Zionism as settler colonialism
has been described by some scholars as a form of settler colonialism in relation to the region of Palestine and the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. Zionism's founders and early leaders were aware and outspoken about their status as colonizers; early leading Zionists such as Theodor Herzl, Max Nordau, and Ze'ev Jabotinsky described Zionism as colonization. The specific paradigm of settler colonialism was later applied to Zionism by various scholars and figures.
The settler colonial framework on the conflict emerged in the 1960s during the decolonization of Africa and the Middle East, and re-emerged in Israeli academia in the 1990s led by Israeli and Palestinian scholars, particularly the New Historians, who refuted some of Israel's foundational myths and considered the Nakba to be ongoing. This perspective contends that Zionism involves processes of elimination and assimilation of Palestinians, akin to other settler colonial contexts similar to the creation of the Native American genocide in [the United States|United States] and Australia.
Critics of the characterization of Zionism as settler colonialism argue that it does not fit traditional colonial frameworks, seeing Zionism instead as the repatriation of an indigenous population and an act of self-determination. This debate reflects broader tensions over competing historical and political narratives regarding the founding and legitimacy of the State of Israel as well as the broader the Israeli–Palestinian conflict.
Concepts
In Patrick Wolfe's model, settler colonialism differs from classical colonialism in that it focuses on eliminating or removing, rather than exploiting, the original inhabitants of a territory. As theorized by Wolfe, settler colonialism is an ongoing "structure, not an event" aimed at replacing a native population. Settler colonialism operates by processes including physical elimination of native inhabitants but also can encompass projects of assimilation, segregation, miscegenation, religious conversion, and incarceration.Ancient Israel has also been analyzed as a case of settler colonialism.
Background
Many of the fathers of Zionism themselves described it as colonisation, such as Vladimir Jabotinsky who said "Zionism is a colonization adventure". Theodore Herzl, in a 1902 letter to Cecil Rhodes, described the Zionist project as "something colonial". Previously in 1896 he had spoken of "important experiments in colonization" happening in Palestine. In 1905 Max Nordau said, "Zionism rejects on principle all colonization on a small scale, and the idea of 'sneaking' into Palestine", and that instead it advocates "that the existing and promising beginnings of a Jewish colonization shall be looked after and maintained till the movement will be possible on a large scale".Major Zionist organizations central to Israel's foundation held colonial identity in their names or departments, such as the Jewish Colonisation Association, the Palestine Jewish Colonisation Association, the Jewish Colonial Trust, and The Jewish Agency's colonization department. On the Colonial bank, Herzl, in a letter to Nordau, wrote that "The Jewish Colonial Bank must actually become the Jewish National Bank. Its colonial aspect is only window-dressing, hokum, a firm-name. A national financial instrument is to be created."
In 1905, some Jewish immigrants to the region promoted the idea of Hebrew labor, arguing that all Jewish-owned businesses should only employ Jews, to displace Arab workforce hired by the First Aliyah. Zionist organizations acquired land under the restriction that it could never pass into non-Jewish ownership. Later on, kibbutzim—collectivist, all-Jewish agricultural settlements—were developed to counter plantation economies relying on Jewish owners and Palestinian farmers. The kibbutz was also the prototype of Jewish-only settlements later established beyond Israel's pre-1967 borders.
File:West Bank Access Restrictions June 2020.pdf|thumb|200px|Map of Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank in 2020
Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann wrote in his autobiography that at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference he had spoken to US Secretary of State Robert Lansing of "the hope that by Jewish immigration, Palestine would ultimately become as Jewish as England is English" and described how he had taken as his example "the outstanding success which the French had at that time made of Tunisia." "What the French could do in Tunisia," Weizmann said, "the Jews would be able to do in Palestine". Anthropologist Scott Atran wrote of this comparison between Zionism and French colonialism in Tunisia that "whereas direct French colonial rule sought to utilize, rather than displace, the fellah's labor, Zionist colonization had no use for Arab labor, at least in principle".
