Earlier this month, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu openly endorsed the project of “Greater Israel”, telling i24 News that he is on a “historic and spiritual mission” of territorial conquest.
This maximalist vision builds on the existing Greater Israel and its settler-colonial control of East Jerusalem, the Golan Heights, the West Bank and now, once again, Gaza – where the government hopes it will soon re-establish itself. It seeks to expand Jewish colonial settlement to encompass all of historic Palestine, allegedly once the exclusive home of the ancient Hebrews and promised by the Jewish God to the “Chosen People”, along with parts of neighbouring Arab countries, including Jordan, Egypt, Syria and Lebanon.
Support for this ideology has surged amid Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza, with images circulating online of soldiers displaying a map of this new, much Greater Israel stitched onto their uniforms.
For its part, the Israeli government is moving quickly to entrench its sovereignty over all the land. This month, it announced successive approvals of both a plan to take over Gaza City and the E1 settlement project in the West Bank – a measure that would cut off Palestinian access to East Jerusalem and displace Bedouins in the area, and which senior officials declared was intended to “bury the idea of a Palestinian state” once and for all.
Yet even as Israel brazenly flaunts its violent expansionism, including mass murder and the starvation of an entire population, its advocates have gone on the offensive, insisting that its actions since October 2023 are in “self-defence” rather than the culmination of decades of explicit settler colonialism and apartheid.
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True to form, pro-Israel organisations have launched a major propaganda campaign to invert reality, portraying Israelis not only as victims of Palestinians but as the “indigenous” people reclaiming this ancient “Jewish” land from supposed Palestinian “colonists”.
For this narrative to succeed, they needed to erase the settler colonial foundations of Zionism – the very basis of Israel’s unrelenting oppression of the Palestinians.
Initially, the Zionist movement and the emerging Israeli regime described their efforts as “colonial” and “colonisation” – even naming institutions such as the “Jewish Colonial Trust” and the “Palestine Jewish Colonization Association” – before later distancing themselves from these terms when “colonisation” came to be associated with imperialism and aggressiveness.
From the 1930s onwards, they shifted their language, discarding the word while pursuing its logic ever more ruthlessly.
The myth of return
Although this ideological offensive long predates Israel’s genocide, its proponents have kicked it into high gear to justify the continued slaughter in Gaza.
Last year, for example, the American Jewish Committee issued a fact sheet titled “Responding to False Claims About Israel”, which set out to explain why the term settler colonialism does not describe what the Zionist movement and Israel have inflicted on the Palestinian people.
It avers that settler colonialism “refers to an attempt by an imperial power to replace the native population of a land with a new society of settlers”.
The Zionist claim that the colonisation of Palestine was merely European Jews ‘returning’ to their ‘ancient homeland’ fits squarely within this European history of settler colonialism
“It cannot describe a reality in which a national group, acting on its behalf and not at the behest of an external power, returned to its historic homeland to achieve self-determination while simultaneously supporting the creation of a nation-state for another national group alongside the creation of their own state.”
Let us briefly examine the two major points of this contention.
Europe’s settler colonial projects often invoked the notion of “return” to “ancient lands”. The French claimed to be “returning” to the lands of the Roman Empire, of which they considered themselves heirs, when they conquered Algeria – insisting that it was the Algerian Arabs who were the real colonists. The Italians likewise claimed they were “returning” to ancient Roman lands when they conquered Libya, framing their colonisation as merely reclaiming and restoring part of their ancient homeland.
Even the German Nazis justified their conquest of Eastern Europe and European Russia as a “return”. These territories, they insisted, were not foreign to Germans but lands to which the Volk was “returning”. Adolf Hitler was explicit on this point, stating: “My goals are not immoderate; basically, these are all areas where Germans were previously settled. The German Volk is to grow into this territory.”
The Nazis also sought to “return” to the territories of the First Reich, or the Holy Roman Empire, which included Russia, Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, and the Baltic states, among others.
The Zionist claim that the colonisation of Palestine was merely European Jews “returning” to their “ancient homeland” fits squarely within this European history of settler colonialism.
