Friday, July 28, 2017

Is Israel a colonial state?

This is taken from an answer I wrote on Quora to the question Is Israel a colony or the Jewish homeland?

  1. Israel is partially the product of internal Arab migration.
    Roughly half of Israeli Jews are from Arab countries, and as such, by migrating to Israel they have migrated within the Arab world. My great grand-parents migrated from Romania and Lithuania to England as internal European migrants I don’t think they were colonizers anymore then my co-worker’s Algerian grand father who migrated from Algeria to Israel is a colonizer.
  2. Jews are descended from aboriginal inhabitants.
    Jews regard migrating to Israel as a return to a homeland that their ancestors left for a variety of reasons. That means that they do not self-identify as colonizers. In this context it is worth noting that much of the population (both Jewish and non-Jewish) are descended from various types of colonizers including the Crusaders, Romans, Greeks and Arabs. It is generally accepted that Jews originated in this area and before the Second World War both European and American academia regarded Jews as Middle Eastern immigrants (of inferior stock). Now academia has shifted ground but the Jews are still seen as being on the “other” side.
  3. The Jewish God, language, sacred texts and religious holidays all originated in Israel.The Old Testament was written in Hebrew a Semitic language which originated in Israel. Religious holidays are timed to coincide with the weather in the Middle East and include harvest festivals, pilgrimages (to Jerusalem) and a lunar calendar which is useless in Europe where clouds cover the moon.
  4. No other independent entity has existed on this territory.Most of the independent countries to have existed on the site of modern Israel within the last 2,500 years are Jewish states. There has been one Crusader state created by the Normans which was independent. All Arab or Moslem rulers had their seat of government outside the country, as part of a wider Empire.
  5. The first European Jews who arrived in the 19th century identified as colonizers but arrived during Islamic rule .
    The first European Jews to arrive during the 19th Century (about 30,000) often called their settlements “colonies”. However the main ruler was the Ottoman Empire and most rejected their European origins, preferring to speak a local language (Hebrew rather than Yiddish). Israel’s first prime minister David Ben Gurion and second president (Ben Tzvi) both served in the Ottoman Army during the first world war and attempted to recruit American Jews to fight on Turkey’s behalf. In that sense they were asylum seekers and not colonizers.
  6. Zionism used colonialism as a tool.Those first European Jewish migrants were Zionists and the Zionist movement up until 1917 sought to settle the country under Ottoman rule (hence Ben Gurion’s support for Turkey). Early Zionists tried to setup universities that would serve the Turks while aiding migration. However when the chance arose the Zionists had no compunction about riding the British coat tails and using British rule to get their cause recognized. That I think is the base for the claim that Zionists were colonizers, but to some extent they were using the British and the relationship, which was always tense, eventually broke down (from 1938).
  7. The Arab population are also colonizers.Although colonialism is associated with modern Europe there is a case to be made that much of the Arab population arrived in Israel as Imperial colonizers. There are communities brought here by the Turks, by the Egyptians (under Muhamed Ali) as well as Bedouin Arabs who probably came with the conquest.
  8. The question is academic and not relevant.
    The Jews are here, they are blending in. In a few generations all Jews will be descended from Arab-Jewish migrants and European refugees from the Holocaust. Colonialism no longer exists and is not relevant to the modern world.

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