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Short answer
If the Arab conquest of the 7th century doesn’t qualify as colonialism, nothing does. In 636 CE, Muslim Arab armies from Arabia invaded and seized the Levant, including Judea/Israel—then under Byzantine rule and home to long-established Jewish and Christian communities. Over time, Arabic language and Islamic culture displaced Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, and Latin, and the descendants of the conquerors came to be seen as the indigenous people, even though their roots trace back to a military invasion from Arabia.
Unlike European empires that lasted only centuries, Arab-Muslim rule endured for 1,300 years, until Israel’s rebirth in 1948. Against all odds, after Arab imperialism, Islamic conquest, and British colonialism, the Jews—indigenous to Judea and present through Ottoman and British rule long before Arafat, born in Cairo, formalized the Palestinian identity in the 1960s—re-established their state in their ancestral homeland, only to be slandered as “colonizers” by the descendants of the real colonizers.
Long answer
In 636 CE, Muslim Arab armies from the Hijaz, today’s Saudi Arabia, invaded and conquered the Levant, including the land historically known as Judea or Israel. At the time, the land was under Byzantine rule and still home to Jewish and Christian communities whose presence stretched back centuries, Jews for millennia. After the conquest, Arabic language and Islamic culture were imposed over time, replacing the native Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, and Latin—a textbook case of colonization, and part of a wider wave in which Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq, once predominately Christian, Egypt, once Coptic, Iran, once Zoroastrian, and Afghanistan, once mainly Buddhist, were all transformed by Islamic conquest through wars, massacres, forced taxation, and cultural-religious shifts.
This was not just a political takeover but a deep cultural and demographic transformation, as native languages disappeared and non-Muslims, under Jizya taxation and social pressure, converted over generations while Arab tribes migrated in, intermarried, and established themselves as the new ruling elite—the same pattern later seen in European colonization of the Americas.
Historical evidence is overwhelming: Jewish sources, Byzantine records, and Muslim historians like al-Tabari all describe the invasion, the Dome of the Rock was built in 691 CE as a declaration of conquest over a city that had never been Arab, and ancient Hebrew, Greek, and Aramaic names were replaced or Arabized. Even “Falastin” derives not from any local tribe but from the Roman name Palaestina, the region’s name and not the name of a nation or country, revived after the conquest.Unlike European empires, which lasted only centuries, Arab-Muslim colonization endured for 1,300 years, until the rebirth of Israel in 1948. Over that time, the descendants of the conquerors came to be viewed as indigenous, even though their roots trace back to a military invasion from Arabia. Against all odds, after Arab imperialism, Islamic conquest, and British colonialism, the Jews—indigenous to Judea and present through Ottoman and British rule long before Arafat, born in Cairo, formalized the Palestinian identity in the 1960s—re-established their state in their ancestral homeland, only to be slandered as “colonizers” by the descendants of the real colonizers, whose cries of “Israel is a colonial project” are the ultimate act of historical hypocrisy.
