Worshipers pray in distance from each other at the Western Wall in Jerusalem’s Old City, amid coronavirus restrictions, March 26, 2020. Photo: Reuters / Ammar Awad.

The publication of Amnesty International’s latest report charging Israel with maintaining a “cruel system of apartheid” — and of trying to establish “Jewish domination and control over specific areas of strategic importance,” while treating Palestinians and Arab Israelis as “inferior non-Jewish racial group[s]” — set off a torrent of accusations in the media that Israel is comprised of settler interlopers (see here, here, and here).

But that’s not true.

The uncritical depiction of Jews as having “stolen” or “colonized” land belonging to the Palestinians is patently false. And the inaccurate portrayal erases the Jewish people’s ancient connection to Israel, while posing a danger to the Jewish state by delegitimizing the historical and cultural foundations upon which it was re-established after 2,000 years.

Colonialism is a practice of domination, characterized by the subjugation of one people by another, usually involving the transfer of a population to a new territory — where the arrivals live as permanent settlers while maintaining political allegiance to their country of origin.

History is full of examples of one society expanding by conquering land where it subsequently brought in its own people.

The ancient Greeks created colonies, as did the Romans, the Moors, and the Ottomans. However, it was in the 16th century that colonialism, due to technological advances in navigation, accelerated. By 1914, a majority of the world’s nations had at some point been colonized by European powers. Although the colonial era largely ended with the success of numerous national movements between the 1940s and 1960s, nearly four centuries of foreign control left a mark on many countries.

Amnesty International’s 280-page document, titled “Israel’s Apartheid Against Palestinians. Cruel System of Domination and Crime Against Humanity,” generated widespread media coverage (see here, here and here). And underlying the report’s faulty premise is an implied charge of colonialism perpetrated by Jewish Israelis.

Indeed, agenda-driven groups have long argued that the Jewish state is a colonial enterprise by likening it to the Anglo-Dutch control over South Africa. However, the validity of this analogy is belied by history.

When the Dutch and English empires arrived in South Africa, they displaced the region’s inhabitants. But these settlers had no grounds for settlement, no cause for war, and no knowledge of or affinity for the territory.

By contrast, Jews have lived in the Holy Land for millennia. And those Jews who, more recently, immigrated to what would become the modern state of Israel, were actually returning to their roots.

Indeed, research confirms that a Jewish nation first emerged in the Levantine region some 4,000 years ago. The Jewish population at the time cultivated the area of Canaan — comprising pre-1967 Israeli territory, the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and Lebanon — and eventually created the Kingdom of Israel in the north and the Kingdom of Judah in the south.

As such, the Land of Israel is where Jews became a people. It is where they achieved sovereignty before losing it, when the Roman Empire actually colonized the region, which resulted over time in much of the indigenous Jewish population either being forced into exile or killed.

It was, in fact, the Roman Empire that reorganized the area into the province of Judea — where the Jews were persecuted. Eventually, Rome stripped the region of this name, and assigned it a new colonial moniker: Syria Palaestina. This move was an attempt to erase the connection between the Jews and their homeland.

Though the Romans renamed the land, the Jewish people never forgot its origins. Beyond Biblical accounts, archeological evidence of Jewish life can be found in more than 30,000 sites across Israel. The Jewish people’s language, culture, holidays, rituals, liturgy, history, and even the word “Jew,” are all inseparable from the Holy Land.

Even when Jews were massacred and persecuted by Christian Crusaders or Arab or Ottoman invaders, the Jewish attachment to the area was never broken.

Some have traced the modern rebirth of Jewish self-determination to the 67-word letter written by then-British foreign secretary Arthur Balfour to Lord Walter Rothschild.

At the time of its publication, the 1917 Balfour Declaration was, in fact, supported by some Arabs living in British Mandatory Palestine. Many of them wanted to coexist peacefully in order to benefit from the economic boon being spearheaded by the Jewish population. In return, Jewish leaders promised to consider the economic viability of an adjacent Arab state, and, if possible, to help develop its resources.

This spirit of cooperation was intended to build on the Balfour Declaration’s vow that “nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in [Mandatory] Palestine.”

Unfortunately for ordinary Jews and Arabs alike, the Arab leadership refused to drop its maximalist positions, and instead embarked on a path of violent confrontation meant to destroy Israel and kill its Jewish inhabitants.

Despite this reality, successive Israeli governments have repeatedly attempted to forge a path towards a peaceful resolution to the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Until the State of Israel was established in 1948, Jews immigrated to the region of their own volition. They were not directed nor overseen by any state or military power, as was the case with actual colonialists such as the French in Algeria.

Another significant difference between Israel and colonial powers is that the Jewish state is the only “interloper” to have been voted into existence by the international community. After six centuries of Ottoman control, the League of Nations established “Mandatory Palestine” — and placed the territory under the control of Great Britain. The British intended to implement the Balfour Declaration and create independent countries for the Jewish and Arab populations.

Following World War II, the League of Nations was replaced by the United Nations. The UN picked up where the League of Nations had left off, voting in 1947 to partition Mandatory Palestine into two separate states – one Jewish and one Arab. The partition plan was rejected by the Arabs, no Arab state was created, and the international community has been blaming Israel ever since.

Despite Amnesty’s claim that Israel is an apartheid state, the country was ranked above Italy, Spain, and the United States in a respected global index of democratic values. The latest edition of the annual Democracy Index from the prestigious Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) gave Israel 7.97 points out of a maximum of ten, just behind France (7.99 points) and Britain (8.1 points).

The results prove that Israel is by far the most democratic country in the Middle East.

Unlike European settler-colonial powers, Israel is a democracy that extends rights and protections to all its citizens — Jews and non-Jews alike. Israel is a country where Arabs serve as Supreme Court Justices, fighter pilots, Members of Knesset, artists, and athletes.

Everything that Jewish Israelis do, Arab Israelis do too.

Moreover, the Israeli government is actively encouraging and facilitating the fuller integration of Arabs into a diverse society.

In October 2021, the Israeli government passed two wide-ranging plans to allocate over $10 billion to enhance the development of Arab communities. Arab mayors, parliamentarians, civil society organizations, and government officials of all backgrounds have worked on the proposal intensively over the past several months.

By uncritically perpetuating the Jewish Israeli-as-settler-colonialist myth, major media outlets (see here, here, here, and here) are making it possible for anti-Zionists to cloak their rejection of the Jewish state in the language of “human rights” or “social justice.”

One notable example was when supermodel Bella Hadid last May posted to her Instagram account, which has 42 million followers, a series of cartoons referring to Israelis as “occupiers” and Palestinians as the “oppressed.” In one cartoon, a woman tells her friend: “There is no ‘fighting’. There is only Israeli colonization, ethnic cleansing, military occupation and apartheid.”

By not calling out the sustained campaign to demean and isolate the world’s only Jewish state, news outlets are effectively turning a blind eye to chronic Palestinian rejectionism and thus making it more difficult to resolve the conflict.

All this occurs, mind you, as antisemitism is reaching levels that should concern every objective observer.