In 1948, 750,000 Palestinians fled or were forcibly displaced from the area that became Israel, and 500 Palestinian villages, as well as Palestinian-inhabited urban areas, were destroyed. Although considered by some Israelis to be a "brutal twist of fate, unexpected, undesired, unconsidered by the early pioneers", some historians have described the Nakba as a campaign of ethnic cleansing. In the aftermath of the Nakba, Palestinian land was expropriated on a large scale and Palestinian citizens of Israel were encircled in specific areas.
In a 1956 speech, Israeli Chief of Staff Moshe Dayan stated in regards to Palestinian political violence: "Who are we that we should argue against their hatred? For eight years now, they sit in their refugee camps in Gaza and, before their very eyes we turn into our homestead the land and the villages in which they and their forefathers have lived. We are a generation of settlers, and without the steel helmet and the cannon we cannot plant a tree and build a home."
Arnon Degani argues that ending military rule over Israel's Palestinian citizens in 1966 shifted from colonial to settler-colonial governance. After the Israeli capture of the Golan Heights in 1967, there was a nearly complete ethnic cleansing of the area, leaving only 6,404 Syrians out of about 128,000 who had lived there before the war. They had been forced out by campaigns of intimidation and forced removal, and those who tried to return were deported. After the Israeli capture of the West Bank, about 250,000 of 850,000 inhabitants fled or were expelled.
Scholarly development
The settler colonial framework on the Palestinian struggle emerged in the 1960s during the decolonization of Africa and the Middle East, and re-emerged in Israeli academia in the 1990s led by Israeli and Palestinian scholars, particularly the New Historians, who refuted some of Israel's foundational myths and considered the Nakba to be ongoing. This coincided with a shift from supporting a two-state solution to a one-state solution that constitutes a state for all citizens equally, which challenges the Jewish identity of Israel.1960s
One early analysis was that of Palestinian writer Fayez Sayegh in his 1965 essay "Zionist Colonialism in Palestine", which was unusual for the pre-1967 era in specifying Zionism as a form of settler colonialism. Sayegh later drafted the UN's "Zionism is racism" resolution. After Israel assumed control of the whole Mandatory Palestine in 1967, settler-colonial analyses became prominent among Palestinians. Sayegh argues that Zionists originally formed a "settler-community" during the first fifteen years of Zionist colonization before fulfilling what had been their aspiration from the outset: to form a "settler-state". For Sayegh, the "special character" of "Zionist colonization" distinguishing it from European colonization was three-fold: the latter was driven "either by economic or by politico-imperialist motives: they had gone either in order to accumulate fortunes by means of privileged and protected exploitation of immense natural resources, or in order to prepare the ground for the annexation of those coveted territories by imperial European governments", whereas Zionism was animated by the desire to attain nationhood; other European settlers could co-exist with natives, but Zionism was incompatible with the continued existence of a native population; other settlers were protected by their imperial metropole, while Zionism was at the mercy not only of local opposition but also Ottoman opposition. This third element, he argued, led the Zionists into alliance with British imperialism.In 1967, the French historian Maxime Rodinson published Israel: A Colonial Settler-State?. In it, he describes Europe as a whole as the metropole of Israeli settler colonialism. Rodinson had probably read Sayegh's work as his 1965 booklet had been translated into English and French.
1980–2000
The "colonization perspective" emerged in the scholarship on Israeli history in the 1980s. This was associated with the New Historians movement in Israel, which focused on Israeli-Palestinian relations rather than only Jewish history and was willing to examine Zionist settlement's colonial character. Alongside explicitly settler colonial analysis, other scholars of the 1980s and 1990s, such as Abdo and Yuval-Davis, argued that the "Zionist national project has been predicated on the destruction of the Palestinian one".Muslim philosopher and scholar of religion Isma'il Raji al-Faruqi characterized Zionism as a project that sought "to empty Palestine of its native inhabitants and to occupy their lands, farms, homes, and all movable properties," describing it as involving "robbery by force of arms" and "slaughter of men, women, and children." He viewed these actions as expressions of what he considered the movement's colonial nature.
