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........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)