Why I Am a Zionist
A Zionist is someone who supports Israel as a Jewish state. If that is true, then I am a Zionist, even though I am not Jewish.
Zionists face the following accusation:
“Zionism means the oppression of the indigenous Palestinian people in their homeland by colonialist immigrants, the Israeli Jews. They have taken the Palestinians’ land away from them and must return it.”
I will now explain why I believe this is wrong.
Which land are we talking about?
No matter what I call it—I’m going to upset someone, because all its names are politically charged. I’ll call it “the land”: present-day Israel, Gaza, the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Golan Heights.
In this land, the Palestinians are the indigenous people. But so are the Jews. And not only because their ancestors once lived here, as genetic analyses now prove. But also because they never disappeared: there have always been Jews in this land for over 3,000 years. And the Jews who lived elsewhere have always maintained a close connection to the land through their culture and religion.
Here is a brief historical overview.
Roots: The Land in the Bible
Claims under international law cannot be based on sacred texts, not even on the Bible. But without the Bible, the significance of the land for the Jews cannot be understood.
According to the Bible, the history of the people of Israel begins with Abraham, whom both Jews and Arabs regard as their forefather. It is no longer possible to determine what aspects of Abraham’s story are historically accurate. But the circumstances described in the Bible point to a time roughly 4,000 years ago.
God called Abraham to settle in Canaan, as the land was known in ancient times. This is where his descendants would one day live. Therefore, Abraham and his wife Sarah left Ur—located in present-day Iraq—and moved to Canaan.
A grandson of Abraham and his wife Sarah was named Israel. His twelve sons and their families did not remain in Canaan: to escape a famine, they moved to Egypt. Their descendants lived there for several generations. Initially welcomed, they were increasingly oppressed. Consequently, their exodus from Egypt under Moses was ultimately a liberating event.
The historically documented period begins around 1250 B.C. with the Israelites’ conquest of Canaan.
The conquest is described in the biblical Book of Joshua as a brief, brutal war of conquest. However, other biblical books as well as archaeological findings suggest that it unfolded differently: much more peacefully, over the course of several generations.
At the turn of the second to the first millennium, Israel became a kingdom. In the tenth century B.C., the First Temple in Jerusalem was built under King Solomon.
After Solomon’s death around 926 B.C., the kingdom split into the Northern Kingdom of Israel and the Southern Kingdom of Judah, with Jerusalem as its center.
Colonized: From the Assyrians to the 19th Century
The Northern Kingdom was conquered by the Assyrians in 722, and the Southern Kingdom by the Babylonians in 587. The Babylonians destroyed the Temple and deported a large portion of Judah’s population to Babylonia (in present-day Iraq).
This marked the beginning of millennia of foreign rule, which—with an interruption of about 100 years—lasted until the founding of Israel in 1948.
The Babylonians were followed by the Persians. In 538, their king, Cyrus II, permitted the exiled Jews to return to Jerusalem. There they built the Second Temple and reinstated the temple cult.
In 332, Alexander the Great conquered the land. This marked the beginning of Israel’s Hellenistic era. During this time, the Jews were generally able to practice their religion but were subjected to considerable pressure to adopt Greek culture and religion.
When the Jewish religion was effectively banned in 167, the Maccabees, a priestly family, launched an uprising that brought them to power and ended foreign rule for about a hundred years. The Maccabees founded the Hasmonean dynasty, which ultimately could only remain in power with the help of the Romans.
The Romans ruled the land from 63 B.C. to 324 A.D. This era encompassed the life of Jesus, the emergence of the New Testament, and the Jewish War, which began in 66 A.D. and ended in 70 A.D. with a bloody defeat and the destruction of the Temple. Another revolt was crushed in 135 CE. Afterward, Jerusalem was renamed Aelia Capitolina. Jews were no longer allowed to enter the city, though they continued to live in the land. The Romans no longer referred to it as “Judaea” but as “Syria Palaestina.” In this way, they sought to erase Jewish history.
In 324, with the reign of Emperor Constantine I, the Byzantine period began—a terrible time for the Jews.
In 638, Muslims conquered the land and established a caliphate. The situation for the Jews improved considerably.
In general, Jews fared better under Muslim rule in the Middle Ages than under Christian rule. However, they were not treated as equals even within Muslim society. Pogroms occurred here as well, albeit less frequently. For the most part, Jews in the region were allowed to practice their religious traditions. As a result, large Jewish communities were able to develop until the Crusades, including in Jerusalem, Tiberias, Rafah, Gaza, Ashkelon, Jaffa, and Caesarea.
In 1099, the Crusaders conquered the land. They established a reign of terror and massacred many Jews.
In 1187, Saladin recaptured Jerusalem for the Muslims. The Crusaders, however, remained in the country until they were gradually driven out between 1260 and 1291 by the Muslim Mamluks, a ruling dynasty that had emerged from former military slaves. For the Jews, it was a turbulent time. But overall, their situation was now considerably better than it had been under the Crusaders. Many rabbis and Jewish pilgrims immigrated, causing the Jewish population to rise again.
