Canaan, Palestine, and Zionism
![Palestinians fleeing Jaffa [1948]](https://beforewewerewhite.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/Fleeing-Jaffa-1948-1030x784.jpg)
Palestinians fleeing Jaffa [1948]
It borders on the insane that the modern Jewish Zionist identity began with a group of Iron Age people telling stories of their erstwhile war and weather god Yahweh commanding a hostile takeover of land belonging to various Canaanites.
And here we are, 2,700 some-odd years later, with Jewish Zionists still believing it is their “destiny” to displace various Canaanites.
Palestinians are the direct descendants of the very Canaanites who, over centuries, over millennia, were forced to live at various times under the rulership of the Egyptian pharoahs, various short-lived Kingdoms of Israel-Judah, the Neo-Assyrian Empire, the Neo-Babylonian Empire, and the Persian Empire.
![Neo-Assyrian Empire [maximum territorial extent]](https://beforewewerewhite.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/Neo-Assyrian-Empire-maximum-territorial-extent-1030x434.jpg)
Neo-Assyrian Empire [maximum territorial extent]
The conquests of Canaan/Palestine didn’t end there.
The Canaanites/Palestinians would fall under the yoke of Alexander the Great of Macedonia, and suffer the ravages of war as various Greek successors to Alexander (and local Jewish leaders) jockeyed for control of the region.
The Roman Empire would displace the Greeks, with Pompey installing a puppet regime under the “sort-of Jewish” Antipater the Idumaean, father of the better-known Herod the Great of Biblical fame.
Canaanites/Palestinians would watch the seizure of Jerusalem by Parthian forces, and endure the outfall of revolts and wars between Parthia, Rome, and various Jewish factions.
Palestinians would see Rome’s final crushing of Jewish attempts to reinstate Jewish rule in the region in the year 74 CE.
Palestinians would witness Queen Zenobia of Syria’s short-lived conquest of Palestine in 270 CE, and its recapture by Rome two years later.
Palestinians would endure plagues, the introduction of Christianity by a Roman emperor, Samaritan revolts, new Persian incursions, and Persian defeat by Eastern Roman Byzantium.
Palestinians would watch the Byzantines defeated by Rashidun Caliphate forces at the Battle of Dathin, right beside Gaza.
From their fishing boats, and from the hills where they tended their flocks and olive orchards, Palestinians saw the later Muslim Umayyad, Abbasid, and Fatimid Arab dynasties fighting among themselves for control of the Palestinians’ “Canaanite” homeland.
Palestine would look, astonished, as Western European Crusaders arrived in a storm of steel and blood, establishing their own Crusader states, and Palestine would endure droughts and famine as they watched their land repeatedly change hands between Ayyubid Arabs and Crusaders, until a new people- the Mamluk Turks – entered the scene.
These Mamluks would remain in control for over two centuries, until Palestine’s final conquest and takeover by the Ottoman Turks in 1517.
Except for minor Egyptian incursions, the relative stability and peace in Ottoman Palestine would last almost 400 years.
*****
In the year 1700, Ottoman Palestine was home to a mixed Muslim, Christian, and Jewish population of around 232,000 – not surprising considering its complex history.
Of this number, 219,000 were Muslims, 11,000 were Christians, and only 2,000 were Jewish.
Jews thus represented less than 1% of the Palestinian population.
In the year 1800, things had changed but little.
A mixed population of around 275,000, of which 246,000 were Muslim, 22,000 were Christian, and 7,000 were Jewish.
So in 1800, Jews represented around 2.5% of the population of Palestine.
But something was afoot in Europe. The age of nationalism and ethnic ideology was taking hold, with people beginning to believe their national borders should reflect distinct ethnic groups.
Very few regions on earth are home to a single, undiluted ethnic group, though.
When we draw lines on a map hoping to enclose a bunch of “Germans” within those lines, we will in fact be including multiple distinct ethnic groups – Swabians and Bavarians and Prussians and Franconians and Saxons and Romani and Slavs, and of course, Jews.
But the exact same drive toward ethnicity-based nationalism seen in Italy, Slavic lands, and Germanic states – with “blood and soil” seen as inextricably linked – took hold of the imagination of many among the Jewish diaspora.
It has become de rigeur for many on the left to compare the current Israeli state’s actions to that of Nazi Germany – without realizing the very real and profound shared roots and genesis of an ideology driving both groups to justify their dehumanization of “the other”.
The similarity doesn’t lie only in the actions of both. It also rests in the motivations.
There is no place in Israel today where one will not notice the “Israeli” rendering of the name Vladimir Yevgenyevich Zhabotinsky (Ze’ev Jabotinsky) on street signs, buildings, and place names.
This native of Odessa – then part of the Russian Empire – was the main force behind the Zionist Revisionists who were obsessed with the establishment of a Jewish nation state on both sides of the River Jordan. Jabotinsky worked with the British Empire in furtherance of Zionist goals, and when the British became a hindrance, he was happy to work with fascists like Mussolini.
