There’s a fashionable framework, imported from Western academia, that likes to slap the label “settler-colonialism” onto the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It’s tidy. It’s ideological. And I think it’s about as accurate as seeing the starving Irish who fled the Great Famine and washed up in Boston as nefarious agents of the British Empire. I’m exaggerating of course, but humor me while we explore it.
Originally, this concept was invoked to describe real imperial expansions: British Australia, the American frontier, apartheid South Africa. There’s a metropole that sends its people to settle, extract, dominate, and, when circumstances call, eliminate. Land is taken. Natives are displaced and/or killed. Wealth flows to the imperial center. Sometimes resistance eventually uproots the settlers and the metropole is forced to concede and withdraw, as happened with the French in Algeria. Other times, the settler colony breaks from the metropole and a new nation is born. That’s the model.
Apply it wholesale to Israel and you get a narrative that’s sufficiently complex and emotionally satisfying, but one that’s historically problematic. Worse still, it doesn’t just misread the past; it actively undermines the present, narrowing the prospects for resolution by flattening a tragic clash of national movements into a one-dimensional morality play. And beneath its righteous surface, it carries a neo-colonially racist logic, one that erases Palestinian agency, casting them as passive objects of history rather than political actors in their own right.
Ok, so let’s walk through this ugly mess together, slowly.
1. No metropole
The first red flag is the absence of an empire calling the shots. In traditional settler colonies, the motherland pulls the strings. But in the case of Zionism, there is no “motherland.” Jews didn’t arrive in Palestine as imperial agents. They were dodging pogroms, fleeing the ashes of Europe, observing the collapse of the Ottoman empire. British policy first approved but then restrained Jewish immigration, culminating in the 1939 White Paper, which slammed the gates shut on Europe’s Jews right as the Holocaust loomed. Not exactly a ringing endorsement of colonial backing.
By 1947, the British were forcibly turning back refugee ships and sending Holocaust survivors back to camps in Germany. Look up or Google the Exodus affair.
The idea that Israel is a colony is not just wrong; it’s grotesquely weaponized to serve a particular narrative. It ignores that Jews were stateless and often unwelcome even where they lived. They weren’t exporting empires. They were clawing for survival.
2. Not an invasion
What makes Israel particularly complicated is that the Jews weren’t strangers to this land. The historical memory runs deep: Jerusalem, Judea, the Second Temple. These are words with deep meaning that have been the cornerstone of Jewish identity for millennia. The land is littered with monuments of ancient Jewish civilization. Yes, Muslim ones too, and Christian. History is layered, one does not negate the other.
Yes, many Zionists came from Europe. But many more came later from Baghdad, Fez, Aleppo, and Cairo, fleeing Arab nationalism or Islamic backlash. These weren't conquistadors in fancy hats. They were also refugees.
Ok, here’s a thought experiment: Imagine if the Native Americans were exiled from their lands, scattered across the world and persecuted for centuries. All the while keeping their traditions and historical memory alive. And then returned. Not as conquerors, but as a people trying to re-establish a homeland in their ancestral lands during an opportune global moment of imperial collapse and national reawakening. Would you call it “settler-colonialism”?
The re-emergence of Jewish desire for sovereignty happened in parallel with Arab, Armenian, Greek, and Kurdish national movements while the Ottoman Empire was disintegrating. But it was not driven by the same forces. It was primarily driven by the realization and urgency of rising hostility in the lands where they had lived for centuries, always as outsiders. Not every national movement succeeded. Some clashed. Some bled. But none of them fit cleanly into the settler-colonial mold. Including this one.
3. “A land without a people”?
One enduring myth is that Zionists saw Palestine as empty. That is not true. Some early pamphlets were naive and romanticized, but serious Zionist leaders knew otherwise and wrestled with the implications. Ahad Ha’am, in 1891, warned that Arabs “see and understand what we are doing.” Jabotinsky’s “Iron Wall” (1923) assumed Arab resistance, not erasure, and argued that only when Jews were seen as permanent would moderates agree to concessions. He saw a path to coexistence:
"Not till then will they drop their extremist leaders whose watchword is 'Never!' And the leadership will pass to the moderate groups, who will approach us with a proposal that we should both agree to mutual concessions. Then we may expect them to discuss honestly practical questions, such as a guarantee against Arab displacement, or equal rights for Arab citizens, or Arab national integrity. And when that happens, I am convinced that we Jews will be found ready to give them satisfactory guarantees, so that both peoples can live together in peace, like good neighbours."
