Deconstructing The Demonization Of The ‘Settler’

What this means is that—if we employ the paradigm of the post-colonialists—more or less everyone is a settler or a descendent of settlers. Settlement was the means by which Homo sapiens established itself as a global species, and without it, humanity as we know it could not exist.

Moreover, if we use the term “indigenous” to mean a people that has been present in a single place for a very long time, then we are faced with a remarkable paradox: In order to be indigenous, one has to have been a settler.

One can see this very clearly, and ironically, in the history of the Middle East. Despite the presence of earlier peoples such as the Jews, Kurds and Berbers, it is now taken for granted that the Middle East is, more or less by definition, Arab. Yet with the exception of Saudi Arabia, the entire Arab presence in the Middle East is the result of settlement.

The Arab armies burst forth from the Hejaz in the 7th century, conquered the entire Middle East and North Africa, as well as parts of Europe, and “Arabized” them via settler-colonial means. There is nothing uniquely evil about this. All empires have been built in precisely the same way. But it is nonetheless the case, and a matter of historical record.

If we accept this more complicated paradigm of settlement and indigeneity, we can see that the Jews are an unusual and perhaps unique case. Their forebears came to the Land of Israel, likely in prehistoric times, as settlers and eventually became “indigenous.” Some thousands of years later, the Roman Empire, via conquest and ethnic cleansing, dispossessed the Jews of this “indigeneity” and took the land for itself.

The long history of the Jews since then was one in which they lived in perpetual hope of reclaiming that indigeneity. But in an irony inherent in the paradigm, they were forced to go through the entire historical process all over again. With the exception of the remnant that had never left, the Jews had to first become settlers in order to reclaim their indigeneity. They had no other choice, because no one has another choice.