WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: The answer to Israel as a “settler-colonial” state is to show meaningful Jewish homeland presence, not with a gap between Hadrian and Herzl, but all through the centuries between ancient Judaea’s fall and Israel’s independence as the land of Israel’s next native state.
A ‘Dear John’ Letter to an American Who Believes a Jewish Homeland Should Have Been Carved Out of Germany
A longtime reader named Bob asked for my comment this week on an email from an American Christian named John, part of an ongoing exchange between them on competing Jewish and Arab Palestine claims. I replied to Bob, then at his instance forwarded my comment to John.
John began by citing as the source of his information Muslim scholar Rashid Khalidi’s 2020 book, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance. He claims that from the start the Zionists’ intent was “to take Palestine away from the population already living there,” which was 97% Arab and other Muslim as of 1897. He concludes:
“My point is that, even before the 1890’s, and more than 50 years before WW II and the Holocaust, Zionism’s overarching goal was to gradually remove all Arabs and Muslims entirely out of Palestine. The popular tenet, in the U.S. at least, is that the Jews have a historical right to Palestine as a kind of payment for the horrors of Holocaust. That is not true. As I said in an earlier correspondence, establishing a Jewish state in a large section of northwest Germany after WW II would have been fair, just and right unto salvation. However, Herzl’s descendants, e.g., Netanyahu, still adhere to the original Zionist goal and the hate and bloodshed there will never end because of that.”
In forwarding my comments to John, I prefaced:
“I think the biggest difference between our respective viewpoints appears in the title of Khalidi’s 2020 book that you cite, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance. We do not regard Jewish presence today in the land of Israel as being ‘settler colonialism.’ The book that I wrote, Israel 3000 Years: The Jewish People’s 3000 Year Presence in Palestine, strived to document British historian Parkes’ assertion that the continued post-biblical presence of organized, homeland-claiming Jews in the land, ‘in spite of every discouragement,’ wrote today’s Israelis’ ‘real title deeds’.”
I put it this way in my Preface to Israel 3000 Years: “The Jewish people’s sense of homeland is place-specific, Israel-specific. It would not play in Uganda [footnote citing rejection at sixth Zionist Congress of the ‘Uganda Plan,’ even as a temporary refuge, especially by the very pogrom-plagued Russian Jews for whom it was immediately intended].” Even less would it have played in Jewish blood-soaked Germany.
In making our case that, whatever residential or resettlement resolution is made with resident Arabs, the land of Israel is the homeland of ours, the key misperceptions we must confront and refute are that the Jewish homeland claim arises not from historical presence but from the Holocaust, and that Jews’ present-day presence in Palestine is a “settler-colonial” presence.
Most Westerners at least accept that Jewish biblical era history happened, from early settlement through the Roman emperor Hadrian’s 135 CE defeat of the Bar Kochba Revolt. But we have to connect the Jewish presence dots, in Westerners’ minds (and even our own), between Hadrian and Herzl. We have show Jews were still there, not as stray individuals but as a people-of-the-land, an organized, openly Jewish, homeland-claiming Yishuv. And we can.
The Romans indeed plowed up Jerusalem, but they didn’t evict the Jews from the land. We know this from [1] Roman-Byzantine era synagogue and other Jewish remains unearthed all over the land; [2] Roman recognition of the Patriarch as head of the homeland Jews until the fifth century; [3] homeland sages constructing the Mishnah and then Palestinian (Jerusalem) Talmud; and [4] 20,000+ homeland Jews aiding the 614 Persian invaders against the hated Romans’ Byzantine heirs. Alas, as historians put it, the Persians’ support of the Jews was “short-lived.”
Nevertheless, following Byzantines’ revengeful slaughter of homeland Jews when they briefly regained control, homeland Jews aided the next-following 630’s Arab invaders, for which they received rewards including restoration of Jewish settlement in Jerusalem, appointment as guards of the Temple Mount, and rebuilding of their synagogue at the entrance of the Cave of Machpelah in Hebron. There followed rule of the land as part of their empires by three successive foreign Arab dynasties – Ommayad, Abbasid, Fatimid – between 638 and 1099, the only time in Palestine history of Palestine’s Arab rule. Were Jews still there? Archeologist Bahat published a ninth century map showing a hundred Jewish communities and cities with Jewish communities. (Bahat, Twenty Centuries of Jewish Life in the Holy Land: The Forgotten Generations, pp. 30-31)
Then, crashing on Palestine’s shores in 1099, came the European Christian Crusaders. The professors writing in the Ben-Gurion-edited The Jews In Their Land (p. 214):
“A contemporary Crusader account of the conquest of Jerusalem acknowledges the valor of the Jewish fighters: ‘And here, in front of us, were the foreigners: Jew, Turk and Arab, fighting for their lives with slingstones, with catapults, with fire and venom … and when the end came upon the foreigners, they withdrew from one battlefront, only to find a second battlefront facing them. And though there was terror on all sides, none put down his sword; the Turk, the Arab and the Jew were among the fallen. The Jew is the last to fall.”
