Growing up in the U.S., whenever the Middle East (more appropriately called Southwest Asia) came up in school, the story was always the same: two peoples from starkly different religions and cultures, fighting over the same desert land—which they had done since the beginning of time.

Of course, we were taught that we should be on Israel’s side—people who were almost exactly like us, who shared our cultural heritage and our love of knowledge and democracy. We could never side with darker-skinned “terrorists” who spoke in a weird language and worshiped a perverse version of our own God.

As I grew older and worked in corporate media newsrooms, it quickly became clear that this was the “objective” view—and that any questioning of it would mean the end of a promising career up the broadcast journalism ladder.

This understanding became so entrenched that any questioning of it was viewed as antisemitic, un-American, and potential career suicide.

But here’s what that narrative deliberately ignores: the actual history of how Israel came to be. And more importantly, what understanding that history means for how this conflict could actually end.

On March 1, 1899, Yusuf Diya, the Arab mayor of Jerusalem, wrote a desperate letter to Theodor Herzl, a Jewish man from Hungary leading a campaign to resettle Europe’s Jews in Palestine—a place Herzl had never visited when he launched his movement.

In the now-famous letter (at least outside the United States), Diya begged Herzl to stop. The land he was promoting was already occupied—by Palestinians. He concluded with a plea: “in the name of God, let Palestine be left alone.”

Palestine wasn’t empty. In 1880, roughly a decade before Herzl’s movement began, the Jewish population was approximately 20,000-25,000 out of a total population of around 470,000—about 5%. Most were native Jewish communities who had lived there for centuries, peacefully alongside their Arab neighbors.

Contrary to what I was taught in my high school world history class (by a man who would later be promoted to gym teacher), Jewish people and Arabs had coexisted peacefully there for centuries—until European Jewish people arrived en masse.

Herzl didn’t stop. Palestine saw waves of European Jewish immigrants—waves that grew after the Ottoman Empire collapsed following World War I and Britain took over administratively. The waves became a tsunami after the horrors of the Holocaust.

This was partly because antisemitic Christians in Europe wanted Jewish people gone. They’d always been a thorn in the Church’s side, and some of Zionism’s original proponents were Christians themselves.

By the time Israel was founded in 1948, some 80% of its Jewish population was from Europe—not Southwest Asia.

This wasn’t an ancient people returning to their ancestral land. It was a European nationalist movement transplanting a population onto land where other people already lived—following the same blueprint as every other colonial project of the era, just decades late.

What Herzl was proposing wasn’t new or unique. It was the exact playbook Europe had been running for centuries.

Throughout the 1800s, European powers were seized by nationalist fervor—the idea that every people deserved their own state, defined by shared ethnicity, language, and culture. This nationalism became the justification for white, colonial expansion across Africa, Asia, and the Americas.

The formula was always the same: identify a territory, declare it underdeveloped or underutilized, send your people there to “civilize” it, establish European-style institutions and governance, and displace or subordinate whoever was already living there.

The British did it to Egypt, India, and South Africa. The French did it to Algeria. The Spanish did it to the Philippines. The Italians did it to Libya. And we Americans did it to the West—declaring the indigenous population savages and slaughtering anyone who stood in the way of our Manifest Destiny.

This toxic ideology of nationalist expansion lasted well into the 20th century. The Nazis’ plan for Lebensraum—conquering Eastern Europe for German “living space”—was the same colonial logic taken to its most genocidal extreme.

Herzl was infected with this exact ideology. He saw the “Jewish Question”—the persecution of Jews in Europe—and proposed a European nationalist solution: create a Jewish ethno-state somewhere else. He initially considered Argentina and Uganda before settling on Palestine.

In his writings, Herzl explicitly framed the project in colonial terms. He promised European powers that a Jewish state would serve as “a rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism.”

He wasn’t hiding what this was. He was selling it as colonialism—because in 1896, that’s what “progress” looked like to European minds.

The tragic irony is that European Jews, fleeing persecution and genocide, became the instruments of a European colonial project against another people.

The Zionist movement took the nationalism that had been weaponized against Jews in Europe and turned it into a state-building project in Palestine—using the same logic, the same methods, and the same disregard for indigenous populations that characterized every other European colonial venture.

By 1948, when most of the world was beginning to dismantle colonial empires, Israel was just getting started. It became the last successful implementation of 19th-century European settler-colonialism, established in the mid-20th century when everyone else was supposedly moving on.

How did it survive when all the others were collapsing?

This is thanks largely to our own United States, who during the Cold War saw Israel as an unsinkable aircraft carrier—a bulwark against Soviet aggression in an area that contained the vast majority of the world’s accessible oil reserves. In a sense, Israel became America’s colony.

The story also gets more complicated after 1948. Hundreds of thousands of Jews from Arab countries—Mizrahi Jews—fled or were expelled to Israel.

Arab governments, enraged by European Jews’ land grab and the displacement of Palestinians, turned on their own Jewish populations—often violently. Though in some cases, Zionist operatives deliberately provoked that violence to accelerate Jewish emigration to Israel.

Today, roughly half of Israeli Jews trace their ancestry to Southwest Asia or North Africa rather than Europe. And 75-80% of all Israeli Jews were born in Israel—meaning they’re now second, third, or fourth generation with nowhere else to “return to.”

This is what makes Israel different from most historical colonial projects. The colonizers don’t have a metropole anymore. There’s no Britain or France to retreat to. For three generations now, Israeli Jews have been born there. They see it as home—the only home they’ve ever known.

But that’s also what makes it the same as America and Australia: settler-colonial projects where the colonizers put down permanent roots. And in those cases, the result was nearly always genocidal—the indigenous population had to be eliminated through expulsion, containment, or death, because the settlers weren’t leaving.

It’s how the United States treated indigenous Native Americans, and it’s what Israel has done to Palestinians. It’s what we’re seeing now in Gaza and the West Bank.

But it doesn’t have to be this way.

What the intelligentsia at the New York Times and on CNN don’t want you to know is that these two peoples can coexist—and could theoretically share the same country.

In almost every case where a minority government has maintained apartheid or oppression, the stated reason for refusing to end it is fear of violent revenge.

This was an argument for maintaining slavery in the American South—that freed Black people would slaughter their former masters. It was the argument in Northern Ireland—that Catholics would massacre Protestants. It was the argument in South Africa—that the end of white rule would mean white genocide.

But when the oppressed were finally freed or given equal rights, the predicted genocidal revenge never came.

After apartheid ended in South Africa in 1994, there was no white genocide. After the Good Friday Agreement brought power-sharing to Northern Ireland in 1998, there were no Protestant massacres. And after slavery ended in America, the genocidal violence that followed was perpetrated by whites against newly freed Black people—not the other way around.

The fear was always a lie—a cudgel used to maintain oppression. Not because the oppressed didn’t have reason to be angry, but because liberation doesn’t require revenge.

The same is true in Israel-Palestine. The path forward exists: equal rights, equal citizenship, equal protection under law. One state or two, it doesn’t matter—what matters is ending the system where one group has all the power and the other has none.

It’s been done before. It can be done again.

So no, this isn’t ancient history or religious destiny or two peoples cursed to fight forever. It’s colonialism—plain and simple.

The same ideology that built empires across Africa, Asia, and the Americas came to Palestine just a few decades too late, long after the rest of the world had decided this kind of thing was supposed to be over.

And the reason you weren’t taught this in school, the reason it’s still not talked about openly in American corporate media, is because acknowledging what Israel actually is would require confronting what America has spent seventy years supporting, funding, and protecting.

Because once you understand what this conflict actually is, the moral question of what must be done becomes unavoidably clear.