In 1516 and 1517, the country was conquered by the Turkish Ottomans. Although Jews did not enjoy equal rights in their empire either, they generally lived in safety and were accepted by society.
During the Ottoman Empire, the country was barely developed and sparsely populated. Of the fewer than 300,000 people living here at the beginning of the 19th century, most had arrived only in the preceding decades. They inhabited land that was largely unsuitable for agriculture, consisting of barren mountainous terrain, desert, and malaria-infested swamps.
Persecuted: The Diaspora in the 19th Century
At the beginning of the 19th century, there were little more than 10,000 Jews in the country, while several million Jews were scattered across the globe. There, they continued to face persecution stemming from religiously motivated anti-Judaism dating back to the Middle Ages. They often had to endure absurd forms of harassment. In the Russian Empire, for example, only Jews were subject to compulsory military service lasting up to 25 years. In the West, there were initial steps toward legal equality for Jews. But these were repeatedly reversed or thwarted by violent excesses.
In the last third of the 19th century, a new form of anti-Semitism emerged: anti-Semitism masquerading as “science.” Jews could not escape this even through conversion.
In Russia, severe pogroms occurred repeatedly beginning in 1881. Instead of protecting Jews from them, the tsarist regime further tightened its anti-Jewish laws, while anti-Semites continued to add fuel to the fire with their unrestrained hate propaganda.
Violent excesses in the Russian Empire, pseudoscientific anti-Semitism in supposedly enlightened countries like France: it was this anti-Semitic climate in which the journalist Theodor Herzl became the founder of Zionism.
Zionism: The Land in the 20th Century
As late as 1893, Herzl had advocated for the assimilation of Jews into Christian society: At that time, he argued for mass conversion to Catholicism. But in 1895, while in France, he witnessed the public humiliation of Captain Alfred Dreyfus, whose only “offense” was being Jewish.
From that moment on, it was clear to him: No matter how much Jews might assimilate, they would never be safe from discrimination in any country in the world except their own. They needed a state of their own.
In 1897, at the First Zionist Congress in Basel, Theodor Herzl called for a Jewish state in Palestine. Beginning in 1901, Jewish settlements there were supported by the Jewish National Fund. Most of the first immigrants were refugees from the Russian Empire. They reclaimed the contaminated swamps and made the land arable.
By 1914, the Jewish population in the country had grown from just over 10,000 to about 85,000 people. Their success made the region attractive again after centuries of neglect.
This attracted not only Jews: the influx of Arabs was considerably greater. For them, Palestine had only become interesting in the first place because of the Jewish pioneers. For it was the Jews who had made the previously barren land productive and had brought about economic growth and created jobs in the previously severely underpopulated country. Improved medical care was also thanks to the Jews.
The Jews came as refugees, out of sheer necessity, to save their lives. The Arabs came to profit economically from the groundwork laid by the Jewish pioneers.
And why not? Jews and Palestinians could have coexisted peacefully.
Arab-Jewish Tensions: The British Fail
In 1919, a peaceful solution seemed within reach. There was agreement between Faisal, the future king of Syria and Iraq, and Chaim Weizmann, the future president of Israel. The two signed an agreement that explicitly welcomed and encouraged Jewish immigration to Palestine.
Had this agreement come into effect, Arab-Jewish relations could have developed peacefully and positively. But the colonial powers, France and Great Britain, had other plans.
After World War I, the British took over Palestine from the Ottoman Turks as a League of Nations mandate. They were tasked with establishing a national home for the Jewish people there. However, they did exactly the opposite.
It began with the British excluding Jews from four-fifths of their mandate territory. For the mandate for Palestine encompassed not only the land between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River, but also a region four times as large east of the Jordan: what is now the Kingdom of Jordan. In 1922, the British separated this part and declared it the Arab emirate of Transjordan. No Jew was allowed to settle there.
Thus, only one-fifth of the original territory remained for the Jewish homeland. But even here, the Jews were discriminated against: While the British allowed all Arabs to immigrate without restrictions, they continued to restrict land acquisition by Jews in violation of the treaty.
They did so out of fear of Arab terrorism. The British rewarded every attack with ever-new concessions. Thus, the situation for the Jews continued to worsen.
In 1933, the Nazis came to power in Germany. The situation for Jews in Europe became increasingly desperate. More and more were forced to flee to Palestine. But the British would not let them.
It is therefore no wonder that, before the founding of the State of Israel, more Arabs than Jews lived in the country: Jewish pioneers had made the land attractive. Many Arabs therefore wanted to immigrate and were allowed to do so. The Jews had to immigrate but were not allowed to.
Back home, the British were preparing for war against Nazi Germany—while in Palestine, they gave the arch-Nazi al-Husseini free rein.
The Father Figure of Palestinian Nationalism: a Nazi
In 1921, the British Mandate authorities had committed a terrible mistake: they had appointed the fanatical anti-Semite Mohammed Amin al-Husseini as Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. As a result, he now also served as their point of contact for the concerns of the Arab population in the country.
