Delegitimization vs. Identity and Intersectionality: From Blog Posts to Book
The purpose of “Delegitimization vs. Identity and Intersectionality” and these blog posts is to combine them into a published book entitled Safe Schools for Jewish Students: An Educator’s Guide to Preventing Antisemitism and Strengthening Belonging.
Go here for the full Table of Contents.
Chapter 3 – Delegitimization vs. Identity and Intersectionality
Chapter 3: Delegitimization vs. Identity and Intersectionality
For should the peoples of the world say to Israel, ‘You are robbers, because you took by force the lands of the seven nations of Canaan,’ Israel may reply to them, ‘All the earth belongs to the Holy One, blessed be He; He created it and gave it to whom He pleased.’
—Rashi, 11th century
“Under no circumstances must we touch land belonging to fellahs (farmers) or worked by them. Only if a fellah leaves his place of settlement, should we offer to buy his land, at an appropriate price.”
—David Ben-Gurion, 1920
This chapter covers:
- Definition of Delegitimization and Zionism
- Myth 1: Jews are not Indigenous to Israel
- Myth 2: Jews and Arabs Lived Peacefully Before the Creation of the State of Israel
- Myth 3: Jews Stole the Land from the Palestinians as Expressed by the Nakba
- Myth 4: Jews are Occupying/Colonizing Palestinian land
- Myth 5: Jews are White Oppressors with White Supremacy and White Privilege
- Myth 6: Israel is an Apartheid State
- Delegitimization by Map
- How to Respond in the Classroom
Delegitimization: The process of making something invalid, illegal, or unacceptable.
Zionism: The belief that Jews have the right to self-determine in their ancestral homeland.
Calling Israel an illegal colonial project is a great insight—if you ignore archaeology, history, DNA, texts, and 3,000 years of receipts.
I’ve seen many signs accusing Jews of occupying land indigenous to Palestinians. These signs call for the end of such an occupation to return the land to the rightful indigenous people.
The argument of ending a country’s occupation is not without merit. There are many examples where indigenous peoples were temporarily occupied by settlers. Haiti from French occupation (1804), India from British occupation (1947), Algeria from French occupation (1962), Ghana from Britain (1957), Democratic Republic of Congo from Belgium (1960), Angola and Mozambique from Portugal (1975), to name a few.
The question is, are Jews in Israel white colonialists occupying land from the indigenous people?
Myth 1: Jews are not Indigenous to Israel
Indigenous people—those who are related to, or descended from the earliest known inhabitants of a place, especially of a place that was colonized—should be permitted to live freely in their indigenous land. Jews, however, are considered by many to be occupying the land not their own.
What is occupation exactly?
Occupation – The Miriam-Webster dictionary has these multiple definitions.
a) the act or process of taking possession of a place or area.
Example: Spain’s occupation of the island
b) the holding and control of an area by a foreign military force.
Example: the Roman occupation of Britain
c) the military force occupying a country or the policies carried out by it
In order for Jews to be occupiers, they need to come from their own country as did the Spanish and Romans in the above examples, typically with armed forces, and control the indigenous people into submission.
So where is the Jewish country?
Biblical Sources
The Torah – In the Torah, also known as the Five Books of Moses, the Israelites traveled from Egypt as slaves into Israel as free people. In Genesis 12:1, God said to Abraham, “Go from your land of your birth… to the land that I will show you, and I will make you into a great nation.” When Abraham and Sarah got to Israel, called Canaan at the time, God promised them in Genesis 15:18, “To your descendants have I given this land from the river of Egypt to the Euphrates River.” The children of Israel, Israelites, are mentioned a couple hundred times in the Torah, and the borders of the land are mentioned four times. In the above quote, the borders seem to refer to the land between the Nile and halfway through Iraq.
The New Testament – In the Christian New Testament, Israel is mentioned over fifty times. According to Arnold G. Fruchtenbaum, “‘Israel’ is mentioned in the New Testament and it is obvious even to Covenant Theologians that the vast majority of the times it refers to national ethnic Israel.”
The Quran – In the Quran, Israel and the children of Israel are mentioned over 40 times. In Surah Al-Ma’idah 5:20-21 of the Quran, it says, “And remember when Moses said to his people, ‘O my people! Remember Allah’s favors upon you when He raised prophets from among you, made you sovereign, and gave you what He had never given anyone in the world. O my people! Enter the Holy Land which Allah has destined for you to enter. And do not turn back or else you will become losers.’”
Granted, these are biblical texts and, as a scientist, I prefer to examine scientific sources. So let’s examine the archeological evidence of Jews living in Israel.
Archeology
Steles and monoliths, are examples of items that confirm the existence of the ancient Jewish land of Israel.
