Friday, April 05, 2024
Elder of Ziyon
By Daled Amos
When talking about Israel, one of the most popular pigeonholes is settler-colonialism:
Why do Europeans invade other countries and then whine like cowards when people fight back?
— Richard Medhurst (@richimedhurst) March 27, 2024
Travelling from the US or UK to Iraq and Afghanistan, armed to the teeth, makes you the terrorist. Leaving your house in Poland to steal one in Palestine makes you the terrorist.
But these are not Europeans invading a foreign country.
These are Jews returning to and re-establishing their land.
Also, Europe, and the US, do not have a monopoly on colonializing, invading, and occupying other countries.
More to the point, a case can be made for saying that Muslims themselves are the most successful colonizers in history. Bernard Lewis wrote in his book, The Crisis of Islam:The then Christian provinces of Syria, Palestine, Egypt, and North Africa were absorbed and in due course Islamized and Arabized, and they served as bases for the further invasion of Europe and the conquest of Spain and Portugal and much of southern Italy. By the early eighth century the conquering Arab armies were even advancing beyond the Pyrenees into France. [p. 34; emphasis added]
The Islamic empire was very busy.
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| Map from Bernard Lewis's The Crisis of Islam |
And like other colonizing powers throughout history, the Muslims, too, had to deal with the resistance from the indigenous people they had conquered. In Spain, that was called the Reconquista, the Reconquest, which was ultimately successful.
Meanwhile, the attempt to re-establish control over the Christian areas of the Middle East was known as the Crusades. Those were not successful.
Muslim expansionism goes even further.
Lewis writes about the next phase of Islamic colonialism, not by the Arabs but by "later recruits to Islam" -- the Turks, who conquered Anatolia and Constantinople (which became the capital of the Ottoman Empire), and the Tatars, who went into Russia.
He writes that the time came when the Muslims were put on the defensive:
By this time the jihad had become almost entirely defensive--resisting the Reconquest in Spain and Russia, resisting the movements for national self-liberation by the Christian subjects of the Ottoman Empire, and finally, as Muslims see it, defending the very heartlands of Islam against infidel attack. This phase has come to be known as imperialism. [p. 35-36; emphasis added]
Today we have a skewed version of this era in history. We suffer from an ironic distortion of terminology, where the resistance and search for self-liberation from Muslim colonialism and occupation is labeled as imperialism.
On the flip side, we have equally misleading labels applied to Jews and Israel accusing them of settler-colonialism and imperialism. The labels simply don't fit. Writing for JNS, James Sinkinson, president of Facts and Logic About the Middle East points out:
Israel doesn’t fit ordinary definitions: Imperialism is a policy of extending a country’s power and influence through diplomacy or military force. Colonialism is the policy or practice of one country acquiring full or partial political control over another, occupying it with settlers and exploiting it economically...
If Israel is an imperial or colonizing power, it would be the first case in history of an indigenous people colonizing its own country.
The Jewish homeland has only ever been colonized by others: Romans, Arabs, Crusaders, Ottomans, British and many other imperialist forces have subjugated the Land of Israel and its indigenous Jews. No other people in human history—except the Jews—sought to give this land independence.
Also, unlike the Roman, Arab, Crusader, and Ottoman invaders -- Jews have an over 3,000-year-old bond with the land based on history, language, culture, and religion. In his book The Seeds of Abraham, Rafael Patai writes about Arabs who also pride themselves on the rich history of their countries. For example, the Syrian capital of Damascus was the center of the Umayyad Caliphate. The Iraqi capital of Baghdad was the center of the Abbasid Empire. And even though Egypt's greatest history dates back to before the founding of Islam, Arab Egyptians today view the era of the Pharaohs as part of their glorious past.
But what do Palestinian Arabs have?
In Palestine, such attempts at establishing a great Arab national past ran into a vexing problem. Since Palestine had never been an independent Arab country, its period of pride had to be sought in the biblical Israelite age.
And their claims of a rival connection to the land are periodically contradicted by archaeological discoveries.
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