From Refuge to Ruin: How Zionism Betrayed Its Palestinian Guardians

The oppressor in the Palestine–Israel story is not the native Palestinians, but the Zionist movement that turned the compassion of its former hosts into a colonial conquest.

History bears witness to ironies that shake the moral foundations of humanity. Few, however, are as profound as the story of the Jewish people who, having endured centuries of persecution in Europe, found refuge and dignity in the Muslim world — only for a section among them, under the banner of Zionism, to turn their guns against the very people who had once sheltered them. What we witness today in Gaza and the occupied territories is not a conflict between equals, nor a religious war, but a colonial conquest — one in which the oppressor is unmistakably the Zionist project that has, in less than a century, through genocide, pushed Palestine to the brink of annihilation.

For centuries, Jews faced unspeakable atrocities across Europe — expulsions, forced conversions, and systematic massacres. The Holocaust, in which Nazi Germany murdered six million Jews, was the horrific culmination of Europe’s own anti-Semitic legacy. Yet, when Europe turned its back on them, it was not Christian Europe but the Muslim world that offered safety, compassion, and coexistence.

Golden Age of Jewish Culture

When England expelled its Jews in 1290, France in 1306, and Spain in 1492, many of those exiled found shelter under Muslim rule. In Al-Andalus, Muslim-ruled Spain from the 8th to 15th centuries, Jewish scholars, physicians, and poets thrived alongside Muslims and Christians in what historians call the “Golden Age of Jewish culture.” When the Catholic monarchs of Spain banished the Jews in 1492, the Ottoman Sultan Bayezid II welcomed them to settle in Istanbul and Salonica, granting them land, livelihood, and liberty. He even mocked the European rulers for “impoverishing their kingdoms” by exiling such talented people.

This history of coexistence and protection exposes the moral hypocrisy of the Zionist narrative that now paints Muslims as eternal enemies of Jews. The truth is that Jews were safer in Muslim lands than in Christian Europe for most of recorded history. The tragedy unfolding in Palestine is not rooted in religious animosity but in colonial ambition. Zionism — not Judaism — transformed a people’s search for safety into a project of domination.

The British Betrayal and the Seeds of Zionism

When Britain issued the Balfour Declaration in 1917, promising a “national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine, it did so without consulting the indigenous Arab population, who made up over 90 percent of the inhabitants. Under the British Mandate (1917–1948), waves of Jewish immigrants, driven by Zionist ideology and European guilt, poured into Palestine. Britain’s dual-faced policy — promising independence to Arabs while backing the Zionist cause — sowed the seeds of one of the world’s longest-running injustices.

By 1948, when Britain withdrew, Zionist militias seized the moment to declare the State of Israel. What followed was the Nakba — the catastrophe — in which more than 750,000 Palestinians were driven from their homes, over 400 villages razed, and countless civilians killed. The Zionist paramilitary groups Haganah, Irgun, and Lehi carried out coordinated campaigns of terror and ethnic cleansing, later celebrated in Israel’s national lore as battles for independence. The victims were labelled “refugees,” their dispossession reframed as a triumph of survival.

In truth, the Jewish refugees who had once been sheltered by Arabs became, through Zionism, instruments of another people’s dispossession. The Palestinians — who opened their land and hearts to the persecuted — were repaid with occupation and erasure.

Machinery of Occupation

Since 1948, Israel has perfected the machinery of control and impunity. It has pursued political assassinations across continents — from Lebanon to Iran — under the pretext of security. It has invoked the infamous “Hannibal Directive,” which authorizes the killing of its own captured soldiers along with any civilians nearby to prevent hostage-taking. This doctrine was brutally applied in Rafah in 2014, where hundreds of Palestinians were killed in indiscriminate bombardments, acts that human rights investigators have described as possible war crimes.

Israel’s expansionism did not end with the establishment of its state. After capturing the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem in 1967, it began a relentless settlement drive — in open defiance of the Fourth Geneva Convention. Today, over 700,000 Israeli settlers occupy land internationally recognized as Palestinian. Their hilltop colonies, guarded by the Israeli military, slice the West Bank into isolated fragments, ensuring that any “two-state solution” remains an illusion.

The United Nations Security Council Resolution 2334 of 2016 declared these settlements to have “no legal validity” and to constitute a “flagrant violation of international law.” Yet Israel continues to build, demolish, and expand — shielded by the diplomatic and military umbrella of powerful allies. Over seventy UN Security Council resolutions and hundreds of General Assembly resolutions condemning Israel’s actions have been rendered toothless by vetoes and political expediency.

World’s Complicity in Apartheid

The world’s silence, particularly the silence of Western powers, remains the most damning evidence of complicity. The same Europe that once hunted Jews to extinction now arms and excuses the Zionist state that hunts Palestinians in their own homeland. In Gaza, Israel has bombed hospitals, schools, and refugee camps — acts repeatedly documented by the United Nations, Amnesty International, and Human Rights Watch. Thousands of children have been killed, not by stray bullets but by calculated strikes on civilian neighbourhoods. Gaza’s blockade — restricting food, fuel, medicine, and electricity — is a slow-motion genocide carried out under the cover of “security.”

What makes the present tragedy unbearable is the inversion of moral history. The descendants of a people who once knew the agony of ghettos, the horror of exile, and the pain of statelessness are today inflicting the same suffering upon another people. The very guardians who gave them refuge in their darkest hour — the Arabs and Muslims — are now branded as their enemies.

To call this a conflict is to distort the truth. Conflicts imply parity. Palestine has no army, no navy, no air force. It has only its memory, its resilience, and its right to exist. Zionism, on the other hand, wields nuclear weapons, Western support, and a narrative of eternal victimhood that has long outlived its moral claim.

This is not a struggle between two faiths but between colonizer and colonized; between an expansionist ideology and an indigenous people fighting for survival. Zionism hijacked the Jewish tragedy and repurposed it as a license to dispossess another nation.

The Moral Reckoning

To understand the Palestinian struggle is to remember the continuum of injustice: Europe’s persecution of Jews, Britain’s colonial duplicity, and the Zionist betrayal of a sanctuary once freely given. The moral arc of this story bends not toward redemption but toward repetition — where yesterday’s victims have become today’s oppressors.

If peace is ever to return to the Holy Land, it must begin with truth. And the truth is simple: the oppressor in this story is not the Palestinian refugee clinging to a torn flag but the Zionist state that has turned history’s compassion into conquest. Justice demands not revenge but recognition — that no people, however wronged in the past, can claim redemption through the subjugation of another.

Until that truth is spoken without fear or apology, the world will continue to witness the slow erasure of Palestine — not as a tragedy of religion, but as the betrayal of humanity itself.

Asif Hussain is a Member of Goa Study Group and Chairman of Centre for the study of Philosophy and Humanities ,Miramar -Goa