For years, the 1967 Six Day War was seen by many as a watershed moment in what was called the Arab-Israeli conflict. Israel’s conquest of the West Bank and Gaza was perceived as a turning point, and the resolution of the conflict was thought to lie in the exchange of land for peace. Now, however, the conflict has been reframed by Israel’s opponents as a struggle for justice by the Palestinians. The watershed moment has shifted back to Israel’s 1948 creation and the Arab population’s flight from the territory that became Israel at its creation. Hence, the renaming of the conflict to Israel-Palestine.
This Nakhba or “catastrophe” narrative and its settler colonial corollary now dominate oppositional frameworks for attacking Israel. The point is to demonize Israel as a colonial usurper, undermine its legitimacy, and ultimately undo what adversaries see as the original sin of Israel’s creation. Whether this reversal is accomplished through the annihilation or emigration of the Jews, or by overwhelming Israel’s Jewish population through the return of the descendants of displaced Palestinians varies by speaker and over time. But the goal is to remove Israel as a sovereign Jewish state from the region.
Despite calls for “context” to justify the rape and slaughter of civilians on October 7, 2023, the settler colonial narrative selectively and often incorrectly uses Jewish history to build its case for Palestinian justice. These distortions make resolution of the conflict, or at least one remotely favorable to the Palestinians, less likely. If the Arabs and the world want to help the Palestinians extricate themselves from the awful situation in which they find themselves, they can start by providing better “context” by accurately representing Jewish history.
For the settler colonial narrative, Jews were a European people and Jewish Middle East history begins around World War I. In reality, however, most Jews have not lived in Europe and they have a 3,000-year unbroken record of living in the land of Israel and other Middle East locations. For more than 95% of Jewish history, the majority of Jews lived in the Middle East. It was only for a very brief 150 years, from approximately 1800-1945, that a majority of Jews lived in Europe.
The European Jewish population’s rapid rise began in the mid-1700s and most likely resulted from increasing cultivation of the potato in Eastern Europe. As in Ireland, the potato afforded people better nourishment per acre than most alternative crops. This rapid increase in Europe’s Jewish population is commensurate with the overall population increase of the non-Jewish European communities. In the Middle East, by contrast, the introduction of the potato (before modern irrigation technology) was much less impactful because the climate and topography were less suited for its cultivation. Starting in the mid-1700s the balance of Jewish population between Europe and the Middle East shifted decidedly toward Europe.
The large European Jewish population declined rapidly after the assassination of Tsar Nicholas II in 1881 and the widespread attacks on Jews it set off. Between this date and World War I, over 2 million Jews left Europe, primarily for America. And after the Nazi murder of two out of three of Europe’s remaining Jews during the Second World War, the proportion of European Jews as a percent of the global Jewish population slipped below 50%. It has been in continuous decline ever since and at present constitutes less than 10% of the global Jewish population.
In the early 1800s, the political situation for Jews and non-Jews across the Middle East and Europe began to change radically. The decline of the Ottoman Empire unleashed a series of nationalist movements; Serbs, Greeks, Romanians, and others fought and eventually achieved political independence. By mid-century, the Hapsburg Empire also began to fracture and other groups including Jews began thinking about establishing politically independent homelands. Modern Jewish nationalism, or Zionism, was little different from other nationalisms of that period. All wanted to break away from the reigning power, be it Ottoman or Hapsburg, and govern themselves.
Most nations that obtained statehood during the early part of this period tended to have a “hardcore of territory inhabited by a particular majority.” Other groups, particularly the Armenians and Greeks had an ethnic “hardcore,” but they also had more widely and thinly distributed populations. The Jews were relatively unique in that they were widely disperse but had no hardcore territory inhabited exclusively by kin. Even in the Russian Empire’s Pale of Settlements, the large concentration of Jews was deeply intermixed with other nationalities, particularly Poles, Ukrainians, Lithuanians, and later Russians.
For the Armenians, the problem of dispersal was resolved by the Turkish genocide and the ethnic cleansing that forced most of those not killed to migrate to Armenia’s historic heartland in the Caucasus mountains. There is an interesting parallel between the struggle of Armenians around the turn of the 20th century and Palestinians after 1967. Both groups used, and in the Palestinian case still use, terrorism and mass casualty attacks on civilians. The intent was/is to provoke harsh reprisals in order to propel sympathetic outside powers to force the local power to grant them statehood. Almost 100 years later, the Armenians obtained statehood, but this probably had more to do with idiosyncrasies of the Soviet Union’s federal system and its breakup than with the slaughter of innocent Turks.
For the Greeks, the problem of dispersal was resolved by defeat in war with Turkey in 1922. After the war, the two governments negotiated a population exchange whereby over a million Greeks and almost half a million Turks moved to their respective homelands. An interesting Isreal-Palestine comparison is that after the Greek-Turkish population exchange, both sides accepted their refugees and integrated them into their societies. In the case of Isreal-Palestine, despite a population exchange of approximately 750,000 Arabs and 800,000 Jews during and immediately after Isreal’s War for Independence, the Palestinians have not been effectively resettled (with the exception of Jordan) into the recipient Arab societies. Some argue, with good cause, that this was a deliberate policy to leave the Palestinian population in wretched circumstances in order to incite hatred of Israel and keep the conflict alive.
For the Jews, the problem of statehood was more complicated than for many others because the Jews had lost their “hardcore of territory” after defeat in the Third Jewish-Roman War in 136 CE. Unlike more distant Roman provinces, Judea was too strategically located for Rome not to do everything necessary to keep it. Consequently, to end continual Jewish rebellion the Romans decided to eradicate the area’s Jewish population.
According to Roman historian Cassius Dio, Rome killed 580,000 Jews in this war and those few who survived were enslaved and deported. A modern review places the number killed at one million. As a result of this defeat, the “hardcore” of the Jewish population was wiped out. However, a small number of Jews in Israel’s Galilee who did not participate in the rebellion survived to form the nucleus of a two-millennium continual presence of Jews in the land of Israel.
The settler colonial narrative clearly misinterprets the extraordinarily long history of Jews in Isreal and the Middle East, and it fails to situate Jewish nationalism among the legitimate forms of nationalism arising from the breakdown of the Ottoman and Hapsburg Empires.
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