By Alex Gordon
HAIFA, Israel — In the world of “progressives,” Israel’s struggle for existence is presented as something outdated, unfashionable, and not modern. This perception is linked to a picture of the conflict that is convenient and profitable for them. The Israelis are seen as imperialists oppressing the aboriginal Arabs. But the fact is that the Jews are themselves natives! They are the indigenous people who have lived in this region for over 3000 years, whereas the Arabs arrived here much later, in the seventh century AD.
The “progressives” have a guilt complex about any natives. As Americans, Canadians, Australians, New Zealanders, they feel guilty about their colonization of Indians and natives. Israelis did not colonize anyone. They live on the land they settled on before the Arabs did. “Progressive humanity” does not accept Israelis as local natives in the Middle East. Therefore, those are not seen as victims even after the horrific massacre in southern Israel. They are seen as alien colonizers, white people who have come to exploit the “colored” natives who are waging a national liberation struggle against the colonizers.
The scope of antisemitic demonstrations on all five continents after the pogrom of October 7, 2023 surpassed the most pessimistic consequences: the people of the victims of the pogrom and the Holocaust began to be presented as criminals, as “white people” oppressing “colored” Arabs, Palestinian fighters against “colonialism.” The Holocaust, which made Jews the greatest victims of violence in history, was forgotten and excluded from the list of the greatest crimes against humanity, and the events of October 7, 2023 – mass murder, violence, abuse and kidnapping – were overshadowed. Jews have been dressed up as the colonizers they never were. It is not Israel that is the colonizer but – the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Russia. The US and Canada colonized the Indians, Australia and New Zealand colonized the natives, Russia is home to 160 nations, 159 of which were colonized by the Russian people. Contrary to the picture of the “progressives,” the Jews are the indigenous people in this region and the Arabs are the aliens and colonizers.
“Progressives” mistakenly see an “unfair” picture, for they catch the Israelis at the peak of development and the Palestinian Arabs in a state of decline. It should be considered that the developed countries of the West and international organizations have paid the Palestinian Arabs trillions of dollars for decades of Middle East conflict. Using these funds for peaceful purposes, the Palestinian Arabs could have surpassed Singapore’s standard of living long ago, if they were interested in a high standard of living rather than a high standard of death. When foreign investment is used by “Palestinian” representatives not for national creation but for the destruction of another people’s prosperous existence, there is a continuous war in which the “unhappy” constantly miss chances to become “happy”. The inability and unwillingness to use vast amounts of money for creation and prosperity shows the material and moral bankruptcy of a nation that could have become rich but chose to live at the expense of others, in permanent war, terror and destructiveness. The Palestinian Arabs have appeared before progressive humanity as a people not self-sufficient, unable to build and develop. Its leaders lead it from war to war. They have built a state of terror with an underground infernal ward whose sole purpose is to destroy the Jewish state.
The great sympathy for the Palestinian Arabs is due to the fact that as “oppressed natives” they are forgiven for their unwillingness to take care of themselves, to build a prosperous country and their willingness to engage in terror. They have repeatedly refused to get a Palestinian state for the sake of destroying a Jewish one. They have earned the unique status of refugees, whose rights to that status have been handed down from generation to generation, and who live at someone else’s expense, on foreign investment and with no economic or cultural achievements.
There is a stark contrast between the Palestinian Arab society, backward in every respect, and the prosperous, wealthy Jewish state, with vast natural gas reserves, advanced technology, irrigation systems and high-end agriculture, and the strongest army. This contrast is perceived by “progressives” not as Israel’s achievements, but as the result of oppression of the natives. The banal, familiar picture of the oppression of the “happy” by the “unhappy” obscures the vision of the brutal terrorist struggle of the Palestinian Arabs against the native Jewish people. Support for this false picture is conflated with traditional antisemitism. The old, traditional antisemitism merges with the new Islamic antisemitism.
However, it is among the natives and indigenous peoples of the planet colonized by the ancestors of the “progressives” that Israelis are finding common ground. In July 2017, Indigenous Australians founded The Indigenous Friends of Israel. Munganbana Norman Miller, a spokesman for the newly formed movement, said, “Calling Israel an apartheid state is an outright lie. We natives know what apartheid is firsthand. Israel is the beacon of democracy in the Middle East, as evidenced by the Arab members of the Knesset and its Arab population, who live in peace and prosperity, enjoying democratic freedoms.”
The Indigenous Coalition for Israel (ICFI) is one of the organizations seeking to change perceptions. It has members from North and South America, Australia, Asia and Africa. ICFI has just opened an office to be located at the Friends of Zion Museum in Jerusalem.
The Millers (Norman and Barbara) stated, “Hamas is recognized as a terrorist organization in Australia and elsewhere, and the massacre, torture and mutilation of Israelis, many in their beds, burning families alive, raping women, beheading babies, killing children and the elderly, including Holocaust survivors, and kidnapping is an act of terrorism. It has awakened the bloodlust of Jews around the world, which is what it was intended to do. There can be no justification for it under any circumstances. […] Jews around the world are no longer safe in their homes, some remove their mezuzahs from their doors, wear nothing to indicate their Jewishness, children do not go to school, university students are forced to take exams in safe rooms. The attacks on Jews and Israelis by angry mobs, the cries for blood at the Russian airport, the tearing down of posters depicting kidnapped Jews, the streets of Australian cities filled with Hamas supporters rallying with calls to “Beat the Jews!” etc., etc. – there is a manifestation of Nazi Germany in this.”
Aboriginal friends of Israel understand what “progressives” don’t want to know: Israel is not a nation made up of white European Jews who came as refugees after the Holocaust. Israel has Jews of all colors. As many Jewish refugees came from Arab countries as Arabs left Israel as refugees in 1948. When Israel was reconstituted as a modern state in 1948, it was an act of decolonization, not colonization. Israel “decolonized” Gaza by withdrawing its troops from there and dismantling its settlements. Gaza responded to this decolonization by firing thousands of rockets at Israel, creating an underground hell whose main purpose is to kill Israelis and destroy the state of Israel. Unlike the “progressives” who call for decolonization, for the creation of two states for two peoples, Hamas calls things by their names: “From the river to the sea Palestine will be free”, that is, the entire area of Palestine will be free of Jews, of Israelis, that is, will be the territory of Judenrein (in German, free of Jews) in terms of the “final solution of the Jewish question” by Islamic neo-Nazis.
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Alex Gordon is a native of Kiev, Ukraine, and graduate of the Kiev State University and Haifa Technion (Doctor of Science, 1984). Immigrated to Israel in 1979. Full Professor (Emeritus) of Physics in the Faculty of Natural Sciences at the University of Haifa and at Oranim, the Academic College of Education.
Thank you for this. I got into this very argument with someone who bought into the false narrative that Jews were a European colonial power who displaced an indigenous Arab population. They didn’t know how to react when I called this out as a false narrative.
I would add that Arabs are themselves a colonial power. The Arabs are indigenous only to the Arabian peninsula. Throughout North Africa and the Middle East, they are colonizers, setting themselves up as the governing upper class, keeping the indigenous peoples such as the Copts, Kurds, Berbers, Chaldeans, Yazidis… and many others, under their heels. What the Israelis took from the Arabs was this status. This is the blow to their pride that drives the Arabs to such murderous level of hatred.