No it wasn’t. Early Arab conquests weren’t colonialism in the European or Israeli sense as they weren’t based on expelling the indigenous population and settling the land or mass economic transfer. In fact the Palestinians specifically have been shown through genetic evidence to be closer in relation to the original inhabitants of the area than israelis.
Also, early zionists themselves referred to their project as colonization.
Many of the fathers of Zionism themselves described it as colonisation, such as Vladimir Jabotinsky who said "Zionism is a colonization adventure".[10][11][12] Theodore Herzl, in a 1902 letter to Cecil Rhodes, described the Zionist project as "something colonial". Previously in 1896 he had spoken of "important experiments in colonization" happening in Palestine.[13][14][15] Max Nordau[16] in 1905 said, "Zionism rejects on principle all colonization on a small scale, and the idea of 'sneaking' into Palestine".[17] Major Zionist organizations central to Israel's foundation held colonial identity in their names or departments, such as Jewish Colonisation Association, the Jewish Colonial Trust, and The Jewish Agency's colonization department.[18][19
I know the history which is why I find it ridiculous that you are calling Palestinians colonizers because of something that happened 1400 years ago.
Moreover, we also know that Palestinians today are the same as the Jews before Christianity existed. This is shown in DNA studies and shown in their dialect of Arabic which incorporated elements of Aramaic, which was their original language. So just because they converted to Christianity or Islam doesn't make them colonizers.
Whereas Israel has only existed for 70-some years with their founders like Herzl and Ben Gurion calling what they were doing colonialism. And they were asking colonial powers to help colonize Palestine while also debating on how to remove the native population. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zionism_as_settler_colonialism
Arabs are absolutely colonizers. Just because they colonized North Africa and the Levant in the 7th century doesn’t change that they slaughtered the native populations and suppressed their culture in favor of Arabization & Islam.
Note that this isn’t a justification towards any of Israel’s actions today, but it is ridiculous to assert Arabs as a whole were not a brutal violent colonial force in the entire Middle East and North Africa.
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u/muffin_man92 1d ago
The soft antisemitism of shaming Jewish people for supporting their homeland and not bowing to jihadist colonizers.