The claim that Israel has existed for thousands of years and that Palestinians are simply Jordanians, Egyptians or Saudis is historically, genetically, linguistically and morally indefensible.
Thomas Milo
The claim that Israel has existed for thousands of years and that Palestinians are simply Jordanians, Egyptians or Saudis is historically, genetically, linguistically and morally indefensible.
Apart from the biblical monarchies of antiquity which ended in the 6th century BCE, there was no modern sovereign state called Israel until 1948 and certainly not a continuous Jewish majority in the land meant by Palestine. Most Jews had lived in the diaspora since across Europe, North Africa, Persia, and later in Russia and the Americas. Many were descendants of communities that emigrated, largely voluntarily but also driven by imperial deportations and later persecution, long before the Bar Kochba revolt of 132-135 CE — just as Irish, Armenians or Frisians later settled in Canada, New Zealand or South America. Others were later converts to Judaism, with no concrete historical or cultural ties to the land that is today claimed as Israel.
FACT: MOST ORIGINAL JEWISH COMMUNITIES OF PALESTINE STRONGLY OPPOSED ZIONISM
The only Jews who had lived continuously in Palestine for centuries — including Sephardic families, ultra-Orthodox groups and long-established Eastern communities sometimes later called Mizrahi — rejected Zionism as a secular, nationalist and heretical ideology. According to their religious tradition, the return to Zion must come through divine intervention, not political or military force. Like the majority of Jews in Europe and the Arab world before the Holocaust, they did not equate Jewish identity with statehood.
After 1948, these communities were sidelined, silenced or forcibly absorbed into the Zionist state narrative. But their legacy of principled opposition lives on — in groups such as Neturei Karta, in the works of post-Zionist scholars, and in the enduring memory of a Jewish identity that did not require displacement, exclusion, or domination.
FACT: PALESTINIANS REPRESENT THE LAND’S CONTINUOUS INDIGENOUS POPULATION
By contrast, Palestinians represent the land’s continuous indigenous population, their lineage running from the Canaanite era through Israelite/Judahite, Samaritan, Hellenistic, Roman, Byzantine, Arab and Ottoman periods. A visible Jewish minority remained throughout—most clearly in long-standing communities—but Jewish ancestry is also woven less visibly into the wider population through conversion, inter-marriage and shared rural life over many centuries.
In village names, family traditions and even genetic markers, older Jewish layers persist inside what is now a mainly Muslim and partially Christian society. The spoken language, Palestinian Arabic, belongs to the native Levantine dialect continuum shared with Syria, Lebanon and Jordan, further anchoring both explicit and implicit descendants of earlier inhabitants to the same scenery and historical landscape.
If Palestinians had arrived recently from Egypt or Saudi Arabia, their speech would immediately betray it — just as native speakers of different regional variants of the same language stand out by distinct accents and grammatical patterns: “a Londoner in Birmingham”.
Furthermore, looking at the historical development of the language, Palestinian Arabic, as a member of the Levantine dialect subgroup, preserves the same traces of the linguistic landscape that predates the later waves of influence of Arabic.
Just as the persistence of the Celtic vigesimal counting system in French (quatre-vingts rather than octante or huitante), unlike the more direct inheritance from Latin octōgintā seen in Italian (ottanta), Spanish (ochenta), Portuguese (oitenta), and Romanian (optzeci), yet clearly present in Irish and Scottish Gaelic (ceithir fichead – four twenties), proves a significant pre-Roman (Celtic) influence on the local language, demonstrating a continuity beyond later linguistic layers; and just as the contrasting syntax in Germanic languages like English (“the whole world”), Dutch (“de hele wereld”), and German (“die ganze Welt”) versus Romance-influenced Flemish and Brabant dialects of Dutch (“heel de wereld,” mirroring French “tout le monde”) reveals distinct historical linguistic contacts, so too does Levantine Arabic, including Palestinian Arabic, exhibit linguistic features that connect it to the region’s older Aramaic substratum. Levantine use of bə-bêtu (in his house), paralleling Aramaic bə-bêtêh and contrasting with non-Levantine Arabic fī baytih, demonstrates this deeper historical layer within the local Arabic dialects.
Palestinian Arabic preserves these exact same linguistic features, demonstrating how language is a social surface structure through which older history permeates, revealing a long and unbroken connection to the land.
THE NAME PALESTINE PREDATES NEARLY ALL MODERN NATION-STATES.
The name Palestine predates nearly all modern nation-states. It appears in Herodotus, Roman provincial names (Syria Palaestina), Byzantine and Islamic geography, Ottoman records and British Mandate documents. It is a historical-geographical term — like “Burgundy,” “Mesopotamia” or “Nederland” — not contingent on statehood. To claim that Palestinians “actually belong elsewhere” is not historical reasoning — it is political erasure. First displace a people, then claim they never existed.
