How to argue against colonialism, apartheid and genocide
Look to the treatment of Jews in the Arab world
Israel, we are told, is losing the PR war. In fact it has been losing it for decades. Epithets such as genocide, apartheid, ethnic cleansing and colonialism, trafficked on campus and by liberal elites, have attached themselves to the tiny Jewish state and seem impossible to dislodge.
But Israel has not even tried to use its best arguments to rebut such lies. The most effective rebuttals restore the Jews to where they belong, in the Middle East.
Most Israelis originate from the Middle East. They are either born in Israel or they are Jewish refugees from Arab or Muslim countries or their descendants, ethnically cleansed from their ancient communities. This does not make Ashkenazi Jews any less 'people of colour'. These were reviled as aliens and swarthy Levantines during their long sojourn in Europe.
Colonialism: the smear that Israel is a white colonial settler state relies on two things: it denies that Jews are a people distinct from the diaspora in which they spent 2,000 years. Secondly, it attempts to sever Jews from their Middle Eastern ethno-religious roots. Israelophobes brand Judaism a matter of faith like Christianity or Islam. They refuse to believe that Jews are distinct genetically, culturally, linguistically and historically from the populations they lived amongst. In order to depict Zionism as a European imposter, the anti-Zionists date the rise of modern Zionism to 1882, the arrival of the the Russian Jews of the first aliya. In truth, Jews never left, and through the centuries returned, albeit in small numbers and for spiritual reasons, to Eretz Israel.
But another argument is seldom heard: While indigenous to Israel, their ancestral homeland, they are also indigenous vis-à-vis the Arabs. The oldest diaspora is the Babylonian - 2,600 years old. It was only in the seventh century, 1,300 years later, when the Arab conquest forced the indigenous peoples to speak Arabic and convert to Islam that the region became known as the Arab world.
Jews are amongst the indigenous peoples of the MENA - together with Kurds, Berbers, Yazidis, Mandaeans, Assyrians and Copts. For millennia, Judaism has been embedded in the local culture, spawning its daughter religions of Chrstianity and Islam.
Apartheid: Jews usually defend against this charge by pointing out that non-Jews enjoy the same rights as Jews in Israel. A more effective argument is that the Jews liberated themselves from a form of Muslim apartheid against their own Jews and Christians called dhimmitude.
The dhimmi was a valuable source of revenue, paying the sometimes crippling jizya tax in return for the right to practise his religion. Jews were not allowed to defend themselves, had few legal rights and were often exploited as a useful, but dispensable minority. Communities lived separate social lives, and where they interacted, the Muslim always asserted his superiority. The Jews did demeaning jobs, like cleaning sewers, as in Yemen. Until recently Christians in Egypt collected rubbish. The pecking order dictated that Jews were close to the bottom rung in society, just above slaves. Today the fact they have their own sovereign state causes resentment : possessing political power flies in the face of the traditional Jewish status of submission.
Genocide: As with colonialism and apartheid, the accusation that Israel is committing genocide turns the truth on its head. Both the raging Arab nationalist mobs of the 1940s screaming 'slaughter the Jews' and the ideological Islamists who posit 'convert or die' are genocidal. The Palestinian cause has never abandoned the genocidal intentions of Nazi-inspired Mufti Haj Amin al Husseini, who broadcast' kill the Jews wherever you find them' over Radio Berlin. Genocide was the motive behind the Arab war against Israel. Genocide is the driving force behind the 7 October massacre of men, women and children in southern Israel. Enshrined in the Hamas charter and the philosophy of the Muslim Brotherhood, they vow the destruction of Israel and Jews. The Islamists of Iran make no secret of their desire to inflict a second Holocaust.
As for the charge that Israel wants to ‘ethnically cleanse’ Gazans, the only real ethnic cleansing here has been that of Jews from Arab countries. From a million in 1948, only 4,000 remain today.
Yet the war is rarely explained in the context of Arab and Islamist antisemitism and of the struggles of non-Arab and non-Muslim peoples indigenous to the Middle East to achieve the religious tolerance or self-determination which is their right. Our talking points remain defensive and Eurocentric.
Time to reframe the conversation.