'Decolonizing' the Holy Land? A Story of Peace, Power, and Privilege

Dan Perry

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The Oct. 7 invasion by several thousand Hamas terrorists will be a national trauma for the foreseeable future in Israel. It is simply unbelievable that the military and government ignored the ample intelligence and warnings and left the border almost unprotected. And the savage brutality, which involved not just the murder of 1,200 Israelis but a campaign of rapes and torture, was gleefully filmed for posterity.

There was briefly some clarity around the world, for a few days, that this pogrom crossed every line and that Hamas had to be removed from power in Gaza. But Hamas is entrenched among civilians and hides—along with the scores of Israeli hostages it holds—in tunnels underneath. Israel is not strenuously denying claims that its counterassault killed 15,000 people, saying only that a third were Hamas "fighters."

Make no mistake: Hamas is happy about the carnage. All has gone according to plan. The high death toll in Gaza opens the door to a devil's workshop of jihadist false equivalence. When everything is reduced to "narratives" Hamas can present everyone as savages. In the eyes of many "progressives" who get their information from TikTok, Hamas is the preferable savage since Palestinians are the "oppressed."

Protesters holding placards and Palestinian flags take part in a "National March For Palestine" in central London on Nov. 25.HENRY NICHOLLS/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

In vain will Israelis protest that the hundreds of thousands of protesters in the West seemed to care little for the probably greater loss of innocent life in the Western-led campaign to similarly uproot Islamic State terrorists in Iraq and Syria, or about the far deadlier wars in Sudan and central Africa. Or the shocking, systematic oppression of Palestinians in Lebanon and Syria. Even Russia's criminally vicious aggression in Ukraine seemed not to animate the West's leftist bleeding hearts.

Perhaps that is because the West is supporting Ukraine. For it is one of the oddities of the progressive left, and of the youth that flock to it, that it has little appreciation for the advantages and freedoms that enable its own ideological mutations—those being liberalism, democracy, free markets and secular humanism. Their opposition to Israel is a proxy for their opposition to their own societies; that fight approaches.

"Decolonization" is a euphemism for the imposition of diversity from boardrooms to newsrooms across the former patriarchy, and Israel has attracted ire because many of its critics now again think it's a colonization project that can still be stopped—a whole country that can be cancelled. That is the meaning of the now-familiar slogan "from the river to the sea"—the elimination of Israel and the expulsion of its Jews.

There are plenty of arguments about why this is wrong. Ever since Homo erectus walked out of Africa into Europe, history has been one long power play. Pretty much every modern country is the product of conquest and injustice. Not knowing this is infantile; picking on Israel only is unfair.

Moreover, even though Israel was created by a large Jewish migration, it was to an ancestral homeland in which Jews had lived throughout, which is not something that can be said of the Anglo arrival in Australia and New Zealand, or of the Iberian invasion of Central and South America. It is also not something that can be said of the 7th century Arabian invasion of the Levant—which includes the Holy Land—as part of the Islamic expansion in the Arab-Byzantine wars.

None of this is of any interest to the ignoramuses—in the West and in the Middle East—now advising Israelis to "just go back to their home countries."

The vast majority of Israel's 7 million Jews were born there. The countries from which their ancestors in some cases came to Israel include Arab ones that remain inhospitable to Jews, like Iran, Syria, Iraq, and Yemen. In many cases these ancestors were kicked out of those countries and their property stolen.

Regardless, the Palestinians have observed this lamentable zeitgeist, and it is hardening their attitudes. A shocking recent poll showed three-quarters of them supported the Oct. 7 massacre and similar proportions reject any accommodation with Israel and seek a Palestinian state instead of Israel, not beside it.

That way lies madness. But this is not a problem that can be ignored. Hamas must be removed from power in Gaza – there is no other way. But after that, Israel needs to figure out a way to divorce from the Palestinians. The world should push for this, because the debacle in Palestine is becoming a global problem.

Dan Perry is managing partner of the New York-based communications firm Thunder11. He is the former Cairo-based Middle East editor and London-based Europe/Africa editor of the Associated Press. Follow him at danperry.substack.com.

The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.