Editor’s note: It is BNG’s mission, when possible, to present diverse viewpoints on key issues of the day. We do not expect anyone to agree with everything we publish. Although the majority of our recent opinion and analysis content has been critical of the modern state of Israel, there are other viewpoints that need to be understood. What follows is one of those viewpoints plainly articulated.
What I’m about to say regarding Israel will confound both the left and the right, but hear me out.
I am a post-colonial traditionalist, which means I think the most just thing that can and should happen to colonial-settler states is to cease to exist and for indigenous peoples to be given back sovereignty, and in some cases the colonial-settlers returned to their native countries.
When the Messiah comes back, he will set right all wrongs, and that means, among other things, this very point.
To this point, I believe countries like the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand are illegitimate and always will be so. Western colonial states must give back sovereignty to the peoples whose land they continue to occupy not as guests but as conquerors.
Gabriel Gordon
In this belief, I’m more radical than any person on the political left or right.
Advocacy for decolonializing is traditionally viewed as an idea from the political left. Namely, the idea that Europeans should give back sovereignty to the locals of various lands they colonized.
While advocacy for the modern political state of Israel is traditionally viewed as an idea from the political right, that’s complicated by the reality that many, if not most Jews in America and Israel lean toward the political left. Namely, the idea of Zionism, that Israel has a right to occupy and control its ancestral homelands.
You might think based on my colonial settler language that I would advocate the end of Israel, but you would be wrong. Rather than being a bastion of colonial settler ideology, I see Israel as a threat to colonial settler ideology.
One popular narrative is that Israel is a kind of colonial settler, taking over lands once occupied by others. In reality, Israel and Jews are the indigenous people whose land historically has been occupied by settler colonial forces and at least in part is still being occupied today.
A different view of history
What we know today as the Holy Land once was described as the Land of Canaan. Unlike Hebrew, which is a Canaanite dialect, the language of the Arabs is not. The Northwest Semitic language family includes Aramaic, Ugaritic, Hebrew and Phoenician. Arabic, however, is a Central Semitic language foreign to the land of Israel, brought in by invading conquering Arab armies in late Antiquity, which is also how Arabic spread across Southwest Asia and North Africa, namely through violent conquest.
It is the Arabs whose Dome of the Rock is occupying our sacred space of the Temple Mount where the Jewish Temple used to stand before the Roman colonizers destroyed the second one in 70 C.E. The Romans even renamed “Judea” to “Syria-Palestine” in 135 C.E to erase our connection and memory to the land. It is the Arabs who are occupying the area of Judea and Samaria, falsely called the “West Bank,” which has some of the earliest Jewish/Israelite remains.
The term “Jew” is actually related to the place name of Judea, and the oldest cities in this area are Jewish cities with Jewish names in Hebrew such as Bethlehem and Hebron — which are being occupied by foreign peoples. The Jewish settlements in Judea and Samaria cannot, therefore, be considered a “colonial occupation” because it is our own land, and thus it really is decolonization.
“In reality, Palestine and the Palestinians are the colonial-settlers.”
In reality, Palestine and the Palestinians are the colonial-settlers.
Seeing it from this perspective illustrates why a two-state solution never will be just. No one has the right to divide indigenous land, giving part of it to a people who originally came in through Arab conquest.
We can look at any period in history for the last 3,000 years and point to a group of people in the land of Israel and positively identify them as Jewish people. Can the same be said of the Palestinians? Indeed, the oldest mention of the people of Israel in the land of Israel goes back to the Egyptian Merneptah stele from 3,200 years ago, where the Pharaoh Merneptah boasts of having destroyed the people of Israel in Canaan/Israel. The name “Israel” shows up 3,200 years ago in the same land that still goes by that name by the same people who are called by that name, and yet somehow, we are not considered indigenous.
Now imagine this
The situation Israel has found itself in since 1948 is something akin to what it might be like if the Lenape people, the native people of New Jersey, many who had been living in other lands because of their forced removal, came back to their ancestral homeland colonized by foreign forces, and reclaimed sovereignty. Let’s say they came back and renamed their homeland Lenapehoking, the original name of the land.
Then imagine the United Nations coming up with a plan to give 51% of Lenapehoking to the European New Jerseans and 49% to the Lenape. The Lenape joyfully accept the unjust plan while the European New Jerseans reject it because they desire all the land. The moment the Lenape declare their independence, the surrounding states declare war on this land, which they continued to call “New Jersey” rather than Lenapehoking.
Despite multiple attempts at genocide, the Lenape win each war, yet the colonizers within Lenapehoking continue to attack from within, desiring to kill all Lenape, dwelling in two sections of the land that represent roughly half of what once was New Jersey.
New Jersians repeatedly come out of their designated sections from time to time and go on terrorist raids stabbing, gunning down and blowing up men, women and children. So the Lenape tribes put up a wall and don’t allow these Europeans unabated access to the main part of their land.
“In my view, the settlers are not Israel and the Jews, but the Arabs who have come from outside the land.”
You see where this is going.
While no analogy is perfect, this helps us see the situation Israel finds itself in. In my view, the settlers are not Israel and the Jews, but the Arabs who have come from outside the land.
Advocating a one-state solution
U.S. President Donald Trump’s plan to remove Arabs from Gaza is, therefore, a just plan, while his plan to have the United States control the land would simply replace one colonial-settler with another.
In the end, the best and most just solution, while a messy one, is going to be removing colonial-settlers out of Judea, Samaria and Gaza into surrounding Arabs nations, like Egypt and Jordan, and maybe some others, ideally with the cooperation of surrounding Arab states. Giving these Palestinians a state will not placate their goals to kill all Jews, but if anything will help give them the means to do so.
The Arabs have 22 Arab states; we have one Jewish state.
As for the 2 million Arab Israelis who are citizens of Israel, who live peaceably, I see no reason why they shouldn’t continue living and contributing to Israeli society. Moreover, the various minority groups, like the Druze and the Aramean Christians, should be protected by the Jewish state of Israel from the persecution and death that would inevitably fall upon them if they were to live even in some of the surrounding states.
The revisionist history that turns Jews from the indigenous people of Israel to the colonial settlers of Palestine is simply a cloak and dagger attempt to construct a self-image of righteousness that often perpetuates the “white man’s burden” and sets itself up to evade any accusation of continued colonialism and racism.
A one-state solution of a Jewish state is the only just option, even if the process would be messy, and might contain some injustices. It is the least of all evils.
Gabriel Gordon is an indigenizing and decolonizing Jewish Anglican. He earned a master’s degree in biblical studies from Portland Seminary and a bachelor’s degree from Oklahoma Baptist University, where he studied anthropology and missiology. He is currently a graduate student at Marquette University, where he studies historical theology with an interest in early Greek- and Syriac-speaking Christianity as well as post-supersessionist Jewish Christian theology. He is the author of multiple books including his most recent by Wipf and Stock The Fundamentals of a Recovering Fundamentalist. He lives with his wife, Hannah, and their dog, Karl Barth, in Milwaukee.