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........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)