Among the loudest slogans hurled at Israel and its supporters lately is the claim that Jews are nothing more than “white colonizers.” It’s shouted on campuses, plastered on placards at rallies, and even echoed in newsrooms as if it were an unquestionable truth.

But it is not remotely accurate or historical. It is an inversion of history; an antisemitic libel dressed in faddish language.

Like all forms of antisemitism, the lie mutates to fit the prejudices of the age.

In medieval Europe, Jews were vilified as Christ-killers. In the 19th and 20th centuries, Jews were branded as rootless “Semites” poisoning Europe. Today, when “white” and “colonizer” are among the most despised labels in much of Western discourse, Jews are suddenly recast as exactly that. The aim never changes: to transform Jews into whatever is most hated in a given era.

Jews: Indigenous to the Land of Israel

The Jewish people are not strangers to the land of Israel. We were formed there. Our language, culture, and tribal faith were born in the hill country of Judea and Samaria. Jerusalem was our nation’s capital more than 1,500 years before the rise of Islam and the Arab conquest of the Levant.

And contrary to the widespread misunderstanding that Rome “exiled all the Jews” after the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE or after the Bar Kochba revolt in 135 CE, no such complete exile occurred.

Archaeological, rabbinic, and Roman sources alike confirm that in the land the Romans renamed Syria-Palestina (circa 135 CE), Jews remained a substantial presence — often a plurality of the local population — well into the Byzantine and early Islamic periods. Major Jewish communities thrived in Tiberias, Sepphoris, Caesarea, Gaza, and Jerusalem itself long after the Roman Empire fell.

If colonialism means foreign empires imposing their will and their imported cultures, languages, and practices on native peoples, then the true colonizers of the land were Rome, Byzantium, and later the Arab and Ottoman conquerors — not the Jews, who remained deeply rooted in their homeland despite forced dispersion and persecution.

Jews Are Not “White”

The effort to cast Jews as “white” is equally false. “White” itself is a social construct — one invented in Europe and America to define tiers of dominance and advantage. Jews were rarely, if ever, included in it. At best, Jews were sometimes considered “white” conditionally, when it was convenient for the dominant group to blur their difference. Until, of course, the construct could be used as a slur against Jews, once “whiteness” itself became a disparagement in certain circles.

For centuries, European antisemitism defined Jews precisely as not white, not European — an alien presence to be ghettoized, excluded, or mass-murdered. The Holocaust was the culmination of this racialized hatred and othering, murdering over six million Jews in Europe and North Africa for being Semitic outsiders.

Calling Jews “white” also erases the majority of Israel’s Jewish population, who trace their families not to Europe, but to the Middle East, North Africa, and Ethiopia.

Roughly half of Israeli Jews descend from communities expelled or fleeing persecution in places like Iraq, Yemen, Morocco, Syria, Ethiopia, and Libya. Are Iraqi Jews “white colonizers”? Are Ethiopian Jews? Of course not.

Nor does the shade of a person’s skin or certain phenotypes erase their identity. Many Ashkenazic Jews may appear fair-skinned, just as many Yemenite or Ethiopian Jews may appear darker than most Arabs—and certainly darker than most Palestinian Arabs. But defining Jewish peoplehood through appearance is as false—and as dangerous—as defining Black identity in America by skin tone. The Jewish people are not a color. We are an indigenous Semitic tribal people.

While Not Determinative of Jewish Identity, Genetics Confirm Our History

Jewish identity is tribal, covenantal, and civilizational — not genetic. A convert to Judaism is fully and equally a Jew, because Jewish peoplehood is about belonging to the tribe, not about DNA.

That said, genetic science confirms what history, archaeology, and memory already tell us: Jews from diasporas across the world — Ashkenazi, Sephardi, Mizrahi, Yemenite, Ethiopian, and Indian — share common Levantine ancestry.

