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Countering the Lie That Israel Is a Settler-Colonial State

Jews in British Mandate Palestine celebrate the UN General Assembly’s passage of Resolution 181. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

Many college students, and all of the anti-Israel protesters, erroneously believe that a country called “Palestine” was populated by a people called “Palestinians” until World War II, after which Jews who escaped the Nazi Holocaust began migrating there as “settlers” and took the land from Arabs.

Today, according to this narrative, Israelis are colonial occupiers of “stolen Palestinian land,” as the Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) “Day of Resistance Toolkit” puts it.

There are many things wrong with these claims, most glaringly the fact that there has never been a country called “Palestine,” and that Jewish people were the original inhabitants of this territory.

While it’s true that many Jews migrated to the British Mandate Palestine in the aftermath of pogroms in the 1930s and then the Holocaust in the 1940s, there has been a continuous Jewish presence in Israel since the beginning of recorded history — centuries before the birth of Muhammad and the advent of Islam. Jerusalem is mentioned 667 times in the Hebrew Bible and zero times in the Koran. Not once.

The further back in history one goes, the less accurate the term “settler” is when applied to Jews living in Israel. King Solomon’s Temple, built sometime between the 10th and 6th century BC, was destroyed by Babylonian invaders in 586 BC, rebuilt between 30 and 20 BC, and then destroyed again by Romans in 70 ADC

Islam ventured into the land of Israel as a colonial force in the 7th century. Muslims built the Al-Aqsa Mosque on the site of Solomon’s temple as an expression of their triumphalism. Academics who universally condemn European colonialism and American imperialism rarely acknowledge Islamic imperialism, especially when it comes to Israel.

For most of the 19th century, the land was sparsely populated and in ruins. When Mark Twain traveled there in the 1860s, he found it largely abandoned. In his book Innocents Abroad (1869), he called it “desolate and unlovely,” declared it “a silent wilderness,” and mourned that “renowned Jerusalem itself, the stateliest name in history, has lost all its ancient grandeur, and is [sic] become a pauper village.”

Various Islamic caliphates occupied the land until the Ottoman Empire lost it in World War I. The League of Nations then turned the land over to Britain in order to re-establish the Jewish national homeland and renamed it “British Mandate Palestine.” It stretched from Egypt in the west, Syria in the north, Iraq in the east, and Saudi Arabia in the south. In 1922, Britain cut three quarters of the land off and unilaterally established a new country called Jordan.

Yet another overlooked component to the simplistic claim that “the Jews took the Arabs’ land” is that many hectares of land in Israel were purchased by Jews from Arabs.

As Robert Spencer points out, Jews who returned to Israel “in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries didn’t come as armed marauders, seizing land from its owners by force. They obtained the land in a far more conventional and prosaic way: they bought it.” Spencer quotes one British government report from 1930 that smugly notes they overpaid for it.

After World War II, the United Nations voted to partition the land into a Jewish state and an Arab state. No Arabs called themselves “Palestinian” at this time. Palestinian nationalism may have begun in 1920, but Arabs did not begin calling themselves “Palestinians” until after the Six-Day War in 1967.

As a result of UN Resolution 181, which authorized the creation of a Jewish and Arab state alongside each other, many thousands of Jews living throughout the Middle East and North Africa were expelled from their homes. Few were permitted to take their belongings with them. They were forcibly exiled and sent to the nascent state of Israel. The Arab population thought this would become “the big graveyard of the Jews” in the war to come, as five Arab nations invaded and sought to strangle the Jewish state in its cradle. But the Arab nations lost the war. The victorious Jewish fighters called it their War of Independence, and the Arabs began referring to their loss as the “nakba” or great disaster. However, for many Jews living in Arab, Muslim-majority countries, the UN partition vote and subsequent war became their disaster too.

According to the Jewish Virtual Library, “Throughout 1947 and 1948, Jews in Algeria, Egypt, Iraq, Libya, Morocco, Syria, and Yemen (Aden) were persecuted, their property and belongings were confiscated, and they were subjected to severe anti-Jewish riots instigated by the governments. In Iraq, Zionism was made a capital crime. In Syria, anti-Jewish pogroms erupted in Aleppo and the government froze all Jewish bank accounts, In Egypt, bombs were detonated in the Jewish quarter, killing dozens. In Algeria, anti-Jewish decrees were swiftly instituted and in Yemen, bloody pogroms led to the death of nearly 100 Jews.” While some left to start new lives in Europe and the US, “586,000 were resettled in Israel — at great expense to the Israeli government, without any compensation from the Arab governments who had confiscated their possessions. The majority of the Jewish refugees left their homes penniless and destitute.”

These hundreds of thousands were genuine refugees.

In spite of the charge that Israel is “occupying Palestine,” nearly all (over 90%) of the Palestinians who live in the West Bank are governed by the Palestinian Authority. Referring to this territory as the “occupied West Bank” is as nonsensical as referring to the Arabian Peninsula as being “occupied” by Arabs, or France as being “occupied” by Gauls.

The United Nations is the most egregious proliferat0r of the idea that Israel is a settler-colonial state that occupies the West Bank, Gaza, and eastern Jerusalem. A 2016 Wall Street Journal article documented 530 UN General Assembly references to Israel is an “occupying power” versus zero for Indonesia (East Timor), Turkey (Cyprus), Russia (Georgia, Crimea), Morocco (Western Sahara), Vietnam (Cambodia), Armenia (Azerbaijan), Pakistan (Kashmir), or China (Tibet). UNESCO’s “Occupied Palestine” document uses the phrase “Israel, the occupying Power” thirteen times.

