In the mid- to later years of the 1960s, as a young member of the Betar Zionist youth movement that recently suffered an act of bureaucratic, progressivist legalist oppression and discrimination in New York City, I would drop by far-left bookstores and pick up the latest pro-Arab literature. Already then, the name of Fayez Sayegh, a Christian Arab born in Syria, was familiar to me.

His 1965 pamphlet charging Zionism as being “settler-colonialism” was republished, as if received at Sinai, in edited form in 2012. I consider Maxim Rodinson’s analysis more challenging. It, too, preceded the 1967 Six-Day War, and Israel’s subsequent extension of its administration of Judea and Samaria (and, until 2005, over Gaza as well), having been first published in French in July 1967 but written previously.

Still, Sayegh represents a more genuine Arab voice of negation, rejection and desire for Jewish elimination. Whereas Marxists applaud killing “Zionists” in the name of “resistance,” Arabs are those mostly doing it.

In the 1920s and ’30s, the Communist Party platform had been asserting that the Mandate of “Palestine is a colony of British imperialism.” This was based on earlier resolutions, such as the Second International’s Fourth Congress in London in 1896, which condemned colonialism, and at the Sixth Congress in Amsterdam in 1904, which positioned the party as “against the colonial and imperialist policy.”

Moshe Machover, born in pre-state Tel Aviv—a Communist and the author of the 1961 anti-Zionist tract Peace, Peace, When There Is No Peace, which uses the colonialist paradigm—more recently spins the conflict differently. He writes that he sees it as a collision between “a Hebrew settler nation and a single indigenous Palestinian Arab people.”

A few counterpoints underlining Sayegh’s propositions are in order.

As New York Times columnist Bret Stephens recently remarked, “the fight against antisemitism … is a well-meaning but mostly wasted effort. We should spend … efforts toimprove pro-Israel advocacy, helping raise a generation of young Jews who are conscious of their Jewishness … .”

Highlighting a few basic irrationalities, historical corruptions and misleading “facts” should illustrate to younger Jewish generations that the ideology and anti-Zionist backlash they face are not new. Such misinformation has been disproved decades ago; modern-day misconceptions are just another form of anti-Jewish fulminations.

Here are a few brief elements as an introduction.

Sayegh writes: “The frenzied ‘Scramble for Africa’ of the 1880s stimulated the beginnings of Zionist colonization in Palestine. As European … prospective settlers … raced for Africa, Zionist settlers and would-be state-builders raced for Palestine.”

Al-Awda, the Palestine Right to Return Coalition, echoes that portrayal.

Petach Tikvah was founded in 1878. As Arie Morgenstern, a senior fellow at the Shalem Center in Jerusalem, has proven, Jews were moving to Eretz Yisrael before 1840. In documents from throughout the Jewish world—Persia and Kurdistan, Morocco, and Eastern (Chassidic and non-Chassidic alike) and Western Europe—a return to Zion was being discussed. It was promoted from 1240 until 1840 as well.

Still, actual land purchases were difficult under Ottoman rule. In 1855, however, Sir Moses Montefiore bought land in Jaffa; other private acquisitions followed. Jews always sought to re-establish sovereign political power in their national homeland. European pogroms, while unfortunate, made the actual move to Jerusalem, Hebron, Safed and Tiberias—cities where Jews have always lived—much more urgent.

This was no “imitation of colonial ventures,” as Sayegh claims, but a most genuine expression of a return home to Zion.

Another of his falsehoods is the statement that “the Zionist settlers could not countenance indefinite coexistence with the inhabitants of Palestine.”

To the contrary, the majority of Jews lived along with Arabs, and in some areas, in mixed-population neighborhoods. The first pioneers of the Bilu movement of the late 19th century, which was fueled predominantly by the immigration of Russian Jews to settle the Land of Israel, employed Arabs not only as agricultural workers but as watchmen. The Histadrut Trade Union incorporated Arabs. The Mapam Party sought out Arab members and assisted the establishment of an Arab Scouts movement.

While there existed the Zionist ideology of the “conquest of labor.” It was based on the need for Jews to first recreate a national society that would include all forms of employment, from doctors and lawyers of the Diaspora to the construction laborers and farmers of Eretz Yisrael. If anything interrupted that vision, it was the Arab terror operations of the 1920s and 1930s.

Sayegh’s suggestion that “the Zionist settler-state remains an alien body [his emphasis] in the region” is the fault of the Arabs, not the Jews.

One last excerpt. One Page 23 of the 1965 pamphlet, Sayegh turns dark and menacing in his formulations. He wants us to believe that there’s a “fundamental Zionist principle of racial self-segregation [which] also demands racial purity and racial exclusiveness in the land in which Jewish self-segregation is to be attained.”

If there is self-segregation, it is practiced by Arabs.

Think, too, of the racist attitude toward the Jews’ relationship with the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. There, as Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas has declared and as Israel noted in a 2015 letter to the United Nations: “Al-Aqsa is ours, and so is the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. They [the Jews] have no right to desecrate them with their filthy feet.” On another occasion, he said: “They [the Jews] have no right to defile it. We must prevent them.” And, “we will not allow our holy places to be contaminated.”

Returning to Stephens’ address, he stated that “this perpetual apology machine, which is the American Jew trying to stand up for the State of Israel, needs to end. We need to be proud.”

Being proud also means being knowledgeable and confident enough to engage in disputations and defenses of Israel and Zionism. And willing to push back. The strength to do comes from a critical insight into the lies of pro-Arab propaganda.

The post Recalling a father of the ‘Zionism is settler-colonialism’ theory appeared first on JNS.org.