The Push to ‘Other’ the Identities of Israeli Jews
By Chloe Greenfield, 2020–2021 CAMERA Fellow at University of Buffalo
When discussing the history of the establishment of Israel, a commonly parroted trope within anti-Israel and antisemitic circles is that the nation was founded by Jewish people who “colonized” the land and displaced more than 1 million Palestinians in 1948. This is an absurd and historically inaccurate narrative.
National Students for Justice in Palestine (NSJP) and its chapters across the country are infamous for spreading this libelous claim. For instance, the website for its New York chapter states, “We are unapologetically anti-Zionist and take that as a non-negotiable tenet of our unity. We identify the establishment of the state of Israel as an ongoing project of settler-colonialism that will be stopped through Palestinian national liberation.”
The land of Israel is the indigenous homeland of the Jewish people. With a continual presence in the land dating back thousands of years, and widespread cultural and religious themes of a return in Diasporic communities, Israel’s founding is a story of liberation, not of colonialism.
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