It’s Not a Conflict Between Palestinians and Jews, but Between Native Palestinians and Western Colonialism

By Susana Khalil — Jun 11, 2025

…Not a day passes when your fleeting image, when your mirage fails to cross my existence. You inhabit me, habibi. I speak of Edward Said.

To the delinquency, demagoguery, and ineptitude of the intellectual academic priesthood; to Hollywood and its derivatives: End the existence of the Eurocentric colonial anachronism, falsely called Israel.

This conflict is not between native Semitic Palestinians and professing followers of the Jewish religion, NO! It is a conflict between the native Semitic Palestinian people against the Eurocentric colonial anachronism, falsely called Israel.

Beyond the heartfelt grief and worthy global solidarity—the most human—in the face of the ongoing, visible genocide against the native Semitic Palestinian people, today’s diabolical juncture must demand a radical awakening. An analysis without artificiality or aesthetic infantilism. A cry for liberation and justice. We must transcend our solidarity. Beware: Let our solidarity not be hijacked, nor serve as an instrument of manipulation by imperial and colonial powers. 

With deep respect and responsibility, we must not continue with therapeutic and contemplative solidarity; we must shift to constructive, concrete solidarity without the burden of abstractions, nuances, and relativities that ultimately sow confusion. This confusion is vital for imperial and colonial misery. A call: The problem is not the Pole Netanyahu; the problem is the existence of that colonial anachronism, falsely called Israel. We must decolonize ourselves, abandon the Eurocentric agenda and lexicon. We must shed fear—YES!—we live under very subtle tyrannies.

I fear being afraid. Twenty-first century: There is no Jewish people, no Muslim people, no Christian people, no atheist people.

This conflict is not a conflict between the native Semitic Palestinian people and the confessors of the Jewish religion. The native Semitic Palestinian people are fighting against a European-US colonial anachronism. The native Semitic Palestinian people are fighting against a Western colonial anachronism.

Let us not see the form but the substance. The background is Western colonialism, and the form is the subject: “the Jewish.”

The Jewish subject (Jewish religion) is the fascinating packaging of that other Orientalism or Orientalism itself as a colonial facade. As a facade for plunder, domination, and extermination.

The Jewish subject (Jewish religious community) is a victim, instrument, element, sentiment, entity, tool—a Eurocentric epistemicide of creative and illustrative fraud, pseudoscientific for colonial purposes.

Though before the European Jewish Holocaust, the first anti-Zionists were European Jews themselves. The Dantean Holocaust caused these Europeans to flee to Palestine. Today, a large part of this religious community calls itself both religion and people simultaneously; neither in the times of theocratic obscurantism nor in today’s supposed era of secularism has this been seen. Clearly senseless, reeking of ridiculousness—an absurdity with criminal necessity beneath an illustrative mantle operated by the academic-intellectual and media priesthood. It permeates and transcends because it carries a charm that subdues and dopes… This psychedelia of Eurocentric gluttony takes me back to Edward Said: Orientalism, Culture and Imperialism.

Europe and/or the West—vanguards of secular values and sentiments—fail to see, fail to perceive, or cannot discern: Jewish religion versus Jewish people. Moreover, as part of that inability, their analyses and studies mechanically reduce the Arab world to a religious commodity. Ah, there are Western academics who cannot distinguish between Arab and Muslim.

Judaism Is a Religion, Not a People; Palestine Is Not a Religion, It Is a People

Back to school
Well, Jewish, Christian, and Muslim monotheism originate in what is today the Arab world. They stem from the Arab ancestor; not only do they come from the same ethnicity—the Semitic—but that triad, that religious trilogy, share the same doctrinal root and trunk. Christianity comes directly from Judaism, and Islam’s direct roots are Judeo-Christian. Judaism is a religion and the mother religion.

Now, the entire bastion of sacred scriptures of that monotheistic trilogy originate from the Levant or Semitic Asia. And much of these monotheistic sacred texts are taken from preceding Semitic, Canaanite, and Babylonian polytheistic scriptures. To summarize: When Israel, Judea, are mentioned in any of these sacred texts, it is allusive and within the Semitic context. Semitic peoples and mythology—today’s Arab world. Semitic peoples who practiced polytheism, then adopted Jewish monotheism, then Christian monotheism, and today predominantly Muslim monotheism. No people in their historical chronology preserves the same religion; peoples are in motion.

To Eurocentric grandiloquence: It was not Jews, Christians, or Muslims who expanded across the world; what expanded were the three respective religions—the three respective doctrines that are a legacy and inheritance of the Arab-Semitic ancestor.

Europe is not the bearer of its own monotheism. Its monotheism is Semitic; its Christian monotheism is an inheritance from the Arab ancestor. They are Europeans converted to the Christian religion—that does not make them Semites. Now, that same Europe uses its own Europeans converted to the Jewish religion to colonize Palestine.

Since 1907, with the Campbell-Bannerman Report, the British Empire had already structured the need to establish, implant an entity—a Western population—in the Arab world to further Western imperial-colonial domination interests.

The so-called “Israel” imposed on May 14, 1948—besides being an obscenity, a colonial anachronism—is an enclave and laboratory of war, of domination for the current Western imperial atrophy.

Those who believe this conflict is between native Semitic Palestinians and confessors of the Jewish religion are mistaken. It is like seeing the index finger instead of the moon the finger is pointing to.

When good-hearted people ask or exclaim, “How long will Israel’s abuses continue?” I answer this trite question: Forever, because the background is an imperial-colonial Western reality supported by Arab tyrannies.

In the face of the macabre genocide, we must shed so much impostor charm—that is, believing Europeans converted to the Jewish religion are the Jewish people. That is a stratagem that makes us poor thinkers.

 

(Al Mayadeen)

Translation: Orinoco Tribune

OT/SK/JRE