Israel is a settler colonial state. Jews are European colonisers who took somebody else's country, and Zionism is a European colonial project like any other.

The fuller answer

8 sectionsJump to one

Nobody has to authorise you to argue this one. It turns up in seminars, in union branches and in comment threads, and on a lot of campuses it is now the default frame rather than a fringe one. You can hold your end of it without a title or an organisation behind you.

One warning before any of the arguments. Everything below can be delivered as a lecture in ancient history, and delivered that way it loses. The person in front of you is making a claim about a living population. Use the history as evidence for who those people are, never as a substitute for answering them.

Start with where Jews are from, because it can be checked

The claim needs Jews to be visitors. They are not, and the evidence for that does not ask anybody to believe a religious text.

A granite slab cut for the pharaoh Merneptah, dated to about 1205 BCE, was found at Thebes by Flinders Petrie and sits in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. Among the peoples its inscription boasts of defeating is Israel. That is an Egyptian document about an enemy, written by people with no interest in flattering them.

A basalt fragment found at Tel Dan in 1993, by the Israeli archaeologist Avraham Biran, carries a ninth century BCE inscription in Aramaic in which a king boasts of beating the king of Israel and the king of the House of David. It is now in the Israel Museum. Again, an enemy’s monument.

Then the part people assume is untrue: the communities never went away. Ottoman tax registers count roughly 48 European Jewish families in Safed in 1525, and by 1555 some 143 Portuguese and 324 Spanish Jewish households in the same town. Safed in that century was where Joseph Karo compiled the Shulchan Aruch, still the working code of Jewish law. That is a functioning community with a tax liability, four hundred years before Herzl.

The genetics point the same way. Behar and colleagues, publishing in Nature in 2010, compared 14 Jewish diaspora communities against 69 non-Jewish Old World populations and traced the origins of most of them to the Levant.

Say all of that as a positive claim about a people, not as a rebuttal. It is stronger ground and it is usually standing empty.

Then ask who the Israelis actually are

This is the fact that reorders the conversation, and almost nobody on our side brings it.

Lewin-Epstein and Cohen, using European Social Survey data collected in 2015 and 2016 from a working sample of 3,917 Israeli Jews, found Mizrahim the largest group at 44.9 per cent, against 31.8 per cent Ashkenazim, with 12.4 per cent recent immigrants from the former Soviet Union, 3 per cent Ethiopian and 7.9 per cent of mixed origin. Pew’s 2016 survey found 48 per cent identifying as Sephardi or Mizrahi and 45 per cent as Ashkenazi.

Be honest about the softness in those numbers, because somebody will check. Lewin-Epstein and Cohen say themselves that Mizrahim are slightly over-represented in their sample, and the two surveys measure different things, one ancestry and one self-description. What survives every version of the count is this. Israeli Jews of Middle Eastern, North African and Ethiopian descent are the largest bloc and outnumber those of European descent, and their families did not arrive from Europe. They came from Baghdad, Sana’a, Casablanca, Tripoli, Aleppo and Cairo. Iraq, Egypt and Libya legislated their citizenship or their property away. In Morocco and Tunisia, which hold the largest numbers, the honest word is emigration under mounting pressure, and it emptied those communities just the same.

So the sentence “Jews are European colonisers” is not contested. It is a factual error about who lives in Israel, and it can be looked up in a minute.

Where this backfires. Used as a trump card it will be misheard as a claim that Palestinians deserved what happened. Keep it as evidence about who the Israeli population is, and say so out loud if you have to.

What the category actually requires

This is a definitional point rather than a rhetorical one, so make it precisely or leave it alone.

Patrick Wolfe, whose 2006 paper in the Journal of Genocide Research did more than any other to establish the field, defined settler colonialism by territoriality: settlers come to stay, and “invasion is a structure not an event”. The classical picture around that involves a metropole, a home power on whose behalf settlers act, and wealth flowing back to it.

Never cite Wolfe for the missing metropolis. He is on the other side of that argument and he wrote it down. Advocates quote his footnote 35, which calls Israel “a partial exception”, and stop there. The same sentence carries on. It says the exception is smaller than the people arguing from the missing metropolis make it out to be, and it names that argument to reject it. His answer is that the Yishuv used Ottoman, British and American power in turn, in what Maxime Rodinson called a collective mother country.

Read the whole footnote before you quote a word of it. The person opposite you will read it out, and everything true you said before it goes down with it.

The reply to Wolfe is on the ground rather than in the definition, so make it there.

