By Roy Altman
Thursday, May 07, 2026
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Detail from the Arch of Titus in Rome, created to celebrate the Roman suppression of the First Jewish Revolt in 70 AD and the conquest of Jerusalem. The depicted relief shows Roman soldiers returning home with sacred Jewish objects looted from the Second Temple.
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The claim that Jews are imperialist “colonizers” isn’t
new. It emerged from the Victorian-era antisemitism of an influential English
journalist and matured in the early Soviet Union, long before the modern state
of Israel was founded. As Paul Johnson (1928–2023), the great historian, observed:
The Soviet campaign against the
Jews, after 1967 a permanent feature of the system, was itself conducted under
the code-name of anti-Zionism, which became a cover for every variety of
anti-Semitism. [The] Leninist theory of imperialism, like Marx’s theory of
capitalism, had its roots in anti-Semitic conspiracy theory.
As Johnson showed, the claim that Jews are “imperialists”
predated Vladimir Lenin, leader of Soviet Russia from 1917 until his death in
1924. Johnson traces the source of this claim to the English writer and
journalist J.A. Hobson, who travelled to South Africa to cover the Boer War in
1899. Hobson, as Johnson relates, regarded Jews as “almost devoid of social
morality,” and possessing “a superior calculating intellect” that allows them
“to take advantage of every weakness, folly and vice of the society in which he
lives.”
In his 1900 work, The War in South Africa:
Its Causes and Effects, Hobson blamed the conflict (falsely) on “a
small group of international financiers, chiefly German in origin and Jewish by
race.” Two years later, in 1902, Hobson expanded on this conspiracy theory in Imperialism: A Study,
which argued that international finance—directed by Jews—was “the chief force
behind colonies and wars.”
In his own
book about imperialism—and its supposedly Jewish causes—Lenin wrote that
he’d “made use of the principal English work on imperialism, J.A. Hobson’s
book, with all the care that, in my opinion, this work deserves.” As Johnson
explains, Hobson’s theory that an international oligarchy of Jewish
financiers—the “peculiar race,” in Hobson’s words—was behind all European
colonialist projects “became the essence of Lenin’s own” view, expressed to
great effect in his above-quoted 1916 work, Imperialism: The Highest
Stage of Capitalism.
Keep in mind: This is 32 years before the modern state of
Israel came into being. “Leninist theory,” as Johnson notes, subsequently
forms the attitudes of many
Third World states toward imperialism and colonialism, as they acquired
independence in the 1950s and 1960s. Granted the theory’s antisemitic roots, it
was not difficult to fit into it the concept of Zionism as a form of colonialism
and the Zionist state as an outpost of imperialism.… That ‘Zionism’ in practice
stood for ‘the Jews’ became quickly apparent.
In the 1960s, Yasser Arafat, head of the Palestine
Liberation Organization from 1969 until his death in 2004, repurposed Hobson’s
theory to suit his own political objectives. While Hobson had claimed that
Jewish financiers were bankrolling the expensive colonial ventures of European
governments, Arafat pivoted to the more extreme contention we see in academia
today: that Jews have no historical connection to the Land of Israel at
all—that they’re simply colonists in Israel, in much the same way as the
British were colonists in America, India, and South Africa, among many other places.
As support for this claim, Arafat often would say that
Jews had dug around the Temple Mount in Jerusalem and found “nothing there.”
More recently, Mahmoud Abbas, Arafat’s successor and the president of the
Palestinian Authority—now in the twentieth year of his four-year term—has been
parroting Arafat, claiming that “Israel dug under the al-Aqsa [mosque]… and
they could not find anything.”
This contention was once (properly) seen as outlandish.
At the Camp David Summit in 2000, for example, US envoy Dennis Ross cautioned
Arafat not to make this sort of frivolous historical argument to Bill Clinton:
“If he hears you denying [the Temple’s] existence [in Jerusalem], he will never
again take you seriously.” In more recent years, however, the claim that Jews
are colonists in Israel has become mainstream on college campuses, at the
United Nations, and in many Western media outlets.
