Dylan Ifrah
Staff Writer
Via Zach Gross
Anyone who spends time on a given social media platform is bound to have encountered the claim that Israeli Jews (and all Jews by extension) are settlers in a neo-colonial state with no historical connection to the land of Israel. This narrative of a forceful Jewish settlement, which resulted in the violent displacement of the land’s Arabs, has proven to be one of the most persistent and pervasive narratives to have come out of the latest conflict. Although this narrative is nothing new, it has become popular in anti-Zionist circles, to the point of being accepted as gospel. Is there any validity to these claims - are Israeli Jews really imposters with no connection to Israel whatsoever?
Undoubtedly, the answer to this question, whether it is historically, religiously, culturally, or linguistically, is a resounding no. The Jewish people have a deep connection to the land of Israel which spans entire civilizations and empires, multiple continents, and over 3500 years.
The vast majority of historians agree that ancient Israelites have been present in the Land of Israel since the second millennium (2000) BC. Historians also acknowledge, although details are sparse, that a United Kingdom of Israel, which later split into two distinct northern and southern Israelite kingdoms, existed. Both were respectively conquered by the Neo-Assyrians in 722 BC and Neo-Babylonian Empires in 586 BC, after which the Jews of the land lived under various occupations.
Archaeology also attests to a Jewish presence in the land. The earliest mention of the world “Israel” in any text is in the Merneptah Stele, dated to 1209 BC, in which an exuberant Pharaoh Merneptah declares that “Israel is desolate, its seed is no more.” One cannot help but notice the irony in this… The construction of Hezekiah's Tunnel, which connects the Gihon Spring (Jerusalem's fresh water source) to the Siloam Pool was reported in the biblical books of 2 Chronicles 32:2-4 and Kings 20:20 and is estimated by modern archeologists to have been built in the ninth century BC. These examples are just the tip of the archeological iceberg. Israel’s Antiquities authority, which is responsible for managing archeology in Israel, has a plethora of Jewish historical artifacts, such as coins, menorah, frescoes, and more, dating back thousands of years.
Sadly, an unfortunate historical fact is that Jews were repeatedly forced out of their land and into exile throughout their history by the Babylonias, Persians, Greeks, and most recently the Romans in 70 AD. The Roman expulsion of the Jews from the land of Israel following the destruction of the second temple (whose remains are perhaps the greatest existing piece of Jewish archeological heritage) forced Jews to re-settle in countries across Europe, the wider Middle East, North Africa, and more. In these new territories, Jews continued to yearn for the land of Israel as they had done hundreds of years before in Babylon (see: Psalms 137).
In exile, Jews were often alienated from the dominant cultures and groups in the places they resided. This alienation from the local culture of the country often forced Jews to live in isolated communities and restricted their job prospects. It is in this context that the Jews of the Diaspora began to develop new Jewish languages and dialects. Languages such as Yiddish and Ladino (Judeo-Spanish) are based on the local languages of the time - Medieval German in the case of Yiddish and Spanish in the case of Ladino. These languages are composed of hundreds of Hebrew and Aramaic loanwords. Additionally, Hebrew remained the liturgical and religious correspondence of Jews worldwide and was often used for communication between far-apart communities. This linguistic heritage of the land of Israel, which most Jews had not seen in nearly two-thousand years, further cements the historical connection of Jews to the land of Israel.
Given this historical and archeological evidence of the Jews in the land of Israel, their forced expulsion by numerous foreign invaders, and their two-millennia-long struggle to return, can Jews be called colonisers?
Let us define who and what a coloniser is. A coloniser is, according to the Merriam Webster dictionary “a country that sends settlers to a place and establishes political control over it.” By extension, a settler, or colonist, is an individual sent by this colonising power to settle the land and exploit it for the colonising power.
Now, the foreign power in Israel shortly before its creation was the United Kingdom, which did effectively exert political power over the region. However, it did not send British or English settlers to the Land of Israel.
In fact, the British authorities did all they could to stop Jews from coming to the land of Israel, and of course, no English people were sent to settle and exploit the land. Instead, the United Kingdom relinquished its mandate and asked the United Nations to solve the problem in the region. Therefore, the Jews that returned to Israel from far and wide, came not as colonisers, but as native people returning to the homeland they had been forced to leave nearly two thousand years earlier. Indeed, the Jews that arrived, and have continued to arrive, have fulfilled the dreams of return of millions of Jews before them.
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