Refugee Immigration, not Settler Colonialism

18 min readMar 25, 2024

The Accusation Israel Is A Colonizer State

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

Emma Lazarus
November 2, 1883

Through her 1882–1883 essays in the Century, Jewish poetess Emma Lazarus put forth the notion of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. She was an important forerunner of the Zionist movement, having argued for the creation of a Jewish homeland thirteen years before the term Zionist was even coined.

The next time you hear someone claim Zionism is a form of “racism” and “colonialism” rather than refugee immigration, remind them that the words inscribed on the Statue of Liberty were written by a Zionist Jewish poetess to express the ideals Jewish people held for immigration to both America and Palestine.

Many of the American progressives with “No human being is illegal” signs in their front yards nevertheless blithely repeat phrases like “illegal settlements” and “settler colonialism” when talking about Israel. Many of them seem to think no human being is illegal, unless that human being is a Jewish person trying to move to their ancestral homeland.

Where is the line between immigration and colonization? When we are talking about Zionist immigration, some of it “illegal immigration”, are we talking about refugees from European and Muslim anti-Semitism or front men for European power? While the early Zionists were European, they were joined after 1948 by Jews from the Middle East and Africa, and today the majority of Jewish Israelis are descended from those regions, not from Europe. In fact Israel is one of the most multi-ethnic societies on earth. Its population is so varied, and its model has been so successful within its own borders, the Brookings Institute has held it up as a model for the United States on how to better handle cultural and ethnic diversity.

Go deeper: How Israel provides a model for the US to handle ethnic diversity

Israel is not a colonial project of any foreign power. The original immigrants were responding to a long history of pogroms in Europe, especially eastern Europe. Pogroms were periodic anti-Jewish riots and purges, and sometimes massacres, endured by Jewish people in Europe under Christian rule. Zionism emerged as a response based on the idea that, if Christians felt Jewish people didn’t belong in Christendom and should go back to where they came from, maybe they really should. The dream was Jewish people could find refuge in a Jewish homeland.

The most obvious evidence of this is that the Zionist Jews were coming to the area prior to the British taking control, and they continued coming to the area after the British relinquished control. It didn’t have much to do with the British, other than the British being a power the Jews had to deal with as part of their own project.

The Zionists did not cooperate with the British to extract resources, to enslave the Arabs already there, or to govern on Britain’s behalf, nor were they ever subjects of the British empire. Indeed, the British mainly considered the Jewish immigrants to be pests and were quite divided about whether to even support the immigration activity. They banned it in 1939, and Jews still tried to come ( sadly, without much success ). Ultimately, the Jewish immigrants fought the British to drive them out.

One of Israel’s first orders of business after 1948 was to establish an outreach program encouraging Jews all over the world, especially the middle east and North Africa, to come to Israel. What sort of British colony prioritizes intaking Jews from the middle east and Africa as among its first official actions? The immigration continues even today, without prodding from any European power. It’s obvious this was not a British project. It is Jewish immigration, not British colonialism.

Anyway, Israel is a Jewish project not a British one or a United Nations one. Anti-Zionists should stop trying to give credit to others. It was all us. The project was a Jewish project of refugee immigration, to establish a safehouse for Jewish refugees in their ancestral homeland as imperial control over the land was weakening.

Go deeper: The wiki on European pogroms.

While Zionism was spearheaded by European Jews afraid of growing anti-Jewish violence in the Christian world, it was a movement for all Jews, everywhere, as Jewish people in the Muslim world were experiencing similar persecution and threat. Most people are familiar with the Holocaust and I assume many have some knowledge of the decades of pogroms which preceded it, and which gave rise to Zionism among the Jews of Eastern Europe in the 19th century. At the urging of the Czar, eastern Europeans for decades were going from village to village, burning and running out the Jews. The number of Jews slaughtered during this time is not known exactly, but some estimates place it as high as 250,000. This was long before anyone had ever heard the name “Hitler”. Emma Lazarus had these poor people, the wretched of the earth, in mind, among others.