Zionism has no such capital. S. Ilan Troen, emeritus at Ben-Gurion University and Brandeis, puts it flatly: there was “no mother country or father country hoping to reap the profit” from money that went to Palestine and did not come back. Capital moved inward. Baruch Kimmerling called the enterprise economically irrational, and Troen cites 1930s Zionist planning that assumed twenty-five years before any kibbutz repaid its investment.

The imperial power on the ground was against it by the end. Britain’s White Paper of May 1939 capped Jewish immigration at 75,000 over five years and provided that after that none would be permitted without Arab acquiescence. It gave the High Commissioner general powers to prohibit and regulate land transfers. Britain held that policy through the Holocaust and after it, and Jewish forces in Palestine ended up fighting the British to overturn it. A colony does not usually have to defeat its own metropolis to be born.

That is the answer to the collective mother country, and it is a fact rather than a definition. Wolfe’s Yishuv co-opts imperial power. This one had to break the imperial power that mattered most, at the worst moment in Jewish history, to get the people in. Say the date and the cap, not the rule.

Concede the parts that are true, then move

Yes, early Zionists used the vocabulary of colonisation. Jabotinsky wrote in 1923 that Zionist colonisation “must either stop, or else proceed regardless of the native population”, and that it could only proceed behind an iron wall, under a power the native population could not breach. That is his word, in his own essay, about his own movement.

It establishes that the word was unremarkable in 1923, when European public life used it for almost any organised settlement. It does not establish that the thing it named met the structural definition scholars built forty years later. Troen, arguing our side, grants that there is a measure of truth in the comparison. Wolfe, arguing theirs, grants that Israel is an exception of a kind. Both are more honest than the version you will hear in a debating chamber, and you can afford to be as honest.

And yes, people were displaced. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians lost their homes in 1948 and were not permitted to return. Nothing about Merneptah or Ottoman tax records touches that. The category argument and the moral argument are separate, and an entry that let the first swallow the second would be doing what it accuses the other side of doing.

Then take the definition at its word and ask what else it catches. If displacement is what makes a settler colony, the category takes in the partition of India in 1947. It takes in the Greek and Turkish populations exchanged in 1923, and the Germans expelled from central Europe after 1945. Nobody applies the word to those, and the reason is not the facts.

The reason is that the frame arrives with a remedy attached. A national conflict between two peoples ends in partition. A settler colony ends with the settler society undone. So ask which of those is being proposed, because that is the question the category is doing the work of not asking.

Do not argue that Palestinians are not indigenous

This is the trap, and taking it costs you the room and deserves to.

Two peoples can both be deeply rooted in the same land. Palestinians have been there for many centuries, they are from there, and saying so takes nothing from the Jewish claim. Derek Penslar, who has spent a career on exactly this comparison, warns that “colonialism” gets used so often that the word loses meaning, and insists the purpose of comparison is to show up differences. Precision, in both directions, is the position that holds.

The strong argument is not that one people belongs and one does not. It is that the settler colonial frame requires an outside people arriving on behalf of a power elsewhere, and there is no elsewhere here for either side.

The Khazar business, briefly

If somebody tells you Ashkenazi Jews are converted Khazars with no Middle Eastern ancestry, they are repeating Arthur Koestler’s 1976 book The Thirteenth Tribe, and it does not survive contact with the data. Behar and colleagues tested it directly in Human Biology in 2013 using 1,774 individuals from 106 populations, including 261 samples from the Caucasus, and found no particular similarity between Ashkenazi Jews and Caucasus populations. Name the study rather than calling the theory names.

The lines

“Pharaoh Merneptah’s men carved the name Israel into a slab around 1205 BCE. It’s in a museum in Cairo. This isn’t a story anybody told me in a synagogue.”

“About half of Israel’s Jews come from families from Baghdad, Sana’a, Tripoli and Cairo. Which European empire were they settling for?”

“Britain capped Jewish immigration at 75,000 in 1939, held that through the Holocaust, and the Zionists ended up fighting them over it. Whatever that makes Britain, it doesn’t make it a mother country.”

“Jabotinsky did use the word colonisation, in 1923, and everybody used it then. That tells you about 1923. It doesn’t tell you there was an empire behind him.”

“I’ve never said Palestinians aren’t from there. They are. Two peoples can be from the same place, and my case doesn’t need theirs to be false.”

Learn four things

Write two lines with a real day in them.

Action. “On Tuesday evening after supper, I will learn four things by heart: Merneptah around 1205 BCE, Tel Dan ninth century BCE, 44.9 per cent Mizrahi against 31.8 per cent Ashkenazi, and the 1939 White Paper cap of 75,000.”

Coping. “If somebody says the structure matters more than the ancestry, I will agree that displacement happened and was not answered by any date I have given, then give the 1939 cap and the fighting rather than arguing about what the category requires.”