by Dr. Alex Joffe
["M]odern Palestinians are, in fact, derived from two primary streams: converts from indigenous pre-modern Jews and Christians who submitted to Islam, and Arab tribes originating across the Middle East who migrated to the Southern Levant between late antiquity and the 1940s".
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The entrance of Caliph Umar (581-644) into Jerusalem,
19th century colored engraving, via Wikipedia
BESA Center Perspectives Paper No. 577, September 3, 2017
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: The
concept of “settler colonialism” has been applied with almost unique
vehemence against Israel. But the fact that Jews are the indigenous
population of the Southern Levant can be proved with ease. In contrast,
historical and genealogical evidence shows Palestinians descend
primarily from three primary groups: Muslim invaders, Arab immigrants,
and local converts to Islam. The Muslim conquest of Byzantine Palestine
in the 7th century CE is a textbook example of settler-colonialism, as is subsequent immigration, particularly during the 19th and 20th
centuries under the Ottoman and British Empires. The application of the
concept to Jews and Zionism by Palestinians is both ironic and
unhelpful.
One of the mainstays of the modern university is
the idea of settler-colonialism. This argues that certain societies are
birthed by settlers implanted in a foreign territory, either directly by
or with the consent of an imperial power. These colonists then dominate
and eradicate the indigenous population. They develop bellicose
cultures that eliminate the natives from historical, literary, and other
narratives. Primary examples often cited are the US, Canada, Australia
and New Zealand, South Africa and Rhodesia, and Israel.
The settler-colonial argument against Israel
posits that Zionism was an imperial tool of Britain (or, alternatively,
that Zionism manipulated the British Empire); that Jews represent an
alien population implanted into Palestine to usurp the land and displace
the people; and that Israel has subjected Palestinians to “genocide,”
real, figurative, and cultural.
According to this argument, Israel’s “settler colonialism” is a “structure, not an event,”
and is accompanied by a “legacy of foundational violence” that extends
back to the First Zionist Congress in 1897 or even before. With Zionism
thus imbued with two forms of ineradicable original sin, violent
opposition to Israel is legitimized and any forms of compromise, even
negotiation, are “misguided and disingenuous because ‘dialogue’ does not tackle the asymmetrical status quo.”
But Middle Eastern history is not amenable to
these formulations. Among the many concepts abused and perverted by the
Palestinians, accusations of Israeli “genocide” rank the highest for
blatant audacity, and for twinned calumny and odiousness. The
settler-colonial idea deserves attention for three reasons: its
comparatively recent adoption by Palestinians and their advocates; its
broader currency in the academy; and its obvious and ironic falsity.
The idea of Jews as “settler-colonialists” is
easily disproved. A wealth of evidence demonstrates that Jews are the
indigenous population of the Southern Levant; historical and now genetic
documentation places Jews there over 2,000 years ago, and there is
indisputable evidence of continual residence of Jews in the region. Data
showing the cultural and genetic continuity of local and global Jewish
communities is equally ample. The evidence was so copious and so
incontrovertible, even to historians of antiquity and writers of
religious texts, some of whom were Judeophobes, that disconnecting Jews
from the Southern Levant was simply not conceived of. Jews are the
indigenous population.
As for imperial support, the Zionist movement
began during the Ottoman Empire, which was at best diffident towards
Jews and uncomfortable with the idea of Jewish sovereignty. For its
part, the British Empire initially offered support in the form of the
Balfour Declaration, but during its Mandatory rule (1920-48) support for
Zionism vacillated. The construction of infrastructure aided the Yishuv
immensely, but political support for Jewish immigration and
development, as stipulated by the League of Nations mandate, waxed and
waned until, as is well known, it was withdrawn on the eve of World War
II. This is hardly “settler-colonialism.”
Ironically, the same cannot be said for the Palestinian Arabs. A recent analysis by Pinhas Inbari
reviewed the history of Palestine (derived from the Roman term
Palaestina, applied in 135 CE as a punishment to a Jewish revolt). Most
notably, he examines the origin traditions of Palestinian tribes, which
continue even today to see themselves as immigrants from other
countries. Inbari’s review, along with many additional sources of
information he did not address, demonstrates that modern Palestinians
are, in fact, derived from two primary streams: converts from indigenous
pre-modern Jews and Christians who submitted to Islam, and Arab tribes
originating across the Middle East who migrated to the Southern Levant
between late antiquity and the 1940s. The best documented episodes were
the Islamic conquests of the 7th century and its aftermath, and the periods of the late Ottoman Empire and the British Mandate.
