Western leftists are committed to the ideological identification of Israeli Jews with European colonizers, which transforms the bitter conflict between Arabs and Jews into a noble chapter in the ongoing anti-imperialist struggle.* Thus I was interested when I discovered (in German author Götz Aly’s book on the history of anti-Jewish violence in Europe between 1880 and 1945) that this trope also has its conceptual antecedents.
It concerns the reaction of Romanian anti-Semites to the murder of Jewish student David Fallik in 1926. No less a figure than the Interior minister (and briefly later prime minister) Octavian Goga called the murder “a defense of the trampled honour of the Romanian people”, and went on to say that the Jews treated the Romanians no differently than “the English treat their colonised peoples.”
* I am referring here less to the discussion of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, which does have colonialist traits, though I’d say more analogous to the English in Scotland and Ireland — including, dare I say it, Northern Ireland — than the military occupation of distant lands. I am thinking more of the general framing that the entire Israeli nation is a colonial project that should be overthrown, and that the Jews should go back where they came from.
Common Infirmities 