Across opposing political camps, a common claim has emerged: that Israel is an imperial, colonial project, often framed as a European or American imposition on West Asia. This view, shared in varying forms by Western progressive activists, Western libertarian critics, and Islamist ideologues, rests on a fundamental misreading of Jewish history.

This perspective overlooks key historical realities, including that Jews are one of the only surviving ethnic minorities of West Asia, that Jews are a historically oppressed diasporic minority who suffered for centuries under Muslim Arab and Christian European rule, that Israel comprises less than 1% of West Asia and 5% of the Levant, that Israel emerged in part through the expulsion of British imperial control, that Israel fought its Independence War against five Arab states without any imperial Western support (and under a weapons embargo by the United States and Britain), and that Israel’s population today is largely composed of Mizrahi Jews from West Asia and North Africa alongside a substantial Arab minority. To describe Israel as a European colonial project is therefore not simply inaccurate. It reflects a reversal of the historical experience of the Jewish people, recasting a small, historically displaced people achieving sovereignty in its ancestral homeland as an expansionist imperial force.

The very idea of Jewish nationalism is criticized by anti-Zionists as a fiction, but if all nations are constructed as “imagined communities,” as the Anglo-Irish-American academic Benedict Anderson put it, then singling out Jewish nationalism as being uniquely illegitimate is inconsistent. Ironically, anti-Zionist narratives also fall prey to and reproduce the “Orientalism” described by the Palestinian-American academic Edward Said, erasing Jewish indigeneity to West Asia and recasting a West Asian minority as “white European colonists,” thereby flattening a complex diasporic identity of a historically oppressed minority within a simplified framework of Western imperial colonialism.

Yet the inversion of Jewish history shapes much of the contemporary discourse about Israel. Accordingly, outrage against Israel’s conduct in the war against Iran, Hezbollah, and Hamas often regresses into debate over Israel’s existence. This relitigation notably results in prejudicial double standards applied to Israel.

Few countries have their existence as persistently relitigated as Israel. The creation of Pakistan in 1947 through British partition involved the displacement of over 10 million people, yet its legitimacy is rarely discussed outside the region. The existence of Australia and the United States—products of actual settler-colonial societies—is not treated as an open question in international discourse. Nor is sustained global attention directed toward Chinese control of Xinjiang or Tibet, or the Turkish occupation of Northern Cyprus, or the continued statelessness of the Kurdish people across multiple West Asian states.

Israel, by contrast—a small state in the region from which Jewish civilization originated and to which Jews maintained a continuous historical and cultural connection—is uniquely subjected to ongoing challenges to its legitimacy. The displacement of about 750,000 Palestinian Arabs during the Israeli Independence War in 1948, during which Israel was invaded by Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Iraq, and during which many Palestinian Arabs either fled or joined the fight against Israel, is consistently cited as though it is a particularly damning aspect of history. The creation of Israel in West Asia is remarkably analogous to the creation of Pakistan in South Asia, leading to a sovereign state for the Jewish minority of West Asia (as well as Europe), just as Pakistan (and later Bangladesh) is a sovereign state for the Muslim minority of South Asia. 

Even when Israel’s existence is accepted in principle, and one acknowledges the logic of the 1948 partition to create a Jewish state, it is often recast as a colonial project post-1967 when Israel occupied the Egyptian Gaza Strip and the Jordanian West Bank. The “colonist” framing overlooks a key fact: Israel withdrew unilaterally from Gaza in 2005, ending its presence there, only to see the territory come under the control of Hamas, which openly calls for Israel’s destruction. It also ignores the security imperatives that have shaped Israel’s policies in the West Bank in the absence of a durable peace agreement or Palestinian recognition of Israel’s permanence. Regardless, there are a multitude of other occupations (Turkish Northern Cyprus, Moroccan Western Sahara, Chinese Tibet, etc.) that exist and are ignored by most of the world, despite there being no anthropological justification, let alone defensive justification from being attacked.

The most serious accusation against Israel—that it has committed genocide in the Gaza Strip—represents the starkest form of inverting Jewish history. The term “genocide” was coined in 1944 by Polish-Jewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin to describe the systematic destruction of ethnic, national, or religious groups, specifically in response to Nazi policies. The application of the term to Israel’s conduct in war was made even before the execution of Israeli military operations following Hamas’s October 7 attack. This accusation is a severe misapplication of the term, even since Israel’s response. As has been often noted, Israel possesses overwhelming military superiority over Gaza. Yet after about three years of full-scale war against Hamas, the vast majority of Gaza’s population remains alive. This is because Israel’s goal has been to dismantle the Hamas government, not to destroy the Gazan people, evidenced by Israel’s extensive efforts to notify and evacuate civilians from buildings before striking. The accusation of genocide thereby inverts Jewish history two-fold, by weaponizing the worst atrocity committed against Jews by the Nazis in the 1940s, and by erasing the extensive efforts of Israel to avoid civilian casualties in an urban war started by Hamas, an entity with actual genocidal intent to kill Jews and annihilate Israel. 

The charge that Zionism represents settler colonialism also overlooks the region’s historical context. The Levant was shaped for centuries by successive empires—Ottoman, British, and others—while Jewish communities maintained a continuous presence in the land, particularly in Jerusalem. Jewish migration in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries largely involved legal land purchases under Ottoman and later British rule. Whatever one’s interpretation of these developments, they do not fit neatly into the model of European settler colonialism applied elsewhere.

The only times that “Palestine” was ever ruled to some degree by a non-imperial, indigenous national population were the Hebrew-speaking kingdoms of Yisrael and Yehuda (Israel and Judah), the Persian semi-sovereign province of Yahud (after Cyrus allowed the Judaean elites to return from the Babylonian exile), the Jewish kingdom of the Khashmonayim (who overthrew the Hellenists), and the Roman province of Judaea (after being a client-state kingdom). 

The persistence of these narratives reveals something deeper than mere disagreement over policy. Israel is not simply criticized; it is uniquely reframed through an inversion of Jewish history itself. They weaponize Jewish history against Jews by robbing and flipping it on its head, accusing the historically oppressed Jewish diasporic minority of expansionist imperialism, colonialism, and genocide. A people indigenous to the Levant, dispersed by empires, persecuted across continents, and nearly annihilated in the twentieth century, is cast as a foreign colonizer and perpetrator of the very crimes once committed against it. The inversion is not only offensive, but dangerously distorts the current conflict. Until that inversion is recognized for what it is, meaningful discourse about Israeli history and policy, and its place in the world, will remain fundamentally unmoored from reality.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)