What a lot of people don’t know, and perhaps you don’t know, is that similar things were happening in the Muslim world, and in the Ottoman empire specifically. For hundreds of years, Jews lived reasonably in the Ottoman empire and it was considered a haven compared to the Christian world. Jews were lower caste people, and experienced periodic repressions and ongoing unfair taxation, but in many places we thrived anyway. Compared to Christendom, it was bad but not as bad. That changed significantly in the 19th century. Here’s a particularly poignant piece which paints the picture of what it was like to be a Jew in the middle east in the 19th century, unearthed by historian Benny Morris. Morris writes that one symbol of Jewish degradation was the phenomenon of stone-throwing at Jews by Muslim children. Morris quotes a 19th-century traveler:

I have seen a little fellow of six years old, with a troop of fat toddlers of only three and four, teaching [them] to throw stones at a Jew, and one little urchin would, with the greatest coolness, waddle up to the man and literally spit upon his Jewish gaberdine. To all this the Jew is obliged to submit; it would be more than his life was worth to offer to strike a Mohammedan.

This is an especially important example in light of the Palestinian Intifada and its famous tactic of Palestinians sending their children out to throw stones at Israelis. Like many things the Palestinians do, stone throwing has two meanings for two audiences. One audience is the Western world, where it is supposed to hit Western eyes as a David and Goliath struggle of powerless Palestinian children reduced to using stones against evil Israeli soldiers with guns.

In this viewing, it is supposed to gather sympathy to the Palestinian cause and encourage isolation of Israel from Western supporters. For Palestinians, other Arabs, and the more awakened of the Israelis it has another meaning altogether, which is cultural and historical. It sends the message that Palestinians have not forgotten the proper place Jews are supposed to have among Muslims, and in time the Palestinians intend to return the Jews to their proper place.

Similarly, when the Hamas terrorists on October 7th, 2023 burned Jewish bodies, in one case a mother and child tied together, the symbolism was not lost on Jews around the world. It was a clear reference to the ovens of the Nazi concentration camps, and a communication to us all that the Palestinians are patient, and they still intend to finish what the Nazis started.

The dual messaging with things like stone throwing works for Palestinians. Westerners react to the message intended for them, with sympathy for what look like oppressed children; and Israelis react to the message intended for them, which is that Arabs are your natural masters and will subjugate you.

The message intended for Israelis is both a direct threat, because stone throwing is actually pretty lethal, but also a deeply personal communication of long-term intention, as an expression of Palestinian’s cultural memory of historical dominance.

As a result, to naive Westerners, Israelis responding to stone throwing look to be bullies shooting at children, while Palestinians, in front of other Palestinians and other Arabs, look like heroes invoking their ancient caste rights and what is, in their memory, the golden age of their time as oppressors.

There were of course many incidents striking fear in the Jewish community during the Ottoman empire. There was a massacre of Jews in Baghdad in 1828. There was a massacre of Jews in Barfurush in 1867.

Throughout the 1860s, the Jews of Libya were subjected to what historian Martin Gilbert calls punitive taxation. In 1897, synagogues were ransacked and Jews were murdered in Tripolitania ( modern Tripoli ). In 1864, around 500 Jews were killed in Marrakech and Fezin Morocco. In 1869, 18 Jews were killed in Tunis, and an Arab mob looted Jewish homes and stores, and burned synagogues, on Jerba Island. In 1875, 20 Jews were killed by a mob in Demnat, Morocco; elsewhere in Morocco, Jews were attacked and killed in the streets in broad daylight. In 1891, the leading Muslims in Jerusalem asked the Ottoman authorities in Constantinople to prohibit the entry of Jews arriving from Russia.

As a result, many Jews throughout the Ottoman empire lived with an ever present sense of fear.

An important instance of anti-Semitism around this time was the Damascus affair, in which many Jews in Damascus (which was then under the leadership of Muhammad Ali of Egypt) were arrested after being accused of murdering the Christian Father Thomas and his servant in an instance of blood libel ( i.e., false accusations of murder used as a pretext for scapegoating and killing Jews ). While the authorities under Sharif Pasha, Egyptian governor of Damascus, tortured the accused until they confessed to the crime, and killed two Jews who refused to confess, prominent European Jews such as Adolphe Cremieux demanded the release of the condemned.

