Correcting The Record: Is Israel a Settler-Colonial State?

Children of Israel are never alone.

Hey, tribe.

Okay, as promised, today I want to tackle the widespread accusation that Israel is a settler-colonial state.

To understand this charge, it’s necessary to understand how anti-Semitism works.

Anti-Semitism, the world’s most ancient hatred, adapts itself in every age and in every place to the values and antipathies of any given dominant population. To scapegoat Jews effectively, the dominant society casts the Jews as the walking embodiment of all they hate most.

So if you have a Utopian Marxist vision of communism as the panacea for society’s inequities, then Jews are greedy, exploitative capitalists.

If you have a classic American reverence for capitalism as a system that rewards innovation, industry and merit, then Jews are traitorous and conniving Communists.

If you value patriotism and nationalism and hold an “America First” ideology, then Jews are globalists and rootless cosmopolitans.

If, on the other hand, you value worldliness, loathe xenophobia, and dream of a world without borders, then Jews are fascist ethnonationalists.

If you value Aryan supremacy and white purity, then Jews are the polar opposite of white — we’re not even human. We’re vermin — an affront and threat to the gene pool.

And if, in your worldview, whiteness is the root of all evil, then Jews are the ultimate whites, the ultimate representatives of white supremacy.

And so we come to our current moment in America in 2024.

On the right, we have Trump followers who believe Jews are engineering a Great Replacement of the white man, part of an all-controlling cabal of pedophiles per Qanon.

And on the left, in keeping with the anti-Semitic rule of casting us as the demons of the present age and place, Jews are racist, fascist, ethno-nationalist, genocidal settler-colonialists.

So let’s look at this indictment.

To be a settler-colonial state, the colonizers need to be representatives of an imperial mother country, exploiting the natives and the colonized land to enrich that distant empire.

There is no conceivable angle from which this is true of the Jews who founded Israel as a modern nation.

Just as an aside, while in NYC last week, I was having coffee with a non-Jewish friend and saying as much to her.

“Okay, can I ask a question?” she ventured.

“Of course.”

“Are Ashkenazi Jews like you, who emigrated from Eastern Europe, really indigenous to the Levant?”

“Oh yes. Absolutely.”

She looked skeptical, and I couldn’t help laughing. “You think we’re European?” I asked her. “Just ask Europe.”

It’s hard to believe I ever need to say this, but Jews were expelled from all over Europe and all over the Middle East during the same set of years that Israel achieved statehood — that is, as I like to remind the revisionists, those few of us lucky enough not to be brutally slaughtered alongside every branch of our extended family trees.

Jews are absolutely, unequivocally and undeniably indigenous to Israel. You can’t dig six feet in Israel without unearthing some Jewish artifact. The longing for Jerusalem pervades Judaism at every level. Jerusalem is mentioned in the Torah 669 times — as opposed to the Quran, where it is not mentioned once. Jews all over the diaspora have prayed facing Jerusalem for millenia. Jews have ended every Passover seder with “Next Year in Jerusalem” for millenia. And we have maintained a continuous presence there for millenia.

Support for the rights of indigenous people is central to progressive dogma. One has to wonder what this means to them. And lately, I have come to feel that I finally understand what it means. It means that pompous academics and artists taking a podium to deliver remarks of any kind get to solemnly and piously make statements like: “Before I begin my talk, I’d like to acknowledge that this conference is taking place on stolen land.”

And that’s it. It’s all about them and their virtue and their piety. Nothing more needs to be done, and when they’re faced with the most successful indigenous and decolonial project in human history, they can’t even recognize it.

Settler colonialism also often involves ethnic cleansing of the native population from the region. Here, too, Israel is innocent of this charge. The surrounding Arab countries, who waged a genocidal attack on Israel the moment it achieved statehood, advised the region’s Arabs to leave temporarily so they could kill all the Jews. After which they would be welcome to come back.

Very fortunately, it didn’t work out that way. Against all odds, tiny rag-tag Israel won the war the surrounding Arab countries incited. Outgunned, outmanned, outnumbered and outplanned, as the song goes, they nonetheless prevailed and managed to hold onto their fledgling state.

The 156,000 Arabs who had chosen not to leave were immediately granted full-fledged citizenship and equal rights within the new Jewish nation.

And over the subsequent decades, in a pattern which is the precise inverse of ethnic cleansing, that Arab population of 156,000 has swelled to 2,100,000, comprising a full 20% of Israel.

And here, my friends, is the ultimate irony:

Today there are more Arab citizens in Israel, with exactly the same rights as their Jewish neighbors, than there are Jews in the rest of Europe and the rest of the Middle East combined.

And of course, Gaza was cleansed of every last Jew in 2005, displacing thousands of families, and today the Strip is totally Judenrein. But somehow, this bothers no one. No one objects to it, no one questions it. The ethnic cleansing of Jews from huge swaths of the world doesn’t merit a mention. The imaginary ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from a hangnail sliver of land is what’s not only central to progressive conviction, but it’s deemed the most singular evil the world has ever seen.

There are a lot of different labels we could apply to this mode of thought. Gaslighting is one. DARVO (Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender) is another. But really, it’s just sheer unadulterated anti-Semitism, dressed up as anti-Zionism.

Now, we might not be able to reverse or even stem the tsunami of slander threatening to drown us. But nor must we ever feel compelled to co-sign it. We must not let anyone persuade us that Israel doesn’t deserve to exist. No one debates the right of any other country on this planet to exist. Ever hear anyone dream of dismantling North Korea? Russia? Libya or Yemen, where the African slave trade is still going full-throttle?

Only the Jewish state is denied the right to exist, even if the alternative is a violent, repressive Islamic Caliphate.

Here’s the good news, fam. The whole world may wish to dismantle Israel as a Jewish state, but not a single one of them has ever protected the Jews from anything and they don’t get a vote. That’s the entire point of having a nation. We are no longer dependent upon the world’s goodwill for our survival. And we’re not going back.

Tomorrow, I’m going to talk about what’s happening in the lit world, specifically what happened within Guernica magazine.

Until then, fierce love to you all. Chazak v’ematz. Am Yisrael Chai.