The Palestinians Are the Colonizers
The historical case for Israel’s legitimacy — and the DARVO that turned Islamist conquerors into "victims".
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by Rod D. Martin
August 30, 2025
Labeling Israel a “settler colony” is an Orwellian reversal. It’s the sort of DARVO — “Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender” — employed by abusers. It casts the indigenous people of the land as foreigners, and the actual colonizers as its rightful heirs.
The Palestinians are the colonizers, not the Jews.
Now this is not an argument that Palestinians should be mistreated. But here’s the thing: in Israel, they aren’t. They’re full citizens, with more civil rights than anywhere in the Arab world. They serve in parliament (the Knesset). They serve as IDF generals. They are citizens, not subjects.
Not so in the Arab world. Virtually the entire Middle East surrounding this Israeli island of freedom is mired in dictatorship. The strong rule the weak, a wicked concoction of Socialism and Sharia prevails, and “rights” are a sick joke. And nowhere is this worse (Afghanistan aside) than in Gaza, where the “elected” government — dominated by Hamas — rules with an iron fist, terrorizing its own people even more than its Jewish neighbors. Is support for Hamas high in Gaza? Sure: if you waver in that support, Hamas will kill you.
But that is not the thrust of this essay.
History happens. We do not suggest that the Visigoths are “colonizers” and thus their descendants should be removed from Spain, nor the Lombards from Italy, nor the descendants of Aeneas from Rome. Muslim migrants may be colonizing the Midlands, but no one advocates for the removal of the Normans from Britain. These are old quarrels, perhaps wrongly decided, but decided nevertheless, centuries ago. We cannot right every historical wrong, nor can we unscramble eggs. The ancient Israelites so intermarried with the Canaanites that over time the two peoples became one: how would you unmix them? The same is true in much of the world.
It is only Critical Theory that suggests we should. But its motive is dishonest. Its adherents don’t believe they can unscramble these eggs either. Rather, they believe they can set various peoples they define as “oppressed” against others they define as “oppressors” to create the strife needed to upend the existing order and thereby usurp power for themselves. It’s cynical, it’s a scam, and it’s the whole history of Marxism, from the Paris Commune to Pol Pot’s Kampuchea.
But if we’re going to adopt the language and framework of the leftists supporting Hamas, then we must be clear: it’s the Palestinian Arabs who are the colonizers, not the Jews. They subjugated Israel by the sword, and they still seek their annihilation “from the River to the Sea”. Any honest person must recognize this. But a growing number are either dishonest or deceived.
The left is never honest. Honesty gets in the way of seizing power. They don’t want to admit that there has never been, and no one ever sought, an independent Arab state called Palestine, not in all of history. They don’t want you to know that the British gave 80% of Palestine to the Arabs 25 years before the UN created Israel. They don’t want you to think about the status of Gaza and the West Bank from 1948-1967: annexed by Jordan and Egypt with no complaint from the so-called Palestinians. They don’t want you to realize that the Arabs have been offered a second Palestinian state three separate times — once by the UN, twice by Israel — and refused it. They certainly never acknowledge that the Arab response to every such offer has been a new war.
Why? Because the aim has never been the establishment of a Palestinian state. The aim has only and always been the annihilation of Israel.
Of course, today’s discourse is filled with such obfuscations. But among them are also efforts to delegitimize the Jews, not merely as a nation-state but as a people.
One such “argument” is that the Jews never lived in Israel before modern times. This contradicts all of recorded history, of course, but why let a little thing like that stand in the way? After all, how many people have actually read any history, much less the ancient historians? Ignorance is bliss, for the Marxists.
Archaeology also poses a problem: Israel is literally filled with evidence of its Jewish civilization, yet again, the pro-Palestinian propagandists pretend this is not so. Never mind that the truth is independently verifiable: they know you likely won’t bother. But just to make certain, they also inhibit or outright prohibit (for example) archaeological research in the vicinity of the Temple Mount, or anywhere else they believe might refute their claims.
Another is that modern Jews aren’t descended from ancient Jews. Mostly this derives from the claim that they’re European, which ignores not only the history of Jewish exile to Europe but also the fact that most Israeli Jews are not of European origin. The majority are the descendants of the Jews exiled by the Assyrians and Babylonians in the 6th through 8th centuries B.C., who lived in Persia and Mesopotamia and everywhere Nebuchadnezzar’s and Darius’s empires reached for nearly three thousand years, until almost all of them were forced from their homes in 1948 and 1949 by the Arabs.
You know, “ethnic cleansing”.
But even that misses the point. Do we claim that Americans are only those descended from residents of the Thirteen Colonies? Do we claim that Italians are only those descended from the Romans? Of course we don’t, and to say such a thing would not merely be inaccurate but offensive. And likewise, we don’t ask for a genealogy of Christians or Muslims, because such a question would be nonsense: both religions encompass countless backgrounds. Why are Jews — ethnically, culturally, and religiously — uniquely singled out?
