Colonists Of Their Motherland

Anti-Zionist (=anti-Semite) poster Christopher Day on Daily Kos:

“[…] Israel is a settler colony engaged in the ongoing displacement of an indigenous population from their lands.” (screenshot)

To each age, until the End of Days, may they come speedily amen, its own form of Jew-hatred: the 19th century saw the rise of pseudoscientific racial theories when the old “Christ-killer” myth had turned stale, and the end of the 20th century gave rise to anti-Zionism and “opposition to Jewish colonialism” as the acceptable form today, now that racism-based arguments are taboo. For the argument that the Jews are not allowed a state of their own, an argument that sparks outrage when leveled against any other nation, the narrative of “opposition to colonialism” is the most frequent justification given. This is the argument I will now address.

Colonialism necessarily assumes two things: a motherland and its colonies. Settlers emigrate from their motherland into a different land and inhabit areas of it, which are the colonies. The colonies may or may not keep ties with the motherland, but one thing is certain: if the colonies already belonged to another people at the time of colonization, then the colonists will be, at the very least, reminded of their being colonists, of their having arrived from a motherland.

In many cases, the colonists are not accepted by the previous inhabitants, and struggles may ensue to drive them away. If those inhabitants are generous, they would just expel the colonists back to their motherland rather than massacre them. The colonists themselves may, if their toll proves too high, opt to return to the motherland of their own accord. The crucial point is that the colonists have a motherland to fall back onto.

A well-known example is Algeria: it was conquered by France in 1830, and colonized by the French subsequently. By 1960, there were over a million colonists (called pieds-noirs) in Algeria, many of them the third generation of French colonists to be born in Algeria. Algeria was, as far as they were concerned, their native land. But in 1962, Charles de Gaulle granted Algeria independence, and as the Oran Massacre of that year had made it clear that the colonists would not be treated generously if they decided to stay, thousands of pieds-noirs fled to France—to the motherland.

So now world opinion posits Israel as a settler colony and the “Palestinians” in the place of the Algerians. However, analogies should always be checked for reasonable accuracy if they are to be given weight. If Israel, then, is a colony, what is the motherland?

This isn’t an area Leftists like to go; understandably, because if you press them to investigate that issue, they realize the analogy breaks down. There is no motherland for the Jews to return to. That is because (take a deep breath) Israel is the Jews’ motherland!

For 2,000 years the Jews were neither in their motherland nor in colonies—they were in exile. Their hosts rarely approved. In 19th century Europe, it was not just the first Zionists, but also many of the anti-Semites of the age, who called for an exodus of Jews from Europe and “back to Palestine”. You can see it even in German road-signs just before World War II: “Juden nach Palästina!”, say those signs. How ironic, then, that the anti-Semites of our day are screaming, “Jews out of Palestine!” As Yediot Achronot right-wing columnist Uri Elitzur once quipped, commenting on Israel’s having to play the World Cup as a European rather than Asian team, “We’re here in Asia because the Europeans didn’t want us in Europe, and we’re playing there as a European team because the Asians didn’t want us as an Asian team” (by “here in Asia” he was referring to being physically situated in Israel, and by “the Asians didn’t want us” he was referring to the Arab ban of Israel from, among other things, participating in Asian sporting events).

Now the anti-Semites of the world are saying we aren’t entitled to our motherland. The “generous” (or should that be “more naïve”) of them say the Jews ought to accept life under an Arab-ruled “Palestine” (in other words: go back to experiencing the Diaspora, but in our historical land), and the less generous (I would say, “less caring to hide their Jew-hatred under a semblance of consideration”) would say the Jews should go back where their Zionist ancestors came from: Europe, Asia and so on. Repatriation, as if Europe and Asia had ever been our motherlands. As if Europe had never been the site of genocide for us, and as if Moroccan, Iraqi and Yemenite Jews had never suffered the humiliation (true humiliation, not the manufactured tears the “Palestinians” sell to the West’s TreasonMedia!) of life as dhimmis under Muslim rule. A return to exile, that’s what that demand is! But who cares about those facts.

The Leftists do not want to accept that the state of Israel is the Jewish motherland, and that any other place is exile. When the French pieds-noirs felt the pressure in 1962, they had the motherland, France, to flee to. Jews in Israel have nowhere to go. Not to Muslim Asia, not to anti-Semitic, Muslim-accommodating Europe, and even the safety of Jews in the USA cannot be taken for granted (the American Left is becoming bolder and bolder in its displays of anti-Semitism each day, and ready to side with the Muslims, whether out of appeasement or solidarity). Secular Zionism was born of the recognition that there was no future for the Jewish nation in exile, that the line, “Berlin is Jerusalem for us” was wrong-headed (and indeed it was proved to be so in the end). Zionism’s deep roots in the Jewish religion are expressed in the incessant reminders, for example in the three daily prayers, that the Land of Israel (yes, the Land of Israel—not “Palestine”, named for the Philistines by the Romans in 135 CE, in order to eradicate the memory of Judea, of the original Jewish possession) is that which the Jews set their eyes on, with Jerusalem, Zion, as its capital. After 2,000 years, G-d has kept His promise to gather His people back into His land, no matter the means by which it was carried out (secular Zionism—a stumbling-block for the Naturei Karta traitors).