Today, Mohammed al-Husseini is revered by both the PLO and Hamas as the preeminent father figure of the Palestinian cause. In doing so, Palestinian nationalism places itself in the tradition of National Socialism. For al-Husseini was a Nazi of the most abhorrent kind imaginable.
The British could have known this. As early as 1920, al-Husseini had organized terrorist cells against Jews. The Palestinians also suffered under his tyranny: Anyone who refused to wear the traditional Palestinian headscarf, or who sought reconciliation with the Jewish population, was murdered.
In 1929, al-Husseini spread the lie that the Jews were planning an attack on the Temple Mount. Horrific pogroms ensued.
During the Nazi era, al-Husseini mobilized Muslims for the Waffen-SS, promoted anti-Semitic Nazi propaganda in the Arab world, and did everything in his power to prevent Jews from fleeing Eastern Europe. He was only too happy that they would be murdered there by the Nazis: In any case, he urged Hitler to exterminate the Jews in the Middle East as well. Time and again, he called on Arabs and Muslims: “Kill all the Jews!”
Had al-Husseini not fueled the Arab revolt of 1936–1939, millions of European Jews might have escaped the Holocaust.
After the war, al-Husseini used his influence over the Arab states to prevent a two-state solution and to incite them to wage war against Israel.
1937: The Rejected Second Two-State Solution
With the separation of Arab Transjordan from the rest of the Mandate of Palestine in 1922, the British had de facto implemented an initial two-state solution. In 1937, they sought to further divide the remaining fifth between Arabs and Jews. The Arabs would have received a significantly larger, contiguous portion, while the smaller Jewish portion would have been separated by a British-controlled corridor. Although this plan by the “Peel Commission” was disadvantageous to the Jews, they accepted it in order to save as many Jews as possible from Europe.
The Arabs could have been the winners in this predicament. But al-Husseini refused. He also said no when the British offered in 1939 to limit Jewish immigration to just 75,000 people, spread over five years: The fanatical anti-Semite would settle for nothing less than the expulsion and extermination of all Jews in Palestine.
After 1945: Salvation Only in Their Own State
The suffering of Jewish concentration camp prisoners did not end with the surrender of Nazi Germany in 1945: Across Europe, 250,000 of them remained detained in the Nazis’ former concentration and prisoner-of-war camps because no one would take them in. They were often still wearing their old prison uniforms. Moreover, they remained under threat of pogroms. In Kielce, Poland, for example, dozens of Holocaust survivors were murdered by a frenzied mob.
Nevertheless, as late as 1947, the British were still preventing Jewish refugees from entering Palestine. But in that same year, the tide turned: the British handed responsibility for Palestine back to the United Nations. Their Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin, summed up their failure as follows: “His Majesty’s Government is faced with an insoluble conflict between two principles. … For the Jews, the top priority is the creation of a sovereign Jewish state. For the Arabs, the top priority is to prevent Jewish sovereignty at any cost, in any part of Palestine.”
The Arabs—today Bevin would say: the Palestinians—thus rejected Jewish self-determination, no matter where in the country, no matter how tiny the Jewish territory might be.
Back then, there was no “refugee problem,” no settlements in the West Bank, no checkpoints, no separation barriers. None of that, therefore, can be the cause of the conflict. Rather, the true cause of the conflict has remained the same since Bevin’s day: The Palestinians insist that the Jews receive not just less of the land, but literally nothing.
The UN partition plan for a Jewish and an Arab state was adopted on November 29, 1947. The only reason the Palestinians did not get their own state at that time was because they rejected the plan—and with it, their own state.
On May 14, 1948, the British left their former mandate territory—and David Ben-Gurion proclaimed the establishment of the State of Israel.
Nakba: The Failed Holocaust 2.0
That very night, from May 14 to 15, 1948, Egypt, Transjordan, Lebanon, Iraq, and Syria declared war on the young state. They had repeatedly expressed their intentions in bloodthirsty terms: with the exception of the somewhat more moderate Transjordan, they wanted nothing less than the extermination of Israel’s Jews. A new Holocaust, barely after the Jews had escaped the old one.
The fact that the Jews succeeded in preventing this new Holocaust at that time is what the Palestinians still mourn today as the “Nakba”—the catastrophe.
Certainly, it is not just that: At that time, more than 700,000 Palestinians were forced to flee Israel or were expelled. Many Palestinian civilians who lost everything back then deserve our sympathy. But how many of them left because they did not want to stand in the way of the planned Holocaust? How many left their villages in anticipation of the bloodbath that would befall their Jewish neighbors? And how could the Jews ever have regained trust in such neighbors?
The fact that the Palestinian refugees could not simply return after the failed “Holocaust 2.0” as if nothing had happened—this “Nakba” is on everyone’s lips. The fact that there was also a “Jewish Nakba”—no one talks about that.
Between 1948 and 1972, over 800,000 Jews were forced to leave their homes in Arab and other Muslim-majority countries. How large would Israel be if the square kilometers of land they were forced to leave behind without compensation were added to its territory?