2000s
According to Israeli sociologist Uri Ram, the characterization of Zionism as colonial "is probably as old as the Zionist movement". John Collins states that studies have "definitively established" that "the architects of Zionism were conscious and often unapologetic about their status as colonizers whose right to the land superseded that of Palestine's Arab inhabitants". Other settler colonial projects did not lay out their plans for dispossessing and eliminating the inhabitants in detail and in advance.According to Patrick Wolfe, Israel's settler colonialism manifests in immigration policies that promote unlimited immigration of Jews while denying family reunification for Palestinian citizens. Wolfe adds, "Despite Zionism's chronic addiction to territorial expansion, Israel's borders do not preclude the option of removal ."
Hussein Ibish argues that such zero-sum calls are "a gift that no occupying power and no colonizing settler movement deserves."
The peer-reviewed journal Settler Colonial Societies has published three special issues focused on Israel/Palestine. Its editor Lorenzo Veracini, who describes Israel as a colonial state, states that Jewish settlers could only expel the British in 1948 because they had their own colonial relationships inside and outside Israel's new borders. He suggests, however, that the possibility of an Israeli disengagement is always latent and that this colonial relationship could be severed if a one-state solution is reached which includes the "accommodation of a Palestinian Israeli autonomy within the institutions of the Israeli state".
Scholar Amal Jamal, of Tel Aviv University, has described Israel as the result of "a settler-colonial movement of Jewish immigrants", stating that Israel has continued to strengthen "exclusive Jewish control" of the land and its resources, while diminishing Palestinian rights and denying Palestinian self-determination.According to Israeli academics Neve Gordon and Moriel Ram, the incompleteness versus completeness of ethnic cleansing in the territory occupied by Israel has affected the different forms that Israeli settler colonialism has taken in the West Bank versus the Golan Heights. For example, the few remaining Syrian Druze were offered Israeli citizenship in order to further the annexation of the area, while there was never an intention to incorporate West Bank Palestinians into the Israeli demos. Another example is the dual legal structure in the West Bank compared to the unitary Israeli law imposed in the Golan Heights.
2010s–2020s
Salamanca et al. state that Israeli practices have often been studied as distinct but related phenomena, and that the settler-colonial paradigm is an opportunity to understand them together. As examples of settler colonial phenomena they include "aerial and maritime bombardment, massacre and invasion, home demolitions, land theft, identity card confiscation, racist laws and loyalty tests, the wall, the siege on Gaza, cultural appropriation, dependence on willing native collaboration regarding security arrangements".Anthropologist Anne de Jong says that early Zionists promoted a narrative of binary conflict between two competing groups with equally valid claims in order to deflect criticisms of settler colonialism. In 2013, historian Lorenzo Veracini argued that settler colonialism has been successful in Israel proper but unsuccessful in the territories occupied in 1967. Historian Rashid Khalidi argues that all other settler-colonial wars in the twentieth century ended in defeat for colonists, making Palestine an exception: "Israel has been extremely successful in forcibly establishing itself as a colonial reality in a post-colonial age".
Although settler colonialism is an empirical framework, it is associated with favoring a one-state solution. Sociologist Rachel Busbridge argues that settler colonialism is "a coherent and legible frame" and "a far more accurate portrayal of the conflict than the picture of Palestinian criminality and Israeli victimhood that has conventionally been painted". She also argues that settler colonial analysis is limited, especially when it comes to the question of decolonization.
Historian Nur Masalha says, "The Palestinians share common experiences with other indigenous peoples who have had their narrative denied, their material culture destroyed and their histories erased or reinvented by European white settlers and colonisers." This paradigm has gained significant traction among left-leaning activists at universities. Palestinian-American historian Rashid Khalidi states that settler-colonial projects are usually "extensions of the people and of the sovereignty of the mother country", whereas Zionism is an independent "national movement" whose means were nevertheless "explicitly settler-colonial".