In 1865, when the equality of all subjects of the Ottoman Empire was proclaimed, Ahmed Cevdet Pasha, a high-ranking official observed, “whereas in former times, in the Ottoman State, the communities were ranked, with the Muslims first, then the Greeks, then the Armenians, then the Jews, now all of them were put on the same level. Some Greeks objected to this, saying: ‘The government has put us together with the Jews. We were content with the supremacy of Islam.’”

Jewish people have a long memory, in a way Western people don’t, and Israel is for all Jews, not just European Jews. We know how the Muslims see us and what they intend. Israelis respond not just to current events but to long-term intentions. This is why Israel will protect itself as a Jewish state, because the people of Israel will not return to the Muslim caste system. Below is a list of Muslim violence against Jews and Jewish communities, simply for being Jews through the centuries. Please take a look especially at the uptick occurring in the 1800’s, leading up to Zionism,

Go deeper: Anti-Jewish violence in the Muslim world before Zionism

It’s historically, transparently true that Zionism is not a racist movement predicated on the superiority of Jewish people over anyone else. It was a refugee movement, predicated on the feeling that well over 1,000 years of cultural insecurity and persecution in Christendom and the Muslim world was probably enough. It was time to go home.

Go deeper: Haviv Gur on who the Israelis are

“Settler colonialism” and the Palestinian shell game

Palestinian apologists and activists typically justify Palestinian’s xenophobic and violent reaction to Jewish immigration by calling Israeli immigration “colonialism” or “settler colonialism”. Early Zionists themselves referred to it as “colonization” and thought of it as a colonial project. But the meaning of that term in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was broader and less problematic than how it is used by leftists today. In its use at the time, there were two kinds of “colonial projects”. One kind just consisted of immigration, as described here earlier. Any intentional project in which people would move to a place to find a better life would be called a colonial project. This sort of “colonial project” is value neutral and not inherently destructive as the “colony” is not a colony of a foreign state and is not established for the purpose of exploitation of people or resources.

The second kind of “colonialism” is a form of foreign conquest, in which a state sends people and armies into another country as their agents, for the purpose of subjugating it and using its resources for the benefit of the imperial state.

Palestinian apologists want to point towards early Zionist documents which refer to the first sense of “colonization” and then condemn them for the second sense of “colonization”. It is a rhetorical shell game. I will be discussing the different waves of the immigration project and their triggers in just a little bit.

Jewish Immigration, Colonialism and “Being White”

The organizers of Zionism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries were desperately trying to save lives. In the Russian empire alone, millions of lives were at stake. Cossacks and Slavs were burning shtetl after shtetl ( shtetls were small Jewish villages in Eastern Europe ), tens or hundreds of thousands of Jews were being killed and many millions uprooted. When Zionist organizers discussed plans to create a Jewish refuge in Palestine, they discussed all contingencies: “what if this happens”, “what if that happens”. Among these contingencies were questions like, “What if Palestine is closed to us?” and “What if the Arabs do not accept us?”

With so many lives at stake, they looked for alternative places to Palestine but could not find any ideas that were realistic. Again, knowing lives were at stake, they talked about contingencies for Arab rejectionism, “What will we do if the Arabs of Palestine try to drive us out, like the Christians are doing?” In their private conversations, early Zionist organizers agreed the Jewish migrants might have to fight and possibly move the Arabs, if the Arabs would not accept the Jews.

This was not a plan. This was a contingency of the desperate, mulling over last chances. Today, anti-Zionists twist this desperation coming from life-and-death stakes into a picture of in-built racism in the Zionist movement. This false picture, taken from partial quotations, gets codified into the idea that the Zionist project was a “white, European, colonial settler” enterprise rather than refugee immigration.