Why? Because people all across the world have hated them, irrationally and uncontrollably, for millennia. I don’t know whether this or that Jew is the latter-day descendant of such-and-such tribe, and I don’t know if there’s any good way to prove that one way or the other. But I know this: No one would be stupid enough to identify himself as a Jew if he didn’t mean it. And such a people clearly needs its own country, because they are not and never have been safe as minorities in anyone else’s.
The irony, of course, is plain. The same leftists who tell us a boy can “identify” as a girl also tell us that people can’t be “legitimate” Jews unless some non-Jew deems them so.
These are excuses, a sort of throwing lots of mud at a wall to see if some might stick. They are all about delegitimizing, if not outright dehumanizing, this one group of people. They all add up to one real claim: that Jews have no right to their own country (unlike every other people on Earth), and indeed may have no right to exist at all. That last bit is certainly the position of Hamas, who quite openly state their wish to murder every Jew “from the River to the Sea”.
That desire, incited early on by PLO founder Yassir Arafat’s uncle, the Nazi Grand Mufti of Jerusalem who actually traveled to Europe to meet with Hitler and personnally help carry out the Holocaust before returning to the Middle East, is so evil, so twisted, so vile, as to be its own standalone argument for the existence of Israel, and the absolute defeat of its attackers. We would not allow the Nazis to continue in Germany. Likewise, we should not allow their successors in Gaza to succeed.
So here’s the truth.
The Jews are not foreigners in Israel. They are the world’s oldest continuous nation in the land, with a history there stretching back nearly four millennia. Insofar as their ancient ancestors thoroughly intermarried with their Canaanite predecessors, the history in the land of the descendants of those unions goes back even further: they are literally the original owners of the land. The Jews built kingdoms in that land before Rome — not just the empire but the city itself —existed, they worshiped in Jerusalem millennia before Muhammad, and those in exile prayed for return unceasingly, reassuring one another throughout: “Next year in Jerusalem”.
Israel is not a colony. It’s a restoration.
Nor is the modern State of Israel some Zionist invention, or an exercise of British imperial fiat. In 1947, the United Nations voted overwhelmingly to establish Israel, partitioning the remaining 20% of the Palestine Mandate into two states: one Jewish, one Arab. The Jews accepted. The Arabs declared a war of annihilation, just three years after the Holocaust, a war the Jews won.
Why do those two facts alone not settle this once and for all?
Oh, and that other 80%? Already given to the Palestinian Arabs in 1922, the modern Kingdom of Jordan. In 1947, the UN sought to give half the remainder — the 20% set aside for a Jewish homeland — to the Arabs as well. That’s 90% for the Arabs, just 10% for the indigenous Jews.
If those Palestinians who refuse to live in peace in Israel (which they may do), and refuse to live peacefully beside the Jews in the so-called “territories” (which they may also do), wish to live peacefully somewhere, what is wrong with the 80% of Palestine on the East Bank of the Jordan? Do these colonizers really need 100%? And why would anyone agree to such an absurdity?
The Jews did not ask for 100%, or even 50%. The Jews accepted the UN’s terms in peace. The Arabs responded with an attempted genocide, not just by the Palestinian Arabs themselves but also the surrounding Arab states. The Israeli victory is nothing short of a miracle. Nor did the Arabs stop there: they expelled vast Jewish communities from their countries, minorities who had lived continuously in those lands for as much as 2,700 years.
How is it that the party of “land acknowledgements” acknowledges none of this?
Israel is not a “settler colony.” The State of Israel was founded by and through international law. Virtually the entire world agreed that there must be a Jewish state, just as there must be an Indian state, and a Kenyan state, and a Polish state, and a French state. Israel’s existence rests not on imperial decree but on the consensus of the nations, and on the same principle of self-determination that birthed nearly every nation in the modern world.
By contrast, the Arabs now calling themselves “Palestinians” are not indigenous. Their presence begins with the Muslim conquest, millennia after the Jews. Jews still lived in the land, then and always, even after Rome had expelled many of them. And most of the ancestors of today’s Palestinians are recent arrivals as well, settling in the wasteland the area had become under the Turks only after the Jews began to develop it, “making the desert bloom”. They came to benefit from Jewish enterprise. Now they want to steal what the Jews built.
The irony is glaring: those who arrived by imperial sword now claim the mantle of the native, while the true indigenous people are smeared as colonizers.
And all of this takes place while Arabs and Jews who wish to live together peacefully in Israel do so, with equal rights and equal opportunities known nowhere else in the Muslim world; and while the totalitarian murderers in Gaza seek to destroy that freedom, that brotherhood, that achievement, replacing it with the Hell they made of their own lands.
Meanwhile, the West clutches its pearls over Israel’s winning a war it did not start, as though Allied armies closing in on Berlin were victimizing Germany.
Yes, it’s time for some truth.
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100% agree! Thank you for writing this. I wish more young people would learn this history. It is hidden in plain sight history.