The Colonialism in the Middle East You Don’t Hear About

(August 29, 2024 / Newsweek)

Since war broke out between Israel and Hamas, the anti-Israel trope of “settler-colonialism”—or foreign Jews displacing indigenous Palestinians has reemerged.

In the case of Israel, this term is no more accurate than such demonization of the Jewish state as an “apartheid” regime or saying that it is committing “genocide.” The refutation of a Jewish connection to the land of their ancestors or the denial of a permanent Jewish presence in Israel stems either from ignorance or malevolence.

The irony is that real “settler-colonialism” in the Middle East is practiced and supported by some of Israel’s most ardent critics—Iran, Turkey, and Qatar.

These countries have intentionally altered the demographics in war-torn Syria and Iraq to strengthen their geopolitical positions.

The worst offender is Iran, which has manipulated sectarian strife to form a Shia corridor from its borders to Lebanon to supply its main proxy, Hezbollah.

In Syria, Iran has settled Shia families from Iraq and Lebanon in strategic Sunni areas between Damascus and the Lebanese border. Tehran has found a partner in the Alawite Islamic sect, which dominates the Syrian regime. President Bashar Al-Assad and other members of the Alawite minority oppress the Sunni-majority that was largely behind the Arab Spring revolution in 2011. As a result, Syria has helped facilitate the export of Iran’s Twelver Shia Islam—a branch practiced by the Iranian regime—to areas under Damascus’s control. Assad has allowed Twelver foreign clerics to occupy senior religious positions and relaxed visa restrictions for Iranians and Iraqis, leading to an influx of Shiites.

A similar story has taken place in Iraq. Following the U.S. removal of Saddam Hussein, Iraq fell into religious sectarianism, allowing Iran to quickly become the patron of the much of the ruling Shia majority. Under the pretext of war against terrorism and the Islamic State, Tehran began systemically changing the demographics to solidify its corridor to Lebanon. Iranian-backed militias were at the forefront of sectarian cleansing of Sunnis in areas like Tel Afar, Mosul and Fallujah.

Iran often uses the pretext of Shia shrines to justify the presence of its militia proxies. Following battles in areas around the “Sunni Triangle” city Samara—home to the Al-Hadi and Al-Askari shrines—thousands of hectares of agricultural land owned by Sunnis was confiscated and its residents were not allowed to return to their homes. In Syria, protecting Shia shrines in the capital of Damascus and its suburbs gave Iranian proxies, including Hezbollah, an excuse to fortify its presence.

Meanwhile, Turkey, another fierce critic of Israeli settlements has been at the forefront of changing the demographics of Kurdish territories in northeast Syria. Since 1978, Turkey has been fighting a Kurdish insurgency led by the Kurdistan Workers Party or PKK. Ankara fears that Kurdish autonomy across its border with Syria could lead to an emboldened PKK within its borders.

After the Turkish military and its allied Islamist militias captured the Afrin district from Kurdish rebels in Operation Olive Branch in 2018, 300,000 Kurdish residents were driven out and their properties given to ethnic Arabs.

Sponsored by Kuwaiti and Qatari organizations, Turkey has constructed villages and settlements in an attempt to “Arabize” Kurdish lands near its border. Qatar agreed to finance 240,000 housing units for Arabs in Turkish-controlled land. According to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, Palestinian groups such as the Palestinian Soldiers of Islam have also sponsored such projects including the construction of “Ajnadin Palestine,” a residential complex in Afrin with 180 apartment units and a mosque.

Forced demographic changes are nothing new in the Middle East. During World War I, Ottoman troops massacred and expelled over a million ethnic Armenians, Assyrians and Greeks. In the 1980’s, Saddam Hussein destroyed thousands of Kurdish villages in Iraq’s Nineveh region. Some 850,000 Jews were expelled from the Arab world and Iran in the 20^th century.

But these current demographic shifts in Iraq and Syria are different. Unlike the large forced exiles of the past, the current Turkish and Iranian settlements are more of a crime of opportunity. Both Ankara and Tehran were able to take advantage of the war against the Islamic State to quietly manipulate regional demographics.

The blatant promotion of such “settler-colonialist” policy by regimes at the forefront of the anti-Israel narrative is part of the cynicism of their support for the Palestinian cause. Such support was never about achieving justice, stopping alleged ethnic cleansing, or defending human rights. Since 1948, the Palestinian cause has been made into the Arab cause, and Iran, Turkey, and Qatar are all positioning to conquer Arab hearts and minds.

The world’s obsession with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has allowed an untold amount of destruction and vast injustices in other countries in the Mideast. As all eyes look to Gaza, Turkey, Qatar, and Iran have carved out swaths of Iraq and Syria, treating the populations there as geopolitical pawns.

Joseph Epstein is the director for legislative affairs at the Endowment for Middle East Truth (EMET) and a fellow at the Yorktown Institute.

The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.