The most vocal protesters, especially college students, are blissfully ignorant of this history. They have been conditioned to respond to the terms “colonial” and “settlement” with images of white Europeans encroaching on the ancestral territories of red, brown, and black peoples. But, as Elliot Abrams put it, “the term ‘settlement’ loses meaning when applied to Jews building homes in their nation’s capital city.”

Investigative Project on Terrorism (IPT) Senior Fellow A.J. Caschetta is a principal lecturer at the Rochester Institute of Technology and a fellow at Campus Watch, a project of the Middle East Forum where he is also a Ginsberg-Milstein fellow. A version of this article was originally published at IPT.

The post Countering the Lie That Israel Is a Settler-Colonial State first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

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UN Security Council Meets on Iran as Russia, China Push for a Ceasefire

Members of the Security Council cast a vote during a United Nations Security Council meeting on the 3rd anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine at UN headquarters in New York, US, Feb. 24, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/David Dee Delgado

The U.N. Security Council met on Sunday to discuss US strikes on Iran’s nuclear sites as Russia, China and Pakistan proposed the 15-member body adopt a resolution calling for an immediate and unconditional ceasefire in the Middle East.

It was not immediately clear when it could be put to a vote. The three countries circulated the draft text, said diplomats, and asked members to share their comments by Monday evening. A resolution needs at least nine votes in favor and no vetoes by the United States, France, Britain, Russia or China to pass.

The US is likely to oppose the draft resolution, seen by Reuters, which also condemns attacks on Iran’s nuclear sites and facilities. The text does not name the United States or Israel.

“The bombing of Iranian nuclear facilities by the United States marks a perilous turn in a region that is already reeling,” U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres told the Security Council on Sunday. “We now risk descending into a rathole of retaliation after retaliation.”

“We must act – immediately and decisively – to halt the fighting and return to serious, sustained negotiations on the Iran nuclear program,” Guterres said.

The world awaited Iran’s response on Sunday after President Donald Trump said the US had “obliterated” Tehran’s key nuclear sites, joining Israel in the biggest Western military action against the Islamic Republic since its 1979 revolution.

U.N. nuclear watchdog chief Rafael Grossi told the Security Council that while craters were visible at Iran’s enrichment site buried into a mountain at Fordow, “no one – including the IAEA – is in a position to assess the underground damage.”

Grossi said entrances to tunnels used for the storage of enriched material appear to have been hit at Iran’s sprawling Isfahan nuclear complex, while the fuel enrichment plant at Natanz has been struck again.

“Iran has informed the IAEA there has been no increase in off-site radiation levels at all three sites,” said Grossi, who heads the International Atomic Energy Agency.

Iran requested the U.N. Security Council meeting, calling on the 15-member body “to address this blatant and unlawful act of aggression, to condemn it in the strongest possible terms.”

Israel‘s U.N. Ambassador Danny Danon said in a statement on Sunday that the U.S. and Israel “do not deserve any condemnation, but rather an expression of appreciation and gratitude for making the world a safer place.”

Danon told reporters before the council meeting that it was still early when it came to assessing the impact of the U.S. strikes. When asked if Israel was pursuing regime change in Iran, Danon said: “That’s for the Iranian people to decide, not for us.”

The post UN Security Council Meets on Iran as Russia, China Push for a Ceasefire first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

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Israel Rejects Critical EU Report Ahead of Ministers’ Meeting

FILE PHOTO: Smoke rises from Gaza after an explosion, as seen from the Israeli side of the border, June 11, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Amir Cohen/File Photo

Israel has rejected a European Union report saying it may be breaching human rights obligations in Gaza and the West Bank as a “moral and methodological failure,” according to a document seen by Reuters on Sunday.

The note, sent to EU officials ahead of a foreign ministers’ meeting on Monday, said the report by the bloc’s diplomatic service failed to consider Israel’s challenges and was based on inaccurate information.

“The Foreign Ministry of the State of Israel rejects the document … and finds it to be a complete moral and methodological failure,” the note said, adding that it should be dismissed entirely.

The post Israel Rejects Critical EU Report Ahead of Ministers’ Meeting first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

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Pope Leo Urges International Diplomacy to Prevent ‘Irreparable Abyss’

FILE PHOTO: Pope Leo XIV holds a Jubilee audience on the occasion of the Jubilee of Sport, at St. Peter’s Basilica, at the Vatican June 14, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Yara Nardi/File Photo

Pope Leo on Sunday said the international community must strive to avoid war that risks opening an “irreparable abyss,” and that diplomacy should take the place of conflict.

US forces struck Iran’s three main nuclear sites overnight, joining an Israeli assault in a major new escalation of conflict in the Middle East as Tehran vowed to defend itself.

“Every member of the international community has a moral responsibility: to stop the tragedy of war before it becomes an irreparable abyss,” Pope Leo said during his weekly prayer with pilgrims.

“No armed victory can compensate for the pain of mothers, the fear of children, the stolen future. Let diplomacy silence the weapons, let nations chart their future with peace efforts, not with violence and bloody conflicts,” he added.

“In this dramatic scenario, which includes Israel and Palestine, the daily suffering of the population, especially in Gaza and other territories, risks being forgotten, where the need for adequate humanitarian support is becoming increasingly urgent,” Pope Leo said.

The post Pope Leo Urges International Diplomacy to Prevent ‘Irreparable Abyss’ first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

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