Israel’s Wars: Self-Defense Against Genocide
The War of Independence ended in 1949. The ceasefire line from that time, the “Green Line,” was never recognized as a border by the Arab countries. Nevertheless, Israel is expected to act as if the Green Line were a recognized border.
Of course, only when it suits them. For example, when, after a war in which it has averted the extermination of its population, Israel is expected to return the territories it captured during that conflict.
All the wars Israel has had to wage since 1948 have been defensive wars against enemies with genocidal intentions.
1956: Suez Crisis
In 1955, Egyptian President Nasser began building up a Soviet arsenal for the next war and training terrorists. In 1956, he assumed supreme command over the armies of Syria and Jordan as well. Terrorist attacks increased. Israel had no choice but to defend itself, in alliance with Great Britain and France. For the two European countries, the conflict ended in defeat. Israel, however, succeeded in warding off the threat to its border posed by Egyptian terrorists and securing access to the vital shipping route through the Gulf of Aqaba.
1967: The Six-Day War
In the Six-Day War, Israel preempted an attack by Egypt, Jordan, and Syria, the objectives of which the Syrian Minister of Defense had articulated in 1966 as follows: “We are determined to saturate this land with the blood of the Israelis and drive them into the sea.” PLO leader Ahmad Shukeri had declared a week before the war began: “I assume that no one will survive.” Yet Israel won the war and conquered territories from which it had repeatedly been attacked: the Gaza Strip, the Sinai Peninsula, the West Bank including East Jerusalem, and the Golan Heights.
1973: Yom Kippur War
On Yom Kippur, the holiest Jewish holiday, Egypt and Syria launched a surprise attack on Israel. They were supported by seven other Arab states as well as the Soviet Union. Their goal was to recapture the territories Israel had conquered in 1967. They could have achieved this through peace negotiations. But the Arab League did not want peace. It had ruled out peace with its three “no’s”: no to peace with Israel—no to recognizing Israel—no to negotiations with Israel. After heavy losses on both sides, the war essentially ended without any territorial gains.
1982: First Lebanon War
In 1982, Israel attacked positions of the PLO terrorist organization in Lebanon, from which northern Israel had been repeatedly attacked. Henry Kissinger defended the operation as follows: “No sovereign state can tolerate, in the long run, the emergence of a military power on its borders that seeks its destruction and pursues its goals through regular shelling and raids.”
1987–1993: First Intifada
The First Intifada was a Palestinian uprising triggered by a false report: a traffic accident had been mistaken for a Jewish terrorist attack. However, it also gave vent to frustration over the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. The insurgents did not care that Israel intended to return these territories as part of peace negotiations. They threw stones, Molotov cocktails, and hand grenades at both soldiers and civilians, blocked roads, set tires on fire, and launched attacks with rifles and explosive devices.
The uprising was driven by a fanatical youth, fueled by rumors, and exploited by the PLO. Palestinians were also among the victims: anyone deemed a “collaborator” was, under the orders of Arafat—who would later win the Nobel Peace Prize—stabbed to death, hacked to pieces with axes, shot, beaten to death with clubs, or scalded with acid. Women were also among the victims.
In Israel, the First Intifada led to a rise in the influence of the left and the peace movement. At the time, many Jewish Israelis reasoned: If the young Palestinians are so angry, then we must have done something wrong.
That changed with the Second Intifada.
2000–2005: Second Intifada
The First Intifada had caused great consternation in Israel. Many Israelis had seen the cause of the outbreak of violence within themselves: Wasn’t it understandable that the Palestinians were rebelling against the occupation of Gaza, the West Bank, and the Golan Heights?
To accommodate the Palestinians, many Israelis had now come to support the peace process: The occupied territories were to be returned to the Arabs. Then, so the hope went, the Palestinians would make peace.
From today’s perspective, we could have known better back then. For the Palestinians said it openly: They did not want peace. They did not want a Palestinian state; rather, they did not want a Jewish state.
But people didn’t want to admit that back then. And so the Oslo peace process began. For Arafat, it was never about peace, but always and only about establishing Palestinian state structures in the West Bank that could later be used as bases for terrorism against Israel.
Arafat took a major step toward this goal with the Oslo Accords: In 1995, a Palestinian governing authority was established to rule over 80% of the Palestinians in the West Bank. The remaining areas were to be administered partly by Israel and partly jointly. After a five-year transition period, a peace treaty was to be signed, and the West Bank was to be handed over almost entirely to the Palestinians.
Everything was well on its way to peace—or so the Israelis thought. That’s why they were completely taken by surprise when Arafat broke off the peace negotiations and unleashed the Second Intifada.
Why on earth? Why are they still murdering our children now, just when we’re making more concessions than ever before?
The offer to withdraw from the occupied territories was on the table. The Israeli army had already withdrawn from the major population centers in the West Bank, handing them over to the Palestinian Authority and Palestinian security forces. Everything was on track toward an independent Palestinian state. Difficult issues still needed to be resolved, but much had already been achieved, and there was no lack of willingness on the part of the Israelis to work with the Palestinians to find solutions.