The myth of conquest
The related claim that settler colonists do not support “the creation of a nation-state for another national group alongside the creation of their own state” is also unsustainable.
The white South African regime did precisely that by creating 10 “independent” Bantustan homelands for the majority Black indigenous population, denationalising them while preserving white supremacy. They also created Bantustans for the indigenous Namibian population to maintain white supremacy in Namibia during the South African occupation of that country.
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Like the French, Italians and Germans, Zionists claimed that it was the indigenous Palestinians who were the real colonists of the “ancient homeland” of European Jews, portraying them as the descendants of the Muslim Arabs who conquered Syria and Palestine in the seventh century.
But the Arab conquest was not a settler colonial one; it was missionising and territorially expansionist.
Most of the indigenous peoples of Syria and Palestine, who were ruled by the Byzantine Empire and subsequently conquered by the Muslim Arabs, remained the majority after the conquest, including the native Syrian Arabic-speaking Christian Ghassanids.
It took some five centuries – in Palestine and Greater Syria, and even longer in Egypt – before most converted to Islam, although Arabisation and adoption of the Arabic language came much earlier, including among the native Christian churches.
Very few Arabs moved to the conquered territories, and the few thousand who did mainly settled in the cities.
By the time the Crusades – the first true Zionists – conquered Palestine in the 11th century, most of its inhabitants were indigenous Arabic-speaking Christians, with a minority of indigenous Arabic-speaking Muslims.
Colonial precedents
As late as 1919, even David Ben-Gurion and Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, the founding fathers of the Jewish settler colony, argued in a co-authored book that most indigenous Palestinians were, in fact, descendants of the ancient Hebrews who had converted first to Christianity and later to Islam.
Mistaking Arabness for a racial category rather than a linguistic and cultural identity, the racialised European colonial powers sought to divide the Arabs. They claimed that Egyptians, Iraqis, North Africans, Maronites and others were not truly Arab but merely conquered peoples who had been Arabised. Arab nationalism, however, insisted that Arabs were simply those whose mother tongue was Arabic and never claimed that Arabness was a race or an ethnicity.
Another common Zionist argument is that Britain was not the “mother country” or “metropole” of the Zionist colonists, since most were not British citizens but came from other European countries. This claim is equally flawed.
The settler colonisation of Palestine was, in fact, typical of other European projects. British sponsorship of Zionist settler colonisation – which included Jews from across Europe as well as from Britain – was not unique. Britain had earlier sponsored the settler colonisation of Ireland by British, German, and French Huguenots, although most of the settlers were Scottish and English.
The Dutch colonised southern Africa with Dutch and French Huguenots, though the Dutch predominated. The French settled North Africa primarily with their own citizens, while also bringing in Spaniards, Italians, Swiss, Maltese and Russians.
The same pattern held in Tsarist Russia’s settler colonisation of Ottoman territories conquered by Catherine the Great in the late 18th century, which drew in Polish Jews, Bulgarians, Italians, Germans, Greeks, Romanians and many others invited to participate in settler colonisation.
More than a century later, in 1897, the Russian settler colony of Odessa still had a majority population of Jews, Greeks, Ukrainians, Poles, and Germans, with Russians amounting to less than 49 percent.
In light of these precedents, Britain’s sponsorship of Zionist colonisation – some of whom were British – was not exceptional, but merely a particularly exaggerated instance of familiar European practice.
False exceptionalism
Then there are those who think they are nuanced and clever by claiming that Zionism was more complicated than other settler colonial movements, since it sought “self-determination” and “national liberation” for Jews – goals usually associated with colonised peoples – but achieved them through settler colonialism in Palestine. This, too, is pure hogwash.
White settler colonists in North America also fought for independence, “self-determination”, and “national liberation” from the British.
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Spanish settlers in what became Latin America pursued the same against Spain. The Dutch Boers of South Africa waged wars against British colonialists to achieve colonial-settler “self-determination”, just as some of the Zionists turned against Britain after 1945 to secure settler colonial “independence”.
French colonists in Algeria even attempted a coup against France to maintain their settler colony, as have other settlers around the world, including white Rhodesians.
