SEPTEMBER 3 — There’s a banner hanging from a building in Jerusalem’s Old City that reads like a punchline nobody laughed at: Make Gaza Jewish Again. A gag sign if it weren’t nailed to a very real project of bombs, checkpoints, bulldozers, and a government that’s not even pretending anymore. Weeks later Netanyahu goes on TV, puffed-up and glowing, and says he’s on a “historic and spiritual mission.” Not to save lives. Not to end wars. To build “Greater Israel.” Imagine a realtor with God on retainer and a map the size of the Mediterranean, scribbling in new borders like a bored kid with crayons.
The idea is simple enough: take what you can, call it yours, and when people complain, sell them a story about how you’re just “coming home.” That’s the genius trick. Not new, not clever, but very efficient. Every coloniser has played it. The French told themselves they were just heading back to their Roman stomping grounds when they took Algeria. The Italians dusted off Caesar’s laurels and marched into Libya. Even the Nazis packaged their invasion of Eastern Europe as a homecoming. Hitler called it modest: Germans were merely returning to where they’d once been. It’s the same joke with a bloodier punchline.
And so we get the Zionist remix: this isn’t conquest, it’s return. Jews weren’t colonising Palestine, they were reclaiming a promised homeland. Except the promise wasn’t from a government, a court, or a treaty. It was from God. Convenient. If tomorrow I told you my grandmother whispered from the grave that your house was mine, you’d laugh me out the door. Unless, of course, I had a few billion dollars of Western guilt behind me, a Bible on the table, and tanks parked outside. Then suddenly it’s “heritage.”
Meanwhile, Gaza is starved and flattened, the West Bank chopped into strips of concrete and wire, Bedouins evicted from their desert homes. Expansion is dressed as self-defence, genocide as security. Language gets tortured until it confesses. Israel kills and calls it protecting life. Colonises and calls it indigeneity. The PR campaign is almost admirable in its shamelessness. Palestinians — who’ve lived on the land for centuries — get reframed as the outsiders, the squatters, the “real colonists.” You can almost hear the spin doctors snorting lines of their own copy, giddy with the inversion.
The thing is, the Zionist movement used to be more honest. Back in the day they were happy to call it colonisation. They had institutions with names like the Jewish Colonial Trust. The Palestine Jewish Colonization Association. They didn’t mind the word until “colonial” became dirty, tied up with imperial brutality. Then they dropped it like a blood-soaked shirt, but kept the knife in their hand.
And when people say Israel is different, special, not like other settler colonies because it’s about Jewish “self-determination”? That’s pure marketing. White Americans talked about independence and liberty while they buried Native Americans under smallpox and gunfire. The Boers in South Africa fought the British for their own kind of settler self-determination. French settlers in Algeria even tried to overthrow their own mother country to keep control. Nothing unique there — just the same script with a different cast.
What about the claim of indigeneity? That one’s a masterpiece of absurdity. Zionist logic runs like this: Hebrews lived here two thousand years ago, therefore modern European Jews have an unbroken right to the land. Never mind that the Hebrews themselves weren’t native — they conquered Canaan, according to their own book. Abraham wasn’t even local; he came from what we now call Iraq. By this reasoning Italians could march into London tomorrow and demand back their Roman bathhouses. Malaysians could annex Mecca because Islam started there. Hell, I could walk into Dublin and say, “We Tamil people built your railways, so pour me a pint, I’m home.” Everyone would laugh, but when it’s Zionists, nobody laughs. They nod solemnly.
It gets more surreal. In 1919, even Ben-Gurion and Ben-Zvi, Israel’s founding fathers, admitted in a book that most Palestinians were descendants of ancient Hebrews who’d converted to Christianity and later Islam. Think about that: the very people Israel now calls foreigners and colonists might be more “native” by bloodline than the Europeans who arrived with ship tickets and rifles. History is a cruel drunk — it remembers everything but tells it crooked.
The rest is colonial déjà vu. Britain bankrolled Zionist settlers just like it once bankrolled Scottish and English settlers in Ireland. The Dutch moved their own into South Africa and brought French Huguenots along for the ride. Tsarist Russia shipped Poles, Germans, Greeks, and Jews into conquered Ottoman lands. Colonialism is never tidy, never ethnically pure. It’s just waves of people pushed around like furniture by empires with too much ambition and too little conscience.
The whole idea that Israel is somehow exceptional is the biggest scam of all. Strip away the rhetoric and it’s the same pattern: outsiders arrive, displace the locals, build walls and myths to justify it, and then call the victims invaders. Palestinians can’t even claim their own ancestry without someone screaming blasphemy. Egyptians can talk about Pharaohs, Lebanese about Phoenicians, Iraqis about Babylonians. But Palestinians? Their history has been repossessed like a car loan in default. Zionism stole not just their land, but their past.
So we arrive at the present: soldiers stitching a map of Greater Israel onto their uniforms, settlers waving banners, a prime minister preaching divine mandate like a televangelist with nukes. The mask slips, but the story doesn’t change. Colonisation with a facelift, theft with a hymn, empire with a menorah on top.
Israel’s defenders still go on TV, voice trembling with fake moral outrage, and insist this is self-defence, this is survival, this is destiny. But it’s just colonialism with better PR. Guns, God, and fairy tales. Same old story. And every time they insist it isn’t colonialism, it’s like watching a drunk argue he’s not drunk while knocking over the bar stools. The louder the denial, the truer the charge.
There’s nothing that sets Israel apart from Rhodesia, Algeria, or North America — except maybe that the world still buys the lie. Greater Israel isn’t some bold new future. It’s the final act of a long, bloody play that’s been running since the first colonisers stepped off their boats. The set is the same, the lines are recycled, the blood on the stage is fresh. And the audience? Still clapping along.
* This is the personal opinion of the writer or publication and does not necessarily represent the views of Malay Mail.
