Here is a cold, hard, and brutal reality: “The Palestinian people does not exist. The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for continuing [the] struggle against the state of Israel for… Arab unity. In reality today there is no difference between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese. Only for political and tactical reasons [is it spoken] today about the existence of a Palestinian people, since Arab national interests demand that we posit the existence of a distinct “Palestinian people” to oppose Zionism.”
Query: Whence these words?
Perhaps they belong to a right-wing member of Israel’s Knesset? Or maybe this is the position of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu? Another apt candidate: are they the violent musings of a gun-toting, blood-curdling, Christian, and dispensational Zionist?
No.
These were the words of Zahir Muhse’in, a member of the Executive Committee of the then-terror-designated Palestinian Liberation Organization in 1977, via an interview with a Dutch newspaper.
Such remarks are hardly surprising, nor are they scandalous to the student of history. Muhse’in was an advocate of violent revolutionary socialism against Israel and an ardent Arab pan-nationalist. He was also a trained Marxist, employing and popularizing through the PLO various Communist theories to frame the nation-state of Israel as a “colonial-settler” state which displaces the rightful heirs of the land we variously call Israel, Palestine, Gaza, and the West Bank.
Furthermore, the successor to Arafat, Mahmoud Abbas, has admitted that Christians were present in the Holy Land preceding the arrival of the present Palestinian leadership’s ancestors. In 2007, he criticized Hamas for their attacks on Christian institutions, stating, “One of our oldest churches in Palestine, which stood long before our arrival [in the region], was looted and set on fire.” The “recent” arrival of Arabs to Israel is also testified to by the place names of cities in the so-called “West Bank” such as Hebron and Bethlehem, which are Hebrew names, not Arabic.
To add to this, no one identified themselves as “Palestinian” until the latter half of the 20th century. Before then, “Palestine” was merely a geographical place name, not a designator of a people group. The geographical place name “Palestine” itself only came about as a result of an act of colonial erasure through Roman imperial colonialism after the failure of the second Jewish revolt, when the Romans renamed Galilee, Samaria, and Judea to “Syria Palestina” in the second century. “Syria Palestina” was then shortened to “Palestine” in the fourth century, and some Christians still called this land Judea in the 5th century. The historical reality is that the Arabs did not begin their colonial imperialism until the 7th century, when they conquered Israel, which had most recently been colonized by the Eastern Romans [i.e., the Byzantines]. Far from originating in the land, they came as conquering invaders, and even then, many of the ancestors of those who self-identify as “Palestinians” today arrived a lot later in the 19th century and even the 20th century. Jews, however, have had a continual presence in the land going back over 3,000 years, even if at times most were living in diaspora. The earliest confirmed mention of “Israel” is from the Egyptians from 3,200 years ago, although there may be an even earlier reference to “Israel.” Furthermore, the consensus in scholarship is that the linguistic, religious, and historical evidence shows that ancient Israel itself was not primarily composed of outside invaders but of native indigenous Canaanites. And while Jews began returning to our ancestral homeland in large numbers in the 19th century, there was no time when there were no Jews in the land; such returns were happening in earlier centuries, such as in the 12th, 15th, and 16th centuries.
But if a “Palestinian people” does not exist, why must it come to dispossess the Jewish nation “from the river to the sea”?
The answer is simple.
One side wants the other side annihilated.
In this way, and in the words of Dennis Prager and many other commentators, while the Israeli-Arab Conflict is perhaps the hardest to solve, it is the world’s easiest to explain.
One side (i.e., the so-called Palestinians and the broader Arab world) wants the other side (i.e., Jews and inhabitants of the state of Israel) annihilated. While many have rewritten history, constructing a false narrative that Jews are colonial settlers coming in and genociding the indigenous people, the truth is probably closer to the other way around. Namely, many Arabs who originally came into Israel via imperial colonialism have attempted and desire to genocide the indigenous Jewish people and take their land. In a world where colonialism and genocide have “supposedly” been recognized as evil, the best strategy your PR department can give you in your attempt to colonize and genocide is to rewrite history and spin the narrative by creating propaganda that presents your victims of colonialism and desired genocide as your oppressors who choose to do the very thing you are doing and aim to do. In other words, what they are accusing Jews/Israel of is precisely what they are doing and desire to do. They know if they accuse Jews of such atrocities, much of the world will believe them because, as it has been for centuries, Jews can do no right but are always the evil, bloodthirsty oppressors we already knew they were.
