I recognize that a lot of what I write probably stays right here in our little echo chamber. Most of you already know at least some of this history. You’re reading because you’re interested in it, you’ve lived some of it, or you’ve been watching the same things I have and wondering how so much Jewish history disappeared so quickly.
But I’m always hoping something I write breaks out of our circle and gets in front of the eyeballs of someone who really needs to read it. Maybe someone who has been sharing things about Israel and Zionism because they sincerely believe they’re standing up for Palestinians. Someone who would be genuinely horrified if anyone suggested they were antisemitic.
Those are the people I’m writing this one for.
What you just read was shared by someone I know in real life. I don’t believe she hates Jews. That’s actually why I’m showing it to you. There are versions of the same thing being shared constantly, including some of my friends. They don’t think they’re spreading Jew hate. They think they’re sharing an opinion they agree with about history.
I have a lot of articles in my archives now about Jewish history, Zionism, the literal land, the Arabs of Palestine, 1948, Jews from the Arab world, pogroms, propaganda, and all the things that happened long before Netanyahu became prime minister. I’ll link some of them throughout this piece because I’ve already gone much deeper into some of these subjects than I can here.
Look at how much history is packed into that post as settled fact. Zionism began in Europe. Jews became colonizers. Palestinians had their land stolen. Israel was created through the Nakba. Eventually we get to occupation, settlements, Gaza, and Netanyahu and his “brutal government.” If that’s the history you’ve been given, I guess understand how you got where you are.
Somebody decided where to start the story, which maps you would see, which refugees mattered, which wars needed context, and which parts of Jewish history could be skipped entirely. And now people who don’t hate Jews are passing that version along without realizing how much was removed before it reached them.
That’s how this Jew hatred spreads.
PS. This article isn’t meant to be a full history lesson. I know I skipped over important events and left out details that deserve far more space than I could give them here. That’s why I’m linking to some of my longer articles throughout. I’ve already done the deeper digging. This one is about how much changes when even a few of those missing pieces are put back into the story.
Netanyahu has become this generation’s answer for everything. His “brutal government.” Gaza. Settlements. His coalition. He has become a convenient explanation…the target for all the anger at Israel, except there’s a lot of history sitting there before Netanyahu ever entered the picture.
He first became prime minister in 1996. Jews were massacred in Hebron in 1929. The Arab Revolt began in 1936. Arab opposition to Jewish immigration was already intense while European Jews were desperately trying to escape Europe. Arab leaders rejected partition in 1947. War followed. Israel declared independence in May 1948 and neighboring Arab armies invaded. The PLO was founded in 1964, three years before Israel controlled the West Bank or Gaza.
Netanyahu can answer for his government and its decisions. I’m sure he has plenty to answer for, as do most governments. But he wasn’t in Hebron in 1929. He wasn’t around in 1936, 1947, 1948, or 1964 either.
There always seems to be somebody who can be made to explain the whole thing. Currently, there’s Netanyahu.
There’s another problem with making Netanyahu the catch-all…October 7.
Hamas called it Al-Aqsa Flood. Al-Aqsa and Jerusalem have been used again and again to frame this conflict as something much older and larger than a fight with whichever Israeli government happens to be in power. October 7 wasn’t a protest against Netanyahu’s coalition. It was a slaughter…an attempted genocide of Jews carried out by Hamas, a terrorist organization.
And somehow even October 7 gets folded back into the Netanyahu excuse. Anger at him and anger over the war in Gaza become a way to recast Hamas as “resistance,” as though October 7 was aimed at changing an Israeli policy or getting rid of an Israeli prime minister.
Hamas told us otherwise. After October 7, the terrorist organization’s political bureau member Ghazi Hamad told Lebanese television that Al-Aqsa Flood was only the first. There would be a second, a third, and a fourth. When the interviewer asked whether he meant the annihilation of Israel, his answer was, “Yes, of course.”
Antisemitism has been called the world’s oldest hatred for a reason. Jews have watched old accusations survive for centuries by changing clothes and finding new audiences. Hamas reaches into that long history too, attaching its war to Al-Aqsa, Jerusalem, occupation, and grievances that don’t disappear when an Israeli election changes the name on the prime minister’s office.
Netanyahu will eventually be gone. The people who want Israel gone will still be there, and Hamas has already told us what it intends to do if it gets another chance.
