/soy/ - Soyjaks

Debunking the illogical claim that Israel is a settler colonial project:

1) Jews are indigenous to the region. We literally originated there, and even those of us in the diaspora have managed to maintain our genetic, cultural, and religious connection to the land for thousands of years. Jews inhabited Canaan millennia before a single Roman even uttered the words “Syria Palestina”. There are no other examples (at least ones that I’m aware of), where indigenous people “colonize” the land they are indigenous to.

2) Zionist immigrants had no metropole, and came from various different backgrounds. Jews born and raised in the region were already buying land with the intention to form a Jewish state before Zionism was even coined as a political movement, and then Jews living in Eastern Europe also began to buy land in the region in the 1800’s. Eventually, many Jews from other Middle Eastern countries joined in after the Farhud.

3) Prior to the first Arab-Israeli war in 1948, most if not all of the land attained by Zionists was legally and consensually bought from Palestinian-Arab land owners, Ottoman absentee landlords, and the ruling Ottoman and then British government. No land was seized by force until the Palestinians and surrounding Arab countries decided to attack Israel, after terrorizing the local Jewish population and Jewish immigrants for decades prior.

4) while many Palestinians are also native to the region, their religion, language, and culture (mostly) is not. Arabic and Islam both originated in the Arabian peninsula, and the only reason that most Palestinians are Muslim Arabic speakers is because of Islamic colonization that took place in the 7th century. A large portion of the Arab-Palestinian population is descended from recent migrants from other Arab countries, and for those partially or wholly descended from actual natives, they have adopted the culture, religion, and tongue of the colonizer through the process of Arabization. In contrast, Jews have not only maintained their genetic connection to the land, but also their cultural, religious, and even linguistic roots. This doesn’t mean that Palestinians don’t also belong in the region, but it’s extremely ironic.