But Arafat walked away from the negotiating table and unleashed the street violence of the Second Intifada. Why?
Ariel Sharon’s visit to the Temple Mount is often cited as the reason for the Second Intifada. Yet Sharon was not even in the government at the time. The government had granted permission for Sharon’s visit only reluctantly and only after consulting with the Palestinian security authorities.
An opposition politician takes a walk on a mountain: Is that supposed to be the reason for the recruitment of an estimated thousand suicide bombers—most of whom were stopped in time—and 140 attacks, often specifically targeting children? Is that supposed to be the reason for the murder of over a thousand Israelis?
Today we know that the godfather of terror, Arafat, had long since decided on the Second Intifada before Sharon’s visit.
Startled by the First Intifada, the Israelis had negotiated an end to the occupation—and the result was an even worse Intifada. A bloodbath with no end in sight.
Now the Israelis no longer blamed themselves. And they no longer sought a solution through negotiations. Who were they supposed to negotiate their security with, anyway? With the PLO and Hamas Nazis, who had nothing less in mind than the extermination of all Jews?
No: If the Israelis wanted to live in safety, they had to build barriers, set up checkpoints, and demonstrate a military presence.
This realism saved many people’s lives.
2006: Second Lebanon War
In 2000, Israel ended an 18-year military presence in southern Lebanon. But the terrorist organization Hezbollah there did not see this as a sign of goodwill, but—like every concession Israel made—as a sign of weakness. It seized power in southern Lebanon, stockpiled thousands of metric tons of weapons, infiltrated the civilian population, created a network of bunkers and terrorist bases, kidnapped soldiers, and repeatedly attacked northern Israel. All for one mission: the genocide of Israeli Jews. By 2006, the threat had reached a level that forced the Israelis to act.
The war ended with a ceasefire. UN peacekeepers were stationed in southern Lebanon.
Blue Helmets? Tin soldiers would have made more sense. For the Blue Helmets were not only useless—they also served as human shields for Hezbollah, allowing it to build up its next arsenal of terror undisturbed.
By 2023, under this protection, Hezbollah had made all the necessary preparations for a massacre in northern Israel. It was to be just as brutal as the Hamas massacre of October 7, only many times larger in scale. A nightmare that was prevented just in time only by the intervention of the Israeli army.
Let’s set aside the military operations that Israel has had to carry out time and again in Gaza to keep the genocidal Hamas in check. Let’s be clear about what Israel’s enemies do when Israel loses sight of the threat for even a moment: Let’s recall the massacre of October 7, 2023.
October 7, 2023: The End of the Two-State Solution
As of October 7, 2023, the Palestinians have forfeited their right to their own state of Palestine. That is my personal opinion. I’d like to explain why.
Imagine there were an indigenous ethnic group in Germany—let’s call them the Korpen. This group would have demands such as: protection from discrimination in the housing and labor markets; better medical care; easier access to higher education; a higher minimum wage; and housing and transportation allowances. In other words, not excessive demands.
And now, to emphasize their demands, the Korpen would burn children, rape women, shoot teenage festival-goers, cut off fathers’ penises in front of their children, slowly torture parents to death in front of their children and children to death in front of their parents, subjecting them to horrific agony, kidnap hostages, abuse them, and starve them to the point where they look like the victims in the Nazi extermination camps.
How would you react?
Something like this: “Opinions may differ on the Korpen’s methods. But their demands are certainly justified. The poor Korpen! How much must they be suffering to resort to such methods? How evil we are for not having met their demands long ago. We must make up for that as quickly as possible.”
Or would it be more like this: “What beasts our neighbors are. We won’t let that happen again.”
The Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank are such neighbors. On October 7, 2023, they frenetically cheered the murderers who employed these methods. In free elections, they would vote for these very same murderers again. “All of Gaza is Hamas”: That is the experience the Israeli hostages have had.
What is supposed to improve if such inhuman beings are also rewarded with a state of their own, where they can pursue what is their top priority: the extermination of the Jews?
Anyone who wants their own state can be expected to strive to earn the trust of their neighbors: they should be assured that the new state will be a peaceful neighbor. The political representatives of the Palestinians promise the exact opposite of all this: they have consistently seized every opportunity to destroy trust and have offered nothing but hostility, death, and destruction.
It may make sense one day in the distant future to give the Palestinians their own state. But only after they have credibly, permanently, and completely renounced violence. And not as a right, but as a concession that Israel may or may not grant.
Whether and when the Israelis can ever trust their neighbors in Gaza and the West Bank again is a decision they must make for themselves.
What the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank should currently be striving for is not a state, but rather: everything they need to lead a good life—and nothing they need to massacre Jews.
Palestinianism: An Ideology of Destruction
At this point, I would like to return to the distinction between Palestinians and “Palestinists” (according to Einat Wilf).
Palestinists reject a Jewish state, regardless of its form or location within the country, no matter how small it may be.
