There is a question the Arab world has never answered, because the Arab world has never been asked – or more precisely, because the infrastructure of acceptable discourse has been so thoroughly engineered that the question itself is treated as blasphemy. The question is this: Who colonized whom?

The conventional narrative, repeated with such mechanical regularity that it has calcified into catechism, holds that Israel is a colonial implant – a European project imposed upon an indigenous Arab population. This narrative is not merely incomplete. It is an inversion of documented history so total, so structurally dishonest, that its persistence says more about the political utility of the lie than about any deficiency in the historical record.

Because if colonialism means anything – if it means the armed invasion of another people’s homeland, the erasure of their language, the destruction of their sacred sites, the imposition of a foreign religion, and the demographic replacement of indigenous populations – then the Arab world is not the victim of colonialism in the Levant. It is its most successful practitioner.

The Jewish presence in the land of Israel is not a claim. It is an archaeological, linguistic, genetic, and textual fact attested across every civilization that has encountered it.

Even the Quran – the text Muslims hold to be the literal, unaltered, uncorrupted word of God – explicitly acknowledges the Israelites’ historical presence in the Holy Land and their divine election to it. “O my people! Enter the Holy Land which Allah has destined for you,” Moses commands in Surah 5:21. “We said to the Children of Israel after him: dwell in the land,” God declares in Surah 17:104. “And We made those who had been persecuted inherit the eastern and western lands which We had blessed,” God reminds in Surah 7:137. “Indeed, We gave the Children of Israel the Scripture, wisdom, and prophethood; granted them good, lawful provisions; and favoured them above the others,” God states in Surah 45:16.

These are not ambiguous metaphors. They are categorical divine decrees, spoken by Allah Himself, preserved in the scripture that 2 billion Muslims believe cannot contain a single false syllable. And yet the modern Muslim world has performed a theological acrobatics act of breathtaking audacity: it has decided that God was wrong – or, more precisely, that God’s words require political editing.

The Quran says God gave the land to the Israelites, but Arabism says the land is Arab. The Quran says God favored the Children of Israel, but the caliphist imagination says divine favor transferred permanently to the Ummah. The Quran says “enter the Holy Land which God has prescribed for you,” but the Friday sermon says the Jews are intruders with no claim to it.

This is not reinterpretation. It is apostasy of principle – the quiet, undeclared defiance of a civilization that selectively obeys its own God, accepting every verse that affirms its supremacy while burying every verse that complicates its politics. The Arab nationalist project and the neo-caliphist fantasy both require the erasure of Jewish indigeneity, and when the Quran itself stands in the way of that erasure, it is the Quran – not the politics – that gets reinterpreted into silence.

Muslims who would never dare question a single letter of Surah Al-Fatiha have collectively decided that God’s covenant with the Israelites is negotiable, that divine prescription of the Holy Land was temporary, and that the most explicit verses in their own scripture are somehow less authoritative than the pamphlets of twentieth-century Arab nationalism. If this is not defying God in favor of ideology, the word defiance has no meaning.

Jews built Jerusalem roughly three thousand years ago. The First Temple stood on Mount Moriah – what the world now calls the Temple Mount – from approximately 957 BCE until the Babylonians destroyed it in 586 BCE. The Second Temple was rebuilt on the same site and stood for nearly six centuries until the Romans razed it in 70 CE.

These are not articles of faith. They are confirmed by Babylonian chronicles, Persian imperial decrees, Greek historiography, Roman military records, and an unbroken chain of physical evidence that includes the Western Wall, the Temple Mount retaining walls, Herodian stone courses, Second Temple-period mikvaot, and inscriptions that no serious archaeologist disputes. Jews were praying on that mountain a thousand years before the Arabic language existed as a written script.

Now consider what happened next. In 636 CE, Arab armies under Caliph Umar ibn al-Khattab conquered Jerusalem. Within sixty years, the Umayyad Caliphate constructed the Dome of the Rock in 691 CE and the Al-Aqsa Mosque in 705 CE – directly on top of the Temple Mount, directly on the ruins of the holiest site in Judaism, directly on the foundation stones where Jewish worship had occurred for a millennium before Muhammad was born.

This was not coincidence. It was the deliberate architectural assertion of supremacy – the same practice every empire in history has employed: you conquer a people, you build your shrine on the rubble of theirs, and you declare the land was always yours. The Romans did it. The Spanish did it in Tenochtitlan. The Umayyads did it in Jerusalem. The only difference is that when Arabs did it, the modern world decided it wasn’t colonialism.

And here is what makes the hypocrisy not merely historical but ongoing, not merely intellectual but structurally breathtaking: Israel, the Jewish state, the country that every Arab government and half the world’s activist class accuses of religious extremism and territorial supremacism – that state has not demolished the Al-Aqsa Mosque. It has not removed the Dome of the Rock. It has not even claimed sovereign worship rights on its own holiest site.

Since capturing the Temple Mount in 1967, Israel has maintained the status quo under which the Jordanian-administered Waqf controls daily religious affairs, Muslims pray freely, and Jews are prohibited from praying on the mount – prohibited from praying on the very site where their temples stood for a thousand years before Islam existed.

There are Jewish extremists who dream of rebuilding the Temple. Israel has restrained them, policed them, arrested them, and enforced a policy that privileges Muslim worship on a Jewish holy site in a Jewish state. Name one Arab or Muslim country that has extended one tenth of that restraint toward a religious minority’s sacred site. Name one. The silence that follows is the sound of a civilization that knows the answer but cannot say it – because saying it would require dismantling every accusation it has ever made.

The Arab colonization of the Middle East and North Africa is not ancient history confined to textbooks. It is the living, breathing political reality of the modern region. From the seventh century onward, Arab armies swept out of the Arabian Peninsula and conquered – by sword, not by invitation – populations that were Amazigh in North Africa, Coptic in Egypt, Aramaic in Syria, Chaldean in Iraq, and Phoenician in Lebanon. These populations did not choose Arabic. They did not volunteer for Islam.

They were conquered, administered, taxed under the jizya, linguistically absorbed over centuries, and culturally replaced so thoroughly that today they are called “Arab countries” – as though the Arabness were indigenous rather than imperial. The Amazigh of Morocco and Algeria, who inhabited North Africa for thousands of years before the first Arab horseman crossed the Sinai, are still fighting for the right to speak their own language in their own schools in their own homeland.

The Copts of Egypt, direct descendants of the pharaonic civilization, are treated as a minority in a country their ancestors built. The Maronites of Lebanon, the Assyrians of Iraq, the Nubians of Sudan – every one of these populations predates the Arab conquest, and every one of them has been demographically marginalized by it. This is not postcolonial theory. This is the definition of colonialism, applied consistently, without ethnic exemption.

The Arab world demands Palestinian self-determination while denying self-determination to Kurds, Amazigh, Copts, Nubians, Baluch, and every other minority that asks for the same thing inside Arab borders.

The Arab world does not deny this history. It does something far more effective: it ignores it. It has constructed a doctrinal edifice in which colonialism is something that only Europeans do, in which indigeneity is something only Arabs possess, and in which the Jewish presence in the land of Israel – a presence older than Arab civilization itself – is recast as foreign intrusion.

And until the Arab world summons the honesty to look at the mosque sitting on top of someone else’s temple and call it what it is, its accusations of colonialism will remain what they have always been: the largest act of projection in human history – an entire political order accusing others of the very crime it perfected.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)