https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/10/countering_the_lie_that_israelis_are_western_colonizers.html
Jews are Israel’s indigenous people; the Muslims are the colonizers.
Across the West, Muslims and their socialist allies claim that Israel is a Western colonizer. That’s a lie. Here’s a very slimmed-down history of the last 4,000 years.
The original indigenous people of the land we now call Israel were the Canaanites. When the Jews migrated to that land roughly 4,000 years ago, tribal warfare ensued, and the Canaanites lost. Since then—for around 4,000 years—the Jews have had a continuous presence in Israel. They are the indigenous people with a claim to the land older than any other living people. In ancient times, they held that land despite wars with and occupations by Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, and Greeks.
Finally, in 70 A.D., the Romans fully conquered Israel, erasing its identity as a nation. To symbolize that conquest, Rome renamed the land Palestine after the Philistines whom the Jews had destroyed in David’s time. In subsequent centuries, Christians, Persians, Umayyad Muslims, Abbasid Muslims and, eventually, Ottoman Muslims invaded the land and ruled as imperialist colonizers. Through it all, Jews continued on the land.
During the Ottoman period, Israel was a barren wasteland riddled with malaria and yellow fever. The Jews were eventually joined by two Muslim tribes: the Druze, whom Muslims consider heretics, and the Bedouins. Beginning in the early 19th century, Muslim refugees from other lands came, too. Pierre Van Paassen, a Protestant minister and journalist, knew the region intimately in the first half of the 20th century. His book The Forgotten Ally, much of it based on events he witnessed and people he knew, fills in some of the erased facts in the region’s history, including how the modern “Palestinians” came there.