And not alone in Jerusalem. “The Jews almost single-handedly defended Haifa against the Crusaders, holding out in the besieged town for a whole month.” (Katz, Battleground: Fact & Fantasy in Palestine, p. 90) Bahat, quoting Albert of Aachen: “Haifa … which the Jews defended with great courage, to the shame and embarrassment of the Christians” (p. 37). “Apart from a few places in the south, we have no information about Jewish participation in the defense of other Palestinian towns; but there is no reason to suppose that Jerusalem and Haifa were exceptional places.” (Ben-Gurion ed., p. 215)
The Crusaders went on blood-curdling massacres. “Proportionally to their numbers, the Jews probably lost more than any other group on the conquest of the country.” (Parkes, Whose Land? A History of the Peoples of Palestine, p. 97). But Jews were still there, as recorded by travelers and others, including the famous Jewish traveler, Benjamin of Tudela. And though Jewish immigration was banned, Jews continued to come.
Following Mongol and other invasions in the Kurd Saladin’s defeat of the Crusaders wake, Turk-Circassian Mamluks gained control of the land in 1260 and ruled, from Turkey then Egypt, until their defeat by Ottoman Turks in 1517. Jews were still there, as a tenacious persecuted minority, during Mamluk rule. In my book (see below) I constructed from several sources a chronology of Jewish presence in Jerusalem in Mamluk times, and cite their presence elsewhere in the land.
Ottoman Turks misruled Palestine for four hundred years, 1517 to 1917, during which they drove Palestine’s population down to its lowest of all recorded times, famously captured by Mark Twain and others. Estimates cited by Katz (pp. 108-09) and historian DeHaas (History of Palestine: The Last Two Thousand Years, p. 39) range down to a hundred thousand or less.
Yet, the Yishuv was still there, surviving and almost prospering at times in its four holy cities – Jerusalem, Safed Tiberias and Hebron – and in Galilee farming villages and elsewhere in the land. British archeologist Charles Warren recorded Jerusalem Jews as including shoemakers, carpenters, silversmiths, bakers, letter-writers, porters and stone-cutters. “These facts clearly contradict the myth that 19th century Jerusalem Jews were either old men praying at the Western Wall or religious youth studying the Torah” (Tal, Whose Jerusalem, pp. 232-33).
Summing Up
During those eighteen hundred years of uninterrupted foreign empire rule, Jews were beaten down to a pummeled minority, but never ceased to be there as an organized, openly Jewish homeland claiming presence. I commend to you (Amazon, Abe) my book on it, Israel 3000 Years. I said in its Preface:
“The task that I set myself in researching and writing this book was to trace the long remarkable saga of the Jewish people’s continuous presence in its homeland of Israel, using words that one non-historian uses to others. It’s indeed a tale, as historian Parkes justifiably called it, of heroic endurance in spite of every discouragement. I hope to have done it some justice.”
Palestine’s 1948 population was about just a million Arabs and over 600,000 Jews. That there weren’t more Jews is because Jews there were repeatedly slaughtered by foreign conquerors – Romans-Byzantines, Crusaders and Muslims – who likewise barred immigration by Jews, down through the British before, during and even after the Holocaust.
Palestinian Arabs (majority population of today’s Jordan, sitting on 78% of the Palestine Mandate) have never ruled Palestine ever, and foreign Arabs only between 638 and 1099. Israel’s biggest population segment is Mizrahi, Jews who never left North Africa and the Mideast, largely from the greater number of Jews displaced from vast Arab and other Muslim lands than Arabs left tiny Israel in the 1948 Arab invasion-started war and its wake.
It’s ineffectual for us to fight the notion that Jews there today are a “settler-colonial” presence by acquiescing in calling the fight over “Palestine” as being between Jews and “Palestinians.” The UN’s 1947 partition resolution sought to create a “Jewish State” and an “Arab State,” and literally called Palestine’s Jews and its Arabs “the two Palestinian peoples.” We mustn’t do less.