Arab and Islamic Colonization: The History the "Decolonize Palestine" Movement Ignores

The phrase 'decolonize Palestine' presupposes that Jews are colonizers in the land where they have lived for 3,000 years — where the archaeological and documentary record attests a Jewish (Israelite/Judean) presence from the late Bronze/early Iron Age onward, with Jewish communities remaining in the land, at times small, through every subsequent period.

The framework does not account for the actual colonial history of the region: 1,400 years of Arab and Islamic expansion that erased dozens of indigenous civilizations, languages, and religions across three continents. When Hamas officials describe themselves as 'Arabs from foreign lands' — as one Hamas spokesman stated on camera — they are inadvertently providing a more accurate account of the region's actual demographic history than most Western media coverage does.

The Arab conquests of the 7th and 8th centuries CE — the rapid military expansion from the Arabian Peninsula outward — constituted the fastest and most geographically extensive colonization in pre-industrial history:

North Africa: The Arab conquest of North Africa (639–711 CE) brought the indigenous Amazigh (Berber) people under Arab rule and began a centuries-long process of Islamization and partial Arabization, who had lived in the region for thousands of years before Arab arrival. Their languages, the Tamazight family, were suppressed in favor of Arabic. The Amazigh, Copts, and other indigenous North African peoples predate Arab presence in the region by millennia. According to a map circulated on X by @HashemAllMighty, about 89.7% of territory in today's Muslim-majority states was not historically Arab or Muslim land (the methodology is not published). The traditional dress photographs shown in the Women before/after Islam event illustrate what these indigenous cultures looked like before Arab-Islamic colonization replaced their dress, language, and religion.

The Levant and Mesopotamia: The Levant (modern Israel, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan) had been home to Canaanites, Israelites, Phoenicians, Arameans, Greeks, and Romans. The Arab conquest of the 7th century imposed Arabic language and, over time, Islam — suppressing Aramaic, Syriac, Greek, and the other languages of the region's indigenous populations.

Persia/Iran: Pre-Islamic Persia had a rich civilization — Zoroastrian, with Persian as its language, distinct from Arabic in every way. The Arab conquest of Persia (633–654 CE) destroyed the Zoroastrian religious infrastructure, forced conversion over subsequent centuries, and imposed Arabic script on Persian (Persian survived as the main spoken language, while Coptic survives only liturgically and Aramaic survives in small Neo-Aramaic-speaking communities). Zoroastrians today — the surviving remnant of pre-Islamic Persian civilization — number under 200,000 worldwide.

Central Asia and the Indian Subcontinent: The Islamic expansion into Central Asia (8th–10th centuries) and into the Indian subcontinent (8th–18th centuries) involved military conquest, forced conversion, and the systematic destruction of Hindu and Buddhist temples and cultural sites. The Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan, remnants of the region's pre-Islamic Buddhist civilization, survived more than a millennium of Muslim rule before the Taliban destroyed them in 2001.

The Jewish connection to the land of Israel is the best-documented continuous connection of any people to any territory in history:

• Archaeological record: Thousands of artifacts from 3,000 years of Jewish habitation, from Tel Dan to Masada, confirm continuous presence
• The Hebrew language: Ancient Hebrew inscriptions at sites throughout modern Israel, the West Bank, and Jerusalem date from the Iron Age (roughly 10th–9th century BCE onward)
• The 2,000-year-old Hebrew text: Incidents like the 8-year-old boy reading a 2,000-year-old Hebrew text found by his ancestor's excavation — from the Second Temple period, before the Roman diaspora — illustrate the unbroken chain
• Genetic studies: Population genetics confirm that contemporary Ashkenazi, Sephardi, and Mizrahi Jewish populations share common ancestry with ancient Levantine populations

Historians generally describe the Arabization of the Levant after the 7th-century conquest as largely a language and religious shift among existing local populations combined with some Arab migration; population-genetic studies find that Palestinians, like Jews, carry substantial ancient Levantine ancestry.

But Hamas's own founding charter describes the organization as part of the Muslim Brotherhood — a 20th-century Egyptian political organization. Yasser Arafat was born in Cairo to Palestinian parents (his father from Gaza, his mother from a Jerusalem family).

Lebanon offers the best modern case study of what Islamic colonization looks like in practice — and why Brigitte Gabriel, who grew up there, warns that the United States is following Lebanon's trajectory.

Lebanon in the mid-20th century was majority Christian — a Maronite, culturally French-influenced state, one of the most cosmopolitan in the Arab world. Its capital, Beirut, was called 'the Paris of the Middle East.' The Lebanese constitution protected Christian political dominance.

Over the second half of the 20th century:

• Palestinian Liberation Organization fighters, expelled from Jordan in 1970, relocated to Lebanon and began operating as a state within a state
• Islamist movements, funded by Iran and the Gulf states, grew alongside secular Arab nationalism
• The Lebanese Civil War (1975–1990) devastated the country's infrastructure and institutions
• Hezbollah, an Iranian proxy, established military and political control over significant portions of Lebanon
• Lebanon's Christian majority became a minority; the cosmopolitan culture Beirut was known for was progressively displaced

Gabriel argues Lebanon shows how a majority-Christian country can be transformed within a generation. Lebanon's Christian share declined through civil war, emigration and differing birth rates, and Hezbollah gained major influence; Lebanon nonetheless retains a confessional system that reserves the presidency for a Maronite Christian.

There are currently 57 member states of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, representing countries with Muslim majorities or significant Muslim populations. These countries span three continents and include populations that were, before the Arab and Islamic conquests, Christian, Jewish, Zoroastrian, Hindu, Buddhist, animist, and polytheist.

Gad Saad, the Lebanese-Canadian evolutionary psychologist, has described the process in conversation with Charlie Kirk: the mechanisms by which countries become Muslim-majority are not primarily persuasion. They include military conquest, demographic expansion, gradual restriction of non-Muslim populations' rights (the dhimmi system), economic pressure, and in the modern era, deliberate immigration and fertility strategies articulated openly by Muslim Brotherhood leadership.

The Muslim Brotherhood's documented strategic documents — including the 1991 'Explanatory Memorandum' entered into evidence in the Holy Land Foundation trial — describe the goal of 'civilization jihad' in the West: a process of 'eliminating and destroying Western civilization from within' through political and demographic means, rather than military conquest.

The memorandum was written by one Brotherhood member (Mohamed Akram) and its status as official Brotherhood policy is disputed; it nonetheless shows strategic thinking within the U.S. Brotherhood network at the time.

The 'decolonize Palestine' framework achieves something remarkable: it applies the language of anti-colonialism to the one group in the region that is actually indigenous, while ignoring the colonization — Arab conquest, language suppression, cultural erasure, religious imposition — that actually happened.

This is why the Hamas official's admission matters. When he says 'we are not indigenous, we are Arabs from foreign lands,' he is describing reality. Some historians date a distinct Palestinian national identity to the late Ottoman and Mandate periods, as with many modern national identities in the region; the local Arabic-speaking population itself has deep roots in the land. The Amazigh, Copts, Zoroastrians, Syriac Christians, and Jews are the actual indigenous peoples of the regions the Arab conquests absorbed.

The intellectual honesty that 'decolonize' discourse claims to champion would require acknowledging this. Critics argue the framework is aimed at eliminating Israel rather than at decolonization.