Guest Post: Anti-Zionism is an inherently colonial cause
The anti-Zionist argument tends to go something like this...
"Why should people who have lived in this land since time immemorial have less right to it than recent immigrants whose claim rests entirely on an obsolete Bronze Age kingdom, lost to the shifting sands of time, and religious fairy tales from thousands of years ago? Who are these people anyway? They don't LOOK Middle Eastern, as I understand it. Do they even HAVE ancestral roots there? Or are they just some weirdo cult of Orientalist Europeans LARPing as Semites for the typical European aim of colonization and subjugation of non-white peoples?"
It's a potent piece of propaganda. It's very simple. It's easy to understand. It's easy to sympathize with. It appeals very strongly to gentile "common sense" and ties in rather nicely with classic antisemitism and the larger post-colonial zeitgeist.
It also offers an exciting, romantic, and action-packed morality play of Manichean good vs evil, of a scrappy "brown" underdog vs a familiar "white" villain everybody knows and loves to hate.
What they don't tell you is that it's all premised on a false and myopic understanding of Middle Eastern history - one written by colonizers for the sole purpose of maintaining/reinscripting colonial hegemony. Time for a dissection...
1. "People who have lived in this land since time immemorial" - The Arab conquests happened in the 7th century (or the 3rd century, if you want to be nice). That's not time immemorial. That's well within historic memory. But that's obviously not what is meant by "time immemorial".
What they're really trying to say is "we're not scions of the Arab conquests. We're Arabized natives - Israelites/Canaanites who speak Arabic, embrace Arab history/identity, and practice Islam". As appealing as this narrative may be, it's still false. Not because the Palestinians are purely "Arab" in DNA and have no genetic ancestry from pre-colonial populations (many do have at least partial ancestry from Jews/Samaritans), but because that alone is not enough.
Indigenous status is defined first and foremost by ethnogenesis. Blood is a requirement, but it's not the only requirement. Indigenous peoples are those whose ethnic identity, language, core culture, national religion, AND ancestry are specific to the land they claim. In other words, you can't colonize your way into indigeneity. You can't usurp an indigenous people's identity, history, culture, and land simply by invading, occupying, and absorbing indigenous peoples. That is what is being attempted here.
Arab nationalists believe that, by sheer dint of having conquered the land, dominated it for centuries, and absorbing vast amounts of indigenous DNA, they have the right to maintain their occupation of it forever. And to keep exiled Jews out. This view is predicated on the very same "might makes right"/"finders keepers" supercessionist logic that undergirds all colonialism. But, unfortunately for anti-Zionists, that is not how it works. Besides, despite expulsions, Jews have maintained a continuous presence in the land.
2. "Bunch of recent immigrants whose claim rests entirely on an ancient, obsolete Bronze Age kingdom lost to the shifting sands of time and religious fairy tales from thousands of years ago"
This claim is equally ludicrous. Just as colonizers cannot become indigenous by dint of successful conquest, indigenous peoples cannot be exiled out of their own identity and rights.
The argument here is that Jews, having been exiled for many centuries in other parts of the world and unable to return en masse until the 19th century, have ultimately lost their right to go home. Because, evidently, our indigenous Middle East North African MENA status has "expired" and grown mould. But again, that's not how it works.
The only way indigenous status and rights can expire is if the population in question is absorbed into another group of people. That is, the indigenous people (Jews, in this case) ceases to exist as a distinct people. Obviously, that never happened. If it had, we wouldn't be here today. There would be no "Jewish people". We would not be Jews. We'd all be Germans, French, Arabs, whatever. We'd have become indistinguishable from them centuries ago. But alas, we're still here. We're still Jews. We're still MENA. And we're still indigenous, whether anyone else likes it or not. Try as they may, our colonizers have invariably failed in their goal of absorbing us.
3. "Who are these people anyway? They don't LOOK Middle Eastern, at least as I understand it." This argument is, if not mendacious, completely Orientalist. The Levant has always had a range of phenotypes and skin tones. Not everybody in the MENA looks like Aladdin. Moreover, most Jews - including most Ashkenazi Jews - have looks that can be described as stereotypically Middle Eastern and could blend in just about any part of the Middle East with ease. Take a good look at this gallery (http://ashkenazijews.net), and then tell me how many of them would stand out in, say, Egypt. Or Syria. Or Lebanon. Not many.
4. "Or are they just some weirdo cult of Orientalist Europeans LARPing as an ancient Near Eastern people for the typical European aim of colonization and subjugation of people of colour?"
Nope, nope, and nope. As you can see from these genetic charts, Ashkenazi Jews overlap with Lebanese Christians, Druze, Syrians, and Armenians. And, of course, with Sephardi Jews.
On the paternal line, Ashkenazim cluster tightly with Syrians, Cypriots, and Lebanese. On the maternal line (where the Greek/Roman admixture occurred), the closest matches are Palestinians and Egyptians.
Last but not least, the Zionist movement at no point saw itself as "European" imperialists or foreign invaders. Invariably, Jewish returnees to the land of Israel saw themselves as just that: native Middle Easterners returning to their homeland. Because that is what we are.
Sources:
https://journals.plos.org/plosgenetics/article?id=10.1371%2Fjournal.pgen.1003316&fbclid=IwAR3he0P-NZWjbmXvQE4MHcX56eVRpnrN2QSe1oPrD_yhTxqkozLWoxyripk
https://www.nature.com/articles/nature09103?fbclid=IwAR1bs_14QKJljMRg6eMG5wW3FioyK3QlTb1uEvh7t_I1HPW-iaRfhki_eQI