THE HISTORICAL IRONY IS DEVASTATING
Israel presents itself as a sanctuary born from the ashes of the Holocaust — a state of safety for a persecuted people. Yet its legal system enshrines precisely the kind of ethnoreligious classification that made mass persecution possible in 20th-century Europe. There is no shared national identity called “Israeli.” Instead, every citizen is categorised by origin: “Jewish,” “Arab,” “Druze,” and more — not as cultural descriptors, but as determining factors for rights to land, housing, marriage, immigration, and even military obligation.
In the Netherlands before 1940, recording a person’s religion was largely a descriptive, bureaucratic entry in the population register. Under Nazi occupation the same data were weaponised for persecution and, ultimately, mass murder—showing how overly detailed but essentially benign administrative tools can be perverted when the legal order collapses under foreign occupation.
In present-day Israel, mandatory classification by ethnoreligious category is not a temporary distortion but an integral feature of the state’s legal architecture. Every citizen is registered as “Jewish,” “Arab,” “Druze” or another predefined group, and many core rights—such as access to land, immigration, family reunification and, for some groups, military service—are allocated partly on that basis. In 2013 the Israeli Supreme Court confirmed this structure by ruling that the state could not recognise a neutral civic nationality (“Israeli”) because it would dilute the Jewish character of the state.
The result is a system in which legal status and life chances are shaped from birth by ethnoreligious identity, creating structural privilege for one group and structural disadvantage for others. This institutional separation of populations on the basis of origin is what international law and comparative scholars describe as apartheid.
A PEOPLE’S RIGHT TO A LAND IS NOT GROUNDED IN BLOODLINES OR MYTHOLOGY
A people’s right to a land is not grounded in bloodlines or mythology, but in presence, language, labour and memory. To deny that right is to repeat, in a new form, the very logic that led to the darkest chapters of the 20th century. Territorial rights in modern international practice are anchored in continued residence, cultural and linguistic attachment, sustained work on the land and the collective memory that develops from those ties. When these elements are set aside in favour of purely ancestral or mythic claims, the outcome risks echoing patterns of exclusion that history has repeatedly shown to be harmful.
ISRAEL’S STATEHOOD ITSELF IS NOT IN DISPUTE
Israel’s statehood itself is not in dispute. The international community recognised Israeli sovereignty within the pre-1967 Armistice (Green Line) borders, which have been the basis of all peace talks since. Precisely because that right is accepted, any Israeli control, settlement or annexation beyond those lines automatically falls foul of international prohibitions on occupation and colonisation (Article 49, Fourth Geneva Convention; UN Security Council Resolutions 242 and 2334).
In other words: acknowledging Israel inside these frontiers—which virtually every state now does—logically entails acknowledging that settlements, land seizures and the military occupation of Gaza (widely considered ongoing even after 2005, because Israel controls airspace, sea access and population registry), the West Bank, East Jerusalem, the Golan Heights and the Shebaa Farms enclave on the Lebanon-Syria border are, by definition, unlawful. Distinguishing between Israel’s legitimate core territory and its illegal external expansion does not undermine the state’s existence; it simply identifies the real problem: a permanent, state-driven enlargement at the expense of the indigenous Palestinian, Syrian and Lebanese populations.
Let it be clearly stated: exposing historical falsehoods and naming structural injustice has nothing — absolutely nothing — to do with antisemitism. Antisemitism is hatred of Jews as people, as a religion or a culture — and it must be confronted relentlessly. But criticism of a state that implements apartheid, occupation and forced displacement is not hate — it is moral clarity. To equate all criticism of Israel with antisemitism is to weaponise the term and undermine the fight against it. True justice is indivisible: it protects Jews, Palestinians, Christians, Muslims and atheists — in short, human beings — against dispossession, racism and violent ideologies, whatever language or flag they may adopt.
Note – These observations are not new. In a 1973 article, Dr. Jan Brugman (1929–2007) analysed the discursive strategies by which Israeli policy framed itself as morally unassailable, while noting the risk of conflating historical victimhood with political infallibility.
https://www.dbnl.org/tekst/_hol006197301_01/_hol006197301_01_0073.php
About the Author
Thomas Milo is a Dutch linguist, typographer, and software inventor best known for his pioneering work in Arabic script technology. A founding partner of DecoType BV (est. 1985), that developed the Advanced Composition Engine (ACE) — the system that became the role model for modern computer typography.
Milo studied Slavic, Turkic, and Arabic languages at the Universities of Amsterdam and Leiden worked in Saudi Arabia pioneering lorry routes and later served as an Arabic-speaking officer with the Royal Netherlands Army including two deployments with UNIFIL in South Lebanon. He also authored the Dutch army’s Arabic manual for the Lebanese dialect.
A contributor to the Unicode Consortium since 1988, Milo has helped shape the encoding of Arabic and Cyrillic scripts. He was awarded the Dr. Peter Karow Prize in 2009, joining figures like Knuth, and Karow himself, for contributions that laid the digital foundations of typography and the Portable Document Format (PDF).
Among his groundbreaking contributions is his role as architect of the Mushaf Muscat, a conceptually revolutionary digital Qur’an edition that bridges the gap between classical Islamic calligraphy and modern digital humanities.