It’s bizarre to me how history has been rewritten to portray the conflict as white European colonizers swooping in, displacing the indigenous people, and stealing the land. That is not what happened. That’s just a popular western narrative that nobody outside the performative first world ascribes to.

Jews have lived in Judea and then Syria Palaestina continuously for thousands of years. They’ve run organizations and founded reknown cities like Tzfat in the 16th century. Many Jews did move from the area to Europe only to immigrate back to the region, but many had lived there for hundreds of years. Remember: the first push for the country happened before the Holocaust, and during the Holocaust and WWII, the British turned Jews away.

During the height of the Holocaust, the British sank two ships full of Jews fleeing the death camps because the Arabs were “unhappy” with the size of the Jewish population in the land.

Let me repeat: the British sank two ships full of Jewish Holocaust refugees during WWII because the local Arabs did not want more Jews in the land.

They had had enough with those that already lived there as well as the number of Jews steadily migrating to the land during the 1800s. You might even say they worried Jews would outnumber the ethnic purity of what they saw as their land. They were part of an Islamic Ethnoempire, after all.

At what point do Jews stop being colonizers? Is it not enough that they either had lived there for centuries or bought the land before the partition? Not to mention the exorbitant costs at which they bought it. The Arabs in the region were happy to sell the land to the Jews. This is all a far cry from being an imperial conquering power.

The truth is that they don’t match actual colonial frameworks like the British in India or the Dutch in Rwanda, and if people took a moment to think about it, they would see it.

People paint the history of the Jewish presence on the land by claiming it was given to them or stolen by them as though they hadn’t already had a significant presence there. This is a common antisemitic trope where Jews are depicted as stealing something that does not belong to them.

Furthermore, Jewish presence in the region completely upends the concept of colonization. Remember, to colonize is to imply a claim to the land for the first time — a claim to land you’d previously had no connection to. The irony being that the colonized land is not empty to be conquered: people already live there, right?

But the Jews didn’t just show up at the Partition, displace people, and act as though those people didn’t deserve to live there. They lived there just as long and in some cases longer than their Arab neighbors. Thus studying this conflict through a colonial lens is not possible unless you alter a lot of the history.

Unlike actual colonial powers, Jews didn’t make elaborate plans to exploit their neighbors for resources and labor. In fact, the Arabs performed the only version of that sort of exploitation. Slavery was legal throughout the Ottoman Empire, including in Palestine, and many Arabs owned slaves. Slavery is still legal in some Middle Eastern countries. The West might have heard about the Yazidi women kidnapped by ISIS. They have been enslaved as servants and sex slaves for years now. Over 2,000 still remain in ISIS or similar fundamentalist Islamic militants.

I can understand the past and still disagree with how many Gazans Netanyahu’s policies have killed. Maybe our world doesn’t have any good examples of resolving conflicts in other ways, but they have to exist.

The thing is that we are rewriting history, and I can’t understand why unless it’s to manufacture consent — to make it acceptable to the people of the world — for Israel to be dismantled and given to the Palestinians. This instead of peace, by the way. Peace was never an option to the “by any means necessary” crowd. Because by any means does include things like butchering babies for the cause.

Hamas means it when they call to destroy Israel. It was not a resistance born from despair at freedom denied. Hamas did not try to warn the civilians or evacuate them in order to engage with only soldiers. Their goal is not to fight but to exterminate. They have always only wanted to wipe Jews from the land so they can colonize it themselves.

The misinformation about these core facts suffuses the zeitgeist, and the loud cry some have adopted is staggering. Between carefully worded articles, worded to suggest a certain narrative to AI generated war images of dead children to misappropriated images from other regions like Syria, there is an agenda, a party line.

And I am deeply frightened that the world will realize this sinister vision only after it is too late, both for the average Israelis and Palestinians who just want to live.

A reminder: Deligitimizing Jewish or Palestinian connections to the homeland is a bad look. Peace is the right look. Let’s focus on that.