Some Palestinianists apparently recognize Israel’s right to exist. By this, however, they do not mean Israel as a Jewish state, but as a state of the “returned” six million Palestinian “refugees.” Thus, by a two-state solution, they mean two Palestinian states and no Jewish state.
Not every Palestinian is a “Palestinist,” and not every “Palestinist” is a Palestinian. Among the “Palestinists” are Hamas, the PLO, other allied terrorist groups, as well as their supporters, followers, and useful idiots.
Our fictional corps made demands that would be feasible if it weren’t for the violence. For the “Palestinists,” on the other hand, even the demand itself is non-negotiable: it is not merely a state of their own. It is nothing less than the willingness of Israeli Jews to allow themselves to be driven out and exterminated without resistance.
Postcolonialism: Anti-Semitism from the Left
Left-wing ideologues portray Israel as the colonial power par excellence. In fact, Israel is the exact opposite.
Colonial powers subjugate foreign lands. But for the Jews, Israel was never a foreign land: Jews have lived here for millennia, and their religion and culture are inextricably linked to this land.
Colonial powers establish colonies to exploit their resources for their own benefit. But the Jews who built Israel did not act in the service of a foreign power. They did not exploit the land; they developed it.
Colonial powers treat the colonized as second-class citizens. But Israeli Palestinians are legally equal to Jews and are equally represented at all levels of society. The fact that Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank instead suffer under war, checkpoints, and controls is their own fault: they need only abandon their sinister determination to exterminate their Jewish neighbors.
Colonialists come to foreign lands on behalf of a foreign power. This does not apply to the Jews who immigrated to the land of Israel beginning in the late 19th century. They came as refugees, as persecuted people, as outcasts from their homelands who had found no welcome anywhere else.
Palestinians and Jews: Who owns the land?
Not only the Jews, but also the Palestinians have strong historical and cultural ties to the land. And when Zionist pioneers began immigrating to Palestine in the late 19th century, they found Palestinians there—alongside Jews and other ethnic groups.
More precisely: Palestinian Arabs. Because at that time, no one was yet speaking of a Palestinian people.
Since when has there been a Palestinian people?
Palestinians are Arabs with ancestors in the land between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River. Some of these ancestors likely arrived in the country with the Muslim conquerors in the 7th century, others later, and still others much earlier: Genetic analyses today clearly show that the Palestinians have roots in the land that go back just as far as those of the Jews.
But since when have the Palestinians been referred to as a people?
Until well into the second half of the 20th century, this was not common practice. Arabs who called for the “liberation of Palestine” did not mean the establishment of a State of Palestine, but rather the annexation of the land to Arab Syria.
The increasing emphasis on Palestinian identity had political reasons: the goal was to lend a semblance of legitimacy to the demand for the destruction of Israel.
After all, how does the following demand sound on the international stage: “We want to create a twenty-third Arab state in addition to the 22 that already exist, and to do so, we will wipe out the only Jewish state, tiny Israel.”
Better to put it this way: “We want to create the first and only State of Palestine for the Palestinian people. To do so, Israel must make way.”
This was the context in which the PLO’s founding charter first referred to a “Palestinian people” in 1964. The top priority of this terrorist organization, however, was never a Palestinian state of its own, but rather the destruction of the only Jewish state—specifically, the expulsion or murder of all Jews living in the country.
The core of Palestinian identity is therefore negative and destructive. It does not have to remain that way. But as long as it does, romanticizing Palestine is either naive or malicious.
Colonialism? What colonialism?
So what is the truth behind the accusation that the Jewish pioneers took the Arabs’ land away from them?
Before the founding of the State of Israel, the Arabs had no state of their own, just as the Jews did not. Therefore, the Jews could not have taken a state away from them.
Palestine had never been a purely Arab land. People from various tribes and religions had always lived there. Jews have been present here continuously from at least around 1,200 B.C. to the present day.
Nor was the Jewish immigrants’ land ownership illegal. They had legally acquired the land on which they settled beforehand—in some cases from Arab landowners who had previously employed Arab farmworkers there.
Where these farmworkers subsequently lost their jobs, they felt displaced—understandably so. But the Jews avoided such conflicts. They preferred to buy land where no Arab tenants lived—land that had lain fallow for centuries and could be cultivated only with great effort. In this way, they avoided having to displace Arabs.
The land was acquired with the help of wealthy benefactors and settled by refugees—often destitute—who had narrowly escaped horrific pogroms. They arrived in a land that politically belonged neither to the Jews nor to the Arabs, but to powers that were foreign to both ethnic groups.
After World War I, Jewish immigrants were able to invoke the promise made by the Mandatory Power, Great Britain, to establish a Jewish homeland in Palestine. Behind this promise stood the League of Nations, which had granted the mandate.
Why, exactly, are only the Jewish immigrants labeled “colonialists,” but not the Arab ones? Politically, the land belonged to neither group. And significantly more Arabs immigrated than Jews: between the two world wars, the Jewish population in the country increased by 470,000 people, while the non-Jewish population grew by 588,000.
