Throughout its 75-year history, Israel’s enemies have tried to defeat the Jewish State through various means.
They tried conventional militarily several times, including in 1948, 1967, and 1973, and failed. Today, they understand that no national military power is a match for the IDF. This has directly led to the understanding that we are a permanent part of the region, and resulted in peace being made with six Arab nations.
They also tried defeating us economically, starting with the Arab League Boycott in 1945, even pre-state, adding a secondary and even tertiary level to try and smother the newly reestablished Jewish state at birth. Fast forward to today, and Israel is a global economy and a member of the OECD, an organization representing high-income nations.
They tried diplomatically, in international institutions, as with the infamous “Zionism is Racism” UN resolution in 1975. Israel’s response was to be a member of more multilateral forums than ever before, and our expertise in many arenas and fields is currently sought across the globe.
Our enemies then determined that we are weakest in terms of numbers, both at the international level, where there is one Jewish State, compared to 21 Arab and 57 Muslim-majority nations. The Jewish People number just over 15 million, whereas there are around 500 million Arabs and over two billion Muslims.
They understood that in a globalized world, numbers count, and they set about weakening Israel in the court of global opinion.
In 2001, beginning with the preparatory conference held in Tehran for the ill-fated Durban 2001 World Conference against Racism (WCAR), a new language guide to try and defame Israel before global audiences was formulated by one of the most bloodthirsty and oppressive regimes on earth. This is when the slurs “genocide” and “apartheid” were first used, purposefully inserted into the international parlance by the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Led by Iran and its proxies, these slurs are now used regularly on university campuses, in parliaments, and on the streets around the world, with few knowing they are merely spouting verbiage straight from the ayatollah playbook.
While these slogans have not gained too much currency among the informed and knowledgeable, one slur appears to have stuck, that the Jewish State is some type of European colonial implant in the heart of the Arab world.
Firstly, and most importantly, the return of the indigenous Jewish people to their ancestral homeland, the Land of Israel, where our language, civilization, and culture were formed, is the direct opposite of the colonialist lie. In fact, there has been an unbroken Jewish presence in the land since time immemorial.
Our return was arguably the greatest victory against colonialism in the history of man. Since Jewish sovereignty was last broken two thousand years ago, every power that came from afar, whether Roman, Rashidun, Umayyad, Abbasid, Fatamid, Seljuk, Crusader, Mamluk, Ottoman, or British, conquered, occupied and colonized the land and the people that were living there.
The Jewish people were the last and only people to have ever given the territory an independent and sovereign status. All others just merely added it to their empires or colonies.
Yes, many Jews came from Europe, because their ancestors were enslaved by these colonizers and forcibly brought to the European continent. However, the Jewish People, regardless of where they resided, never forgot their national homeland, praying and yearning for it every single day, during holidays, and in life cycle celebrations.
However, what is not as well known, is the story of the Jews of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region.
The Jews of the Middle East
The Jews who never left the region and lived in this area, including an unbroken presence in the Land of Israel, for thousands of years, long before the Islamic conquest and Arab occupation of the region beginning in the Seventh Century.
These Jews, of which I am a proud descendant, never lived in Europe.
Jews lived in what is now known as Iraq for around double the amount of time that is has been under Arab and Islamic rule.
Jews lived in Arabia and spoke Arabic, centuries before the Muslim prophet Muhammad was even born.
The Jewish People predated the Arab presence in the wider region, and certainly anteceded Islam by a wide margin of thousands of years.
There are many other examples that simply thrown the whole colonizer – colonized paradigm on its head.
When people know the history of the Jews of the MENA the terms of oppression, conquest and occupation have to be profoundly transformed.
Apart from the moral and ethical imperative to learn the history of Jews from all over the world, placing the history and identity of the Jews of the MENA firmly into the center of the debate about the conflict allows for discussions on Israel to take on a radically different shape.
The accusation of “apartheid” and “colonialism” against Jews are victim-blaming as they raise extremely visceral memories of cultures, languages, and lands erased in the seventh century until today by Arab conquest, imperialism, and subsequent colonialism and occupation.
The Jews living under Islam were forced into a second- or third-class status in a system which ensured that they lived under state-sponsored fear and terror, paying the taxes of a subjugated people and being forced into ghettos. The type of pogrom that Israel experienced on October 7 was regularly perpetuated against Jews living in the Middle East and North Africa throughout the centuries.
Even this precarious situation came to an end in the middle part of the 20th Century, as almost one million Jews were forced out of their homes in the Arab and Islamic world almost overnight. Thankfully, there was a State of Israel where they became citizens and could enjoy the freedom and equality that entitled.
These refugees did not have a United Nations organization created for them. Their leaders did not bully the international community into spending tens of billions of dollars to use them as a political weapon until this very day. They did not resort to violence, terrorism, or “any means necessary” to achieve compensation for the communities they were ripped from, the assets that were stolen, and the bloodshed and humiliation they suffered.
All they sought was redress.
The white privileged anti-Israel haters on university campuses would like no one to know about the Jews of the Middle East and North Africa, because it shatters all their false paradigms and lies. It destroys the very foundation stone, that Israel is a European insert, on which their whole vacuous talking points rest.
Especially after the recent poll which showed that two-thirds of young Americans between the ages of 18-24 believe that Jews as a class are oppressors and should be treated as oppressors, let’s start having a new conversation about identity, oppression, colonization, and privilege in the Israel-Palestinian conflict.
Through this we can all understand that Zionism is not only one of the most just but also one of the most successful indigenous people’s liberation movements in history, and should be feted by all.
Understanding the long-standing historical context of Israel and the Jewish people in the region would break the racist and false paradigm surrounding the conflict’s current narrative, which is merely the latest tactic to weaken and subsequently destroy the Jewish State.
If this understanding is achieved, then we could start talking about the possibility for a realistic peaceful solution, based on historic justice and liberation for an indigenous people.
The writer is an MK from the Religious Zionist Party, and chairman of the Knesset Committee for Public Enterprises.