One need not take our word only. Genocide is the stated position of the current governing body of Gaza, Hamas, in its original charter: “Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it.”
This was perhaps too macabre for the liberal sensibilities of effete Westerners who romanticize “revolution” and “indigeneity” (except, of course, in their own neighborhoods), so Hamas revised its charter in 2017, this time coding it in the language of postcolonialism and critical theory to garner sympathy:
The Zionist project is a racist, aggressive, colonial, and expansionist project based on seizing the properties of others; it is hostile to the Palestinian people and to their aspiration for freedom, liberation, return, and self-determination. The Israeli entity is the plaything of the Zionist project and its base of aggression… The establishment of “Israel” is entirely illegal and contravenes the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people and goes against their will and the will of the Ummah; it is also in violation of human rights that are guaranteed by international conventions, foremost among them is the right to self-determination. There shall be no recognition of the legitimacy of the Zionist entity.
Despite rhetorical flourish and employing the frameworks of the Frankfurt School, the core message remains unchanged: Israel does not have a right to exist, for it is an illegitimate state. Accordingly, she must be destroyed.
Additionally, in 2012, the Palestinian Authority’s religious leader, Mufti Muhammad Hussein, declared that for a Muslim, the killing of Jews is a religious goal. He cited the Hadith (a purported collection of sayings from Muhammad) at an event commemorating the founding of Fatah, stating that the resurrection will not arrive until Muslims fight and kill all the Jews: “The Hour will not come until you fight the Jews. The Jew will hide behind stones and trees. Then the stones or trees will call: ‘Oh Muslim, servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.’”
Indeed, most recently, on October 24, 2023, the senior Hamas official Ghazi Hamad promised that October 7 “is just the first time, and there will be a second, a third, a fourth,” until Israel is “annihilated.”
To elaborate on our previous point, while it would be absurd to question the indigeneity of, say, Native Americans, doing so for Jews despite the concrete realities to the contrary is commonplace. In Wisconsin, where I live, the Oneida people were forcibly removed from their own land in what the European colonizers renamed New York State, to northwest Wisconsin, which happens to be how the Episcopal Church came to this state. If they were to go back to what is now called New York and reclaim the land, would they then be colonial settlers? Of course not! Yet people ignore or rewrite the reality that Jews are indigenous to Israel to avoid just that reality. Namely, the fact that indigenous people have the right to return to their own ancestral homeland regardless of any unjust law created by humans. As Augustine once said, and Martin Luther King Jr repeated, an unjust law is no law at all. If Jews are indigenous to Israel and there are 7 million Jews still living in diaspora, do they not have the right to return? And if so, much of their ancestral homeland, which is now being occupied by Arab colonial settlers, must be freed up so that they can rightfully return to the land of their fathers and mothers.
Such arguments that try to erase the indigenous status of Jews in Israel and replace them with the “Palestinians” as the supposed indigenous people are a modern form of Christian replacement theology. In this vein, Anti-Zionism is not only pro-colonialism but supersessionist, since it does not recognize the ongoing gift of land given by God’s eternal covenant, and is racist because it denies the right of an ethnic minority to their ancestral homeland.
It is truly stunning that, among Westerners who have little tolerance for the sins of bigotry and racism in a post-Floyd world, anti-Jewish racism is coddled by our institutions and even celebrated on American and Canadian streets. Yet those who support the “pro-Palestine” cause, who supposedly do so for anti-racist reasons, find themselves in the same company as notoriously racist people like Nick Fuentes and David Duke, the former Grand Wizard of the KKK. Others who routinely stand up in the “name” of justice and against racism and violence find themselves spouting blatantly racist tropes from the medieval period.