Both sides could have benefited from coexistence. The fact that this did not happen is something the left likes to blame on a form of Zionist colonialism that never existed.
The reason for the failure of Arab-Jewish relations has another name: anti-Semitism.
No one is above criticism. Why should Israel be?
Of course, there have been wrongdoings on the Israeli side. When, as has been the case in Gaza since 2023, some 160,000 soldiers and 360,000 reservists are waging war under extremely stressful conditions, it is impossible for every single one of them to do the right thing in every situation.
Mistakes must be addressed. The fact that Palestinians are held in Israeli prisons under conditions that are often inhumane must stop. Harassment of civilians at checkpoints in the West Bank is repugnant. The violence perpetrated by Jewish extremists against Palestinian farmers there requires just as strong a government response as the aggression against peaceful Palestinians in Israel. And every civilian killed in Gaza is a human tragedy that deserves our compassion.
In this article, I have not mentioned many of the hardships that Palestinians have unfortunately had to endure as a result of the conflict. But that does not mean I am indifferent to this suffering. Nor do I want this suffering to be swept under the rug. Both sides have suffered greatly, and I hope that both sides can bring themselves to acknowledge the suffering of the other.
But any criticism of Israel must take into account the dramatic situation in which the country finds itself: It is surrounded by populations that hate Jews for no other reason than that they are Jews. It is threatened by enemies whose top priority is the next Holocaust, such as Hamas, the PLO, and Hezbollah. Among their powerful supporters are countries such as Iran, Qatar, and Turkey—and, indirectly, Russia and China as well. They let their children play in terrorist outfits with cute little explosive belts, train Jew-killers in their schools, and reward the families of dead or imprisoned murderers.
What if the founding of Israel had been an injustice?
Let’s consider for a moment the false claim that the founding of Israel was an injustice. What would follow from that?
Even then, Palestinian politicians would have to recognize this: Anyone who seeks to undo an injustice after nearly eighty years by attempting to forcibly restore the situation that existed before that injustice did not restore justice, but created a new injustice.
However one may judge the founding of the State of Israel, people have been born here since then who bear no blame for what came before them. The land where they, their children, and their grandchildren were born and raised is now their home. Historical events—even if they may have involved expulsions—do not give anyone the right to expel or murder these people today.
Let’s stop confusing friends and enemies
Yet such considerations will not convince a terrorist. Nothing can appease their hatred, for it is motivated by religion and ideology.
Ultimately, this hatred is directed at all “infidels”—including us.
The terrorists have long since put a knife to our throats—and yet we continue to pick on the only country in the Middle East that shares our values, simply because it isn’t nice enough to those murderous beasts.
We allow ourselves to be persuaded that the conflict stems from Israel denying the Palestinians the state to which they are entitled. But if that were what the Palestinian leaders were after, they would have had that state long ago. It has been offered to them time and again, and each time they have rejected it. Not because the Jews would have gotten too much under any partition plan. But because they would have gotten anything at all: Only when the Jews get nothing at all will the Palestinians be satisfied.
If we were to give in to the Palestinians: Who would that help? The Palestinian mothers who would lose their sons to the next jihad? The LGBTQ+ people who would be dragged to their deaths on the streets of Palestine? The critically thinking Palestinians who would be lynched by terrorists in their torture cellars?
No: What we need is not a retreating Israel, but a strong one. Not appeased terrorists, but disempowered ones. Not a brainwashed civil society that prepares the rebuilt Gaza for the destruction of Israel. But a denazified civil society that wants a peaceful future for its children.
The Israelis would be the last to stand in the way of their own future.
In Israel, two million Arabs with equal civil rights live among ten million citizens. In the Arab countries, just a few thousand Jews live among four hundred million citizens, constantly threatened by the next wave of anti-Semitism. How did that go again: Who is accusing whom of expulsion, ethnic cleansing, apartheid, and genocide?
It is not Israel, but its enemies, who are seeking to commit genocide.
Israel’s enemies want to exterminate the Jews; Israel wants to protect them: That is the core of the conflict at hand. I know where I stand.
Sources
If you want to learn more about the suffering of the Palestinians than I have been able to cover here, please look elsewhere for information.
If, in doing so, you come across sources that deny that Israel’s enemies want nothing other than the expulsion and murder of all Jews in Israel: Then that is not a different narrative. Then that is a lie.
General:
Adi Schwartz and Einat Wilf (2022): The Struggle for Return. How Western Indulgence of the Palestinian Dream Has Hindered Peace.
Noa Tishby (2022): Israel: A Fact-Check on the Most Misunderstood Country in the World
Center for Online Judaic Studies
Center for Online Judaic Studies | Jewish History from Antiquity to Today
Mena-Watch
Independent Middle East think tank offering a comprehensive range of information—including on Israel—available free of charge.
https://www.mena-watch.com/
“If you want it to be, it’s not a fairy tale.” Key Points of Israeli History
https://www.mena-watch.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/eckpunkte-israelischer-geschichte-dossier.pdf
History of Palestine
Dossier from the State Agency for Civic Education in Baden-Württemberg.