Before 1947, there were no mass expulsions, no destroyed villages, no Nakba. Jews and Arabs lived in uneasy coexistence, fractured by violence. Much of that violence fell on Jews: the Jerusalem riots of 1920, the Jaffa riots of 1921, the massacres in Hebron and Safed in 1929. During the Arab Revolt of 1936–39, hundreds of Jews were killed, and Jewish militias retaliated in kind. Bloody episodes, yes, but not a campaign of ethnic cleansing. Until the British imposed restrictions in 1939, much of the land was purchased legally, often from absentee landlords, though some Arab tenants were displaced. Not seized. Not looted. That distinction matters because it speaks to intent.
By 1937, in the midst of the Arab Revolt, the British Peel Commission proposed partition as a compromise: one state Jewish (about 17% of Mandate Palestine), one state Arab (the rest, minus a British corridor around Jerusalem). The Zionist leadership was bitterly divided; many had hoped for more, but the Congress authorized continued negotiations, albeit reluctantly. The Arab Higher Committee unanimously rejected it outright. They refused any division that included Jewish sovereignty and proposed instead an independent Arab state, with protections for the Jewish minority, while demanding a halt to Jewish immigration and a stop to land sales. Two years later, the British White Paper slammed the gates, just as some Arab leaders, most notoriously the exiled Grand Mufti, began aligning with Nazi Germany.
4. 1947–49: The war, the flight, the catastrophe(s)
As Britain prepared to abandon the Mandate in 1947, Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin summed it up in Parliament: “His Majesty's Government have thus been faced with an irreconcilable conflict of principles… For the Jews, the essential point of principle is the creation of a sovereign Jewish state. For the Arabs, the essential point of principle is to resist to the last the establishment of Jewish sovereignty in any part of Palestine.”
Britain washed its hands of the Mandate, passing the question to the UN. Resolution 181 was another shot at compromise: partition again. Two states. The Jewish Agency accepted. Arab leaders rejected it outright and mobilized. In May 1948, five Arab armies, Egypt, Transjordan, Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq invaded the nascent state of Israel, because any form of independent Jewish state was unacceptable.
What followed was catastrophe. For Palestinians, the Nakba. Some 700,000 people displaced, hundreds of villages depopulated. But also for Jews across the Arab world, who were expelled or fled en masse. Around 800,000 of them. Hundreds of thousands ended up in Israel, swelling its population with people who had no European passports, no foreign motherland, no “metropole” to lean on.
If all of these people were “settlers,” they were the strangest kind: persecuted, stateless, homeless, and broken.
5. The framing that blocks the solution
And this, perhaps, is the most damning thing about the settler-colonial framing: it makes peace impossible.
Because if Israel is a colonial project, then the only acceptable “solution” is its dismantling. No partition. No recognition. No compromise. Just return and reversal.
That may feel righteous to some, but every serious peace effort, whether Clinton in 2000, Geneva in 2003, or Olmert–Abbas in 2008, was built on mutual recognition, reparations, land-swaps, and partition. Two states, not “decolonization”.
An obvious objection is that this isn’t about erasure, but about equality and universalism: one democratic state, no state religion, equal rights for all. What’s the problem?
The problem is that this vision demands the end of Jewish self-determination, dressed in the language of liberal principle. It imagines decades of war, trauma, and clashing national identities can be resolved by folding everyone into a single, post-national flag. But “equality” that abolishes one people’s independence isn’t peace. It’s rejectionism dressed up in respectable clothing.
The maximalist return narrative necessarily obliterates Jewish self-determination and guarantees permanent conflict. It’s a morality tale that celebrates continued rejectionism and subverts any hope for what Palestinians themselves have long demanded: an independent Palestinian state.
6. Not invaders, not demons, but no saints either
None of this is to say Israel is faultless. It isn’t. Occupation corrodes. Nationalism blinds. And yes, historical trauma can become a blunt weapon if not examined honestly. Israel also has a lot to answer for and continuously wrestles with its identity.
But if we want to talk seriously about peace, we have to understand what this conflict is *not*. It is *not* a replay of white settlers landing on native shores in the name of Queen and Country. It is *not* a story of Europeans extracting value from foreign soil.
