If Israel deserves to be "decolonized" -- What country is/was Israel a colony of?

Why do so many college students today actually seem to care about what Israel does? That question has puzzled me for a long time, in part because I was so late to the concept of decolonization and the frequently chanted idea that Israel is a settler colonial country (and therefore illegitimate). But what does that mean?

When I think of the concept a “colony”, the prototypical example that comes to my mind is the Republic of the Congo – which, when I was in early elementary school, was actually called the Belgian Congo. The Belgian Congo was a country in Africa which actually had the nationality of the European country that colonized it as part of its name! Other “colony prototypes” that spring to my mind include the countries of West Africa colonized by France, the Portuguese colonies of Macao and Brazil, and, of course, the many countries of the “sun never sets upon” British Empire of the early 1800’s. What all these colonies had in common was that they were essentially invaded by, and then ruled by, a much stronger foreign country, with some citizens of that foreign country settling and establishing homes and lives in the colony.

With those prototypes of colonies and the process of colonization in mind, I was deeply puzzled when I first heard (and when I more frequently now still hear) Israel referred to as a settler/colonial country.

What country, exactly, is it that colonized the land that is now Israel? Many of the inhabitants of Israel are descendants of immigrants from a large number of countries – countries in Europe, in the Americas, in Asia, and for the majority of current Israelis, Arab countries in the Middle East and North Africa. As Coleman Hughes has written, in another of his superb essays on his substack – an essay focusing on ways in which the situation in the Middle East does not parallel the struggle for civil rights for African Americans in the U.S. — he writes (copied at length here for the obvious reason that I could not possibly improve on Hughes’ summary):

The Struggle for Black Freedom Has Nothing to Do with Israel

Whereas Europeans had no claim to belong in the New World, Jews are indigenous to the land and have lived there continuously for millennia. Just before the first wave of Zionist migration in the late nineteenth century, there was a pre-existing Jewish community there numbering between 13,000 and 20,000. European colonialists sought to expand empires and extract wealth on behalf of their home countries. Early Zionists, by contrast, were poor migrants fleeing pogroms, legally migrating to their ancestral homeland, and purchasing small tracts of land from willing Arab sellers. Once the British Mandate began, more Jews (many fleeing the Nazis) migrated and purchased land, such that by 1947, hundreds of thousands of Jews had migrated into the region. And in the years after 1948, the overwhelming majority of Jews living in Arab countries—fleeing persecution in places like Iraq, Morocco, and Egypt—migrated to Israel.

Perhaps I missed some crucial parts of the “colonization” lessons in my history classes in high school, but I do not recall learning anything about, for example, Portuguese expats purchasing property at (or much above) market value from those who owned the property in Macao or Brazil. And I don’t recall learning about the French citizens who moved to, for example, Senegal to escape anti-French pogroms in other countries within Africa. And of course, I guess I just missed all of the discussions of evidence that there had been British communities in India and Pakistan thousands of years ago, and the evidence that Belgian communities existed in the Republic of the Congo thousands of years ago – and that there has been at least some continuous presence of Belgians in that region even since and that there are remnants today in the Republic of the Congo of some of the most culturally important Belgian structures ever built.

In contrast, even as a young child I became aware that Jews had lived in parts of Israel and the West Bank thousands of years ago (I’m pretty sure, for example, that there was a Jewish family in Bethlehem and Nazareth a little over 2000 years ago), and when I first visited Israel in 1969 I was able to spend time in the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem, an area that was home to almost 20,000 Jews early in the 1900's, and I was also able to visit the Western Wall (or Wailing Wall) in Jerusalem, a site sacred to Jews, and that sure looks like it’s thousands of years old (which much of it is).

So – Israel sure is different from all other “colonies”. I guess because it never was, and now is not, a colony at all. So “decolonizing” what has never been a colony would be quite a trick.

But of course, that fact doesn’t stop those who hate Israel from trying to characterize Israel as a country that exists solely because of a process of colonization – a claim made to demonize and delegitimize Israel as a country and to support those (like the death cult Hamas) whose stated goal is to eliminate Israel and all of its Jewish inhabitants. What is so distressing is how successful that effort has been, as significant numbers of university faculty (primarily in humanities departments, and especially in so-called “studies” departments) have devoted their apparently considerable intellectual abilities toward the goal of convincing their students that the “settler colony” description of Israel is an accurate one. The leaders of this effort, of course, have been at elite universities, presumably because you do need to be really smart to be able to twist history and reality to the degree that it has to be twisted in order to convince yourself of the legitimacy of that conclusion (while simultaneously engaging in feats of legerdemain to trick students into doing nothing but the most shallow of thinking — never, for example, thinking about the most obvious of the “emperor has no clothes” kinds of question like “But professor — weren’t there Jews living there thousands of years ago?”).

Which brings me back to the original question; why do these faculty (and their students) care so much about delegitimizing Israel – one small country, and the only majority Jewish country in the world? Is it, as some argue, solely because it is now (according to the Israel haters) the only remaining colonization relic in the world — and what they REALLY care about is decolonization? Obviously I don’t know the answer to this question for sure. But my speculative answer is – no. My hypothesis is that all these brilliant faculty and ivy league students focus on “decolonization” as the supposed reason for their anti-Israel animus because they are smart enough to feel uncomfortable about having no apparent “rational” reason at all for hating Israel. So they glom onto, and spend their considerable cognitive resources defending, to themselves and others, the idea that Israel deserves to be “decolonized from the river to the sea” (i.e., all the Jews there need to be killed or expelled to achieve the higher decolonization goal). But I suspect that is just a cover for the real reason. I contend that the real reason in most cases is that — they’re antisemites, and they will always have some reason or another for wanting Israel eliminated from the face of the earth.