Reader Post: Our Flawed Response To The “European Colonialism” Libel

One of the most damaging stereotypes promulgated by the anti-Israel crowd is the “white European colonialism” myth. In other words, it is claimed that since the overwhelming majority of pre-1948 Jewish olim are of Ashkenazi descent (i.e. Israelite refugees who settled in Central/Eastern Europe during the Middle Ages), Israel’s rebirth is essentially a European settler colonial construct and therefore an “injustice” against the Arab population of Palestine, who are believed to be indigenous. And we all know how civilized, progressive people are supposed to treat settler colonial states: boycotts, isolation, and delegitimization. For this reason, it has become the centerpiece of contemporary antisemitic propaganda, and remains a popular slogan among those who want nothing more than to bring the Jewish state down.

But what’s even worse is our preferred method for responding to this libel. Instead of confronting it head on, we offer what amounts to little more than an evasion. What I’m referring to here is the “more than 50 percent of Israel is Sephardic and Mizrahi” counter-argument. It is ineffectual, lazy, and akin to applying bandages to axe wounds. By immediately moving the subject over to Sephardim (the majority of whom returned after Israel’s War of Independence), you are tacitly conceding to the anti-Zionists that Israel’s rebirth was, in fact, a European colonial project. And just how do you think people will respond if you tell them “Israel may have been established by thieving colonizers from Europe, but hey! Look at those Sephardim! They came from Arab countries, right? That means they’re legitimately Middle Eastern, so we can just ignore all of that earlier colonial business!”? Do you think that’s going to convince them of Israel’s legitimacy? I can almost guarantee that it won’t. At first glance, it may seem like an easy and convenient rebuttal, but it is deeply flawed and doesn’t disprove anything.

So the question remains, how *do* we respond to this accusation? The answer is a simple one. We do away with the profoundly ridiculous conception of Ashkenazi/European Jews as “white European converts” and remind our interlocutors of who they really are: Israelites. They’re not foreign immigrants from Europe, they’re returning natives. Anyone with an understanding of indigenous status will be able to see how they, along with most other Jewish groups, meet all of the criteria for inclusion.

Genetic studies are particularly useful here, but one should not overlook phenotypes (that is, physical/facial features) either. Ashkenazim are often categorized as “white Jews” in contrast to “Jews of color”, but anyone who has spent a significant amount of time around Ashkenazi and Sephardi Jews would know that this is nonsense. It is almost impossible to distinguish the former from the latter, or from other Levantine groups (e.g. Lebanese, Syrians, Druze, etc). In fact, Jews living in Central/Eastern Europe were frequently characterized as ‘dark-skinned Asiatics’ by the indigenous European populations they lived with. Evidence of this can be found in the writings of European philosophers, scholars, and historians from before WWII. Immanuel Kant, for example, once famously remarked that Central European Jews were “the Palestinians who live among us”. Not even the philosemites of the time questioned their origins in the Fertile Crescent.

All of that being said, it’s easy to see why many people would rather just point to Sephardim/Mizrahim instead of deconstructing this myth directly. There are many who desire to give more of the spotlight to a Jewish population whose history and plight has largely been overlooked. This is perfectly understandable, but there are better ways to handle this topic. It is a worthy cause on its own merits, and as a Mizrahi Jew myself, I feel we deserve more than to be used as red herrings in a discussion that, frankly, has very little to do with us. Whether we like it or not, Ashkenazim are the main target of the colonialism myth, so they should be the main focus in deconstructing it. There’s really no other way.

12 thoughts on “Reader Post: Our Flawed Response To The “European Colonialism” Libel”

  1. here is my answer

    every colonial project in history had the backing of a country and its army

    name the country and army that backed the aliya of the 19th century

    when they cant (and they cant) you have won

    the end

  2. The thing is, if you talked about this to Jews or their European “hosts” of pre-war or even post-war Europe, it would be like you landed from an alternative universe. Honestly, it’s like suggesting the Holocaust never happened. How is it that the Nazis separated out the Jews across Europe? It wasn’t by their religion stated in the sensus and it wasn’t by their look. True, if Jews looked less Semitic, there was a chance of getting false documents and saving themselves but precious few managed this. Israel even does this today – Israelis have internal ID stating nationality (as opposed to religion). Europe did this. Watch movies about the war or Holocaust – what do you think it means when the police or whoever asked for “papers”? And which nation country does this nationality belong to? And the shameful reason why “progressive” European countries are able to join the chorus and bleat about colonization and occupation, is because three quarters of the population of Jews in Europe was annhilated. It’s much easier to vilify Jews when so few are left amongst you to call you on it.

    1. That just goes to show how antisemitism changes and mutates over time. Whereas Jews in Europe had previously been maligned as foreigners from Asia, they are now cast as European colonizers in the Middle East, in large part because it’s no longer convenient for antisemites to refer to Jews as “Asiatics”. This is something I have explored in one of my previous articles. None of this changes the fact that European Jews originated in the Middle East (and as such, were “racially” different from their host populations). Rather, what is often left unstated is that their apparent racial/ancestral/cultural difference does *not* warrant persecution and certainly not genocide. Post WWII, many Jews have tried to distance themselves from their roots (while embracing a “European of the Jewish faith” identity) out of fear of a repeat of the Holocaust. This is silly and irrational, especially now when Israel’s legitimacy is being called into question.

  3. It doesn’t matter what the facts are or what we prove or say. Anti-Semites are hate groups and the facts never matter to them.