However, in the end of this, I did find a Leftist argument addressing mine. It was on the Daily Kos thread “The Problem of Anti-Semitism”, which I responded to a while back but has since been deleted (chalk up another point for having your own blog). It was an excerpt from Evan Jones’ anti-Zionist blog Alert and Alarmed, which is itself slated to shut down soon, according to its November 6th post. And the excerpt itself is part of a series of letters to the editor for the loony-lefty (and anti-Semitic) British newspaper The Independent. The letter is dated to August 18, 2006:

(writer) Colin Readman, Twyford, Berkshire

Sir: I read Alex Swanson’s letter (17 August), which stated that the descendants of the Jews should have the right of return to Palestine, and remarked how relevant it was to my own life, as I had just returned home to find a nice young Welsh couple occupying my house. They claimed that their Celtic ancestors had lived here 1500 years previously, and therefore it now belonged to them.

Naturally I accepted this reasonable argument, and I am now negotiating my move back to the forests of my own ancestral Saxony. Of course, I’d better hurry, before over 200 million “returning” Americans overwhelm the European housing market.

On the original Daily Kos thread, the letter was given under the title, “Your Lease Is Expired!” That’s an apt summary of the argument of that letter, and that issue, the issue of “lease expiry”, is what I wish to address now.

The argument is that, if a long time has passed since a particular nation lost hold of its land, it loses its claim to it in favor of those who have gotten hold of it in the meantime. When pertaining to the Jews and Israel, the argument is somewhat of an improvement (comparatively speaking)—here is an admission that the Jews were indeed first, thus even more deserving of being considered “indigenous” than the Palestinians. But, of course, the argument swiftly defuses that concession with the declaration that the long duration of time has voided the Jews’ claim to possession of the land.

It looks good (and, in all fairness, I have to give Mr. Readman props for the attempt—Leftists usually just regurgitate tired old stuff instead), but it suffers from a fatal flaw: the duration after which “the lease expires” is left hanging at mid-air. Or, to put in another way: how many years are required for a nation’s lease upon their original land to expire?

You see, this “Your Lease Is Expired!” argument can be applied to many more situations than that of Israel. More: it could even be a double-edged sword that cuts at the “Palestinians”. Leftists are all too eager to cry about the “dispossession” of the “Palestinians”. By their own admission, the “Palestinians” left their lands for a duration of time. If we take 1947 to be the year they left, that would be nearly 60 years of not living on their lands (in reality, many areas within Israel’s internationally recognized borders, such as the Galilee, are densely inhabited by Arabs undisturbed by the events of 1947–9. But don’t tell anybody, because it leaves the collateral damage of lots of anti-Israel arguments behind it). Now tell me this: why are 2,000 years of exile enough to void the lease, while 60 years of exile aren’t? Or, again: just give me a number signifying the duration after which a lease expires.

Let’s take this even further, going back to Algeria: as I said, a lot of the French colonists born in Algeria by 1962 had had their families there from as far back as the last quarter of the 19th century. Yet our dear moonbats would say they had to leave Algeria in the name of “decolonial justice”, “reparations”, “giving the lands back to their rightful owners” and all that. But, but… they’d been there for nearly a century! They have their new lease! Or maybe let’s go to the Native Americans: a lot of them have now been absent for more than a century from places they previously inhabited. Are those places theirs or not? The Leftists aren’t settled on that question: some say no, it’s too far back in the past, let bygones be bygones et cetera; some say yes, they were dispossessed just like the “Palestinians”, and just like them they’re still entitled to return to whatever areas they wish.

The fact that the Leftists themselves are divided on this question proves my point: they can’t say what the expiry date of a lease of land is. They can’t because it’s not even a legal point, it’s an ad hoc political device tailored to fit current needs. They don’t want their own homes to be reclaimed by Native Americans, so the Native Americans’ lease is expired; they want to stick it to the USA, so the Native Americans’ lease is still active; they hate Israel and the Jews, so the Jews’ lease is expired and that of the “Palestinians” is still active. That’s all there is to it. As with their off-the-wall alliances (hippie nudists with Muslim burka-pushers), their arguments are fashioned by the conveniences of the day.

They can call us colonialists, but we have G-d’s word and history shouting that Israel is our motherland. And they can argue our lease is expired, but they can never back it up with any consistent principle, and we have G-d’s promise that our “lease” will never expire. If they really want to clear things up, they had better take it to G-d. I do have an idea that He doesn’t particularly like people calling Him a liar. He keeps His promises—always has in the past, always will in the future.