Khalid Yahya Blankinship is professor and department chair of religion at Temple University
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Hamza Yusuf is a leading proponent of classical learning in Islam and president of Zaytuna College, a Muslim liberal arts college in Berkeley, California.
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Khalid Yahya Blankinship is professor and department chair of religion at Temple University
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Hamza Yusuf is a leading proponent of classical learning in Islam and president of Zaytuna College, a Muslim liberal arts college in Berkeley, California.
More About this Author
An Arab protest gathering (against British policy) in session at an elementary school in Jerusalem’s Old City, 1929
Nur Masalha’s book Palestine: A Four Thousand Year History examines Palestine’s millennia-old multicultural heritage, which has been distorted and mythologized. That work was the subject of Zaytuna College’s First Command Book Club session in August 2024, hosted by Hamza Yusuf with historian extraordinaire Khalid Yahya Blankinship. Their enlightening conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Hamza Yusuf: I’m excited today because we’re joined by Dr. Khalid Blankinship, one of the great intellects and historians of our time. His knowledge is encyclopedic in many subjects, including Palestine. He is a professor in the Religion Department at Temple University, and his early academic work focused on the end of the jihad state and the decline of the Umayyad state. We are honored to have him here today.
One thing that really struck me about Nur Masalha’s book is that he makes an extraordinary case that “Palestine” was the name of the region long before Muslims arrived there. He also showed that the idea of an ethnostate in that region is an imaginary construct; it has always been a multiethnic environment. As a historian, how do you view this kind of erasure of history?
Khalid Yahya Blankinship: The erasure of history has been carried on all the time. People edit their own personal histories to benefit themselves. The idea that one alters and transforms history is not surprising. But the historian wants truth and accuracy. When you have period-piece films that portray this or that era of history, a historian might say, well, it did not happen that way, or they added this, and that did not occur. An example is Spike Lee’s Malcolm X, where because Malcolm X’s brothers and sisters, and another person, did not cooperate, Lee created a fictional character to replace them. One might say that’s of no consequence because it’s a little point, but little points add up. As a historian, one tries to amass all the sources that are available to arrive at the complete history, at least as far as history can be complete.
HY: In light of that, how is it that this narrative surrounding Palestine has been thrust upon the Western world? If you look at the support for the Palestinians, almost the entire Global South and consistent UN votes reflect that. But then you have Europe and Anglophone countries—Australia, New Zealand, Canada, England, and America—that consistently sustain, as is evident in this book, this other imaginary narrative that these are Indigenous people returning to their homeland, and the Palestinians are somehow an insignificant element and need not be given any consideration. How did this narrative come about?
KYB: Well, I could write a book about that. Today, we think of the Palestinian case as being truly extraordinary, because there is nothing like that—a great imperial power being dictated to by a little colony, and these absurd discourses that have been justifying to that colony, to that Zionist project. However, if we go back in time, it was not so absurd. The Zionist project has had the misfortune to be overtaken by changing times.
Settler colonial projects have been practiced all over the world; for instance, the expansion of China from North China into South China and the gradual assimilation of the Southern Chinese tribal peoples into Chinese—that’s a settler project too, although a non-European one. But European colonialism was accompanied by an unusual racism fostered by the fact that they lived in an extremely northern part of the world and had much lighter skin tones than most other peoples in the world.
As a result, that became the determining difference. The great historian Arnold Toynbee said that if one went to some other cultures or peoples, it might be body hair determining the difference of who was racially superior. And Europeans, in terms of their hair, would be seen as backward peoples compared to the Japanese, or the Bushmen of Southwest Africa or the Tasmanians. So skin color is a superficial thing that happened because of historical choice.
The other thing is that when the Europeans went sailing around the world with superior naval technology from circa 1500, they encountered other civilizations all at once and that just gave them a mental overload, and they had to figure out how to establish superiority over these peoples. They were rather mean colonialists, especially to aboriginal peoples whom they wiped out in taking over in what I call the six successful settler colonies: United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Argentina, and Uruguay. These countries were all settled by Europeans who mostly replaced the Indigenous people, maybe not so much in New Zealand, but the other five especially.
And this idea of settler colonialism is distinguished from exploitative colonialism, as when the British occupied India. There was never any question about Europeans settling in India, as it was full of fatal diseases, not suitable for settlement, and the Indian population was a few hundred million and simply not displaceable by European settlers. That wasn’t on the table. The Europeans usually went out and prospected for lands that were empty of people, more or less—areas that were inhabited by aboriginal people who had either no agriculture or basic agriculture and therefore had little population density and could thereby be overwhelmed. This was the specialty of the Northern Europeans, particularly the English and also, to some extent, the French.