Looking at Israel today, or at Jewish people in modern America, it is almost impossible to understand the vast gulf between the dire straits of those times and today. The best way I can think of to convey it is to quote Louis Armstrong, the great American Jazz musician, from his deathbed memoir, “Louis Armstrong + the Jewish Family in New Orleans, La, the Year of 1907”. It is the story of the Russian immigrant Jewish family who helped raise him when he was a child, who bought him his first trumpet, and taught him Russian lullabies. Speaking of what he saw of their lives, he wrote,

I had a long time admiration for the Jewish People. Especially with their long time of courage, taking So Much Abuse for so long. I was only Seven years old but I could easily see the ungodly treatment that the White Folks were handing the poor Jewish family whom I worked for. It dawned on me, how drastically. Even `my race,’ the Negroes, the way that I saw it, they were having a little better Break than the Jewish people, with jobs a plenty around. Of course we can understand all the situations and handicaps that was going on, but to me we were better off than the Jewish people. But we didn’t do anything about it.

Please take a moment to let this sink in. Here are the recollections of a young black boy in early 20th century New Orleans, observing the harsh treatment by white people of Jewish people, and expressing his belief that the black people of the time were better off.

Elsewhere in his memoir Louis Armstrong discusses how the Jewish people were very happy to be in America because they were treated so much better than they were in the Russian empire. Think about that hierarchy. Jewish immigrants in America, held below black people in the deep south on America’s social ladder, were happy to be here, because they were treated so much better than where they came from in Europe.

Go deeper: Louis Armstrong’s deathbed memoir

These were also the bulk of the early immigrants to Palestine, the “first wave” of immigrants before the Holocaust happened, against whom the Arabs organized deadly riots to drive them out. In the anti-Zionist mythologies, they are being recast as privileged white people and “colonial settlers”, pitted against powerless indigenous Arabs. Nothing could be further from the truth.

For his adult life, Louis Armstrong always wore a Star of David around his neck, to honor the Russian Jewish immigrants of New Orleans, who helped him when he was a boy.

That is not the behavior or recollections of a boy who was dealing with racists.

Famous jazz musician Louis Armstrong wearing his customary Star of David to honor the kindness of the Russian Jewish immigrants who helped him when he was a boy in the early 1900’s in New Orleans.

How Anti-Zionists Make The Illusion Work: A Case Study

The climb from the bottom of the social ladder to where American and Israeli Jews are today is a long one. It is hard to imagine it ever really happened. It did. I know it personally.

Below is a true story of immigrants, my family. It is a quintessentially American story. I hope everyone can keep us in mind the next time you are being told the Eastern European Jews who immigrated to Palestine in the first wave of immigrants ( the second wave were fleeing the Nazis ) were agents of European colonial power. Those people were the same as my family. They just went to a different land.

If it resonates with you, please share it. With some of the current talk it is so important for us to remind ourselves of our own stories. There are millions of stories like mine to be told.

My maternal grandfather Herman emigrated from Eastern Europe (Czech/Hungary) in the 1910’s. He was poor. He had a heavy accent. He didn’t really have a way to make a living. To get by, he hustled. He sold junk from a cart on the street*, eventually saving enough to move to a small rented space.

[[ *I’ve received a correction from an aunt, who says though they always referred to grandpa’s goods as junk, it was really “second-hand goods” and he sold from a blanket on the ground and not a cart. Also, she would sometimes go with him and bring deviled egg sandwiches she’d make for lunch, which she remembers fondly. Finally, while grandpa worked very, very, very hard to make ends meet, the four girls and their Aunt Gee — who everyone loved and who helped look after the kids once their mother died — kept the home spotless. ]]

He had five children, four daughters and a son. His wife died when the children were still young and they lived together in a small home, one unusual man who worked all the time and couldn’t be home a lot, who dressed funny, sometimes wore a wide brimmed black hat, who talked funny, who worshipped funny, who had “too many kids”, who scrounged around at flea markets and struggled to make ends meet. He had a big nose. I’ve read that some would call it “hooked”, though I’ve never liked that description.

I cannot imagine what the white Christian Americans of northern and western European descent must have thought when they looked at him, especially during the depression when my mother and her siblings were kids and he was hustling to raise them alone. Who are “these people”, they must have thought. Why don’t “those people” try to fit in? Don’t you think “those people” are dirty, and they have too many kids? Do you think they share “Christian values”? Jews aren’t really like us. They are going to change our country. What will happen to the future of our country?

