'Wildly inaccurate' narrative of White colonizers finds willing audience among generations weaned on woke ideology
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Hamas hostage family members Ruby and Roy Chen explain how they discovered Itey was taken prisoner by a terrorist organization on 'America Reports.'
Enemies of Israel are pouring gas on the tinderbox of antisemitism with a fictitious narrative of White colonizers victimizing people of color in Palestine, experts told Fox News Digital.
Pro-Hamas protesters this week took their racially charged grievances to the perimeter of the White House and into the Capitol rotunda.
"The reality is that in Israel you will see Jews who look Black, brown, Asian, African and everything in between," Dan Feferman, a former national security adviser to the Israel Defense Ministry, told Fox News Digital.
"The mischaracterization is wildly inaccurate and unfortunately drives animosity in the Middle East and around the world against Israel."
Feferman is also the executive director of Sharaka, a nonprofit comprised of Israeli and Arab entrepreneurs, with branches in Israel, Bahrain and Morocco.
Members of the Hebrew Israelite community attend Passover holiday celebrations to mark the 42nd anniversary of their arrival in Israel, in the southern Israeli town of Dimona, May 20, 2009. The holiday commemorates the day they left Chicago for Liberia before moving to the Holy Land. (MENAHEM KAHANA/AFP via Getty Images)
Its goal is to forge unity between Israelis and Arabs in a world of far-left forces that appear intent on deepening the divide — with race used as the heavy equipment.
The narrative of Israelis as White colonizers and Palestinians as minority victims echoes grievances aired on campuses and in leftist doctrine used to divide the United States along racial lines and question the nation's legitimacy.
"The reality is that in Israel you will see Jews who look Black, brown, Asian, African and everything in between."
The effort has convinced millions of young Americans weaned on woke ideology to champion the terrorist organization Hamas — and to shout for the destruction of the constitutional republic of Israel, which is also one of the most racially, culturally, ethnically and religiously diverse nations on Earth.
The narrative is "endangering Israelis and it's endangering American Jews," Michael Makovsky, president and CEO of the Jewish Institute for National Security of America (JINSA) in Washington, D.C., told Fox News Digital.
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The true palette of Israel’s population defies the anti-Zionist narrative.
It reflects instead the nation’s location on the world map and the historic journey of the Jewish people across Europe, Africa and Asia.
It's also evident in the faces of the victims of the Hamas Oct. 7 terror attack on Israel.
A pro-Palestinian protester holds a "White Supremacy" sign during a rally on Wall Street in support of Palestinians on Oct. 26, 2023. The protest was against manufacturers and Wall Street firms investing and creating weapons used in the retaliation bombing of Gaza after the Palestinian militant group launched a deadly attack in southern Israel on October 7. (Michael Nigro/Pacific Press/LightRocket via Getty Images)
The victims included Israelis of many races and religions and people who traced their ethnic roots to 30 different countries.
The victims included dozens of Bedouins, a traditionally nomadic Arab tribe: 19 of them were killed and seven taken hostages in the surprise Hamas attack on soft civilian targets.
Official national data indicates that more than 1 in 5 people among Israel's 9.4 million residents are Arab.
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"They have full rights in Israel," Charles Wax, a prominent San Diego business executive active in Israeli affairs, told Fox News Digital.
"They can be Supreme Court justices. They can be anything in Israel. And they're fighting for Israel right now."
About 72% of Israelis are Jewish. But that figure doesn't tell the full story of Israel's diversity, say experts.
Israel, he noted, is the only place in the Middle East where Arabs enjoy the basic rights of modern representative government.
He called the persistent charges of "White supremacy" against Israel "the big lie" fueling the current international wave of antisemitism.
About 72% of Israelis are Jewish. But that figure doesn't tell the full story of Israel's diversity, experts note.
Pro-Palestinian demonstrators let off a red smoke flare and shout slogans while joining in a demonstration at Lafayette Square near the White House on Jan. 13, 2024. (Probal Rashid/LightRocket via Getty Images)
More than half of Jews in Israel are Sephardic: non-European Jews of Turkish, Persian, Arab and African descent, according to the Israel Central Bureau of Statistics.
