You Are Probably Ignorant of Jewish History
Suppose you’re a progressive, a Muslim, or even a Christian raised in the Middle East. In that case, you probably think you are acquainted with Jewish history wrapped up in your justice ideology.
Antisemitism
By Dr. Tim Orr
Suppose you’re a progressive, a Muslim, or even a Christian raised in the Middle East. In that case, you probably think you are acquainted with Jewish history wrapped up in your justice ideology. Still, chances are—unless you’ve gone out of your way to study it—you are probably ignorant of Jewish history. If you are college educated, listen to left-wing media, or listen to Tucker Carlson or Candice Owens, you are probably ignorant of Jewish history. That’s not an insult; it’s a reality I’ve encountered repeatedly. Whether I’m speaking to university students, engaging in interfaith dialogue, or simply chatting with Uber drivers in London, the pattern is consistent: people have absorbed modern political narratives, but know shockingly little about the 3,000-year story of the Jewish people and their ancestral land. With few exceptions, the Jewish presence in the land of Israel is reduced to a footnote, a myth, or a colonial invention. That omission is not coincidental—it is historical amnesia and deliberate erasure in some contexts.
The Roots of Ignorance
This widespread lack of awareness has deep roots. Under Islamic rule beginning in the 7th century, Jews were subjugated under dhimmi status—permitted to live but marginalized socially, politically, and religiously. Over centuries, particularly under the Abbasids and Ottomans, Jewish history in the land of Israel was downplayed or dismissed entirely. The Qur'an recognizes Jewish ties to the land (Qur’an 5:21), but Islamic historiography later reframed the narrative to center Arab and Muslim primacy in the region (Lewis, 1999). Over time, the theological narrative evolved into one that minimized or denied Jewish nationhood altogether.
Middle Eastern Christians, particularly those within Orthodox or Eastern Catholic traditions, often absorbed the Islamic framing of history, especially under regimes that enforced anti-Zionist, and at times, antisemitic education policies (Tibawi, 1956). Meanwhile, progressives—especially in the West—have inherited a post-colonial worldview that paints Jews as European colonialists, even though over half of Israel’s Jewish population descends from Jews expelled from Arab and Muslim lands after 1948 (Stillman, 1979).
Against this backdrop, Melanie Phillips enters the conversation like a storm cutting through fog.
The Battle for Memory: Melanie Phillips, Historical Truth, and the Invention of “Palestinian” History
There’s a war that isn’t fought with bombs or missiles, but with textbooks, tweets, op-eds, and hashtags. It is a war over memory—over who has the right to remember, belong, and define reality. This is the war Melanie Phillips has been fighting, often alone, and always at great personal cost.
In her compelling interview on Triggernometry (March 27, 2025), Phillips defends Israel and unflinchingly indicts the lies that have shaped Western consciousness. Her message is clear: the dominant narrative surrounding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not just mistaken—it’s manufactured, emotionally manipulative, and morally reversed.
The Myth of the “Original Sin”
Phillips begins by challenging what she calls “the foundational myth”—that Jews were given land in the Middle East as a compensation prize for the Holocaust, displacing an indigenous Arab population. “Every single thing you just said is untrue,” she tells the host, cutting through years of assumptions with the precision of a scalpel.
She backs this up with historical depth. The Jews are not colonial settlers, she argues. They are indigenous. They governed the land of Israel centuries before Islam existed. “They were a people in a particular area of land, which they governed according to laws they made, and which they defended,” she explains. This is not poetic mythology. It is the definition of a nation-state.
This Jewish sovereignty was ended not by Arab resistance but by Roman conquest. And even after exile, Phillips reminds us, the Jews never let go of the land. “They were always coming back,” she says. She illustrates this by noting that from the mid-19th century onward, Jews were the majority in Jerusalem, long before the British Mandate or the Zionist movement.
In The Innocents Abroad, Mark Twain described the land in 1867 as “a desolate country…a silent, mournful expanse,” devoid of people or cultivation. The Jewish return, far from being an act of dispossession, was one of restoration. Swamps were drained. Cities rebuilt. Hebrew was revived. It was a resurrection, not a conquest.
