Like the Palestinians chanting Heil Hitler at the Olympics, whose atrocities you support, you show your true colors with this blood libel and promotion of Nazi-like genetic test for Jewish identity,ignoring that 60-65% of Israelis are Mizrahi and Sephardic Jews who are no whiter or more European than their Arab cousins who pogromed, persecuted and expelled them after 13 centuries of Muslim supremacist apartheid dhimmitude.
But we no longer submit ourselves to this kind of pseudo-scientific biologistic experiments that Dr.. Mengele performed on my late twin friend Otto Klein.
To validate the claim of settler colonialism requires validating, instead of just assuming, the indigeneity of those allegedly displaced. Israel's accusers automatically deny Jewish indigeneity, despite 3000+ years of Jews' ties to and habitation in the land. Aren't Jews always foreign interlopers and rootless cosmopolitans?
You uncritically accept Arab claims of indigeneity to the Judea the Romans renamed as Palestine to erase its Jewishness. This PLO and P.A. indigeneity fraud claims today's Arabs are Philistines, who were actually Greek-origin sea people, Canaanites and Jebusites and that Jesus was a Palestinian and not Jewish. And let's not forget that the Cairo-born Arafat, Zuheir Mohsen, King Hussein and Hamas leader Fathi Hammad have all said there's no such thing as a Palestinian national identity separate from other Arabs: "invented for tactical reasons" (Mohsen), "half the Palestinians are Egyptian the other half Saudi" (Hammad), "the truth is that Jordan is Palestine, Palestine is Jordan" (Hussein), "the Palestinian people have no national identity" (Arafat).
The unfiltered ahistorical idiocy of erasing Jews' connection to Israel found its way into the 2000–01 Camp David and Taba peace talks in which Arafat's negotiation support unit insisted on including a clause that denied any Jewish connection to the western wall and Jerusalem. This indigeneity and identity fraud branding Jews as foreign settler colonialists was integral to the PLO rejecting statehood that excluded Arabs' unlimited right of return to Israel. This is how the settler colonialist libel feeds into the Palestinians' delusional War of Return that's the fundamental obstacle to a two state peace.
Double standards define indigeneity in revolving door demography
We'll see below that they were no more indigenous to the land than the Jewish immigrants to the Ottoman vilayet of South Syria and British mandatory Palestine.
As Ottoman decline accelerated Palestine imported refugees, many not Arab. As Muslims in a region dominated by Islam since the 7th century, they're of course ineligible for the settler-colonizer label. Muslim supremacy is assumed to be the natural order of things. Arieh Avneri's The Claim of Dispossession documents how its settlers were:
"Asians from all over the world - Persians, Afghans, Hindus and Baluchis - were engaged in commerce…In 1878, the Sultan, Abd el-Hamid took under his protection Circassian refugees who fled Christian-Russian rule in the Caucasus. Many settled in Trans-Jordan. West of the Jordan they settled in three villages: Kafer-Kamma, Sarona, and Reihaniya. Some Moslems from Bosnia also found refuge in Palestine and settled near Caesarea. Laurence Oliphant writes about one of the Turkoman tribes that pitched their black tents near a Circassian village. They were new immigrants who had arrived from the mountains of Iraq. They knew no language other than Turkish and hoped that their fellow-tribesmen in the Sharon Plain would receive them. (Avneri, page 17–18)
from Lebanon and Syria: "In 1880 Haifa was a small town of 6,000 souls, with fewer than two hundred Jews. In 1910 it had 18,000 inhabitants, of whom 15,000 were Moslems and Christians. Many of the newcomers to the city were from Lebanon and Syria. Many Arab villages were practically deserted, with only a few women and children remaining."
from Yemen: "In the winter of 1908, a group of Arabs arrived in Jaffa from Yemen and settled there. Like the Mugrabis, the Turkomans and the Egyptians before them, they assimilated over the years with the general Arab population." (Avneri, p18)
Many Yemeni Jews had in the 19th century fled to Palestine to escape pogroms, the oppressive extortion of the Muslim jizya tax and forced child abduction marriages. They're presumed to be "settler colonizers", while the Muslim Yemenis who came to Palestine remain ineligible for this label. Smell the stench of double standards?
Palestine's revolving door demographics: immigration to emigration
Meanwhile, large numbers of Arabs, especially Christians escaping Muslim supremacist dhimmitude, emigrated through the revolving door of Ottoman Palestine:
"There is emigration from the Christian districts, such as Bethlehem, Beit-Jala and Ramallah to North and South America, even though in smaller numbers than from the Lebanon. In many cities of South America there are colonies of people from Bethlehem who maintain contact with their homeland, and some of them even go back. They are engaged mostly in trade. The American Consul in Jerusalem (Daily 25 Consular Trade Reports 6–6–14) estimates the emigration from the Jerusalem District at 3,000 annually, of whom 30% are Christians, 35% Moslems, and 35% Jews." Thus, from the Jerusalem District alone 2,000 Arabs emigrated annually. The High Commissioner replied that the population of Bethlehem was estimated to be about 14,000 to 15.000 people. During the ten-year period between 1910 and 1920, 4,500 people emigrated from the town; 393 returned. In the year 1919/20, 245 emigrated and 35 returned. In 1920/21, 185 emigrated and 65 returned. during a ten-year period, at a time when the Jews had no political standing, a third of the population of Bethlehem emigrated voluntarily….Safed in those days had the relatively large population of 25,000, of whom 11.000 were Jews…..According to Abramowich-Gelfat, Arab emigration ran to about 2,500 to 3,000 annually. The average over a twenty-five year period was undoubtedly lower, but it must have reached 30,000–40,000 for the period under discussion. (Avneri, page 25–26)
So the demographic reality was large scale population exchange through immigration and emigration, not displacement of a static indigenous population by Jewish settler colonizers.
