є.ѕну 🇮🇱 🇺🇸 ישי🎗️

Muslims in Dearborn, Michigan, have a Muslim mayor, Muslim council members, and other Muslim government officials. Despite being mostly first-, second-, or, in rarer cases, third-generation Americans, they obviously don’t view themselves as foreign settlers or their elected officials as illegitimate occupiers. They view themselves as Americans. They live there, they vote, and, in their view, the people they elect are legitimate representatives. Yet many of the same people will call Jews “settlers” and “invaders” in Israel, including Jews whose families have lived there for centuries or millennia, as well as Jews who immigrated, legally purchased land, built communities, and voted for their own government. Apparently, immigration, land ownership, voting, and elected representation make you a legitimate citizen in Michigan, but a “settler” in Israel. Can’t make this up.

When Mark Twain visited the Land of Israel in 1867 under Ottoman rule, he did not describe some booming, densely populated Arab state that Jews later “colonized.” He described a neglected and desolate land. In The Innocents Abroad, Twain wrote about empty valleys, uncultivated fields, swamps, ruins, and long stretches of land with barely any people at all. He famously described parts of the land as “desolate” and “unpeopled.” That does not mean nobody lived there. Arabs, Jews, Christians, Druze, and others were living throughout the land. But Twain’s firsthand observations completely contradict the modern revisionist fantasy that the land was a thriving Palestinian national society before Zionism. Jerusalem itself had only around 15,000 people at the time, and Jews were already the largest demographic group in the city. Much of the land was poor, undeveloped, malaria-ridden, and economically stagnant after centuries of Ottoman neglect. The transformation came later. Jewish pioneers drained swamps, fought malaria and typhus, built farms, roads, universities, hospitals, ports, industries, and entire cities from the ground up, turning a neglected province into one of the most advanced and innovative countries in the world. People ignore Twain’s testimony because it destroys the simplistic colonial narrative they try to force onto Jewish history.