The Merneptah Stele – From 1205 BCE, a victory stele celebrating Pharaoh Mernaptah’s military victories, states, “Canaan is captive with all woe. Ashkelon is conquered, Gezer seized, Yanoam made nonexistent; Israel is laid waste, bare of seed.”
Three other steles, all from the 9th century BCE, mention Israel:
The Mesha Stele – “The king of Israel had built Yahaz, and he lived there while fighting against me, but Chemosh drove him out before me.”
The Tel Dan Stele – “…killed Jehoram son of Ahab king of Israel and killed Ahaziah son of Jehoram king of the House of David.”
The Kurkh Monolith – “Karkar, his royal city, I destroyed, I devastated, I burned with fire. 1,200 chariots, 1,000 cavalry, 20,000 soldiers, of Hadad-ezer, of Aram; 700 chariots, 700 cavalry, 10,000 soldiers of Irhulêni of Hamath; 2,000 chariots, 10,000 soldiers of Ahab, the Israelite.”
All these sources cite a kingdom of Israel, a land that existed before the presence of Christians and Muslims.
Also among the archeological artifacts are synagogue ruins and coins that connect the existence of Israel with Judaism.
Biology
When tested, Jews across the world share common genetic traits, demonstrating their ancestors come from a common region.
One study reported:
“We show that, at least in the context of the studied sample, it is possible to predict full Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry with 100% sensitivity and 100% specificity, although it should be noted that the exact dividing line between a Jewish and non-Jewish cluster will vary across sample sets, which, in practice, would reduce the accuracy of the prediction. While the full historical demographic explanations for this distinction remain to be resolved, it is clear that the genomes of individuals with full Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry carry an unambiguous signature of their Jewish heritage, and this seems more likely to be due to their specific Middle Eastern ancestry than to inbreeding.”
—“A genome-wide genetic signature of Jewish ancestry perfectly separates individuals with and without full Jewish ancestry in a large random sample of European Americans” by Anna C Need, Dalia Kasperavičiūtė, Elizabeth T Cirulli & David B Goldstein, Genome Biology, January 22, 2009.
Who Are the Occupiers?
So, if the Jewish people are indigenous to the region of Israel, who are the occupiers?
The Hebrews entered the land free from slavery and started Israel as a commonwealth. Israel was conquered and occupied by the Babylonians in 586 BCE, the Jewish people conquered the Greeks in the Hellenistic Era and Israel became a commonwealth again until the Romans conquered and occupied the land in 63 BCE. The Romans changed the name of the land to Palestine, named after the Philistines, the Greek enemy of the Jews. Then the land passed from Empire to Empire, from the Romans to the Arab Caliphate, to the Crusaders, to the Mamluks, to the Ottomans, to the British, until returned to the Jews. Only when the Jews had control of the land was it a commonwealth. At all other times, the land was a part of an empire, occupied by invaders.
As Constantine K. Zurayk, the man who coined the term “Nakba,” stated in his book The Meaning of Disaster:
“Then the Jewish kingdom was divided into two states, north and south. The first fell in 722 B.C., and the second in 586 B.C. During the following centuries they were scattered, and although they tried to rebuild their political life, they failed time after time until finally, during the first two Christian centuries, they were completely dispersed. One thing which shows that their relationship with Palestine was transitory is that the name by which the country has been known throughout history is not derived from them but from their bitterest enemies, the Philistines.”
—“History of Palestine,” The Meaning of Disaster, Constantine K. Zurayk, 1948, Translated from the Arabic by R. Bayly Winder in 1956.
So why call Jews occupiers of Israel?
Perhaps people think, “Israel had been destroyed nearly 2000 years ago. Why claim the Jews are still indigenous to the land if they’ve spread all across the Middle East and Europe since then?”
Which brings up another question: At what point does a people stop being indigenous to the land?
Another possible reason to call Jews occupiers of Israel is because historically white men have been the ones to occupy the land of non-white indigenous people. Perhaps people think, “Since Jews are white and the Palestinians are not, the pattern should follow that the Jews are the privileged people oppressing the non-priveledged people.”
The notion of Jews as white will be addressed in “Myth 5: Jews are White Oppressors.”
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Author Biography of Safe Schools for Jewish Students
Ezra Barany, son of a Bronx father and a Dutch mother from Nazi-occupied Netherlands, loves riveting readers with Jewish thrillers. His first two books in The Torah Codes series were award-winning international bestsellers. In his free time, he has eye-opening discussions on the art of writing novels with his wife and book coach Beth Barany. A high school physics teacher, Ezra lives in Oakland with his beloved wife and two cats working on the next book. Ezra, not the cats.
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