A dear Jewish friend of mine, who I won’t name because I’d fear for his safety, wrote this brilliance on social media. Shared with his permission.
Here are a few factors that complicate the ‘Israel as white colonial enterprise’ narrative:
- The origins of the Jewish people, and the site of the ancient, independent Jewish commonwealths, were in the territory currently encompassed by the State of Israel and the Israeli-occupied West Bank. The Jewish calendar, early literary tradition, language, and earliest historical references are all rooted in these geographic areas.
- There have always been thousands of indigenous Jews living in the territory currently encompassed by the State of Israel and the West Bank, including during the Babylonian, Persian, Greek, Roman, Byzantine, Umayyad, Abbasid, Fatimid, Crusader, Mamluk, Ottoman, and British colonial periods. These indigenous Jews and their descendants are not white and European.
- Beginning in 1882, and continuing for a century, European and Arab nationalist movements expelled or destroyed by other means the majority of Jewish communities on the European, Asian, and African continents (including Jewish communities indigenous to what is today the West Bank; in 1929, for example, centuries of Jewish habitation in Hebron ended with the massacre of many of its residents by their Muslim neighbors). Few countries were willing to settle the survivors and refugees of these expulsions and massacres, many of whom had no choice but to flee to Palestine or, post-1948, the State of Israel, whose legal system allowed for the immigration of anyone who fit the definition of a Jew under the Nazi’s Nuremberg laws.
- A majority of the State of Israel’s Jewish population emigrated within the last four generations from North Africa and the Middle East. By definition, therefore, a majority of Israeli Jews are not “white and European.”
So to anyone who believes that Israel is a “white colonialist enterprise,” I would ask the following questions:
- What is the “country of origin” with which Jews maintain “political allegiance,” and to which we should return once a Palestinian state is established “from the river to the sea,” as so many uninformed college students like to scream at campus rallies? Or is the implication that all of the Jews between the river (Jordan) and sea (Mediterranean) should simply be liquidated (murdered) to make way for a Palestinian state?
- Where should my Jewish friend, whose family has been in Israel for eight generations (after moving from Egypt), go? How many generations in a place confers indigenous status? Should he and his parents and children move “back” to Egypt where they no longer speak the language or have family or commercial ties?
- Where should the approximately 150,000 Jews who were expelled by the Iraqi government in 1951, and their hundreds of thousands of descendants, go? “Back” to Iraq? How about the Jews of Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Yemen, Lebanon, Syria, Iran… or how about survivors of the Holocaust? Should they go “back” to countries to which they have no personal ties? “Back” to countries that legally prohibited them from living as full citizens with rights equal to their Christian and Muslim counterparts? (You’ll note, for example, that many of the Jewish surnames cited in the NY Times article below about the Israeli town of Ofakim, devastated by Hamas on October 7, are actually Arabic; many of the town’s Jewish founders were refugees from Arab countries. Again, not white, not European.)
There is no country to which Israeli Jews can “return” because they were never fully part of those societies. There is a reason that Jews who live outside of Israel have always been described as part of a “diaspora” (in English) and “in exile” (in Hebrew, בגלות). Our language developed in the Land of Israel, our formative literature was written there, our calendar developed there, we pray in that direction, our ancient cities are there… it IS our “country of origin.” And for some of us, we have always physically lived there, even when it was ruled by some other, actual colonial ruler, like the Romans, Ottomans, or British (people who were able to return to their own homelands).
But practically speaking, seven million Jews aren’t going to disappear between the “river and the sea” anytime soon. So maybe, instead of chanting ridiculous, genocidal slogans, people can be part of the solution: advocating for two states, for two people, living in peaceful coexistence… both of which have deep historical roots in the land. It is time for a safe, secure State of Israel, and a safe, secure State of Palestine next door, in the territory now known as the West Bank. Let’s please dispense with the lazy, pseudo-intellectualism, and faux-progressivism, and try to make some real, long-term change.”
