OP-ED: The settler-colonial lie, debunked
By LYN JULIUS
(JNS.org) – “As a Palestinian who refuses to parrot our leadership’s lies, I have to say it bluntly: Telling Mizrahi Jews, Jews from Iraq, Yemen, Egypt, Morocco, Syria and the rest of the Arab world, that they are doing ‘ethnic cleansing’ to us is the gaslight of the century.”
The Grand Synagogue of the Hara in Tunis, Tunisia, 1960. Credit: Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.
These words come not from a Jew, but from Ahmed al-Khalidi, a self-described “pragmatic Palestinian,” in a posting on X in mid-October that got 692,500 views.
Khalidi states bluntly what so many “useful idiots” in the West ignore: All Jews did not come from Europe. In his social-media post, he reminds readers that communities in Babylon, Damascus and Sana’a existed for 2,500 years or longer.
In fact, Jews lived in the Middle East long before the Arab conquest and Islam. They spoke a Middle Eastern language and prayed toward Jerusalem. For millennia, Judaism has been embedded in the local culture, spawning its daughter religions of Christianity and Islam.
An Arab-Israeli influencer, Nuseir Yassin (aka Nas Daily on Instagram), told his 5 million followers that most people have never heard that nearly a million Jews were kicked out of Arab lands. (His message is slightly marred by the fact that he called them Arabs for much of the video.) An AI video he made on the subject has more than 80,000 Likes. As one commenter on the video said: “Finally someone speaking out on this taboo subject by Arab nations.”
It is Nas’s position that “two truths can exist at the same time.” Palestinians were driven out of their homes after the creation of modern-day Israel in 1948, but so, too, were Arabic-speaking Jews forced out of their communities in the years that followed.
As Khalidi wrote on X: “The same families who were driven from Baghdad, Aleppo and Tripoli, who rebuilt their lives from refugee camps in Israel, are accused of committing the same crime that was done to them.”
Jews are not settler-colonialists from Europe. Yet the liberal elites, university students and media—besotted with the Palestinian cause—are convinced that they are. Decades of indoctrination, with little pushback from Israel, have entrenched such falsehoods.
Jews are among the indigenous peoples of the Middle East and North Africa, together with the Kurds, Berbers, Yazidis, Mandaeans, Assyrians and Copts, all colonized by the Arabs. In the seventh century, Arabs overran the Byzantine and the Persian empires, expanding across North Africa, reaching as far as Spain and southern France.
Persians, Berbers, Copts, Arameans, Jews, Greeks and others came under Arab rule; languages and faiths were pushed aside as Arabic became the dominant tongue and Islam the dominant faith.
In fact, Israel is the only decolonization project in the Middle East, an indigenous people that has managed to throw off the yoke of Arab and Ottoman dominance. And yet many people assume that political rights only belong to Arab Muslims.< Indeed, there were high hopes at the end of World War I, with the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire, that indigenous Christian and other minorities would be given enclaves affording them special protection. The Assyrians and Kurds both expected to have autonomy, if not a homeland of their own. But only the Balfour Declaration of 1917, with its commitment for a home for the Jews, was endorsed at the 1920 San Remo conference and written into the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne. For Khalidi, the settler colonial lie is “not just hypocrisy; it’s historical amnesia. If we truly want justice, we have to stop gaslighting our neighbors and start acknowledging that their story is Middle Eastern, too. Our liberation won’t come from denying theirs.” Why is it that so few Arab voices of moderation are out there, while Western far-leftists, in alliance with Islamists, almost all espouse extremist positions or traffic lies about Israel or Jews? The smear that Israel is a white colonial-settler state relies on two false premises: It severs Jews from their Middle Eastern ethno-religious roots and denies that Jews are a people distinct from the Diaspora, in which they spent 2,000 years. Israelophobes brand Judaism a matter of faith, like Christianity or Islam. They refuse to believe that Jews are distinct genetically, culturally, linguistically and historically from the many populations they lived among. In order to depict Zionism as a European imposter, the anti-Zionists date the rise of modern Zionism to 1882 and the arrival of the Russian Jews of the first aliyah. In truth, Jews never left. Through the centuries, they returned, albeit in small numbers, to Eretz Israel.
To keep the memory of the 850,000 Jews forced to leave Arab countries and Iran in the 20th century alive, organizations such as JIMENA (Jews Indigenous to the Middle East and North Africa) and HARIF (the Association of Jews from the MENA), along with synagogues and community groups around the world, will observe “Mizrachi Heritage Month” throughout November.
The Israeli Knesset designated an official “Mizrachi Heritage Day” in the calendar on Nov. 30, the day after the U.N. Partition Plan for Palestine was passed in 1947, which triggered riots across Arab countries.
History matters. We must not let the truth be drowned out by crude and dishonest sloganeering. We must keep repeating the facts. And any help from Arab members of society is welcome.
HARIF will host the United Kingdom’s Commemoration of the Departure and Exodus of Jews from Arab Countries and Iran in London on Nov. 20, at 7 p.m., in person and online.
