Rich's revisionist history presented to the Royal Commission

Had Joseph Goebbels met Dr David Rich, he may well have admired Rich’s ability to selectively reconstruct history in service of nationalism, militarism, and colonial expansion. Rich is a prominent British Zionist polemicist, and it is difficult to understand why an Australian Royal Commission requires his contribution, particularly given his longstanding hostility towards sections of the political left.

In his testimony to the Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion, Rich presents a version of history that is not merely selective, but fundamentally revisionist, reshaping historical events in ways that minimise or justify the colonial dimensions of Zionism and the violence that accompanied Israel’s formation and expansion.

The first fiction is the attempt to characterise Zionism not as a colonial movement, but as an almost inevitable humanitarian response to European antisemitism. This framing seeks to create a distinction between a supposedly sympathetic or defensive nationalism, with which audiences are encouraged to empathise, and ‘colonialism’, presented as something driven solely by exploitation and conquest.

The ‘nascent nationalism’ Rich attributes to Zionism is described in remarkably soft terms: ‘building settlements for people to live in … buying land, and so on’. He concedes that there is a ‘legitimate investigation and critique to be made about colonial engagement and colonial practices in the history of the Zionist movement and in Israel post-independence in the West Bank and so on’ — though notably without ever seriously engaging in such an analysis himself.

Instead, the colonial question is acknowledged only briefly before being displaced by a straw man argument about anti-colonialism supposedly justifying violence against Jews. The effect is to avoid meaningful historical comparison between Zionism and other settler-colonial movements that are now widely condemned, particularly where those comparisons might complicate the moral narrative he seeks to construct.

So, what is colonialism? The easy answer is to look to European great powers that invaded countries, imposed their culture and governance, and exploited resources. However, in many cases, colonialism does not involve such clear intentions, actions, trajectories or outcomes.

A case in point is South Africa. From roughly 1488 until 1652, Portuguese navigators rounded the Cape of Good Hope but established no permanent settlement there. Their interest lay in the Asian trade routes, not in acquiring African territory. The Cape functioned primarily as a convenient stopping point for fresh water and provisions. Interactions with local populations were relatively limited, involving trade, occasional conflict, and little long-term political engagement.

In 1652, Jan van Riebeeck and around ninety Calvinist settlers established a permanent VOC victualling station at Table Bay. The stated purpose was to resupply ships travelling between Europe and Asia, rather than to conquer territory. The VOC constructed a fort and later began granting freehold farms to released employees along the Liesbeeck Valley.

It is easy to interpret this as the deliberate expansion of Dutch colonial power. However, although freeholders were farming beyond the immediate area controlled by the VOC fort, records suggest that the colony did not formally ‘purchase’ land until 1671.

The engagement with local populations may have remained relatively unremarkable were it not for significant cultural differences between the Khoikhoi and the new arrivals. Local communities required access to the river systems and did not recognise the fixed property boundaries established by the farmers, particularly where those boundaries restricted access to water.

For the settlers, farming was primarily a commercial enterprise, driven by the profits to be made from supplying passing ships. What began as localised skirmishes over land, water access, and livestock gradually escalated into the Khoikhoi–Dutch Wars.

Khoikhoi leaders protested the European fencing of pastures and water sources. In 1671, the VOC ‘purchased’ land beyond the original Table Bay fort from Khoikhoi leaders. Contemporary records framed the agreement as the purchase of territory for European settlement and defence. Payment was typically made not in money, but in trade goods such as copper, beads, tobacco, and brandy, with alcohol often playing a significant role in negotiations.

However, the Khoikhoi were negotiating with a militarily stronger VOC that had already occupied portions of their grazing land. As a result, they were in a far weaker position to bargain over territory. For the Khoikhoi, the concept of ‘sale’ likely resembled the granting of grazing or temporary usage rights, consistent with customary systems in which land was not treated as alienable property in the European sense. For the VOC, by contrast, the agreement represented permanent and exclusive ownership under Roman-Dutch law.

Under a more orthodox understanding of colonisation, these territorial disputes were less concerned with reshaping local culture than with securing access to land and resources. The conflict was not primarily framed in terms of converting the ‘ungodly’ or civilising the native population, but rather in removing what settlers perceived as an obstacle to expansion. Nevertheless, the subsequent destruction of Khoi and San societies was no less real. It suggests that colonial outcomes are not always determined by explicit colonial ideology or intent alone, but can also emerge from economic pressures, incompatible land systems, and asymmetries of power.

Of course, the trajectory of colonisation in South Africa is historically well documented. In 1813, indigenous land tenure was formally extinguished in parts of the colony. In 1913, the Natives Land Act of 1913 restricted Black land ownership to around 7% of the country through designated ‘reserves’, establishing the spatial foundations later embedded within apartheid.

Between 1948 and 1960, apartheid was formally institutionalised. Forced removals intensified and the system of ‘homelands’ expanded. Resistance grew in parallel, including the Defiance Campaign in 1952 and the Sharpeville massacre in 1960, in which 69 people were killed. International opposition also strengthened during this period, with the United Nations establishing inquiries into South Africa’s racial policies and the IOC excluding South Africa from the Olympic Games.