It’s a story of two peoples, each with competing historical claims and wounds, colliding in the same space at the same time. One returning, one rooted. One exiled, one present. Both now native. Both scarred. Both stuck. And increasingly radicalized.
Bottom line?
Zionism didn’t flow from Empire. It rose from statelessness and persecution. Jews weren’t foreign to the land. They were of it, culturally, historically. And 1948 didn’t unfold in some colonial boardroom, it erupted in the ashes of empire and the chaos of war.
Call it tragic. Call it complex. But don’t stick a fancy label on it and call it something that it wasn’t. Don’t presume to know better than Israelis who they are and where they come from, and proceed to lecture them about it. Don’t distort what they tell you to fit your preferred narrative.
Palestinians and Israelis have their own voices and they are valid, and important, and contradictory, and they matter. Afford them the dignity to listen when they tell you about who they are, and what they want. Not just the intellectual elites in the diaspora. But the voices of ordinary people, on the ground.
When you deploy the settler-colonial framework to Israelis, you aren’t just arguing about history, you are failing to understand how they understand themselves. You are ignoring how they self-determine. And by doing so, you draw the wrong conclusions about how to engage with them effectively. If you persist in engaging people in terms they reject, you will only ever reach dead-ends.
Unless, of course, your goal isn’t understanding and resolution, but elimination, of one or the other, or both. And then the labels start to make a terrible kind of sense.
But it leads nowhere. Except back to the blood.
Post-scriptum: Post-1967 and when the analogy begins to fit
Now that I’ve probably pissed off friends and family on one side, let me risk pissing off friends and family on the other. In for a penny, in for a pound. Social isolation must be the fate I’m building for myself.
If the "settler-colonial" shoe doesn’t fit the founding of Israel, the concept begins to gain some traction after 1967. West Bank, Gaza, East Jerusalem, and the Golan Heights came under Israeli control, a temporary measure, to ensure security, the world was told. Yet the occupation was never rolled back. Nor were those territories formally annexed with equal rights extended to all. The situation calcified. Settlements sprang up and started expanding. These were not refugee camps or revival villages, but state-subsidized enclaves, often built on contested or privately owned Palestinian land. Security was the stated rationale. Permanence was the apparent political goal.
Inside these territories, two populations now live under two legal systems. One votes in Israeli elections; the other is governed by military law. Roads, permits, courts, property rights, everything bifurcated. The Palestinian Authority’s autonomy is fragmented, conditional, and ultimately subordinate to Israeli control. When a democracy behaves like a landlord with a favoured tenant, it invites precisely the colonial analogies it claims to refute. Trust erodes. Legitimacy frays.
I can already hear the objections: but Hamas! Terrorism! And yes, the failures of Palestinian leadership have ranged from tragic miscalculations to outright betrayal. Opportunities for negotiated compromise have been squandered. Civilians have been targeted alongside soldiers. Terrible war crimes have been committed. An angry, zero-sum politics has often prevailed where painful compromise might have been possible. But none of this justifies an endless occupation and the slow-motion annexation of territory.
Zionism began as a movement for national self-determination. Post-1967 expansionism is something else entirely. It distorts the original vision into a kind of nationalist overreach that threatens Israel’s future. A people who returned to their homeland as survivors risk becoming rulers by habit and occupiers by inertia. If Israel continues down this path, as it is currently doing, the question won’t be whether it was a settler colony, but whether it has chosen to become one.
[For a more comprehensive treatment of both Israeli and Palestinian narratives, including structural critiques, see my earlier piece: The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict Beyond Traditional Narratives.]
Further Reading & References
Morris, Benny. Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist–Arab Conflict, 1881‑1999 (Vintage Books edition 2001)
Shafir, Gershon. Land, Labor, and the Origins of the Israeli‑Palestinian Conflict, 1882‑1914 (1989)
Segev, Tom. One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs Under the British Mandate (2000)
Khalidi, Rashid. The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917‑2017 (2020)
Karsh, Efraim. Palestine Betrayed (2010)
Halevi, Yossi Klein. Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor (2018)
Yakobson, Alexander & Rubinstein, Amnon. Israel and the Family of Nations: The Jewish Nation‑State and Human Rights (2008)
