Fighting the The Great Genocide Blood libel is a full-time occupation. It’s the lie that it is haunting the West; it’s the lie that’s destroying truth; it’s the lie that sustains Arab Imperialism; and we will fight with all our strength to find a vaccine. Yet this is but the end point of university-Soviet-PLO-sponsored language inversion. It began with apartheid and it continued with “colonialism”. Those who are the most insidious colonists of all - the warriors of Pax Arabica - have the temerity to cast aspersions on the indigenous of Judea. In Chapter 5 of Rooted Truth, Uri fights the good fight against mendacity. If you believe in the cause, sign up to Uri’s Israel Brief and become a paying subscriber of Guerre & Shalom. Without your resistance funds, language is lost and morality along with it. - Daniel Clarke-Serret (Editor)
Rooted Truth: Israel’s Case Against the Deniers
by Uri Zehavi
Preface & Introduction: The Return of the Lie // Chapter 1: Setting the Record Straight // Chapter 2: From Balfour to Independence // Chapter 3: By Right, Not Permission // Chapter 4: Apartheid as Propaganda
Chapter 5: Colonialism and the Great Erasure
In January 2018, Mahmoud Abbas stood before an applauding audience in Ramallah and declared that Israel “is a colonial project that has nothing to do with Judaism.” The line was not new. It was the same slogan polished for diplomats and activists: that the Jewish state is an alien implant, a European fraud imposed on Arab land. The United Nations repeats it in its resolutions. Western academics recycle it for applause. On campuses, students chant that Jews are “settlers” and “colonizers,” as if Tel Aviv were a British outpost and Jerusalem a suburb of London. The charge sounds sophisticated, couched in the language of anti-imperialism. In truth, it is historical amnesia posing as virtue.
Colonialism actually has a meaning. It describes a foreign empire conquering and exploiting another people’s land for profit. A distant metropole sends its sons to rule, extract wealth and ship it home.
The British in India fit the definition: an island nation subjugating a subcontinent for its salt, spices, silks and markets.
The French in Algeria did the same, declaring the territory an extension of France while its people were treated as aliens.
The Belgians in the Congo turned the country into a personal plantation and killed millions.
That is colonialism—foreign rule, foreign enrichment, local misery.
Now look at the Jewish return. No emperor sent the Jews. No “Jewish motherland” bankrolled colonies abroad. There was no sovereign state in the land to be conquered—only the decaying Ottoman Empire, then the British Mandate administering territory that had no self-rule of its own.
The Jews who came were not agents of a metropole but refugees of one. They fled Europe’s pogroms and its ghettos.
They were not foreigners to the soil they sought; it was the birthplace of their nation: their prophets, their law, their language. They called it Eretz Yisrael—the Land of Israel—for thousands of years.
As legal scholar Ruth Gavison put it plainly, Zionism was never a colonial or imperial venture. It was the restoration of Jewish independence in the only land that had ever been theirs.
There were no British redcoats. No viceroys. No flag of a distant crown. There was a dispersed indigenous people returning home with shovels, prayer books and debt. To call this colonialism turns words into weapons.
Colonialism was Britain ruling India. Zionism was Jews escaping British rule.
Colonialism was France clinging to Algeria. Zionism was Jews fleeing Europe’s empires and exterminators.
Colonialism was the carving up of Africa and the Middle East by outsiders. Zionism was survivors and exiles reviving a neglected land their ancestors had never forgotten.
The early Jewish immigrants did not arrive as conquerors but as refugees. They drained swamps, planted vines, and built schools in Hebrew—not in the languages of colonialism: English, French, or Arabic. They imported no foreign culture and served no foreign master. They enriched the land and, with it, their Arab neighbors.
The Yishuv—the pre-state Jewish community—was a society of self-rule, self-labor, and self-defense, not an outpost of empire.
Labeling Israel “colonial” is the great erasure. It strips Jews of their indigeneity and repaints their homecoming as an invasion. It denies the simplest fact in the historical record: the people of Judea came back to Judea. And like the apartheid smear before it, the colonialism libel survives not because it is true, but because it is useful.
Indigenous, Not Imperialists
Jews are indigenous to the Land of Israel. That is not a slogan. It is the record—inscriptions, prayers, coins, chronicles by neighbors who met the Jews there and wrote it down. “Judea,” the hill country at the core of the land, gives the world the word “Jew.” To claim Jews are foreign to Judea is the kind of doublespeak that should make any honest historian wince.