At its height, apartheid produced both its most extreme policies and its strongest resistance. In 1970, the Bantu Homelands Citizenship Act stripped Black South Africans of South African citizenship by assigning them citizenship in nominal ‘homelands’. Approximately 87% of land was designated for white ownership and control. The Soweto uprising in 1976 marked a major student revolt against apartheid education policies, while the death of Steve Biko in police custody in 1977 became an international symbol of state repression. Across the decade, the United Nations increasingly characterised apartheid as a ‘crime against humanity’ and imposed a mandatory arms embargo against the regime.

By the late 1980s, the collapse of apartheid had become increasingly difficult to avoid. Militarisation consumed roughly 28% of the national budget by 1987, while a prolonged state of emergency existed between 1985 and 1990. Township uprisings spread throughout the mid-1980s, coinciding with growing international divestment campaigns and sanctions, including the passage of the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act in the United States. In 1990, Nelson Mandela was released from prison, and in 1992 a whites-only referendum endorsed negotiations to dismantle apartheid.

Thus, the arc of colonisation in South Africa followed a trajectory from settlement and coexistence, to migration, territorial seizure, legal codification, racial segregation, total separation, resistance, global isolation, and finally constitutional reform.

In terms of a broader global understanding of how colonisation can evolve from relatively limited settlement into systemic atrocity, South Africa — along with many other colonial projects — demonstrates how processes initially framed as coexistence or pragmatic settlement can gradually develop into dispossession, institutionalised oppression, and, in some cases, genocidal outcomes.

This makes Rich’s plea for special consideration of Israel as merely a human response to oppression and pogroms, rather than as a form of colonisation, deeply mistaken. The parallels with South Africa are compelling — and ironically, Israel itself maintained significant ties with the apartheid regime, including military cooperation.

The Boer descendants of the twentieth century were no less convinced that God had bestowed upon them ‘unoccupied’ land than many Zionists were in relation to Palestine. In both cases, settlers understood themselves not primarily as conquerors, but as historically justified occupants returning to, cultivating, or securing land they believed they had a legitimate claim to. Yet the broader processes of colonisation — territorial expansion, legal restructuring, dispossession, segregation, and resistance — followed strikingly similar patterns.

There is much else in Rich’s testimony that could be criticised. For example:

the irony of failing to recognise that the Hebrew Bible itself contains narratives in which the Israelites celebrate Yahweh’s command to dispossess or destroy the Canaanites;

the historical reality that, prior to the Holocaust, millions of Jews were not making aliyah, but were instead living, integrating, and often thriving within European societies, to the extent that Yiddish — itself rooted largely in medieval German dialects — became the lingua franca of many Jewish communities;

the claim that Israel possessed some universally recognised or self-evident status as the natural homeland of world Jewry, despite political Zionism being a relatively recent movement and one that many Jews historically rejected, ignored, or regarded with ambivalence;

the framing of resistance to Israel primarily as hostility towards Jews, rather than as opposition to a state perceived by many Palestinians and their supporters as an occupying power;

the portrayal of critics of Israel as indifferent to oppression or refugees, when many such critics explicitly ground their arguments in anti-colonialism, human rights, and solidarity with displaced populations;

the caricaturing of anti-colonial critiques as a simplistic theory in which ‘colonisers can never have rights’, when many critics instead argue that historical settlement does not erase the rights of displaced or subordinated populations;

and the construction of a straw man in which critics supposedly believe that all Israelis are legitimate targets of violence, despite many critiques being directed instead at state policies, military occupation, settlement expansion, and the absence of a negotiated resolution regarding Palestinian dispossession and sovereignty. ”

This is Rich’s conclusion:

[What] pervades this anti-colonial narrative about Israel, including, you know, tenured professors in American universities and all the rest of it, saying, well, what do they expect [of Oct 7, 2023]? They're colonisers. This is what happens to colonisers. Now they'll finally realise, ... families and kibbutzim in southern Israel. So, it's a narrative that prohibits compromise. It mitigates against the idea of working for peace between Israelis and Palestinians, and it justifies the use of violence against Israeli civilians within Israel itself. And then the ripple effect from that is, because colonialism and settler colonialism are seen as manifestations of European racism and white supremacy, therefore, in this thinking, anyone who supports Israel in the West, anyone who's a Zionist, is therefore a coloniser, is therefore a racist, therefore can be excluded, can be attacked, can be demonised, and so on. And that's what we see happening to a lot of Jewish people now.

Of course, this argument only functions by stripping away all historical and political context. Missing from Rich’s framing are the Nakba, the occupation of the West Bank; the expansion of settlements widely regarded internationally as illegal; the displacement of Palestinians since 1948; the blockade of Gaza; repeated cycles of military violence; the unequal distribution of political and civil rights between Israelis and Palestinians in the occupied territories; and the long-standing failure to negotiate a durable political settlement.

Once this context is removed, it becomes possible to construct a narrative in which Zionism appears solely as the embattled expression of a historically persecuted people confronting an irrational and uniquely dangerous ideology. In doing so, Rich collapses distinctions between criticism of Israel, opposition to Zionism, anti-colonial analysis, antisemitism, and violence against Jews. The result is a rhetorical framework in which political critique is recast as racial hatred, and in which the experiences of Jewish people globally are presented as inseparable from the political and military actions of the Israeli state.