By Rich
Lowry
Tuesday,
October 10, 2023
It doesn’t
take long to read or listen to anti-Israel advocacy before the word “colonial”
or “colonialism” is hurled at the Jewish state.
After
the spasm of Hamas murder, rape, and kidnapping over the weekend, the
U.S. Palestinian Community Network exclaimed, “Our people are waging an
anti-colonial, anti-occupation, and anti-Zionist liberation struggle.”
According
to an anti-Israel statement signed by dozens of student groups at Harvard,
Israel is undertaking “colonial retaliation.”
An
academic cottage industry is devoted to deeming Israel a decades-long exercise
in “settler colonialism,” and Hamas itself is partial to the term.
The use
of the word “colonial” in all its forms isn’t meant to accurately describe
realty or clarify anything; rather, it is a term of abuse wielded to
delegitimize Israel and justify every means of resisting its very existence.
The
“colonial” smear can’t survive contact with the slightest critical scrutiny.
First of
all, the original Jewish settlers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries
weren’t sent by any mother country to set up enclaves for the honor and profit
of the homeland. To the contrary, they were escaping countries that, in many
cases, didn’t want them. It would have been perverse for Jews to have sought,
say, to establish an outpost of Russia in the Levant, given the atrocities
routinely carried out against them on Russian soil.
They thought
of their venture as a return to a place that Jews had
inhabited for thousands of years.
Indeed,
the colonialism charge raises the question of how an indigenous people can be
colonizers.
The
Jewish people have had a connection to Israel since Abraham. The people became
fundamentally identified with the land; indeed, they were synonymous. The land
was a locus of the Jewish faith — the site of its holy city, Jerusalem; the
place where many religious commandments, the mitzvot, were supposed to be performed;
the object of yearning after the dispossession of Ancient Israel (“Next year in
Jerusalem”).
There is
a reason that Zionists had no interest in settling in Uganda, as was proposed
in the early 20th century.
On top
of this, Israel has been willing at key junctures, notably right at the
beginning in 1948, to accept a two-state solution.
The
Palestinians must be counted among the worst nationalists the world has ever
known: They have repeatedly rejected opportunities to obtain a nation-state
because they hate Israel’s legitimate national aspirations more than they love
their own.
In one
sense, Israel’s ultimate offense is to have won defensive wars fought against
antagonists seeking to wipe it from the map.
As for
Gaza, Israel ended its occupation nearly 20 years ago. It wanted to wash its
hands of the place as much as possible, an understandable impulse but one that
has proved unsustainable. Hamas won legislative elections in 2006 and then
expelled the rival Palestinian group Fatah in a factional war. In total
control, Hamas proceeded to make Gaza a base for conducting armed operations
against Israel.
Israel’s
failing here wasn’t so much heavy-handedness — although it took measures to
protect itself from the threat in Gaza, as did Egypt — but the naïve belief
that it could reach a de facto accommodation with a Hamas that would misrule
Gaza for its own ends while not becoming too dire a threat to Israel.
Its mass
terror attack on Israel ends that delusion.
If
nothing else, the accusation of colonialism is very telling. There is one
country in the roll call of nations that doesn’t deserve to exist. One people
that doesn’t deserve a homeland. One people who, despite being subjected to
hideous persecutions over the centuries and being constantly attacked today, is
supposedly guilty of every possible crime.
And it
happens to be Israel and its Jewish inhabitants.
The
Hamas attack was just a taste of what it would do to Israel if it had the power
— extricate an indigenous people from their homeland in the most brutal fashion
possible, in the name, of course, of anti-colonialism.
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