“By the rivers of Babylon we sat and wept when we remembered Zion… How can we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land? If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand wither. Let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth, if I remember thee not; if I set not Jerusalem above my chiefest joy.” (Psalms 137:1-6).

Both archeology and the written record prove that Jews have lived in what is now Israel & Palestine since Biblical times, nearly 4,000 years. In fact, the only sovereign nations that have ever existed in Israel/Palestine have been Jewish states.

The Philistines were a confederation of settlements on the Mediterranean Sea originating from Crete that waged war on the Jewish Kingdom of Judea, and vice versa, and the Romans later coined the name “Palestine” from “Philistine”, but the Philistines never had their own currency or a central government, and so they can’t really be called a nation.

There have been many invaders and conquerors in the land over the centuries. Yet, despite these waves of conquest and expulsion, Jews have lived continuously in the Holy Land for all of recorded history. Those in the diaspora vow to return to their homeland in their sacred prayers at least twice a year, at Passover and Yom Kippur, chanting together, “Next year in Jerusalem!”

You might say, so what? That’s ancient history. Exactly! Indigenous means native. If someone is kicked out of a place it doesn’t make him a foreigner in his native homeland. Is there a statute of limitations on indigeneity? No definition of the word notes an “end date”, explicit or implied.

“Jews were conquered and expelled,” some say, and so lost the rights of indigenous people. Well, if indigeneity is lost and legitimacy belong to the conquerors, no problem. Israel won the wars of 1948, 1967, 1973, etc., and therefore is the legitimate governor of the land.

“But the establishment of Israel was colonialism!”, you might say. Well, if all conquerors are illegitimate then the land never belonged to the Romans, nor the Crusaders, nor the Ottomans, nor the British– all were foreign occupying powers. The territory would still belong to the Jews since the Kingdom of Judea, with its capital in Jerusalem, was for 1,000 years before the birth of Christ, a sovereign nation on the land.

Judea was conquered by the Romans in 63 BCE and renamed the province “Syria Palestina”. That is how the Palestinians got their name. Interestingly, there is no “p” sound in the Arabic language, and Palestinians did not use this word to describe themselves until around 1900. During the British Mandate, the British used the term to describe all inhabitants of the region: Arabs, Jews, Christians, and others. The word only became commonly used to describe the Arab residents of the land after the formation of the PLO in 1964. For most of modern history Palestinians were just called Arabs.

But weren’t Arabs/Palestinians a majority, overrun by Jewish immigration over the last 200 years or so?

Fredrik Hasselquist, a Swedish doctor and naturalist, visited the Levant (today’s Israel, Gaza, West Bank, Lebanon and Syria) in the 1750s. Hasselquist’s account was translated into English and published in 1766 as “Travels in the Levant in the Years 1749, 50, 51, 52”. Hasselquist wrote that the Holy Land was “uncultivated and almost uninhabited.” He estimated the Jewish population of Jerusalem to be 20,000, surely a substantial portion of its population at the time, while the town of Tiberius is described as half inhabited by Arabs, and the other half by Jews.

“Journey of a Tour in the Levant”, published in 1820 by William Turner, a British diplomat and writer, is a three-volume description of the Levant and surrounding countries. Turner’s travelogue describes a sparsely inhabited land. He reports a small Jewish community in the town of Acre; Safed, a town of 1,000 houses, includes 300 to 350 that are Jewish, he wrote; Tiberius, a town of 550 houses, includes about 100 that are Jewish; and some Jews are to be found in Samaria. He notes that Jews constitute about half of the population of Jerusalem. Like Hasselquist, Turner comments on the Jewish pilgrims coming from far and wide to the Holy Land. See https://www.jpost.com/jerusalem-report/article-700904

Karl Marx, hardly a philo-semite, visited Israel and wrote an article in 1854 for the New York Daily Tribune noting that Jews constituted a majority of the population of Jerusalem.

Felix Bovet, a Christian theologian and professor of French Literature and Hebrew, visited the Holy Land in 1858 and wrote a book, “Egypt, Palestine and Phoenicia: A Visit to Sacred Lands”, translated into English in 1882. Bovet describes a dreary and desolate landscape that is sparsely inhabited. He notes that close to half of the population of Jerusalem is Jews, and that a majority of the Jews in Jerusalem are indigenous, that is, born there.

Mark Twain visited the Holy Land in 1867 and his observations concur with Bovet’s. He noted the land’s desolation and unpeopled nature, calling Palestine “a hopeless, dreary, heart-broken land.” Arab pundits dispute this description, but with recitation in so many historical accounts it must be given credibility.

Jewish immigration to the Holy Land increased in the 1800’s with the advent of Zionism as a response to pograms– ethnic massacres– in Russia and Europe, and contributed significantly to the region’s population growth, which scholars estimate at around 400,000 in 1880.  

Was this immigration “colonization”? Most dictionaries define colonization as the process of one state establishing control over a dependent area or people, but the Jews who immigrated to the Holy Land in modern times did not have a state. They were escaping state-sponsored persecution and returning to their ancestral homeland for their own survival. That does not fit the definition of “colonization”.

Coincident with Jewish immigration to the Holy Land in the late 1800s many Arabs immigrated to the area from surrounding countries, for jobs and to participate in the economic growth brought on by Jewish immigration. Surnames often identify Palestinians’ nation of origin. Last names such as al-Masri (the Egyptian,), al-Djazair (the Algerian), el-Mughrabi (the Moroccan), al-Yamani (the Yemenite) and even al-Afghani are common among those claiming to be Palestinians, but indicate immigration to Palestine within the last 150 years, typically.

But didn’t Israel “steal Palestinian land”?  In fact, prior to 1948 no land was “stolen” from Palestinians. It was all bought at premium prices, mostly desert and swampland, from the legitimate owners, mostly absentee landlords.