But this claim fundamentally inverts the concept of colonization
and ignores the historical evidence—casting the Jewish people, who have ancient
and continuous ties to the land, as colonists while attributing indigenous
status to Muslim Arab populations whose presence stems only from later
conquests of the region.
Colonialism is a political and economic process by which
one nation exerts its dominance over foreign territories and populations. There
are two kinds of colonialism: extractive colonialism and settler colonialism.
Extractive colonialism occurs when a foreign nation exploits a native
population merely for the purpose of enriching or empowering its own empire.
Settler colonialism, by contrast, occurs when a foreign population immigrates
to a new land and, once there, displaces or dominates the indigenous people of
that land.
The essential element of both categories of colonialism
is the foreignness of the colonizing population. The colonists don’t
speak the land’s language, practice its religion, or share any of its cultural
heritage. They also carry the names of their own ancestors, and they typically
pass those naming conventions down to their descendants.
All well-accepted examples of colonization meet this
basic definition. For instance, England colonized what is now the United States
by sending its citizens to distant shores (including a place now called New
England)—lands on which no English person had ever set foot before—with the
hope of finding raw materials that could be sent back across the pond to enrich
the British Empire. This aspect of America’s colonization meets the definition
of what today we would call extractive colonialism. Before long, however,
English Puritans were coming by the tens of thousands—fleeing the tyranny of
Charles I and looking for a safe place to practice their religion freely. This
aspect of American colonization is an example of settler colonialism.
In either case, before they came to America, English
citizens had never spoken any of America’s languages, practiced its religions,
nor shared in any material aspects of its culture. And, when they got here,
they carried English (not Native American) names—like John Winthrop, Walter
Raleigh, and Francis Drake—and they passed these names on to their descendants
such that, even generations later, the English colonists in America still bore
English names (like George Washington, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson).
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The First Thanksgiving at Plymouth, a 1914 portrait by American painter Jennie Augusta Brownscombe depicting early 17th-century settlers at England’s first permanent English colony in New England.
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Take another example. The Spanish colonization of the
Americas—a prototype of the extractive model—colonized Central and South
America by sending Spanish conquistadores to (what is now) Mexico, Peru, and
Colombia to subdue the indigenous populations there and steal the gold and
silver deposits that would finance the Spanish Empire’s global ambitions. To
read Bernal Díaz del Castillo’s account
of Spain’s conquest of Mexico is to understand what a colonist truly looks
like: an outsider with no historical, linguistic, cultural, or religious
connection to the land he’s conquering.
Dozens of similar examples abound. The case of Algeria is
particularly relevant because many Palestinian Arabs (and their supporters)
cite the ultimately successful national uprising against French colonial rule
in Algeria as a kind of model for the Palestinian cause. That uprising took
more than seven years (from late 1954 to early 1962), and resulted in the
deaths of more than a million Algerian civilians. The Algerian National
Liberation Front never won a battle—but, when it was all said and done, the French
army packed up and moved over half a million French nationals back to France.
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The cover of a January 1959 edition of the Syrian magazine Al-Jundi, commemorating the Algerian uprising against French colonial rule.
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Similarly, the fact that Palestinians are weaker than
Israel and that thousands of Palestinians have suffered and died (and will
continue to suffer and die) in their forever war with the Jewish State—indeed,
the fact that the war is protracted and indefinite—is seen as precisely the
point: To defeat a militarily superior “colonist,” the argument goes, the
indigenous population must only outlast him. Outlasting him isn’t easy, of
course. But if a native population struggles long enough, the Palestinians believe,
the foreign oppressors will ultimately tire of fighting (and dying) on foreign
soil and, cutting their losses, will turn around and go home—as the French did
in Algeria.
