Скачать или смотреть Israel Wasn’t a Colonial Project. It Was Part of a Global Breakup.

Imagine your great-grandparents lived in Baghdad. Or Jaffa. Or Thessaloniki. And then, in a few short years, their entire world vanished.
You’ve probably heard this before: that Israel is a Western colonial project dropped into the Middle East. But what if we zoomed out—and saw 1948 not as the beginning, but as a symptom? Of a world coming apart. Empires collapsing. And new nations—messy, painful, often violent—emerging from the wreckage.
For centuries, the Middle East wasn't a map of nation-states—it was the Ottoman Empire. A vast, sprawling, multi-ethnic world. Jews had lived for centuries in Baghdad, Damascus, and Aleppo. Arabs in Jaffa. Armenians in Anatolia. Greeks in Izmir. Kurds across the mountains. Muslims, Christians, Jews—all part of a patchwork held together not by nationality, but by imperial rule.
Then came World War I. And the empire shattered. The European victors—Britain and France—sliced up the region into artificial states under the mandate system. Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Transjordan. Borders drawn in boardrooms. And one of those mandates? Palestine.
Just like the others, it was meant to become a new nation-state—this time with a Jewish majority. Not as a colonial outpost, but as part of the same post-imperial experiment as its neighbors.
Here’s the key: the world embraced the idea that every people should have its own nation. National self-determination became the solution to imperial collapse. A democratic ideal—in theory.
But democracy for whom? If your group didn’t fit the new borders, the answer was: you’re out.
These new states weren’t empty. They had mixed populations. And the 20th century’s brutal solution was simple: move the people to match the map. Between 1945 and 1950, over 50 million people were forcibly relocated in what the world called “necessary nation-building.”
Just months before Palestine, the largest case unfolded: the partition of India. Seventeen million people were uprooted. Hindus fled to India. Muslims to Pakistan. As many as two million died. The international community called it a success—two “clean” states, born from the chaos.
This became the model: displacement was acceptable if it built ethnic stability.
In 1948, around 750,000 Palestinians fled or were expelled during Israel’s war of independence. The Nakba—the catastrophe. Families scattered. Villages erased.
But that same year, another exodus began. Across the Arab world, nearly 800,000 Jews—most of them indigenous to the region—were forced to flee. Riots. Seized property. Expelled by nationalist regimes. Most ended up in Israel—stateless, traumatized, unwanted elsewhere.
Two peoples. Two traumas. One shared pattern.
This wasn’t colonialism. It was nation-building at its most violent. And it didn’t just happen in Israel.
Everywhere, minorities paid the price. Jews in Arab lands. Palestinians in Jewish ones. Kurds in Turkey, Syria, and Iraq. Armenians. Greeks. Assyrians. Christians in Anatolia. No group was immune. Everyone lost something.
Israel wasn’t the only state shaped by forced migration. It wasn’t even unusual. It just became the most scrutinized.
So here’s the flip: if you accept Iraq and Syria as real countries, born from empire’s ruins, you have to accept Israel too. Its existence doesn’t erase Palestinian pain—just like Lebanon’s doesn’t erase the Kurds, or Pakistan’s doesn’t erase the victims of partition.
The tragedy isn’t that Israel exists. The tragedy is how the modern world demanded clean borders in a messy region—and redrew the map in blood.
If we want to understand the present, we have to let go of tidy stories. 1948 wasn’t the start of the problem. It was the outcome of a global system breaking apart—and the people caught in the middle, still living with its ghosts.