Elia Zureik's Israel's Colonial Project in Palestine: Brutal Pursuit, updates his earlier work on colonialism and Palestine and applies Michel Foucault's work on biopolitics to colonialism, arguing that racism plays a central role and that surveillance becomes a tool of governance. It also analyses the dispossession of indigenous people and population transfer, including sociological, historical and postcolonial studies into an examination of the Zionist project in Palestine. Sánchez and Pita argue that Israeli settler colonialism has had far more severe effects on the indigenous Palestinian population than the discriminations suffered by the Spanish and Mexican populations in the Southwest of the United States in the wake of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo which ended the Mexican–American War. Jeff Halper said that Zionism went in the direction of Settler-Colonialism without a full understanding of what it may involve. Most scholars who have addressed Israeli settler colonialism have not discussed the Golan Heights.
Sociologist Areej Sabbagh-Khoury suggests that "in tracing the settler colonial paradigm... Israeli critical sociology, albeit groundbreaking, has suffered from a myopia engendered through hegemony." She states that "until recently, most Israeli academics engaged in discussing the nature of the state ignored its settler colonial components", and that scholarship conducted "within a settler colonial framework" has not been given serious attention in Israeli critical academia, "perhaps due to the general disavowal of the colonial framework among Israeli scholars."
In his 2020 book The [Hundred Years' War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017], Palestinian historian Rashid Khalidi, describes the Zionist claim to Palestine in the century spanning 1917–2017 as late settler colonialism and an instrument of British and then later American imperialism, doing so by focusing on a series of six major episodes the author characterizes as "declarations of war" on the Palestinian people.
Critiques of the framework
Scholarly Rejections
German philosopher Ingo Elbe argues that applying the settler colonialism paradigm to Zionism "leads to a lack of sensitivity for the specific nature of Zionism" by reducing it to a form of white settler colonialism. He notes that such critiques often ignore key historical realities: that Jews "have always resided in the area that was named 'Palestine' by the Romans," that they maintained "a special cultural connection to Eretz Israel," and that Zionism's "civilizing mission... was primarily directed at the Jewish people itself." Elbe emphasizes that European Jews did not migrate from a colonial metropole but were "looking for a safe haven from their systematic antisemitic marginalization and eventual extermination," while Jews from Arab countries also fled persecution.Israeli historian S. Ilan Troen suggests that Zionism was the repatriation of a long displaced indigenous population to their historic homeland, and that Zionism does not fit the framework of a settler society as it "was not part of the process of imperial expansion in search of power and markets". With his wife Carol Troen, a former applied linguist at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Troen writes that the concept of Palestinian indigeneity is a recent addition to the "linguistic arsenal of lawfare" used to deny Israel's legitimacy. They suggest this frames Israel as inherently settler colonial and as "reprehensible in its exploitation of the indigenous".
Political scientist Alan Dowty argues that Zionism does not align with the standard model of settler colonialism. Dowty contends that the vast majority of Jews arriving in Palestine were refugees escaping persecution rather than agents of imperial expansion. He emphasizes that rather than extending a European culture, these immigrants sought to shed their "Diaspora baggage" and reconstruct a society based on ancient Middle Eastern roots and a revived Semitic language. As to their treatment of Palestine's Arabs, Dowty says that "unlike the classical colonialist powers, Jewish settlers did not include the existing population in their basic design, except as incidental beneficiaries. The presence of another people was first and foremost a major inconvenience, which the early Zionists tried their best to ignore and minimalize, not to dominate or reshape." Dowty suggests that while countries in the Western Hemisphere, Oceania, and certain regions of Asia and Africa serve as clear examples of settler colonialism, Israel is an outlier that does not fit the definition.
Legal scholar Steven E. Zipperstein critiques the settler-colonial framework by characterizing Zionism as a 20th-century national liberation movement rather than a colonial enterprise. He argues that the 1922 Palestine Mandate, which utilized terms like "historical connection" and "reconstituting," provided international legal recognition of Jewish indigeneity and the right to self-determination in an ancestral homeland. Zipperstein contends that the settler-colonial model ignores several key historical factors, including a continuous Jewish presence in the land for over three millennia, archaeological evidence of Jerusalem as an ancient Judean capital, the Ottoman Empire's acceptance of Jewish immigration from Europe and that "Jewish land acquisition in Ottoman and British Palestine occurred through lawful, arms‑length purchases from willing Arab sellers at mostly above‑market prices."