And the Spanish and Portuguese, of course, occupied places in Latin America and tried to pour in settlers there, but they were never able to overcome the natives—there was never a question of completely displacing, say, the populations of Mexico or Peru. That was not on the table either.
But in the case of North America, the United States, the native population was largely wiped out and supplanted and overwhelmed by a huge number of European immigrants. And today, nobody is calling for the situation to be reversed.
I remember that just before the invasion of Iraq by the United States, in January 1991, I appeared on a panel at West Chester University where one supporter of the invasion said, “We have to protect the rights of the Kurds in Kurdistan, and we have to protect the Maronites in Lebanon.” And I said, “Well, then I suppose that you support the legitimate right of the state of Iraq to protect the rights of the Lakota Sioux to take back the western half of South Dakota.” And two hundred people in the audience applauded. But it’s quite easy when you’re in Pennsylvania to give back the western half of South Dakota to the Lakota Sioux. But if you go to Rapid City, South Dakota, you will find the attitude toward the Lakota Sioux is somewhat similar to the attitude of the Jewish or Zionist settlers in the West Bank toward the Palestinians.
HY: I’ve noticed a lot of Palestinian activists who talk of Turtle Island and invoke the example of America as a settler state—that doesn’t seem to be a wise approach because although there are aboriginal peoples in Palestine, the Bedouin peoples, Palestine is also a propertied land. For instance, I think about 20 percent of the settlers are on deeded property, and it’s all recorded—the Ottomans recorded everything.
I think it’s a vastly different situation when you have tribal lands, and conquest was part of the tribal world. As you know about the Comancheria in the United States—they were pretty ruthless in dealing with other tribes that didn’t pay tribute. And they gave the Americans the hardest time of any of the tribes. But I think in Palestine, people have deeded properties; they still have the keys to their houses that they were chased out of. It’s provable in a court of law.
And Western people hold the rule of law as this sacred thing that we believe in, and we’re taught as children that law is what makes people civilized. This is why property laws are especially important. Even in the Islamic tradition, the protection of property is one of the five (or six, as some believe) universals. In that way, I think it’s a different situation in Palestine with deeded properties.
KYB: I’d like to explain two points regarding the Zionist colony which led to its failure to be accepted and led to the catastrophe that we’re faced with now. One, they started too late. For instance, the United States started more than four hundred years ago with the Jamestown settlement in 1607, and that English colonization of North America was virtually complete with the surrender of Geronimo in Arizona in 1886. By then, the rest of the country was completely pacified. Whereas in Palestine, this is not the case. They had the First Zionist Congress in 1897, and I would identify the period from 1880 to 1920 as the zenith of European imperialism. You could even say 1880 to 1914, because World War I started the end of European imperialism. So the Zionists were starting out too late.
And when they started acquiring land in 1920 and bringing in the settlers, their colonial project was just beginning after all the other European colonial projects were already set. And many others also failed for being too late: the British in Kenya and in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), the French in Algeria, which is a very parallel case, the Italians in Libya, and the Portuguese in Angola. The Portuguese were trying in 1950 to get a big settler colonialism going in Angola—way too late, and they lost.
The second is that [the Zionists] didn’t choose a place with thin aboriginal populations which could be set against each other. As you were saying about America, the Comanche were massacring other tribes, and the Crow Nation helped the US Army against Sitting Bull and against the Lakota Sioux because they were enemies. And again, this was very different from Palestine, where you had a homogenous population, a dense population, and furthermore, you had a civilized population with advanced agriculture. And today, while this project is still ongoing, it’s one of the most densely populated places on the earth, and it’s a tiny area.
So you have this complete mess because of this very late attempt at an ethno-national colonization of a civilized land. And to your point about having deeded properties, well, that has to do with the civilized aspect. When the English came to buy the land from the Native Americans in North America, those Indigenous people had no concept that you could own land. They didn’t consider it an ownable thing. It’s like the land belonged to God. In Islam, landholding went back to various models in the past that differed from the one that was imposed on the Ottoman Empire by the British: the Ottoman Land Code of 1858, which essentially forced privatization on the Ottomans, and which opened it up to this very type of colonization that then emerged after that. And, as happened in the collapse of socialism in the Soviet Union, the people who were well placed took advantage of that situation to seize a lot of land and became absentee landholders who later sold their holdings to the Zionists and gave them a foot in the door in Palestine.