They said again and again. I believe them, and you should too.
Starting the Jewish story with Theodor Herzl is the gateway to making Zionism look like something a bunch of Europeans invented. Herzl helped organize political Zionism in the late nineteenth century. But Jews had been attached to Israel for thousands of years by the time he held the First Zionist Congress.
The word Jew comes from Judah. Judea is a place. Jerusalem had been part of Jewish life for centuries. Jews prayed toward it, mourned it, wrote about it, and ended Passover seders with “Next year in Jerusalem.” Most Jews had been scattered across the world…the diaspora. But Jewish communities remained in the land through centuries of changing rulers. Other Jews returned at different times. Jerusalem, Safed, Tiberias, and Hebron all had Jewish communities long before the State of Israel existed.
I wrote an entire article about Ottoman restrictions on Jewish immigration because I didn’t know much about that history until I started digging into it either. Jews were trying to return before Britain controlled Palestine, before the Balfour Declaration, before the Holocaust, and long before there was an Israel.
The 1922 League of Nations Mandate actually referred to the “historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine” and the grounds for “reconstituting their national home in that country.” It also called for safeguarding the civil and religious rights of the non-Jewish population. That language is right there in the document.
I keep coming back to that word: reconstituting. In 1922 they understood that the Jewish story in the land hadn’t begun with Herzl. A hundred years later, somehow social media has managed to misplace several thousand years.
The word “colonizer” gets thrown at Jews constantly now.
I'm adding a video here that runs through country after country, and it’s perfect for this section. Britain had an empire that stretched around the world. France colonized huge parts of Africa and Asia. Spain and Portugal conquered vast territories in the Americas. The United States expanded across a continent inhabited by Native peoples through war, removal, broken treaties, purchases, and annexation. The Ottoman Empire conquered and ruled huge parts of Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East for centuries.
Arab conquest belongs in this conversation too. Beginning in the seventh century, Arab armies expanded out of the Arabian Peninsula into the Levant, Egypt, North Africa, Mesopotamia, and beyond. Egypt didn’t begin as an Arab Muslim country. The Amazigh peoples were in North Africa before the Arab conquests. Jews, Samaritans, Christians, Aramaic-speaking communities, Greeks, and others lived throughout the Levant before Arabic and Islam became dominant across much of the region.
This is human history. People conquered other people. Empires grew and collapsed. Borders moved. Populations moved, mixed, fled, were expelled, conquered, and were conquered. Open a history book about almost anywhere on Earth and eventually you’re going to find something ugly.
Yet somehow Israel gets put under a microscope that I rarely see applied to other countries. Jews get an even smaller microscope. Where did your grandparents come from? How long were they there? How long were your great-grandparents in Poland? What about Iraq? When did your ancestors leave Judea? How much land did Jews own? How much did they buy? How many generations can pass before exile supposedly cancels your connection to where you came from?
Nobody asks an Egyptian Arab to explain the Arab conquest of Egypt before he’s allowed to call himself Egyptian. Nobody asks an American to produce his family’s land records before saying he belongs in America. Nobody asks a Brit to personally answer for the British Empire every time Britain appears in the news.
But the Jew is still being asked to explain why he’s in Judea.
Watch this video by Yehuda Meitav
The video is inspired by a line from Soviet Jewish writer Vasily Grossman that fits the point almost too well: “Tell me what you accuse the Jews of, and I’ll tell you what you’re guilty of.”
There are many countries represented in that video. Keep the line in mind while you watch it.
This is another one I ended up digging into because I kept seeing those maps in people’s social feeds. You know the ones. A series of maps supposedly showing Palestinian land disappearing while Jewish or Israeli land gets bigger and bigger until almost everything has been stolen.
They’re convincing when nobody explains what you’re actually looking at.
The land system under the Ottomans and later the British included privately owned land, state land, communal land, absentee ownership, tenant farmers, and a registration system that quickly became complicated. Jews and Jewish organizations purchased land. Some bought from local Arab owners and some bought large tracts from absentee landlords. Sometimes Arab tenant farmers who had worked the land were displaced after the land was sold, causing real resentment and hardship.
Those maps don’t tell you that everything colored as “Palestinian” wasn’t privately owned Palestinian land. It doesn’t show which land was state or public land. It doesn’t show Jewish purchases or tell you who sold the land. There’s no Ottoman land system, no absentee landlord, no deed, no sale, and usually no explanation beyond a few colors and dates.