My grandfather finally passed away when I was fourteen. He was not much more by then than he ever was. He lived and died in a small apartment in Cleveland, OH with his second wife. He was a devout Jew who wore talit, a kippah or a wide brimmed hat, and smoked a pipe. His English was heavily accented and he made a small living going to flea markets on the outskirts of the city early in the mornings, picking up junk cheaply, and reselling it from a basement space in the city [ which he saved up to afford as an upgrade from the blanket on the sidewalk ]. He was never much for other people to look at, not someone whose outward appearance or material accomplishments would give Americans already here faith in the power of immigration to make this country great.

His four daughters all married and made it into the middle class. His son, the only one who could go to college, became a professional and did well for himself. All his children had children as well, producing myself and 13 cousins. Among us we have two Ph.D.’s, a lawyer, a doctor, two dentists, and two successful entrepreneurs. If I include our spouses, I’d add another lawyer, a CPA, and an electrical engineer. More of us than not are successful, none of us are criminals or welfare cheats, and together we’ve saved lives, created jobs, published books, and improved communities in all four corners of our country (literally).

The cousins have also had children — a third generation born from that junkman — and they are just beginning to enter the workforce. The first “graduates” of generation three so far boast two lawyers, a poet and entrepreneur, a successful business consultant in NYC, a software engineer working for Apple, the founder of a successful law firm, and an epidemiologist who works for the CDC to keep tuberculosis in check.

For myself, I’m a Ph.D. and a reasonably well-off serial entrepreneur. Because of our own experience, like most Jewish Americans we have a soft spot for immigrants of all types. I always tell people, please, the next time you see a Mexican immigrant living in a crowded house, or a Muslim wearing some funny haberdashery, or an Indian hunched over a keyboard pounding out code, please look past the appearances. Please remember Herman Weiss’s family. The people who make the sacrifices, brave the dangers and face the prejudices required to be immigrants — and the sacrifices are huge — are the people with the strongest inner flames. The flame is often veiled by wear and tear from years of hard work and struggles you can’t imagine, but it will pass on to the children.

Erasing history, replacing it with cheap surface appearances in the present, is how the illusion of Jews as white, colonial oppressors works on the young. To shake free of the illusion, when you look at us now, you need to see through us to that junkman. It is who we were then, and that is still who we are when we talk to one another now. We have not forgotten.

What does this have to do with Palestine and the establishment of Israel? People like my grandfather Herman are mostly the people who actually immigrated to Israel, not Herzl or other Zionist organizers in Europe who were trying to open the way for them. While Jewish immigrants to America faced poverty and prejudice, the immigrants to Palestine faced far worse. They faced violence and death and xenophobia similar to what they were running from in Europe. That, not racism or fascism or colonial ambitions or anything else you hear from anti-Zionists, was the determining factor for how things diverged for Jews in America and Palestine.

The best way to understand how things have gone so badly is to read the chapters of this resource in order, from beginning to end, clicking on the Go deeper links as your time allows. It is an immersive experience and few people will get through unchanged, having learned the context of the conflict, including parts the United Nations does not want people to learn.

This essay is part of a larger resource for parents, teachers, students, concerned individuals, and anyone else who desires to contextualize the conflict and navigate the accusations against Israel and Palestinians.

All Chapters:

0. Foreword to Zionism and Anti-Zionism

1. The Gish Gallop of Anti-Zionism

2. Genocide or Just War?

3. For Hamas, The Suffering Is The Point

4. What Is Israel? Why So Much Violence?

5. The Hebrew People, Not the Jewish Religion

6. Chosen For Their Insignificance, Not Their Superiority

7. The Incoherence of, “I am not anti-Semitic. I am just against Zionism.”

8. Refugee Immigration, Not Settler Colonialism

9. Zionism, Arab Feudalism, and the Tragedy of the Serfs

10. How the Zionists Saved ( Not Conquered ) Palestine