Why you can't "colonize" Palestine - by Daniel Greenfield

...The existence of Israel not only means the decolonization of Abdul Rahim al-Shaikh’s imaginary colonial fantasies of “Palestine,” but inspires resistance in peoples struggling against Islamic colonialism throughout the region, from the Copts to the Berbers to secular intellectuals fighting for freedom. Islamic colonialism has always been defeated, whether at the Gates of Vienna or in the Sinai Desert. Its colonial fantasies are false and will be defeated as many times as it takes, whether in the form of Palestine or ISIS.

Daniel Greenfield..
Frontpagemag.com..
05 April '16..

At Israeli Apartheid Week, campus haters claim to be fighting “colonialism” by fighting Jews. Columbia University’s Center for Palestine Studies, dedicated to a country that doesn’t exist and which has produced nothing worth studying except terrorism, features diatribes such as Abdul Rahim al-Shaikh’s Palestine Re-Covered: Reading a Settler Colonial Landscape”. This word salad is a toxic stew of historical revisionism being used to justify the Muslim settler colonization of the indigenous Jewish population.

Colonialism is CPS’ favorite word. When Israeli social workers remove abused children from Muslim homes, that’s colonialism. Israeli farms are a form of environmental “colonialism”. When non-profits aren’t representative enough, it’s the fault of the “Israeli settler-colonial regime.” If it rains on Thursday, it’s caused by “colonialism,” preferably of the “Israeli Zionist colonial settler regime” variety.

But you can’t colonize colonizers. The Muslim population in Israel is a foreign colonist population. The indigenous Jewish population can resettle its own country, but it can’t colonize it.

Not even if you accuse Jews of being a “super-double-secret settler colonial regime.”

Muslims invaded, conquered and settled Israel. They forced their language and laws on the population. That's the definition of colonialism. You can't colonize and then complain that you're being colonized when the natives take back the power that you stole from them.

There are Muslims in Israel for the same reason that there are Muslims in India. They are the remnants of a Muslim colonial regime that displaced and oppressed the indigenous non-Muslim population.

There are no serious historical arguments to be made against any of this.

The Muslim conquests and invasions are well-documented. The Muslim settlements fit every historical template of colonialism complete with importing a foreign population and social system that was imposed on the native population. Until they began losing wars to the indigenous Jewish population, the Muslim settlers were not ashamed of their colonial past, they gloried in it. Their historical legacy was based on seizing indigenous sites, appropriating them and renaming them after the new conquerors.

The only reason there’s a debate about the Temple Mount is because Caliph Omar conquered Jerusalem and ordered a mosque built on a holy Jewish site. The only reason there’s a debate about East Jerusalem is because invading Muslim armies seized half the city in 1948, bombed synagogues and ethnically cleansed the Jewish population to achieve an artificial Muslim settler majority. The only Muslim claim to Jerusalem or to any other part of Israel is based purely on the enterprise of colonial violence.

There is no Muslim claim to Israel based on anything other than colonialism, invasion and settlement.

Colonists and Other Forgotten Facts about the Arab-Israeli Conflict

...The Yazidi in Iraq and the Christian Copts in Egypt are not "occupiers" or "settlers;" neither are the Jews in Israel. They are both victims of a common enemy that seems to want a Middle East free of non-Muslims.

Ezequiel Doiny..
Gatestone Institute..
15 August '14..

The current Palestinian narrative is that all Muslims in Palestine are natives and all Jews are settlers. This narrative is false. There has been a small but almost continuous Jewish presence in Palestine since the destruction of Jerusalem by Rome two thousand years ago, and, as we will see, most of the Muslims living in Palestine when the state of Israel was declared in 1948 were Muslim colonists from other parts of the Ottoman Empire who had been resettled and living in Palestine for fewer than 60 years.

There are two important historical events usually overlooked in the Arab-Israeli conflict.

One is the use that Muslim rulers made of the jizya (a discriminatory tax imposed only on non-Muslims, to "protect" them from being killed or having their property destroyed) to reduce the quantity of Jews living in Palestine before the British Mandate was instituted in 1922. The second were the incentives by the Ottoman government to relocate displaced Muslim populations from other parts of the Ottoman Empire in Palestine.

Until the late 1800s entire ancient Jewish communities had to flee Palestine to escape the brutality of Muslim authorities. As Egyptian historian Bat Ye'or writes in her book, The Dhimmi:

"The Jizya was paid in a humiliating public ceremony in which the non-Muslim while paying was struck in the head. If these taxes were not paid women and children were reduced to slavery, men were imprisoned and tortured until a ransom was paid for them. The Jewish communities in many cities under Muslim Rule was ruined for such demands. This custom of legalized financial abuses and extortion shattered the indigenous pre-Arab populations almost totally eliminating what remained of its peasantry... In 1849 the Jews of Tiberias envisaged exile because of the brutality, exactions, and injustice of the Muslim authorities. In addition to ordinary taxes, an Arab Sheik that ruled Hebron demanded that Jews pay an extra five thousand piastres annually for the protections of their lives and property. The Sheik threatened to attack and expel them from Hebron if it was not paid."

The Muslim rulers not only kept the number of Jews low through discriminatory taxes, they also increased the Muslim population by providing incentives for Muslim colonists to settle in the area. Incentives included free land, 12 years exemption from taxes and exemption from military service.

The Arab foot, the colonial boot and its proper owner

...All in all, Bensoussan has dropped a bombshell of a book. A sovereign Jewish state in the land of Israel begins to look like the liberation of a colonised, indigenous people from 14 centuries of subjugation. Will Bensoussan have the impact on western intellectual thinking that Maxime Rodinson had, 65 years ago?

Lyn Julius..
Clash of Cultures/JPost..
11 September '13..

It's been 65 years since the late French Marxist scholar Maxime Rodinson published his influential essay, and later book: "Israel : colonial settler state? "

Reinforced by Israel's 1967 'occupation of Palestinian territories', and its auxiliary Apartheid myth, 'Israel: colonial settler state?' cemented the trope that Zionism was a European movement to displace the native Arab inhabitants of Palestine.

Now another French historian, Georges Bensoussan, threatens to stand the notion of 'Jewish colonialism' on its head: it is the Jews who lived under Muslim rule who were the true victims of colonialism.

His book, "Juifs en pays arabes: le grand deracinement 1850 - 1975 " published in 2012 in French, examines the reason why the Arab world was emptied of its Jews in barely a generation. Since most fled as refugees to the Jewish state from the Arab and Muslim world and now constitute at least half Israel's Jews, the question has huge implications for the Israel-Arab conflict.

Moroccan-born Bensoussan, who made his name as a Holocaust historian, argues that the Jews have been colonised thrice over.

The first wave of colonisation was Arab-Muslim. By the time the Arab conquerors had swept over the Middle East and North Africa, the Jews had been living in the region for 1,000 years.

Under Islam, according to the eighth-century Pact of Omar, indigenous Jews and Christians were permitted to practise as long as they acquiesced to the 'dhimmi' condition of inferiority and institutionalised humiliation. Dhimmis were exploited for specific talents and skills.

Bensoussan observes that the Islamic order was built on a 'colonial' notion - submission. The Muslim submits to Allah, the Muslim woman submits to her husband, the non-Muslim dhimmi submits to the Muslim. At the very bottom of the pile is the slave. Women, minorities and slaves are curiously absent from Edward Said’s postcolonial ‘bible’, "Orientalism", Bensoussan notes.