OPINION:
Thank you for publishing Gerard Leval’s “The anti-colony: Sanctimoniously and falsely labeling Israel” (web, Oct. 8).
Far from being “colonizers,” Jews are indigenous to Israel, as archaeology attests. In Egypt, a 13th-century B.C.E. stele celebrating the conquests of the Pharaoh Merneptah (Ramses II’s son) acknowledges a people called Israel in neighboring Canaan.
In Iraq, the Assyrian King Shalmaneser III’s ninth-century B.C.E. Black Obelisk shows the biblical Israelite king Jehu paying tribute, and King Sennacherib’s royal palace reliefs depict Assyria’s 701 B.C.E. siege of Lachish in Judah. In Israel, the ninth-century B.C.E. Tel Dan Stele mentions King David. DNA studies connect today’s Jews to the Levant as their ancestral homeland.
Moreover, Jews were themselves victims of settler colonialism. Assyria, Babylonia and Rome all conquered ancient Israel, displaced Israelites and settled colonists. Rome’s conquest of Jerusalem is depicted on the Arch of Titus; Jewish slaves from Judea built the Roman Colosseum.
After 2,000 years of ghettos and pogroms in Europe, culminating in the Holocaust, and 77 years of being ethnically cleansed from across the Islamic world, Jews have returned home.
Notably, Jews in Israel were not colonists for a mother country. They were stateless refugees fleeing persecution and genocide. Also, they did not seize land; they purchased it.
Finally, many Arabs immigrated to pre-state Israel in response to the economic opportunities created by the Zionist pioneers. As future Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, then a Boston Post correspondent, noted in June 1948: “The Jews point with pride to the fact that over 500,000 Arabs, in the 12 years between 1932 and 1944, came into Palestine to take advantage of living conditions existing in no other Arab state.”
As Bill Maher recently observed: “Calling Jews colonizers in Israel is like calling Native Americans colonizers here. It’s ridiculous.”
STEPHEN A. SILVER
San Francisco
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