The Palestinians' Dishonest Use of Maps

Claims that Israel is colonialist and imperialist are unabridged nonsense. A dictionary and a map are all that is needed to prove it. Too bad that both seem to be in short supply.

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This is a guest essay written by Nachum Kaplan of Moral Clarity.

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

Share this essay using the link: https://www.futureofjewish.com/p/the-palestinians-dishonest-use-of-maps

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A month or so ago, The Guardian (a tawdry Marxist newspaper) gave a full 5,000 words to Rashid Khalidi, a former spokesman for the murderous Palestine Liberation Organization terror group, to repeat the provably false claims. He wrote that the Zionist movement was “settler colonialist” and “aimed to replace the Palestinian people in their ancestral homeland.”

Publication of such lies shows that fact-checking and verification are dead — no less subservient to “the narrative” — in a worrying amount of mainstream media. It is concerning, but it is not mysterious.

Even in this post-Modernist dystopia, words have meanings. Imperialism means a state extending its power and influence, traditionally through military force and colonialization. Imperialist states build empires, which are extensive group of states that a single monarch, sovereign state, or oligarchy rules over.

Israel is a tiny nation-state that must fight regular wars just to maintain its borders. It is only 420 kilometers (261 miles) long and 115 kilometers (71 miles) across at its widest point. That alone makes claims of imperialism absurd.

The Palestinian propaganda machine has successfully gotten people to forget this by publishing maps showing only Israel and the disputed territories, which make Israel look huge and the Palestinian areas look small and shrinking.

However, if one pulls back a bit, it becomes clear that Israel is a tiny country surrounded by an Arab Muslim empire, now broken into nation-states at least in part due to the collapse of Europe’s empires.

Far from expanding, as an empire does, Israel has been shrinking in its pursuit of sovereignty and peace, even from before conception.

Britain, history’s most duplicitous nation, carved Transjordan (now Jordan) out of British-era Mandatory Palestine in 1921, instead of fulfilling its legal obligations under the Balfour Declaration, and San Remo Resolution, to nurse the mandate into a Jewish homeland. The fetal Jewish state lost about 78 percent of its legally promised territory before it was even born.

Britain’s treatment of Israel remains devious, supporting it on the one hand and undermining it on the other. Britain’s foreign secretary and former Conservative prime minister David Cameron is smarmy and untrustworthy. He will be out of office soon.

Israel declared independence in 1948, and both gained and lost territory in the First Arab-Israeli War that immediately followed when Arab states attacked it, creating the Palestinian refugee problem. Israel has twice occupied the Sinai Peninsula in Egypt (1956 and 1967) in defensive wars, and twice given it back (1957 and 1982) in exchange for peace.

Israel gave up parts of the West Bank in 1993 to Palestinians, and to Jordan in 1994, all of Gaza in 2005, and offered to give up 95 percent of the West Bank in 2008. This is the opposite of what empires do.

Charges that Israel is colonialist are likewise nonsense. Jews are the indigenous people of Israel. You cannot colonize yourself. The Arabs, whose ancestral homeland is Arabia, are just one in a long line of colonizers in Israel. They even built a mosque on top of the Jewish temple in a colonialist act aimed at erasing Jewish history and identity.

Israel’s reconstitution — the third Jewish commonwealth — was an act of decolonization. Jewish insurgents drove the colonialist British out of Mandatory Palestine, something Jewish insurgents have been doing, or trying to do, since even before the Sicarii rebels at Masada circa 72 to 73 AD.

Colonialization requires a Mother Country, an imperialist entity from which colonialists set out to claim land. To the extent that there is a Mother Country, it is a case of Jews returning to their Motherland, not setting out from one.

The Jews returning to their ancestral homeland were refugees, not colonizers. Some came fleeing persecution in Europe, many were indigenous Mizrahi Jews ethnically cleansed out of Arab lands. Arab Christian communities have likewise been purged. The idea that refugees fleeing persecution are colonialists makes no sense. Also lost in this narrative is the fact there were always Jews in the Land of Israel, even if they were a minority without sovereignty.

Even the Palestinian propaganda writers, who never let facts interfere with a lie, recognize that there being no colonizing Mother Country or imperial power makes the claim of colonialism specious. That is why they resort to the sophistry of “settler colonialism.”

Colonialism also suggests that there has been a displacement of people, such as what happened to the Native Americans and Indigenous Australians. The story of a great Arab replacement is propagandistic fiction. The Arab population in Israel and disputed territories has increased tenfold since Israel’s inception.

What is more, and this gets nowhere near the attention it deserves, the Palestinians displaced in the 1948 war are still in the land of British-era Mandatory Palestine.

Where populations are not displaced or replaced, colonialism usually implies the subjugation of an existing population, such as the British in India or the Dutch in Indonesia. Yet the Zionists gave full citizenship to the Arab population, which is why Israel’s two million Arab citizens enjoy more rights than anyone in the Arab world.

One can contrast this with somewhere such as Australia, which was colonized through a mix of traditional colonial takeover and settlers displacing — murdering — indigenous Australians. Unlike in Israel, where Arabs received full rights, Indigenous Australians only got the right to vote in 1962 — 192 years after the British arrived, and 62 years after Britain’s colonies federated to become Australia.

Palestinian propagandists and terror apologists always point to Israel’s settlers in Judea and Samaria (which Jordan rebranded as the West Bank in a public relations masterstroke, of which I am awe) as evidence of colonialism. This is nonsense.

Under the 1917 Balfour Declaration and the customary international law principle of uti possidetis juris, Israel has sovereign title to Judea and Samaria (and Gaza). Before the 1948 war, there were 40,000 Jews in Judea and Samaria, and 17,000 in East Jerusalem. The Jordanian army ethnically cleansed them through massacre and expulsion. Jews returning to where they were forced out of just a few decades earlier is not colonialism.

The whole colonialist narrative is a calibrated lie, the world’s acceptance of this lie is disgraceful, and the media’s perpetration of it is a perfect example of why no one trusts the media anymore, or ever will again.

One reason that Palestinian lies are so effective is that many Westerners can view the Israel-Palestinian conflict only through the eyes of their own history. Americans reckoning with their racist past see the Middle East through a racial prism, which is why Jews get framed as “White oppressors” despite most Jews not being White. The Arab world never makes the “White oppressor” claim because they know that most Jews are not White, so it will not resonate.

Europeans reckoning with their colonialist past insist on imposing this prism on the Israel-Palestinian dispute, despite it not fitting. It is an unimaginative projection.

Marxists (rebranded as “progressives”), who are mainstream again despite communism being history’s most reliably worst form of government, insist on seeing everything through a prism of “oppressed versus oppressor.” This also does not fit since Jews are history’s most oppressed people during the last few-thousand years.

The world’s fetish with Jews and Israel makes them overlook that there is a true imperialist force in the Middle East: the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Islamists, including the Iran-backed Hamas, want to do away with nation-states in favor of a Caliphate (a political-religious state comprising the Muslim community and the lands and peoples under its dominion in the centuries following the death of the Prophet Muhammad).

Thus, Iran has expanded its influence into Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, and the Palestinian Territories — and that is just in the Middle East. Some 49 countries have a Muslim majority population; who knows how deep and wide the Iranian octopus reaches into all of them.

Either way, the idea that Israel is colonialist and imperialist may be the most absurd of all the lies perpetrated about the Jewish state.

Even a child with a map can see that Israel is not an empire.

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