Somebody made that map and decided what the colors would mean and what information you wouldn’t get.
Your friend may have no idea. You may have no idea. You saw something that seemed to confirm what you’d already heard and you shared it. Your friends shared it, their friends shared it, and eventually a complicated land history became a brightly colored picture proving that Jews stole a country.
This is exactly what I’m talking about. Every time Jewish land purchases disappear, every time Judea disappears, every time Arab rejection of partition disappears, every time the Jews driven out of Arab countries disappear, the story gets easier to understand and the Jews in it look worse. Eventually people who would swear they don’t hate Jews are sharing it too.
They didn’t start the fire. They’re still adding fuel to it.
I became curious about the people we now call Palestinians and started digging into that history too. There were Arab families who had lived in the land for generations. There were families whose roots went back to Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, and other parts of the region. There were Bedouins, Circassians, Bosnians, Muslims, Christians, Jews, and others living within a part of the Ottoman Empire where people moved around far more than today’s national borders would suggest.
Palestinian Arab national identity developed over time and grew during the British Mandate. The word Palestinian existed long before 1948 and was used in different ways, including geographically. The PLO was founded in 1964.
I don’t have any problem with Palestinians having a national identity that developed over time. That’s how national identities work. What makes no sense is projecting today’s Palestinian identity backward unchanged for centuries while chopping Jewish national history off in Europe in the 1890s.
Those are two completely different sets of rules.
The Nakba may be the clearest example of entering a story halfway through. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians became refugees during the 1948 war. Some fled fighting and fear, some were expelled, communities were destroyed, and families lost homes they had lived in for generations.
But the story didn’t begin there. In 1947 the United Nations proposed two states, one Jewish and one Arab, with Jerusalem under international administration. The Jewish Agency accepted partition. The Arab Higher Committee rejected it and demanded an Arab state across all of Palestine. Fighting followed before Israel had even declared independence.
On May 14, 1948 Israel declared independence. The very next day, armies from Egypt, Transjordan, Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq entered the war.
There were expulsions. There were people who fled. Terrible things happened. But remove the rejected partition, the civil war that followed, and the invasion by five Arab armies, and you haven’t explained the Nakba. You’ve cut away everything that came before it until what remains looks like Jews were handed a country and simply threw Palestinians out.
The Arab side rejected partition, went to war, and lost. That loss didn’t end the conflict. Israel faced another major war in 1956, years of cross-border attacks and raids, another regional war in 1967, another in 1973, and decades of terrorism and warfare after that. The actors, borders, governments, and stated goals changed over time, but the conflict did not end with the Arab defeat in 1948.
Again, somebody chose where to start the story.
Hundreds of thousands of Jews lived across Arab and Muslim countries around the creation of Israel, some in communities that had existed for more than 2,000 years.
The Jews of Iraq didn’t come from Poland. Neither did the Jews of Yemen, Egypt, Libya, Syria, Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, and elsewhere in the region. They had homes, businesses, synagogues, cemeteries, foods, music, traditions, neighborhoods, and family histories tied to places where Jews had lived for generations.
Within a few decades, those communities were gone. What happened varied by country. Jews faced expulsions, slaughters, pogroms, arrests, confiscations, loss of citizenship, discriminatory laws, and conditions that made Jewish life increasingly dangerous or impossible. Hundreds of thousands ended up in Israel, very often leaving property and businesses behind.
Somehow their history disappears from the version being shared today. Iraqi Jews become “European settlers.” Yemenite Jews become “white colonizers.” Jews whose families had lived across North Africa and the Middle East for centuries get shoved into a European story that was never theirs.
You can’t erase nearly an entire Jewish world from the Middle East and then point at the Jews who ended up in Israel as proof that Israel was a European colonial project. But that’s exactly what this version of history asks people to do.
Eventually everything comes back to 1967. Israel “occupied Palestine,” and there you have it. Cause identified and history “explained.”
Except there was no Palestinian state in the West Bank or Gaza for Israel to take over in 1967. Jordan controlled the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Egypt administered Gaza. And the 19 years between Israel’s creation and the Six-Day War weren’t peaceful.
The PLO was founded in 1964, three years before Israel controlled any of th…
