The history of Israel and Palestine is often told as a story that begins in 1948. That framing is convenient. It avoids harder questions about Europe, about antisemitism, about empire, and about how one people’s trauma was displaced onto another’s land.
Zionism (nationalist movement seeking Jewish self-determination in response to persistent exclusion in Europe) did not appear suddenly. It took shape within a European inheritance of antisemitism formed before Europe itself had settled into nations. Its roots lie in late Roman Christian thought, developed far from the later centres of European power. This tradition was articulated by figures such as Augustine of Hippo (354–430 CE) and John Chrysostom (349–407 CE). It did not call for extermination. It authorised hierarchy, presenting Jewish subordination as divinely sanctioned and theologically necessary.
As Europe transitioned into a post-Roman era, these ideas did not remain abstract. They were taken up by churches, folded into law, repeated until they felt unremarkable. Jewish communities were allowed to remain, but only as marked minorities. Violence flared, receded, returned. Exclusion did not. It sat quietly inside rules, sermons, and habit.
The sixteenth century marked a critical turn. What had circulated as doctrine took on regulatory shape. Martin Luther, the central figure of the Protestant Reformation, pressed longstanding Christian contempt into governance. His 65,000-word treatise On the Jews and Their Lies (1543) shifted discourse from creed to command: Burn their synagogues. Tear down their dwellings. Strip legal shelter. The language is stark, almost bureaucratic. This was no passing rage. It became embedded in German cultural memory, blending confessional hatred with the consolidation of state power.
By the nineteenth century, antisemitism had been racialised. Jews were no longer a religious minority that could convert. They were framed by ideologues such as Christian Wilhelm von Dohm and Bruno Bauer as a civilisational problem. This was the context in which Europe formulated what it called the Jewish Question: how to deal with a population it refused to fully accept. The proposed answers oscillated between forced assimilation and exclusion. Both failed.
In the late nineteenth century, the inherited structure of exclusion had reached a breaking point. Legal emancipation existed on paper but belonging remained conditional and reversible. Assimilation did not dissolve suspicion. Conversion did not erase difference. Jews were present everywhere, secure nowhere. It was within this climate that modern political Zionism took form, not as abstraction but as response.
Theodor Herzl was not the author of this logic. He stepped into it. In Der Judenstaat (1896), he reframed the “Jewish Question” as a matter of power rather than doctrine, arguing that vulnerability would persist without a state. Independence, he believed, could secure parity. But independence demanded land. And land, in the imperial imagination, was never neutral. This is where empire enters decisively.
This turn toward empire did not rely on ignorance. It relied on a particular kind of knowledge. By the early twentieth century, the Middle East had been surveyed, catalogued, and annotated by European travellers who mistook proximity for authority. Travel became expertise. Observation became entitlement. The region was rendered legible not through its societies, but through European eyes trained to see space before people. This was Orientalism at work. It functioned here as administration, translating familiarity into decision.
When Sykes and Picot partitioned Ottoman provinces in 1916, the gesture exceeded cartography. It reflected how the region was already understood. Territory first. People later, if at all. Picot was not an accidental bureaucrat. He was a leading figure in France’s openly named Colonial Party. Orientalism was not a prejudice here. It was policy.
By the time the Balfour Declaration was issued in 1917, the terms of dispossession were already set. Britain promised a “national home for the Jewish people” in a land it did not own, while reducing its Arab majority to the phrase “existing non-Jewish communities.” This was not oversight. It was method. Palestinians were acknowledged only to be administratively minimised.
Yet, history does not sustain the view that Palestine functioned as the default destination of European Jews. The numbers suggest otherwise. From 1890 through 1924, almost three million Jews relocated to the United States. The dominant refuge was American territory. Palestine did not command the majority of departures. Palestine received only a fraction of Europe’s Jewish migrants. The preference was clear.
The shift came later. Not from persuasion, but closure. The 1924 Immigration Act sealed American entry from Eastern and Southern Europe. Britain followed. Other routes thinned. What had once been one path among many hardened into the remaining exit at precisely the moment antisemitism intensified across the continent.
This was the moment when Zionism changed character. It moved from aspiration to necessity. Not because Palestine was empty or uncontested, but because Europe and the Atlantic world made themselves inaccessible. Migration to Palestine accelerated under pressure, not romance. Survival replaced choice.
This parallel matters. It reveals that the catastrophe in Palestine was not driven solely by ideological zeal, but by Western exclusion. Jewish refugees were funnelled toward a land already inhabited, under imperial rule, and stripped of political voice. Europe’s failure to absorb its own victims did not disappear. It was redirected.
What followed was not a collision of equal claims, but the unfolding of an imperial decision chain. Jewish suffering was real. That needs no qualification. Palestinian displacement or Nakba did not happen by accident. These histories run together, not against each other. One cleared space. The other moved into it.
This is why the Nakba cannot be treated as an unfortunate by-product of Israel’s creation. It was the predictable outcome of a century in which Europe theorised difference, partitioned territory, and mistook authority for legitimacy. Europe did not solve antisemitism. It relocated it. And Palestinians were positioned to absorb the consequences.
The United States inherited this blindness wholesale
In a now-famous speech, Al Gore noted, with pride, that the United States recognised Israel within eleven minutes of independence. The applause came quickly. Nothing else did. But what Gore did not mention, then or later, was what those eleven minutes coincided with on the ground. No reference or acknowledgement of the Nakba. Fifty percent of the story vanished in a standing ovation.
That omission was not accidental. It reflected a deeper American inheritance of European Orientalism, one in which Palestinians appear only as obstacles, never as political subjects. From Truman to Clinton to Kushner, the pattern holds. Palestinians are peripheral in moral discourse, even when central to historical fact.
Israel today exists as a recognised project of Jewish self-rule, authorised through international resolutions shaped during Europe’s imperial retreat. International law played a role in its recognition. That legal pathway emerged within a wider imperial order in which external powers were redrawing territories across the Middle East. What followed raised questions that law alone did not settle. Palestinian refugees, now around 8.36 million, remain part of the ledger, alongside claims of right to return, citizenship, equality. The events of 1948 produced recognition. But they opened a longer conversation that has yet to close.
This is why the conflict persists. Not because history is too complicated, but because responsibility has been too carefully avoided.
Until Europe and the United States think honestly with how antisemitism, empire, and Orientalism converged to produce both Israel’s birth and Palestine’s catastrophe, every solution will repeat the same structure. Different language. Same erasure.
Conclusion
This piece is not written to deny Israel or dismiss the reality of antisemitism, or to turn Palestine into a symbol. It is written because two histories have been kept apart for too long. Jewish insecurity and Palestinian loss were not born separately. They were shaped by the same European failures, even if the costs were uneven. Acknowledging this does not flatten history. It clarifies it. Until such clarity is accepted, Palestinians will continue to live inside decisions made without them.
Dr. Abdullah Yusuf is a Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in Politics and International Relations at the University of Dundee, UK. He studied Public Policy and Diplomacy at The Australian National University in Canberra, Australia, and holds a PhD in International Relations from the University of Dundee. His research and scholarship interests include: International organizations (United Nations, League of Arab States, and African Union); Politics of the Middle East, including Palestine, Israel, and the Arab-Israeli conflict; Politics of humanitarian armed interventions; Peacekeeping and post-conflict peacebuilding; International law and refugee protection; Climate politics; Post-colonial Studies. For more details on my teaching, research, and scholarship profile, please visit: his research profile and bio.
