Everyone is indigenous, unless they are Jews.

Israel is the only country expected to undo history.

photo: Cole Keister/Unsplash

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This is a guest essay by Melissa Brodsky, a writer focused on media literacy, modern antisemitism, and history.

You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.

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People seem to love playing the “what about” game.

You’ve probably heard this hypothetical thrown around: What if Native Americans came to our homes today and demanded the keys?

Okay, I’m game. Let’s play. But let’s first get our terms straight.

What exactly is a colonizer? By working definition, it is a foreign power that uses military force to conquer a land, displace, or subjugate its indigenous population, and claim the territory for its own empire.

Here’s the harsh reality: The winners of history are almost always colonizers. In the case of the United States, wars were fought, territory was conquered, and the U.S. won.

Let me be perfectly clear: I’ve always thought it was horrific, and it makes me sick to my stomach to look back at the atrocities that paved the way for the country we live in today. But I also carry zero personal guilt for it. I was born here centuries later. I had absolutely nothing to do with it.

This is how human history has worked across the entire globe since the dawn of time. Rulers find land they want, they fight for it, and they take it. Almost every single modern border on Earth was drawn with a sword and cemented in blood.

If we’re going to casually throw around the word “colonizer,” let’s pull out the receipts. When you look at the largest empires in human history, the strategy is identical: military force, displacement, and subjugation.

The British claimed a whopping 24 percent of the Earth’s surface, violently displacing populations across North America, Australia, India, and Africa. The Russians conquered their way across Eurasia, swallowing up indigenous Siberian tribes and Central Asian territories. The Spanish steamrolled indigenous empires like the Aztecs and Incas, extracting their wealth to build a sprawling stronghold across the Americas. The French carved up massive chunks of Africa and Southeast Asia, forcing millions to assimilate.

Yes, there are more, but those examples are enough to make the point. Nobody is marching in the streets demanding modern Brits hand Australia back to the Aboriginal peoples. Nobody expects modern Spaniards to surrender South America. The world accepts that these empires fought wars, borders shifted, and history kept moving.

But there’s this glaring difference between those European empires and the Arab conquests. The British do not pretend they sprouted out of the ground in India. The Spanish acknowledge they were conquerors in Mexico.

Now, look at the Arab conquests. Starting in the 7th century, Arab empires exploded out of the Arabian Peninsula. Through brutal military force, they conquered their way across the Levant, North Africa, and the broader Middle East. They imposed their language, culture, and religion on the actual indigenous populations of those regions — Jews, Samaritans, Copts, Arameans, and Berbers.

And they are still doing it today. Take the Kurds, for example. They are an indigenous Middle Eastern people numbering in the tens of millions. They have no state. They are actively oppressed, marginalized, and bombed by Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and Iran. Yet, there are no global campus encampments demanding a Kurdish state, and no one marches in the streets calling Arab nations “colonizers” for occupying Kurdish land.

Instead, the Arab conquests run the ultimate historical grift: They are colonizers who actively claim to be the indigenous natives of the exact lands they conquered. Most notably in “Palestine.” They successfully colonized the region, and now demand the world treat them as the original inhabitants while violently rejecting the actual indigenous people trying to return.

If you want to see just how much leeway Islamic empires have gotten for their violent conquests, look at the Ottomans.

For over a thousand years, Constantinople was the crown jewel of the Byzantine Empire, a Greek, Christian civilization. In 1453, the Ottoman Turks laid siege to the city, took it by force, and claimed it. They did not just take the land; that was not enough for them. They also took the Hagia Sophia, the world’s most famous church, and turned it into a mosque. And then renamed the city Istanbul.

They kept going. They spent centuries conquering their way through the Middle East, North Africa, and deep into Europe, subjugating indigenous populations and forcing them to live as second-class citizens, known in Arabic as dhimmis.

Where are the protests demanding that modern Turkish citizens pack their bags and hand Istanbul back to the Greeks? Crickets. Nobody is demanding the dismantling of Turkey. The world grants them the ultimate conqueror’s privilege.

The irony gets even more ironic: After World War I, Western powers like the UK and France dismantled the Ottoman Empire.

Fast forward to today, and those exact same Western nations, along with Canada and Australia, are paralyzed by their own post-colonial guilt. We are watching what many cultural commentators call “reverse colonization” play out in real time. Populations from the Middle East, North Africa, and former colonies are migrating in massive numbers to the very countries that once fought or conquered them.

A shortlist example, but in places like London, Paris, and Sydney, Western governments are bending over backward to accommodate these shifting demographics. Entire neighborhoods are fundamentally changing. The West is voluntarily allowing its cultural borders to be reshaped from the inside out, without a single shot being fired. It is truly astounding.

And then we get to Israel. Wow, the hypocrisy is … there are no words. And the international obsession is codified. Just look at the numbers: From 2015 through 2025, the United Nations General Assembly adopted an astonishing 278 resolutions exclusively condemning Israel, compared to just 91 resolutions for the entire rest of the world combined.

Israel gets three times the condemnation of every other nation on the planet put together.

Meanwhile, Western countries are actively dismantling their own cultural borders in the name of tolerance. Yet the moment Israel — this tiny country — fights to secure its physical borders and protect its indigenous identity from those exact same regional forces, they are branded as the “ultimate evil.” People have not stopped going insane over this.

Israel is held to a standard that literally no other country on Earth is expected to meet. The “But, but Israel colonizer club” crowd loves to push the lie that all Jews left the Middle East 2,000 years ago, became white Europeans, and then suddenly showed up in 1948.

That is so wildly false.

There has been a continuous Jewish presence in the Levant for over 3,000 years. Even after the Romans, the Byzantines, the Crusaders, the Arabs, and the Ottomans tried to ethnically cleanse them, Jews never entirely left. You cannot colonize a land you never vacated.

Jews are a colonizer who decolonized.

Yet, the world grants the British, Russians, Spanish, Americans, and Arab empires infinite grace for the atrocities of their massive conquests. The West allows itself to be guilt-tripped into handing over the keys to its own cultural homes, and in many instances, their physical homes, while aggressively demanding that Israel do the same.

Israel is not allowed the same “free pass,” the right to self-defense, or the basic right to exist at all, which every other nation is granted without a second thought.

So, if we are going to “what about” our way through who has a right to be where, what about that?

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