Even notable examples like Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat, who ludicrously claimed
that “I am the proud son of the Canaanites who were there 5,500 years
before Joshua bin Nun burned down the town of Jericho,” traces his real family lineage to the Huwaitat tribe, which migrated from Arabia to Jordan. The rare admission by Hamas minister Fathi Ḥammad that “half the Palestinians are Egyptians and the other half are Saudis” is more honest.
Echoing Inbari, it is not to be argued here that
“there are no Palestinians” who thus do not deserve political rights,
including self-rule and a state. To do so would be both logically and
morally wrong. Palestinians have the right to define themselves as they
see fit, and they must be negotiated with in good faith by Israelis.
What Palestinians cannot claim, however, is that they are Palestine’s
indigenous population and the Jews are settler-colonialists.
Palestinian genealogies that show their own tribes originating outside the Southern Levant are prima facie
evidence of Arab settler-colonialism. And while narratives of the Arab
conquests of Byzantine Palestine and North Africa cannot be taken at
face value, they are pure ideological expressions of
settler-colonialism. In 634-37 CE, Muslim armies commanded by the Caliph
Umar conquered the entirety of the Levant before invading Armenia and
Anatolia in 638 and Cyprus in 639.
The subsequent Islamization and Arabization of the
Levant was a long and complex imperial process that entailed
reorganizing the region into administrative provinces, instituting new
social categories for the purposes of taxation and control, implanting
settlers and reapportioning lands as estates, and encouraging conversion
to Islam. Over the centuries, other settlers migrated and were
intentionally implanted, including, in the 19th century alone, Egyptians fleeing from and imported by Muhammad Ali from the late 1820s to the 1840s,
as well as Chechens, Circassians, and Turkmen relocated by the Ottoman
Empire in the 1860s after its wars with Russia. Tribes of Bedouins, Algerians, Yemenis, and many others also immigrated during that century.
As for modern immigration, Inbari could well have pointed to the well-documented increases in Palestinian census numbers from 1922 to 1931, produced by illegal immigration spurred by the development of the region’s infrastructure and economy. One estimate
sees some 37% of the increase in Palestinian population between 1922
and 1931, over 60,000 persons, having been the result of illegal
immigration. Another study
found that from 1932 to 1946, another 60,000 illegal male immigrants
entered the country, with uncounted females imported as brides. These
were in addition to the great influx of Arab workers from 1940 to 1945
in connection with the war effort.
To reiterate, these arguments do not devolve to
arguing “a land without a people for a people without a land,” or that
Ottoman Palestine was “empty” when the Zionist movement began. It was
indeed populated, albeit unevenly, but those populations had immigrated
into the land over the previous centuries, a process that accelerated
precisely because of the Zionist movement and the British Mandate.
Palestinian settler-colonialism took place, ironically, under the aegis
of both a Muslim and a Christian empire.
Finally, there is the matter of a separate
Palestinian ethno-national consciousness and its relationship to
settler-colonialism. Claims to find a separate Palestinian ethnic
identity as far back as the 17th century are unpersuasive.
Instead, the idea developed as an elite concept in the years immediately
before and especially after World War I, vying with far deeper and more
resilient tribal and religious identities. The nationalization of the
masses occurred gradually over the next few decades, propelled in part
by tragedies largely foisted on them by their leaders, notably the “Arab
Revolt” of 1936-39, the rejection of partition in 1947, the Israeli War
of Independence of 1948-49, and the subsequent, rather local, dispersal
of refugees into the 1950s. Palestinian nationalism and identity are
largely reactive and secondary, pointing to the fact that
settler-colonial identity was primarily tribal and religious, the latter
imperial by definition.
During the 19th and 20th
centuries, a mythology of the “timeless” Palestinians took root. During
the earlier period, this was a European Orientalist trope: the
Palestinians as living “fossils” who reflected the lifeways of the
Bible. It was later adopted for strategic reasons by the Palestinians
themselves as a political and cultural retort to the Zionist return to
the land. That usage was perhaps understandable, if ironic; but it
reaches a reductio ad absurdum in Erekat’s claim to have had Upper Paleolithic ancestors.
It is, then, the Palestinians who are the
settler-colonialists, not the Jews or even the Zionists. Does this
realization change anything? Does removing a term from the rejectionist
toolbox bring the cause of negotiation and peace any closer? This seems
unlikely. But in the longer term, facing certain truths will be
necessary for Palestinians and Israelis alike. One is that rejection of
Israel, at its core, is not a function of Palestinian nationalism and
local identity but Islamic religious opposition to Jewish autonomy and
sovereignty. Another is that tendentious categories like
“settler-colonialism,” which ironically undermine Palestinian claims to
indigenous status, should be dispensed with in favor of honest
appraisals of history.
BESA Center Perspectives Papers are published through the generosity of the Greg Rosshandler Family
Source: https://besacenter.org/perspectives-papers/palestinians-settlers-colonialism/
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