Linking Zionism with colonialism – much like accusing Israel of apartheid-like practices – is often central to any discourse that seeks to demonize, dehumanize and delegitimize the Jewish state and those who support it. In the same way that the Israel apartheid slur needs to be deconstructed, so too should the Zionism as colonialism falsehood be addressed.
Writing in the New Republic (Aug. 17, 2010), Dore Gold, president of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, comments that it was the association of Israel with colonialist regimes that “set the stage in 1975 for the most insidious resolution ever adopted in the UN General Assembly against Israel, which stated that Zionism was a form of racism.”
Even after the resolution was overturned in 1991, Gold notes that that “comparisons between Zionism and colonialism [have] persisted, arguably becoming even more strident.”
The notion that Jews colonized Israel (both before and after the Holocaust) is a gross distortion of history. It goes to the very core of a delegitimization argument that portrays the Palestinians as indigenous to the region, with Jews as the “immigrants” or intruders – which deliberately negates the connection of Jews to Israel that goes back to biblical times and has been sustained, in one way or another, ever since.
In embellishing the calumny of the Jew as interloper, Jerusalem’s Al-Quds University has an internet posting that denies the existence of King David, questions whether there was ever an exodus of Israelites from Egypt and claims that Solomon’s Temple was really a centre of pagan worship and that the Western Wall was likely just part of a Roman fortress. When referring to the various conquests of Palestine, Egyptians, Hittites, Philistines, Babylonians, Persians, Romans, Muslims, Arabs, Ottomans and British are mentioned, but Jews are not.
Moreover, in 2000, then-Palestinian Authority president Yasser Arafat declared that the Temple had never existed, while the Hamas Covenant still proclaims Islamic hegemony over all of what is termed Palestine and draws demonical reference to Jews appropriating Arab lands and challenging Islam.
The inference, of course, is that Jews have no historic rights to their land. But what invariably goes unsaid is that Jews who went to Israel in both ancient and modern times never represented a foreign, colonizing power and therefore, by simple definition, they could not be branded as colonialists.
Also notable is that such immigrants did not take land by force. Instead they purchased it!
In the conclusion to his New Republic piece, Gold laments that “ascertaining the truth has never been the objective of those trying to paint Israel with a colonialist brush.” Propagandist historical fiction is, after all, so much more compelling.