The problem with this Palestinian narrative is that it
ignores the available evidence—the basic facts on the ground—which would lead
any neutral observer to understand that Israel meets none of the commonly
accepted definitions of colonization. Israelis aren’t foreign to the land they
now govern
Jews, not just in Israel, but all over the world, share a
common DNA ancestry—DNA that, as dozens of genetic studies have shown, spread
from the Levant (where Israel is today) thousands of years ago. Israeli Jews
also speak the same language, practice the same religion, and share a deep
cultural and historical connection to the Jews who have lived continuously in
Israel for thousands of years.
Indeed, even today, the Jews of Israel pass on to their
children the very same names that, according to the archaeological record, have
been given to Jewish children in the land of Israel for millennia. No less
significantly, the state of Israel wasn’t at its founding (and isn’t today) a
colony of any foreign government.
As Golda Meir once quipped to then-Senator Joe Biden,
Israelis have a secret weapon: “We have nowhere else to go.” Israel, in other
words, wasn’t created to enrich (or expand the influence of) any European
power. It thus cannot be—and has never been—a colonialist state.
History itself makes plain that, if anyone has “colonized”
the Land of Israel, it has been the succession of Muslim armies from Arabia,
Egypt, Damascus, Baghdad, and Turkey (not to mention Christian Crusaders, Roman
and Byzantine emperors, and British colonists) that ruled Jerusalem as foreign
occupiers for almost two millennia.
Throughout all these occupations, thousands of Jews
remained in the Land of Israel. We know this because archaeologists in Israel
have found Jewish synagogues and cemeteries dating all the way back to the 1st
century AD. And new discoveries are often being made. In 2025, for instance,
archaeologists excavated a Jewish synagogue in the Yehudiya Nature Reserve,
located in Israel’s Golan Heights, dating back to the 6th century
AD.
We know it because, when the Arabs built the Dome of the
Rock in 691 AD, it was maintained for years by 300 black slaves, 20 Jewish
servants, and 10 Christians.
We know it because the Seljuk Turks (whose empire would
envelop the entire region during the 11th century) tell us that, in
the AD 940s, the Jewish community of Jerusalem had split in two—with the
followers of the traditional scholar-judges (called gaons) on one side
and the Karaites (a novel sect whose members rejected any law but the Torah and
who believed in a return to Jewish sovereignty in Israel) on the other.
We know it because, in the years leading up to AD 1011,
the Fatimid occupiers of Israel allowed their Jewish subjects to build a
synagogue on the Mount of Olives, to maintain a rabbinic academy in Jerusalem,
and to pray at the Eastern Wall of the Temple Mount.
We know it because occupying Muslim forces passed an
ever-evolving series of laws addressing the rights of their Jewish subjects. In
AD 1266, for instance, the Arabs forbade the Jews of Israel from entering the
Cave of Machpelah, in the foothills of Hebron, where the Patriarchs are
buried—and where King David was anointed—to pray.
We know it because of a long litany of Muslim massacres
against Jews in Israel—the most notorious coming in AD 1518, when occupying
Ottomans slaughtered hundreds of Hebron’s Jews.
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Detail from a woodcut by 19th-century French printmaker Paul Gustave Louis Christophe Doré depicting the burial of the biblical matriarch Sarah in the Cave of Machpelah, also known as the Cave of the Patriarchs.
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We know it also because, after Napoleon Bonaparte won
Egypt for France at the Battle of the Pyramids in 1798, he marched his army
through Gaza and up toward Jerusalem, where he found a mostly desolate country,
ignored by Ottoman occupiers and populated mainly by small communities of Jews,
Christians, and Bedouins. On March 18, 1799, Napoleon laid siege to Acre—then
under the command of an Ottoman dictator who called himself “the Butcher” and
whose chief minister was a native-born Jewish man named Haim Farhi. Napoleon
took Acre after defeating the Butcher’s army of foreign mercenaries
(principally Albanians, Afghans, and Turks) before turning to Jerusalem, on the
outskirts of which he issued his now-famous “Proclamation to the Jews” of April
20, 1799:
Bonaparte, commander in chief of
the French Republic in Africa and Asia, to the rightful heirs of Palestine—the
unique nation of Jews who have been deprived of the land of your fathers by
thousands of years of lust for conquest and tyranny. Arise then with gladness,
ye exiled, and take unto yourselves Israel’s patrimony. The young army has made
Jerusalem my headquarters and will within a few days transfer to Damascus so
you can remain there [in Jerusalem] as ruler.
