What Happens When You Apply “Decolonial” Theory to Arab History in Palestine? (Video) ~ Elder Of Ziyon

Monday, August 24, 2026

What Happens When You Apply “Decolonial” Theory to Arab History in Palestine? (Video)

(Originally published on my Substack)

I recently read an academic paper in Critical Education called “Decolonial Praxis: Confronting Genocide in Gaza with TribalCrit and Human Rights Education.” Its author, Sean Corrigan, argues that Tribal Critical Race Theory, a framework developed to analyze the experiences of Native Americans under colonialism, has “analytical potential” when transferred to Palestinians and Israelis. He combines it with Human Rights Education to teach students about Israeli “colonialism,” “white supremacy,” and “genocide,” explicitly with the goal of encouraging activism among students.

I thought this was a great idea. I just couldn’t understand why the analysis should start in the 20th century.

So I made a video called “Muslim Supremacy in Palestine, 638–2026: A TribalCrit / Human Rights Education Analysis.”

It is partly a spoof of contemporary academic jargon. But the history it teaches isn’t a spoof at all.

Because it is far easier to prove Muslim supremacy in the area of Palestine than Jewish supremacy.

Corrigan quotes the first principle of TribalCrit: “Colonization is endemic to society.” The framework asks us to look at conquest, political domination, unequal status, indigenous sovereignty and the way dominant societies normalize their own power.

OK, but the region has seen plenty of conquests.

Arab Muslim armies conquered Byzantine Palestine in the seventh century. Jerusalem came under Muslim sovereignty in 638 and again with Saladin.

Jews, who had been badly treated under Byzantine Christian rule, at times even excluded from Jerusalem, actually benefited in some ways from the Muslim conquest. They were again permitted to live in their ancient city. But they were not equals.

Jews and Christians became dhimmis: protected communities living under Muslim rule. Protection came with explicitly inferior political and legal status, special taxation and, depending on the period, restrictions on worship, public religious expression, dress and other aspects of life.

Even under the most benevolent Muslim rules, Jews and Christians still had fewer human rights than Muslims. The structure stayed the same.

If a society today divided its citizens by religion, gave one religion superior legal status, imposed special disabilities on the others and conditioned their protection on acknowledging the supremacy of the dominant group, any progressive would call this “apartheid.”

Which is why one slide asks: What would Human Rights Education call this today?

The video then looks at the durability of the assumption that Muslim sovereignty is the natural condition of Palestine, while non-Muslim sovereignty is an aberration that history will eventually correct.

Muslims eventually defeated the Crusaders and restored Muslim control of Jerusalem. Israel has repeatedly been compared in Arab and Islamist discourse to the Crusader states: an alien enclave that may survive for decades or even centuries but whose defeat is ultimately inevitable.

If Israel is another Crusader kingdom, accepting its existence today does not necessarily mean accepting its legitimacy. You can lose a battle, accept a temporary boundary and wait for Saladin.

That brings us directly to the PLO’s 1974 Ten-Point Program, commonly called the “stages plan.” It called for establishing Palestinian authority over any territory that could be obtained while continuing the struggle for the rest. Partial Palestinian sovereignty did not necessarily require permanent recognition of Jewish sovereignty.

This creates a question that almost never appears in decolonial analyses of the conflict:

Was the problem always that Palestinians lacked a state, or was one problem that accepting a Palestinian state next to Israel would mean accepting Jews as an equal sovereign people? This hypothesis explains facts that the usual colonial narrative has trouble with.

Anti-Jewish violence in Palestine preceded Israel. It preceded the settlements. It preceded the 1967 occupation. Jews were attacked at Nebi Musa in 1920 and massacred in Hebron in 1929.

Then came the Mufti of Jerusalem’s alliance with Nazi Germany.

Then came the repeated rhetoric of driving the Jews “into the sea.” I previously collected contemporaneous newspaper reports and a British Foreign Office document showing that this was not a Zionist invention created decades later. The same imagery appeared again in Egyptian propaganda in 1967.

The point is not that every Arab government had exactly the same war aims or that every Muslim wanted Jews dead. The point is what the rhetoric regarded as the proper outcome: Jewish sovereignty disappearing altogether.

Hamas eventually made the underlying religious claim explicit. Its original charter describes Palestine as an Islamic waqf, consecrated to Muslim generations until Judgment Day. Jews can exist. Christians can exist. But permanent Jewish sovereignty over Islamic land cannot.

That looks remarkably different when viewed through the same Human Rights Education framework Corrigan uses against Israel.

Corrigan describes TribalCrit as a framework concerned with indigenous peoples obtaining “sovereignty,” “autonomy,” “self-determination” and “self-identification.”

Yet Jews originated in this land. Their religion, national memory, calendar, language and historical consciousness remained centered on it throughout exile. Jewish communities continued to exist there under successive Roman, Byzantine, Muslim, Crusader, Mamluk, Ottoman and British rulers.

As soon as Jews recovered sovereignty, the decolonial vocabulary flips. Jewish power becomes colonialism. Jewish national self-determination becomes settler colonialism. Jewish sovereignty becomes supremacy.

The millennium of political arrangements in which Jews were subordinate to somebody else largely disappears from the analysis.

That is why the final line of the video says:

A society can normalize the supremacy of one community so deeply that the loss of that supremacy is later redescribed as colonization.

The presentation is deliberately provocative. Yet it is accurate. I’m just applying the same rules that progressives apply to Israeli Jews to Muslim Arabs throughout history.

Corrigan says TribalCrit is transferable. I transferred it. It produces some very interesting results.

Here’s the video.

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