries later in 1099. Nor is “colonialist” a vague term here. In fact, it is the precisely accurate one: a powerful nation wrests land from a neighboring nation that it bests on the battlefield, then annexes that land to itself with reference neither to the history of the place nor to the wishes of its citizens.

At first, life under Arab occupation wasn’t that bad. Historians estimate that there were between 300,000 and 400,000 Jewish residents in Israel in those days. Umar, the second caliph of the Rashidun caliphate, even eventually permitted Jews to return to Jerusalem. The famous Pact of Umar promised Jewish families security and safety, but also classified Jews as dhimmis, i.e., as non-Muslims whose presence in Islamic lands was begrudgingly to be tolerated as long as they accepted their second-class status and agreed to pay a special tax, called the jizya, that was levied against non-Muslims. Things were not great, but tolerable. But tolerable didn’t last, particularly after the Arabs built the Dome of the Rock on the Temple Mount in 691 and the Al-Aksa Mosque in 705. By 720, Jews were banned from the mount, the holiest site in all of Judaism and things just continued to deteriorate from there. (To read more about the Pact of Umar, click here.)

And so did the Arabs come to Byzantine Palestine, a land that had been the Jewish homeland even then for one and a half millennia. But although Muslim rule eventually gave way to a long series of foreign overlords who seized the land and ruled over it for as long as they were able, the Muslims who came along with the armies of occupation remained in place. And so were set in place the ancestors of today’s Palestinian Arabs.

Working all that data yields the semi-astounding result that, in the almost two thousand years from the time the Babylonians laid siege to Jerusalem in biblical times until the Crusaders were finally defeated once and for all by the Mamluks (yet a different version of Arab invader), the Jews were able to restore Jewish sovereignty to the Land of Israel and rule over themselves for precisely one single century, the one stretched out between the Maccabean victory over King Antiochus in 164 B.C.E. and Romans’ successful invasion of the land a century and a year later in 63 B.C.E.  That’s a lot of years of occupation by a wide range of occupiers.

To refer to today’s Palestinians as imperialist colonizers because their ancestors came to the land as part of an army of occupation thirteen centuries ago—that seems exaggerated: thirteen hundred years is a long time! But to refer to the Jews of Israel, whose ancestors have been present in that place not for centuries but for millennia—that seems even wackier and far less reasonable. I suppose some of Israel’s enemies must be sincere in their sense of Israel as a force of occupation, as a last-gasp vestige of European colonialism. But leaving aside the detail that most Israelis are not of European origin, the notion itself is simply incorrect. The Land of Israel has been the homeland of the Jewish people from time immemorial. To argue to the contrary is to ignore history. And ignoring history is never good policy, not for our own nation and not for anybody. Arabs have lived in Israel for more than a millennium. But to use that fact to deny the reasonableness of there being a Jewish state in the Land of Israel is simply an abuse of history.