Zionist pamphleteers used the Semitic kinship claim to justify colonization

Evidence

Towards the end of 1918, a Zionist pamphlet published in Jaffa deployed the Semitic argument as part of a case for Zionist colonisation, which also cited the backwardness and stagnation of the Arab population. The author, Elie Eberlin, a lawyer from Paris, argued that the Jews and Arabs were ‘sister nations’ who were ‘two vigorous branches of the big Semitic tree, the shade of which had covered the ancient world’. — James Renton, Ben Gidley (eds.), Antisemitism and Islamophobia in Europe, 694

Categorization

• DEFINE: Shows the ‘political Semite’ as an ideological instrument: a claim of racial kinship deployed for colonial legitimation.