The UN partitioned the land in 1947 for Jewish and Palestinian states to coexist peacefully side by side someday. Israel accepted this partition, but the Palestinians and surrounding Arab states did not. Within hours of declaring its independence in 1948, Israel was attacked from all sides by Arab nations who sought to eliminate the Jewish state in their midst. The Arab armies lost that war, and they lost land in the process. That’s what happens when you start a war: you might lose.

In 1964 the PLO was formed, both as a fighting force for pan-Arab nationalism and for the “liberation” of the Palestinian people– i.e., the destruction of Israel. It is worth noting that Yasser Arafat, considered the father of the Palestinian national movement, was born and raised in Egypt. The PLO committed acts of terror globally in the 1960’s and ’70s before later transforming into the Palestinian Authority. With support from the PLO, Egypt and Syria launched or sought to launch wars against Israel in 1967 and 1973 and lost.

Many Arabs simply cannot accept a Jewish homeland in their midst, even though the Jewish state comprises just 1/200 of the land held by Islamic nations. This refusal to accept Israel may derive from the many incitements to jihad against Jews and non-believers in the Koran. Hamas terrorists cried “Allahu akbar!” as they gleefully committed murder, rape, torture, kidnapping, and unimaginable acts of barbarism against innocent civilians on October 7, 2023. I think it is fair to say that October 7 and the repeated Arab wars against Israel have fundamentally been religious wars. Yet Jerusalem is not even mentioned once in the Koran. It must be the principal of the thing.

What about “ethnic cleansing”? There is no question that atrocities were committed by both sides in Israel’s War of Independence, a/k/a the Nakba. Approximately 750,000 Arab residents left or were forced from their homes in this war. Some left on the urging of the Arab armies, who asked them to leave temporarily for their own safety. Others were made refugees involuntarily. That’s what happens in war, people are displaced.  

Many Palestinians remained in Israel and became citizens of the new Jewish state. Today approximately 21% of the Israeli population is Palestinian—Muslim, Cristian, Druze, and Bedouin, primarily—all with full citizenship rights, including the right to vote and to representation in the Israeli legislature, the Knesset.

The Palestinian population that was forced into Gaza and the West Bank in 1948 are the only refugees in history who have been allowed to retain their refugee status generation after generation. They are unique in having the United Nations Relief and Works Agency just for them. The UNRWA has transferred cumulatively over $9 billion to Palestinian refugees in the last 30 years. Aid from other nations and non-governmental organizations brings total foreign subsidies to Palestinians to roughly $40 billion over the last 30 years. It is fair to say that Palestinian refugees have been given special treatment by the UN and the global community. Perhaps as a condequence of all this aid, the Palestinian refugee population has increased from around 800,000 in 1948 to more than 5 million today. That is hardly “ethnic cleansing”.

In contrast, over 800,000 Jews have been expelled from Muslim nations in the Middle East since 1948, and most of these refugees were accepted as citizens in Israel. Middle Eastern Jews are the majority ethnic group in Israel today. But virtually no Jews remain in Muslim Middle Eastern countries where Jews once thrived: Iran, Iraq, Yemen, Syria, Lebanon, Egypt… today these countries have essentially no Jews. This can more accurately be described as “ethnic cleansing”.

I concede that the illegal settlements in the West Bank could be considered acts of colonization. The State of Israel has been both a colonizer and a de-colonizer. In 2005 the government of Ariel Sharon forcibly removed 8,000 Israelis from 21 settlements in the Gaza Strip, and around 1,000 from four settlements in the West Bank. Finance Minister Benjamin Netanyahu opposed the withdrawals and resigned over their approval, warning of a surge in terrorism as a result of the withdrawals.

Certainly Palestinian terror against Israel has been a recurring tragedy for decades, and Israel has not taken it lightly. In response to repeated acts of terror Israel has instituted a draconian checkpoint system and installed barrier walls along the border with the West Bank and Gaza. Most Palestinians in those territories live under a state of occupation, with restricted freedom of movement and subject to possible human rights violations and humiliations. But this is not “genocide”.

Lots of facts have been turned upside-down by those seeking to disparage the Jewish state with the ultimate goal of eliminating it. There is much to criticize in the government of Bibi Netanyahu and its policies, but that is a completely different lengthy argument. Israel is a democracy and its government changes all the time. The Arab List parties once held 12.5% of seats in the Israeli Knesset and were briefly part of the governing coalition, right before Netanyahu last rose to power in 2022. Netanyahu may want to be a dictator but the Israeli people, as we have recently seen, will not let him become one. Netanyahu rules with the flimsiest and most extreme right-wing coalition in Israeli history. That can change overnight.

Palestinians deserve dignity and respect, to have their stories heard, and ultimately their own state. But Israel is not going away. Those calling for the liberation of Palestine “from the river to the sea” and “by any means necessary” are calling for endless war. This is both stupid and counter-productive to the ultimate goal of peace and freedom for both peoples.

Both Jews and Palestinians have a historical connection to the land of Israel/Palestine, and both people are indigenous to the region. Denying Jewish indigeneity, and calling Israel a “colonial project” are expressions of historical ignorance and arguably anti-semitic.  

I hope for more empathetic leaders to assume power in Israel and Palestine someday soon. The land has been drenched in blood and trauma throughout its history, and neither side benefits from continuing warfare and oppression. Jews and Palestinians share common ancestry and both peoples are indigenous to the land. The only way forward is to accept and acknowledge the other, stop the terrorism and war-making, and do the hard work of grieving, healing, and rebuilding. A new story must be created– one of peaceful coexistence and shared society. When the current war ends I hope new leadership will come to power on both sides with the intention to fulfill this vision.

Paul Drescher

December 10, 2023