Since the destruction of the Second Temple in AD 70, the
Jews of Israel pined, like their cousins in the diaspora, for the “redemption
of Israel.” For centuries before the reconstitution of Jewish sovereignty, in
fact, Jews returned each year to the Temple Mount on the anniversary of its
destruction (the Ninth of Av in the Jewish calendar) and, praying at the
Western (or Wailing) Wall, would rend their clothes. Witnessing this sorry
scene in the 4th century, St. Jerome wrote: “On the day of the
Destruction of Jerusalem, you see a sad people coming to visit, decrepit little
women and old men encumbered with rags and years” who “weep over the ruins of
the Temple.”
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Detail from an 1806 print by French engraver Louis François Couché Graveur depicting Napoleon Bonaparte granting freedom of worship to the Jews.
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Judah Halevi, the great Spanish rabbi, wrote in 1141:
O [Jerusalem] city of the
world, most chastely fair,
In the far West, behold I sigh for thee.
Oh! Had I eagles’ wings, I’d fly to thee.
And with my falling tears make moist thine earth…
When I dream of the return of thy captivity,
I am a harp for thy songs.
And every year at
the end of their Passover Seder, Jews the world over would sing—then as now—the
ancient refrain: “Next year in Jerusalem!”
The earliest textual evidence we have is the Merneptah
Stele, a granite slab from 1208 BC inscribed with an account of the pharaoh
Merneptah’s military victories—including his campaign against Israel. If you go
back to the period of the Stele’s creation 3,200 years ago, and look at all the
different peoples who existed at that time, there is only one people who still
speaks the same language, who still practices the same religion, who still
lives (and governs) in the same land as it then did—and those are the Jews who
live and govern in Israel today.
So, if we care about the rights of indigenous peoples—if
we care at all about decolonization projects that liberate native populations
from the imperial forces that have occupied their homelands for centuries—we
should recognize that the story of modern-day Israel represents one of the most
successful decolonization projects in human history.
And that was once the view even of Arab leaders. In March
1918, for instance, after the fall of the Ottoman Empire, King Hussein—leader
of the Arab armies that fought, together with T.E. Lawrence (of “Lawrence of
Arabia” fame), to dismantle Ottoman rule in the Middle East—penned an op-ed in
the Al Qibla newspaper. In it, he wrote that “the country [Israel] was
for its original sons [the Jews] a sacred and beloved homeland,” and that “the
return of these exiles to their homeland” would be beneficial to the Arab
inhabitants of the region.
Nine months later, in December 1918, Hussein’s son,
Faisal I, who would become the first king of Iraq, held a banquet in Jerusalem.
At that event, Faisal gave a toast, toward the end of which he said, “No true
Arab can be suspicious or afraid of Jewish nationalism.… We are demanding Arab
freedom and we would show ourselves unworthy of it, if we did not now, as I do,
say to the Jews—welcome back home.”
Prince Faisal would later send a letter to US Supreme
Court Justice Felix Frankfurter—who, like his friend and fellow justice, Louis
Brandeis, was a passionate Zionist—expressing his strong support for the
Zionist cause.
That’s all unsurprising. The Quran itself makes clear
that Allah promised Israel to the Jewish people: “And remember,” the Quran
says, “when Moses said to his people, ‘O my people! call to mind the goodness
of God towards you when he appointed Prophets among you, and appointed you
kings, and gave you what never had been given before to any human beings:
Enter, O my people! the holy land which God hath destined for you.’”