Historical background on the question of an independent state of Palestine.
https://www.lpb-bw.de/geschichte-palaestinas
History of Israel (as of 2018)
A five-part series marking Israel’s 70th anniversary.
https://www.mena-watch.com/der-jude-unter-den-staaten/
Myths & Facts: A Guide to the Arab-Israeli Conflict
https://jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/myths3/mftoc.html
On specific topics:
October 7, 2023
Eli Sharabi (2025): Hostage
Firsthand account by Eli Sharabi, a former Hamas hostage.
Douglas Murray (2025): On Democracies and Death Cults. Israel and the Future of Civilization.
On the brutality of the Hamas massacre on October 7 and the legitimacy of Israel’s self-defense.
Anti-Semitism
Anti-Semitism in the 19th and 20th Centuries (Wolfgang Benz, Federal Agency for Civic Education)
Anti-Semitism and Persecution (Hamburg Key Documents on German-Jewish History)
Anti-Jewish pogroms in Russia (WDR “Stichtag,” June 27, 1881)
History of the Jews in Russia (Wikipedia)
Jews in the Russian Army
(Up to 25 years of military service for Jews in the Russian Army under Tsar Nicholas I since 1827; see also Jüdische Rundschau)
British Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin on the conflict between Jews and Palestinian Arabs (1947):
“His Majesty’s Government has thus been faced with an irreconcilable conflict of principles … For the Jews, the essential point of principle is the creation of a sovereign Jewish state. For the Arabs, the essential point of principle is to resist to the last the establishment of Jewish sovereignty in any part of Palestine.”
British Decision to Abandon the Mandate, Feb. 18, 1947. | Center for Online Judaic Studies
Genetic analyses:
https://www.kirchevach.de/90-prozentige-genetische-abstammungabrahams-kinder/
Genomic History of the Middle East (2020)
Education for Hatred by the Palestinian Authority:
Education for Hatred. An Analysis of Palestinian Textbooks
https://www.mena-watch.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/erziehung-zum-hass-palaestinensische-schulbuecher-dossier.pdf
Mohammed al-Husseini:
Insightful, among other things:
https://www.mena-watch.com/vom-weissbuch-zum-teilungsplan-die-jahre-vor-israels-staatsgruendung/
Faisal-Weizmann Agreement (1919):
https://mena-watch-lexikon.com/das-lexikon/geschichte/faisal-weizmann-abkommen/
A homeland for the Jewish people:
Balfour Declaration (1917)
https://www.mena-watch.com/100-jahre-balfour-deklaration/
The First and Second Intifadas:
The Impact on Perceptions of the Middle East Conflict in Israel
“Ask Haviv Anything” podcast, Episode 10:
Thirty Years of Traumatic Peacemaking—What Do Israelis Really Think?
Mamluks:
https://www.israel-spezialist.de/herrschaft-der-mamluken.htm
Nakba:
https://www.mena-watch.com/die-nakba-erzaehlung-ist-unsinn/
“Jewish Nakba”:
A Forgotten Tragedy: The Jewish “Nakba.” The Expulsion of Jews from Arab Countries. mena-watch 2024
https://www.mena-watch.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/JUeD.NAKBA_dossier-nr.6_s.1-32-_WEB_low.pdf
https://www.mena-watch.com/die-juedische-nakba-protokoll-einer-ignoranz/ (2023)
Figures on the expulsion of Jews from Arab countries and Iran:
https://www.mena-watch.com/die-naqba-von-der-niemand-spricht/
The Jewish Nakba in Iraq:
https://www.mena-watch.com/von-ehemals-150-000-juden-leben-im-irak-heute-weniger-als-zehn/
Oslo Accords:
https://www.mena-watch.com/protokoll-sitzung-vor-oslo-abkommen/
Since when have people been talking about Palestinians?
https://mena-watch-lexikon.com/das-lexikon/palaestinenser/seit-wann-spricht-man-von-palaestinensern/
The 1967 Six-Day War. Causes. Course of Events. Consequences. German-Israeli Society 2017
https://www.mideastfreedomforum.org/fileadmin/editors_de/Broschueren/dig_1967_seiten_datenreduziert.pdf
Solidarity with Jews and Israel:
https://www.dein-ak.com/
All the information about July 10, the annual Day of Solidarity with Jews and Israel.
Pogroms Following al-Husseini’s Temple Mount Lie (1929):
https://www.israelnetz.com/reue-und-gedenken-an-das-hebron-massaker-von-1929/
West Bank:
Occupied, disputed, annexed?
Jewish Presence in the West Bank: An Analysis Under International Law
https://www.mena-watch.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/juedische-praesenz-im-westjordanland-voelkerrecht-dossier.pdf
Two-State Solution:
Rejected in 1948:
https://www.mena-watch.com/vom-weissbuch-zum-teilungsplan-die-jahre-vor-israels-staatsgruendung/