The landholding is a crucial point. When you’re going into a place that has few people, you just go clear the table. But if you go to a place that’s densely populated and the people are well established because it’s a civilized culture, it’s going to require a lot more effort to get anything. This is the problem that the Zionists have faced. And it is an insoluble conundrum where they see no way out. And that is most unfortunate, and the situation is extremely dangerous and could lead to atomic war in the Middle East, to general atomic war in the whole world. It may not be likely, but it’s possible.
Delegates at the First Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland, 1897
HY: Yes, it’s possible, and as we know, events can escalate quickly. I think about World War I and the eighteen-year-old member of a secret society who killed Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria in Sarajevo and within twenty-eight days, the world was thrust into this insane war. What troubles me is that a lot of the men who were in control of the governments at that time were Greek and Latin classicists. They’d gone to Cambridge and Oxford, or through the advanced German gymnasium education tradition, and they’d read Thucydides, they’d read Tacitus and other extraordinary historians. So they knew a lot about what could happen. Whereas today, we don’t see statesmen anymore—the people in control of the levers of power are, I think, terrifying.
KYB: That is true, they’re terrible. They are part of this mass psychosis of mass stupidity. Like one would think, How is it that the Zionists could be that way? And the answer is they didn’t think about it in the right way. The Eastern European Jews were being persecuted because of the spread of ethno-nationalism throughout Eastern Europe, where the Jews were a minority. They could not acquire any territory in Europe because they were the downtrodden element in the region. They thought they could go out and colonize some other place. And there were many potential projects to colonize—Patagonia and southern Argentina, for example. And they had the British government’s offer of part of Kenya in 1903, which Theodor Herzl [father of political Zionism] accepted. [The offer was later declined by the Sixth Zionist Congress.] The Zionists thought they needed a land right away; Jews were being killed, so they feared being massacred.
But they were not thinking about Palestine or the people in Palestine and thought they could just brush them away—because that’s what all the other European colonialists thought about their colonial empires in Africa and elsewhere. So they made no allowance for the people in Palestine. The Zionists who went and got settled there eventually realized this was going to be a problem. And yet for decades—in the teens and the twenties of the twentieth century—they were still more concerned about the attitude of the European powers toward them. They thought they had to cultivate European powers because they were the only ones that counted—the people in Palestine didn’t count for anything. That was their attitude, and they were wrong.
HY: I want to talk about the Christian Zionists’ desire, going back to the 1830s and ’40s with the Earl of Shaftesbury, and later the beginning of the Aliyah in the 1880s, to have the Jews of the diaspora immigrate to the Palestine region. What really strikes me is that Russia, as the “third Rome” of the Orthodox tradition—after the “first Rome” of the Western Roman Empire and the “second Rome” of Constantinople—did not like the fact that the Greek Orthodox Church controlled the orthodoxy in the Holy Land. They were very interested in having a Russian component in there because they considered themselves the third Rome that, after the fall of Constantinople, would go to Kiev.
KYB: They were also taking over the Ottoman Empire. That was their goal.
HY: Exactly, the Crimean War—between the Russian Empire and the Ottoman Empire—was part of that. I recently found this book called Travels in the Crimea and Along the Shores of the Black Sea by J. Reuilly, who set out from St. Petersburg to the Crimea in 1803. It’s all about being amongst the Muslims—the entire Crimea was all Muslim, which is amazing. The Russian Orthodox were troubled by the fact that the Catholics and the Protestants were getting in there and converting the Orthodox in Palestine because 90 percent of the Christians of Palestine were actually from the Greek Orthodox tradition. So the Christian element in the creation of Palestine is fascinating, because this colonial project comes from these Zionist Christians who believe they have to get all of the Jews back to Palestine in order for Armageddon to occur.
KYB: Well, Zionism was founded by Christians, not Jews. And Masalha, in his book, sufficiently documents that and points out the role the seventh Earl of Shaftesbury played in this. That fact is very salient. So then, why were the Jews at that time not on board with this, even though the Christians were telling them they ought to take back the Holy Land? The Jews were reluctant—they didn’t want to join the movement for at least two reasons.