    All they want is to announce to the world how much they hate Jews

  4. HardRocker111

    Perhaps the writer of this piece should consider to stop insulting Israelis/Sabras with these weird arguments he’s having with trolls online (that’s how it seems like) about looks and skin tones, or other irrelevant, pointless arguments which have nothing to do with most nationalisms, and should go instead for normal explanations about the historical, national, political and religious connections/rights, plus explaining that there was never a “Palestinian nation” in the land. Just a consideration.

    1. It would seem that you have been paying very little (if any) attention to the rhetoric emanating from “left wing” anti-Zionists. A key component of their argument is that Israel is colonial because Ashkenazim are “white” (in contrast to Arab “people of color”) and thus don’t belong in the Middle East. You may not like this discussion of race and phenotype. I don’t either, and I wish I didn’t have to rely on it. But it’s the only thing that will ever get through to these people, so it’s a necessary evil.

      1. It is the entirety of their argument. The very Foundation Stone. So potent, that it causes total blindness to all else – the free speech suppressing, Union busting, violently misogynistic, homophobic, fat cat kleptocratic theft of the “Peoples Wealth”; by an elite class. And worst of all; theocracy. Those who use the “Opium of the Masses” to perpetrate their violent, misogynistic, homophobic thefts and tyranny.

        I always ask how they can continue to consider themselves Liberals/Progressives when they are little more than armchair enabler/co-dependents; perpetuating the evils they claim to be against. Like Orwell’s sheep chorus “Four legs good, two legs better!”

        I believe they do it because it’s cheap way to feel “noble”, “meaningful”. But it’s built on the Potemkin Village propaganda ploy of Palestinianism. Like Toothfarianism and Easterbunnyianism a malicious make-believe.

  5. I would simply respond that the whole notion of an “indigenous” people with heritable “blood and soil” entitlement to a land is fascist and racist. If you add up all the lands that the chauvinists of various nationalities and ethnicities consider to be their native birthright, you would get an area many times as large as the entire surface area of planet earth–and if they all decided to make war to defend their claims, then the world’s population would be slaughtered many times over in the ensuing free-for-all.

    The Jewish people yearned for Zion for 2000 years, but that gave them no legal or political right to the territory they loved, nor did anyone recognize one. They eventually established their right not by spiritual passion or legal argument, but rather by moving to the land, inhabiting it, and growing into a thriving local population capable of establishing and maintaining an independent nation-state.

    The inhabitants of the West Bank and Gaza could similarly have their own state tomorrow on the land they actually inhabit, if they so desired. The only thing that stops them is a deluded attachment to the notion that they’re somehow entitled to a separate, much larger area merely by virtue of their heritage, despite having lived in their current location for multiple generations now. As always, this sort of belief in heritable title to land has led only to war, hatred and racism.

  6. Yitzchak Goodman

    You have a point. However, pointing out the high percentage of Sefardim is a valid answer to what I call “Helen Thomas syndrome,” the inability to admit that Israeli families come from anywhere but Germany and Poland. The Palestinians themselves seem to instinctively realize that their narrative cannot even withstand an accurate account of Israeli demographics.The big colonial power in Israel’s modern history was Great Britain, for whom Zionism eventually became a big inconvenience. Why doesn’t the Israeli battle against the British armed, trained, and led TransJordanian Legion count as anti-colonialism?

  7. Firstly the entire “Jews as European settlers” always conveniently brushes aside how Judaism got to Europe in the first place when it is not a religion known for proselytizing.

    Secondly their point relies on the idea that, despite the fact that Jews were feared, hated and persecuted for hundreds of years, despite the fact that in most places they had no rights or certainly fewer than the European population and that they were frequently murdered in pogroms, that some Europeans; numbering in their millions; decided their lives were far too comfortable and; against their interests; became Jewish and adopted costumes and customs (and somehow facial features) that singled them out for harsh and often brutal treatment.

    Yeah…OK.

  8. Good article, but there is an even better argument based on undisputed facts and reasonable logic and my argumentation line doesn’t need support from legal points such as Balfour Declaration, San-Remo Conference, Mandate, etc. There are only two parties that lay claims to the holy-land (I take a neutral term here):

    1. people calling themselves Jews;
    and
    2. people calling themselves Palestinians

    Palestinians claim that the holy-land was inhabited by their ancestors when the ancestors of current rulers of the holy-land (i.e., Jews) began coming from Europe in late 19th Century and “colonized” the land. Therefore, they are the indigenous, “genetic” inhabitants and they have the absolute right on the land.

    No one argues historic facts that in Biblical times holy-land belonged to Jews, but the Arabs claim that there is no proof that the people that call themselves Jews and come from Europe are indeed genetic successors to the Biblical Jews and therefore, these European Jews (and indeed even the Sephardi Jews from the Middle East) aren’t entitled to the holy-land, even though Biblical Jews were here BEFORE the Muslims.
    What haters of Jews and Israel forget is that Jews NEVER left the holy-land, another undisputed fact. So as long as there was an unbroken Jewish presence in the holy-land, these Jews were the legitimate and undisputed successors to the Biblical Jews and therefore, entitled to do with the land as they (i.e., these Jews that maintained continuous presence here) as they please, including the acceptance of European (and Sephardi) Jews as legitimate Jews. If one applies this argument (and I don’t see how one can overturn it), then any Muslims that
    colonised this land have no rights to claim priority over the “European” Jews, because the ones that have the right to decide are the descendants of Jews that lived in Tiberias and Jerusalem from times of Christ to late 19th century. They haven’t objected to “European” Jews and so these Jews aren’t colonisers but successors. QED.

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