Jabotinsky would go on to found Irgun, a violent and terroristic offshoot of the Jewish paramilitary group Haganah. Zionist terrorist groups like Irgun and Lehi were responsible for some of the worst violence committed against the British in Mandatory Palestine, and they were behind many of the worst atrocities committed against Palestinians during the 1930s and 1940s.
Read that last bit carefully. Zionists were killing Palestinians in the Levant BEFORE Nazis began killing Jews in Germany.
The linkage between culture, “blood and race”, and physical territory made by Germany’s National Socialists had ugly repercussions for Jews in Europe.
And the same linkage between culture, “blood and race”, and physical territory by made by Revisonist Zionists is having ugly repercussions for Palestinians of the Levant today.
*****
Here is not the place to explain at length the birth and development of the Zionist movement in various European countries.
Instead of history, I’ll leave you with a little bit of science in the form of population genetics.
Modern Palestinian DNA shows an 80-90% match with Bronze Age DNA samples from the Levant, including Palestine.
Modern Palestinians also show small percentages of Iranian, East African, Bedouin, and Bronze Age European admixture – all explainable by the various conquest and invasion events outlined above.
Of course many Jewish people also carry these ancient Levantine genes, but…
After 2,000 years of living in Europe, and 2,000 years of greater or lesser integration into various European populations, Ashkenazi Jews – the main drivers of the Zionist movement – also show around 41% European DNA admixture.
What this means in simple terms, is that most Palestinians today – but not European Jews/Israelis – are the descendants of people who have been continuously in this region since long before any Jewish polity came into being.
And this means long, long before even the small Hebrew kingdoms of the Iron Age.
They are essentially the descendants of the Canaanites of antiquity. They have adapted over the centuries and millennia, practicing whichever religion was imposed on them by their conquerors.
The people of Palestine are not enduring the first attempt by powerful outsiders to conquer, control, or displace them.
In fact, they’re not even enduring the first Jewish attempt to conquer, control, or displace them.
I said at the beginning of this short screed that it seems insane that the Jewish identity alive today actually began over 2,500 years ago with a folk myth of their god Yahweh “promising” them a land already belonging to various Canaanites.
Even the very founder of Judaism (and by extension the founder of Christianity and Islam), was not from Palestine.
No, Abraham the Patriarch is thought to have been from either Mesopotamia (modern Iraq), or perhaps Assyria (modern Turkey).
It is hard to know from the archeological record whether the ancient Hebrews were just one small Semitic-speaking Canaanite tribe among many who happened to cobble together a couple of minor kingdoms in the Levant during the Iron Age, or if they were non-Canaanite incomers who really did conquer Canaanite territories.
What is certain is that the descendants of Israel and Judah had no more “right” to the Levant than the descendants of other peoples like the Edomites, Ammonites, Moabites, Arameans, Phoenicians, Philistines, and many others also living in “the land of Canaan”.
And the vast majority of modern Israeli Jews are the descendants of an ethno-religious diaspora which hadn’t lived on the soil of Canaan/Palestine for untold centuries, indeed, millennia.
A modern European-descended Israeli Jew is not a “child of the land of milk and honey promised to the Hebrews”, and the “right of return” to Palestine offered by the Israeli state to Jews worldwide is outrageous and ridiculous.
![Palestinians being used as human shields bt the IDF, Gaza City [2024]](https://beforewewerewhite.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/Palestinian-human-shields-Gaza-City-2024-1030x823.jpg)
Palestinians being used as human shields bt the IDF, Gaza City [2024]
An American Jew from Chicago – perhaps descended from German Jews who fled the Holocaust – now choosing to claim a “right of return” to Palestine/Israel, is playing games with history and reality itself.
An American Jew from Chicago has as much of a relationship to Roman-era Palestine as an Irish-American from Boston has to the Early Christian Gaelic kingdom of Cenél nEogain (Tyrone).
To a Palestinian, ancient Jews were just one in a long line of conquerors intent on hegemony in the ancient land of Canaan.
To a Palestinian, modern Jews or “Neo-Hebrews” are just another in a long line of conquerors intent on hegemony in the ancient land of Canaan.
Whichever polity has attempted to impose its will on “Canaan”, the Canaanites have remained.
If anyone has earned a right to dwell in Canaan/Palestine, it is the stunningly resilient Palestinians, who have stubbornly remained on their ground for 3,000 years, only leaving <part> of their homeland when pushed by Zionist bombs or at the end of a Zionist rifle barrel in 1948.
Free Palestine.
![Gaza 2025 [Beit Lahia]](https://beforewewerewhite.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/Gaza-2025-Beit-Lahia-1030x579.jpg)
Gaza 2025 [Beit Lahia]