#WTH We are [almost] all colonizers

A short recitation of facts

Quick note: If you missed our terrific 10/7 event, check it out here.

I keep seeing signs from antisemitic and antisemitism-adjacent students decrying the Jewish “colonization” of “Palestine.” And there have been plenty of excellent articles about the roots of the far Left “settler colonizer” trope. But let’s actually talk about who is a colonizer…

Off we go with a country that doesn’t fret about who is indigenous, at least not yet — Great Britain. We can begin (somewhat arbitrarily) around the first millennium BCE with the Celtic peoples — Gaels, Picts, Britons; then came the Roman conquest; followed by settler tribes who called themselves Angles and Saxons (Germans!), the Vikings, and then the Normans (led by the aptly-named “William the Conqueror”, who we think of as French, but was really of Viking descent, hence the name Norman, which derives from the “Northmen” who had conquered that region of France). Name a people that has been more victimized by colonizers than the poor British!

We could try out South Africa, but it might be embarrassing to admit that the indigenous residents of that land are Bushmen, and not the marauding West and Central African Bantu speakers who now make up the colonizing black majority.

Russia was invaded by colonizing Slavs, who now make up the majority.

France… sheesh, lots of Celts. Some Greeks. The Gauls, Romans, and then the Germanic Franks, after whom, ahem, France is named. To say nothing of the Viking/Norman/Northmen noted above.

We could go on like this for aeons, but let’s turn to the point of our brief colonial history. The Jews.

While there were certainly humans in the land of Israel before the Canaanites, they are there in prehistory, and that’s the simplest place to start. This is where the Israelites came from. Yes, there’s a reason they are called Israelites. This is where Hebrew script comes from. And yes, Hebrew is a dialect of the Canaanites. And yep, the Israelites are called Canaanites in the Old Testament. Then came invading neo-Assyrians, the neo-Babylonians, Greeks, the Romans, their successors, the Byzantines, the Muslims of Arabia (who imposed their language and religion on most of today’s “Palestinians”), the Ottomans (who btw were also the colonizers of Turkey), and finally the Brits, until the State of Israel was recreated in 1948.

I’ve skipped much of history here, but there is no dispute that the land of Judea was largely inhabited by Jews until almost the turn of the first millennium. So who were the colonizers? Everyone except the Jews, who are the indigenous people of the land of Israel. It may be that there were people who now call themselves Palestinians on that land, but that Greek neologism post-dated the Canaanites by centuries. If the Palestinians of today wish to suggest that they are the original Jewish inhabitants of the land… well, I’d like to hear that.

Being ignorant is nothing special at today’s elite universities, and not knowing that it is the Arab Muslims who should have “colonizer” pride of place, having occupied so much of the Middle East is par for the course; but the reality is that we are all colonizers of one kind or another. All of us, that is, except the Jews of Israel. And for those newly minted ethnographers driven more by antisemitism than actual data, no, it does not matter that the gene pool of some of those Israelites living in the State of Israel comes from Europe or North Africa or the Arab Muslim colonized lands of the Levant. No one has known forced exile over the last two millennia like the Jewish people. No matter where they went, or how many were killed, Jews have always longed for home. Israel.