First of all, their religion taught that the Jews were not to go against the will of God by trying to recover Palestine as a Jewish area—that is an established teaching of rabbinical Judaism—even though the land of Israel was a sacred place in the Jewish halacha or law.
Second, they suspected, correctly, that the Europeans were trying to get rid of them. So they were somewhat resistant to this because, in fact, the Zionist project is an anti-Semitic project. And here we understand anti-Semitism as being anti-Judaism. So when I say anti-Semitic in this discussion, I mean anti-Judaism. It’s an anti-Semitic project because it essentially adopts the ideas of the anti-Semites that the Jews are an alien body who can never be absorbed by any society, so they have to be moved out of all the societies in the world and into their own place—and then they can be a nation like any other nation.
The Jewish Zionists did take this idea up eventually, which was signaled by the early appearance of Zionism in Russia, primarily after 1881, which is a late date. And then, of course, the conversion of Louis Brandeis, the US Supreme Court Justice, to Zionism in 1913, and so on. When the Zionists eventually took this up, their thinking was, We are being beaten up by nationalism in the national states; therefore, the solution is to create our own national state and be like everyone else—which was a complete betrayal of Judaism.
So they condemned rabbinical Judaism. Masalha mentions this where he says they feminized [and thus rejected] rabbinical Judaism and looked instead for the muscular, masculinist Zionism to come along and save them. So Zionism is essentially an anti-Semitic project.
This point is well established in The Empty Wagon: Zionism’s Journey from Identity Crisis to Identity Theft by Rabbi Yaakov Shapiro, which is a fourteen-hundred-page book by a Satmar Hasidic Jew, an ultra-Orthodox Jew. This is coming from people who are the descendants of the Jewish opposition to Zionism in the first place, the rabbinical opposition. The main opposition to Israel and Zionism emanates today from inside of Judaism. And that has always been there.
Now for us as Muslims, it’s important that we resist the temptation of anti-Semitism. We have to resist being anti-Semitic and making a general condemnation of the Jews and say, The Jews are all like this, the Jews are blah, blah, blah. No, no, no!
Gaza after the Ottoman surrender to British forces, 1918
HY: You’re making such an important point. And as you know, you scratch the surface of a European and you’ll find an anti-Semite pretty quickly, but they’re anti-Muslim as well. They’re anti-Semites in the broad sense of that original term, which was used to describe the sense of superiority over the Semitic peoples, which included the Arabs. That was the original meaning of that term. And I think this is what the Nazis did—because Weimar Germany had powerful Jewish people in high positions—they collectivized this ethnic group. And suddenly the baker and the candlestick maker become part of this conspiracy.
And at a time when we’re seeing a rise in anti-Semitism again, permission for people to voice it becomes more acceptable. I concur with you that Muslims have to really resist that and recognize that we are the traditional protectors of the Jewish people, that it was the Muslims that saved them so often from the persecutions of the Europeans, whether it was in Spain or Eastern Europe, where they would come to the Ottoman Empire for refuge. I just wanted to enhance your point because I can see Muslims falling into that trap very easily.
Now I want to turn to something that Masalha brings up in the last quarter of his book: Europeans who are ethnically probably far more European than they are Middle Eastern. We tend to forget that a lot of Palestinians who are Arab were actually Jewish converts to Islam and also Christian converts who were there far longer than the small number of Arabs who initially conquered the land and actually liberated people. We know this from the wonderful book by Michael Penn, When Christians First Met Muslims, which highlights the fact that many of the non-Orthodox Christianities that existed in the area saw the Muslims as liberators and were very happy for them to come and give them the religious freedom that they had been deprived of by the Byzantine Church.
But what really strikes me is the Hebraization, the name changes—for instance, Netanyahu’s father changed his last name from Mileikowsky to Netanyahu, and the Russian-Jewish linguist Eliezer Perlman became Eliezer Ben-Yehuda. This pretty much re-created, or revived, the Hebrew language, but they are forced to look at their Arabic roots because so much knowledge was lost to them. I find it fascinating that these Eastern Europeans indigenized themselves: suddenly they’re from this place because they have these new names. But it’s just not the case. They’re Eastern Europeans, they’re Russian and Polish. And ethnically, they’re far more Russian, Polish, or German than they are Middle Eastern. I mean, they do have some Middle Eastern DNA, but it’s not a lot.