There are even those who spuriously claim that opposition to Zionism need not equal anti-Jewish racism. We ask, therefore, our Western anti-Zionist interlocutors: How is this position materially different than claiming that while you do not personally hate the peoples of the Native American tribes, they do not have rights to the land to which they are vitally, historically, religiously, and culturally connected?
We ask: Is it any different than a White man living in the American South telling his family, “You know, it’s not that I don’t like the Blacks all that much. Some of them are alright. I don’t really want to live with them or near them.” Or saying, “we are fine with Native Americans as long as they don’t have any political sovereignty in their indigenous homeland”?
In some ways, the anti-Zionist position resembles these offensive sentiments. Yet there remains a stark divergence. To be true to the content of the so-called “liberative” Palestinian arguments, we would need to take these comparisons further:
In the first case, not only do Native Americans not have a right to the land wherein they lived for millennia, we must commit ourselves to the full-on destruction of Native American peoples and dispossessing the tiny parcels of land which they own via revoking and rescinding the rights and privileges of the American reservation system, which is an unjust colonial enterprise robbing the White Man of what is rightfully his.
In the second case, staying away from the Blacks is not enough. They must be expunged from the region by any means necessary through the work of the people’s struggle.
The double standard of justice and Decolonialism garbed in a revisionist narrative that ignores the historical, linguistic, and religious reality that shows Jews as indigenous to Israel is stark. (Although some indigenous people recognize and fight this double standard) It’s interesting to observe, on the one hand, that here in Turtle Island (what some indigenous tribes call the land that was renamed North America), those who call this land by indigenous terminology, namely “Turtle Island,” are identified as left-leaning on the ideological spectrum. In contrast, those who continue to call it by its colonial name, “North America,” are placed outside of the left side of the ideological spectrum. On the other hand, over in Israel, those who call the region of “Judea and Samaria” by its indigenous name, namely “Judea and Samaria,” are placed on the right side of the ideological spectrum. In contrast, those who call it the “West Bank” are placed on the left side of the ideological spectrum. Anywhere else in the world and with any other people, the Jewish “settlers” in Judea and Samaria would be rightfully identified and celebrated as decolonizers. And yet, instead, they are demonized as far-right ideologues. Whether or not such indigenous signifiers should be identified on the left or the right side of the ideological spectrum is besides my point, which is to say there appears to be a wild inconsistency here.
Could it be because the indigenous peoples of Turtle Island are not decolonizing land and therefore are not perceived as a threat to the colonial status quo? So the left (which is just as colonial as the right) allows the term to be used, while some Jews are currently in the process of decolonizing Samaria and Judea and thus are perceived by a leftist colonial system as a threat and therefore place them on the right side of the ideological spectrum to delegitimize their decolonization project by turning them into “colonizers” themselves?
When decolonization is used to demonize and delegitimize a set of original inhabitants of a land, i.e., the Jews/Israel, it ceases to be decolonization and it becomes the very thing it was created to combat, i.e., colonialism.
In a word, then, the issue with the long-hailed “Two-State Solution” (besides the fact that the original Two-State solution had Jordan as the Palestinian State) is that it employs a set of rose-colored, Western, and liberal lenses that do not correspond to reality in any meaningful way. The only just solution that honors true indigeneity, principles of justice, and the prevention of actual genocide of the Jewish people at the hands of the so-called Palestinian people and their extremist government is the One-State Solution—that is, Israel. Tecumseh, a member of the Shawnee tribe, once said, “No tribe has the right to sell [land], even to each other, much less to strangers….Sell a country! Why not sell the air, the great sea, and the earth? Didn’t the Great Spirit make them all for his children?” Even Israel and the Jewish people themselves have no right to sell their ancestral homeland, given to them by God as a gift of land, as God gives gifts of land to all peoples. No right to give Samaria, Judea, and Gaza to another people from outside the land, even in exchange for supposed peace.
