Law enforcement vehicles at an evacuation site, after the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) made an agreement with the Syrian government to depart, and evacuate to northeastern Syria after days of fighting with the Syrian army, in Aleppo, Syria, Jan. 9, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Khalil Ashawi

If you try to defend Israel online or in the public sphere today, one of the first things you’ll hear is that Israel is a “colonizer.” So let’s explore that claim.

If not for colonialism, Egypt would be Coptic; Morocco, Algeria, and Libya, would be Amazigh; Syria and Lebanon, would be Aramaic-speaking, remembering themselves as Phoenician; Iraq would be Babylonian; Sudan, would be Nubian — and the list goes on.

None of that happened, because seventh-century Arab conquest swept the region by the sword, imposing Arabic language, Islamic rule, and Arab identity through conversion and subjugation — conquest all the same.

People who’d never minimize Spanish and Portuguese conquest of indigenous “Latin America” go blank when the identical dynamic is named in the Middle East.

This isn’t controversial among historians. It’s simply the region’s history — one today’s loudest anti-Israel activists avoid, because they insist the one indigenous people who survived their own conquest and exile, kept their language, tribal faith, and peoplehood intact, and rebuilt a sovereign state in their homeland, are the region’s real colonizers.

The imperial project that erased a dozen civilizations gets a pass; the civilization that survived its own displacement gets called the invader.

An inventory of erasure: before 641 CE, Egypt was Coptic — a Christian civilization with its own script, church, and continuous language since antiquity. Egypt didn’t become Arab because Egyptians were Arabs; conquest made it so, and Copts remain a persecuted minority today, governed by a conqueror’s language and religion. The Amazigh — many reject the Roman-derived label “Berber” as a slur – were indigenous to Morocco, Algeria, Libya, and Tunisia for millennia before Arab armies arrived; their identity survives despite generations of suppression by rulers who denied they existed as a distinct people.

Aramaic was the everyday language of the ancient Near East; Syriac Christians in Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq still speak dialects of it, in shrinking numbers, through fourteen centuries of Arabization. Lebanon’s Maronites claim continuity with the Phoenicians. Iraq’s Assyrian Christians are a remnant of a civilization the conquest never fully erased. Iran alone was Islamized but never Arabized linguistically, keeping its own language and pre-Islamic identity -proof Arabization wasn’t inevitable, succeeding in some places and failing in others.

Sudan’s Nubian civilization — with pyramids and kingdoms predating the pharaohs — survives only as a minority pushed to the margins of an Arabized state still finishing the job: forced Arabization, the genocidal Darfur years, a civil war shaped by the same fault line. Across the region, Arab conquest replaced indigenous identities with Arab ones for fourteen centuries, backed by the longest slave trade in history – roughly 1,300 years, trafficking an estimated eighteen to thirty million people, many castrated.

None of this is disputed by serious historians. What is disputed — furiously, almost exclusively in one case — is whether the same dynamic applies to the Land of Israel. It does.

“Palestine” is not an ancient Arab or Islamic name; it’s Greco-Roman, imposed by Hadrian after crushing the Bar Kokhba revolt in 135 CE to erase the Jewish name for the land, Judea.

Arab conquerors inherited it as a geographic term, not the name of a sovereign nation or people. For thirteen centuries, no independent Arab or Muslim polity ever called itself “Palestine,” and most inhabitants identified as Arabs, Ottoman subjects, or Greater Syrians. Arab leaders said so themselves well into the 20th century, telling Britain’s 1937 Peel Commission that “Palestine” was a Zionist invention.

A distinct Palestinian Arab nationalism emerged only in the 20th century — genuinely felt today, but historically recent, shaped substantially as a rejectionist response to Jewish return rather than continuation of an ancient nation. That’s not a dismissal of Palestinian peoplehood today; it’s an honest dating of when this Arab identity took form — unlike the Kurds, Amazigh, or Assyrians, peoples with identities predating modern nationalism by millennia, whose nationalism sought self-determination for peoples who already existed, not one largely defined against another people’s return home.

Meanwhile, the Jewish people are the one nation in this story whose ancient names for their homeland — Zion, Judea, Israel — survived exile and were restored, not invented, in 1948. Hebrew, preserved for centuries as a liturgical language, was revived as a living national tongue only in the land where it originated.

I’ve made the historical and genetic case for Jewish indigeneity elsewhere and won’t repeat it here. Indigeneity is where a people became a people, not who arrived last.

What matters is that, of all the peoples displaced, erased, or subordinated by Arab conquest, only one is routinely accused of “colonizing” for surviving that fate and reclaiming sovereignty in its ancestral homeland. No one says Amazigh indigeneity requires permanent political powerlessness, or that Assyrian ties to Nineveh vanish if Assyrians seek self-government. Jews alone are subjected to a standard applied to no one else.

Without Arab imperial expansion, there is no Palestinian national movement in its modern form — one shaped, as Einat Wilf argues, by opposition to Jewish restoration rather than revival of a previously sovereign Palestinian nation.

The Arab conquests produced a great civilization, but they also absorbed, displaced, and subordinated older ones through centuries of military domination, religious coercion, and the longest continuous slave trade in history — a legacy still remembered by Copts, Amazigh, and Assyrians struggling to preserve their distinct identities.

The Jewish people are unique in this history for one reason: despite conquest, exile, and dispersal, they remained the same people. They outlived the empires that conquered them, preserved their identity, and returned to sovereignty in the land where their civilization began.

To call that “colonialism” requires a standard applied nowhere else. It assumes that conquest confers permanent rights on the conqueror, while indigenous return becomes an invasion. That is not anti-colonialism. It is colonialism with a statute of limitations.

Put differently: the argument is that the Middle East belongs by right to the descendants of the conquerors, but not to the descendants of the conquered. That’s something we should start talking about.

Micha Danzig is an attorney, former IDF soldier, and former NYPD officer. He writes widely on Israel, Zionism, antisemitism, and Jewish history. He serves on the board of Herut North America.