Most have the appearance of what American leftists and activists call "people of color."
About 45% of Jews in Israel are Ashkenazi: Jews who arrived in Israel from Europe, from Russia to Spain and almost every nation in between.
"Few people outside the Middle East are aware of the tens of thousands of people of African ancestry living in the Jewish state."
"Some 90% of Jews in America emigrated from Europe," noted Feferman.
The predominance of Ashkenazi Jews in the United States shapes the American stereotype of Israelis as White.
The image in America has been reinforced by the so-called "neurotic, White, New York City deli" Jew commonly portrayed in American pop culture, from Woody Allen flicks to the classic sitcom "Seinfeld."
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Israel also boasts a burgeoning Black population among its already diverse population, experts note.
"Few people outside the Middle East are aware of the tens of thousands of people of African ancestry living in the Jewish state," reports the site Blackpast.org, citing research by University of Tel Aviv historian Dafnah Strauss.
Israel's Black population has soared in recent decades from the "African Diaspora," an influx of Somali and Ethiopian Jews in recent decades spurred by unrest in those nations, the same source indicated.
Thousands of Black American Jews from Chicago, Illinois and elsewhere in the Midwest moved to Israel in the 1960s. Known as the African Hebrew Israelites, they claim to be descended from the original 12 Tribes of Israel.
Yosef Haim, 23, was among the more than 250 Israelis taken hostage by Hamas on Oct. 7, 2023. (Courtesy Bring Them Home Now)
Israel's population also includes 250,000 Bedouins, nearly 3% of the country's population, notes the Israel Central Bureau of Statistics.
Among them are more than 10,000 Black Bedouins.
Israel "is a complete melting pot. It's paradise on Earth," Thomas Hand, an Israeli citizen born in Dublin, Ireland, told Fox News Digital during an interview in New York City in late 2023.
Hand’s 8-year-old daughter, Emily, was taken hostage by Hamas on Oct. 7.
Israel "is a complete melting pot. It's paradise on Earth."
He cited Israelis from Iraq, Iran, England, Ireland, South Africa and South America living in his community alone.
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Still, the narrative of a racist White nation persists and is being exploited by organizations such as National Students for Justice in Palestine (NSJP), among those inciting protests around the United States and calling for the destruction of Israel.
"Israel was founded through racism," the NSJP wrote last year in its online magazine "The Written Resistance."
Thomas Hand is interviewed in New York City on Nov. 15, 2023. Hand is the father of captured Hamas hostage, 8-year-old, Emily Hand. After 50 days, the girl, now 9, was among the hostages who were released. (Jennifer Mitchell for Fox News Digital)
The attack on Israel continued, "The idea of a state ‘for’ a particular ethnic group is racist because it entails privileging one group over another. Therefore there can be no Jewish state, or any ethnostate for that matter, that is not fundamentally racist."
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Race shouldn’t drive the conflict in any case, said Wax, the San Diego businessman, even if every citizen of Israel were White.
"We should look at it as an issue of just vs. unjust," he said.
Supporters of Israel also flatly refute the charge that it's colonizing the Middle East.
Children run toward a group of media on an organized tour in the unrecognized Bedouin village on Nov. 22, 2023 in El Bhat Al Rabi, Israel. On Oct. 7, Hamas launched a surprise attack on Israel, killing over 1,200 people, including 19 Bedouins killed by rockets and in the ground attacks, and seven Bedouins who were among the over 230 people kidnapped. (Alexi J. Rosenfeld/Getty Images)
"The creation of Israel in 1948 was supported by the left because it was seen as a major part of the movement to de-colonize the region from British control," said Makovsky of JINSA.
"Israel was originally seen as the David vs. the Goliath of colonization."
Leftists began to reject Israel, he said, after its stunning victory over Arab powers in the Six-Day War of 1967.
The anti-Israel movement has accelerated in recent years, he said, by the effort to define every issue by race or as a matter of occupier vs. oppressed.
"It is a deliberate mis-telling of the history of Israel and the Jews," Feferman said, "to delegitimize the very founding of the state of Israel and the Jewish presence."
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Kerry J. Byrne is a lifestyle reporter with Fox News Digital.
