The myth of ‘white’ Israel

‘Settlers, settlers, go back home, Palestine is not your home!’ This was the chant of a group of young women, many in headscarves or keffiyehs and waving Palestinian flags, filmed on a packed London Underground train last month. One woman added a new twist to the slogan: ‘Israel out of Palestine. Whiteys out of Palestine’, prompting a round of sniggers.

It was a scene all too familiar. It echoed countless other anti-Israel demonstrations that erupted in the wake of the Hamas-led attacks on Israel on 7 October last year, and that have continued throughout Israel’s war against the terrorist group in Gaza.

At American Ivy League universities, students pitched tent encampments across campus lawns and held ‘Resistance 101’ workshops, where student activists were assured there’s ‘nothing wrong with being a member of Hamas, being a leader of Hamas, being a fighter in Hamas’. At these elite institutions, all manner of hatred has been spewed towards Jews and Israelis. In Montreal, a university professor jeered ‘Go back to Poland’ at Jewish students. Masked protesters outside Columbia University chased a handful of Israel supporters down the street, yelling, ‘You ain’t from Palestine, go back to Europe’. The usual slurs, like ‘Zionazi’ and ‘murderers’, have been hurled across manicured college greens.

It’s hardly surprising that the refrain of ‘Go back to Poland’ – or some variation of it – has become a mainstay among the anti-Semitic taunts at ‘pro-Palestine’ protests. These displays of hatred by those who likely consider themselves progressive are, in fact, the product of a carefully crafted lie. It’s a lie that’s been swallowed wholesale by students at universities where ‘white-identified’ individuals are encouraged to attend five-week ‘anti-racism’ workshops, and where undergraduates can register for courses on ‘settler colonialism’ in the United States and Israel.

It’s the lie that leads the absurdly named ‘Queers for Palestine’ activists to march alongside bearded Islamists who, to put it lightly, might not fully embrace the intersectionality between trans rights and Islam. It’s the lie that paints Israel as a nation of ‘white colonisers’, and Israelis as Europeans, who supposedly planted themselves in a distant land of brown indigenous people.

Of course, the ‘white coloniser’ label is simply false. For brevity’s sake, let’s set aside millennia of Jewish history, which tells of a continuous Jewish presence on the land that is now modern Israel. Not to mention the fact that the Jewish diaspora is the product of waves of forced scattering from Jews’ ancestral homeland, largely due to wars and persecution.

Instead, let’s go back to 14 May 1948, when Israel formally declared its independence, coinciding with the expiry of the British Mandate for Palestine. This came months after the United Nations adopted Resolution 181 (II) – a measure accepted by Jewish leaders – which recommended partitioning the land into a Jewish state and an Arab state.

Following Israel’s declaration, two significant events reshaped the region. On 15 May 1948, a coalition of neighbouring Arab armies – those of Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Jordan and Egypt – launched an assault on the fledgling Jewish State. At the same time, a sweeping expulsion of Jews began across North Africa, the Middle East and the Gulf, targeting an entire ethnic group that had lived in these lands for thousands of years.

Between 1948 and the early 1970s, nearly a million Jews were forced from their homes across the region, effectively erasing centuries-old communities. Iraq’s once thriving Jewish population of 130,000 was reduced to near extinction, with 120,000 fleeing by the early 1950s. Yemen’s 50,000 Jews disappeared in the span of a year from 1949, while Syria’s 30,000 Jews were driven out by escalating violence.

In North Africa, Egypt’s 80,000-strong Jewish community dwindled to just a few dozen, driven out by a succession of anti-Jewish laws. Libya expelled its 38,000 Jews by the 1960s. Algeria’s 140,000 Jews had mostly left for France by 1962. Morocco was once home to a large Jewish community, with a population numbering between 250,000 and 350,000. However, rising Arab nationalism forced most to emigrate, with only a couple of thousand remaining today.

This purge didn’t occur in a vacuum. Jews and Christians in the Islamic world had long been relegated to second-class status, forced to pay special taxes and subjected to arbitrary and discriminatory laws. The mass expulsions following Israel’s creation were simply the culmination of a long history of subjugation.

Today, around 50 per cent of Israel’s Jewish population is of Mizrahi descent – Jews whose parents and grandparents were forcibly expelled from neighbouring Muslim lands. Their ancestors had likely never set foot in Europe.

Israel’s ethnic makeup is approximately 73 per cent Jewish and 19 per cent Muslim, with Christians, Druze and other minorities making up the rest. All Israeli citizens are afforded equal rights under the law, including religious and political freedom. Israel is, in every sense, a Middle Eastern melting pot.

The claim that Israel is a ‘white’ coloniser nation is a myth cooked up by identity politics. The only way that the average keffiyeh-wearing student protester is able to understand the Israel-Palestine conflict is through this identitarian lens. Because whiteness has become shorthand for privileged oppressors, the Israelis must be ‘white’ in contrast to the ‘brown’ Palestinians – thus making Israel an acceptable target of woke vitriol. This simplistic fantasy is just another attempt to delegitimise and demonise the Jewish State.

There is an irony in the slurs that were yelled out on the London Underground last month. Israel is a diverse nation, a place where many people rub along. ‘Whites out of Palestine’ is an absurd chant. Israelis do not segregate themselves on racial or ethnic lines. Sadly, the same could probably not be said about those protesting against them.

Rachel O’Donoghue is the senior editor of HonestReporting, based in Jerusalem.