Ottoman and early mandatory Palestine were depopulated malaria-ridden swamps when Jewish settlers started arriving after the Ottomans legalized land purchases by non-Muslims in 1867. Mark Twain painted a picture of
""a hopeless, dreary, heart-broken land." On the approach to Jerusalem, "There was hardly a tree or shrub anywhere. Even the olive tree and the cactus, those fast friends of a worthless soil, had almost deserted the country."
which was confirmed by numerous other travelers:
Fredrik Hasselquist, a Swedish doctor and naturalist, visited the Levant (today's Israel, Gaza, West Bank, Lebanon and Syria) in the 1750s…Hassel-quist writes that the Holy Land is "uncultivated and almost uninhabited."
Hasselquist's friend and fellow Swede, Carl Linnaeus, the prominent biologist and inventor of the taxonomic system still used to identify plant and animal life, translated the account into English.
Journey of a Tour in the Levant, published in 1820 by William Turner, a British diplomat and writer…describes a sparsely inhabited land. He reports that there is a small Jewish community in the town of Acre; that Safed, a town of 1,000 houses, includes 300 to 350 that are Jewish; Tiberius, a town of 550 houses, includes about 100 that are Jewish…
Felix Bovet, a Christian theologian and professor of French Literature and Hebrew, visited the Holy Land in 1858:"the Turks "have made a desert of it where it is scarcely possible to walk without fear. Even the Arabs who dwell there do so as temporary sojourners."
So where does this evidence-free settler colonialism blood libel come from? Canadian Metis aboriginal rights activist Ryan Bellerose, who has unquestioned expertise on indigeneity, answers:
"So why is there so much fuss about the population of a small corner of the Ottoman Empire in the 18th and 19th centuries? It is all about intersectionality and rival narratives regarding indigeneity. For Palestinians, and their anti-Zionist supporters, they are the indigenous people of Palestine, and the Israelis (Jews) are European colonial interlopers with no historical connection to the land. Their struggle is at one with the struggle by North American aboriginal activists….Ryan Bellerose, a Canadian Métis and a North American aboriginal rights activist, noted in a 2017 Tablet article that "Palestinian Arabs also hold a claim to the Land of Israel… this does not trump the indigenous status of Jewish people."
In 2015 Bellerose unmasked how the Arabs use fake history and confession by projection to exploit western guilt about their own origins in conquest:
Palestinians have become Obsessive "Tragedy Tourists"
"Dear Palestinians,
Lets get a few things straight. You do not get to claim a genocide when your population has exploded. As someone whose family has gone through one, I am telling you to cut that s*** out, it's offensive and it's annoying. You did not "go through what Native Americans went through." Nobody forced you to speak an alien language, worship God in an alien manner and steal your sacred places. As a matter of fact THAT'S WHAT YOU DID. You stole sacred places, forced indigenous people to speak Arabic and worship god as Muslims.So seriously, cut that out too….You do not get to keep stealing stories. You stole the identity of what was known as 'Palestinian'. Before World War II the term meant Jews. But that's OK, it's a colonialist term, and I am sure that my Jewish friends don't want it. They prefer to be called Jews, Hebrews, Israelites or Israelis, so you can take your colonialist garbage and get lost….Ethnic cleansing? So why is it there is 0% Jews in the Arab controlled area of the Palestinian Authority and almost 2 million Arabs in the Jewish controlled areas? I think it's clear who is ethnic cleanser here….
The native American struggle against settler colonialism? Nope it's always "from turtle island to Palestine", even though anyone with a 3rd grade education knows that the Arabs are in fact the colonists who colonised the entire damn region in the 7th century killing and force converting indigenous people all over the entire region. YOU ARE NOT INDIGENOUS TO THE LANDS YOU ARE TRYING TO CLAIM. Say it with me: "Jews are from Judea, Arabs are from Arabia." You can live there, you just don't get to oppress people anymore.
Yes, I have seen what's happening in Gaza and the PA, and it's not even remotely the same goddamn thing as the things you claim. It's time for you people to grow the hell up, not everything is about you, not every refugee gets to be a whiny entitled refugee for 67 goddamn years. Some of us move forward, some of us don't steal from our own people and perpetuate the conflict to keep skimming money. You want to know the truth? This is why the Palestinians cannot have nice things. Absolutely no regards, - Ryan Bellerose
Jews, not Goyim decide Jewish identity. I'm a prosciutto and lobster-loving Jewish atheist and just as Jewish as any Haredi in Mea Shearim or Brooklyn. Jews are a nation and a religion. Singling out Jews for exclusion from the sovereignty club while questioning no other people's sovereignty is the very definition of anti-semitism according to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance's definition, which has been accepted by over 40 countries, including Italy. This makes using "Zionazi", which you've used repeatedly, the very definition of illegal hate speech.