Historian Tuvia Friling argues that Zionism diverges from European colonialism because Jewish settlers generally severed ties with their home countries to pursue a "revival of an ancient national heritage." He brings to attention the revival of the Hebrew language and the creation of a distinct national culture as evidence of a unique motivation of "national restoration" that goes beyond the typical colonial pursuit of fortune. Friling says that his commitment erodes comparisons between Zionism and traditional European settler-colonial movements.
Adam Kirsch in his book On Settler Colonialism disputes the "settler-colonial" label by noting several key deviations from the traditional model. He notes that unlike settlers in North America or Australia, Zionists did not encounter a terra nullius but rather a territory governed by imperial powers that frequently restricted their entry. Kirsch emphasizes that Israel lacks a "mother country" to provide refuge or defense, making the stakes of its survival "existential." He says that "the persistence of the conflict in Israel Palestine is due precisely to the coexistence of two peoples in the same land—as opposed to the classic sites of settler colonialism, where conflict between European settlers and native peoples ended with the destruction of the latter." Several experts, including theologist Nigel Biggar and philosopher Hendrik van der Breggen agree with the book's points, while others experts disagree. Some, while agreeing, added their own prespective. Historian Tony Fels, while agreeing adds that "by the 1980s and ’90s the concept had become a pejorative label—really, little more than a slogan—with which to stigmatize the nation of Israel, itself formed during the same era." Philosopher Michael Walzer, while saying that the application of the paradigm is "an ideological construction of the conflict that takes little interest in history" adds that "it is important to acknowledge that Israeli settlement on the West Bank from 1967 until the present moment fits the ideological construction all too neatly."
Historians Susan Pedersen and Caroline Elkins distinguished between the methods of Zionism and its nature, saying:
Some critics, such as Yehoshofat Harkabi highlight ideas such as the putative non-exploitation of indigenous labor by Zionists as a reason not to consider it a colonial movement. Historian Benny Morris suggests that Zionism does not meet the definition of colonialism since it did not involve "an imperial power acquiring political control over another country, settling it with its sons, and exploiting it economically". Historian Tom Segev states that "colonialism is irrelevant to the Zionist experience" because most Jewish immigrants came as refugees, and Zionists did not seek to "dominate the local population".
Journalist Roger Cohen and law scholar Yuval Shany, describe the Israeli–Palestinian conflict as one between two indigenous groups. Shany argues that labelling Israel's establishment as a colonial enterprise is "a significant category error". He says that Israel cannot be considered colonialist because it was not an "imposed power" and its creation "was endorsed by the United Nations". Cohen states that Israel's "very diverse, multihued society" includes many Jews who fled persecution in the Middle East and Europe, and who had no metropole they could flee to, unlike most settler colonial societies.
Some scholars have stated the lack of an imperial power to benefit from exploiting the region, means a colonial paradigm does not apply. Other scholars have stated that Israel's external supporters, either private organizations or various states, may function as a metropole.
Reception among Jews and Israelis
The portrayal of Zionism as settler colonialism is strongly rejected by most Zionists and Israeli Jews, and is perceived either as an attack on the legitimacy of Israel, a form of antisemitism, or historically inaccurate.Activist usage
According to The Economist, the Palestinian diaspora has sought to reframe the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from "a clash between two national movements" to "a generational liberation struggle against 'settler colonialism'". This paradigm has gained significant traction among left-leaning activists at universities.Sociology professor Jeffrey C. Alexander refers to colonialism as "the go-to term for total pollution" of Israel's legitimacy. According to scholar Bernard D. Goldstein, "The accusation of 'settler colonialism' is increasingly used to attack Israel and justify its destruction."