Astounding Facts Most People Don’t Know About Israel 12
Zionism is the most successful anti-imperialist movement in history
Ever had trouble falling asleep? Try counting sheep, people say. Well, it’s never worked for me.
Here’s another idea, and one that’s tailor-made for "woke" young Europeans suddenly stumbling across their continent’s inglorious imperial past. Count the number of foreign invaders who have conquered Israel. It’s such a long list that you’re bound to doze off before reaching the end: Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Seleucids, Romans, Byzantines, Sassanids, Arabs, Umayyads, Abbasids, Fatimids, Seljuks, Crusaders, Ayyubids, Mamluks, Ottomans, British…..
On second thoughts, perhaps you should revert to counting sheep – that list of 17 imperial powers is guaranteed to startle the most somnolent of readers. (That’s a minimum figure – the Babylonians and Arabs each invaded at least twice and Napoleon’s ill-fated campaign of 1799 should perhaps also be added). Some of these regimes employed shockingly cruel tactics including mass deportations, enslavement and massacres. Two examples will turn the strongest stomachs: Roman Emperor Hadrian’s brutal suppression of the Bar Kochba revolt in the second century is believed to have cost around 600,000 Judean lives, either through violence or starvation, while the Crusaders (11th-13th centuries), after murdering tens of thousands of European Jews en route to the Holy Land, had a particular predilection for incarcerating Jews inside their synagogues and burning them alive.
Yet this long history of dispossession, suffering and death reached a joyful (if precarious) ending. The rebirth of a sovereign Israel in the ancestral homeland is testament to the capacity of the oppressed to overcome the injustice of the oppressor. Not once but 17 times.
It also exposes a huge lie, one that is touted as an irrefutable fact by antiZionists. They allege, against all the evidence, that Zionism is an imperialist, colonialist venture, a tool of the Great Powers who carved up territories conquered in the Great War to enhance their hegemony and wealth. Here’s what the respected UK Open Democracy political website proclaims (echoing countless others): “The foundations of Israel are rooted in a colonial project that has modernized its face but continues to subject Palestinians to military occupation, land dispossession and unequal rights.” [1]. It’s pure fiction. Yet millions believe it.
A reminder: Jews (“Judeans”) were the original indigenous inhabitants of today’s Israel, Palestinian Authority and part of Jordan. There is ample historical, archaeological and even genetic evidence to support that view. The Hebrews arrived in that land in the second millennium BCE and established the Kingdom of Israel that subsequently split in two – Israel in the north and Judea to its south. After a brief period of uninterrupted sovereignty, it was then occupied by a succession of colonial powers right up until the British Mandate of the twentieth century. As is often observed, had it not been for foreign conquest and expulsion, Israel today would be over 3,000 years old.
The Palestinians, by contrast, are relative newcomers. Though a minority were indigenous, a sovereign Palestine never existed and modern Palestinians are believed to have originated from three main groups: Muslim invaders, Arab immigrants and local converts to Islam. Indeed the Muslim conquest of Byzantine Palestine in the seventh century is a textbook example of settler-colonialism. This is not just an Israeli claim: Hamas minister Fathi Ḥammad, cited by Joffe [2], asserted that “half the Palestinians are Egyptians and the other half are Saudis.” (That history of inward migration doesn’t invalidate the contemporary Palestinian self-definition of peoplehood, nor have Zionist or Israeli leaders sought to deny their right to self-determination in the context of peaceful co-existence with Israel).
A key question that the antiZionist accusers have never answered is this one posed by Alan Dershowitz: “If the Jewish refugees who immigrated to Palestine in the last decades of the nineteenth century were the tools of European imperialism, for whom were these socialists and idealists working?” [3] In reality, the Zionist pioneers had to overcome opposition from Turkish, British and pan-Arab imperialists to achieve their goal of self-determination (or even, as many sought at that time, merely autonomy). It took the mass upheaval of the First World War to undermine and eventually overcome the hostility of the imperial powers.
The Balfour Declaration of 1917 and the San Remo Resolution (“the Jewish Magna Carta”) were stunningly unambiguous anti-imperialist statements. Both these milestone documents prioritised the rights of the indigenous inhabitants with three millennia of attachment to the territory over those of the imperial Turkish occupiers. How ironic that the British, who had trailblazed the principle of self-determination (articulated by US President Woodrow Wilson), should have then so callously turned their backs on it, reneging on their legal commitments to the Jewish people that had been enshrined in the Palestine Mandate.
The effects of the British U-turn on the Jews of Europe, desperately struggling to survive under the Nazi jackboot, were predictably disastrous. The United Kingdom became the latest – and arguably most pitiless – of the long list of colonial occupiers of the Jewish homeland. Throwing off the suffocating straitjacket of British rule became the latest (and ultimately successful) battle of the long Jewish war against imperialism.
But the imperialists weren’t done with the Jews. Immediately following Israel’s declaration of independence on 14th May 1948, five Arab armies, acting as the spearhead of an expansionist pan-Arab nationalist movement, prepared to snuff out the reborn Jewish state. As we know, Israel won and survived. Another foreign invader intent on massacre and mayhem had been repulsed.
It was a close-run thing. As Israeli academic Shany Mor [4] has written: “Israel’s national liberation, unlike so many other post-colonial births, wasn’t just the end of one foreign domination, it was also the most threatening moment of another. Having to fend off a combined Arab invasion united disparate pre-statehood factions as no ideology could have.”
The truth that modern antiZionists and their self-styled “progressive” allies seek to conceal is that Zionism is the most successful anti-imperialist and anti-colonialist movement in history. Yet legions of Israel’s academic critics cling to an invented inversion of history: they assert that Israel is predicated on an inherently colonialist ideology. Why do they do this and how do they get away with it?
Israeli journalist Ben-Dror Yemini [5] provides some answers. “The Israel depicted by these scholars bears virtually no relation to the actual Israel or its history, intentions, or influence. These scholars rely, whenever they can, on fabricated or discredited sources, on true facts taken grotesquely out of context, and on narratives that serve neither truth nor peace. They have built a web of pseudo-scholarship, a paper trail that allows each writer to cite the works of others in the circle, sharing a unified purpose that is political rather than scholarly: to discredit a country and to rally troops to that end.”
I often wonder how such "scholars" can internalise such patent mendacity. The only answer I can offer is that they don’t care; the cause is too important for them to allow themselves the luxury of being deflected by the facts. A tsunami of post-modernism has swept across western academia and civil society in recent decades. This bizarre form of groupthink asserts that history merely reflects competing narratives and that ideology trumps all. In the words of revisionist historian Ilan Pappé, “Who knows what the facts are?”
I have an answer for the campaigning prof. We do. And so do all fair-minded people who care about the truth. I also have a question for him. How do you – and other antiZionist academics who have bothered to fact-check – manage to sleep at night in the knowledge that you are deliberately peddling falsehoods?
[1] Avelar D, Ferrari B. Israel and Palestine: a story of modern colonialism. Open Democracy, 2018
[2] Joffe A. Palestinian Settler Colonialism. Ramat Gan, BESA Centre, 2017 https://besacenter.org/perspectives-papers/palestinians-settlers-colonialism/
[3] Dershowitz A. The Case for Israel. Hoboken NJ, J Wiley and Sons, 2003
[4] Shany Mor. The accidental wisdom of Israel’s maligned electoral system, Fathom, 2019
[5] Yemini Ben-Dror. Industry of Lies. New York, Institute for the Global Study of Antisemitism and Policy, 2017