• A landmark 2010 study in Nature found that “Jewish Diaspora groups from Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East converge genetically to form a distinct population sharing Middle Eastern ancestry” (Behar et al., Nature, June 2010).
• A 2020 study in Cell confirmed that “the major Jewish groups all share substantial genetic ancestry tracing back to the Levant” (Xue et al., Cell, 2020).
• Even the Y-chromosome lineages of Ashkenazi Jews point overwhelmingly to Middle Eastern rather than European origins, clustering closely with Samaritans, Druze, and Palestinian Arabs (Hammer et al., PNAS, 2000).

In short, while our peoplehood does not depend on genes, genetics underscore what archaeology and history already attest: Jews are a Middle Eastern tribal people — dispersed, but never severed from their ancestral roots.

Return, Not Colonialism 

Colonialism is what France did in Algeria, and what Britain did in India: a foreign power sending its people to exploit an alien land.

Zionism is the opposite. Jews had no empire, no metropole, no “mother country” to dispatch us to “settle” in Zion. What Jews had was memory, yearning, a tribal call to return — repeated constantly through prayer — and an unbroken chain of community in the land itself.

When Jews fled Baghdad pogroms in 1941, or when Yemenite Jewish communities walked across deserts in the late 1800s to reach Jerusalem, they were not colonizers. When Ashkenazic Jews, survivors of pogroms and of the Holocaust, returned (mostly as refugees fleeing brutal persecution) to the only land in which Jews had ever been sovereign, they were not colonizers.

When Ethiopian Jews risked their lives in the 1980s and 1990s to come home to Israel, they were not colonizers either. They were all sons and daughters of Zion returning home.

The Projection of Colonialism

Ironically, the accusation of “colonialism” is truer of the Arab conquest of the Levant in the 7th century than of the Jews.

Arab-Muslim armies imposed new rulers, languages, and cultures on lands stretching from Spain to Persia, including the land of Israel. Yet today, many descendants of that conquest call the indigenous people of the land of Israel “colonizers.”

In fact, some Palestinian Arabs themselves are descended from Jews and other native peoples of the Levant who, over centuries of pressure under Arab Islamic rule, abandoned their native faiths, languages, and cultures and fully adopted the identity of the colonizing culture. The irony is that many of those descendants now claim the Jews are the interlopers and colonists.

This is projection, not history.

The Poison of a False Narrative

Labeling Jews as “white colonizers” is not an innocent mistake. It is part of a sustained campaign to delegitimize Jewish self-determination, and to make the Jewish return to Zion appear as imperial theft rather than what it is: justice, survival, and self-determination.

And tragically, it has poisoned the minds of generations of Palestinian Arab children, raised on the fantasy that Jews are foreigners who can be expelled like the French in Algeria, rather than neighbors who belong and who have a right to self-determination in their indigenous land.

Truth as the Path to Peace

The facts are clear: the Jewish people are not “white.” We are not colonizers. We are the indigenous Semitic people of the land of Israel, who after dispersion and near-destruction returned home. To call us otherwise is not just historically wrong. It is an assault on truth itself, a modern mutation of antisemitism cloaked in the rhetoric of “decolonization.”

None of this means that Jews cannot share the land with Palestinian Arabs, many of whom have lived here for generations.

But coexistence must be built on truth, not fiction. It cannot rest on denying that the Jewish Temples stood in Jerusalem, as Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas recently claimed, or on pretending there ever was an Arab nation or state anywhere in the Levant with Jerusalem as its capital.

Peace requires acknowledgment of the actual history of this land: that it has always been the birthplace and homeland of the Jewish people, and that a shared future must begin with recognition of that enduring reality.

Only then can we replace poisonous myths with the possibility of real peace.

Micha Danzig is a current attorney, former IDF soldier & NYPD police officer. He currently writes for numerous publications on matters related to Israel, antisemitism & Jewish identity & is the immediate past President of StandWithUs in San Diego and a national board member of Herut.