There is nothing in the Zionist quest for a settler colonial state that distinguishes it from these cases.
Indigeneity myth
Most important for the European and American Christian public is the Zionist claim of “indigeneity” in Palestine, based on biblical narratives, and, more recently, on alleged “genetic” ties. These alleged “historical and biblical ties to the land” form the crux of the Zionist claim to the homeland of the Palestinians and include the primary assertion that “the Jewish people” lived in Palestine two millennia ago and were its sole occupants.
But two millennia ago, some of Palestine’s inhabitants were Hebrews – not “the Jewish people”, a concept of much later coinage – and the Hebrews never lived there alone.
Indeed, the Bible itself, in the Book of Joshua, describes how the Hebrews were not native to Palestine but conquered the land of Canaan from the Canaanites and occupied it, claiming that their God had “promised” it to them. Even Abraham, with whom the God of the Hebrews made his covenant, the Jewish scriptures tell us, came from Ur, in modern-day Iraq.
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The greater fiction, however, is that modern Jews are fantastically the direct and only descendants of the ancient Hebrews.
This claim was cemented by Christian theology, rooted in the Catholic Church’s historic enmity to European Jews, whom it linked to the ancient Hebrews as the “killers of Christ”, and more emphatically on the Protestant Reformation’s millenarian ambitions to expel Europe’s Jews to Palestine, which Protestants claimed would expedite the Second Coming of Jesus Christ. European Christians began to identify Jews as a foreign “nation” only in the late 18th century.
That many religious Jews had historically believed that they came from Palestine is tantamount to Indian, Chinese, Indonesian, Nigerian, or Malaysian Muslims claiming that they came from Arabia simply because Arabia was the birthplace of their faith.
Indeed, it would be akin to asserting an “indisputable” right to Mecca and Arabia, and an “unbroken presence” there, because a few of their annual pilgrims settled there over the centuries, and because some Muslim Arab immigrants moved to those East Asian or African regions over the same period.
Zionists reject such analogies, insisting that Judaism was never a missionary religion. But this is false. Scholars have shown incontrovertibly that Judaism actively proselytised, with mass conversions continuing at least until the ninth century.
Even if one accepted the idea of some historical “connection” between European Jews and Palestine – and even if one assumed they were not descendants of converts – transforming that connection into a “right” to colonise Palestine has no moral, let alone legal, standing.
White Americans, Australians, New Zealanders, and South Africans all retain factual ancestral connections to Europe, but that hardly gives them the right to re-colonise it. Nor does the Roman Empire’s past dominion over Britain entitle modern Italians to claim it today.
Colonial fictions
Zionism’s appropriation of the history of the Palestinian Hebrews as the ancestors of European Jews was designed to sever Palestinians from their Hebrew ancestry.
While Egyptians, Jordanians, Lebanese, and Iraqis can narrate uncontroversially a national history that extends to the Pharaohs, the Nabateans, the Phoenicians, and the Babylonians, Palestinians cannot lay any national claims to Palestine’s past since a European Jewish colonist population decided to appropriate that past as their own and exclude the indigenous Palestinians from it.
There is not a single argument that Zionism has put forth that distinguishes it from those of other European colonisers
Thus, while Palestinians may claim the Canaanites as their ancestors controversially, as far as the Zionists are concerned, they are forbidden to claim the ancient Palestinian Hebrews as also their ancestors.
Zionism has always rested on unreasonable arguments that cannot withstand scrutiny by the colonised. Palestinians have debunked them for more than a century and a quarter, but their reasonableness has never swayed Israel’s imperialist sponsors.
What makes Zionism’s bogus rhetoric persuasive is the European Christian commitment to reformulated biblical myths and racialist criteria – the same logic that justified not only Zionist settler colonialism, but also the European conquest of the Americas, the enslavement of Africans and the continued western domination of the globe.
There is not a single argument that Zionism has put forth that distinguishes it from those of other European colonisers.
It is why Israel’s embrace of “Greater Israel” today is not a departure from this history but its apotheosis: the most brazen stage yet of a settler colonial project that has long cloaked itself in the fictions of return, false indigeneity and divine promise.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