KYB: They’re mixed like everyone else. And regarding the Jewish DNA, you can find a huge argument on the internet. The upshot of it, in my opinion, is that the people are mixed—they have some Middle Eastern origin that goes back to Middle Eastern Jews, and they have some European origin that goes back to Europeans. And the Palestinians, too—they’re also a mixed people. Masalha actually makes the point that the people there are not a single ethnicity.
One has to be really cautious about these things. Zionists like to say that the Arabs came in the seventh century. Well, no, they didn’t. They were there previously. Not only that, but the people themselves who were Jews, as you observed, became Christians and eventually became Muslims in a process that took centuries.
I even think that some of the shared roots go back even further than that, where you see, for example, the ancient Judaic branch of the tribe of Judah called Caleb, which is attributed to an eponymous ancestor, Caleb, who came along with Moses and the Hebrew exodus from Egypt. This tribe was in southern Palestine, in the desert. Well, centuries later, the Banu Kalb tribe was in the same place. Kalb, Caleb, same word, same tribe. So it seems like there was actually a great deal of continuity in the population, which is shown by the evidence of the continuity of place names.
Masalha tends to say, Well, they said all these Palestinian place names had Hebrew originals. But that just shows continuity in place; it means that the people there are the descendants of the original inhabitants, because the place names didn’t change. If the ancient Canaanitic place names of Palestine persisted over a history of three thousand years or more, wouldn’t that indicate that the same people were still inhabiting those villages and those places and that they just gradually changed their religion?
I mean, where did all the Muslims in the world come from, after all? Did they all come from the Śaĥābah of the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ, from Mecca and Medina? Is that possible—that all the Muslims are descended from there and that those people spread out and displaced all the other people in many countries so that you have the humongous populations of hundreds of millions of people in Indonesia and Pakistan and Morocco and so on? Of course not. People embraced and converted to Islam, and they continue to embrace Islam just as we did.
HY: You told me many years ago that people think the Śaĥābah showed up in Egypt and Syria and Palestine, and everybody just took the shahādah and converted. But you pointed out that it was a long process, that it took about three hundred years to get to a 50 percent Muslim population in Egypt, five hundred years for Syria, and Andalusia never got to 50 percent Muslim. A lot of Muslims today are not aware of that. It’s a very gradual thing for people to abandon these premodern religions.
KYB: And there are many places in the world where Islam only became established in the last few centuries. Like Kazakhstan and Albania became majority Muslim in the eighteenth century.
HY: A lot of Palestinians were Christians, and many of the Christians had been Jewish before that—there have always been Jewish converts to Christianity and then Jewish converts to Islam. It’s also striking that a lot of the Arab Jews were actually Arabians who had converted to Judaism on the Arabian Peninsula. So these Arabs in Medina who identified as Jews were actually from Arabian tribes originally. The Jews were waiting for a prophet; the Kohanim, the priestly class, were there with their midrash, and the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ went and sat with them studying the midrash, according to Ibn Isĥāq.
I want to ask you about something else in Masalha’s book. He mentions this concept of dawlah quţriyyah, a geographical independence, which obviously is not the same as having the national anthem and the flag and all. There were these particular regions that definitely saw themselves as independent, not as nation-states—the idea of a Greater Syria, for instance, which was a nationalist invention and attempt to create an independent region. I know you have no love for a nation-state, but what do you think of this regional concept?
KYB: Well, people have some love for, and loyalty to, their place. Not everyone has this, but in general, people have a familiarity with a particular place. At the same time, at the practical level, the institutional level that Masalha is talking about, the people in the local place have their life. They have the institutions that they built, and no matter what imperial state is ruling them from far away, they are about their own place that they live in, and that’s their primary concern.
So the fact that Palestine was ruled by, say, the Roman Empire does not mean that the Palestinian people of that time lost their title to it because the Romans had conquered them and therefore they didn’t have their own state. The Zionist propaganda makes a big deal of the fact that there was never originally a state of Palestine, only inhabitants calling it Palestine—that was the basis for Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir’s infamous statement denying the existence of Palestinians. She was trying to argue, even though it was taken out of context and really made her look bad, that the Palestinians never had a state of their own in that place. But what difference does that make? That makes no difference at all about the rights of people living in a place, which ought to be seen as individual rights before they’re taken as collective rights. That is, they have their own rights to the place. And this idea of Masalha—that there are these local institutions and an ongoing local society—he’s right. It was all there, it was all legitimate, they owned the place, and that was that.
HY: That’s an excellent point you’re making. This has been such an enlightening conversation. Thank you, Dr. Blankinship.
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