To be unmistakably clear, we are not advocating for the Israeli “annexation” of the Gaza Strip, or Judea and Samaria, for the word “annexation” implies unilateral appropriation devoid of consent of another party. Instead, we claim that “annexation” is impossible, for a state cannot annex what it rightfully owns. We are calling for true decolonization in contrast to the call to “Free Palestine,” which is in reality a call to Arab colonialism. We are proposing that the majority of the Arab colonial settlers in Gaza, Judea and Samaria be integrated into the surrounding Arab nations, many of which they came from, with the help and cooperation of those nations so that long term both the Arabs who self-identify as “Palestinians” and the Jews can flourish in their lands in long-lasting peace.
Israel, in our thought, is not the perpetrator of a colonial enterprise, but a victim of 1) coordinated displacement fueled by the Arab-sponsored relocation of colonial settlers to Israel (which we recognize is a kind of “replacement theology”) and 2) violence fueled by historic Arab-alignment with the Axis Powers and the Islamic phenomenon of Jihad. The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and many of the Arabs in Israel (at that time called British Mandate Palestine) and the surrounding Arabs nations in the 1930s and 1940s were allies of the Nazis and shared the Nazis goals of genociding the Jews. The Grand Mufti even had plans for a German-style concentration camp he was planning on building in Israel. Many of the surrounding Arabs held onto these genocidal aims even after the fall of the Nazis.
Just merely 3 years after the horrors of the holocaust in 1948, as soon as Israel declared Independence, the armies of Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and Egypt invaded Israel. Here’s what the secretary general of the Arab League had to say during that event: “This will be a war of extermination.” The Arab Muslim spiritual leader of Palestine’s Muslims, the Grand Mufti in Jerusalem, who again was allies with the Nazis, concerning this invasion said, “I declare a Holy War, my Muslim brothers! Murder the Jews\! Murder them all\!”
Gone are the days of offering land for peace, as Israel did with much of the Sinai Peninsula in the twelve years following the Six-Day War—but only after Israel faced the famous “Three Noes” of the Khartoum Conference (No Peace, No Negotiation, and No Recognition for Israel). Gone too are the days of believing that demilitarization and endless peace accord signings will quench the Palestinian thirst for Jewish blood. Time and time again, Israel has offered to share the land in exchange for peace, and every time, the Arabs have said no. Why, because colonizers are not known for wanting to share the land, nor for their desire to sustain the indigenous culture and people.
Our proposal would ideally involve the cooperation and collaboration between Israel and the surrounding Arab Nations in the process of resettling the Arabs out of Israel back into their home countries. A partnership overseen by a group like the Indigenous Jerusalem Embassy, which sought to ensure immediate sustainable housing in the surrounding Arab nations to which settlers were resettled, immediate jobs set up for the “day after arrival”, a pledge and plan of those Arab countries for immediate implementation of a re-education system both for the new comers and the rest of the nation towards the dismantling of their anti-Jewish racist worldviews, but would include helping them get adjusted to life in these countries, guaranteed immediate citizenship granted for those resettling, and collaboration from an organization like the indigenous Jerusalem embassy, Israel, the Arab nations involved, and some other third party countries, in the actual process of moving Arabs from Gaza, Judea and Samaria into these nations of resettlement to help mitigate a peaceful process of settlement. The hope and aim of such a proposal is the possibility of flourishing, peace, and the end of a perpetual cycle of violence for both Jews and Arabs of Gaza, Judea, and Samaria, as well as the surrounding Arab nations as a whole. However, it should be noted that we are not proposing that all Arabs, such as the 2 million Israeli citizens, or other minorities, such as the Aramean Syriac Christians or the Druze, need or should even be removed as part of this decolonization process. Aliens from time immemorial have resided in nations around the world. Once implemented, such a proposal could serve as a model for the future decolonization of other countries.
As long as a group of foreign colonialists has yet to relinquish the land stolen, which does not rightfully belong to them, there can be no relinquishing of their racism toward the indigenous people. To hold on to the land of another is to hold on to racist attitudes and behaviors toward that other.
