The ‘Free Palestine’ movement is guilty of everything it accuses Israel of.
by Lucy, FutureOfJewish.com Oct. 16, 2026
“Free Palestine” is a colonisation movement.
If that idea sounds absurd, it speaks to just how successfully the movement has colonised the language of “decolonisation,” “land back,” and “indigenous resistance.”
But it takes little more than applying their own anti-colonial framework consistently to discover that the narrative we’ve been relentlessly force-fed, in which Arab Palestinians are emphatically cast as the indigenous people resisting Israel, “the great colonial intruder,” is almost comically backwards.
So let’s apply it.
The basic categories should be recognisable: indigenous peoples and ancestral lands, conquest and dispossession, political domination and assimilation, cultural and linguistic transformation, resistance and self-determination.
Two caveats: We won’t start the historical clock at an arbitrary point in the middle of the 20th century, and we won’t stop recognising conquest when the conquerors aren’t European.
First, some geographical basics. Palestinians are Arabs, and the large majority are Muslim. Palestinian Basic Law declares that “the Palestinian people are part of the Arab nation,” recognises Islam as the official religion and Arabic the official language. “Palestine” is one of 22 members of the Arab League, within a wider Muslim-majority region spanning more than 50 countries. For context, there is one Jewish state, roughly the size of Wales.
The colonial arithmetic is already looking a little suspect.
Israel, we are told, is a colonial creation because the British put it there. But if European-drawn borders make a country “colonial,” Israel has plenty of company. Britain and France helped draw borders across the modern Middle East, including Iraq, Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon, and influenced who would rule them.
The facts don’t quite fit, either. While Britain initially supported a Jewish national home, it later restricted Jewish immigration, explicitly rejected establishing a Jewish state as British policy, and abstained from the 1947 United Nations partition vote. It also funded and equipped Transjordan’s Arab Legion, which fought Israel in 1948 under British officer John Glubb.
This is not how you install a colonial outpost.
For one final irony, “Free Palestine” was used in the 1940s by Zionist activists campaigning for an end to British rule. So the slogan really did have anti-colonial roots, just not quite the ones its modern users imagine.
But let’s get even more basic and look at the flag waved by anti-colonial activists.
The Palestinian flag is literally Pan-Arab. Its colours are associated with the successive Arab and Islamic dynasties: black with the Abbasids, white with the Umayyads, green with the Fatimids, and red with the Hashemites. Variations of the same palette appear across the region. These were expansionist dynasties whose territories grew through military conquest or, in other words, colonisation.
So the great anti-colonial symbol being waved across Western campuses quite literally wears the colours of Arab imperial history. Isn’t that awkward.
And, apparently, this needs saying: Neither the Levant nor the region we now call “the Arab world” was always Arab or Muslim. Before the seventh-century Arab-Muslim conquests, the region was home to Jews, Samaritans, Aramaeans, Assyrians, Copts, Amazigh, and numerous other peoples, languages, and religions. Arab armies then conquered vast territories across the Middle East and North Africa, setting in motion centuries of Arabisation and Islamisation.
When Arab armies entered the Levant, Jewish civilisation’s connection to the land was already ancient. A few decades later, the Umayyads built the Dome of the Rock on the Temple Mount, the site of the ancient Jewish Temples. In Gaza, the remains of the ancient synagogue bear an inscription dating to 508 CE, more than a century before the Arab-Muslim conquest of the city in the 630s.
Then there is the language. And, at the risk of spoiling another mystery, Arabic did not independently spring from the soil everywhere from Morocco to Iraq. Its vast geographic reach reflects centuries of conquest and Arabisation. Hebrew is a Canaanite language with its origins in the Levant. Yet somehow Arabic’s expansion becomes “indigenous,” while the revival of Hebrew in its ancestral homeland becomes the foreign intrusion.
That doesn’t mean all Palestinians are simply descendants of Arabian settlers, that some of them don’t have roots in the land, or that the history of Arab-Muslim conquest somehow forfeits their right to self-determination. Colonisation does not require population replacement. An existing population can adopt the language, religion, and identity of a conquering civilisation while retaining its ancestry.
For example, a Mexican can have deep indigenous ancestry while speaking Spanish and practising Christianity. But that does not make Spanish or Christianity indigenous to the Americas. So why do the rules change in the Middle East? Why are Arabic and Islam treated as the indigenous baseline against which Jewish cultural revival is measured as colonial?
Indigeneity does not come with an expiry date. Nor is it a status bestowed by contemporary activist movements, or something erased by the recovery of political sovereignty. If ancient connection, cultural continuity, and ancestral homeland matter to the anti-colonial framework, Jewish history cannot simply be timed out of the analysis. At least, not without the sort of spectacular mental gymnastics that have become a defining feature of modern anti-colonial ideology.
After all, the transformation of indigenous populations through the language, religion and culture of a conquering power is exactly the sort of process anti-colonial scholarship is interested in — when Europeans do it. That helps explain the Herculean effort to recast Jews as Europeans, conveniently forgetting that less than a century ago they were hunted across Europe — for not being European.
But there is another framework at work here, one that makes much more sense of the region’s history and rather less effort to disguise its imperial legacy.