The Invention of “Palestinian” Identity
One of the most contentious yet crucial claims Phillips makes is that the Palestinian identity was not ancient but invented in the mid-20th century. “There was no such thing as Palestinians,” she says bluntly. Before Israel's rebirth, the people who lived in the land were mainly nomadic Arabs who considered themselves part of southern Syria, or simply Arab. The term “Palestinian,” before 1948, often referred to Jews—the Palestine Post, the Palestine Symphony Orchestra, the Palestinian Jewish Brigade in the British army.
This aligns with what scholars like Rashid Khalidi (1997) and Benny Morris (2001) have documented: that a cohesive Palestinian national consciousness only emerged in reaction to the Zionist movement and the establishment of Israel. This doesn’t negate the suffering of Arab families displaced in 1948, but it complicates the moral narrative that casts Palestinians as the only victims and Jews as foreign invaders.
Phillips recounts how early Arab leaders, including King Faisal, initially welcomed the Jewish return, acknowledging the land as the Jews’ ancestral homeland. That cooperation was sabotaged by the rise of political Islam and the appointment of Haj Amin al-Husseini as the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem—a man who incited anti-Jewish pogroms and later collaborated with Nazi Germany.
The Left’s Racism and Britain’s Betrayal
Phillips’ perspective is not purely historical—it is lived. At The Guardian, she noticed a bizarre double standard: Syria’s Assad regime massacres tens of thousands in Hama—barely a whisper. Israel defends itself in Lebanon? Front page fury. When she pointed this out, her colleagues responded, “We don’t expect the developing world to adhere to our standards.”
It was in that moment she understood that “the Left was racist”—not because it said so overtly, but because it denied moral agency to Arabs while imposing moral perfection on Jews. And when Jews defended themselves? They were betraying the progressive script.
The deeper she spoke out, the more she was marginalized. “Oh, she’s a Jew,” people would whisper. Her Britishness was revoked. Her liberalism is suspect. As she puts it: “You’ll always be the Jew.”
When Truth Becomes a Subversive Act
Ultimately, Phillips’ interview isn’t just about correcting historical inaccuracies. It’s about reclaiming moral clarity. “They don’t want two states,” she says about Hamas and the Palestinian Authority. “They want Israel gone.” And yet, the West refuses to see this, choosing instead to live in what she calls “a fantasy world” of emotional narratives and inverted justice.
The ignorance of Jewish history—intentional or not—is not harmless. It is the soil in which antisemitism grows, cloaked in academic footnotes and progressive slogans. Melanie Phillips is not just correcting the record; she’s defending the truth in an age where truth is heresy.
References
BJE. (n.d.). The Historical Presence of Jews in the Land of Israel. Retrieved March 28, 2025, from https://bje.org.au/knowledge-centre/israel/history/historical-presence/
Cook, D. (2005). Understanding Jihad. University of California Press.
Khalidi, R. (1997). Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness. Columbia University Press.
Krämer, G. (2008). A History of Palestine: From the Ottoman Conquest to the Founding of the State of Israel. Princeton University Press.
Lewis, B. (1999). Semites and Anti-Semites: An Inquiry into Conflict and Prejudice. W.W. Norton & Company.
Morris, B. (2001). Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881-2001. Vintage Books.
Phillips, M. (2010). The World Turned Upside Down: The Global Battle Over God, Truth, and Power. Encounter Books.
Pipes, D. (2001). The Hidden Hand: Middle East Fears of Conspiracy. St. Martin’s Press.
Sartre, J.-P. (1946). Anti-Semite and Jew. Schocken Books.
Stillman, N. A. (1979). The Jews of Arab Lands: A History and Source Book. Jewish Publication Society.
Tibawi, A. L. (1956). Arab Education in Mandatory Palestine. Luzac & Co.
Triggernometry. (2025, March 27). British Author Just EXPOSED The Truth About "Palestinian" History! [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tewr18aKtyo
Twain, M. (1869). The Innocents Abroad. American Publishing Company.
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