By Israel Medad
(JNS) — The framework of settler-colonialism has fixed Zionism within a box-cum-coffin. For more than 25 years, college students have been convinced by their professors that the only way to look at Israel (and a few other countries) is through the lens of a theoretical paradigm that emerged in the 1960s, although it essentially was the Communist critique of an unacceptable Jewish nationalism since the 1920s. Some of them, in turn, became diplomats, politicians, heads of organizations, and, most importantly, media people. In short, influencers.
Zionism, they claim, is foreign to the Middle East. It represents a white and European imperialist domination of an indigenous people.
But what if an optical perversion took place? What if a true and genuine review of the history of “Palestine” revealed an inverted presentation of what took place, and is taking place? What if the historical events had been juggled and rearranged?
What if, instead of an ancient Arab people called “Palestinians” having suffered an invasion of their homeland, what actually happened was that a foreign raiding people invaded a country that had its 2,000-year-old name altered from Judea to Palestine? And these invaders emerged not as the original “Palestinians,” but were and are Islamic colonialists who had subjugated the native Jewish population?
What if they were, quite simply, another part of a large Arabian tribal federation that coalesced around a new religion that set about to take over and settle large swathes of not only the Arabian Middle East, but of the Far East, Africa and on into Europe?
“Settler colonialism,” according to the literature, is racial and is a mode of domination. It is a social formation whereby persons, typically from Europe, live on and exercise sovereignty over land inhabited by Indigenous communities. Settler colonialism seeks to eliminate Indigenous populations and to replace their societies. Unlike “Franchise colonialism,” settler colonialism has endured into the present because “settler colonizers come to stay.” It is a “structure” and not just an event of economic exploitation and temporary residence by foreigners.
It can be argued by proponents of applying that theory to Zionism that “Israeli settler-colonialism indeed stands out as a peculiar phenomenon within the spectrum of global colonial history and practices, marked by distinct features that underscore its exceptionalism.” However, they counter themselves that due to Israel’s “deep entrenchment with U.S.-led imperialism,” an “evolution within the domain of settler-colonial practices” has permitted Zionism to adapt to changed dynamics. This “adaptation is marked by the strategic employment of innovative strategies that enable the continuation and justification of settler-colonial expansion.”
Have they thus trapped Zionism in an inescapable position? Or, is it possible to point out that, in essence, the real settler colonialists who engaged in military conquest, subjugation of native populations, forced conversions and empire-building were the Muslims themselves?
Fred M. Donner has written on those military crusades — the Islamic conquests of the seventh and eighth centuries C.E. As he outlines, in western Arabia, columns of troops were dispatched to bring all of Arabia under Medina’s control, commanded by Abu Bakr from 632 to 634. Here is a short summary to grasp the extent of that campaign.
After Yemen and northern Arabia fell, by 636 C.E., the Byzantine forces were shattered. Campaigns were begun against northern Mesopotamia and Armenia was invaded in 646 C.E. Next was Iraq. The Sasanian army of today’s Iran was defeated, and most of central Iraq was occupied.
Southernmost Iraq and then the Iranian highlands and the Iranian plateau collapsed. By 650, Muslim troops were on the fringes of Central Asia. Earlier, a front had been opened against Egypt. By 642, all of Egypt, including the coastal towns and most of the Nile Valley, was held by Muslims.
A second phase of conquests and expansion of the caliphal state brought under their control even more distant territories. These included southern France and on to India, the region south of the Caspian Sea and parts of northern Afghanistan. Tashkent was subdued in 741. The Lower Indus Valley was next, then Anatolia. Constantinople was attacked in 669 and several more times, all unsuccessfully.
From Egypt, they proceeded westward across North Africa to Libya and modern Tunisia. From North Africa, raids were launched into Visigothic Spain, and around 711, two Muslim armies crossed into Spain. They quickly seized control of much of the peninsula as far as the Pyrenees, including Toledo. The next century saw the immigration into Spain of significant numbers of Berber settlers and some Arabs, particularly from Syria, who became the ruling elite.
From Spain, the Muslims pushed across the Pyrenees into southern and central Gaul, but were defeated by Charles Martel near Poitiers in 732 C.E., saving France. Sicily fell in 831, and many Italian coastal towns, including Naples and Rome, were threatened. The raids and conquest against Berber groups in North Africa, especially, seemed to have been aimed at securing slaves.
Even without detailing the later Mamluks of the 13th century or the Ottoman Empire’s victories even unto the gates of Vienna in 1683, the extent of the territory conquered, the population subjugated, and the resulting religious colonization is enormous. And in 638 C.E., Jerusalem was taken.
In the seventh century, besides the occasional trader, no Arabs were residing in any significant number whatsoever in Judea-renamed-Palestine by the Romans. But the conquering Muslim armies reached Jerusalem, defeated the Byzantines (who had just retaken the city from the Sasanian Persians). Their conquest made them the settler colonialists of the country.
They were dislodged by the Crusader Kingdom but regained control in 1187. The territory of the Jewish commonwealth of Judea passed, once again, into the hands of a foreign occupier: the Ayyubi. The Ottomans came in 1516 and ruled, as colonialists, until the British conquest of 1917. The not that large Arab Muslim population of the territory of Palestine increased exponentially due to the arrival of Jews who developed the country economically under the regime of a British Mandate.
Is Zionism “settler-colonialism” or — instead of an Arab “Palestinian” people being threatened by Jews — is the story really that an Arab ethnic group invaded a land called by the non-Arab name of “Palestine,” who thereby become an artificial people, the ”Palestinians”? Was this the first instance of a Pallywood production?