Israel’s Creation: The Ultimate ‘Decolonisation’ Project
7th May 2026
The claim that Jews are imperialist “colonisers” isn’t new. It emerged from the Victorian-era antisemitism of an influential English journalist and matured in the early Soviet Union, long before the modern state of Israel was founded. As Paul Johnson (1928–2023), the great historian, observed:
The Soviet campaign against the Jews, after 1967 a permanent feature of the system, was itself conducted under the code-name of anti-Zionism, which became a cover for every variety of anti-Semitism. [The] Leninist theory of imperialism, like Marx’s theory of capitalism, had its roots in anti-Semitic conspiracy theory.
As Johnson showed, the claim that Jews are “imperialists” predated Vladimir Lenin, leader of Soviet Russia from 1917 until his death in 1924. Johnson traces the source of this claim to the English writer and journalist J.A. Hobson, who travelled to South Africa to cover the Boer War in 1899. Hobson, as Johnson relates, regarded Jews as “almost devoid of social morality,” and possessing “a superior calculating intellect” that allows them “to take advantage of every weakness, folly and vice of the society in which he lives.”