For Islamist movements, the conflict is fundamentally theological, even when presented to Western audiences in the secular language of “liberation” and “decolonisation.” Land once brought under Muslim rule retains particular religious significance, making what Western activists call “decolonisation” a project of restoring Muslim sovereignty over territory originally acquired through conquest.
Hamas made this explicit in its 1988 charter, describing “Palestine” as an Islamic waqf (a permanent, irrevocable charitable endowment in Islamic law where a donor dedicates assets — such as real estate, land, buildings, or cash — for religious, educational, or social welfare purposes in perpetuity), consecrated to Muslim generations until the Day of Resurrection. Within that framework, the problem is not Israel’s borders, government, or prime minister, but Jewish sovereignty.
For Islamist movements, “Palestine” has long been a potent vehicle to mobilise Muslims across borders, centred on restoring Muslim land. Israel is not the endpoint, but one front in a much larger project. One of the greatest achievements of Islamist movements has been convincing Western activists that restoring the reach of one of history’s great imperial civilisations is what anti-colonialism looks like.
And then comes the part the colonial narrative really struggles with: applying its own framework to Zionism. To preserve that framing, Zionism has to be reinvented as something entirely European, severed from the Jewish history and attachment to the land that produced it.
But Jews did not acquire their connection to Judea through 19th-century European nationalism. Jewish peoplehood, religion, and language were rooted there long before the Assyrians, Babylonians, Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Crusaders, Ottomans, or British arrived to rule the land. Nor did Jewish presence disappear altogether. Jewish communities endured through successive conquests and changes of rule, in places such as Jerusalem, Hebron, Safed, and Tiberias.
If preserving a distinct peoplehood and resisting foreign domination are among the sacred principles of decolonisation, Jewish history contains a lot of both. Jews repeatedly resisted imperial rule, most famously in the revolts against the Seleucids and Romans.
Diaspora Jews have prayed facing Jerusalem, preserved Hebrew, retained religious practices tied specifically to the Land of Israel, and maintained a longing for return across centuries. That longing is documented more than 2,500 years ago in the Babylonian exile and the return that followed Cyrus’s conquest of Babylon in 539 BCE. “Next year in Jerusalem,” we have said for centuries. The word diaspora presupposes displacement from somewhere. Modern Zionism politicised that ancient attachment in the 19th-century age of nationalism; it did not invent one.
For centuries, Jews were widely recognised as a people whose ancestral homeland was the Land of Israel. In 18th-century Europe, Immanuel Kant referred to Jews living among Europeans as “Palestinians among us.” Later, European antisemites told Jews to “go back to Palestine.”
It wasn’t just a European phenomenon. Yemenite Jews began migrating to Palestine in 1881 and 1882, alongside the beginnings of the First Aliyah (Jewish immigration), while longstanding Sephardic and Middle Eastern Jewish communities were already present in the land.
The early Zionist project did not begin with an invading Jewish army seizing “Palestine.” Much of the land acquired for Zionist settlement before statehood was legally purchased, sometimes at exorbitant prices, with the deeds and transaction records to prove it. This is contrary to the fabrications peddled by former U.S. President Barack Obama in an interview this week, in which he claimed Israel “took land off people and they were excessive.”
When Jewish sovereignty was re-established, the ancient name Israel was reclaimed; Hebrew, the language of the ancient Israelites, was revived as the everyday language of a modern society; and ancient Jewish places and cultural traditions once again became part of the life of a sovereign people in its ancestral land. The revival of Hebrew has inspired indigenous language revitalisation elsewhere, including efforts to revive the Barngarla language among Aboriginal Australians.
In the decades surrounding Israel’s establishment, roughly 850,000 Jews left or fled communities across the Arab and wider Muslim world amid persecution, expulsions and political upheaval. Many were stripped of their homes, property, and livelihoods, leaving behind communities that had existed for centuries, sometimes millennia.
Hundreds of thousands were absorbed by the fledgling State of Israel, struggling to accommodate an extraordinary influx of refugees and immigrants. Jews arriving from Baghdad, Sana’a, Tripoli, and Casablanca were plainly not Europeans embarking on an imperial adventure.
Even Fayez Sayegh, one of the earliest Palestinian theorists to frame Zionism as colonialism, acknowledged it was unlike conventional European colonial projects. There was no distant Jewish metropole governing the settlers or extracting resources from “Palestine.” Sayegh recognised that colonisation was the instrument of Jewish nation-building, not the extension of an existing empire.
The economic model simply did not fit the classic extractive-colony template. Zionist communities invested in agriculture, infrastructure, drainage, and anti-malaria work, building a permanent society rather than extracting wealth for a distant empire.
Even the damning use of “colonisation” by early Zionists requires some linguistic time travel. The Jewish Colonisation Association, founded to resettle persecuted Jews, established agricultural “colonies” in Argentina and Canada too. Nobody seriously imagines these were attempts to build a Jewish empire.
Now apply the criteria ordinarily used to identify indigenous peoples: historical continuity with a pre-colonial society, attachment to ancestral territory, a distinct language, culture and religion, and the preservation of that identity under foreign domination. In almost any other context, this is exactly the sort of story the “decolonial” Left would fall over itself to celebrate.
But, unfortunately, the casting was wrong. Centuries of anti-Jewish prejudice made the role reversal considerably easier to sell. So, in the great ideological inversion of our time, this is the part of the story we are instructed to call “colonisation.”