One final note must be addressed. Namely, that many will falsely accuse this proposal as an act of ethnic cleansing. First of all it should be noted that when pro-Palestinians, whether Arab or not, are screaming from “the River to the Sea, Palestine will be free,” what they are saying is that it will be free of Jews. Yet nobody is accusing them of ethnic cleansing or even genocide even though intentions of genocide towards Jews are not uncommon. Why? Because they falsely and ignorantly think Arabs are indigenous to Israel and Jews are not, and that such an action would thereby be an act of supreme justice. However, in this case, namely in the case of the call to free Israel from Jews, an accusation of ethnic cleansing would be entirely accurate. This is because the Arabs are not indigenous to the land, are in reality in the land themselves through Arab-Muslim colonialism, are in reality the colonizers of the region, and the people they would be removing, namely, the Jews, are indisputably indigenous to the land. Such an act of removing the Jews, the indigenous people would be ethnic cleansing and an expansion of their Arab colonial enterprise.
If somehow the Native Americans of Turtle Island were able after years of European colonialism to remove the Europeans and send them back to Europe, would that be ethnic cleansing? If the Aboriginals of Australia were able to decolonize their land and oust the Europeans back to Europe, or the Māori of New Zealand able to do so, would that be ethnic cleansing? Was it ethnic cleansing in the 160s B.C. E. when the Jews under Greek colonial occupation in the land of Israel/Judea ousted the Greeks out of their land? No, none of these are in reality examples of ethnic cleansing. Any definition of ethnic cleansing that would exclude an indigenous people from being able to remove the colonial settlers from their midst, is in reality a definition that serves to favor the colonialists and keep the indigenous population under their thumb. Namely, such a definition of ethnic cleansing that would answer yes to my above rhetorical questions would be a colonial definition of ethnic cleansing meant to favor the colonializers and disenfranchise the indigenous population. The above hypothetical examples are instances of what would be decolonial justice, not ethnic cleansing. I think many would agree, and yet by rewriting history and often simply being zealous without any knowledge, they hypocritically reject the indigenous people of Israel, i.e. the Jews, the same right. They might even say the last example, namely the story of the Maccabees ousting the Greeks out of Judea, and the only actual historical example of such an act actually occurring, somehow doesn’t count. Our proposal is not that all Arabs or even other ethnic minorities (Arabs are not an ethnic minority in the land of Israel, but actually have a slight majority) be removed from the land of Israel, from the river to the sea, only that the majority be removed, and given that they are the colonial settlers of a land not their own, and have time and again shown their intentions to genocide all Jews, such a proposal cannot be an act of ethnic cleansing, but an act of colonial justice.
It is time for a new vision, a new peace plan that will be lasting, just, and as equitable as humanly possible with the understanding that, while no plan will be devoid of suffering or injustice and nothing in this fallen world is purely good, the soft and reductionistic appeals to “love” and “justice” ascribed as motives to the so called Palestinians by the progressive left are, in fact, myths. For Israel’s, and the Arabs within Gaza, Judea, Samaria and the surrounding states own peace, prosperity, and security, she must make the hard decision to finally retake what has always been hers despite it having been stolen by a barbarous faction that boasts of glorying in death as much as she sanctifies life.
Gabriel Gordon is a researcher at the Ultra-Orthodox in Israel Program and the Economic Reform Program. His research focuses on demographics and trends within the Israeli labor force.
David Bumgardner is a writer, theologian and educator living in Columbus, Ohio. He is a former BNG Clemons Fellow and a graduate of Texas Baptist College at Southwestern Seminary. He is a licensed commissioned pastor and holds an evangelism license through the Anglican Province of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Diocese of Boga, and Missio Mosaic, an ecumenical missional society and religious order. He is awaiting the conferral of his master of arts in practical theology degree from Winebrenner Theological Seminary. He is currently studying for a master of pastoral care and counseling degree at Ohio Christian University and conducting postgraduate theological research (MTh) at the University of Aberdeen in New Testament and Early Christianity.
